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Dr John Lechte
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Biography
After completing an MA in Politics at Monash University with a thesis on the writing of Australian history, I won a scholarship to the Université de Paris-VII. There, in the UFR Sciences des Textes et Documents (a department based in semiology), I wrote a mémoire on Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, and a Doctoral dissertation, supervised by Julia Kristeva, on Rousseau and the problem of fiction. On my return from Paris, I found that there was not a great demand for those trained in semiology, so, somewhat bizarrely perhaps, I was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in History, under the sponsorship of Greg Dening, at the University of Melbourne, where I had been appointed as a full-time tutor just prior to my departure for Paris. My project involved research on Kristeva’s theory of abjection as applied to Pacific cultures.
After my fellowship, I found that semiologists were still not in demand in Australia, even the ones who had been ‘re-educated’ in a well-respected discipline, and so, in 1985, I went to work in the Participation and Equity Programme (PEP) at the Office of the Victorian TAFE Board, where my main claim to fame were articles in the internal PEP magazine and the supervision of 10 research projects. PEP folded, and I then got an appointment in 1986 as a tutor in Political Science at the University of New South Wales. In 1987, I was appointed a lecturer in Sociology at Macquarie University in Sydney, where I have been ever since.
Personally, I love all the arts and spend what spare time I have in indulging this passion. Indeed, I began my student days — until the money ran out — doing a certificate of art course.
Current Research
My current research concerns problems of the image, the imaginary and writing as a technology, with particular reference to the work of Kristeva and Deleuze. I am particularly interested in evaluating Kristeva’s view that we are in a mediatised society of the image and spectacle that has led to an atrophying of imaginary capacities. As Kristeva’s approach begins from a psychoanalytic point of view, I am interested in comparing this with the anti-oedipal approach of Deleuze on the cinema, where the ‘movement-image’ and the ‘time-image’supposedly make the notion of the imaginary redundant. A further component of this research involves the relationship between writing and the image, or between writing as poetic (mythos), and writing as a technology of the sign.
Research Interest
Cinema, photography and society; the image and the imaginary; technologies of the word and image; continental philosophy and social theory.
Recent Publications
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Publications
Books
1979 Politics and the Writing of Australian History, Melbourne: Politics Monograph.
1990 Julia Kristeva , London and New York: Routledge.
1994 Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers: From Semiotics to Postmodernism, London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Reprinted, 1995 (Twice), 1996, 1998, 2000.
1996 Cincuenta pensadores contemporáeos esenciales, Spanish trans. Luisa Rodriguez Tapia, Madrid, Ediciones Cátrdra.
1996 Writing and Psychoanalysis (editor) London: Arnold.
1998 After the Revolution: On Kristeva (with Mary Zournazi), Sydney: Artspace.
1999 Japanese language translation of Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers;
1999 Publication of Panorama wsólczesnej myjsli humanistycznej: Od strukturizmu do postmodernizmu a Polish translation of Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers;
2000 Publication of the Chinese language translation of Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers.
2001 Publication of the Korean language translation of Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers.
2001 Publication of the Lithuanian language translation of Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers.
2002 Publication of the Portuguese language translation of Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers.
2003 Publication of Hebrew language translation of Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers.
[Also to be translated into Czech, Bulgarian, Turkish, Indonesian, Belarusian.]
2003 Key Contemporary Concepts: From Abjection to Zeno's Paradox, London: Sage.
2003 The Kristeva Critical Reader (with Mary Zournazi) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
2004 Julia Kristeva: Live Theory (with Maria Margaroni) published by Continuum Press, London
2006 'Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers', second edition (in preparation), Routledge.
Cinema, Time, Society: The Image in Cinema and Society (in preparation)
Articles and Chapters 1997-2005
2005 (a) Entries on 'Structuralist Marxism', 'Althusser' and 'Benjamin' in Ritzer, G., ed. 'Encyclopedia of Social Theory', London, Thousand Oaks, and New Deli: Sage
2005 (b) 'Day, Night and the Image in Mallarmé and Joyce' in Stephen Barker, ed. Interrogating Images, Evanston: Northwestern University Press (chapter, forthcoming).
2005 (c) 'Bataille and Caillois: Chance and Communication' Thesis Eleven, 83, November 2005: 90–103
2004 (a) chs in Julia Kristeva Live
2003(a) 'Julia Kristeva' in Elliott and Ray, eds, Key Contemporary Social Theorists, Oxford and Malden MA, Blackwell, 183-9.
2003(b) 'Introduction' (with Mary Zournazi) in Lechte, J. and Zournazi, M., eds., The Kristeva Critical Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1-10.
2003(c) 'Love, Life, Complexity and the “Flesh" in Kristeva's Writing Experience' in Lechte, J. and Zournazi, M., eds., The Kristeva Critical Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 185-201.
2003(d)'Interpretation in Context: Dream and the Uncanny' in Literature and Psychoanalysis Conference Collected Papers Number 5, 'Interpretation: Dream or Delusion' (refereed article),
2002(a)'Time After Theory: The Cinema Image and Subjectivity', Continuum, Vol 16, no 3, 301-312.
2002(b) 'Complexity and Exchange Relations', Thesis Eleven, no 71, November, 91-103.
1999(a) 'The Who and the What of Writing in the Electronic Age', Oxford Literary Review, 21, 135-160 (Refereed Article).
1999 (b)'"To Gaze to See; To See Perchance to Look...": On Vision, Surrealism and Other French Insights' (Review Essay), Thesis Eleven 58, August, 121-133 (Refereed article).
1999(c) 'Thinking La Grande Bouffe (Blow-Out)',Anita Lundberg, et al, eds, Proceedings of the 1998 Postgraduate Conference, Sydney: University of NSW Press, 28-31 (chapter).
1998(a) 'Transcendence, Fixation and Belief in the Vicissitudes of the Imaginary', Parallax, 8 (July-September), 119-133 (Refereed article).
1998 (b) 'The Semiotic, Code and Imaginary in the Work of Julia Kristeva' in John Lechte and Mary Zournazi (eds), After the Revolution: On Kristeva, Sydney: Artspace, 31-46 (chapter).
1998 (c) (with Mary Zournazi)'Introduction' in After the Revolution: On Kristeva, Sydney: Artspace, 5-15 (chapter).
1998 (d) 'Thinking the (Ecstatic) Essential: Heidegger After Bataille', Thesis Eleven, 52, (February), 35-52 (Refereed article).
1998(e) 'Writing Before the Postcolonial. Mythos, Logos and the Other' in Brian Edwards and Wenche Ommundsen (eds) Appreciating Difference. Writing Postcolonial Literary History, Geelong, Vic: Deakin University Press, 41-58 (chapter).
1997(a) 'Review Essay' (on Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, and Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Claude Passeron and Monique de Saint-Martin, Academic Discourse), Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, 33, 3 (November), 403-407.
1997(b) 'Eleven Theses on Sculpture', Art & Design Profile No 55: Sculpture, Contemporary Form and Theory, 18-21 (article).