Alan Riding from The New York Times Service
In France, Julia Kristeva is best known as the wife of Philippe Sollers, a high-profile French novelist. In the United States, by contrast, it is Kristeva who has long enjoyed both recognition and notoriety, admired by many for her teachings and writings on linguistics, sexuality and psychoanalysis, criticized by others for stimulating the rise of multiculturalism.
Of course, she is hardly the first French thinker to wield more influence over students and scholars in the United States than in France: This was also true of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In fact, it was the fate of Kristeva and those three unlikely subversives to be accused of planting the seeds of political correctness in American colleges long before the concept was re-exported back to France to be mocked as a typically American aberration. Now, however, at age 60, Kristeva is bringing a new twist to this bizarre trans-Atlantic to-and-fro. She feels she has been misunderstood in the United States by the very circles that have embraced her as an icon of feminism and multiculturalism. `Many of our American colleagues have taken what we proposed and have simplified it, caricatured it and made it politically correct,` she said. `I can no longer recognize myself.`
The kernel of her ideas, distilled through literary criticism and psychoanalysis, was that it was not enough simply to dissect the structure of language in order to find its hidden meaning. Language should also be viewed through the prisms of history and of individual psychic and sexual experiences. Known as poststructuralism, this approach in turn enabled specific social groups to trace the source of their oppression to the very language they used. Today, however, Kristeva believes that the group identity adopted by some feminist, gay and ethnic leaders as a pedestal for their revindications is outdated and even, in her word, `totalitarian.` This is not an overnight judgment. She has been developing these ideas since the early 1990s, with particular focus on women. `What interests me is not all women, but each woman in her intimacy,` the Bulgarian-born writer said, in an interview in her Left Bank apartment. Kristeva has been writing a trilogy that explores the specificity of what she calls `the female genius` through the lives, thought and practice of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and the writer Colette.
`Hannah Arendt` will be published by Columbia University Press in translation in the United States next month. `Melanie Klein,` already available in French, will be out in English next year, while Kristeva is now completing `Colette.` Ever prolific, she has also just published an English translation of `The Feminine and the Sacred,` a lively exchange of letters with Catherine Clement, an expatriate French essayist and novelist. In her trilogy, Kristeva`s approach is not biographical. Rather, what interests her is the intellectual journey of her subjects, above all since each took a different path: Arendt `finding her happiness,` as Kristeva puts it, through thinking, Klein doing so through healing, and Colette through writing. `I think there are three things worth doing in the world,` Kristeva said, `to think, to heal and to write.` By no coincidence, these have also served as signposts to Kristeva`s own life. When she first came to France from Bulgaria as a student in 1966, she was drawn into a world of thought when she enrolled in courses given by the French critic and semiotician Roland Barthes. Later, as she advanced on her own work in linguistics, she formed part of a group of intellectuals, including Sollers, linked to the review Tel Quel. Her publications were soon noticed in the United States, and by the early 1970s, she had begun teaching at Columbia University, where to this day she remains a visiting professor, returning to New York for a semester, on average, every three years. A trip to China with the Tel Quel group in 1974, however, proved a watershed. It resulted in her book `About Chinese Women,` but more significantly it led her to break with the militant French feminist group that had paid her way.
Her response was to turn away from politics and seek to enrich her linguistic research through psychoanalysis. `I understood that my study of everyday language and of the language of the literary avant-garde - Mallarme, Lautreamont, Bataille, Artaud - could not advance without a profound knowledge of the psychic life based on sexuality,` she explained. To achieve such a knowledge meant undergoing Freudian psychoanalysis herself.
Today, between teaching at Paris University, researching and writing, Kristeva receives patients in her home four afternoons a week. The concession to her continuing research, she admitted, is that she accepts only patients who interest her. Her best-known books of criticism and psychoanalysis are probably `Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature,` `Strangers to Ourselves,` `New Maladies of the Soul,` `Black Sun,` `Tales of Love` and `The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt,` all published by Columbia University Press.
With her new trilogy, she has returned to the world of ideas and, specifically, to what she calls Arendt`s `joy of living through thinking.` `In a century of horror and persecution, Hannah Arendt found happiness in thought, not in love,` Kristeva said. Kristeva`s interest in the sacred seems linked to her perception that modern Western society is experiencing a form of psychic implosion. `The Feminine and the Sacred` ranges widely over the place of women in monotheistic, traditional and animistic religions, but Kristeva also points to the growth of fundamentalism and esotericism as a sign of our times. In probing today`s world, she does not disguise her sense of alarm. `People cannot express what happens to them,` she said. `Why? Because in the past, there was the family, the grandmother, the church. But now these spaces of communication have vanished.` Indeed, for this very reason, Kristeva is one of the few French intellectuals to applaud the phenomenal success of France`s first television reality show, `Loft Story,` based on `Big Brother,` which hypnotized millions of French viewers this spring. `It offered a solution,` she said. `It was a televised and manipulated representation of what people cannot express, but it responded to people`s needs. Parents wondered, `Why do my kids need this?` It`s because at home they cannot express what they feel about life, about sex, about their friends. There is no conversation to absorb the psychic malaise.`
As a psychoanalyst, of course, Kristeva can only address individual needs, but that is where she sees the drama of contemporary society unfolding. `What is important is not to affirm the power and identity of groups, but to increase the freedom of individuals,` she insisted. `To assume a group identity is a dead end. And if some people have interpreted French thinking to mean they should, they are totally wrong.`
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