Julia Kristeva

Lore & Background

Julia Kristeva was born in Sliven, Bulgaria to Christian parents, the daughter of a church accountant. On her mother's side, she has distant Jewish ancestry. She attended a Francophone school run by Dominican nuns and became acquainted with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin in Bulgaria. She studied at the University of Sofia and, as a postgraduate, obtained a research fellowship that enabled her to move to France in December 1965 at age 24. She continued her education at EPHE, studying under Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes. On August 2, 1967, she married the novelist Philippe Sollers. She taught at Columbia University in the early 1970s and remains a visiting professor. She has also published under the married name Julia Joyaux.

After joining the 'Tel Quel group' founded by Sollers, Kristeva focused on the politics of language. She trained in psychoanalysis and earned her degree in 1979. Her work adapts a psychoanalytic approach to poststructuralist criticism, sharing similarities with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, but she rejects a structuralist understanding of the subject, favoring a subject always 'in process' or 'on trial.' She traveled to China in the 1970s and later wrote About Chinese Women (1977). Kristeva is also the founder of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.

Reader's Guide

Kristeva's significance lies in her development of key concepts that bridge linguistics, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Her distinction between the 'semiotic' and the 'symbolic' in signification rethinks the formation of the subject: the semiotic is an emotional, instinctual realm tied to the pre-Oedipal and the feminine, while the symbolic is the realm of language, law, and culture entered through the Mirror Stage. The process of separation from the mother, called abjection, is central to identity formation, and Kristeva argues that subjects continue to oscillate between the semiotic and symbolic, remaining permanently 'in process.' This framework has been influential in analyzing cultural phenomena, such as the degradation of women's bodies in popular culture as a reenactment of abjection. Her adoption of Plato's concept of the chora as a nourishing maternal space further elaborates the mother-child bond. Kristeva also contributed to the concept of intertextuality. In feminism, she is regarded as a key proponent of French feminism, though her relation to feminist movements in France has been controversial. She proposed multiple sexual identities against a unified feminine language and has denounced identity politics as understood by some American feminist academics, arguing that language must be viewed through history and individual psychic experience.

Did You Know?

• Kristeva moved to France in December 1965 at age 24 after obtaining a research fellowship.
• She married novelist Philippe Sollers on August 2, 1967.
• She founded the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.
• She has published under the married name Julia Joyaux.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"Julia Kristeva (born 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist." — Julia Kristeva "The text is a practice that could be compared to political revolution: the one brings about in the subject what the other introduces into society." — Julia Kristeva "My two favorite theorists are Kristeva and Bakhtin, both of them because they see writing as infinite possibility, in which one plays with cultural and linguistic conventions rather than being limited by them." — Julia Kristeva