Julia Kristeva
Encyclopedia
Julia Kristeva (born 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian
-French
philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst
, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France
since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory and feminism
after publishing her first book Semeiotikè in 1969. Her sizable 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. Together with Roland Barthes
, Todorov
, Goldmann
, Gérard Genette
, Lévi-Strauss
, Lacan
, Greimas, and Althusser, she stands as one of the foremost structuralists
, in that time when structuralism took a major place in humanities
. Her works also have an important place in post-structuralist thought.
She is also the founder and head of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize
committee.
, Bulgaria
, Kristeva is the daughter of a church accountant. Kristeva and her sister were enrolled in 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. She continued her education at several French universities.
group' founded by Philippe Sollers
, Kristeva focused on the politics of language and became an active member of the group. She trained in psychoanalysis, and earned her degree in 1979. In some ways, her work can be seen as trying to adapt a psychoanalytic approach to the poststructuralist criticism. For example, her view of the subject
, and its construction, shares similarities with Sigmund Freud
and Jacques Lacan
. However, Kristeva rejects any understanding of the subject in a structuralist sense; instead, she favors a subject always "in process" or "in crisis." In this way, she contributes to the poststructuralist critique of essentialized structures, whilst preserving the teachings of psychoanalysis. She travelled to China in the 1970s and later wrote About Chinese Women (1977).
founded by Saussure
. As explained in The History of Women in Philosophy by Augustine Perumalil, Kristeva's "semiotic is closely related to the infantile pre-Oedipal referred to in the works of Freud, Otto Rank
, Melanie Klein
, British Object Relation psychoanalysis, and the Lacan
ian (pre-mirror stage
). It is an emotional field, tied to the instincts, which dwells in the fissures and prosody
of language rather than in the denotative meaning
s of words. In this sense, the semiotic opposes the symbolic, which correlates words with meaning in a stricter, mathematical sense. She is also noted for her work on the concepts of "abjection
" (a notion that relates to a primary psychological force of rejection, directed toward the mother-figure), and intertextuality
."
and psychology
, or the connection between the social and the subject, do not represent each other, but rather follow the same logic: the survival of the group and the subject. Furthermore, in her analysis of Oedipus
, she claims that the speaking subject cannot exist on his/her own, but that he/she "stands on the fragile threshold as if stranded on account of an impossible demarcation" (Powers of Horror
, p. 85).
In her comparison between the two disciplines, Kristeva claims that the way in which an individual excludes the abject mother as a means of forming an identity, is the same way in which societies are constructed. On a broader scale, cultures exclude the maternal and the feminine, and by this come into being.
, Hélène Cixous
, and Luce Irigaray
. Kristeva had a remarkable influence on feminism and feminist literary studies in the US and the UK, as well as on readings into contemporary art although her relation to feminist circles and movements in France
was quite controversial. Kristeva made a famous disambiguation of three types of feminism in "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul (1993); while rejecting the first two types, including that of Simone de Beauvoir
, her stands are sometimes considered to reject feminism altogether. Kristeva proposed the idea of multiple sexual identities against the joined code of "unified feminine language".
, multiculturalism
, and identity politics
, Kristeva said her writings had been misunderstood by American feminist academics. She believes that it is harmful to posit collective identity above individual identity, and this political assertion of sexual, ethnic, and religious identities is "totalitarian".
. 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 and has been described by Kristeva as "a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code."
in 2004. She won the 2006 Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought.
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 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."
But 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". Ian 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. 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".
And in Intellectual Impostures, two professors of physics Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont devote a chapter to Julia Kristeva's use of mathematics in her writings. They conclude "the main problem summarized by these texts is that she makes no effort to justify the reference of these mathematical concepts to the fields she is purporting to study - linguistics, literary criticism, political philosophy, psychoanalysis - and this in our opinion, is for the very good reason that there is none. Her sentences are more meaningful than those of Lacan, but she surpasses even him for the superficiality of her erudition."
Other books on Julia Kristeva:
Bulgarians
The Bulgarians are a South Slavic nation and ethnic group native to Bulgaria and neighbouring regions. Emigration has resulted in immigrant communities in a number of other countries.-History and ethnogenesis:...
-French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory and feminism
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
after publishing her first book Semeiotikè in 1969. Her sizable body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality
Intertextuality
Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined...
, the semiotic, and abjection
Abjection
The term abjection literally means "the state of being cast off". In usage it has connotations of degradation, baseness and meanness of spirit.-In critical theory:...
, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. Together with Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
, Todorov
Tzvetan Todorov
Tzvetan Todorov is a Franco-Bulgarian philosopher. He has lived in France since 1963 with his wife Nancy Huston and their two children, writing books and essays about literary theory, thought history and culture theory....
, Goldmann
Lucien Goldmann
Lucien Goldmann was a French philosopher and sociologist of Jewish-Romanian origin...
, Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette
Gérard Genette is a French literary theorist, associated in particular with the structuralist movement and such figures as Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, from whom he adapted the concept of bricolage.-Life:...
, Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
, Lacan
Lacan
Lacan is surname of:* Jacques Lacan , French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist** The Seminars of Jacques Lacan** From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, a book on political philosophy by Saul Newman** Lacan at the Scene* Judith Miller, née Lacan...
, Greimas, and Althusser, she stands as one of the foremost structuralists
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...
, in that time when structuralism took a major place in humanities
Humanities
The humanities are academic disciplines that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences....
. Her works also have an important place in post-structuralist thought.
She is also the founder and head of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize
Simone de Beauvoir Prize
The Simone de Beauvoir Prize is an international human rights prize for women's freedom, awarded since 2008 to individuals or groups fighting for gender equality and opposing breaches of human rights...
committee.
Life
Born in SlivenSliven
Sliven is the eighth-largest city in Bulgaria and the administrative and industrial centre of Sliven Province and municipality. It is a relatively large town with 89,848 inhabitants, as of February 2011....
, Bulgaria
Kingdom of Bulgaria
The Kingdom of Bulgaria was established as an independent state when the Principality of Bulgaria, an Ottoman vassal, officially proclaimed itself independent on October 5, 1908 . This move also formalised the annexation of the Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia, which had been under the control...
, Kristeva is the daughter of a church accountant. Kristeva and her sister were enrolled in a Francophone school run by Dominican
Dominican Republic
The Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of La Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are shared by two countries...
nuns. Kristeva became acquainted with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
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
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
in December 1965, when she was 24. She continued her education at several French universities.
Work
After joining the 'Tel QuelTel Quel
Tel Quel was an avant-garde magazine for literature, founded in 1960 in Paris by Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier.-Overview:...
group' founded by Philippe Sollers
Philippe Sollers
Philippe Sollers is a French writer and critic. In 1960 he founded the avant garde journal Tel Quel , published by Seuil, which ran until 1982...
, Kristeva focused on the politics of language and became an active member of the group. She trained in psychoanalysis, and earned her degree in 1979. In some ways, her work can be seen as trying to adapt a psychoanalytic approach to the poststructuralist criticism. For example, her view of the subject
Subject (philosophy)
In philosophy, a subject is a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness or a relationship with another entity . A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed...
, and its construction, shares similarities with Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
and Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who made prominent contributions to psychoanalysis and philosophy, and has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". Giving yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, Lacan influenced France's...
. However, Kristeva rejects any understanding of the subject in a structuralist sense; instead, she favors a subject always "in process" or "in crisis." In this way, she contributes to the poststructuralist critique of essentialized structures, whilst preserving the teachings of psychoanalysis. She travelled to China in the 1970s and later wrote About Chinese Women (1977).
The semiotic
One of Kristeva's most important propositions is the semiotic, as distinct from the discipline of semioticsSemiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
founded by Saussure
Saussure
People of the surname Saussure or de Saussure include* Horace-Bénédict de Saussure , Swiss physicist and Alpine traveller** Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure , chemist, son of Horace-Bénédict, and brother of Albertine...
. As explained in The History of Women in Philosophy by Augustine Perumalil, Kristeva's "semiotic is closely related to the infantile pre-Oedipal referred to in the works of Freud, Otto Rank
Otto Rank
Otto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, teacher and therapist. Born in Vienna as Otto Rosenfeld, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, an editor of the two most important analytic journals, managing director of Freud's...
, Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein
Melanie Reizes Klein was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had an impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis...
, British Object Relation psychoanalysis, and the Lacan
Lacan
Lacan is surname of:* Jacques Lacan , French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist** The Seminars of Jacques Lacan** From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, a book on political philosophy by Saul Newman** Lacan at the Scene* Judith Miller, née Lacan...
ian (pre-mirror stage
Mirror stage
The mirror stage is a concept in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. Philosopher Raymond Tallis describes the mirror stage as "the cornerstone of Lacan’s oeuvre."...
). It is an emotional field, tied to the instincts, which dwells in the fissures and prosody
Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...
of language rather than in the denotative meaning
Denotation (semiotics)
In semiotics, denotation is the surface or literal meaning encoded to a signifier, and the definition most likely to appear in a dictionary.-Discussion :Drawing from the original word or definition proposed by Saussure , a sign has two parts:...
s of words. In this sense, the semiotic opposes the symbolic, which correlates words with meaning in a stricter, mathematical sense. She is also noted for her work on the concepts of "abjection
Abjection
The term abjection literally means "the state of being cast off". In usage it has connotations of degradation, baseness and meanness of spirit.-In critical theory:...
" (a notion that relates to a primary psychological force of rejection, directed toward the mother-figure), and intertextuality
Intertextuality
Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined...
."
Anthropology and psychology
Kristeva argues that anthropologyAnthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
and psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, or the connection between the social and the subject, do not represent each other, but rather follow the same logic: the survival of the group and the subject. Furthermore, in her analysis of Oedipus
Oedipus
Oedipus was a mythical Greek king of Thebes. He fulfilled a prophecy that said he would kill his father and marry his mother, and thus brought disaster on his city and family...
, she claims that the speaking subject cannot exist on his/her own, but that he/she "stands on the fragile threshold as if stranded on account of an impossible demarcation" (Powers of Horror
Powers of Horror
Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection is a 1982 book by Julia Kristeva. The book is an extensive treatise on the subject of abjection and all it entails...
, p. 85).
In her comparison between the two disciplines, Kristeva claims that the way in which an individual excludes the abject mother as a means of forming an identity, is the same way in which societies are constructed. On a broader scale, cultures exclude the maternal and the feminine, and by this come into being.
Feminism
Kristeva was regarded as a key proponent of French feminism together with Simone de BeauvoirSimone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
, Hélène Cixous
Hélène Cixous
Hélène Cixous is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. She holds honorary degrees from Queen's University and the University of Alberta in Canada; University College Dublin in Ireland; the University of York and University College...
, and Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian feminist, philosopher, linguist, psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One .-Biography:...
. Kristeva had a remarkable influence on feminism and feminist literary studies in the US and the UK, as well as on readings into contemporary art although her relation to feminist circles and movements in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
was quite controversial. Kristeva made a famous disambiguation of three types of feminism in "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul (1993); while rejecting the first two types, including that of Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, often shortened to Simone de Beauvoir , was a French existentialist philosopher, public intellectual, and social theorist. She wrote novels, essays, biographies, an autobiography in several volumes, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and...
, her stands are sometimes considered to reject feminism altogether. Kristeva proposed the idea of multiple sexual identities against the joined code of "unified feminine language".
Denunciation of identity politics
Though she is often seen as one of the architects of postmodern feminism which partly gave rise to what is known to be political correctnessPolitical correctness
Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...
, multiculturalism
Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism is the appreciation, acceptance or promotion of multiple cultures, applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, usually at the organizational level, e.g...
, and identity politics
Identity politics
Identity politics are political arguments that focus upon the self interest and perspectives of self-identified social interest groups and ways in which people's politics may be shaped by aspects of their identity through race, class, religion, sexual orientation or traditional dominance...
, Kristeva said her writings had been misunderstood by American feminist academics. She believes that it is harmful to posit collective identity above individual identity, and this political assertion of sexual, ethnic, and religious identities is "totalitarian".
Novels
In the past decade, Kristeva has written 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 DostoevskyFyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....
. 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 and has been described by Kristeva as "a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code."
Honors
For her "innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture and literature", Kristeva was awarded the Holberg International Memorial PrizeHolberg International Memorial Prize
The Holberg International Memorial Prize was established in 2003 by the government of Norway with the objective of increasing awareness of the value of academic scholarship within the arts, humanities, social sciences, law and theology, either within one of these fields or through interdisciplinary...
in 2004. She won the 2006 Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought.
Criticism
Roman Jacobson 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."Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, existentialism, social theory, Marxism, anthropology and...
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 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."
But 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". Ian 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. 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".
And in Intellectual Impostures, two professors of physics Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont devote a chapter to Julia Kristeva's use of mathematics in her writings. They conclude "the main problem summarized by these texts is that she makes no effort to justify the reference of these mathematical concepts to the fields she is purporting to study - linguistics, literary criticism, political philosophy, psychoanalysis - and this in our opinion, is for the very good reason that there is none. Her sentences are more meaningful than those of Lacan, but she surpasses even him for the superficiality of her erudition."
Selected writings
- Séméiôtiké: recherches pour une sémanalyse, Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1969. (English translation: Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.)
- La Révolution Du Langage Poétique: L'avant-Garde À La Fin Du Xixe Siècle, Lautréamont Et Mallarmé. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974. (Abridged English translation: Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.)
- About Chinese Women. London: Boyars, 1977.
- Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.Powers of HorrorPowers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection is a 1982 book by Julia Kristeva. The book is an extensive treatise on the subject of abjection and all it entails...
New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. - The Kristeva Reader. (ed. Toril Moi) Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
- In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
- Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.
- Nations without Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
- New Maladies of the Soul. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
- Crisis of the European Subject. New York: Other Press, 2000.
- Reading the Bible. In: David Jobling, Tina Pippin & Ronald Schleifer (eds). The Postmodern Bible Reader. (pp. 92–101). Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
- Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words: Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette: A Trilogy. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
- Strangers to Ourselves New York: Columbia University Press,1991
- Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative Toronto: University of Toronto PressUniversity of Toronto PressUniversity of Toronto Press is Canada's leading scholarly publisher and one of the largest university presses in North America. Founded in 1901, UTP has published over 6,500 books, with well over 3,500 of these still in print....
, 2001. - Hatred and Forgiveness New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Other books on Julia Kristeva:
- Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, Oxford University Press, 2000.
- Megan Becker-Leckrone, Julia Kristeva And Literary Theory, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
- Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Modernity, Suny Press, 2004. (2006 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship for the best book published in 2004)
- Kelly Ives, Julia Kristeva: Art, Love, Melancholy, Philosophy, Semiotics and Psychoanalysis, Crescent Moon Publishing Édition, 2010.
- Kelly Oliver, Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing, Routledge Édition, 1993.
- John Lechte, Maria Margaroni, Julia Kristeva: Live Theory , Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 2005
- Anna Smith, Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement, Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.
- David Crownfield, Body/Text in Julia Kristeva: Religion, Women, and Psychoanalysis, State University of New York Press, 1992
Novels
- The Samurai: A Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
- The Old Man and the Wolves. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
- Possessions: A Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
- Murder in Byzantium. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
See also
- List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction
- Luce IrigarayLuce IrigarayLuce Irigaray is a Belgian feminist, philosopher, linguist, psychoanalyst, sociologist and cultural theorist. She is best known for her works Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One .-Biography:...
- Hélène CixousHélène CixousHélène Cixous is a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and rhetorician. She holds honorary degrees from Queen's University and the University of Alberta in Canada; University College Dublin in Ireland; the University of York and University College...
- Écriture féminineÉcriture féminineÉcriture féminine, literally "women's writing," more closely, the inscription of the female body and female difference in language and text, is a strain of feminist literary theory that originated in France in the early 1970s and included foundational theorists such as Hélène Cixous, Monique...
- French feminism