Strangers’ games. Julia Kristeva in Utopian perspective
Strangers’ games. Julia Kristeva in Utopian perspective

Summary/Abstract: Apart from exploring different aspects of the problem of the "maternal" presence in language, Julia Kristeva also treats the problem of the "father." Not so much as a symbolic father, however, but rather as a formation of the imaginary: an "imaginary father". The imaginary father is the phantasm of a father who can love like a mother. It is precisely the lack of (an idea of) a loving father that can explain, according to Kristeva, the crisis of the modern soul, and not the lack of a stern and relentless patriarch as it is sometimes claimed. Intellectually derived from Hegel, Freud and Lacan but imaginatively drawn from the (nostalgic) transplantation of the maternal aura of the Eastern Orthodox Trinity under the empty skies of the modern soul, the concept of the imaginary father focuses some persistent Utopian traits of Kristeva's writing into the solicitation for us to revisit the watery settings of Narcissus in order to gaze at the image. Free of Narcissus's illusions, however, and with a lucid awareness of the irreality of the image - and of the reality of our love for the fake, for the phantom loveliness of our own creations which once produced the space of the Western psyche and today, according to Kristeva, could become the wager for a new humanity.

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