Julia Kristeva

Based on Wikipedia: Julia Kristeva

The Philosopher Who Made Language Strange Again

Imagine you're a child, not yet able to speak. The world is a blur of sensations, rhythms, and emotions. You don't know where you end and your mother begins. There's no "I" yet, no separation between self and everything else. This state—this primordial soup of experience before words carved the world into pieces—fascinated Julia Kristeva so much that she built an entire philosophy around it.

Kristeva arrived in Paris from Bulgaria in December 1965, a twenty-four-year-old with a research fellowship and ideas that would reshape how we think about language, identity, and the hidden forces that lurk beneath our carefully constructed selves. Within four years, she published her first book and became a central figure in the intellectual explosion that was structuralist and poststructuralist thought.

But here's what makes Kristeva unusual: she wasn't content to stay in one lane. She's a philosopher, a literary critic, a practicing psychoanalyst, a feminist theorist, and a novelist. She has taught at Columbia University and remains a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. She has written more than thirty books, been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, and won the Holberg International Memorial Prize—sometimes called the Nobel Prize for the humanities.

Her work asks a simple question that turns out to be anything but simple: What happens when we learn to speak?

The Two Layers of Meaning

Kristeva's most influential idea divides the way we make meaning into two parts: the symbolic and the semiotic. But be careful here—her "semiotic" isn't the same as semiotics, the academic discipline founded by Ferdinand de Saussure that studies signs and symbols. Kristeva is pointing at something far more primal.

Think of the semiotic as the layer of language that exists before meaning in the conventional sense. It's rhythm. It's tone. It's the music of speech rather than its dictionary definitions. When a poet chooses words not just for what they mean but for how they sound together, when a baby babbles in patterns that seem almost like communication but aren't quite, when you find yourself moved by the cadence of a sentence even before you've processed its content—that's the semiotic at work.

This layer connects to our earliest experiences. Before a child can distinguish between itself and its mother, before it enters what psychoanalysts call the mirror stage and realizes "that's me in the reflection, separate from everyone else," there's a kind of consciousness that's all feeling and no structure. Kristeva calls this the chora, borrowing a term from Plato that roughly means a nurturing, maternal space. It's not a physical place but rather a state of being—undifferentiated, rhythmic, driven by what Freud would have called instincts or drives.

The symbolic, by contrast, is the world of rules, grammar, clear definitions, and social meaning. It's the realm we enter when we learn to speak. Language forces us to separate from that primordial merger with the mother's body. To say "I" is to declare yourself distinct from everything that is "not-I." The symbolic is associated with law, structure, the father figure in Freudian terms, and the entire apparatus of culture that allows human beings to communicate and build societies.

The Subject In Process

Here's where Kristeva departs from earlier thinkers. Traditional structuralism—the intellectual movement that dominated French thought in the mid-twentieth century—tended to treat the self as something that gets constructed once and then stays fixed. You enter language, you become a subject, end of story.

Kristeva says no. The subject is always "in process" or "on trial" (she uses the French phrase "en procès," which conveniently means both). We never fully leave the semiotic behind. Even as adults navigating the symbolic world of meaning and law, we're constantly pulled back toward those preverbal rhythms and emotions. The semiotic keeps erupting through the cracks in our ordered symbolic existence.

Poetry does this. Music does this. The slippage of meaning in puns and jokes does this. And certain psychological states—particularly depression, which Kristeva explored in her 1989 book Black Sun—do this in more troubling ways.

This view preserves what's valuable in psychoanalysis while updating it for a poststructuralist world. Kristeva trained as a psychoanalyst and earned her degree in 1979. She takes seriously the idea that our conscious, speaking selves are built on top of unconscious processes we never fully control. But she rejects the notion that these processes follow fixed, universal structures. The drama is ongoing, never resolved.

Abjection: The Horror of the Mother's Body

To become a self, Kristeva argues, a child must reject the mother. Not the mother as a person, but the mother's body as a site of undifferentiation—that state where the boundary between self and other doesn't exist. This rejection is what Kristeva calls abjection.

The abject isn't simply an object we find disgusting. It's something that threatens the very boundary between subject and object, between self and world. Corpses are abject because they remind us of what we will become. Bodily fluids that cross the boundary of the skin—blood, vomit, excrement—provoke abjection. Open wounds. Decay. The maternal body itself, because it held us before we were separate beings.

This explains, Kristeva suggests, some of the strange power of horror in culture. Why are audiences drawn to slasher films that degrade women's bodies? Perhaps because these films allow viewers to safely reenact the process of abjection—vicariously expelling and destroying the maternal figure that threatens our sense of having a separate identity. We're both drawn to the abject and repulsed by it because some part of us longs to return to that undifferentiated state, even as we fear the loss of self it would entail.

The cultural critic Barbara Creed extended this analysis in her 1993 work on "the monstrous-feminine" in film, arguing that horror movies tap into deep anxieties about the maternal body as a site of primal terror and fascination.

Women and Melancholy

Kristeva's analysis of the semiotic and the symbolic has particular implications for women. If girls identify more closely with their mothers than boys do—and much psychoanalytic theory suggests they do—then the process of separation and abjection may be different for them.

Boys, in this framework, more fully reject the maternal and enter the symbolic realm of the father, law, and language. Girls may retain a stronger connection to the semiotic, to that preverbal world of rhythm and feeling. This isn't inherently bad—it may give women privileged access to certain kinds of creativity and emotional depth. But it also creates vulnerability.

In Black Sun, Kristeva proposes that depression—which she distinguishes from ordinary sadness—may result from an impossible relationship to the mother figure. The melancholic person is stuck in a kind of mourning for the lost maternal body that can never be properly mourned because it was never fully given up. Women, because of their continued identification with the mother, may be particularly susceptible to this melancholic structure.

This is not to say that depression is uniquely female, but rather that the gendered dynamics of early development create different psychological landscapes for men and women.

A Controversial Feminist

Kristeva's relationship with feminism has been complicated. She's often grouped with Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray as a major figure in French feminism. She founded the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee. Her work has profoundly influenced feminist literary studies, particularly in the English-speaking world.

Yet she has also rejected certain strands of feminism. In her 1979 essay "Women's Time," she identified three phases of feminist thinking. The first demanded equal access to the symbolic order—votes, rights, professional opportunities. The second celebrated feminine difference and sought to create a separate women's culture. Kristeva criticized both of these approaches and called for a third possibility: the deconstruction of the very opposition between masculine and feminine.

This position has made her controversial in feminist circles, particularly in France. Some read her as rejecting feminism altogether. She has pushed back against this interpretation, arguing that her critique targets identity politics more broadly—the assertion of collective identities (whether based on gender, ethnicity, or religion) above individual complexity. In her view, this kind of group identity thinking is ultimately totalitarian, even when it comes from oppressed groups.

American feminist academics in the identity politics tradition, she has suggested, misunderstood her work by reading it through a framework she was actually trying to dismantle.

About Chinese Women and Its Critics

Not all of Kristeva's intellectual adventures have aged well. In 1974, she traveled to China as part of a delegation from the French intellectual journal Tel Quel, the influential avant-garde publication founded by her husband, the novelist Philippe Sollers. (They married on August 2, 1967, and she has occasionally published under her married name, Julia Joyaux.) The trip resulted in her 1977 book About Chinese Women.

Critics have been harsh. The postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak argued that despite Kristeva's critique of Enlightenment universalism, her book reproduces exactly the kind of sweeping, uninformed generalizations about non-Western cultures that characterized eighteenth-century European thought. Kristeva writes about two thousand years of Chinese civilization, Spivak notes, in a "brief, expansive, often completely ungrounded way."

Similar criticisms have been leveled at Kristeva's remarks about the Muslim world, which critics like Ian Almond find dismissive and unsophisticated. She has opposed what she calls "Islamic societies" to "democracies where life is still fairly pleasant," apparently unaware of the complex debates among Muslim women theorists and collapsing diverse cultures into a single monolithic threat.

These critiques point to a genuine limitation: Kristeva's brilliant analyses of Western subjectivity don't always translate when she ventures beyond that context.

The Mathematics Problem

A different kind of criticism came from an unexpected direction. In 1997, the physicist Alan Sokal—famous for his hoax that exposed the credulous acceptance of fashionable nonsense by humanities journals—co-authored Fashionable Nonsense (published in French as Impostures intellectuelles) with physicist Jean Bricmont. The book devoted a chapter to Kristeva's use of mathematics in her early work.

Their argument was simple: Kristeva invokes mathematical concepts in her linguistic and literary analyses, but she never demonstrates that these concepts are actually relevant to what she's studying. Mathematical terms appear as metaphors or decoration rather than genuine tools of analysis. The mathematics adds an air of scientific rigor, Sokal and Bricmont suggest, without delivering any actual explanatory power.

This criticism stung, and it remains a point of contention. Defenders argue that Kristeva was using mathematical language metaphorically, which is legitimate in humanities scholarship. Critics counter that the metaphors are so inexact as to be misleading, and that importing scientific-sounding terminology without scientific precision is intellectual bad faith.

Agent Sabina?

In 2018, a bombshell dropped. Bulgaria's state Dossier Commission—the body responsible for examining the archives of the former communist secret police—announced that Kristeva had been an agent for the Committee for State Security under the code name "Sabina." According to the documents, she was supposedly recruited in June 1971.

Kristeva vigorously denied the charges, calling them "grotesque and false." The Commission released its entire file online.

But the story was more complicated than the initial headlines suggested. Under the People's Republic of Bulgaria, any citizen who wanted to travel abroad needed an exit visa approved by the Ministry of Interior. The process was deliberately difficult because anyone who reached the West might claim political asylum. Kristeva left Bulgaria in 1965, and the files indicate that Bulgarian intelligence officers cornered her in Paris afterward, pointing out that she still had vulnerable family members back home.

The British journalist and historian Neal Ascherson reviewed the actual contents of the file and came to a deflating conclusion: "the recent fuss about Julia Kristeva boils down to nothing much." She agreed to regular meetings over many years, he reported, "in the course of which she seems to have told her handlers nothing more than gossip about Aragon, Bataille & Co. from the Left Bank cafés—stuff they could have read in Le Canard enchaîné." The intelligence value of her reports was "almost zero." The Bulgarian security men, Ascherson suggested, probably knew they were being played, but it looked good to have an international celebrity on their books.

Whether this makes Kristeva a victim of Cold War coercion, a compromised figure who should have resisted, or something in between remains a matter of debate.

The Novels

Later in her career, Kristeva turned to fiction. Her novels—including The Old Man and the Wolves, Murder in Byzantium, and Possessions—are strange hybrids. They have the surface structure of detective stories, with narrative suspense and mystery. But woven through the plots are the theoretical concerns that animated her academic work: identity, language, the unconscious, the semiotic bubbling up through the symbolic.

Her characters reveal themselves primarily through psychological devices, which gives the fiction a resemblance to the later novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky—all that tortured interiority, those minds in conversation with themselves. The books are allegorical but also autobiographical; one protagonist, a French journalist named Stephanie Delacour, reads as Kristeva's alter ego.

Murder in Byzantium engages with Orthodox Christianity and politics. Kristeva described it as "a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code"—presumably meaning it takes religion seriously as a domain of genuine mystery rather than treating it as a conspiracy to be debunked.

The Living Legacy

What do we make of Julia Kristeva now?

She's a thinker who insisted that language is never neutral, never merely a tool for communication. It's a force that constructs us as subjects while simultaneously revealing the cracks in that construction. Every time we speak, we're negotiating between the order of meaning and the chaos of the drives that predate meaning.

She's a theorist of boundaries—the border between self and other, between culture and the maternal body it expels, between the sayable and the unsayable. Her work on abjection has influenced fields from horror film criticism to disability studies to analyses of racism and xenophobia. If groups construct their identity by expelling some Other as abject, then understanding abjection helps us understand the mechanics of exclusion.

She's a controversial figure who has drawn fire from all directions: from scientists who find her mathematical borrowings meaningless, from feminists who find her insufficiently committed to the cause, from postcolonial theorists who find her Eurocentric, from those who cannot forgive even unwilling collaboration with a totalitarian state.

Roland Barthes, her mentor and champion, put it well: "Julia Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the last prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by." She subverts authority, he said—"the authority of monologic science, of filiation."

Whether you find her work illuminating or infuriating, it's hard to deny that Kristeva did something that few thinkers manage: she made the familiar strange. She took language—the medium we all swim in, the water we forget we're wet from—and forced us to see it as the alien, constructing, destabilizing force it actually is.

At eighty-three, she has spent six decades probing that question she started with: What happens when we learn to speak? Her answer, endlessly elaborated across those thirty-plus books: we gain a self and lose something else, something that keeps calling to us from the margins of meaning, the rhythms between words, the silences that structure speech. We become subjects, but subjects always in process, never quite finished, never quite at home in the symbolic order that made us possible.