Kristeva, Julia (1941- )

Bulgarian-born French psychoanalyst and literary theorist. Drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis and structuralist linguistics, she has analysed the relationship between language, society, and the self. In Semeiotiké 1969 she argues that the self is not a stable, autonomous entity, but the product of language.

Consequently, those elements that are repressed in the well-ordered language of bourgeois society (the ‘dominant social discourse’) become the repressed elements (the unconscious) of the self. She examines the political and cultural implications of this position in The Revolution in Poetic Language 1974, in which she claims that poetry is essentially an expression of the irrational, of those repressed elements that form the unconscious. Poetry (and such disruptors as laughter and pleasure) challenges the order, rationality, and repressive control of the dominant social discourse, and so shows that revolution is possible at both the personal and political level.

Polylogue 1977 and Love Stories 1983 express her growing interest in the relationship between language, the body, and the limits of personal identity with her analyses of sexuality and the ‘feminine’ becoming an important part of feminist debates. Among her more accessible books are About Chinese Women 1974, a feminist study of the Cultural Revolution, and Les Samourais 1991, a novel containing thinly disguised portraits of several figures who have recently dominated French intellectual life.