Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Julia Kristeva: Intimate Revolt

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  As wrong as my friend Chris was about how much I'd enjoy the first book he recommended by Kristeva, I should have known better than to accept another recommendation from him.  Nonetheless, I did, and my compulsion to complete things started drove me to finish this volume, even after it was clear that it had nothing to say.  I suppose there is a bit of insight to be gained from her distinctions between American (consumerist) and European (humanist) liberalism, and I did enjoy her pleas for a return to the latter, but these enjoyable sections came from seemingly nowhere, with no logical underpinning or connection to the rest of the book.  I remain hard pressed to say whether this is the eponymous "revolt" of which she is so fond, or some tangential filigree. I feel like my time was wasted reading this, and would have been better spent enjoying the books that she feels like she had to have read for me, especially Being and Nothingness.