At the Risk of Thinking

At the Risk of Thinkingis the first biography of Julia Kristeva--one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the world. Alice Jardine brings Kristeva's work to a broader readership by connecting Kristeva's personal journey, from her childhood in Communist Bulgaria to her adult life as an international public intellectual based in Paris, with the history of her ideas. Informed by extensive interviews with Kristeva herself, this telling of a remarkable woman's life story also draws out the complexities of Kristeva's writing, emphasizing her call for an urgent revival of bold interdisciplinary thinking in order to understand--and to act in--today's world.

Alice Jardineis Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University, USA. Her publications include The Future of Difference (1980), Gynésis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (1985), Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan(2007), and, as translator, Julia Kristeva's Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art(ed. Leon Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon Roudiez, 1980).

Acknowledgments Author's Note Introduction: At the Risk of Thinking The Question of the Intellectual-Again In the Face of Resistance My Coup de Foudre Why Now? The Contestatory Intellectual Notes on the Biography Part I Bulgaria, My Suffering (1941-1965) A Production of History Stoyan Kristev All My Childhood Was Bathed in This Kristina Kristeva One Spoonful at a Time I Didn't Want to Take Care of All That The Journalist Pure Oxygen The Writer Sputnik or the New Novel Endings, Beginnings Part II The Crazy Truth of It (1965-1979) Early Exile The Lost Territory Tzvetan Stoyanov Mentors and a Doctorate Philippe Sollers Tel Quel Resurrections Sit Down! Sit Down! Dominique Rolin Multiverses Beneath the Paving Stones Semiotike (1969) Language, the Unknown (1969) Émile Benveniste The Text of the Novel (1970) Ilse Barande Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) The Pedagogical Imperative The Desire for China About Chinese Women (1974) The Intimate Acts of the Modern Personality David Compartmentalizing Reliance: An Ethic of Care The Crossing of Signs (1975) New York City The Dissident Polylogue (1977) Crazy Truth (1979) Part III Becoming Julia Kristeva (1980-TODAY) A Vertical Present Yes, Yes, of Course, But What Shall We Do Now? Death, That Strange Voice . . . 1 The 1980s: Strangers to Ourselves and Others Ça continue: Work, Family, the Île de Ré Whatever Happens to Me, That's What I Write About Questions of Civilization Cannot Be Managed by Politics Powers of Horror (1980) Tales of Love (1983) In the Beginning Was Love (1985) Black Sun (1987) Strangers to Ourselves (1988) And Yet, It's up to Women . . . If You Could Just Die . . . 2 The 1990s: Revolt, She Said Accolades and Accusations New Directions: Fiction and Revolt Thinking Through the Novel The Samurai (1990) The Old Man and the Wolves (1991) Possessions (1996) Time and Sense (1994) Revolt After the Revolution New Maladies of the Soul (1993) The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (1996) Intimate Revolt (1997) The Future of Revolt (1998) Nations Without Nationalism (1990) Revolt, She Said (1998) The Severed Head (1998) Transcend yourself! The Feminine and the Sacred (1998) Hannah Arendt (1999) I Cannot See Any Light . . . 3 The 2000s: An Intellectual Who Works on the Invisible Against Cynicism I Can Only Rely On My Own Strengths Psychoanalysis Is a Humanism Singular Universalism and Human Rights Crisis of the Subject (2000) At the Risk of Thought (2001) Micropolitic (2001) Chronicles of a Sensitive Time (2003) Open Letter to the President (2003) Their Look Pierces Our Shadows (2011) Murder in Byzantium (2004) Hatred and Forgiveness (2005) Alone, a Woman (2007) Melanie Klein (2000) Colette (2002) Teresa, My Love (2008) This Incredible Need to Believe (2007) Reinventing Secular Humanism The "French Death of God Theologian" The Crisis of Ideality Teresa, Our Contemporary Representing the Atheists of the World 4 The 2010s: Traveling Through Myself No One Owns the Truth The Why Rather than the How No One Pays Attention to the Political Until It Feels Spiritual Perpetual Motion Beauvoir Presents/In the Present (2016) Passions of Our Time (2013) The Enchanted Clock (2015) It's a True Nightmare or a Pitiful Farce, I'm Not Sure Which . . . Who's Afraid of Julia Kristeva? A Violence That Reaches the Heart It's Just Not My Life Appendix 1: Document #10 of the "Sabina" File Appendix 2: A Chronological List of Kristeva's Books in French Notes Index