Julia Kristeva

12 Key excerpts on "Julia Kristeva"

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  Modern Criticism and Theory

  A Reader

  • Nigel Wood, David Lodge(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  19 Julia Kristeva

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315835488-19

  Introductory note

  Julia Kristeva (b. 1941), like Tzvetan Todorov (see above pp. 226–32), was born in Bulgaria and has made her intellectual career in France, writing in French and teaching at the University of Paris. She is one of the most brilliant and versatile of the French intellectual figures of the last two decades. Roland Barthes said of her (it could have been equally well said of himself) that ‘Julia Kristeva always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud.’

  Beginning as a linguist and semiotician, she became a key figure in the group associated with the journal Tel Quel, which in the late 1960s and early 70s promoted a heady (and, as it proved, unstable) mixture of literary semiotics and Maoist politics. The ideas of Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida were all grist to her mill, but her Slavic background made her also a shrewd and illuminating commentator on Jakobson and Bakhtin. In the mid-1970s, Julia Kristeva began to write on topics related to women and feminism, and her work became increasingly oriented to psychoanalysis, which she now practices. To the dismay of many of her early admirers, she has in recent years repudiated the leftism of her Tel Quel period and espoused some very right-wing views. In her intellectual brilliance, epigrammatic poise, conceptual eclecticism, sometimes wilful obscurity, and determination to stay ahead of the game, she typifies everything that is, to outsiders, most impressive and most irritating in contemporary French intellectual life. In a part summation, part extension of her work, she has more recently applied (with Leon S. Roudiez) her linguistic theories to matters of biography and self-consciousness in Strangers to Ourselves (1990) and appreciations of Hannah Arendt (2003) and Melanie Klein

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  Profiles in Contemporary Social Theory

  • Anthony Elliott, Bryan S Turner, Anthony Elliott, Bryan S Turner(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  15 Julia Kristeva KELLY OLIVER BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT J ulia Kristeva was born in 1941 in Bulgaria. She was educated by French nuns, studied literature and worked as a journalist before going to Paris in 1966 to do graduate work with Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes. While in Paris she ®nished her doctorate in French literature, became involved in the in¯uential journal Tel Quel , and began psychoanalytic training. In 1979 she ®n-ished her training as a psychoanalyst. Currently, Kristeva is a professor of lin-guistics at the University of Paris VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University. In addition to her work as a practising psychoanalyst and her theo-retical writings, Kristeva is a novelist. Kristeva's work re¯ects her diverse background. Her writing is an intersection between philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and cultural and literary theory. She developed the science of what she calls `semanalysis', which is a combination of Freud's psychoanalysis and Saussure's and Peirce's semiology. With this new science Kristeva challenges traditional psychoanalytic theory, linguis-tic theory, and philosophy. Kristeva's goal is to bring the speaking body, complete with drives, back into philosophy and linguistics. In one of her most in¯uential books, Revolution in Poetic Language, she criticizes both Husserlian Phenomenology and Saussurean linguis-tics for formulating theories of the subject and language that cannot account for the processes through which a subject speaks. There are two ways in which Kristeva brings the speaking body back into theories of language. First, she proposes that bodily drives are discharged through language. Second, she maintains that the structure or logic of signi®cation is already operating in the material body. On Kristeva's analysis language is in the body and the body is in language.

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  Gender, Embodiment and Fluidity in Organization and Management

  • Robert McMurray, Alison Pullen(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4  Julia Kristeva

  Speaking of the body to understand the language of organizations

  Marianna Fotaki

  Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born, French poststructuralist philosopher, semiotician, literary critic and psychoanalyst whose rich and diverse work spans five decades. Her ideas on the body and the abjection of the maternal have had a profound influence on developing feminist thought. She has written extensively about language, drawing attention to movements within text and its intersection with the real, material body. In groundbreaking explorations of otherness, Kristeva provides theoretical foundations to explain various forms of social exclusion and how these can be overcome. Her influence thus extends beyond feminism, and she continues to be very productive. Recently, Kristeva examined the nature of the female genius in biographies of philosopher Hannah Arendt, child psychoanalyst and founder of object relations theory Melanie Klein and French writer Colette. She intervenes in key public debates on contemporary political issues such as terrorism, and also writes fiction.

  Kristeva is now Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris VII Diderot and holds honorary degrees from universities around the world. She has received many international prizes, including Officer of the French Legion of Honour (the highest accolade in France) in 1997 and the prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in 2006. In 2004 she was the first person to be awarded Norway’s Prix Holberg in recognition of her ‘innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture and literature which inspired research across the humanities and the social sciences throughout the world and have also had a significant impact on feminist theory’ (www.holbergprisen.no/en/julia-kristeva.html

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  Understanding Kristeva, Understanding Modernism

  • Maria Margaroni(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Julia Kristeva’s contribution to the theorization of the European avant- gardes from the end of the nineteenth century to the Second World War has widely been acknowledged and continues to be the focus of much critical debate. Equipped with a solid knowledge in a variety of fields (i.e. continental philosophy, linguistics, European literature and aesthetics, Russian avant-gardism and Poetics, Marxist political theory, anthropology, psychoanalysis), Kristeva has revolutionized the study of modernism by developing a theoretical approach that is uniquely attuned to the dynamic interplay between, on the one hand, linguistic and formal experimentation, and on the other hand, subjective crisis and socio-political upheaval. Inspired by the contestatory spirit of the late 1960s in which she emerged as a theorist, Kristeva has defended the project of the European avant-gardes and has systematically attempted to reclaim their legacy in the new societal structures produced by a global, spectacle-dominated capitalism. Although her reading of this legacy changes in response to the different challenges her generation faces from the Cold War climate of the 1960s and 1970s to the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the new terror-haunted landscape of the twenty-first century, Kristeva’s allegiance to avant-garde thought never wavers and continues to inform her more recent reflections on a politics of permanent conflictuality. 1 As a number of commentators have argued, her early work (Semiotiké, Le texte du roman) already contains the seeds of what will be recognized as a groundbreaking theory of avant-garde writing. 2 It is, however, La révolution Introduction: Kristeva at the bleeding edge of modernism Maria Margaroni

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  Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing

  • Kelly Oliver(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Kristeva is also a self-diagnostician, and the psychic drive or investment of much of her writing can often be lifted straight out of her texts. “I desire the Law,” she writes in a key chapter of this latest book, 4 voicing a panic which—psychoanalysis itself might have anticipated— was bound to be the ultimate effect of that earlier onslaught on the securing identity of the image, which Kristeva and the Tel Quel group had castigateci throughout the 1970s as little more than bourgeois deceit. Julia Kristeva's work belongs to that semiotic tradition most closely identified with the work of Roland Barthes, in which the analysis of the structure of language rapidly became a critique of the stabilizing illusion of the sign, and of those forms of writing, in particular the nineteenth-century novel, which were seen to embody and guarantee that illusion for a bourgeois society binding its subjects into the spurious unity of a culture inaccessible to change. The unity of the culture and the psychic unity of subjects went together, with the second as precondition of the first, complementary facades which bound over the psychic and social divisions beneath. Kristeva now argues that this dual emphasis set her apart from the pitfalls of structuralism and of what became for many the predominant strand of “poststructuralism” alike: “For some the important task was to ‘deconstruct’ phenomenology and structuralism as a minor form of metaphysics unaware of being so

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  Word Outward

  Medieval Perspectives on the Entry into Language

  • Corey J. Marvin(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 1

  Entry into Language

  Medieval Literature and the Poetics of Julia Kristeva

  “It was at the threshold of a world such as this that I stood.”

  —Augustine, Confessions

  Broadly speaking, the work of Julia Kristeva accounts for the triple relation among material language, physical body, and a sense of selfhood.1 Her central notion is that the body itself, an envelope of diverse and fluctuating drive-energy, provides a fundamental distinctiveness which underlies both a subjective sense of self and signifying systems based on difference.

  SEMIOTIC CHORA

  The body at its most concrete level is shot through with tumultuous surges of drive-energy. These surges, emerging from various “sources” and directed towards various “objects,” arise from within the materiality of the body itself. Although drives move organisms in several directions at once (hunger, sex, and blushing all qualify as drives), they can nevertheless be reduced, says Kristeva (following Freud), to two fundamental and contradictory compulsions, a “positive” drive of assimilation, gathering, and holding together; and a “negative” drive of destruction, dispersal, and dissolution. These two compulsions are in constant struggle and they make the interiority of the body a place of tumult and conflict.2

  Nevertheless, this struggle is essentially rhythmic . As drive-charges contend with each other and with various biological and social constraints, they rise and fall in what can be described as great oceanic surges of ebb and flow. The rhythmicity is noted by Freud: “one group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey... it is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm.”3

  These rhythmic surges wash over the interior of the body and up against their point of impact, the psyche. Here they articulate what Kristeva calls the semiotic chora . The chora is the most primitive level of ordering in the psyche: nothing more than a rhythm . Kristeva, in fact, calls it a “rhythmic space”; “a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated”; an “essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases” (Revolution 15, 40). Situated on the border between body and mind, the chora might be said to be the “turning point” at which carnal pulsations become available to the higher level order of consciousness, thought, and representation. The distinguishing characteristic of the chora is its ambivalence. It is at once essentially dichotomous— that is, comprised of “positive” and “negative” drives—and also “heterogeneous,” both biological and yet affected by various social and psychical “constraints.” Rhythmic and ambivalent, the chora is only provisional. It is not yet a “thing” that can attain a “position” in an open combinatorial system. No boundaries stable enough to allow the formation of enduring identity can exist in the chora. Yet in its oceanic rise and fall there is a fundamental distinctiveness that lends itself to the formation of a proto-symbolic space which Kristeva labels the “semiotic.”4

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  Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought

  • Stephen Linstead(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  From the start of her studies in Paris, she was to work with some of the leading figures in French structuralism. She was particularly influenced by Roland Barthes who, as one of the foremost champions of structuralism, had sought to reveal the ways in which bourgeois ideology was embedded in French language and literature. Barthes was one of the ‘ New Critics ’ and a semiotician. This concern with semiotics and the implicit regulation of language was significant in terms of the development of Kristeva’s writings although it is clear that she was already forming a dialectical relationship to these ideas even in her early writing. Barthes himself acknowledges Kristeva’s influence when he says that she ‘changes the order Organization Theory and Postmodern Thought 90 of things … (that) … she subverts … the authority of monologic science and filiation’ (Moi, 1986: 1). ‘A stranger in a strange land’ A mother is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh. And consequently a division of language – and it has always been so. (Kristeva, 1987: 254) Kristeva had gone to Paris to study Bakhtin. She had been schooled in Marxist theory, spoke fluent Russian and had lived under the strictures of Eastern European communism. She had a formidable intellect, knew Latin and Greek, spoke French, Russian and German as well as her mother-tongue Bulgarian, and, at the same time, she carried powerful experiences which, with simplification, one might set against her intellectualism. Clearly such tensions find expression in her ideas and in her writing. She was a foreigner and a foreigner exiled from her native land; estranged from her own country and estranged from the theoretical ideas to which she was exposed in her adopted one; another vacillation between the appeal of semiotics and her own theoretical position. The notion of strangeness/estrangement was to play an important part in the development of her ideas.

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  Women in Contemporary Culture

  Roles and identities in France and Spain

  • Lesley Twomey(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Intellect Books

    (Publisher)

  signifying space ’ (Belsey and Moore, p. 214) within which conflicts in human relationships can be uncovered in order to explicate and modify the process of marginalization inherent in society.

  Over the past thirty years,4 she has remained devoted to defining and refining a framework to analyse what she calls ‘the human enigma’.5 Her journey can roughly be divided into three stages. Starting with a linguistic approach to the human subject, and in particular the study of language acquisition, the limits of language and psychotic discourse,6 she developed a framework enabling an apprehension of the human prior to entry into the linguistic sphere. She then shifted her methodology towards psychoanalytic theory and practice;7 psychoanalysis was to become the cornerstone upon which she built her oeuvre . More recently, Kristeva’s work has shifted away from her usually specialized style towards styles accessible to a more varied audience: fictional texts,8 transcripts of her lectures,9 her correspondence with Catherine Clément.10 Her interests have also diversified into various cultural concerns: neurosciences, the media, politics, education and so on. However, within this diversity emanates one essential topic, central to Kristeva’s concern at the end of the millennium, which is the representation of the maternal.11

  What follows is a presentation of Julia Kristeva’s work, starting with a brief summary of the Freudian legacy leading to an explanation of how Kristeva’s psychoanalysis furthers the paternalistic model. It will focus in particular on three areas of her journey: semanalysis, the failure of the paternal function and the importance of re-theorizing the maternal.

  From Freud to Kristeva: The Place of the Maternal in the Process of Subjectivation

  In short, Freud considered the Oedipal Phase constitutive of the subject and of gender. The child and, later on, the adolescent, renounce their desire for the mother, separate themselves from her and choose to take their place in the father’s society. The Oedipal Phase, or phases, marks a departure from the maternal continent and an identification with the paternal realm. In his later work, Freud expressed his awareness of the need to research into this maternal continent, in other words to investigate the importance of the maternal function in the process of subjectivation. However, Freud did not perform this research and his legacy remains mostly that of a paternalistic theory, centred around the idea of a castrating father and his law by which the subject must abide so as to attain membership of society. The importance of theorizing the maternal and its function in society is something that Kristeva has always insisted upon and which remains central throughout her work.

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  New Forms of Revolt

  Essays on Kristeva's Intimate Politics

  • Sarah K. Hansen, Rebecca Tuvel, Sarah K. Hansen, Rebecca Tuvel(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  I have never fully understood why—although sometimes I think I do. What I know for sure is that since I first started reading Kristeva in the mid-1970s, I have mostly remained fascinated by her loyal defense of the creative, psychic process at the heart of the literary and artistic humanities and her ability to maintain that defense across mind-numbing historical change. Do I still read Kristeva today because of that defense? Or is it because of my fascination with her status as a “migrant female intellectual”? Or is it her identity as an intellectual and writer who is also a mother? Or is it her advocacy for those who are marginalized in scary new ways in an increasingly technologically flattened-out world? Or is it my attraction to risk: to the risk of thinking, to the idea of putting at risk my sense of who I am while embracing Julia Kristeva’s call for all of us to take the risk of thinking? Period. Sometimes I wonder whether the strong resistance to Kristeva’s thought, particularly on the Anglo-American Left, is an allergy to thinking— period. Whatever the reason, the critiques are serious, loud, and often difficult to answer: —There is the familiar accusation of elitism, most often accompanied by an allusion to the famous difficulty of her prose, a stylistic approach associated with postwar High French poststructuralism and its emphasis on the power of language to shape reality. —There are the accusations of Eurocentrism, the argument that her emphasis on “caring for Europe” (soigner l’Europe), her emphasis on and celebration of the singularities at the heart of European intellectual history, have led her to naive ethnocentric tourism (for example, in China) and, more importantly, to false theoretical generalizations about the “others” she so values

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  Sacrificial Logics

  Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity

  • Allison Weir(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  22

  As I have argued, Kristeva never claims that the sustained presence of the semiotic in culture leads to psychosis; in fact, she argues that the semiotic is always “present” in culture, and she cites ideal forms of perception, subjectivity, language, and art as those which manage to express rather than repress the semiotic. It is not the sustained presence of the semiotic but the failure to engage with the symbolic (and hence an incapacity to express the semiotic) which, for Kristeva, leads to psychosis and to the breakdown of cultural life.23

  Thus, it makes no sense to call for the liberation of the semiotic from the symbolic. Such a demand could only be made on the assumption that political change requires a pure negation or abolition of the symbolic. Kristeva’s theory of the relation of semiotic to symbolic is precisely a critique of the call to escape from the symbolic order into another space—into the body or anywhere else. If the semiotic has an emancipatory force, it is not as an escape from or destruction of an unchangeable symbolic order, but as a constant reintroduction of heterogeneity into linguistic and social structures—a constant remembering and reassertion of difference, which produces conflict and change.

  Toward a Psychoanalytic Theory of Women’s Self-Identity From Archaic Mother to Subject in Process

  I want now to return to the problem with which I opened my discussion of Kristeva, in the analysis of “Women’s Time”: the problem of self-identity for women. In “Women’s Time,” Kristeva insists that there can be no society without a “socio-symbolic contract,” and that that requires a “founding separation, some sort of “break-producing symbolism.” But she argues that this symbolism need not be the sacrifice of the Woman/Mother. We need, Kristeva argues, to move away from our preoccupation with—either defense against or celebration of—the archaic mother. We need, then, a different basis for social community, and for self-identity.

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  Sexual Subversions

  • Elizabeth Grosz(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2

  The speaking subject

  Virtually all of Kristeva’s concerns converge on her notion of the speaking subject. She claims that traditional linguistic, literary and social theory is based on an unrecognised commitment to a concept of the speaking subject. No social or discursive function can be understood without some notion of the speaking being as the locus of textual production and deformation.

  Traditional knowledges within the social sciences remain ignorant of the revolutionary upheaval in concepts of subjectivity effected by Freud’s postulation of the unconscious, relying as they do on Cartesian/transcendental notions of a pre-formed, pre-linguistic subject. Psychoanalysis effects a rupture, a crisis in the rational self-certainty of the subject, the implications of which still need to be understood and unravelled in the social sciences. She forces these fields to confront Freud’s Copernican revolution directly. Conversely, she forces psychoanalysis to confront its own often unrecognised commitments to an understanding of language and systems of representation — to the enrichment of both.

  Kristeva is interested in exploring the region of overlap between linguistic/literary theory and psychoanalysis. She analyses the ways in which texts are able to confirm and stabilise subjectivity or to put it into question; and how the subject is able to transmit/ receive and deform meanings. She explores the contradictory tensions within and between the unified, rational subject and the coherent, meaningful text, revealing the wayward functioning of desire in both. She links subjectivity and textuality through a series of terms, including ‘the semiotic’, ‘the symbolic’ and ‘the thetic’. These indicate sites and processes in human social development that provide the necessary conditions for representational and symbolic processes.

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  Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory

  • Megan Becker-Leckrone(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  The consequences of Kristeva’s argument, offered as a featured presentation at an international conference populated by participants likely to be both supportive of fellow readers and cognizant of Kristeva’s authorita-tive theoretical status, would hardly be so dire. Yet it is remarkable that Kristeva’s and Stephen’s arguments rely on a set of similar critical moves. Given the long history of Kristeva’s participation in a theory of textuality that so incisively critiques our unexamined assumptions about authors, textual utterances, their sources and echoes of other texts, and our own implication in the great intertextual dialogue they engender, her most “complete” reading of Joyce to date strikes a strange chord. Ultimately, I believe it leaves us with usefully cautionary questions about the juxtaposition posed by this book from the start: what is the relationship between Julia Kristeva and literary theory? Does she offer one? If so, how can we produce one in kind? What I hope to convey, even in the final confusing light of the “Gracehoper” essay, is that those questions need constantly to be asked, their answers never taken for granted. While Kristeva herself has for decades profoundly asked those questions, where she does not, we must ask them for her. J o y c e ’ s “ Q u a s h e d Q u o t a t o e s ” 1 3 1 What does it matter who’s speaking? In “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes bases his provocative vision of a new type of reading on the very practical fact that, in the Balzac passage he quotes at the essay’s outset, we cannot tell who is speaking. As we have explored, this “death of the author” ushers “the birth of the reader,” who must navigate texts in the midst of this uncer-tainty, vigilantly attentive to it.

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