Julia Kristeva

Philosopher

• Born: June 24, 1941
• Place of Birth: Silven, Bulgaria

BULGARIAN-BORN FRENCH CRITIC AND PSYCHOANALYST

Biography

Julia Kristeva is perhaps most accurately and conventionally described as a semiotician, that is, a student of signs and their use and meaning. However, in a career that repeatedly defied conventions, Kristeva became one of the most diverse, controversial, and consistently innovative theorists engaged in the postmodern reconsideration of the origin, nature, and destiny of the human self. With a skillful and highly original blend of disciplines and methodologies ranging from linguistics and psychoanalysis to Marxism, feminism, and literary criticism, Kristeva produced works that trace various interactions between language and the human psyche and explore the ways these interactions create and maintain the political, cultural, and religious structures of society.

Kristeva was born in 1941 into a middle-class Bulgarian family. She originally aspired to a scientific career, but because her parents lacked the political influence necessary for advanced technical study in the Soviet Union, she attended the Literary Institute of Sofia. She graduated in 1966 with a degree in linguistics and won a fellowship for doctoral study in Paris, where she worked with the famous linguist Émile Benveniste and the structuralist writer Roland Barthes. The literary critic Tzvetan Todorov, a fellow Bulgarian who had established himself in the French capital, introduced her to the group of writers and intellectuals associated with the radical French journal Tel Quel. Among them was the avant-garde novelist Philippe Sollers, who later became her husband. Encouraged by Todorov and Sollers, Kristeva began writing essays for Tel Quel. In 1973, she received her doctorat d’état and subsequently accepted a professorship in linguistics at the University of Paris.

In 1974, Kristeva’s dissertation was published under the title La révolution du langage poétique (Revolution in Poetic Language, 1984). In this book and in her previously published collection of early essays, Sēmeiōtikē: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (1969; Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, 1980), Kristeva introduces the terminology and lays the theoretical foundation of all her later work. She presents her definition of the human self as a “subject in process,” explores at length her distinction between two types of language use, the semiotic and the symbolic, and explains her theory of the way literary texts respond to and appropriate each other, a process she names “intertextuality.” She also registers her discontent with linguistics as a science because it studies language as a self-enclosed, formal object and is primarily concerned with systematizing and structuring the products of linguistic behavior. Traditional linguists did not pose the types of questions that intrigued Kristeva—questions about the irrational, unconscious, and purely physical aspects of language that underlie and often subvert the language of conventional, day-to-day communication.

Given these concerns with unconscious and nonrational processes, it was perhaps inevitable that Kristeva would be drawn to psychoanalysis as the one “science” that might be able to provide the answers to her unprecedented questions. During the mid-1970s, she received her training as a psychoanalyst, and in 1979 she began her own practice.

The influence of this experience is immediately apparent in the changing emphases and methods of Kristeva’s work throughout the 1980s. In Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection (1980; Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1982), for example, she presents her own revision of the stages and purposes involved in the process Sigmund Freud defined as “abjection.” In Histoires d’amour (1983; Tales of Love, 1987), Kristeva reverses her focus to examine the various discourses of love that have been produced throughout the history of the West. She uses Freudian concepts such as narcissism, the Oedipus complex, the ego ideal, and the process of transference to explain the role of desire and illusion in allowing the human self to create and cling to a tentative, fluid, and essentially fictional sense of identity.

It is in a short book entitled Au commencement était l’amour (1985; In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, 1987) that Kristeva asserts her strongest and most provocative claims for the efficacy of psychoanalysis. After sorting out the differences between Christianity and psychoanalysis, she concludes that the latter offers more varied, tolerant, and livable roles for its patients to play. She proposes that as a source of identity and of healing love, psychoanalysis has thus come to supplant Christianity.

With the publication in the 1990s of the novels Les samourais (1990; The Samurai, 1992), Le vieil homme et les loups (1991; The Old Man and the Wolves, 1994), and Possessions (1996; trans. 1998), Kristeva entered yet another phase of her varied and continually evolving career. She continued publishing both fiction and nonfiction into the twenty-first century, such as L’Horloge enchantée, (2015; The Enchanted Clock, 2017) and Dostoïevski (2020). Throughout the many stages of her work, one constant has remained: her concern with ethics. She has insisted that it is the intellectual’s duty to formulate and follow a more inclusive, more equitable, and, where women are concerned, potentially more liberating ethical code than the one that governs Western societies.

Bibliography

Fletcher, John, and Andrew Benjamin, eds. Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva. 1990. Routledge, 2012.

Jardine, Alice, and Mari Ruti. At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

Kristeva, Julia. "In the Current State of War, it is Our Most Inner Selves that We Must Save." European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2020, www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/in-the-current-state-of-war-it-is-our-most-inner-selves-that-we-must-save. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Kristeva, Julia. “Crossing the Borders: An Interview with Julia Kristeva.” Interview by Birgitte Mittun Huitfeldt. Hypatia 21.4 (2006): 164–77.

Kristeva, Julia. The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva. Open Court, 2020. 

Lechte, John. Julia Kristeva. 1990. Routledge, 2013.

Miller. Elaine P. Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times. Columbia University Press, 2014. 

O’Grady, Kathleen A., ed. Julia Kristeva: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources in French and English, 1966–1996. Bowling Green: Philos. Documentation Center, Bowling Green State U, 1997.

Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

Schippers, Birgit. Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 

Smith, Anna. Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996.

Wardi, Eynel. Once below a Time: Dylan Thomas, Julia Kristeva, and Other Speaking Subjects. State U of New York P, 2000.