Imaginary interview with Julia Kristeva
by Charactorium · Julia Kristeva (1941 — ?) · Philosophy · Literature · 5 min read
Late afternoon in a Haussmann-style apartment in the 5th arrondissement, between bookshelves overflowing with volumes in four languages. Julia Kristeva receives us after a day shared between writing and the couch, a cold black coffee within reach. The conversation quickly slides from linguistics to exile, as if the one cannot go without the other.
—How does one end up in Paris at twenty-four, barely speaking the language of the country?
It was December 1965. I arrived from Sliven with a French government scholarship in my pocket and school French, learned with the Dominican sisters in Bulgaria. Five dollars on me, I've been told since, and a suitcase of Russian books. Very quickly, the doors of Roland Barthes' seminar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, rue de Tournon, were opened to me. Imagine the scene: this young woman from the East who stumbled over words and yet burned to say something that these gentlemen so sure of their language had not yet formulated. The French I did not possess, I inhabited like a stranger inhabits a city: by breaking in, by desire. It is perhaps there, in that gap, that everything began.
The French I did not possess, I inhabited like a stranger inhabits a city.
—What did Barthes' seminar represent for you in the intellectual Paris of the time?
Barthes listened. That's rare, a master who listens. In that small lecture hall at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, one did not recite knowledge; one made it aloud, together. I arrived weighed down by Saussure and Hjelmslev — my copies of the Course in General Linguistics were blackened with annotations — but I felt that structuralism, rigorous as it was, left the body and desire at the door. Barthes let me enter with my Slavs in my luggage. Around us, it was Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Deux Magots, the publishers, that effervescence where you ran into Sartre at the corner of a table. For a twenty-four-year-old exile, it was less a setting than an echo chamber where my intuitions finally found interlocutors.
That's rare, a master who listens.
—Do you remember the moment when the word "intertextuality" imposed itself on you?
1966, 1967. I was reading Mikhail Bakhtin in the original, in Russian, a thinker then almost entirely unknown in France. He spoke of dialogism: the idea that a person's speech is always full of the speech of others. It struck me like lightning. I understood that no text is an island, that it is a tissue of quotations, an absorption of prior writings. I forged that word, intertextuality, in an article in the journal Tel Quel devoted to Bakhtin. I wrote it in Séméiôtiké: the poetic word is "a dialogue of several writings: of the writer, the addressee, the current or earlier cultural context." What I could not foresee is that one day it would be taught to high school students as an obvious fact.
I understood that no text is an island.
—Why did your first major book, Séméiôtiké, carry this project of a "sémanalyse"?
Because semiology, as it was practiced, dissected signs like one dismantles a clock, forgetting that in language there is drive, rhythm, body. I wanted to cross the science of signs with the Freudian discovery. Séméiôtiké, in 1969, was that: a reading of the processes by which a text produces meaning and, in the same gesture, produces a subject. Language is not a factor, a post office that would deliver a pre-packaged content — it fabricates the one who speaks at the same time as what is said. The Greek title was found pedantic, the writing arduous. Perhaps. But I refused to simplify an object that, itself, was not.
—How do the theorist and the analyst who receives patients coexist in you?
The morning belongs to theory; I get up around six, a black coffee, two hours of writing before the world claims its due. In the afternoon, I sit behind the couch, and there it is no longer concepts, but voices, silences, bodies that suffer. I underwent Lacanian training because I sensed that literary theory alone ran on empty. Listening to depression, anxiety, a dream teaches you about language what no library gives. Black Sun, in 1987, was born as much from those afternoons as from my readings of Nerval or Duras. The couch is my second laboratory — more honest, often, than the first.
The couch is my second laboratory — more honest, often, than the first.
—What did this clinical experience allow you to think under the name of "abjection"?
Abjection is that violent movement of rejection that seizes us before what threatens the boundary of our identity: a corpse, blood, filth. In Powers of Horror, in 1980, I tried to articulate this experience that is neither entirely inside nor entirely outside. I wrote it thus: "Abjection is, in me, a rebellion of the person against what threatens it and which appears to come from an exorbitant outside or inside." This book, which I thought reserved for a few clinicians, ended up nourishing the visual arts, criticism, even reflections on gender. That is because the abject concerns us all: it outlines, in negative, the fragile membrane through which we stand upright as subjects.
The abject outlines, in negative, the fragile membrane through which we stand upright.
—In 1974, you left for Maoist China with the Tel Quel group. What were you looking for there?
We left four of us — Philippe Sollers, Roland Barthes, Marcelin Pleynet, and I — at the heart of the Cultural Revolution. Tel Quel, that journal where we wanted to think at the avant-garde of everything, had taken a fancy to Maoism as a promise: that writing and politics could together break the bourgeois order. I say it bluntly today: we lulled ourselves with illusions. I saw a country where the women I observed, so present, remained silent; I drew a small book from it. We traveled toward a utopia and brought back above all the measure of our naivety. Having come out of Bulgarian communism, I should have been more lucid than my companions — and it was precisely my native East that, little by little, sobered me up.
We traveled toward a utopia and brought back above all the measure of our naivety.
—What remains, in retrospect, of this adventure of the journal Tel Quel?
Tel Quel was an intellectual war machine and, like any avant-garde, it burned quickly. We published there what was most demanding about language — that is where intertextuality was born, where the semiotic chora found its first readers. But a journal is also passions, ruptures, successive renunciations: yesterday Maoism, tomorrow something else. What I keep from it is not the political line, always shifting, but the demand for form, that conviction that the way of writing engages a way of thinking. Our jargon was much mocked. I persist: better a difficult language that seeks than a clarity that lies about the complexity of the real.
Better a difficult language that seeks than a clarity that lies.
—In Strangers to Ourselves, you refuse to oppose "us" and "them." Why this conviction?
Because I naturalized French in 1981 without ever ceasing to be that Bulgarian who stumbles, occasionally, over a word. The stranger is not the one knocking at the border; he lodges within us, in our own unconscious. I wrote it thus in Strangers to Ourselves, in 1988: "The stranger is within us. And when we flee or fight the stranger, we fight our unconscious." This book appeared at a time when France was tearing itself apart over immigration. I did not want a sentimental plea, but a psychoanalysis of fear: if one recognizes the uncanny strangeness that inhabits us, one stops projecting it onto the neighbor. It was a nation open to its own otherness that I was calling for.
The stranger is not the one knocking at the border; he lodges within us.
—This condition of exile from the communist East will have followed you all your life. How do you carry it?
One never quite leaves the country where one learned to be afraid. I grew up in communist Bulgaria, under a regime that watched souls as much as borders, and I made my life as a free subject in Paris. This division, I carry it even in my kitchen — the thick yogurt, the pickled vegetables of my childhood next to French cheese. One day, perhaps, archives will resurface to replay the trials of the Cold War and summon intellectuals to account for their shadows of that time. I believe that whoever has lived in two worlds is condemned to never be quite at home in either — and that it is from this discomfort, precisely, that thought is born.
One never quite leaves the country where one learned to be afraid.
This imaginary interview was generated by artificial intelligence from sources documented in Julia Kristeva's profile. It dramatises what the figure might have said based on what we know about them, but does not constitute attested historical testimony. For primary sources and factual documentation, refer to the full profile.