27 Facts About Julia Kristeva

1.

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s.

2.

Julia Kristeva has taught at Columbia University, and is a professor emerita at Universite Paris Cite.

3.

Julia Kristeva is the founder of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.

4.

Julia Kristeva became acquainted with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin at this time in Bulgaria.

5.

Julia Kristeva went on to study at the University of Sofia, and while a postgraduate there obtained a research fellowship that enabled her to move to France in December 1965, when she was 24.

6.

Julia Kristeva continued her education at several French universities, studying under Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes, among other scholars.

7.

Julia Kristeva taught at Columbia University in the early 1970s, and remains a Visiting Professor.

8.

Julia Kristeva has published under the married name Julia Joyaux.

9.

Julia Kristeva trained in psychoanalysis, and earned her degree in 1979.

10.

However, Julia Kristeva rejects any understanding of the subject in a structuralist sense; instead, she favors a subject always "in process" or "on trial".

11.

Julia Kristeva travelled to China in the 1970s and later wrote About Chinese Women.

12.

In Desire in Language, Julia Kristeva describes the symbolic as the space in which the development of language allows the child to become a "speaking subject," and to develop a sense of identity separate from the mother.

13.

Julia Kristeva departs from Lacan in the idea that even after entering the symbolic, the subject continues to oscillate between the semiotic and the symbolic.

14.

Julia Kristeva is known for her adoption of Plato's idea of the chora, meaning "a nourishing maternal space".

15.

Julia Kristeva is noted for her work on the concept of intertextuality.

16.

Julia Kristeva argues that anthropology and psychology, or the connection between the social and the subject, do not represent each other, but rather follow the same logic: the survival of the group and the subject.

17.

Julia Kristeva has been regarded as a key proponent of French feminism together with Simone de Beauvoir, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigaray.

18.

Julia Kristeva has had a remarkable influence on feminism and feminist literary studies in the US and the UK, as well as on readings into contemporary art although her relation to feminist circles and movements in France has been quite controversial.

19.

Julia Kristeva made a famous disambiguation of three types of feminism in "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul ; while rejecting the first two types, including that of Beauvoir, her stands are sometimes considered rejecting feminism altogether.

20.

Julia Kristeva argues her writings have been misunderstood by American feminist academics.

21.

Julia Kristeva wrote a number of novels that resemble detective stories.

22.

Julia Kristeva's characters reveal themselves mainly through psychological devices, making her type of fiction mostly resemble the later work of Dostoevsky.

23.

Julia Kristeva won the 2006 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.

24.

Julia Kristeva has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, and the Vaclav Havel Prize.

25.

Julia Kristeva cites Gayatri Spivak's conclusion that Kristeva's book About Chinese Women "belongs to that very eighteenth century [that] Kristeva scorns" after pinpointing "the brief, expansive, often completely ungrounded way in which she writes about two thousand years of a culture she is unfamiliar with".

26.

Almond notes the absence of sophistication in Julia Kristeva's remarks concerning the Muslim world and the dismissive terminology she uses to describe its culture and believers.

27.

In 2018, Bulgaria's state Dossier Commission announced that Julia Kristeva had been an agent for the Committee for State Security under the code name "Sabina".