Julia Kristeva Overview

Identity formation, the limits of linguistic signification, gender difference, and the possibility for political solidarity: Julia Kristeva has addressed them all. She serves up some of the most nuanced batches of critical theory to date, with all of the passion and... [more]

Identity formation, the limits of linguistic signification, gender difference, and the possibility for political solidarity: Julia Kristeva has addressed them all. She serves up some of the most nuanced batches of critical theory to date, with all of the passion and rigor -- and often all of the enigmatic drama -- of related thinkers like Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida. Kristeva is most renowned for contributing to the shift from Structuralist to Poststructuralist thought in the '60s and '70s. An important member of the radical "Tel Quel" group based in Paris at that time, Kristeva was unfailingly concerned with radicalizing the politics of language. The group embraced the notion of history as a interpretable text, and writing as an act of politicized production (as opposed to objective reproduction). Like other French Poststructuralist feminists, such as Irigaray and Cixous, Kristeva designated a realm separate from traditional language that she saw as being a more female mode of communication. Her work is often concerned with motherhood and the feminine, and she frequently attacks patriarchal ways of viewing language and the world. Unlike theories that are explicitly feminist, though, Kristeva's work never makes gender the only site of political concern, nor does it insist on any essential difference of the feminine. Instead, her work tends to be more generally subversive, which often means deconstructing bourgeois feminist positions alongside patriarchal philosophies. Kristeva's contributions, which traverse fields from linguistics and semiotics to psychoanalysis and philosophy, Marxism and feminism to literature and poetics, are often difficult to compartmentalize. Her later work continued to focus on the process of identity formation, and the role of abjection and Otherness in that process. As her interest in psychoanalysis increased, she also became a practicing analyst. [show less]