2: Language, Bodies and Drives




16 Oct | 5.00–6.30pm | Seminar Room 1, 3:01, Clothworkers South Building

For our second meeting, Quilting Points will be reading Julia Kristeva’s ‘From One Identity to Another’ (1975), alongside Judith Butler’s ‘The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva’ (1988). Kristeva’s essay sets out many of the defining ideas of her early period—the subject-in-process, chora and the distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic—in order to characterise what is in her view the privileged access of poetic language to primordial and prediscursive drives.

Butler’s essay, later included in what remains her most well-known work, Gender Trouble (1990), takes ‘From One Identity to Another’, alongside other texts from the period, as its object of critique. Butler raises questions regarding not only the logical consistency of Kristeva’s theories, but also the political ramifications of those theories.

All are welcome, and as always discussion will continue in the pub following the session.

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