Julia Kristeva's Bibliography

[This information was contributed by Kelly Oliver.]

FRENCH BOOKS

1. Le feminin et le sacre. Co-authored with Catherine Clément. Paris: Stock, 1998.
2. Le temps sensible: Proust et l'expérience littéraire, Paris: Gallimard, 1994.
3. Les Nouvelles maladies de l'ame, Paris: Libraire Artheme Fayard, 1993.
4. Soleil noir: Depression et mélancolie, Paris: Gallimard, 1987.
5. Histoires d'amour, Edtions Denoël: Paris, 1983.
6. Pouvoirs de l'horreur, Paris: Seuil, 1980.
7. Polylogue, Paris: Seuil, 1977.
8. La Révolution du langage poétique, Paris: Seuil, 1974.

BOOKS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

1. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, Trans. by Ross Guberman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
2. New Maladies of the Soul Trans. by Ross Guberman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
3. Black Sun Trans. by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
4. Tales of Love Trans. by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
5. Revolution in Poetic Language, Trans. by Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
6. Powers of Horror, Trans. by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
7. Desire in Language, Edited by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

ARTICLES

• "A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident," in The Kristeva Reader, Edited by Toril Moi, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986; originally published in 1977.
• "Julia Kristeva in conversation with Rosiland Coward," Desire, ICA Documents, 1984, p. 22-27.

Secondary Sources

• de Nooy, Juliana. Derrida, Kristeva, and the Dividing Line: An Articulation of Two Theories of Difference. Garland, 1998.
• Huntington, Patricia. Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray.
• Julia Kristeva 1966-96: Aesthetics, Politics, Ethics. (special issue of the journal Parallax out of the University of Leeds, UK) 1998.
• Lechte, John and Mary Zournazi, ed. After the Revolution: On Kristeva. 1998. ISBN 1-876017-37-6.
• O'Grady, Kathleen, ed. Julia Kristeva: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources in French and English: 1966-1996. 1997.
• Oliver, Kelly, ed. Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writings. 1993.
• Oliver, Kelly. "Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions," Hypatia a journal of feminist philosophy, 8:3, summer 1993, p. 94-114.
• Oliver, Kelly, ed. The Portable Kristeva. 1997.
• Oliver, Kelly. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind. 1993.
• Reineke, Martha J. Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence. 1997.
• Smith, Anna. Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement. 1997.
• Smith, Anne-Marie. Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable. Pluto Press, 1998.
  

Internet Sites

[Note: Some of this information was contributed by David Polan.]
http://www.stfx.ca/people/mmoynagh/445/more-445/Concepts/krist_sub.html or click here.
http://www.n2h2.com/KOVACS/CD/2884.html or click here.
http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.2/features/eyman/julia.html or click here.
http://pilot.msu.edu/user/chrenkal/980/INTERTEX.HTM or click here.
You can reach the Julia Kristeva page on the Voice of the Shuttle website at: http://www.humanitas.ucsb.edu/shuttle/gender.html#kristeva or click here.

An Interview with Julia Kristeva (4)

by Kathleen O'Grady

[Copyright 1998 Kathleen O'Grady]

This is a small section (pp. 8-11) of a larger audience dialogue with Julia Kristeva, printed in Parallax: Julia Kristeva 1966-96. Aesthetics, Politics, Ethics. Issue 8 July-September 1998, pp. 5-16. Guest Editor, Griselda Pollock. This interview appears here with the permission of Kathleen O'Grady.

Kathleen O'Grady: Though your work has included linguistic and semiotic studies, literature and psychoanalytic analyses, your writings have been consistently framed by the Johanine quotation, 'In the beginning was the Word.' You adopted Céline's revision in Powers of Horror: 'No! In the beginning was emotion. The Word came next to replace emotion as the trot replaces the gallop'. In Tales of Love you sum up your understanding of Freud with the statement: 'In the beginning was hatred'. Your text on the relation of psychoanalysis and faith is titled, In the Beginning was Love. And more recently your work on Proust has reformulated this statement once again: 'In the beginning was suffering'. This continual transformation of the New Testament invocation ('In the beginning') begs the question: which of your semiotic, psychoanalytic, or Catholic proclivities generates this perpetual revisionism, this persistent desire for tracking and tracing a beginning?

Julia Kristeva: You are posing some very searching questions and not treating me gently here. I will answer the question in two parts: one is the interest in origins, and the other the place of Christian tradition. Origins are one of the fundamental questions of metaphysics that cannot be entirely avoided in linguistics or psychoanalysis. Let me take the psychoanalytical point of view. In anamnesis we have the possibility of entering as far as possible into the investigation of infantile memory to discover the most distant memories of our childhood. These are so often traumatic memories. In this journey, a strange transmutation occurs in our language. In speaking, in traversing the universe of signs, we arrive at emotions, at sensations, at drives, at affects, and even at what Freud named the 'umbilicus of the dream'. This is something unnamable, which becomes, none the less, the source of our investigation. The heteronomy of our psyche has always preoccupied my investigations. I am interested in language [langage], and in the other side of language which is filtered inevitably by language and yet is not language. I have named this heterogeneity variously. I have sought it out in the experience of love, of abjection, of horror. I have called it the semiotic in relation to the symbolic. But it is the doubling of language [la langue] that seems, at the moment, to be of more interest to women than to men.

What the other side of language as metaphysics thinks of as origins, is not an origin. Rather it is heterogeneity vis-à-vis language. I suggest that this is a fundamental point of psychoanalytical theory. Freud frequently reclaimed what he called his dualism: the death drive versus the life instincts. For Freud the psychic apparatus is composed of two distinct economies or logics of Ruth the Moabite. The book of Ruth is a magisterial reflection on the alterity and strangeness of woman which one finds nowhere else. Ruth is a foreigner and yet she is the ancestor of the royal house of David. Thus, at the hear of sovereignty there is an inscription of a foreign femininity. Institutionalized Judaism does not recognize this, yet it is part of a tradition of generosity towards the other that is at the heart of Jewish monotheism. In the Song of Songs the amours relation is figured as a relation between a man and a woman who are strangers, travelers, destined to lose each other. Separation is thus placed at the heart of the relation of one to the other in the Bible. With regards to my interest in narcissism, you will recall the Biblical and Gospel verse on which Thomas Aquinas comments: Love your neighbor as yourself. It can be interpreted narrowly as the legitimation of egotism and individualism. But in my book, Tales of Love, I interpreted it as the necessity of structuring narcissism. To become capable of loving our neighbor as ourself, we have first of all to heal a wounded narcissism. We must reconstitute narcissistic identity to be able to extend a hand to the other. Thus what is needed is a reassurance or reconstruction of both narcissism, personality and, of course, the subject for there to be a relation to the other. To put this into its practical social context, let me recall the enthusiasm with which many of us of the generation of '68 launched ourselves into social activism, and put our selves and our comforts at risk. We struggled to find some meaning in the destruction. We occupied factories; I myself took part in this to find meaning in life. But while reading as usual, and in particular at that moment, these texts, the Bible, the Gospels and Thomas Aquinas, I began to argue that it was important to act on this social plane by moving into the factories, but perhaps it was necessary to be installed within ourselves first of all. This seems to be the primary message of Thomas Aquinas: love the other as oneself, but by being settled within oneself, by delight in oneself. Thus: heal your inner wounds which, as a result will render you then capable of effective social action, or intervention in the social plane with the other. Therefore, I would argue that we must heal our shattered narcissism before formulating higher objectives.

Summary of Major Themes "Kristeva and Feminism"

by Kelly Oliver

[Copyright 1998 Kelly Oliver]

Although Kristeva does not refer to her own writing as feminist, many feminists turn to her work in order to expand and develop various discussions and debates in feminist theory and criticism. Three elements of Kristeva's thought have been particularly important for feminist theory in Anglo-American contexts:

1. Her attempt to bring the body back into discourses in the human sciences;
2. Her focus on the significance of the maternal and preoedipal in the constitution of subjectivity; and
3. Her notion of abjection as an explanation for oppression and discrimination.

The Body

Theories of the body are particularly important for feminists because historically (in the humanities) the body has been associated with the feminine, the female, or woman, and denigrated as weak, immoral, unclean, or decaying. Throughout her writing over the last three decades, Kristeva theorized the connection between mind and body, culture and nature, psyche and soma, matter and representation, by insisting both that bodily drives are discharged in representation, and that the logic of signification is already operating in the material body. In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva describes the drives as "as pivot between 'soma' and psyche', between biology and representation" (30; see also Time and Sense).

She is now famous for the distinction between what she calls the "semiotic" and the "symbolic," which she develops in her early work including Revolution in Poetic Language , "From One Identity to the Other" in Desire in Language, and Powers of Horror. Kristeva maintains that all signification is composed of these two elements. The semiotic element is the bodily drive as it is discharged in signification. The semiotic is associated with the rhythms, tones, and movement of signifying practices. As the discharge of drives, it is also associated with the maternal body, the first source of rhythms, tones, and movements for every human being since we all have resided in that body.

The symbolic element of signification is associated with the grammar and structure of signification. The symbolic element is what makes reference possible. For example, words have referential meaning because of the symbolic structure of language. On the other hand, we could say that words give life meaning (nonreferential meaning) because of their semiotic content. Without the symbolic, all signification would be babble or delirium. But, without the semiotic, all signification would be empty and have no importance for our lives. Ultimately, signification requires both the semiotic and symbolic; there is no signification without some combination of both.

Just as bodily drives are discharged into signification, the logic of signification is already operating within the materiality of the body. Kristeva suggests that the operations of identification and differentiation necessary for signification are prefigured in the body's incorporations and expulsions of food in particular (see Revolution in Poetic Language and Powers of Horror). These bodily "identifications" and "differentiations" are regulated by the maternal body before birth and the mother during infancy. Kristeva proposes that there is a maternal regulation or law which prefigures the paternal law which Freudian psychoanalysts have maintained is necessary for signification (see Powers of Horror and Tales of Love). The regulation or grammar and laws of language, then, are already operating on the level of matter.

The Maternal Body

Following Melanie Klein and in contrast to Freud and Lacan, Kristeva emphasizes the maternal function and its importance in the development of subjectivity and access to culture and language. While Freud and Lacan maintain that the child enters the social by virtue of the paternal function, specifically paternal threats of castration, Kristeva asks why, if our only motivation for entering the social is fear, more of us aren't psychotic? In Tales of Love, she questions the Freudian-Lacanian notion that paternal threats cause the child to leave the safe haven of the maternal body. Why leave this safe haven if all you have to look forward to is fear and threats? Kristeva is interested in the earliest development of subjectivity, prior to Freud's oedipal situation or Lacan mirror stage.

Kristeva argues that maternal regulation is the law before the Law, before Paternal Law (see Tales of Love). She calls for a new discourse of maternity that acknowledges the importance of the maternal function in the development of subjectivity and in culture. In "Stabat Mater" in Tales of Love and "Motherhood According to Bellini" in Desire in Language, Kristeva argues that we don't have adequate discourses of maternity. Religion, specifically Catholicism (which makes the mother sacred), and science (which reduces the mother to nature) are the only discourses of maternity available to Western culture.

In "Motherhood According to Bellini" and elsewhere, she suggests that the maternal function cannot be reduced to mother, feminine, or woman. By identifying the mother's relation to the infant as a function, Kristeva separates the function of meeting the child's needs from both love and desire. As a woman and as a mother, a woman both loves and desires and as such she is primarily a social and speaking being. As a woman and a mother, she is always sexed. But, insofar as she fulfills the maternal function, she is not sexed. Kristeva's analysis suggests that to some extent anyone can fulfill the maternal function, men or women.

By insisting that the maternal body operates between nature and culture, Kristeva tries to counter-act stereotypes that reduce maternity to nature. Even if the mother is not the subject or agent of her pregnancy and birth, she never ceases to be primarily a speaking subject. In fact, Kristeva uses the maternal body with its two-in-one, or other within, as a model for all subjective relations. Like the maternal body, each one of us is what she calls a subject-in-process. As subjects-in-process we are always negotiating the other within, that is to say, the return of the repressed. Like the maternal body, we are never completely the subjects of our own experience. Some feminists have found Kristeva's notion of a subject-in-process a useful alternative to traditional notions of an autonomous unified (masculine) subject.

Abjection and Sexism

In Powers of Horror, working with Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger (Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger, New York: Routledge, 1969.), Kristeva develops a notion of abjection that has been very useful in diagnosing the dynamics of oppression. She describes abjection as an operation of the psyche through which subjective and group identity are constituted by excluding anything that threats one's own (or one's group's) borders. The main threat to the fledgling subject is his or her dependence upon the maternal body. Therefore, abjection is fundamentally related to the maternal function. As Kristeva claims in Black Sun, matricide is our vital necessity because in order to become subjects (within a patriarchal culture) we must abject the maternal body. But, because women cannot abject the maternal body with which they also identify as women, they develop what Kristeva calls a depressive sexuality (see Black Sun). Kristeva's analysis in Black Sun suggests that we need not only a new discourse of maternity but also a discourse of the relation between mothers and daughters, a discourse that does not prohibit the lesbian love between women through which female subjectivity is born.

In Tales of Love, Kristeva suggests that misplaced abjection is one cause of women's oppression (see p. 374). In patriarchal cultures, women have been reduced to the maternal function; that is to say, they have been reduced to reproduction. So, if it is necessary to abject the maternal function to become a subject, and women, maternity, and femininity all have been reduced to the maternal function, then within patriarchy, women, maternity, and femininity are all abjected along with the maternal function. This misplaced abjection is one way to account for women's oppression and degradation within patriarchal cultures.

Feminism

Although many feminist theorists and literary critics have found Kristeva's ideas useful and provocative, Kristeva's relation to feminism has been ambivalent. Her views of feminism are best represented in her essay "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul. In this essay originally published in 1979, Kristeva argues that there are three phases of feminism. She rejects the first phase because it seeks universal equality and overlooks sexual differences. She implicitly criticizes Simone de Beauvoir and the rejection of motherhood; rather than reject motherhood Kristeva insists that we need a new discourse of maternity. In fact, in "A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident," Kristeva suggests that "real female innovation (in whatever field) will only come about when maternity, female creation and the link between them are better understood" (298).

Kristeva also rejects what she sees as the second phase of feminism because it seeks a uniquely feminine language, which she thinks is impossible. Kristeva does not agree with feminists who maintain that language and culture are essentially patriarchal and must somehow be abandoned. On the contrary, Kristeva insists that culture and language are the domain of speaking beings and women are primarily speaking beings. Kristeva endorses what she identifies as the third phase of feminism which seeks to reconceive of identity and difference and their relationship. This current phase of feminism refuses to choose identity over difference or visa versa; rather, it explores multiple identities, including multiple sexual identities. In an interview with Rosalind Coward, Kristeva proposes that there are as many sexualities as their are individuals.

Notes

1. For a more detailed account of Kristeva's ambigious relation to feminism, see my "Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions" Hypatia a journal of feminist philosophy, 8:3, summer 1993, p. 94-114.
2. She introduces her notion of subject-in-process/on trial in her early texts including Revolution in Poetic Language, "Le Sujet en Proces" in Polylogue and Desire in Language, and develops this notion in her later writings.
3. Her recent analysis in New Maladies of the Soul also carries this suggestion.
   

Julia Kristeva's Profile (4)

Introduction to Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva (b. Bulgaria, 1941-): psychoanalyst, linguist, semiotician, novelist, and rhetorician

• 1965 - emigrated to Paris for doctoral studies. joined 'Tel Quel group' eventually marrying its head, Philippe Sollers.
• 1968 - involved in leftist French politics, publishing in Tel Quel.
• 1970 - part of Tel Quel's editorial board, attended Lacan seminars.
• 1973 - state doctorate in Paris, thesis published as Revolution in Poetic Language (1984).
• 1974 - University of Paris, chair of linguistics and visiting appointments at Columbia University.
• 1979 - begin psychoanalytic career.
• 1990 - novel, Les Samourais, published.

Kristeva Glossary

• symbolic - the domain of position and judgment, chronologically follows semiotic (post-Oedipal), is the establishment of a sign system, always present, historical time (linear), and creates repressed writing.
• semiotic - the science of signs (that which creates the need for symbolic),cyclical through time, pre-Oedipal, and creates unrepressed writing. Exists in children before language acquisition and has significance.
• semanalysis - word coined by Kristeva to differentiate her type of linguistic analysis which is a dissolving of the sign through critical analysis, avoids the text designing its own limits, and stresses the heterogeneity of language rather than homogeneity of conventional linguistic model.
• intertextuality - also a term which originates in Kristeva's work, used to designate the transposition of one or more systems of signs on to another which is accompanied by a new enunciative and denotative position.
• jouissance - total joy or ecstacy achieved through the working of the signifier implying the presence of meaning.
• (fear - mark of the failure of language to provide symbolization.)
• other - what exists as opposite of, or excluded by, something else.
• Other - a hypothetical space or place which is that of the pure
• signifier, rather than a physical entity.
• chora - a Platonic term for a matrixlike space that is nourishing, unnameable, and prior to the individual. Chora becomes the focus of the semiotic as the 'pre-symbolic.'

General philosophy

• writings have gone from macrocosmic to microcosmic to fiction.
• never privledges either semiotic or symbolic, but strives for equilibrium.
• all are under the desire to return to period of preseparation.

Writing the body

• the body is outside the domain of sign and appears as trace writing.
• semiotic, pre-language self displayed through words outside symbolic definitions.
• is feminine (semiotic is feminine for Kristeva) but is available to the masculine.

Poetic language

• distinct from language used for ordinary communication, an otherness of language.
• it embodies contradiction, life and death, being and non-being, good and evil can exist simultaneously in a text.
• is the movement between: the real and the non-real.
• transcends the laws of logic presenting itself as the production of meaning.

"Women's Time" - Kristeva's brand of feminism

"Thanks to the stamp of feminism, do we not sell many books whose naive whining or commercialized romanticism would normally be scoffed at? . . . However questionable the results of women's artistic productions may be, the symptom has been made clear: women are writing. And we are eagerly awaiting to find out what new material they will offer us."

• first and second generation feminists and the resulting violence.
• Freud defended and defined.
• anti-motherhood attitude is alienating.
• childbirth creates child as symbolic phallus, so that motherhood can be a normalizing and fulfilling experience.
• create child or literature.
• desexualization, 'I' as attacker and as victim.
• Return to religion, community for sake of singularity.

Kristeva and Rhetoric

• analysis of the rhetoric in art and poetry.
• Semiotic discussions as possible link to pre-genre study.

Primary Bibliography (translated material)

Kristeva, Julia. About Chinese Women. Trans. Anita Barrow. New York: Marion Boyars, 1977.

- - -. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

- - -. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Leon Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.

- - -. In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.

- - -. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.

- - -. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.

- - -. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

- - -. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.

- - -. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1987.

Moi, Toril, ed. The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

Secondary Bibliography

Caws, Mary Ann. "Tel Quel: Text and Revolution." Diacritics 3.1 (1973): 2-8.

Clark, Suzanne and Kathleen Hulley. "An Interview with Julia Kristeva: Cultural Strangeness and the Subject in Crisis." Discourse: A Review of the Liberal Arts, Vol. 13, No. 1, Fall-Winter, 1990-91, pp. 149-80.

Fletcher, John and Andrew Benjamin, eds. Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

Lechte, John. Julia Kristeva. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

Phillips, Adam. "What is there to Lose?" London Review of Books, Vol. 12, No. 10, May 24, 1990, p. 6-8.

Steiner, Wendy. "The Bulldozer of Desire." The New York Times Book Review, November 15, 1992, pp. 9, 11.

:: Presented by Alice Kelsey in English 510, 5 August 1996

Julia Kristeva's Profile (3)

Julia Kristeva was born in Bulgaria in 1942. At the age of 23, she moved to Paris and has lived there ever since. Her original interests were in language and linguistics, and she was influenced by her contemporaries Lucian Goldmann, and Roland Barthes. She also studied Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and like her mentors, she began to work both as an analyst and an academic. She joined the 'Tel Quel group' in 1965, where she met her future husband, Phillipe Sollers, and became an active member of the group, focusing on the politics of language. The Tel Quel group worked with the notion of history as a text for interpretation and its writing as an act of politicized production rather than an attempt to make an objective reproduction. Kristeva's articles began to appear in publications by Tel Quel and the journal Critique in 1967, and in 1970 she joined the editorial board. Her research in linguistics, including her interest in Lacan's seminars during the same year, manifested in the publication of Le Texte Du Roman (1970), Séméiotiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (1969), and subsequently, La Revolution du langage poetique (her doctoral thesis) in 1974. The latter publication led to her accepting of chair of linguistics at the University of Paris, and a series of guest appointments at Columbia University in New York.

Kristeva's unique background, a "foreign" woman working in the predominantly male intellectual circles of France, drives the strategies of her work in semiotics and her interest in the politics of marginality. In accordance with her thinking, she produces both fictional and academic texts. Her interest is in discourses that resist rigid and one-dimensional logic and instead engage in an ongoing process of writing the struggle with the impasse of language. She prefers to analyze, to think language against itself, by its fracturing and multiplication of texts, while taking the figure of negativity into account.

In addition, Kristeva's experiences in Communist Bulgaria provide her an intimate understanding of Marxism and the work of the Russian Formalists such as Mikhail Bakhtin (whose work she is accredited with introducing to the West). Developing Hegel's concept of negativity in conjunction with these ideas and those of her teachers and peers, she produced an influential critique and following shift from Structuralist to Poststructuralist thought. Her particular focus is a process-oriented reading of the sign.

Such a process for Kristeva is concerned with bringing the speaking body back into Phenomenology and linguistics. In opposition to theories in structuralist linguistics that she feels are "nothing more than the thoughts of archivists, archaeologists, and necrophiliacs" she develops a new science, "semanalysis," that connects the body, complete with its drives, back into language from where she believes the logic of signification is already present. In this process she elaborates on the Lacanian idea of the mirror stage and the formation of a separation, a lack, from the (m)other that forms signification as a movement from need (demand) into desire. It is an ongoing process of completion through the symbolic castration of the subject. Here, Kristeva is critical of Lacan's overlooking of processes that take place before the mirror stage.

Kristeva's elaboration on the model of Lacan involves a distinction between the "semiotic" and "semiotics" as a field of study in linguistics, and a further distinction between two heterogeneous types of signification in language, the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic exists within the signifying process, it is a discharge of the drives within language that manifests in the rhythm and tone of the text (and the speech of the subject). It refers to an element in symbolic language that does not signify, the bits of psychic and bodily energies (partial drives) that are less precise but nonetheless "speak" of the phenomena of embodied significations through language and their inherent limits. The symbolic is the rule-governed element of language, grammar and syntax, that makes reference and therefore judgment at all possible, the element of meaning associated with the very forces of grammar and syntax.

Kristeva became more interested in psychoanalysis and completed her training in 1979. Her work intensified around the formation of identity and the role abjection and Otherness play in the process. Her writings of the 1980's include transcripts from her practice as an analyst, such as Tales of Love (1983) and Black Sun (1987). Her 1982 publication, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, describes the pre-mirror stage development of the child's entry into the Law of the father as Lacan theorized. For Kristeva, birth itself is a separation within the body, a violent separation from the body of the mother. In the maternal body, excess gives rise to a separation that is material and maintained by a regulation (regarding availability of the breast) that is prior to the mirror stage. The maternal regulation operates as a law, prefiguring and providing the grounds of paternal Law as the entry of the child into language and society.

Kristeva's writings maintain this logic of an oscillation between symbolic identity and semiotic rejection or the experience of difference. Revolution in Poetic Language and Powers of Horror are focused on material maternal rejection, which prefigures signification and sets up the logic of rejection. Tales of Love (trans.1987) and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy (trans.1989) are focused on primary narcissism, which prefigures all subsequent identity and sets up the logic of repetition. Strangers to Ourselves (1989) and Lettre ouverte ý Harlem Désir (1990) are focused on rejection or difference within identity. In recognition of her contribution to French intellectual culture, she was honored by the French government in 1990 and made a "chevalier de l'ordre des arts et des lettres." [source]

Interview with Julia Kristeva

Interview by Josefina Ayerza (JA)
JK= Julia Kristeva

JA: With all these Eastern Europeans arriving in Western Europe and the USA, what do you think may happen to local regional cultures?

JK: I have talked about this problem in my last novel The Old Man and the Wolves. The shock, the starting point of this novel was the killing of my father in a Bulgarian hospital, which is an example of what happens in these cultures. My book is about the power of evil. In those countries what succeeds for the communists so called "culture" is the eruption of evil, and I think that unfortunately those people will pass a long time through hell, before arriving at a culture. Will it be national or cosmopolitan, or some new kind of graft between European culture and local tradition? The question now is: we are in front of something that has never happened in Europe since the end of the Roman Empire, which is the bankruptcy of human links — this has of course to do with culture.

JA: The word "bankruptcy" brings up quite an image — since it concerns economy — are you saying it involves wrong administration of the libido, of erotism, of good and evil... and were there links before that aren't there now?

JK: It involves all kind of links: affective links — age, cultural links, and hope projects, love — especially those which make up social tissue. You and me, we are together because we have this ability to exchange something, and we exchange something because erotism is a link. Evil is the break in the link but now there isn't a break, or cut...

JA: How will this bankruptcy effect engage in relation to Jacques Lacan's theory with his emphasis on Kant's ethics?

JK: We have been through two thousand years of christianity and utilitarian philosophy, we are aware of the problem of desire, of sublimation, and of groups and ideal objects... I hope we will remain in this phase. However, what we are experiencing now is something very dangerous — an apocalyptic moment — and I'm afraid that European or American intellectuals have not noticed the radicality of the crisis of this tradition.

JA: So it is a Kantian world which is in crisis?

JK: But desire survives beyond the Kantian world. The whole European tradition is going back to the Bible, to the Gospels, and to Greek philosophy — all those means to sublimate the death potions that writers have elaborated into philosophy and religion — this tradition is threatened now.

JA: Could you be a bit more specific? We are talking of the Russians coming in to the Western world, would that be a reason for this apocalyptic moment to happen?

JK: There is this project of the Western world to see Russians coming, but when you go to Russia, when you go to those Eastern countries, you see them just in a position of passivity, they are stone like, they are depressed and they are stuck.
In a sense I am questioning the question. Intellectuals and others in the Eastern countries like Western culture, they are very willing to join in, but this, for now, is utopia. This is what happened with my hero, the old man who is professor of Latin, but he is the only one from this standpoint to react against the failure of his civilization; to be a dissident. He was killed because they did not allow him to revolt. There were very strong forces in those countries that drive back the ambition of other people to join Western culture. There was an unwritten law in Bulgaria against giving expensive medicine to older people. You cannot speak about Kant and objects of desire when you are on such levels of brutality.

JA: Too primitive a level?

JK: Too primitive, yes: you make operations, but you do not have surgical tools, so part of it is economic crisis and part humanitarian crisis: a loss of value.

JA: A loss of value in reference to human life?

JK: Human life has been transformed into something which does not have any value.

JA: Now, did you see for instance what happened with Andy Warhol? He was in one of the most sophisticated places one might think of; nevertheless he died due to neglection at the hospital.

JK: There are two answers to this question. First I think that the dominance of evil and lack of value is not only a phenomenon in the East; unfortunately it also happens elsewhere. When I wrote this book I wrote it as a metaphor for our civilization also. There is an important difference: here, such kinds of things happen but there are oppositions, while in the Eastern countries we cannot see who are the forces that can struggle against this lack of values.

JA: In your article "The Abject: Powers of Perversion" you wrote about the outrageous Fascism of Céline. Did you, at that time, foresee the actual racism happening in Europe today?

JK: Yes, I am frightened by the strength of nationalism and racism — xenophobia — in European societies. We see this for instance in Germany, but also in France where it can sound more subtle. We have a very strong rejection of foreigners and a sort of withdrawal of the nation, of its own origin and values, and I look at it with concern. I am really envisioning the problem to maybe leave France and to establish myself as an immigrant... to be more accepted.

JA: So you're thinking of coming to America?

JK: Maybe not America. I get the impression that Canadian societies may be more tolerant. But I know that France now is very hostile against immigrants and foreigners and Europe in general— in my mind, I belong to the tradition of French enlightenment. Instead what I see in this country is fragmentation and confinement which does not go in the sense of finding a common ground; you have to bring all those particularities together at the same time as you recognize them. There are two logics to be reconciled.

JA: Could these two logics reconcile through Lacan's idea of alterity? In this sense, isn't love based on differences, moreover on the mutual recognition of these differences?

JK: This point of view, this alterity is not only a Lacanian one.

JA: But the word alterity... I would say it's so Lacanian.

JK: No, alterity is Hegel's word, and in my mind it means that one has to recognize the other in order to bring him in a link with you. Love is a link, which means recognition of an otherness.

JA: We seem to be talking of something that's going on now, in America. Have you seen this extreme division in other countries?

JK: No, even in America it was not the case some years ago, but it is stronger and stronger now. These groups grow separated in separated cultures, you know how much Chinatown is a little piece of China... Somebody told me that many new immigrants do not even learn the English language.

JA: As for the sake of language I think it's even poorer what comes about when people speak their own language at home and go to school in English. Since they are not taught to read and write in their own language, English expressions get translated directly. Then Spanish for instance, this beautiful language which remits to Cervantes, to Borges, has turned into a monstrous deformation... it even has a name, it's called Spanglish.

JK: I have been told also that some of them, Spanish or Asian because they are big communities, can satisfy their needs: they have shops, they live in groups but they are split from what is supposed to be the American community, which means that they can survive but never will a child from this community be a representative of the American society, in the parliament or the senate, or a judge.

JA: Since you are often compared to Simone de Beauvoir, I would like to talk about her and about her novel The Mandarins in relation to your book: The Samurai. Simone de Beauvoir makes a woman the witness of men's intrigues. In your novel instead, at least one woman, if not two, become the core of all the intrigues. Are you saying men are no longer the ones in power, can we see this as a feminist attitude?

JK: I don't know if it is a feminist attitude, but I would hope so, anyhow it's not a feminist attitude in the dogmatic sense of the word. I am not a feminist militant. You are right to say that the main characters are all female. It's funny that no one noticed this before. What our generation wrote about the complexity of this feminine experience escapes cliché and militarist positions. The creative profession of life is deeply connected with the sexual and body experience, more strongly in women than men.

JA: In Desire and Language you allude very much to color through Giotto's paintings, then you write about Bellini and say that his Venus has the face of the Virgin Mary. Is there a vague allusion of this in The Samurai?

JK: Oh, yes, I love Bellini. I put some aspects of this into The Samurai. Contemporary or past art, you can refer to this experience in the course of interpretation. I think the lack of words during the interpretation is important to help people represent their depressive state, natural lack of words, so natural that it's called language. You can refer to some painting or music or literary style and get this usage of beauty into the psychoanalytic interpretation.

JA: But always through words?

JK: Yes, I translate them into words, but when I refer to painting the person sees through my words on the painting, and so it has a sublimatory semiology in order to heal the depressive wounds.

JA: Who are the painters you choose for this? What art do you select, isn't it very subjective?

JK: Yes, it's very subjective. I am very interested in Holbein's The Ambassadors, and the Dead Christ. In my book The Black Sun, the image on the cover is also a child in one of Holbein's paintings. All the portraits of Holbein are of depressed people.

JA: When you talk of this depression, can you say this is the castration concept in Lacan?

JK: No, I think it's something more archaic, and deeper than the phallic stage and the problem of desire. It's mere narcissism, it's a narcissistic wound, which is more how I can relate it to the impossibility of the mother to become an object.

JA: To change the subject, how do you like Jean-Luc Godard? Do you know there is a show in New York at the moment — at the PS1 Museum — which includes works of different artists who have been inspired by Godard's films? Simultaneously his films are playing at the MOMA (Museum of Modern Art).

JK: There is a project about making a film on The Old Man and the Wolves. I am thinking very much of Godard as a possible film maker. Precisely because I think he has very strong feelings about evil. Although this bankruptcy of humanity would prefer something less neat and more postmodern than Godard, I think he is able to go beyond his actual modernism and rejoin something he has done with Pierrot Le Fou and things like that, and in a postmodern style represent these kinds of values. It would be an interesting achievement if we could work together.

JA: Oh! So he is one of the chosen ones.

JK: There is an intention to make him work for this. I have written things about Godard in Art Press years ago. I am very interested by his intensity and cutting, and his lacunar elliptic art. I think in The Old Man and the Wolves there is a treatment of the evil through the paintings of Goya: the old man is dreaming in some visions that finally I find out are very close to Goya's vision of human life. I think Godard could be the right person.

This article was first published in Flash Art Jan/Feb 1993. [source]

The ideas interview: Julia Kristeva

Why is a great critic ashamed of being fashionable? By John Sutherland

The Guardian, Tuesday March 14, 2006

To her admirers, Julia Kristeva is one of the heroic band of French critics who injected "theory" into the sluggish Anglo-Saxon cultural bloodstream. To diehards on the other side, she is a prime exponent of impenetrable and unnecessary critical complexities. One colleague, to whom I mentioned her name replied with the single word "bonkers". Another suggested she should get a Nobel prize.

She is particularly associated with three concepts, which she now seems to wish to disown. Le semiotique is the idea that speech works as much through sub-verbal codes as by what is actually said. The real work of signification is done in the "cleavage between words and meanings". This fascination with the sub- or pre-verbal is something that, looking back, Kristeva now associates with the liturgy of the Orthodox Church: "All my childhood was bathed in this," she says.


The second of Kristeva's hallmark ideas is what she calls "abjection". Why, Kristeva inquires, are we fascinated by things that disgust and horrify us? As she put it in her essay on the subject: "There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced."

Most famously, Kristeva is associated with the concept of "intertextuality" - the idea that all literature is constantly in conversation with all other literature, undetachable, as a single unit, from the textual mass. Having patented these influential ideas, Kristeva is now acutely uneasy at being chained to her own thought, or confined within her own thinking. "I am very proud of the widespread use of my ideas," she says, "and at the same time very much ashamed because they have become so fashionable. Everybody thinks and talks about 'intertextuality', everybody thinks and talks about 'abjection'. The ideas become politically correct everywhere in the world and I hate it because I think when people repeat what you have done and said, they can no longer recognise you yourself. You are denied. It's a kind of decay of this moment when the idea burst out of your mind. Now the idea is consumerised."

Kristeva applies one term to her project - "synthetic". She likes to join things, mix them fluidly. It is, perhaps, something that links with her background. She came to France in 1965, aged 24, as a refugee from communist Bulgaria. She says she now thinks in French. But clearly, as her latest writing indicates, she still feels Bulgarian.

In recent years, restless as ever, Kristeva has utilised fiction as her principal mode of expression. Her latest detective novel, Murder in Byzantium, revisits the Greek Orthodox Christianity of her childhood and incorporates religious conspiracies and Thomas Harris-style serial killers. What does she see as the connection between Kristeva the critic and Kristeva the novelist? "There is a continuation", she replies. "As you know, I belong to the tendency, or school, in French philosophy which developed in the 60s, in which conceptual work is deeply involved with the personal and in which notions, or ideas, are sutured by style. There is a lot of imagination, rhetorical figures, subjective expressions and so on that that often bother the so-called Anglo-Saxon reader because they consider this French 'stuff' - theory - to be somehow indigestible."

Why is her latest novel so concerned with religion? Is she attracted by the Church? Or merely fascinated by it? "I am not a believer, I believe in words. There is only one resurrection for me - and that is in words. My novel is a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code. I'm not Catholic by background. My father was a very great believer, but in the Orthodox Church, in Bulgaria. As a young woman my Oedipus conflict was in a perpetual fight with that." She laughs. "Afterwards I tried to understand what Christianity is and my approach became more intellectual. On the one side, I'm very much interested in religion. On the other hand, I don't make any kind of spiritual - how shall I say - extrapolation or message. My idea is to link religion with politics and see how in both of them there were, and will be, a lot of crimes and human folly."

Why the detective novel format? "It is necessary to revisit the starting point of my writing detective stories. I date it as some months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when my father was assassinated in a Bulgarian hospital. It was a very, very difficult experience for me. When I arrived, after he was dead, the family was not informed of the cause of his death.

We could make no inquiry as to who was the criminal who had done it. And finally he was, without our permission, cremated, which was wholly contrary to his religious belief. It was very, very difficult for me to recover from this grief - to mourn. In this situation the detective story imposed itself on me, without any voluntary act on my part."

Since then, Kristeva has written a string of detective novels. Is it an entirely separate exericise from the academic work?" No. This is why I made the point about the 60s, and the French theoretical 'stuff'. There have always been some personal implications in my essays. But now it's a jump because I think that writing novels is a sort of process I like to call transubstantiation. There is, as I see it, a very strong linkage between words and flesh in writing fiction. It's not merely a mental activity. The whole personality is in it. You have psychology, you have belief, you have love affairs, you have sexuality, you also have a connection to language. When I'm writing novels, I am making a voyage around, or into, myself. I do it also, of course, in my essays. But my essays are a defence of my self-voyaging. In the novel, I take all the risks of the traveller, or the explorer. And I get all the pleasures as well"

· Murder in Byzantium is published by Columbia University Press, priced £19.50