Julia Kristeva refracts the impulse to hate (and our attempts to subvert, sublimate, and otherwise process it) through psychoanalysis and text, exploring worlds, women, religion, portraits, and the act of writing. Her inquiry spans themes, topics, and figures central to her writing, and her paths of discovery advance the theoretical innovations that are so characteristic of her thought.Kristeva rearticulates and extends her analysis of language, abjection, idealization, female sexuality, love, and forgiveness. She examines the "maladies of the soul," utilizing examples from her practice and the ailments of her patients, such as fatigue, irritability, and general malaise. She sources the Bible and texts by Marguerite Duras, St. Teresa of Avila, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Georgia O'Keefe. Balancing political calamity and individual pathology, she addresses internal and external catastrophes and global and personal injuries, confronting the nature of depression, obliviousness, fear, and the agony of being and nothingness. Throughout Kristeva develops the notion that psychoanalysis is the key to serenity, with its processes of turning back, looking back, investigating the self, and refashioning psychical damage into something useful and beautiful. Constant questioning, Kristeva contends, is essential to achieving the coming to terms we all seek at the core of forgiveness.

Foreword, by Pierre-Louis FortI. Worlds
1. Thinking About Liberty in Dark Times
2. Secularism: "Values" at the Limits of Life
3. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and . . . Vulnerability
II. Women
4. On Parity, Again; or, Women and the Sacred
5. From Madonnas to Nudes: A Representation of Female Beauty
6. The Passion According to Motherhood
7. The War of the Sexes Since Antiquity
8. Beauvoir, Presently
9. Fatigue in the Feminine
III. Psychoanalyzing
10. The Sobbing Girl; or, On Hysterical Time
11. Healing, a Psychical Rebirth
12. From Object Love to Objectless Love
13. Desire for Law
14. Language, Sublimation, Women
15. Hatred and Forgiveness; or, From Abjection to Paranoia
16. Three Essays; or, the Victory of Polymorphous Perversion
IV. Religion
17. Atheism
18. The Triple Uprooting of Israel
19. What Is Left of Our Loves?
V. Portraits
20. The Inevitable Form
21. A Stranger
22. Writing as Strangeness and Jouissance
VI. Writing
23. The "True-Lie," Our Unassailable Contemporary
24. Murder in Byzantium; or, Why I "ship myself on a voyage" in a Novel
Notes
Notes on the Origins of the Texts
Bibliography
Index