Kristina Mendicino works on literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis from the eighteenth through the twentieth century, as well as Ancient Greek poetry, drama, and philosophy.
Kristina Mendicino is completing a monograph on the subject of speech and language in the writings of Heidegger and Lacan. More broadly, her current research probes various articulations of poetic and philosophical logic through the lens of psychoanalysis. Her emphasis upon psychoanalysis is itself a logical consequence of the thinking that is reflected in her first three monographs. In the latter, she staged a series of confrontations between philosophical and literary texts in order to expose, among others, how the fiction of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Franz Kafka offers a critical literary complement to the Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology (Passive Voices, 2023). What remains a constant across her investigations into otherwise divergent corpuses is an interest in the ways in which major philosophical concepts are legibly at stake in literary texts but register there in such a manner that those same concepts are placed in question through the poetic exposition of possibilities for thought that exceed conceptual grasp.
Her approach to texts of various genres involves drawing out the consequences that specific linguistic inventions entail for the interpretation of philosophical and literary traditions, and this sustained concern for the impact of language has led her to psychoanalysis, which opens uniquely elucidating perspectives upon the constitutive role of speech and language in everything from thinking and acting to remembering, repeating, and working through traumatic events. Hence, her current monograph in progress, as well as two further book-length projects that have grown out of it, elaborates the significance of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis for the re-interpretation of fundamental problems such as the meaning of (human) ‘being’ and the structure of truth as problems of the subject's relationship to language. Drawing upon psychoanalytic theory, she pursues textual analyses that expose how such problems are articulated in literary and philosophical writing, attending to the ways in which this articulation often occurs not at the level of explicit argumentation, but rather at the level of rhetorical performance and intertextual resonances. It is not, in other words, a question of what subjects of consciousness know to say but what subjects of language will have made it possible to think through signifying effects that have left a mark upon the field of thought and language – and that remain to be read and interpreted.
