Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book describes early Julia Kristeva's development in and contribution to the revolutionary scene of the 1960s. It discusses the theory of literature offered by Kristeva as a terrorist aesthetics, and the challenge to identity politics. The book argues that the psychoanalytic notion of temporality present throughout the work of Kristeva could be regarded as a key to the political. Insisting on a Freudian view of the unconscious as timeless, Kristeva argues that Sigmund Freud has in fact discovered a negativity that must be regarded as the condition for all forms of questioning. Freud shows that philosophical issues, as well as art, must be regarded as dependent on an experience of nihilation that can only be explained through a psychoanalytic notion of a timeless unconscious.