Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought
Birgit Schippers
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0748640894
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book appraises the relationship between contemporary feminism and Julia Kristeva, a major figure in Continental thought. It addresses the conflicting range of feminist responses to Kristeva's key ideas and Kristeva's equally conflicting as well as ambiguous position vis-à-vis feminism.
Schippers argues that this complex relationship can only be understood by positioning Kristeva along the fissures and fault lines which run through feminism. By attending to feminism's internal debates and disputes, and addressing the philosophical commitments and attachments held by Kristeva's critics, the book clarifies the diverse Kristeva reception within feminism and illuminates how her ideas trouble contemporary feminist thought.
And despite Kristeva's fundamental ambiguity towards all matters feminist, Schippers makes a case for Kristeva's important contribution to a feminist project which is sympathetic towards her account of fluid subjectivity and her critique of identity politics. In doing so, the author advances the scholarly understanding of Kristeva and of contemporary feminist thought.
structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism, is particularly important to a feminist interpretation of her work, because it sheds a light on her relationship with structuralism (I return to this point later) and on the role of agency. Early on in Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva identifies two linguistic traditions, both highly influential during the 1960s, which, in her view, and notwithstanding substantial differences between them, share a series of problematic
elsewhere she suggests that it is the symbolic that precedes the semiotic, logically and chronologically, asserting ‘the logical and chronological priority of the symbolic in any organization of the semiotic’ (1983: 34). Kristeva’s apparent inconsistencies pose serious challenges for the critical exegesis of her work, and they contribute substantially to the contradictory and often negative reception of her writings within feminism; it becomes impossible to adjudicate between a ‘proper’ and
the inside, never remains apart, other, it inflames me at once, without a second’s respite. As if that was what I had given birth to and, not willing to part from me, insisted on coming back, dwelled in me permanently. One does not give birth in pain, one gives birth to pain. (1977a: 167) Yet, the child’s symbiotic relationship with the mother and the maternal body comes to an end; separation from the maternal body is necessary for the emergence of the subject. Key to understanding the idea of
of this aspect of Kristeva’s œuvre, 9 SCHIPPERS PRINT.indd 9 01/03/2011 16:29 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought and it has deservedly received much scholarly attention.10 Of interest to my discussion is a further point: already in her early writings on language, language acquisition and semiotics (or semanalysis, as she calls it), Kristeva subscribes to a Freudian framework that grows in importance as her writings develop. The full import of Kristeva’s debt to psychoanalysis, as far as her
reiterate that this freedom is not primarily understood in a political sense; in fact, despite the Arendtian influence on her work, Kristeva tends to posit this form of freedom as antithetical to politics. For Arendt, as is well known, freedom becomes the raison d’être of politics (1977: 145), where ‘politics’ and ‘freedom’ can be used interchangeably.8 Unlike Arendt, Kristeva locates freedom in the realm of the intimate. What, though, are we to make of this association between freedom, revolt