Julia Kristeva

Mixing fiction, history, psychoanalysis, and personal fantasy, Teresa, My Love turns a past world into a modern marvel, following Sylvia Leclercq, a French psychoanalyst, academic, and incurable insomniac, as she falls for the sixteenth-century Saint Teresa of Avila and becomes consumed with charting her life. Traveling to Spain, Leclercq, Julia Kristeva's probing alter ego, visits the sites and embodiments of...

This book is concerned with the notion of the stranger—the foreigner, outsider, or alien in a country and society not their own—as well as the notion of strangeness within the self, a person's deep sense of being, as distinct from outside appearance and their conscious idea of self. Strangers to Ourselves begins with the personal and moves outward by examining...

Growing up in Bulgaria, Julia Kristeva was warned by her father not to read Dostoyevsky. “Of course, and as usual,” she recalls, “I disobeyed paternal orders and plunged into Dosto. Dazzled, overwhelmed, engulfed.” Kristeva would go on to become one of the most important figures in European intellectual life—and she would return over and over again to Dostoyevsky, still haunted...

Julia Kristeva presents a thoroughly original and compelling reading of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, first delivered at the 1992 T.S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Canterbury. Kristeva's first essay, "Proust and Time Embodied," takes a broadly psychoanalytical, linguistically sensitive approach to Proust's exploration of time and the operation of memory. Next, in "In Search of Madeline," she delves into Proust's...

In this absorbing, suspenseful novel, Julia Kristeva combines social satire, medieval history, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and autobiography within a gruesome murder mystery. Murder in Byzantium deftly moves from eleventh-century Europe, wracked by the turbulence of the First Crusade, to the sun-dappled, cultural wasteland of present-day Santa Varvara, threatened by religious cults, gangs, and a serial killer on the loose. This...

Julia Kristeva's dazzling fictional debut is an intellectual adventure, full of vitality, sensuousness, and sustained lyricism. Reminiscent of The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir's 1954 masterpiece, The Samurai brilliantly reconstructs a pivotal era of postwar French history—Paris in the late 1960s—and at the same time records the political disillusionment and ferment of a generation. In a brisk narrative spanning three continents,...

Desire in Language traces the path of an investigation, extending over a period of ten years, into the semiotics of literature and the arts. But the essays of Julia Kristeva in this volume, though they often deal with literature and art, do not amount to either "literary criticism" or "art criticism." Their concern, writes Kristeva, "remains intratheoretical: they are based...

In this wide-ranging introduction, Julia Kristeva presents the evolution and emergence of linguistics. For Kristeva, the object of linguistic investigation is not "What is language?" but rather "How can language be thought?" In a series of carefully documented analyses, she examines the links between philosophical speculation and linguistic practice. She traces postmodern linguistic theory back to its roots, using sources...

In the Palace of Versailles, there is a fabulous golden clock, made for Louis XV by the king's engineer, Claude-Siméon Passemant. The astronomical clock shows the phases of the moon and the movements of the planets, and it will tell time—hours, minutes, seconds, and even sixtieths of seconds—until the year 9999. Passemant's clock brings the nature of time into sharp...

Underlying Julia Kristeva's Nations Without Nationalism is the idea that otherness-whether it be ethnic, religious, social, or political-needs to be understood and accepted in order to guarantee social harmony. This book is an impassioned plea for tolerance and for commonality, aimed at a world brimming over with racism and xenophobia. Responding to the rise of neo-Nazi groups in Germany and...

This sequel to Julia Kristeva's celebrated allegory The Old Man and the Wolves returns to the corrupt seaside resort of a mythical town, where the boundaries between East and West, civilization and barbarism, and good and evil are erased. Part mystery, part meditation, this engrossing tale features the return of Parisian amateur detective and newspaper reporter Stephanie Delacour (Kristeva's alter...

Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyses the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva delves into the psychological and cultural dimensions of...

In Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva explicates her foundational distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic and explores their interrelationships. Linking the psychosomatic to the literary and the literary to a larger political horizon, she questions the premises of linguistic, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and literary theories.

Part detective story, part fable, this novel-narrated by a French journalist-takes the reader to a mythical postindustrial city where the boundaries between East and West, civilization and barbarianism have been erased. Wolves invade the seaside resort town of Santa Varvara in Eastern Europe, killing thousands of people, but no one will talk of it except a Latin professor known as...

In Black Sun, Julia Kristeva addresses the subject of melancholia, examining this phenomenon in the context of art, literature, philosophy, the history of religion and culture, and psychoanalysis. She describes the depressive as one who perceives the sense of self as a crucial pursuit and a nearly unattainable goal and explains how the love of a lost identity of attachment...

Julia Kristeva has been both attracted and repelled by Dostoyevsky since her youth. In this extraordinary book, by turns poetic and intensely personal, she brings her unique critical sensibility to bear on the tormented and visionary Russian author. Kristeva ranges widely across Dostoyevsky's novels and his journalism, plunging deep into the great works—and many of the smaller ones—to investigate her...

This book is concerned with the notion of the "stranger"—the foreigner, outsider, or alien in a country and society not their own—as well as the notion of strangeness within the self, a person's deep sense of being, as distinct from outside appearance and their conscious idea of self. Kristeva begins with the personal and moves outward by examining world literature...

New Maladies of the Soul poses a troubling question about the human subject in the West today: Is the psychic space that we have traditionally known disappearing? "These days, who still has a soul?" asks Julia Kristeva in this psychoanalytic exploration. Drawing on her many years of experience as a practising psychoanalyst, Kristeva reveals to readers a new kind of...

We are still coming to terms with the controversial figure of Hannah Arendt. Interlacing her life and work, this book is an elegant, sophisticated biography brimming with historical and philosophical insight. Focusing on the theme of female genius, Julia Kristeva emphasizes three features of the philosopher's work. First, by exploring Arendt's critique of Saint Augustine and her biographical essay on...

This intellectual biography of Colette—the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy on female genius—represents a major breakthrough in understanding one of the great creative minds of the twentieth century. Colette (1873–1954) was a prolific novelist celebrated for exploring sexual pleasure and inventing a language for it at a time when women writers were hesitant to address the topic. Female sexuality...

Growing up in Bulgaria, Julia Kristeva was warned by her father not to read Dostoyevsky. "Of course, and as usual," she recalls, "I disobeyed paternal orders and plunged into Dosto. Dazzled, overwhelmed, engulfed." Kristeva would go on to become one of the most important figures in European intellectual life—and she would return over and over again to Dostoyevsky, still haunted...