5 - Towards a Philosophy of Freedom?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
I am increasingly skeptical about the capacity of political movements to remain places of freedom … We saw this with the feminist movement which rapidly became a movement of chiefs where women crushed women inside the same group. The strategies of the oppressors against which women fought were reproduced in their own groups.
(Revolt: 107–8)The previous chapter identified the themes of singularity and plurality as key reference points of Kristeva's political philosophy, which, as I suggested, is reaffirmed through her engagement with the ideas of Hannah Arendt, and which comes to inform her recent writings on politics. While Kristeva's interpretation of Arendt's thought displays an explicit consideration for the political, it withdraws, as I demonstrated, Arendt's emphasis on ‘the world’ and on politics into the intimate. Even though, as I have suggested throughout Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought, the idea of the political receives some considerable attention in Kristeva's writings, this is mainly implicit, and it sits uncomfortably alongside her dislike of matters pertaining to politics. In this chapter I want to consider possible ways to bridge this gap between politics and the political in Kristeva's thought; my task is aided by the thematic orientation of some of her most recent writings, which have a direct bearing on politics, such as her interviews on revolt (2000b) and her essay ‘Europhilia, Europhobia’ (1998a) and its various modifications (2004a; 2005a), as well as some of her other more recent texts (2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2009a; 2009d).
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- Information
- Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought , pp. 145 - 174Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011