Julia Kristeva vs Luce Irigaray

Broadcast 5-6 December, 2024. Duration: 5 hours 45 minutes

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Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray are the most powerful thinkers to emerge from the generation of female analysts who first trained with and then became critics of Jacques Lacan.

Kristeva works within a broadly Lacanian framework, but insists that Lacan’s conception of the ‘Symbol Order’ needs to be supplemented by her own notion of the Semiotic. She demonstrates that the crucial role of the father – both in individual development and in culture – presupposes the earlier and more fundamental role of the mother. We will study her important and influential notion of the ‘Abject’, her brilliant re-interpretation of ‘Narcissism’, and her radical re-thinking of the notion of the feminine.

Irigaray, on the other hand, absolutely rejects Freud and Lacan. She argues that psychoanalysis is merely the most recent development of the Western tradition of thought which assumes that there is only one kind of human subject – the male. We will study her brilliant re-thinking of the foundations of Western philosophy from the point of view of the feminine, and explore the new kind of philosophy which emerges from her insistence that we begin our thinking from the fundamental fact of sexual difference. We will also explore her response to those trends within contemporary thought which seek to deny the reality of sexual difference.

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Course Leader:

Keith Barrett BA PhD received his first degree in philosophy from Oxford University after having spent three years working as a nursing assistant in psychiatric hospitals. It was in this practical context that Keith first encountered existentialism and psychoanalysis. He then began postgraduate studies on both Freud and Heidegger, leading finally to a PhD from the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL for a dissertation on ‘Freud’s Self-Analysis’. Keith has been a philosophy teacher for over 20 years, and has been delivering courses at the Freud Museum for over a decade, where he has developed a series of introductory lectures on Freud, psychoanalysis after Freud, and exploring the overlap of philosophy and psychoanalysis.