Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva in Paris, 2008
Born	Юлия Кръстева June 24, 1941(1941-06-24) Sliven, Bulgaria
Residence	France
Nationality	French/Bulgarian
Alma mater	University of Sofia and others
Known for	philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, novelist
Spouse(s)	Philippe Sollers
Awards	Holberg International Memorial Prize, Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought
Website http://www.kristeva.fr/

Julia Kristeva (Bulgarian: Юлия Кръстева) (born 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory and feminism after publishing her first book Semeiotikè in 1969. Her immense body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. Together with Roland Barthes, Todorov, Goldmann, Gérard Genette, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Greimas, and Althusser, she stands as one of the foremost structuralists, in that time when structuralism took major place in humanities. Her works also have an important place in post-structuralist thought.

She is also the founder and head of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.^[1]

Life

Born in Sliven, Bulgaria, Kristeva was the daughter of a church accountant. Her parents were not members of the Bulgarian Communist Party in power at the time, excluding Kristeva and her sister from the associated privileges. They were enrolled in a Francophone school run by Dominican nuns. Kristeva became acquainted with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin at this time in Bulgaria. Kristeva went on to study at the University of Sofia, and while a postgraduate there obtained a research fellowship that enabled her to move to France in December 1965, when she was 24.^[2] She continued her education at several French universities.

Work

After joining the 'Tel Quel group' in 1965, Kristeva focused on the politics of language and became an active member of the group. She trained in psychoanalysis, and earned her degree in 1979. In some ways, her work can be seen as trying to adapt a psychoanalytic approach to the poststructuralist criticism. For example, her view of the subject, and its construction, shares similarities with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. However, Kristeva rejects any understanding of the subject in a structuralist sense, instead, she favors a subject always "in process" or "in crisis." In this way, she contributes to the poststructuralist critique of essentialized structures, whilst preserving the teachings of psychoanalysis. She travelled to China in the 1970s and wrote About Chinese Women (1977) about her experiences.^{[3][4][5][6][7][8]}

The semiotic

One of Kristeva's most important propositions is the semiotic. Kristeva's use of the term 'semiotic' here should not be confused with the discipline of semiotics suggested by Ferdinand de Saussure. For Kristeva, the semiotic is closely related to the infantile pre-Oedipal referred to in the works of Freud, Otto Rank and mainly Melanie Klein and the British Object Relation psychoanalysis, and to the Lacanian (pre-mirror stage). It is an emotional field, tied to our instincts, which dwells in the fissures and prosody of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words. In this sense, the semiotic opposes the symbolic, which correlates words with meaning in a stricter, mathematical sense. She is also noted for her work on the concepts of abjection (a notion that relates to a primary psychological force of rejection, directed toward the mother-figure), and intertextuality.

Anthropology and psychology

Kristeva argues that anthropology and psychology, or the connection between the social and the subject, do not represent each other, but rather follow the same logic: the survival of the group and the subject. Furthermore, in her analysis of Oedipus, she claims that the speaking subject cannot exist on his own, but that he "stands on the fragile threshold as if stranded on account of an impossible demarcation" (Powers of Horror, p. 85).

In her comparison between the two disciplines, Kristeva claims that the way in which an individual excludes the abject mother as means of forming an identity, is the same way in which societies are constructed. On a broader scale, cultures exclude the maternal and the feminine, and by this come into being.

Feminism

Kristeva was regarded as a key proponent of French feminism together with Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray.^[9],^[10] Kristeva had a remarkable influence on feminism and feminist literary studies^[11][12] in the US and the UK, as well as on readings into contemporary art^[13],^[14] although her relations with feminist circles and movements in France was quite controversial. Kristeva made a famous disambiguation of three types of feminism in "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul (1993), while rejecting the first two, including that of Simone de Beauvoir, her stands are sometimes considered as rejective of feminism in common; in fact, Kristeva tried to propose the idea of multiple sexual identities against the joined code of "unified feminine language".

Novels

In the past decade, Kristeva has written a number of novels that resemble detective stories. While the books maintain narrative suspense and develop a compellingly stylized surface, her readers also encounter ideas intrinsic to her theoretical projects. Her characters reveal themselves mainly through psychological devices, making her type of fiction mostly resemble the later work of Dostoevsky. Her fictional oeuvre, which includes The Old Man and the Wolves, Murder in Byzantium, and Possessions, while often allegorical, also approaches the autobiographical in some passages, especially with one of the protagonists of "Possessions," Stephanie Delacour - a French journalist - which can be seen as Kristeva's alter ego. Murder in Byzantium deals with themes from orthodox Christianity and politics and has been described by Kristeva as "a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code."^[15]

Personal

Julia Kristeva is married to the French writer Philippe Sollers and has a son.^{[citation needed]}

Honors

For her "innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture and literature", Kristeva was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004. She won the 2006 Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought.

Criticism

Among her criticics are also Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont who, in a book Fashionable Nonsense triggered off a debate, reporting three articles of Kristeva, that have an excessive use of mathematical or physical technical terms sometimes in a rather forced sense (a similar use of such terms, according to both of them--the mathematician Sokal and the physician Bricmont--is found in the writings of Lacan, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Virilio etc), intended according to them to impress a reader who does not have knowledge that would permit judging whether the use of these terms is well-grounded.

Selected Writings

• Séméiôtiké: recherches pour une sémanalyse, Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1969. (English translation: Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.)
• La Révolution Du Langage Poétique: L'avant-Garde À La Fin Du Xixe Siècle, Lautréamont Et Mallarmé. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974. (English translation: Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.)
• About Chinese Women. London: Boyars, 1977.
• Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
• The Kristeva Reader. (ed. Toril Moi) Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
• In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
• Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
• Nations without Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
• New Maladies of the Soul. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
• Crisis of the European Subject. New York: Other Press, 2000.
• Reading the Bible. In: David Jobling, Tina Pippin & Ronald Schleifer (eds). The Postmodern Bible Reader. (pp. 92-101). Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
• Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words: Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette: A Trilogy. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
• Strangers to Ourselves New York: Columbia University Press,1991

Novels

• The Samurai: A Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
• The Old Man and the Wolves. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
• Possessions: A Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
• Murder in Byzantium. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

See also

• List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction
• Luce Irigaray
• Fashionable Nonsense
• Hélène Cixous
• Écriture féminine
• French feminism

External links

• Julia Kristeva (Official Site)
• Holberg Prize

Notes

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