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Julia Kristeva on the Burqa.

I [disagree] with Muslim women from the left who contend we have to honor women’s free choice to cover their faces … I want to recall here Simone de Beauvoir, who argued that freedom does not end with choice. Choice is the starting point of freedom. True freedom is crossing selfhood borders and opening up to others.

Margaret Soltan, June 23, 2017 8:41AM
Posted in: democracy

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6 Responses to “Julia Kristeva on the Burqa.”

  1. V Ricks Says:

    I don’t suppose you can post a non-paywalled copy of that article, can you? (I’m a little embarrassed even to be asking…)

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Wow – right you are. I don’t subscribe to Haaretz – but for some reason the first time I opened it there wasn’t a paywall. So I assumed it wasn’t locked. Sorry. I’ll peck around on Google News and other places and see if I can find it – or at least some excerpts. UD

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:

    ‘… Kristeva calls herself “an energetic pessimist,” so I go to work based on this assumption. “I also derive inspiration from the novelist Colette, who wrote, ‘To be reborn has never been too much for me,’” she says. Despite Colette’s pessimism and depression, she was attentive to plant life, to the world of animals, and followed the constant renewal of nature and the possibility of starting everything over.’

    … “I think studying humanities is a way of preventing a cracking of the foundations of civilization and even humanity. The humanities also have to be found in the political discourse that discarded them in favor of economics and the business world. Modern fanaticism attracts youths with a fragile psychological makeup.

    “In contrast to other children who are curious and want to know, these youths look for an ideal to believe in so they can build autonomy and disengage from their parents. When the need to believe in something is insufficient, that boy or girl can feel they don’t belong, rejected and unappreciated, a feeling that can turn into a type of destructive depression that’s the basis of fanaticism. We need educators, teachers and guardians who can create the bridges between humanism and diversity, a kind of Marshall Plan of knowledge and diversity.”

    I get the whole article when I simply Google Kristeva Haaretz. You might try that.

  4. dmf Says:

    ah Freudians and their blind faith in rational talk to cure irrational passions, luckily we have Trump to remind us of how silly that is…

  5. Margaret Soltan Says:

    def: I’m afraid I have to agree with you there.

  6. dmf Says:

    her early work, black sun, powers of horror, and the like were impressive but her later leap into the political realm has been a real disappointment tho not as bad as her fiction.

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