Born: June 24, 1941, Sliven, Bulgaria
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born French psychoanalyst and literary theorist, who, drawing on Freudian psychoanalysis and structuralist linguistics, has analyzed 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). 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. This 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. Her analyses of sexuality and the “feminine” have become 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.
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