Kristeva, Julia (1941–)

5. Psychoanalysis

When Kristeva denies being to a woman, her assertion takes account of Heidegger’s ontological distinction – the difference between a being and Being (or existence) as such (see Heidegger, M.) – and Lacan’s notorious statement in Seminar XX (1972–3) that ‘There is no such thing as The woman.’ Understood in this light, rather than as a merely polemical statement, it can be read as a way of insisting upon the relevance of sexual difference, the limitations of ontological language, and the need to interrogate the possibilities of situating a woman’s subjectivity on a level that does not simply conform to the position of male subjectivity. The position adopted by the female subject is thus one in excess of the boundaries of language, outside the order of being – at least in so far as language and existence are sanctioned as male.

It was Kristeva’s abiding interest in language that drew her to psychoanalysis. Interested in the underside of language, Kristeva’s work of the late 1980s and 1990s is preoccupied with the exploration of borderlines, marginal existence, outlawed subjectivities, and what it means to be a foreigner, an outsider. While the significance of these themes is by no means limited to sexual difference – the question of nationality, the issue of psychosis, and the desire for abjection are a few of the concerns that Kristeva pursues by focusing upon the limits and borders of subjectivity and consciousness – the question of feminine and masculine identity is a central one.

The symbolic, a Lacanian term that Kristeva invests with a new significance in counterposing it to the semiotic, interprets the father of Freud’s Oedipal drama in terms of language. Since the semiotic chora has maternal connotations, there is a sense in which the distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic is sexually marked. This does not mean that Kristeva discerns semiotic energies only in the work of women artists. On the contrary – and this has provoked consternation to some feminists – she points more often to the works of Bellini and Giotto, Baudelaire and Proust for their capacity to evoke the sexual pleasure that she calls corporeal ‘jouissance’. This term, like so much of her work, reflects the influence of Lacan, whose impact on Kristeva’s corpus is decisive, despite the critical distance she inserts between her own writing and Lacan’s oeuvre.