Quotes from Julia Kristeva

Love is the time and space where "I" give myself the right to be extraordinary.

Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic--it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.

Single or lesbian motherhood] can be seen as [one] of the most violent forms taken by the rejection of the symbolic ... as well as one of the most fervent divinizations of maternal power - all of which cannot help but trouble an entire moral and legal order without, however, proposing an alternative to it

How can I be without border?

During that course in which "I" become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit.

Does one write under any other condition than being possessed by abjection, in an indefinite catharsis?

Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the Judeo-Christian compound by means of a unilateral call to return to what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same Celinian anti-Semitic fantasy? And this is so because, as I have tried to explain earlier the writings of the chosen people have selected a place, in the most determined manner, on that untenable crest of manness seen as symbolic fact—which constitutes abjection.

Geniul" este o invenÅ£ie terapeutic? ce ne împiedic? s? murim de egalitate într-o lume f?r? via?? de apoi.

The work of art that insures the rebirth of its author and its reader or viewer is one that succeeds in integrating the artificial language it puts forward (ne style, new composition, surprising imagination) and the unnamed agitations [Émois] of an omnipotent self that ordinary social and linguistic usage always leave somewhat orphaned or plunged into mourning. Hence such a fiction, if it isn't an antidepressant, is at least, a survival, a resurrection.

The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.

Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components – that is doubtless a way to curb mourning.

Abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it --- on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.

the abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the "I" does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence.

That faith be analyzable does not necessarily imply a method for getting by without it. . . .

Or should one recognize that one becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within?

To be deprived of parents - is that where freedom starts?

The sadness that overwhelms us, the retardation that paralyzes us, are also a shield—sometimes the last one—against madness

Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?

Pregnancy = "the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality - such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity.

The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, "fear"- a fluid haze an elusive clamminess- no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.

He is a foreigner, he is from nowhere, from everywhere, citizen of the world, cosmopolitan. Do not send him back to his origins.

Since he has nothing, since he is nothing, he can sacrifice everything.

To be of no account to others. No one listens to you.

Music, rhythm, rigadoon, without end, for no reason.