Michael Sarris, Minister of Finance
will be hosting a presentation of the world’s first management
art book:
The Art of Innovation Integrating
Creativity in Organizations
You are cordially invited to the launch and cocktail party
that will follow presentations from:
Dimis Michaelides, Author
Umit Inatci, Artist
Constantinos Markides, Professor - London Business School
The series of sixteen paintings featured in the book will be
exhibited for the first time.
Friday 28 September 2007 at 7.30pm
Journalists’ House, 12 RIK Avenue , Nicosia – Tel 22 44 60 90
“….the book stands out in the mass of books on innovation.
It deserves attention and it deserves to be read by all practitioners interested
in integrating innovation in their organizations”
Constantinos Markides
“Innovation has become a buzzword bandied about
contemporary organizations but few know how to take innovation beyond window
dressing. Dimis does. He provides us with concepts that animate and organize the
transformation of creative ideas into innovative products and services, using
original art as a powerful metaphor.”
David Magellan Horth, President of the Creative Education Foundation and
Senior Faculty at the Center for Creative Leadership
“A standing reproach to all those who doubt that business
can be artistic.”
Christopher Hitchens, Author and Contributing Editor to “Vanity Fair”
University of Cyprus
Faculty of Humanities
Monday, 24 September 2007, 7 p.m., University Hall at
Kalipoleos 75, Nicosia
Presentation of an
honorary degree by the Faculty of Humanities to Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva was born in Bulgaria in 1942. At the
age of 23, she moved to Paris and has lived there ever since. Her original
interests were in language and linguistics, and she was influenced by her
contemporaries Lucian Goldmann, and Roland Barthes. She also studied Freudian
and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and like her mentors, she began to work both as an
analyst and an academic. She joined the 'Tel Quel group' in 1965, where she met
her future husband, Phillipe Sollers, and became an active member of the group,
focusing on the politics of language. The Tel Quel group worked with the notion
of history as a text for interpretation and its writing as an act of politicized
production rather than an attempt to make an objective reproduction. Kristeva's
articles began to appear in publications by Tel Quel and the journal Critique in
1967, and in 1970 she joined the editorial board. Her research in linguistics,
including her interest in Lacan's seminars during the same year, manifested in
the publication of Le Texte Du Roman (1970), Séméiotiké: Recherches pour une
sémanalyse (1969), and subsequently, La Revolution du langage poetique (her
doctoral thesis) in 1974. The latter publication led to her accepting of chair
of linguistics at the University of Paris, and a series of guest appointments at
Columbia University in New York.
Kristeva's unique background, a "foreign" woman working in
the predominantly male intellectual circles of France, drives the strategies of
her work in semiotics and her interest in the politics of marginality. In
accordance with her thinking, she produces both fictional and academic texts.
Her interest is in discourses that resist rigid and one-dimensional logic and
instead engage in an ongoing process of writing the struggle with the impasse of
language. She prefers to analyze, to think language against itself, by its
fracturing and multiplication of texts, while taking the figure of negativity
into account.
In addition, Kristeva's experiences in Communist Bulgaria
provide her an intimate understanding of Marxism and the work of the Russian
Formalists such as Mikhail Bakhtin (whose work she is accredited with
introducing to the West). Developing Hegel's concept of negativity in
conjunction with these ideas and those of her teachers and peers, she produced
an influential critique and following shift from Structuralist to
Poststructuralist thought. Her particular focus is a process-oriented reading of
the sign.
Such a process for Kristeva is concerned with bringing the
speaking body back into Phenomenology and linguistics. In opposition to theories
in structuralist linguistics that she feels are "nothing more than the thoughts
of archivists, archaeologists, and necrophiliacs" she develops a new science, "semanalysis,"
that connects the body, complete with its drives, back into language from where
she believes the logic of signification is already present. In this process she
elaborates on the Lacanian idea of the mirror stage and the formation of a
separation, a lack, from the (m)other that forms signification as a movement
from need (demand) into desire. It is an ongoing process of completion through
the symbolic castration of the subject. Here, Kristeva is critical of Lacan's
overlooking of processes that take place before the mirror stage.
Kristeva's elaboration on the model of Lacan involves a
distinction between the "semiotic" and "semiotics" as a field of study in
linguistics, and a further distinction between two heterogeneous types of
signification in language, the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic exists
within the signifying process, it is a discharge of the drives within language
that manifests in the rhythm and tone of the text (and the speech of the
subject). It refers to an element in symbolic language that does not signify,
the bits of psychic and bodily energies (partial drives) that are less precise
but nonetheless "speak" of the phenomena of embodied significations through
language and their inherent limits. The symbolic is the rule-governed element of
language, grammar and syntax, that makes reference and therefore judgment at all
possible, the element of meaning associated with the very forces of grammar and
syntax.
Kristeva became more interested in psychoanalysis and
completed her training in 1979. Her work intensified around the formation of
identity and the role abjection and Otherness play in the process. Her writings
of the 1980's include transcripts from her practice as an analyst, such as Tales
of Love (1983) and Black Sun (1987). Her 1982 publication, Powers of Horror: An
Essay in Abjection, describes the pre-mirror stage development of the child's
entry into the Law of the father as Lacan theorized. For Kristeva, birth itself
is a separation within the body, a violent separation from the body of the
mother. In the maternal body, excess gives rise to a separation that is material
and maintained by a regulation (regarding availability of the breast) that is
prior to the mirror stage. The maternal regulation operates as a law,
prefiguring and providing the grounds of paternal Law as the entry of the child
into language and society.
Kristeva's writings maintain this logic of an oscillation
between symbolic identity and semiotic rejection or the experience of
difference. Revolution in Poetic Language and Powers of Horror are focused on
material maternal rejection, which prefigures signification and sets up the
logic of rejection. Tales of Love (trans.1987) and Black Sun: Depression and
Melancholy (trans.1989) are focused on primary narcissism, which prefigures all
subsequent identity and sets up the logic of repetition. Strangers to Ourselves
(1989) and Lettre ouverte ý Harlem Désir (1990) are focused on rejection or
difference within identity. In recognition of her contribution to French
intellectual culture, she was honored by the French government in 1990 and made
a "chevalier de l'ordre des arts et des lettres."
The Art of Innovation
Integrating Creativity in Organizations
Dimis Michaelides
Art by Umit Inatci
Introduction by Constantinos Markides
M o u f f l o n B o o k s h o p 
