| Julia Kristeva | |
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Julia Kristeva in Paris, 2008 |
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| Born | Юлия Кръстева 24 June 1941 Sliven, Bulgaria |
| Residence | France |
| Nationality | French/Bulgarian |
| Alma mater | University of Sofia and others |
| Known for | philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, novelist |
| Spouse | Philippe Sollers |
| Awards | Holberg International Memorial Prize, Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought |
| Website | |
| 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. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory and feminism after publishing her first book Semeiotikè in 1969. Her sizable 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 a 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]
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Born in Sliven, Bulgaria, Kristeva is the daughter of a church accountant. Kristeva and her sister 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.
After joining the 'Tel Quel group' founded by Philippe Sollers, 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 later wrote About Chinese Women (1977).[3][4][5][6][7][8]
One of Kristeva's most important propositions is the semiotic, as distinct from the discipline of semiotics founded by Saussure. As explained in The History of Women in Philosophy by Augustine Perumalil, Kristeva's "semiotic is closely related to the infantile pre-Oedipal referred to in the works of Freud, Otto Rank, Melanie Klein, British Object Relation psychoanalysis, and the Lacanian (pre-mirror stage). It is an emotional field, tied to the 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."
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/her own, but that he/she "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 a 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.
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 relation to 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 types, including that of Simone de Beauvoir, her stands are sometimes considered to reject feminism altogether. Kristeva proposed the idea of multiple sexual identities against the joined code of "unified feminine language".
Though she is often seen as one of the architects of postmodern feminism which partly gave rise to what is known to be political correctness, multiculturalism, and identity politics, Kristeva said her writings had been misunderstood by American feminist academics. She believes that it is harmful to posit collective identity above individual identity, and this political assertion of sexual, ethnic, and religious identities is "totalitarian".[15]
In the past decade, Kristeva has written a number of novels that resemble detective stories. While the books maintain narrative suspense and develop a 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—who 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."[16]
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.
Roman Jacobson said that "Both readers and listeners, whether agreeing or in stubborn disagreement with Julia Kristeva, feel indeed attracted to her contagious voice and to her genuine gift of questioning generally adopted 'axioms,' and her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question marks."[17]
Roland Barthes comments that "Julia Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the last prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by, could be take pride in; what she displaces is the already-said, the déja-dit, i.e., the instance of the signified, i.e., stupidity; what she subverts is authority -the authority of monologic science, of filiation."[18]
But Ian Almond criticizes Kristeva's ethnocentrism. He cites Gayatri Spivak's conclusion that Kristeva's book About Chinese Women "belongs to that very eighteenth century [that] Kristeva scorns" after pinpointing "the brief, expansive, often completely ungrounded way in which she writes about two thousand years of a culture she is unfamiliar with".[19] Ian Almond notes the absence of sophistication in Kristeva's remarks concerning the Muslim world and the dismissive terminology she uses to describe its culture and believers. He criticizes Kristeva's opposition which juxtaposes "Islamic societies" against "democracies where life is still fairly pleasant" by pointing out that Kristeva displays no awareness of the complex and nuanced debate ongoing among women theorists in the Muslim world, and that she does not refer to anything other than the Rushdie fatwa in dismissing the entire Muslim faith as "reactionary and persecutory".[20]
And in Intellectual Impostures, two professors of physics Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont devote a chapter to Julia Kristeva's use of mathematics in her writings. They conclude "the main problem summarized by these texts is that she makes no effort to justify the reference of these mathematical concepts to the fields she is purporting to study - linguistics, literary criticism, political philosophy, psychoanalysis - and this in our opinion, is for the very good reason that there is none. Her sentences are more meaningful than those of Lacan, but she surpasses even him for the superficiality of her erudition."[21]
Other books on Julia Kristeva:
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