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Continuing on Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, ch. 1 and 2.
We try to get clearer on Kristeva's talk of "object," the relationship between language and abjection, how Kristeva is advancing on Freud, how to be a mom that allows a kid to separate in a healthy way, and how abjection plays into religion and writing.
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Don't miss Mark's Close Reading of the beginning of this text that allows you to further explore Kristeva's language and ideas.
End song: "Eyes of Fire" by Jill Freeman, as discussed on Nakedly Examined Music #28.
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Hi all,
Thank you for your fantastic podcast. I listened with great interest to the Kristeva episodes. Me myself being involved in emotion research, I thought that you might want to explore new perspectives on emotions in humans. As interesting as the psychoanalyst perspective might be, it has a line of problems inherent to it: it is non-empirical and builds on a perspective on emotion that might in itself be wrong, i.e., that there is an unconscious emotional life with similar properties as conscious emotional experiences and that this unconscious life can be explored employing psychoanalytical techniques. From this follows that psychoanalytic theorizing has an infinite degrees of freedom attached to it; it can postulate anything without running the risk of being falsified.
If you want to follow-up your Kristeva episodes with the most up-to-date theories of human emotion, I would suggest you read two recent papers by one of the last century’s most influential emotion researchers: Joseph LeDoux. And also a recent book from the prominent emotion researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett, who, during the last decade, has questioned many of the “thruths” in conventional emotion theory.
Here are my reading suggestions:
First, a nice facebook post by LeDoux where he argues that neuroscience needs philosophy:
https://www.facebook.com/joseph.ledoux/posts/10154703480210683
First paper by LeDoux:
LeDoux, J. E., & Pine, D. S. (2016). Using Neuroscience to Help Understand Fear and Anxiety: A Two-System Framework. Am J Psychiatry, appiajp201616030353. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2016.16030353
Second paper by LeDoux (written together with Richard Brown, professor of philosophy at the City University of New York’s LaGuardia College):
LeDoux, J. E., & Brown, R. (2017). A higher-order theory of emotional consciousness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201619316.
Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book:
https://lisafeldmanbarrett.com/books/how-emotions-are-made/
Best,
Matti