Julia Kristeva

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Julia Kristeva
Kristeva IMG 5888.jpg
Julia Kristeva in Paris, 2008
Юлия Кръстева

(1941-06-24) 24 June 1941 (age 78)
NationalityFrench / Bulgarian
Alma materUniversity of Sofia
Spouse(s)Philippe Sollers
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
Main interests
Notable ideas

Julia Kristeva (French: [kʁisteva]; Bulgarian: Юлия Кръстева; born 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a professor emeritus at the University Paris Diderot. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize, awarded by the Havel Foundation.

Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural studies and feminism after publishing her first book, Semeiotikè, in 1969. She has published a large amount of academic work including 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. She is important in structuralist and poststructuralist thought.

Kristeva is also the founder of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.[3]

Life[change | change source]

Kristeva was born in Sliven, Bulgaria. Her parents were Christian. Her father was a church accountant. Kristeva and her sister attended a Francophone school run by Dominican nuns. Kristeva learned about the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Kristeva went on to study at the University of Sofia. While a postgraduate there she got a research fellowship that let her move to France in December 1965, when she was 24.[4] She continued her education at several French universities, studying under Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes, among other scholars.[5][6] On August 2, 1967, Kristeva married the novelist Philippe Sollers,[7] Philippe Joyaux.

Kristeva taught at Columbia University in the early 1970s. She is still a Visiting Professor.[8] She has also published under the married name Julia Joyaux.[9][10][11]

Work[change | change source]

After joining the 'Tel Quel group' founded by Sollers, Kristeva mostly worked 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 poststructuralist criticism. For example, her view of the subject, and its construction has some things in common with Sigmund Freud and Lacan. However, Kristeva rejects any understanding of the subject in a structuralist sense. Instead, she describes the subject as always "in process" or "on trial".[12] In this way, she contributes to the poststructuralist critique of essentialized structures, while preserving the teachings of psychoanalysis. She travelled to China in the 1970s and later wrote About Chinese Women (1977).[13][14][15][16][17][18]

The "semiotic" and the "symbolic"[change | change source]

One of Kristeva's most important contributions is that signification is composed of two elements: the symbolic and the semiotic. That use of semiotic is different from the discipline of semiotics founded by Ferdinand de Saussure. Augustine Perumalil explained that 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 Lacan's pre-mirror stage." It is an emotional field that is related to the instincts in the gaps and sounds of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words.[19] According to Birgit Schippers, the semiotic is associated with music, poetry, rhythm, and that which lacks structure and meaning. It is closely tied to the "feminine" and shows the state of the pre-Mirror Stage infant that has not yet developed independently.[20]

In the Mirror Stage, the child learns to tell the difference between self and other. The child begins a process of sharing cultural meaning, known as the symbolic. In Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva describes the symbolic as the development of language in the child to become a "speaking subject" and to develop a sense of identity separate from the mother. This process of separation is known as abjection. The child must reject and move away from the mother in order to enter into the world of language, culture, meaning, and the social. This realm of language is called the symbolic and is different from the semiotic that is associated with the masculine, the law, and structure. Kristeva thinks differently from Lacan. She thinks that even after entering the symbolic, the subject continues to move back and forth between the semiotic and the symbolic. Therefore, the child does not form a fixed identity. The subject is permanently "in process". Because female children continue to identify to some degree with the mother figure, they are especially likely to retain a close connection to the semiotic. This continued identification with the mother may result in what Kristeva refers to in Black Sun (1989) as melancholia (depression), because female children both reject and identify with the mother figure at the same time.

It has also been suggested (e.g., Creed, 1993) that the degradation of women and women's bodies in popular culture (and particularly, for example, in slasher films) emerges because of the threat to identity that the mother's body poses: it is a reminder of time spent in the undifferentiated state of the semiotic, where one has no concept of self or identity. After abjecting the mother, subjects retain an unconscious fascination with the semiotic, desiring to reunite with the mother, while at the same time fearing the loss of identity that accompanies it. Slasher films thus provide a way for audience members to safely reenact the process of abjection by vicariously expelling and destroying the mother figure.

Kristeva uses Plato’s idea of the chora, meaning "a nourishing maternal space" (Schippers, 2011). Kristeva’s idea of the chora may mean: a reference to the uterus, as a metaphor for the relationship between the mother and child, and as the time before the Mirror Stage.

Kristeva is also know for working on intertextuality.

Anthropology and psychology[change | change source]


Julia Kristeva in Paris in 2008


Feminist[change | change source]

Kristeva has been called an important leader of French feminism together with Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray.[21][22] Kristeva has had a strong influence on feminism and feminist literary studies[23][24] in the US and the UK. She has also influenced thinking about contemporary art.[25][26] But her relation to feminist groups and movements in France has been very controversial. Kristeva made a famous statement about three types of feminism in "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul (1993). She rejected the first two types, including that of Beauvoir. Some people think she completely rejects feminism. Kristeva proposed an idea of multiple sexual identities against concepts of "unified feminine language".

Against identity politics[change | change source]

Kristeva says American feminist academics have misunderstood her writings. According to Kristeva, it was not enough to take language apart to find its hidden meaning. History, individual psychic and sexual experiences also tell us how to understand language. This is a post-structuralist approach. It helped some social groups to find the source of their oppression in the language that they used. However, Kristeva believes that it is harmful to think of collective identity as more important than individual identity. She thinks that politics that makes sexual, ethnic, and religious identities the most important thing is ultimately totalitarian.[27]

Novelist[change | change source]

Kristeva wrote some novels that are like detective stories. The books have mystery and suspense, but readers also find ideas from her theoretical projects. Murder in Byzantium has themes from orthodox Christianity and politics. She called it "a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code".[28]

Honors[change | change source]

Kristeva won the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004. She won the 2006 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. She has also received Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, and the Vaclav Havel Prize.[29]

Scholarly reception[change | change source]

Roman Jakobson said that Kristeva was very good at asking questions in a way that interested people even if they disagreed with her[30]

Roland Barthes comments that Julia Kristeva changes the place of things. He says that she always destroys your last prejudice and that she turns authority against itself."[31]

Ian Almond criticizes Kristeva's ethnocentrism. He repeats Gayatri Spivak's conclusion that Kristeva's book About Chinese Women has problems. Almond says it has the same discrimination and bias as in the eighteenth century. Also, he says that Kristeva wrote about two thousand years of history that she does not know well.[32] Almond also thinks that Kristeva's ideas about the Muslim world, culture, and believers are too simple.[33] He adds that Kristeva ignores Muslim women and pays too much attention to the Rushdie fatwa.[34]

Some writings[change | change source]

  • 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.)
  • About Chinese Women. London: Boyars, 1977.
  • Marriage as a Fine Art (with Philippe Sollers). New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Novels[change | change source]

  • Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Other books about Julia Kristeva:

  • Irene Ivantcheva-Merjanska, Ecrire dans la langue de l'autre. Assia Djebar et Julia Kristeva. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2015.
  • Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Modernity, Suny Press, 2004. (2006 Goethe Award Psychoanalytic Scholarship, finalist for the best book published in 2004.)
  • Noëlle McAfee, Julia Kristeva, Routledge, 2003.

References[change | change source]

  1. Kelly Ives, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism, Crescent Moon Publishing, 2016.
  2. Creech, James, "Julia Kristeva's Bataille: reading as triumph," Diacritics, 5(1), Spring 1975, pp. 62-68.
  3. Simone de Beauvoir Prize 2009 goes to the One Million Signatures Campaign in Iran Archived 2009-02-01 at the Wayback Machine, Change for Equality
  5. Nilo Kauppi, Radicalism in French Culture: A Sociology of French Theory in the 1960s, Burlington, VT, 2010, p. 25.
  6. Schrift, Alan D. (2006). Twentieth-century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers. Blackwell Publishing. p. 147. ISBN 1-4051-3217-5.
  7. Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013, pp. 176-77.
  8. Riding, Alan, Correcting Her Idea of Politically Correct. New York Times. 14 June 2001.
  9. Library of Congress authority record for Julia Kristeva, Library of Congress
  10. BNF data page, Bibliothèque nationale de France
  11. Hélène Volat, Julia Kristeva: A Bibliography (bibliography page for Le Langage, cet inconnu (1969), published under the name Julia Joyaux).
  12. McAfee, Noêlle (2004). Julia Kristeva. London: Routledge. p. 38. ISBN 0-203-63434-9.
  13. "State University of New York at Stony Brook". Archived from the original on 2004-11-20. Retrieved 2004-11-23.
  14. Tate Britain Online Event: Julia Kristeva
  15. Who's who in Les samouraïs by Kathleen O'Grady
  16. An Interview with Josefina Ayerza - Flash Art Magazine
  17. Guardian article: March 14, 2006
  18. Julia Kristeva - site officiel
  19. Perumalil, Augustine. The History of Women in Philosophy.
  20. Schippers, Birgit (2011). Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought.
  25. Griselda Pollock, Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum. Routledge, 2007.
  28. Sutherland, John (14 March 2006). "The ideas interview: Julia Kristeva; Why is a great critic ashamed of being fashionable?". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 November 2014.
  29. http://www.holbergprisen.no/en/julia-kristeva/french-order
  31. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of language, p 168
  32. Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, I.B.Tauris, 2007, p. 132
  34. Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, I.B.Tauris, 2007, pp. 154–55

Other websites[change | change source]