Person
Julia Kristeva
Bulgarian-born French psychoanalyst, linguist, literary theorist and novelist, who came to Paris in 1965, joined the Tel Quel circle and taught for decades at the University of Paris VII. Her theory of the speaking subject set the semiotic, the pre-verbal and drive-laden side of meaning, against the symbolic order of language. She coined the term intertextuality and wrote influential psychoanalytic studies of abjection, love and melancholia. She trained at the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, becoming an associate member in 1987 and a full member in 1997.
- Born
- 1941
- Known for
- Influenced by
introduced
- Intertextuality 1967 Kristeva coined “intertextualité” in her 1966 essay on Bakhtin, published in Critique in 1967 and reprinted in Sēmeiōtikē (1969), to describe every text as a mosaic of quotations and the transformation of other texts.
- Subject in process 1972 Kristeva introduced the “sujet en procès” in an essay of that title in Tel Quel (nos. 52–53, 1972–73) and developed it in La Révolution du langage poétique (1974), where the subject is both in process and on trial, never fixed by the symbolic order.
- The semiotic 1974 In her 1974 state doctoral thesis Kristeva set the semiotic, the drive-charged, pre-verbal modality of signification, against the symbolic, and made their interplay the basis of her account of poetic language.
reworked
- Primary narcissism 1983 In Histoires d’amour Kristeva recasts primary narcissism as a structure rather than an objectless state, organised around an emptiness and sustained by primary identification with the “imaginary father of individual prehistory”.
- Depressive position 1987 In Soleil noir Kristeva reads melancholia as a failure of the depressive position: the subject cannot carry out the necessary matricide and symbolise the loss of the mother in signs.
influenced by
- Jacques Lacan Kristeva attended Lacan’s seminar from the late 1960s and built her semiotic/symbolic distinction on, and against, his account of the symbolic order, the mirror stage and the subject of the signifier.
- Melanie Klein Kristeva drew on Klein’s account of the archaic mother, matricide and the depressive position from Soleil noir onward, and devoted the second volume of Le Génie féminin (2000) to her.