Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting Book

Dense, academic, insightful, with pages at a time on a single line or couplet. Found the e-book format a limitation; wanted to flip back all the time or have the poems in front of me while I read the analysis. Slow-going, but have a better appreciation for the ways different aspects of a poem interact and fuse in the mind of the reader to create an impression of mystical insight.

Not only great as a starting point for reading Kristeva but I found this book as a very efficient and understandable summary for Lacan, Barthes, Saussure, and Derrida. I enjoyed how all these favourite authors of mine are connected and melted into Kristeva's philosophy.

As it is the premise of the book, it's important to understand Kristeva as a literary theorist and not only as a feminist writer. To be honest, the more I read her the more I like her as a postmodernist than a feminist (although it's true that her non binary, non hierarchical approach to feminism is also much more inclusive).

On ART: "Kristeva shows that to be challenged by art is to be confronted by the void of non-meaning and the prospect of our own hell, our own suffering caused by a loss of identity including our melancholies and the truly tragic aspect of being. [...] this suffering is also the way to a 'resurrection' as a renewal of the self in language."