Introduction

In June 1996, the Centre for Cultural Studies hosted a conference entitled Aesthetics. Politics. Ethics: Julia Kristeva 1966–96. It was held at the Leeds City Art Gallery whose monumental neighbour is the equally nineteenth century structure of Cuthbert Broderick's Town Hall: the proximities of, and the tensions between the state and culture are often the very topics of Cultural Studies. This conference could have been hosted by one of several subgroups within the University of Leeds and the Department of Fine Art in particular. As an art historian, I could have planned this event to consider the contributions of Julia Kristeva to ways of thinking about the aesthetic, the image, and the larger historical frameworks within which certain themes have been obsessively pursued. As a feminist theorist I could have arranged this event to consider Julia Kristeva's significant interventions in the political and cultural theories of femininity, sexual difference and revolution. As a critic of modern and contemporary art, I could have invited her to focus analysis on questns of modernity and post modernity in literature, film and the visual arts. As a director of the Centre for Cultural Studies I might have thought we needed to take time to assess the whole political and cultural climate of our moment of extreme tensions between left and right, the outbreaks of neotribalism, xenophobia and racism, the questions of globalisation in contemporary capitalism and the impact of media massification and the information society on the status of singularity and subjectivity. Julia Kristeva has credentials for being called upon to assist in all such reflections.