REVIEW OF SYLVIE GAMBAUDO, KRISTEVA, PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CULTURE: SUBJECTIVITY IN CRISIS

After more than a decade of exposure to Slavoj Žižek and a Slovenian school of psychoanalytic cultural analysis, it is sometimes easy to forget that there are many competing streams of this theoretical movement. Žižek 's translation of Jacques Lacan's obscure tomes into the language of popular culture has done much service to both psychoanalysis and cultural theory. Yet the lineage from Lacan to Žižek is but one variation on the interpretation of Sigmund Freud. Sylvie Gambaudo's Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Culture: Subjectivity in Crisis is a remarkable volume in returning to another interpretation, that of the practitioner and writer Julia Kristeva. The maternal and narcissistic dimension of Freud is here used to construct a coherent and compelling account of modern subjectivity. Gambaudo's sophisticated account of Kristeva's part in debates within both psychoanalytic and feminist milieu's constructs a model of psychic subject formation that is deeply tied to the conditions of modern life. The earlier chapters of the book describe Kristeva's theorisation of a maternal repression that dates from childhood. Such repression op-erates not only on an individual level, but also on a widespread, cultural one. Kristeva differs from the more radical linguists of her generation in arguing that the maternal and paternal are inevitable psychic functions, a position that has been upsetting for her feminist and poststructura