By Julia Kristeva
Proficient via a provocative exhibition on the Louvre curated by means of the writer, The Severed Head unpacks inventive representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic interval to the current. Surveying work, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed serious eye to a research of the top as image and metaphor, as non secular item and actual truth, extra constructing a serious topic in her work-- the ability of horror--and the potential of the face to supply an event of the sacred.
Kristeva considers the pinnacle as icon, artifact, and locus of notion, looking a keener knowing of the violence and wish that drives us to sever, and from time to time maintain, this sort of powerful item. Her research stretches the entire as far back as 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early ornament and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa fable; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic during which the face of a saint appears to be like on a bit of cloth); the biblical tale of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; stories of the guillotine; glossy homicide mysteries; or even the rhetoric surrounding the struggle for and opposed to capital punishment. Kristeva translates those "capital visions" in the course of the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing limitless connections among their manifestation and sacred adventure and extremely a lot declaring the potential of the sacred, even in an period of "faceless" interaction.
Reviews:
Through her ask yourself and her doubt Kristeva units forth a compelling account of the sacred and of the intimate visionary potential of the human soul.
(Joshua Paetkau The Ecclesial collage Blog)
The Severed Head is a reminder that artwork could be the simplest instructor, rather whilst the subject is an uncomfortable one.
(Patricia Contino New Pages.com)
This superbly written and richly layered meditation on mortality and illustration will definitely attract these readers drawn to semiotic and psychoanalytically trained readings of art.
(Jonathan Patkowski Library magazine XPress reports)
Read or Download The Severed Head: Capital Visions (European Perspectives) PDF
Similar social theory books
Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance
Filled with new examples and fabric, this moment version offers a completely up to date exploration of the genesis, dynamics, and death of ethical panics and their affects at the societies during which they occur. * filled with up to date and up to date examples together with terrorism, the Sep 11 assault at the global exchange Towers, college shootings, flag burning, and the early-2000s resurgence of the “sex slave” scare* encompasses a new bankruptcy at the media, at the moment considered as an important element of the ethical panic* Devotes a bankruptcy to addressing criticisms of the 1st variation in addition to the ethical panics proposal itself* Written by means of normal specialists within the box* Designed to slot either self-contained classes on ethical panics and wider classes on deviance
Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach (Expanded Edition)
In lecturers as Cultural employees, Freire speaks on to lecturers concerning the classes realized from a life of adventure as an educator and social theorist. Freire’s phrases problem all who train to mirror seriously at the which means of the act of training in addition to the which means of studying.
Freedom in the Anthropocene: Twentieth-Century Helplessness in the Face of Climate Change
Whereas it really is transparent that the Holocene/Anthropocene transition marks the exceptional transformation of human societies, students haven't been capable of account for what this transition includes, the way it may supply upward thrust to our present ecological situation, and the way we would plausibly circulation past it. with out such an realizing, we're left with an insufficient research that creates the situation for ill-informed coverage judgements and a self-sustaining cycle of unsuccessful makes an attempt to ameliorate societally precipitated environmental degradation.
"One of the broadest, such a lot finished, intricate and very theoretical works in social conception. Social conception and philosophy may well by no means be a similar back. " (Philosophy and Social feedback)
- Diversity and Community: An Interdisciplinary Reader
- War and Social Theory: World, Value and Identity
- New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader
- The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
- Postmodernism, Religion, and the Future of Social Work
- Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action
Extra resources for The Severed Head: Capital Visions (European Perspectives)
Example text
On the other hand, there has been a strong romantic tradition (symbolised by Lawrence of Arabia) of affiliation with the Arabs in their struggles against the Ottomans. As a result, an Orientalist racialised discourse (Said, 1985[1978]; 1993) has constructed the Arabs as the exotic 'Others', a representation in which cruelty, sensuality, nobleness and sexuality were intertwined. The ambiguity towards 'the Arab' has not simply concerned colour, but also that of the Arabs' 'postcolonial status'. The British actually ruled over many Arab countries, but there was no significant British settlement in the Arab world, which was officially part of the Ottoman empire, until after the First World War.
1. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1982) The Empire Strikes Back (London: Hutchinson).
Lash, S. and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space (London: Sage). Mason, D. (1995) Some Problems with the Concepts of Race and Racism (Leicester: University of Leicester Press). Miles, R. (1982) Racism and Labour Migration (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Rowbotham, S. (1989) The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since the 1960s (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Said, E. W. (1993) Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage). , Jones, S. and Gilroy, P. (1982) 'The Organic Crisis of British Capitalism and Race: the Experience of the Seventies', in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 1970s Britain (London: Hutchinson).