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Kristeva, Julia

Julia Kristeva is a philosopher, literary and cultural theorist, practicing psychoanalyst, chair of linguistics at the University of Paris, and permanent visiting professor at Columbia University in New York. In her writing, she uses representations of mothers in art and literature and examples from her patients' case histories to illustrate her theories about the psychological impact of the mother, or, rather, of attitudes about the mother, more than any actual person. Her most well-known idea is that of the abject or death-bearing mother, which she develops in some of her later works particularly by building on the theories of Sigmund Freud and D.W. Winnicott, but she is also interested in religion, especially Catholicism, and writes extensively on the Virgin Mary in some of her earlier works.

Early Beginnings

She was born on June 24, 1941, in Communist Bulgaria, where she learned to suspect collective activist movements such as feminism, an attitude later evidenced in her work (despite which she is often known as one of the French Feminists, a group that also includes Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray). She emigrated to Paris at the end of 1965 to begin a fellowship at the School of Higher Education in Social Sciences, earning her Ph.D. in linguistics in 1973 and another degree in psychoanalysis in 1979. In 1990, the French government made her a chevalier de l'ordre des arts et des letters, or a knight of the order of arts and letters. Then in 1997, she received the medal of the French Legion of Honor; in 2004, the Holberg International Memorial Prize; and in 2006, the Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought.

Her earliest work on mothers is the 1976 essay “Stabat Mater” (later reprinted in Tales of Love, 1987), which discusses the appeal to both men and women of what she terms the Virgin Mother fantasy, the effects of the fantasy, and its failure for women. She find that it fails because it is an impossible ideal, but one way in which it appeals to women is through the Virgin's centrality—as a woman, to a god and a religion—thus suggesting the possibility for female power, made acceptable through humility. The fantasy is further appealing, she argues, due to the association of sexuality with death, which resonates with her later writings on abjection in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (published in 1980). By avoiding sexuality, the Virgin Mother avoids death and thus represents the ultimate possibility for life. This fantasy also fills the gaps left by linguistic communication, contributing tears and other pre- and nonverbal forms of communication. However, Kristeva notes that painting and music also accomplish that, by depicting and using the Virgin, thereby making her unnecessary. In “Stabat Mater,” Kristeva also discusses a particular paradox: On the one hand, the loss of a literal part of oneself via giving birth; and on the other hand, the pleasure that results from it.

Further Ideas

She explores many of these ideas further in another 1980 book, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, particularly the artist Giovanni Bellini's use of the Virgin Mother in his art to depict the stages in the mother-child relationship (from the implicitly incestuous “possessive mother,” to the distant or absent mother, and to the “hostile mother”) and, simultaneously, the stages in the child's psychological development. She argues for the importance of the mother to children's achievement of psychological stability and the acquisition of language (that is, their “entry into the symbolic order”). The maternal body, she writes, is the place of a splitting, both literally (as suggested by the above paradox in “Stabat Mater”), and between nature and culture. This positing of the mother as boundary—particularly her attractiveness and fascinating quality, or that of the space that she represents, despite the necessity of rejecting and distancing oneself from her—again foreshadows Kristeva's later discussions of abjection.

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