Hatred and forgiveness

Julia Kristeva, Translated by Jeanine Herman Columbia University Press, New York, 2010, 341 pp., $29.50. ISBN-10: 0231143257

Hatred and Forgiveness is a compilation of Kristeva’s public lectures, conference papers and interviews concerned with a variety of issues such as daily politics, psychoanalysis, religion, women, writing, fatigue, anorexia and the arts. All these issues stem from the same premise: at a time of globalization, nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, psychoanalysis is the only path to psychic salvation.

Even though the book comprises an assortment of fragments from Kristeva’s professional appearances, the sequential order of the six thematic chapters (World(s), Women, Psychoanalysis, Religion, Portraits, and Writing) structures the fragments as a continuous analysis, which starts with diagnoses of global psychic illness, moves to the intimate, and ends with the arts and writing as the path to what Kristeva describes as “psychical rebirth” (p. 158).

The opening chapter, “Thinking About Liberty in Dark Times,” sets up the diagnostic context for the rest of the book: we are living in “Dark Times,” trapped between Islamic fundamentalism and American financial oligarchy; America is becoming a new Rome, which as a consequence creates global reaction in the form of ethnic nationalism and political radicalism. Europe offers “an alternative to the globalized world” (p. 17) that emphasizes the particular “art of living, taste, leisure, the so-called ‘idle’ pleasures, grace, pure chance, playfulness, wastefulness, our ‘dark side’ even, or, to put it in a nutshell, freedom as the essence of ‘Being-in-the-World’ prior to any ‘Cause’” (p. 17).

Premising the modern subject as a work-in-progress of self-opening, she focuses on woman and singles out throughout the book what she considers the three major causes of woman’s foreclosure, or the “veiling of women”: totalitarianism; Islam; and bisexuality. According to Kristeva, because France lacks proper social policies