ABSTRACT
Counter-culturally (in the climate of post-1968 France), Julia Kristeva is prepared to recognise that Western civilisation has emerged from, and still owes a great deal to, its nurturing Judaeo-Christian faith-matrix. Where Irigaray reads Christianity solely in a Freudo-Lacanian schematisation, presenting it as the religion of the (‘phallogocentric’) Word, Kristeva enters into this religion’s own proclaimed distinctiveness as the faith of self-revealing Agape. Her variation on the contemporary malaise at the ‘loss of love’ centres on the question: what is lost to ‘advanced’ Western humankind when this faith is relegated to the cultural margins? What bridges to the future are still imaginable?
