Julia Kristeva

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Image:Kristeva.jpg Julia Kristeva (born 24 June 1941, Sliven, Bulgaria) is a Bulgarian philosopher, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. Her works have an important place in post-structuralist thought.

Born in Bulgaria, Kristeva moved to France in December 1965, when she was 24, escaping Stalinist Bulgarian communism. She continued her education at several French universities. She arrived there just in time to experience the rapidly waning influence of structuralism, which was being challenged by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, among others. In some ways, her work can be seen as trying to adapt a psychoanalytic approach to these poststructuralist critiques.

For example, her view of the subject, and its construction, shares many similarities with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. However, Kristeva rejects any formal systematical (or structuralist) understanding of the subject in favor of a subject perpetually "in process" or "in crisis." In this way, she addresses the poststructuralist critique of essentialized structures, while preserving a psychoanalytic approach.

One of Kristeva's most important propositions is her idea of the semiotic. For Kristeva, the semiotic is closely related to the infantile (pre-mirror) state in both Lacan and Freud. It is an emotional force, tied to our instincts, which exists in the fissures and prosody of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words. In this sense, the semiotic is opposed to the symbolic, which refers to a more denotative mathematical correspondence of words to meaning. Kristeva's use of the term 'semiotic' here should not be confused with the discipline of semiotics suggested by Ferdinand de Saussure. She is also noted for her work on the concepts of abjection and intertextuality.

Julia Kristeva is married to the French writer Philippe Sollers.

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About her work

Kristeva draws the line between anthropology and psychology, the connection between the social and the subject: they do not represent each other, but rather follow the same logic: their well-being, which is the survival of the group and 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, 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. Cultures exclude the maternal and the feminine, and by this come into being. By this she follows Mary Douglas, who made a longer line, between the body – subject – society, thus adding biology to anthropology and psychology.

In the past decade Kristeva has written a number of detective novels. Her fiction includes The Old Man and the Wolves, Murder in Byzantium, and Possessions; it is often allegorical and incorporates ideas from her academic work. It is sometimes semi-autobiographical, with the character of Stephanie Delacour, a French journalist, as Kristeva's alter ego. Murder in Byzantium deals with themes from orthodox christianity and politics.

For her "innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture and literature", Kristeva was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004.

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