Kristeva, Julia (1941—)
Bulgarian-born, Paris-based linguist, philosopher, and psychoanalyst. One of the most significant feminist authors in the latter half of the twentieth century, Kristeva’s career seems to fall into three distinct periods, each distinguished by a different primary interest: post-structuralism linguistics, psychoanalysis, and critical biography. These shifts of interest are not so much departures as stepping stones toward an ever more sophisticated theorization of language, desire, and the unconscious. She was awarded the prestigious Holberg Prize in 2004. Kristeva came to Paris to study in 1965 and enrolled in Barthes, Roland’s seminars. Already very well versed in Eastern European linguistics and philosophy, particularly the work of the Russian Formalism and Bakhtin, Mikhail, she gave seminar presentations that helped introduce this work in France. Perceiving the limits of structuralism as a methodology, Kristeva used Bakhtin’s work to endow it with a sense of dynamism and history that it so critically lacked. In 1966, in a famous essay for the French journal Communication (later incorporated into Séméiotiké (1969), partially translated as Desire in Language (1980), she proposed the concept of intertextuality to explain the interconnectedness of all aspects of communication. Consistent with Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, intertextuality holds that there are no intrinsic meanings, that rather all meaning is produced in a negotiation between previously established meanings. She found inspiration for her theory in modernist authors, particularly Louis-Ferdinand Céline, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust. Her teacher, Roland Barthes, adopted the concept of intertextuality in his S/Z (1970), as did her contemporary Derrida, Jacques. In 1965 she joined the Tel Quel group, a small band of philosophers and thinkers (among them Barthes, Derrida and Klossowski, Pierre) who wrote for and identified with the journal of that name founded and edited by her then husband Sollers, Philippe. Kristeva participated in the 1974 Tel Quel study trip of China, then in the grip of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, following the group’s conversion to Maoism in the late 1960s, and afterwards wrote a highly idealized account of Chinese life, About Chinese Women (1986). Throughout this period, Kristeva undertook psychoanalytic training, eventually attaining the status of analyst in 1979. She attempted to blend her interests in politics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis by synthesizing a new methodology she christened semanalysis. Out of this work arose the influential concept of the khōra, which is a pre-linguistic, pre-subjective realm of psychosexual development. As the 1970s unfolded, Kristeva drifted away from the Tel Quel group and began to focus more on psychoanalysis. She wrote a trilogy of studies on abject, love, and depression: Powers of Horror (1982), Tales of Love (1983), and Black Sun (1987). The focus of her work is consistently the situation of the subject and its relation to itself and others. Beginning in the late 1980s Kristeva worked on a trilogy on the theme of ‘female genius’, writing comprehensive critical biographies of Arendt, Hannah, Collette, and Klein, Melanie. As much feminist acts of historical recovery as demonstrations of psychoanalytic prowess, these works seem to portend a move beyond strictly academic work into a more ‘pop’ philosophical realm aimed at a broad readership. She has also written a number of semi-autobiographical works, starting with Les Samouraïs (1990), which are for the post-structuralist generation what Beauvoir, Simone de’s works were for the existentialism. See also Cixous, Hélène; Irigaray, Luce. Further Reading: M. Becker-Leckrone Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory (2005). E. Grosz Sexual Subversions (1989). J. Lechte Julia Kristeva (1990).