A collection of twenty-two interviews and one personal essay, Julia Kristeva Interviews presents an intimate and accessible portrait of one of France's most important critical thinkers and intellectual personalities.
This rich collection presents an intimate, accessible portrait of one of Europe's most important intellectuals. Spanning twenty years of her remarkable career, Julia Kristeva Interviews includes twenty-three interviews- many appearing here for the first time in English and one conducted expressly for this volume. These provocative discussions with key figures in contemporary arts and letters touch upon topics as diverse as the American literary academy, the novels of Celine and Proust, neuro-science, and the American Left.
Here is Kristeva on her own terms, candidly reflecting upon life and work. She is able to elucidate the complexities of her own theories, clarifying such difficult ideas as abjection, intertextuality, the semiotic and the symbolic, and the effect of aesthetic revolution on social change. The interviews consider Kristeva's intellectual roots including Bakhtin and the Tel Quel group, her often-questioned connections to feminism, her views on socialism in its Eastern and Western incarnations, her concept of avant-garde practice, and her own assessment of her recent sociopolitical works and novels.
Here too are revealing autobiographical insights: Kristeva's childhood memories of Bulgaria's ancient cathedrals and beautiful Black Sea coast, accounts of her experiences as foreigner in paris and as participant in the Parisian intellectual scene, recollections of her studies under Barthes and Levi-Strauss, and reflections on her visits to the United States. Eighteen photographs from Kristeva's own collection lend immediacy to her vivid personal history.
For those not yet familiar with her work, Julia Kristeva Interviews provides a superb introduction to an extraordinarily influential body of writings. For specialists in cultural criticism, literaturem psychoanalysis, philosophy, linguistics, and women's studies, the collection is an unparalleled resource for the further study of this brilliant thinker's work.
'It is perhaps edifying to take Kristeva's work as a whole, in order that we may best consider her complex balances of interdisciplinary concerns. In his recent collection of Kristeva's interviews, Ross Mitchell Guberman gives us the opportunity to do just that, in a space that affords us, additionally, a fresh perspective on this theorist's personal and intellectual developments.' - Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JULIA KRISTEVA is a practicing psychoanalyst and Professor at the Universite de Paris VII. Her many acclaimed books include Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, New Maladies of the Soul, Strangers to Ourselves, and Desire in Language, all published in English by Columbia University Press.
Ross Mitchell Guberman is the translator of Kristeva's New Maladies of the Soul.
