Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva (French: [kʁisteva]; born Yuliya Stoyanova Krasteva, Bulgarian: Юлия Стоянова Кръстева; on 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize, awarded by the Havel Foundation.
In this Bulgarian name, the patronymic is Stoyanova and the family name is Krasteva.
Julia Kristeva
- The "semiotic" of the pre-mirror stage
- Nature of abjection
- Intertextuality
- 'the transfinite'[2][3]
Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural studies and feminism after publishing her first book, Semeiotikè, in 1969. Her sizeable body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. She is prominent in structuralist and poststructuralist thought.
Kristeva is also the founder of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.[6]
Life[edit]
Born in Sliven, Bulgaria to Christian parents, Kristeva is the daughter of a church accountant. On her mother's side, she has distant Jewish ancestry.[7] Kristeva and her sister attended a Francophone school run by Dominican nuns. Kristeva became acquainted with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin at this time in Bulgaria. Kristeva went on to study at the University of Sofia, and while a postgraduate there obtained a research fellowship that enabled her to move to France in December 1965, when she was 24.[8] She continued her education at several French universities, studying under Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes, among other scholars.[9][10] On August 2, 1967, Kristeva married the novelist Philippe Sollers,[11] born Philippe Joyaux.
Kristeva taught at Columbia University in the early 1970s, and remains a Visiting Professor.[12] She has also published under the married name Julia Joyaux.[13][14][15]
Novelist[edit]
Kristeva wrote a number of novels that resemble detective stories. While the books maintain narrative suspense and develop a stylized surface, her readers also encounter ideas intrinsic to her theoretical projects. Her characters reveal themselves mainly through psychological devices, making her type of fiction mostly resemble the later work of Dostoevsky. Her fictional oeuvre, which includes The Old Man and the Wolves, Murder in Byzantium, and Possessions, while often allegorical, also approaches the autobiographical in some passages, especially with one of the protagonists of Possessions, Stephanie Delacour—a French journalist—who can be seen as Kristeva's alter ego. Murder in Byzantium deals with themes from orthodox Christianity and politics; she referred to it as "a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code".[32]
Honors[edit]
For her "innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture and literature", Kristeva was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004. She won the 2006 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought. She has also been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, and the Vaclav Havel Prize.[33] On October 10, 2019, she received an honoris causa doctorate from Universidade Católica Portuguesa.
Scholarly reception[edit]
Roman Jakobson said that "Both readers and listeners, whether agreeing or in stubborn disagreement with Julia Kristeva, feel indeed attracted to her contagious voice and to her genuine gift of questioning generally adopted 'axioms,' and her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question marks."[34]
Roland Barthes comments that "Julia Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the last prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by, could be take [sic] pride in; what she displaces is the already-said, the déja-dit, i.e., the instance of the signified, i.e., stupidity; what she subverts is authority -the authority of monologic science, of filiation."[35]
Ian Almond criticizes Kristeva's ethnocentrism. He cites Gayatri Spivak's conclusion that Kristeva's book About Chinese Women "belongs to that very eighteenth century [that] Kristeva scorns" after pinpointing "the brief, expansive, often completely ungrounded way in which she writes about two thousand years of a culture she is unfamiliar with".[36] Almond notes the absence of sophistication in Kristeva's remarks concerning the Muslim world and the dismissive terminology she uses to describe its culture and believers.[37] He criticizes Kristeva's opposition which juxtaposes "Islamic societies" against "democracies where life is still fairly pleasant" by pointing out that Kristeva displays no awareness of the complex and nuanced debate ongoing among women theorists in the Muslim world, and that she does not refer to anything other than the Rushdie fatwa in dismissing the entire Muslim faith as "reactionary and persecutory".[38]
In Impostures intellectuelles (1997), physics professors Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont devote a chapter to Kristeva's use of mathematics in her early writings. They argue that Kristeva fails to show the relevance of the mathematical concepts she discusses to linguistics and the other fields she studies, and that no such relevance exists.[39]
Alleged collaboration with the Communist Regime in Bulgaria[edit]
In 2018, Bulgaria's state Dossier Commission announced that Kristeva had been an agent for the Committee for State Security under the code name "Sabina". She was supposedly recruited in June 1971.[40][41] Five years earlier she left Bulgaria to study in France. Under the People's Republic of Bulgaria, any Bulgarian who wanted to travel abroad had to apply for an exit visa and get an approval from the Ministry of Interior. The process was long and difficult because anyone who made it to the west could declare political asylum.[42] Kristeva has called the allegations "grotesque and false".[43] On 30 March, the state Dossier Commission began publishing online the entire set of documents reflecting Kristeva's activity as an informant of the former Committee for State Security.[44][45][46][47][48][49] She vigorously denies the charges.[50] However, anyone even remotely familiar with the practices of the former communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe would know that the state would never issue anyone an international passport – particularly for travel behind the “iron curtain” – unless they collaborated with the authorities (most typically by becoming a State Security operative).
Neal Ascherson wrote: "...the recent fuss about Julia Kristeva boils down to nothing much, although it has suited some to inflate it into a fearful scandal... But the reality shown in her files is trivial. After settling in Paris in 1965, she was cornered by Bulgarian spooks who pointed out to her that she still had a vulnerable family in the home country. So she agreed to regular meetings over many years, in the course of which she seems to have told her handlers nothing more than gossip about Aragon, Bataille & Co. from the Left Bank cafés – stuff they could have read in Le Canard enchaîné... the combined intelligence value of its product and her reports was almost zero. The Bulgarian security men seem to have known they were being played. But never mind: they could impress their boss by showing him a real international celeb on their books..."[51]