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