Julia Kristeva's main interest is in discourse which confronts language and thinks it against itself. She focuses on the signifying process, trying to answer not only the question of exactly how language means but also what is in language that resists intelligibility and signification. She argues that structuralism, which focuses on the static phase of language and attempts to fix it and describe its details, sees it as homogeneous. Semiotics, on the other hand, which studies language as discourse articulated by a speaking subject, sees it as fundamentally heterogeneous. Influenced by Lacan and her study of psychoanalysis, she combined semiotics with analysis to create "semanalysis" which sees language as a "signifying process," at once a system and a transgression, coming from the drive-grounded basis of sound production and produced in the social space---the site of the speaking subject. "All functions which suppose a frontier (in this case the fissure created by the act of naming and the logico-linguistic synthesis which it sets off) and the transgression of that frontier (the sudden appearance of new signifying chains) are relevant to any account of signifying practice, where practice is taken as meaning acceptance of a symbolic law together with a trangression of that law for the purpose of renovating it" (The Kristeva 29).
For Kristeva, semiotics occupies a paradoxical position. It is a meta-language---a language which speaks about language and, therefore, homogenizes its object in its own discourse. But, at the same time, semiotics insists on the heterogeneity of language. The semiotician, thus, finds herself caught, forced to analyze her own discursive position while at the same time renewing her connection with the heterogeneous forces of language. These forces, in her view, make it a productive structure. ". . .thus poetic language making free with the language code; music, dancing, painting, reordering the psychic drives which have not been harnessed by the dominant symbolization systems. . .all seek out and make use of this heterogeneity and the ensuing fracture of a symbolic code which can no longer 'hold' its (speaking) subjects" (30). Semanalysis, then, is a way of thinking about language which has the potential to subvert established beliefs in authority and order.
"Word, Dialogue, and Novel" from her work entitled Desire in Language shows the particular influence of the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin on Kristeva's work. Actually, she was one of the first to introduce Bakhtin's theories to the West. Her insistence upon the importance of the speaking subject as the primary object for linguistic analysis is itself rooted in "dialogism" and her own active dialogue with Bakhtin's texts. According to Kristeva, Bakhtin saw the literary word as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than as a fixed point or meaning---as a dialogue among various texts: the writer's, the character's, and the historical cultural context. Each word (or text) is an intersection of words or texts where at least one other word or text can be read; the horizontal axis composed of the writer-character intersects the vertical axis composed of the text-context. Any text, therefore, is double---both "an absorption and a transformation of another." This reading of Bakhtin's dialogism led to her own idea of " intertextuality ," identifying writing as both subjectivity and communication---writing where "one reads the other." Poised between structuralism and post-structuralism, Kristeva was also interested in the way structuralism's "pure" categories break down in circumstances where language is ambivalent, subversive, and mocking as in the tradition of carnival which Bakhtin described in his work on Rabelais. In the space of carnival, the official text broke down when it confronted the text of carnival (and Rabelais' rabble-rousing). Great potential exists within carnival where prohibition (the monologic) and transgression (the dialogic) co-exist. Language both parodies and relevatizes itself, thereby repudiating its role in representation. Dialogism situates philosophical problems within language, language as a correlation of texts. It does not strive toward transcendence; it absorbs concepts within relationships, working toward harmony while implying the idea of RUPTURE as a way of transforming. In examining the "ambivalence" of spectacle and of lived experience itself, the potental for rupture between them becomes possible. Culture, thus, can forsake itself to go beyond itself. The novel and other ambivalent literary structures, then, provide the basis for new intellectual structures. Interest in the subversive effects of language grounded her later interest in the politics of marginality.
Sabtu, 24 November 2007
Linguistic Theory
Intertextuality
In Revolution and Poetic Language, Kristeva's thesis for her Doctorat d'Etat, she further developed her concept of intertextuality. To the two processes Freud identified as being at work in the unconscious, displacement and condensation, Kristeva added a third process, "the passage from one sign system to another." Inherent in this process she saw an alteration of the thetic phase of language involving the destruction of the old system and the forming of a new one. The new system may use the same or different signifying materials, as in "carnival" as described by Bakhtin. She argued that the novel particularly exhibited the potential for embodying a "redistribution" of several different sign systems. "Intertextuality," then, is a specific type of coextension in which a variety of diverse meanings overlap; it refers to the transposition of one or more sign systems into another or a "field" of transpositions of many signifying systems. The novel provides a particularly good space for this phenomenon to occur.
The Old Man and the Wolves
This interview was conducted by Bernard Sichere and was first published in a 1992 issue of L'Infini. It appeared in an English translation by Leon Roudiez in Partisan Review. Although the interview is based on Kristeva's second novel, The Old Man and The Wolves, much of the conversation addresses politics and contemporary culture. This interview shows Kristeva at her most pessimistic, describing a world tainted with pain, disorder, mourning, violence, apathy, depression, barbarity, and banality. She defends her idea of a contemporary "civilizational crisis," supporting it with her account of a recent trip to Moscow. Commenting on contemporary intellectual life, Kristeva claims that we must free ourselves from "consensual ideology" and "moralizing, euphoric discourses," adapting instead an "analytic, relentless position" that takes negativity into account. Although she acknowledges that psychoanalysis needs to confront some serious issues (excessive literalism, internal power struggles, the media's appropriation of psychoanalytic jargon, the rapid growth of psychopharmacology), she contends that it continues to furnish us with a "living discourse." At the end of the interview, she claims that the age-old dichotomy between the "right wing" and the "left wing" may no longer be relevant, and she lambastes a political culture in which no one admits guilt. She challenges "writers," as opposed to "intellectuals," to reinvent the political realm, "even to circumvent it." Speaking specifically about her novel, Krisreva notes that the Santa Barbara she describes combines the collapse of the East and the malaise and banality of the West. Suggesting that her novel serves as an antidote to "a deep crisis in language," she describes it as a "grafting of what comes from another culture, another mentality, onto the language I adopt and that I assume welcomes me." Also addressed are the characters of Stephany. whose "truth-seeking" is said to counterbalance the overarching negativity of the novel, the couple Alba and Vespasian, and the Old Man, whom Krisreva affecrionately likens to her father.
Two features of your second novel distinguish it from the first, it seems to me. Thematically, there was in The Samurai a sort of emphasis on the positive aspects of the main character as well as on her intellectual, erotic, and domestic journey, whereas The Old Man and the Wolves brings to the fore a dark, negative dimension, an outlook on the world that is more pessimistic. The second feature involves form: why is there, in this new narrative, a scrambling of codes and genres (clipped dialogue, allegory, first-person narrative), and such an increase in the variety of voices, so many metaphors?
In connection with what you call negativity, I would refer to Holderlin's well-known query, "Wozu Dichter in durftiger Zeit?" and rephrase it by asking, "Of what use are novels in times of distress?" The thrust of my new book stems from the conjunction of the personal shock of mourning (the death of my father, who was killed in a Sofia hospital through the incompetence and brutality of the medical and political system) and a public unease—the acknowledgment, which was indeed barely present in my first novel, of a general disarray in a society—to begin with, our own. As a psychoanalyst (that is one of my frames of reference), I am sensitive to the collapse of minimal values and the rejection of elementary moral principles. I found it imperative to choose the form of the novel instead of a theoretical form (as was the case in my earlier essays), because I realized that the novel form was a better way to portray that distress. On the other hand, within the novel form metaphore operates, giving form to infantile psychic inscriptions that are located on the border of the unnamable. On the other hand, by elaborating intrigue one enacts the dramatic essence of passion, the intolerable aspect of love as it is necessarily coupled with hatred. In comparison, the ability of theoretical discourse to rake on metaphore and intrigue seemed to be far behind the form of the novel. Recent French novels most often reject metaphor and avoid drama: "good taste" demands a certain amount of restraint. For my part, I have not ceased reading Proust: "Truth shall arise only at the moment when the writer, raking two different objects, will posit their relation [. . .] in a metaphor. The relation might be uninteresting, the object mediocre, the style awful, but so long as that has not taken place, there is nothing there."'
The allegorical dimension, for instance, which is indeed central in The Old Man and the Wolves, needs to be understood in that context. In contrast to The Samurai, my second novel is anchored in a pain to which allegory aims to give significance without fixing it, instead irradiating it, having it vibrate, in an oneiric way, according to each reader's personal framework of ordeals and choices. Thus the fictional city in the novel, Santa Barbara, might be located in the heart of Central or Eastern Europe, but it also suggests an American megalopolis, or some continental city: it harbors a fountain that strangely resembles the one at the Pompidou Center, and the Oasis Bar in the novel brings to mind a rather fashionable spot in San Francisco. Santa Barbara's very name suggests to me first the surrounding barbarity but also, by alluding to an American television series, the surfeited elements of American society and that vulgarization which constitutes one of the aspects of contemporary, savagery. In short, the novel's negative diagnosis first applies to the collapse in the former Communist countries of Europe, but at the same rime I did not want to exclude the West, the malaise of our society.
And the wolves? To what extent does this key metaphor illustrate (beyond its explicit reference to book I of Ovid's Metamorphoses) what you have just said?
Those threatening wolves, setting wildly upon their victims, recall the invasion of the Red Armies, the establishment of totalitarianism—my readers in Eastern Europe have had no problem identifying them. More deviously, the wolves are contagious; they infect people to the extent that one can no longer make out their human faces. They symbolize everyone's barbarity, everyone's criminality. They finally signify the invasion of banality, which erases the entire criterion of value amid the racketeering, corruption, wheeling and dealing.
Nevertheless, making all-pervasive violence or barbarity contemporary doesn't play off only on the level of the wolves. It also is reflected in the narrative fragmentation in the novel that you mentioned, in the multiplicity of codes and voices. In the novel's Santa Barbara, which is comparable to the declining Roman Empire, history cannot unfold in a naive, indubitable manner, nor can the characters themselves embody stable identities. Hence the presence of Doppelganger in the book: the Professor and the narraror's father, but also Alba and the other Alba who is discovered drowned. The shiftings in the narrative, the duplication and dissemination of identities, refer to the obvious fact that we are experiencing contemporary culture in a process of metamorphosis. Does it have to do with the return of the gods, as set our by Heidegger? Does it involve another fictional experience, and if so, which one? For the time being we are in the gothic roman noir.
But doesn't the book's shift to the first-person narrative, spoken by Stephany, the investigator, change the perspective from the dark, negative dimensions we have just conjured up?
Absolutely. Stephany doesn't play her part on the same level as the orhers. As soon as she speaks, the oneiric, confused universe of the novel's first section assumes the shape of a detective novel; it means that a crime has been committed and that it is possible to unravel the truth about this crime. A trurh-seeking effort takes place, thanks to Srephany Delacour, who will show up again in other episodes, for in the book there are a series of mystery, novels. So the "twilight of the gods" that makes up the first part of the novel acquires a meaning in the second part, which is simply the setting of a course, the shaping of a plot: it is possible to know. Henceforth, an ethics of knowledge, let us say, is involved. Consequently, I feel that to call my novel pessimistic is inaccurate. As long as the investigation is being carried out, the crime is challenged, and death does nor prevail. Stephany introduces the vigilance that is the resistant force of life, if not of hope. In the third section of the book, Stcphany imposes her diary upon the mystery novel, as a counterpoint.
Her subjective experience, her sensibility as a woman, a child, a lover is a veritable counterweight to death and hatred. If Srephany is able to undertake this investigative work and confront crime, it is because she doesn't ignore her personal experience, because she is plunged to a point of rapture, and not without cruelty, into the pain that mourning imposes on us: mourning for her own father, until then repressed, awakens on the occasion of the Old Man's mourning. As a consequence, the character of the journalist-detective introduces a certain psychoanalytic tonality in the book. Without this interior space sculpted out by mourning but given shape by other erotic upheavals— for mourning is an eroticism full of undulations, without the smooth visage of joy—no working-out of truth is possible. No investigation, no knowledge. Some based their aesthetics, for example, on Goethe, others on Rousseau, or Rimbaud; I consider myself a contemporary Freud. A possible wager: what about a novel that would be cognizant of Freud. Is such a novel possible? Would it attract readers? For my part, it is enough that the novel is disturbing.
The barbarity you alluded to earlier seems to me to be essential. Part of the opposition your book has encountered, I'm sure, has to do with its illumination of what is unbearable in our society, with people recognizing themselves. As I was reading the 600k—and what you have just said confirms it—I f ound two images of barbarity; criminality, violence, on the one hand, and on the other what you have termed "banality. " Coul you tell us a little more? To what extent does this duality reflect the distinction suggested by Guy Debark in Commentaire sur la sociere du spectacle between the "integrated spectacular" germane to the Western democratic societies and the archaic survival of tyrannic forms that, a short time ago, characterized communist societies?
'The Old Man and the Wolves is set in Santa Barbara—a city that also evokes the violence of our own societies, their racketeering and delinquency. At the same time violence has become banalized, a trivialization that is no less frightening. The psychoanalyst detects it in the speech of certain patients. We are basically dealing with the image of a depression that integrates aggression but under the ruinous guise of an erasure of meaning. That is what I depict in the character of Alba. Alba is one of those depressed persons who considers herself to be "void of meaning." She views her actions as neutralized, impossible to describe,even in the extreme, murderous facets that they might exhibit. A true depression of meaning itself takes place, and the insignificance into which the melancholy person sinks is not merely an individual, "pathological" occurrence. Because of its amplitude, it assumes the seriousness of a societal event, a civilization crisis. I should like to add something about the nature and the extent of that crisis. I have just come back from Moscow, where I have a series of lectures at the French Studies Institute in Moscow's Lomonosov University. I was struck by the pervasive crisis over there, the way in which it seemed to be the very realization of the crisis I portrayed in The Old Man and the Wolves. I recognized Santa Barbara. No one any longer respects authority; no one any longer occupies the seat of power, particularly in the university, where there are students but no semblance of rules and regulations; and no one is in charge. I am puzzled by contemporary studies of Soviet or Russian society that, knowingly or nor, minimize the extent of the catastrophe, which is not only economic but also ethical. In the face of such general decay, there is at the moment a massive regressive return to religion, which effectively serves as a solace but also a way to flee reality. The French Institute, which, on the other hand, enrolls a large number of very qualified and crirical-minded students who are eager to learn, constitutes a fortunate exception in that landscape. Basically, the most disquieting symptom, here as well as over there, the major consequence of which I have called banality, is the tendency that could result in a loss of interest in the psyche. In Western societies today, the most common temptation is to prescribe medicine to appease people's anguish rather than guide them to confront the pain of living. In this respect, I refer, in The Old Man and the Wolves, to Holderlin's Der Tod des Empedokes [The death of Empedocles] and Mnemosyne, from which the Old Man explicitly quotes, to the waning of the gods, which arouses in the Old Man a strange mixture of nostalgia, doubt, and fear. On the other hand, Alba in her own evil fashion rakes up a theme dear to Heidegger: the "protective heed" provided by being. Alba perverts the heed. She believes that paroxysmal conflict carried to the point of hatred is the only truth. That is her very own punctilious nihilism. She hates without feeling guilty, she ends up untouchable, "at home," proud within the supposed truth of her hatred. That is the dreadful part of it--the unscathed conscience, with neither unease nor hardship, present at the very core of hatred, which might go as far as murder. Within the reverberations of Holderlin and Heidegger, to which the Old Man and Alba harken again, the insistence of the question remains. In opposition, what strikes me in today's world, and this is why I speak of the loss of interest in the psyche, is the feeling that the very possibility of questioning has been closed. We have become unscathed in evil just as one might have been immaculate in love.
Fiction: The Samurai
In this interview, Kristeva speaks candidly and at length about The Samurai her first novel. The interview was published in an issue of L'lnfini, and the translation is by Ross Guberman. Kristeva explains why she wrote The Samurai and describes it as "popular" and "polyphonic."
With The Samurai, your first novel, you set aside theoretical writing and turned to fiction. How do you account for this shift from theory to the novel?
I was recently reading the manuscripts of Proust's notebooks, and I came across a question he asks in one of his drafts: "Should I make this into a novel or into a philosophical study?" People have always wondered if they should treat a subject that interests them through theory or through fiction. Is there really a choice to be made? Must we prefer one form of discourse to the other? If we think of more recent writers, we realize that Being and Nothingness did not prevent Sartre from writing Nausea. And Merleau-Ponty, who was less committed than Sartre or perhaps committed in a different way, planned to write a novel although he never did so. The imaginary could be understood to be the deep structure of concepts along with their underlying systems. The core of the symbolic lies in the fundamental drives of the signifier, that is, in sensations, perceptions, and emotions. When we translate them, we leave the realm of ideas and enter the world of fiction, which is why I sought to describe the emotional lives of intellectuals. You will forgive me, moreover, for believing that the genius of the French people is rooted in the links they make between popular passions and the dynamics of intellectual tensions. This close relationship exists nowhere else, yet certain time periods, particularly those plagued by national depression, such as our own, place a greater distance between intellectuals and the rest of the world. I thus tried to give nonspecialists a taste of what intellectuals do and what they are like. Finally, the lewd and pervasive influence of television has forced literature to go back and forth between documentation and invention and between autobiography and fiction. Yet because the whole truth can never be known—at least, this is what psychoanalysis along with other disciplines has taught us—inserting a bit of autobiography into a narrative guarantees a grounding in reality. At the same time, another piece, a fictional one, serves as a magnet for the intense subjective bonds that connect the narrator to other people as well as to himself. As opposed to the autobiographical piece, this fictional piece releases a certain discretion and modesty while transforming real-life characters into literary models.
Why did you wait so long to shift the focus of your work to fiction?
When I finished writing my book, I realized that I had needed to acquire enough distance from myself to become a "character" before I could become an "author." And my experience with psychoanalysis may have made me aware of the banality of life and the insipid richness of everyday language, which may have enabled me to take a step back from the symbolic asceticism of theory—for the time being, that is.
In which fictional genre would you place The Samurai?
I wanted to write a popular novel This may come as a surprise, especially because I wrote a story about intellectual circles. Let me explain what I mean. For me, a popular novel is a sensual and metaphysical narrative. I mean "popular" in the sense of Victor Hugo's phrase, "That enormous crowd eager for the pure sensations of art." Today, the crowds seem to be even more enormous and eager because they are so overtly targeted by the mass media. I mean "popular" in the sense of Mallarme's concern for the "necessary anecdote demanded by the public." I mean "popular" in the sense of Celine's claim that "in the beginning was emotion." I wanted to rely on language to reach an infralinguistic and infraconceptual experience consisting of emotion, sensation, and perception, an experience that could correspond to the conventions of the avant-garde and that could take shape as a source of jouissance that often remains hidden although it is occasionally acknowledged. I thus took note of Mallarme's declaration of his aesthetic project: In fact, it is to prolong, joyfully if possible, something for eternity. Let it be!" When a state of enthusiasm is attained through immediate access to an undecidable experience that appears to be less concerned with formal problems, it serves as a magnet of joy, anguish, and pain. In sum, such a state is a fusion of Eros and Thanatos seeking to create what is traditionally known as a "catharsis" for the reader as well as for the author. To put it another way, I wanted to reach the sensory core of language by sifting through a network of memories and fantasies. While I was writing my novel, I gave a course on Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception and on Proust. I had the feeling that The Samurai offered me a way to put into practice what I was trying to communicate theoretically to my students: the connivance between words and sensory rapture. So I wrote a story about intellectual creation, the conflicts that marked the years between 1965 and 1990, and the rise and fall of different theories and intellectual preoccupations: structuralism, psychoanalysis, political positions and experiments, religions, ecology (immersion in the mother-of-pearl reflection of a salty marsh or in the beautiful birds inhabiting an island), but also feminism, motherhood, an often burning or obscene intimacy.... The theoretical project, the "novel of ideas," never truly disappears from the novel, but it becomes increasingly intimate and personal as the novel goes along. The story becomes simply subjective, microscopic—and ethical.
Does the story become incarnate?
Yes, particularly in the experience of motherhood, which is rejected by Carole and chosen by Olga, who views it as a quasi-pantheistic accomplishment . . . My desire to reconstruct the sensory basis of language made me a great admirer of Colette. As to the theme of intellectual maturation, I was moved by the reflections on the body depicted in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Mann's novel is not very well known to French readers, who fear the weightiness of German literature, but the character of Hans Castorp is confronted with an ill body just as the Samurai contemplate erotic bodies. That said (am I simply echoing avant-garde thought here?), I sought not to build a mountain but to construct fragments, discontinuities, unexpected links, and reciprocal relationships among characters, places, and discourses. I wanted the emblem of my book to be not a mountain but an island, a secret island where characters could meet, an island open to all winds, the winds of other chapters as well as the winds of the interpretations that readers would use to fill the empty space between narrative sequences.
How do you think your writing compares with the ‘neutral writing"[e'criturc Blanche] that Blanchot and Barthes discuss?
Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero, a book I have discussed at length and continue to admire, successfully delineates the most rigorous currents of postwar literature. With "neutral writing," the writer acts as a technician of words, a sort of Orpheus (as Blanchot says) who crosses the river Styx into Hades, the hell of daily life. Along the way, he collects a few rare trophies that he transposes onto a sparse poetic text through ellipses and litotes. This sort of writing condenses impossibilities; according to Barthes, it "outlines in detail the breakup of bourgeois consciousness." I would add that it outlines in detail the breakup of all consciousness by collecting the fragments that remain and by extracting minute, modest, and extremely sparse races. Our silent anguish latches onto dhese traces, and when we experience psychic catastrophes, evidence chat they exist is what enables us to survive. We see this process at work, for instance, in the writings of Samuel Beckett. These two forms of writing do not entail the same relationship to meaning . . . The version I call Plutonian" is more similar to contagious writing, the postmodern, communicable writing I mentioned earlier while discussing the "popular" novel. What is more, the fusion between Eros and Thanatos that inspired The Samurai dearly stems from Freud's conception of the psyche, a conception that precludes any idea of a rational power rooted in an existential demand. None of the characters in The Samurai could say that Shell is other people," for hell is inside us. Similarly, no one can ask, "Should we burn Sade?" because Sade burns inside us. Acknowledging such cruel truths may open a path to "neutral" writing, but striving for a more immediate and cathartic contagiousness and communicability can also pave the way for a writing marked by the plenitude and abundance of joy and suffering. Childlike and infantile, this sort of writing may respond to the eternal childhood lurking inside us and to our need for ghost stories and fairy tales. In The Samurai, Olga writes a children's book called The Samurai. (Guberman, Ross Mitchell. ed. Julia Kristeva Interviews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.) [source]
Feminism and the Politics of Marginality
In About Chinese Women, Kristeva's account of her three-week stay in China in 1974 with other members of the Tel Quel group, she examines her position as a Western woman observing China by first analyzing the Judeo-Christian traditions that undergird traditional notions of femininity and sexual difference. In Genesis, she notes, it was written "male and female created He them" before the story of woman's creation from Adam's rib---told to correct any misinterpretation, no doubt. Then, she traces the development of the patriarchal monotheism of Judaism which "triumphed" over the matriarchal, fertility-based early religions, reducing women to the "silent other" of the symbolic order. Later, she notes, Christian ideology added the insistence on female virginity and martyrdom. In Christianity, motherhood is a conspicuous sign of "jouissance," the pleasure associated with the female body which must be repressed. Procreation must be kept strictly subordinated to the rule of the Father. For women, then, access to the symbolic order is through the father, entrapping women in THE classic double bind: If a woman identifies with the mother, she ensures her exclusion from and marginality in relation to the patriarchal order. If, on the other hand, she identifies with the father---makes herself in his image, then she ends up becoming "him" and supporting the same patriarchal order which excludes and marginalizes her as a woman. Kristeva argues that women must refuse this dilemma! They must, in fact, uphold the Law and sexual difference within the patrilinear frame and refuse to become one of "them." If, as she argues, the Judeo-Christian culture represents woman as the unconscious of the symbolic order---basic instinctual, drive-related "jouissance," then, from her very marginal position she can disrupt the symbolic chain. So, women must not refuse to enter the symbolic order, but neither should they adopt the masculine model of femininity. This balancing act turns out to be much too costly for some woman for whom madness and suicide become the only routes (Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Maria Tsvetaeva).
Key for Kristeva is that women know the material conditions---the body, sex, and procreation---which permit the very existence of the community, its permanence, and, therefore, man's dialogue with God. Just recently I saw the following written somewhere, "Christ was created by God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with it." It is, perhaps, a bit of feminist patter, but I think it supports to some extent Julia Kristeva's idea that women CAN return to the mother and that their roles as mothers themselves may be the key to real social change. She sees motherhood as a mode of love (like transference love in psychoanalysis). It is unconditional and directed toward the final separation of two subjects caught in a loving relationship. The idea for both mother and psychoanalyst is to help produce subjects free to construct imaginary fantasies (or works of art) to produce NEW LANGUAGE. Being able to situate themselves in relationship to the Law enables them to construct provisional identities, subjects in process in the symbolic order. Mother love (like psychoanalytic interpretation) may be poised in that space between ONE MEANING and the rejection of all truth. Kristeva sees love as a concept of agency which gives subjects permission to act.
Carnivalesque language broke through the laws of language censored by grammar, semantics and their attempt to manage the voice of the other; at the same time it was a social protest which came into being in the margins of the dominant culture, but from that position it was powerful enough to begin to generate social change. Perhaps, the margin is the place to be.
In "Women's Time" Kristeva makes the point that female subjectivity seems linked to both cyclical time (menstruation, pregnancy, repetition) and monumental time in sense of eternity---from the perspective of motherhood, reproduction, and the genetic chain. The time of history and language, however, is linear. Her stated aim in this work is to emphasize the "multiplicity" of female expressions to avoid essentializing or homogenizing "woman" and to insist on recognition of sexual difference. She projects a new generation of feminists who will have the task of reconciling "maternal" time with linear time. She writes, "No longer wishing to be excluded or no longer content with the function which has always been demanded of us (to maintain, arrange, and perpetuate this symbolic contract. . .), how can we reveal our place, first as it is bequeathed to us by tradition, and then as we want to transform it?" (The Rhetorical 1258) Her thought is that unless we are able to theorize the continued desire of women to have children the door will be open to religion and mysticism. "Without refusing or sidestepping this sociosymbolic order. . .This leads to active research, still rare, undoubtedly hesitant but always dissident, being carried out by women. . .particularly those attempts, in the wake of contemporary art, to break the code, to shatter language, to find specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unameable repressed by the social contract. . .What remains is to break down resistance to change" (1259-60). She argues that the "role of what is usually called 'aesthetic practices' must increase. . . to demystify the identity of the symbolic bond, to demystify, therefore, the community of language as a universal and unifying tool. . .in order to bring out---along with the singularity of each person and, even more, the multiplicity of every person's possible identifications. . .the relativity of his/her symbolic as well as biological existence, according to the variation in his/her specific symbolic capabilities. And in order to emphasize the responsibility which all will immediately face of putting this fluidity into play. . ." (1266). [source]
Julia Kristeva's Profile (2)
Julia Kristeva, a professor and psychoanalyst, was raised in communist Bulgaria. At the age of 25 she left for Paris with a doctoral research fellowship in hand. By1967 her articles were already appearing in the most prestigious reviews, Critique and Tel Quel. Her linguistic research led to the publication of two books, du Le texte roman and Semeiotike, and ultimately to her doctoral thesis, La Revolution du langage poetique, in 1974.
The Tel Quel Group in China in 1974Kristeva met and worked with the most important figures of structuralism in Paris with her most important teacher being Roland Barthes. Barthes states of Kristeva:
"Kristeva changes the order of things: she always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud: what she desplaces is the already-said, that is to say , the insistence of the signified: what she suvbverts is the authority of monologic science and of filiation" (La Quinzaine Litteraire 19).
She inspired her teachers right from the start because of her unique intellectual background. Her Eastern European training with a solid background in Marxist theory and fluent Russian enabled her to acquire first-hand knowledge of the Russian Formalists and, more inportantly, societ theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work she was instrumental in introducing to the Western world. With a Marxist, Formalist, and adaptive form of the Hegelian concept of negativity context, she had the confidence to not only learn from those she encountered in Paris but to utilize them and transform them for her particular project to take up a critical position towards structuralism. A focal point of her position is her process-oriented view of the sign. Her semiotic theory "demonstrates precisely her radical attack on the rigid, scientistic pretensions of a certain kind of structuralism, as well as on the subjectivist and empiricist categories of the traditional humanism."
Her communist Bulgarian upbringing, unique intellectual surroundings in France, position as a foreigner and a woman in a male-dominated environment gave shape and impetuous for her work in semiotics. While not considered a feminist, Kristeva's main concerns are with the politics of marginality and against all monologic discourse, with the desire to produce a discourse which always confronts (and is thus in process all the time), the impasse of language, and moves to think language against itself.
Julia Kristeva feels that instead of accepting consensual ideology and moralizing, we need to adopt an "analytic, relentless position" that takes negativity into account. She also challenges "writers" instead of intellectuals to reinvent the political realm. Kristeva, unlike many others, practices her theories. In her non-fiction and fiction she fractures language and conventions and interacts with multiple texts. [source]
Rabu, 01 Agustus 2007
Julia Kristeva's Profile
Roland Barthes (Kristeva's Teacher) wrote: "Julia Kristeva changes the order of things: she always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud: what she displaces is the already-said, that is to say, the insistence of the signified; what she subverts is the authority of monologic science and of filiation."
Julia Kristeva who was born on 24 June 1941 is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s.
Kristeva has become influential in today's critical analysis and cultural theory after publishing her first book Semeiotikè in 1969. Her immense body of work includes books, essays and preface publications of architectural importance, which include the notions of intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, for the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history.
Together with Barthes, Todorov, Goldmann, Genette, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Greimas, Foucault, and Althusser, she stands as one of the forefront structuralists, in that time when structuralism took major place in humanities. Her works also have an important place in post-structuralist thought.
These are some links would might help you in understanding Julia Kristeva works.
