Kristeva, Julia

Psychoanalytic theorist, linguistic scholar, and philosopher, Julia Kristeva theorizes relations among psychic desire, the body, sexuality, and culture. She has contributed extensively not only to philosophy, linguistics, and psychoanalytic theory but also to literary and cultural theory as well as feminist theory. Her publications explore topics such as the relationship of semiotics and subjectivity (Revolution of Poetic Language, 1974), depression and melancholy (Black Sun, 1987), maternal experience and abjection (Powers of Horror, 1980), national identity and territorial space (Strangers to Ourselves, 1989), literature and sensation (Time and Sense, 1994), and the practice of psychoanalysis (New Maladies of the Soul, 1993).

Kristeva was born in 1941 in Bulgaria. In the mid-1960s at the age of 25, she was granted a doctoral research fellowship that enabled her to emigrate to Paris. In Paris, she worked with Roland Barthes, a central figure in structuralism and literary theory, and Jacques Lacan, a leading psychoanalytic theorist. She was involved in leftist French politics, completed psychoanalytic training, and was inducted into the French legion d'honeur, the highest cultural honor in France. She is currently professor of linguistics and humanities at the University of Paris VII and a frequent visiting lecturer at Columbia University.

Kristeva's first major publication, Revolution of Poetic Language (written in 1974 as her doctoral dissertation and published in 1984), began her theoretical work in semiotics and psychoanalysis. In this work, she proposes a new semiotics she terms semanalysis. Semanalysis argues that meaning is a signifying process rather than a sign system. Semanalysis explores the relationship between language and subjectivity by combining the semiotics of Charles Pierce and Ferdinand de Saussure with the psychoanalysis of Freud, Lacan, and Melanie Klein. Semanalysis asserts that subjectivity is formed in conjunction with language acquisition and use and that all signification is composed of the “semiotic” (genotext) and the “symbolic” (phenotext).

Incorporating Lacanian psychoanalysis, Kristeva further distinguishes the semiotic as the pre-Oedipal stage of human development and the symbolic as the postoedipal stage. The semiotic, which refers to the bodily drive as it produces signification or meaning, is associated with the rhythms, tones, and movement of signifying practices. As bodily drive, the semiotic is also associated with the maternal body, considered by Kristeva to be the original source of rhythms, tones, and movements for every human being. In this theorization, the semiotic (genotext) represents biophysiological processes constrained by social and cultural norms. The semiotic is prediscursive and cannot be reduced to language systems. In contrast, the symbolic element of signification is associated with the grammar and structure of language. The symbolic (phenotext) element exists within the larger semiotic (genotext) and makes reference possible.

Signification and meaning require both the semiotic and symbolic. The semiotic and the symbolic represented departure points for Kristeva to bring the body back into discourse through the speaking subject. She argues that the speaking subject is a divided subject consisting of a conscious mind containing social constraints and an unconscious mind consisting of biophysiological processes (i.e., Freudian drives). While traditional semiotics could not deal with desire or transgression from social norms, semanalysis rests upon a split subject—a socially-shaped, biological being that is always negotiating inner desire and social norms. Semanalysis launched Kristeva's theoretical work on the connections between mind and body, psyche and soma, nature and culture, and materiality and representation that comprise her scholarship.

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