Julia Kristeva b. 1941

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, and psychoanalyst whose work has shaped semiotics, feminist theory, and contemporary continental philosophy. Revolution in Poetic Language introduced her distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic dimensions of language, in which a pre-Oedipal rhythmic and bodily semiotic continually disturbs the symbolic order of meaning. Powers of Horror developed her influential theory of abjection, while Strangers to Ourselves and her trilogy on female genius extended her concerns to the status of foreigners, exile, and the lives of Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Colette.

Julia Kristeva was born at Sliven in Bulgaria in June 1941, the daughter of a hospital accountant and a biologist. She studied literature, French, and linguistics at the University of Sofia, came to Paris on a doctoral fellowship in late 1965, and joined the circle of the journal Tel Quel around Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers (whom she married in 1967), Gérard Genette, and Tzvetan Todorov. She took her doctorate at Paris VII in 1973, trained as a Lacanian psychoanalyst and has practised since the late 1970s, and held the chair of linguistics at Paris VII Diderot from 1979 with concurrent professorships at Columbia and at the European Graduate School.

Her major works are Sēmeiōtikē (1969), Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), Polylogue (1977), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), Tales of Love (1983), Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987), Strangers to Ourselves (1988), the trilogy Female Genius on Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Colette (1999–2002), and the late This Incredible Need to Believe (2007).

Kristeva combined Russian formalism with Lacanian psychoanalysis and a phenomenology of the body to produce a series of widely influential concepts: the semiotic chōra and the symbolic order, intertextuality, the abject as that which the subject must expel to exist as itself, and the cosmopolitan ethics of 'foreigners to ourselves'. She has also written novels and a substantial body of psychoanalytic essays.