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Item Number: 114978
Title: The Severed Head: Capital Visions
Author: Kristeva, Julia
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9780231157209
Description: Translated by Jody Gladding. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. 24cm., hardcover, 1626pp., 18 illus. Summary: Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her workthe power of horrorand the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to severand in some cases keepsuch a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with the humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows the depiction or presence of heads in the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic in which the face of a saint appears on a piece of cloth); the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even in the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction. (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)
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