Julia Kristeva split language into a rhythmic semiotic layer and a rule-bound symbolic
A Bulgarian postgraduate arrived in Paris in December 1965 on a research fellowship, aged 24. Julia Kristeva went on to publish more than 30 books, from Powers of Horror to Black Sun, and in 2004 took the Holberg Prize for work where language, culture and literature meet.
She was born Yuliya Krasteva in Sliven, Bulgaria, on 24 June 1941, the daughter of a church accountant, and went to a French-language school run by Dominican nuns, where she first encountered Mikhail Bakhtin. From the University of Sofia she moved to France and studied at the EPHE under Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes. On 2 August 1967 she married the novelist Philippe Sollers and joined his Tel Quel group, concentrating on the politics of language; her first book, Semeiotikè, appeared in 1969. She taught at Columbia in the early 1970s and qualified as a psychoanalyst in 1979.
Her best-known idea splits meaning into two strands. The semiotic, unrelated to Saussure's discipline of semiotics, is a pre-verbal layer of drives, rhythm and music that lives in the tone and cadence of speech rather than in dictionary definitions, and it is tied to the infant's early bond with the mother. The symbolic is the ordered realm of shared language, law and structure that a child enters by breaking away from the mother, a separation she named abjection. Lacan treated that entry as an arrival; Kristeva held that people keep swinging between the two, so the self is always in process.
She scaled the argument up, claiming that whole cultures come into being the way individuals do, by pushing out the maternal and the feminine. From Plato she borrowed the chora, a nourishing maternal space prior to language. She is ranked among the leading French feminists alongside Beauvoir, Cixous and Irigaray, yet her 1993 essay Women's Time rejected two of the three kinds of feminism it described, and she calls the political assertion of collective sexual, ethnic and religious identity above the individual ultimately totalitarian.
She also writes novels shaped like detective stories, and described Murder in Byzantium as a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code. Honours include the Hannah Arendt Prize in 2006, the Vaclav Havel Prize in 2008 and Commander of the Legion of Honour in 2014. Barthes praised her for demolishing even the final prejudice, the comforting one a reader might have hoped to keep.
Source: Julia Kristeva
