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Drawing on a wide range of contemporary social and political thought, the book engages with a feminist dissident movement: namely, former Yugoslavia’s “Women in Black” (Žene u Crnom orŽuC) and its practices of performative mourning for the abjected other. This agonistic mourning involves standing still in public, wearing black, and holding vigils to acknowledge the victims of the “other side.” In performatively occupying the position of the internal enemy, these political actors respond to those estranged as external enemies. By re-positioning their political bodies at the centre of the polis as a means of embodying their own and others’ ambivalent and precarious belonging vis-à-vis its demarcation lines, the activists bring intolerable memories into public view. Hence, they actualize the multilayered modalities of stasis as standing still but also taking the stand as embodied traces of those who had been stripped of their capacity to testify within the nationalist and militarist banality that led to ethno-nationalist violence in what has become the former Yugoslavia. In commemorating those socially instituted as impossible to commemorate, and in upsetting the grounds of mourning as a founding scene of maternal properness in nationalism, these dissident political subjects contest the idealized mourning inscribed in the genealogies of biopolitical normalization and ethno-national militarism. The book addresses agonistic mourning as a critical practice of contesting the power assemblage of sovereignty, biopolitics and nationalism.

Julia Kristeva's writings on the female subject and on feminist politics continue to trouble many of her readers; as yet, there exists no unified response to her ideas in contemporary feminism. Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought offers a novel and engaging appraisal of Kristeva's recent work that recuperates her significance for a feminist project. Drawing on her recent texts on revolt, female genius and freedom, the book provides a detailed assessment of the diverse feminist responses to Kristeva's key ideas, and it demonstrates how feminism's troubled relations with Kristeva can only be understood by attending to the plurality and heterogeneity of contemporary feminist positions. As the book suggests, any feminist appropriation of Kristeva's ideas requires a reading against the grain, as well as careful attention to their positioning along the fault-lines that run through contemporary feminism. While considering Kristeva's ambivalence about the importance of feminism, the book provides a sympathetic account of her radical philosophy of feminine heterogeneity, her concern with singularity and freedom, and the deeply ethical orientation of her work towards conditions of otherness. It argues that while conceptualising feminism in such a way can be profoundly unsettling, it also keeps feminism's plural and diverse theory and practice alive.