The Feminine and the Sacred (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism)
Contributors: Jane Marie Todd (Translator)
Edition: New Ed edition
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: April 15, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780231115797
Subjects: Psychology; Social Science; Religion - Socialissues; Sociology; General; Philosophy / Movements / Deconstruction; Feminism & Feminist Theory; Women's Studies - General; 1939-; 1941-; Clement, Catherine,; Correspondence; France; Kristeva, Julia,; Senegal; Women novelists, French; Women philosophers
First sentence: WE HAD KNOWN each other since the late 1960s, had shared similar interests in the human sciences, in philosophy, and in psychoanalysis as well as in politics.
Description: "In November 1996, Catherine Clement and Julia Kristeva began a correspondence exploring the subject of the sacred. In this collection of those letters Catherine Clement, writing from Dakar, Senegal, approaches the topic from an anthropologist's point of view and Julia Kristeva responds from a psychoanalytic perspective. Their correspondence leads them to a controversial and fundamental question: Is there anything sacred that can at the same time be considered strictly feminine?

The two voices of the book work in tandem, fleshing out ideas, blending together into a melody of experience. Two women, writing to each other about two themes, have produced a dialogue that delves into the mysteries of a woman's experience of belief, the relationship between faith and sexuality, the body and the senses - an experience, they argue, women feel with special intensity. Although their discourse is not necessarily about theology, Clement and Kristeva consider the role of women and femininity in the religions of the world, from Christianity and Judaism to Confucianism and African animism.

The authors are the first to admit that what they have undertaken is "as impossible to accomplish as it is fascinating." Nevertheless, their lively, free-minded exchange succeeds in raising questions that are perhaps more important to ask than to answer."--BOOK JACKET.