Kristeva, Julia (1941–)

1. Life and works

Although Kristeva has come to be known to a large portion of her English readership as a French feminist, the label is misleading. Bulgarian by birth, Kristeva moved to Paris in 1966, and her engagement with feminism has been nothing if not polemical. After an early training in the sciences, she worked as a journalist while pursuing her literary studies. In France, having received a doctoral fellowship, she followed the advice of Tzvetan Todorov, and attended the seminar of Lucien Goldmann. She embarked on a career that is distinguished by its breadth and interdisciplinary approach, the main strands of which – in addition to philosophy – can be identified as linguistics, literature, and psychoanalysis. A research assistant at Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Laboratory of Social Anthropology, she also took advantage of the resources offered by the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, and the École Pratique des Haute Études. As an associate of the Tel Quel review, edited by Philippe Sollers, Kristeva quickly took her place at the centre of French intellectual life (see Tel Quel School). She joined the faculty of the University of Paris VII, and became a practising psychoanalyst.

Among the early influences on her work, in addition to Marxism, Mikhail Bakhtin stands out, as does her engagement with structuralism. Semiotics, or the science of signs, provided the focus of her first published works, Semeiotiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (1969) and Le Texte du roman (1970). Adapting and building upon the work of Roland Barthes, Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles S. Peirce, Kristeva began to develop a theoretical framework that would be more fully elaborated in the landmark text La Révolution du langage poétique (1974) (Revolution in Poetic Language, 1984).

By 1980, with the publication of Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 1982) Kristeva’s growing interest in psychoanalysis had become decisive. The impact of Jacques Lacan’s Écrits (1971), and the psychoanalytic training that Kristeva had undergone continued to inform her approach in Histoires d’amour (1983) (Tales of Love, 1983), Soleil noir (1987) (Black Sun, 1989), Étrangers à nous-même (1988) (Strangers to Ourselves, 1991) and Les Nouvelles Maladies de l’âme (1993) (New Maladies of the Soul, 1995). Her work also includes novels.