The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva

By Open Court

Julia Kristeva is well known for her influential contributions to an unusually wide variety of scholarly fields, including philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, biography, literary criticism, cultural criticism, feminism, and psychoanalysis

Kristeva is the author of over 30 books

Outside of academia, Kristeva is known also as a novelist who authored The Old Man and the Wolves (English translation,1994), Murder in Byzantium (English translation, 2006), Possessions (English translation, 1998), and The Enchanted Clock (English translation, 2018)

Kristeva is still an active scholar and sought-after speaker: she gave a key address in London in July 2019 at the conference held by the International Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytical Studies Organization and another in Oslo in October 2018 at the Cultural Crossings of Care Conference

This volume contains the first and only translation of Kristeva's acclaimed autobiography, originally published in French in 2016

This volume also contains original replies to the critical and expository essays that were solicited specifically for this book

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Court
• Release date: Aug 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812694932

Book preview

THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS

THE PHILOSOPHY OF

JULIA KRISTEVA

THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS

PAUL ARTHUR SCHILPP, FOUNDER AND EDITOR 1939–1981

LEWIS EDWIN HAHN, EDITOR 1981–2001

RANDALL E. AUXIER, EDITOR 2001–2013

DOUGLAS R. ANDERSON, EDITOR 2013–2015

SARA G. BEARDSWORTH, EDITOR 2015–present

Paul Arthur Schilpp, Editor

THE PHILOSOPHY OF JOHN DEWEY (1939, 1971, 1989)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF GEORGE SANTAYANA (1940, 1951)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD (1941, 1951)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF G. E. MOORE (1942, 1971)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BERTRAND RUSSELL (1944, 1971)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ERNST CASSIRER (1949)

ALBERT EINSTEIN: PHILOSOPHER-SCIENTIST (1949, 1970)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SARVEPALLI RADHAKRISHNAN (1952)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF KARL JASPERS (1957; AUG. ED., 1981)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF C. D. BROAD (1959)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RUDOLF CARNAP (1963)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF C. I. LEWIS (1968)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF KARL POPPER (1974)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BRAND BLANSHARD (1980)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1981)

Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, Editors

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARTIN BUBER (1967)

Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn, Editors

THE PHILOSOPHY OF GABRIEL MARCEL (1984)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF W. V. QUINE (1986, AUG. ED., 1998)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF GEORG HENRIK VON WRIGHT (1989)

Lewis Edwin Hahn, Editor

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CHARLES HARTSHORNE (1991)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF A. J. AYER (1992)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF PAUL RICOEUR (1995)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF PAUL WEISS (1995)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HANS-GEORG GADAMER (1997)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RODERICK M. CHISHOLM (1997)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF P. F. STRAWSON (1998)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DONALD DAVIDSON (1999)

Lewis Edwin Hahn, Randall E. Auxier, and Lucian W. Stone, Jr., Editors

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR (2001)

Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, Editors

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARJORIE GRENE (2002)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF JAAKKO HINTIKKA (2006)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MICHAEL DUMMETT (2007)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RICHARD RORTY (2010)

THE PHILOSOPHY OF ARTHUR C. DANTO (2013)

Randall E. Auxier, Douglas R. Anderson, and Lewis Edwin Hahn, Editors

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HILARY PUTNAM (2015)

Sara G. Beardsworth and Randall E. Auxier, Editors

THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBERTO ECO (2017)

Sara G. Beardsworth, Editor

THE PHILOSOPHY OF JULIA KRISTEVA (2020)

THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS VOLUME XXXVI

THE PHILOSOPHY OF

JULIA KRISTEVA

EDITED BY

SARA G. BEARDSWORTH

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY CARBONDALE

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS • OPEN COURT • ESTABLISHED 1887

To find out more about Open Court books, visit our website at

www.opencourtbooks.com.

Cover photo © John Foley

Frontispiece photo © Anne de Brunhoff

THE PHILOSOPHY OF JULIA KRISTEVA

Open Court Publishing Company is a division of Carus Publishing Company,

dba Cricket Media.

Copyright © 2020 by The Library of Living Philosophers

First printing 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Open Court Publishing Company, a division of Cricket Media, 70 East Lake Street, Suite 800, Chicago, Illinois 60601.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kristeva, Julia, 1941– | Beardsworth, Sara, editor.

Title: The philosophy of Julia Kristeva / edited by Sara G. Beardsworth, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

Description: Chicago, Illinois : Open Court, 2020. | Series: The library of living philosophers; volume xxxvi | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020009716 | ISBN 9780812694895 (cloth) | ISBN 9780812694932 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Kristeva, Julia, 1941-

Classification: LCC B2430.K7544 P45 2020 | DDC 194—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020009716

The Library of Living Philosophers is published under the sponsorship of Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this book, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

All photographs in Dear Julia by Anish Kapoor are © Anish Kapoor. All Rights Reserved, DACS, London/ ARS, NY 2019.

Their Look Pierces Our Shadows by Jean Vanier translates the title of his book with Julia Kristeva, and contains several passages from the book. Julia Kristeva and Jean Vanier, Leur regard perce nos ombres (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2011) © Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2011.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

TO

THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS

Since its founding in 1938 by Paul Arthur Schilpp, the Library of Living Philosophers has been devoted to critical analysis and discussion of some of the world’s greatest living philosophers. The format for the series provides for creating in each volume a dialogue between the critics and the great philosopher. The aim is not refutation or confrontation but rather fruitful joining of issues and improved understanding of the positions and issues involved. That is, the goal is not overcoming those who differ from us philosophically but interacting creatively with them.

The basic idea for the series, according to Professor Schilpp’s general introduction to the earlier volumes, came from the late F. C. S. Schiller’s essay Must Philosophers Disagree? While Schiller may have been overly optimistic about ending interminable controversies in this way, it seems clear that directing searching questions to great philosophers about what they really mean or how they might resolve or address difficulties in their philosophies can produce far greater clarity of understanding and more fruitful philosophizing than would otherwise exist.

To Paul Arthur Schilpp’s undying credit, he acted on this basic thought in launching the Library of Living Philosophers. The general plan for the volumes has sometimes been altered to fit circumstances, but in ways that have well served the mission of the series. The intellectual autobiographies, or, in a few cases, the biographies, shed a great deal of light on both how the philosophies of the great thinkers developed and the major philosophical movements and issues of their time; and many of our great philosophers seek to orient their outlook not merely to their contemporaries but also to what they find most important in earlier philosophers. The critical perspectives of our distinguished contributors have often stood on their own as landmark studies, widely cited and familiar not only to subsequent specialists, but frequently discussed in their own right as pieces of great philosophy. The bibliography helps to provide ready access to the featured scholar’s writings and thought.

There is no reason to alter our historical format or mission for the present century. We are pleased that the success of the Library of Living Philosophers has led to a wider appreciation of the need for dialogue of the type our format creates. We respect the efforts of other academic publishers to employ versions of our format to facilitate pluralistic, meaningful, sharp, constructive, and respectful exchange in philosophical ideas. We are fortunate to have such support from the Open Court Publishing Company, the Edward C. Hegeler Foundation, and the Board of Trustees, College of Liberal Arts, and the Department of Philosophy of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, as to permit us to carry out our purpose with a degree of deliberate thoroughness and comprehensiveness not available to other academic publishers, and we have rededicated ourselves to maintaining the highest standards in scholarship and accuracy anywhere to be found in academic publishing. In recognition of the permanent value that has been accorded our previous volumes, we are committed to keeping our volumes in print and available, and to maintaining our sense of the long-term importance of providing the most reliable source for scholarly analysis by the most distinguished voices of our day about the most important philosophical contributions of the greatest living thinkers.

The Library of Living Philosophers has never construed philosophy in a narrow and strictly academic sense. Past volumes have been dedicated both to the leading academic philosophers and to the most visible and influential public philosophers. We renew with each volume our historical orientation to the practice of philosophy as a quest for truth, beauty, and the best life, and we affirm that this quest is a public activity and its results a public possession, both for the present generation and in the future. We seek, with the sober judgment of our Advisory Board, to bring forth volumes on the thought of figures whose ideas have made a genuine difference to the lives of people everywhere. Ideas truly do have consequences, and many of the ideas that have had the broadest impact were indeed best articulated by the figures to whom we have dedicated past volumes. The selfless work of Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn in realizing this mission stands among the most important scholarly contributions to twentieth-century philosophy. Their judgment regarding how best to pursue the purposes of the Library of Living Philosophers has found constant and continuous confirmation in the reception and ongoing importance accorded this series. Let us continue in their footsteps as well as we may in the important task of continuing the series in light of philosophical developments in the twenty-first century.

SARA G. BEARDSWORTH

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY CARBONDALE

FOUNDER’S GENERAL INTRODUCTION*

TO

THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS

According to the late F. C. S. Schiller, the greatest obstacle to fruitful discussion in philosophy is the curious etiquette which apparently taboos the asking of questions about a philosopher’s meaning while he is alive. The interminable controversies which fill the histories of philosophy, he goes on to say, could have been ended at once by asking the living philosophers a few searching questions.

The confident optimism of this last remark undoubtedly goes too far. Living thinkers have often been asked a few searching questions, but their answers have not stopped interminable controversies about their real meaning. It is nonetheless true that there would be far greater clarity of understanding than is now often the case if more such searching questions had been directed to great thinkers while they were still alive.

This, at any rate, is the basic thought behind the present undertaking. The volumes of the Library of Living Philosophers can in no sense take the place of the major writings of great and original thinkers. Students who would know the philosophies of such men as John Dewey, George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Jaspers, Rudolf Carnap, Martin Buber, et al., will still need to read the writings of these men. There is no substitute for first-hand contact with the original thought of the philosopher. Least of all does this Library pretend to be such a substitute. The Library in fact will spare neither effort nor expense in offering to the student the best possible guide to the published writings of a given thinker. We shall attempt to meet this aim by providing at the end of each volume in our series as nearly complete a bibliography of the published work of the philosopher in question as possible. Nor should one overlook the fact that essays in each volume cannot but finally lead to this same goal. The interpretive and critical discussions of the various phases of a great thinker’s work and, most of all, the reply of the thinker, are bound to lead the reader to the works of the philosopher.

At the same time, there is no denying that different experts find different ideas in the writings of the same philosopher. This is as true of the appreciative interpreter and grateful disciple as it is of the critical opponent. Nor can it be denied that such differences of reading and of interpretation on the part of other experts often leave the neophyte aghast before the whole maze of widely varying and even opposing interpretations. Who is right and whose interpretation shall he or she accept? When the doctors disagree among themselves, what is the poor student to do? If, in desperation, he or she decides that all of the interpreters are probably wrong and that the only thing to do is to go back to the original writings of the philosopher and then make his or her own decision—uninfluenced (as if this were possible) by the interpretation of anyone else—the result is not that he or she has actually come to the meaning of the original philosopher, but rather that he or she has set up one more interpretation, which may differ to a greater or lesser degree from the interpretations already existing. It is clear that in this direction lies chaos, just the kind of chaos which Schiller has so graphically and inimitably described.

It is curious that until now no way of escaping this difficulty has been seriously considered. It has not occurred to students of philosophy that one effective way of meeting the problem at least partially is to put these varying interpretations and critiques before the philosopher while he or she is still alive and to ask him or her to act at one and the same time as both defendant and judge. If the world’s greatest living philosophers can be induced to cooperate in an enterprise whereby their own work can, at least to some extent, be saved from becoming merely desiccated lecture-fodder, which on the one hand provides innocuous sustenance for ruminant professors, and on the other hand gives an opportunity to such ruminants and their understudies to speculate safely, endlessly, and fruitlessly, about what a philosopher must have meant (Schiller), they will have taken a long step toward making their intentions more clearly comprehensible.

With this in mind, the Library of Living Philosophers expects to publish at more or less regular intervals a volume on each of the greater among the world’s living philosophers. In each case it will be the purpose of the editor of the Library to bring together in the volume the interpretations and criticisms of a wide range of that particular thinker’s scholarly contemporaries, each of whom will be given a free hand to discuss the specific phase of the thinker’s work that has been assigned to him or her. All contributed essays will finally be submitted to the philosopher with whose work and thought they are concerned, for his or her careful perusal and reply. And, although it would be expecting too much to imagine that the philosopher’s reply will be able to stop all differences of interpretation and of critique, this should at least serve the purpose of stopping certain of the grosser and more general kinds of misinterpretations. If no further gain than this were to come from the present and projected volumes of this Library, it would seem to be fully justified.

In carrying out this principal purpose of the Library, the editor announces that (as far as is humanly possible) each volume will contain the following elements:

First, an intellectual autobiography of the thinker whenever this can be secured; in any case an authoritative and authorized biography;

Second, a series of expository and critical articles written by the leading exponents and opponents of the philosopher’s thought;

Third, the reply to the critics and commentators by the philosopher; and

Fourth, a bibliography of writings of the philosopher to provide a ready instrument to give access to his or her writings and thought.

PAUL ARTHUR SCHILPP

FOUNDER AND EDITOR, 1939–1981

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY CARBONDALE

*This General Introduction sets forth in the founder’s words the underlying conception of the Library. —S. G. B.

ADVISORY BOARD

THOMAS ALEXANDER

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

THOMAS O. BUFORD

Furman University

EDWARD S. CASEY

State University of New York at Stony Brook

PETER J. CAWS

George Washington University

RICHARD DE GEORGE

University of Kansas

RALPH D. ELLIS

Clark Atlanta University

JACQUELYN ANN K. KEGLEY

California State University, Bakersfield

WILLIAM L. MCBRIDE

Purdue University

BARRY SMITH

State University of New York at Buffalo

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FRONTISPIECE

GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS

FOUNDER’S GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO THE LIBRARY OF LIVING PHILOSOPHERS

ADVISORY BOARD

PREFACE

PART ONE:  INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JULIA KRISTEVA

SAMPLE OF KRISTEVA’S HANDWRITING

INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JULIA KRISTEVA: JE ME VOYAGE, A JOURNEY ACROSS BORDERS AND THROUGH IDENTITIES

PART TWO:  DESCRIPTIVE AND CRITICAL ESSAYS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF JULIA KRISTEVA WITH REPLIES

I.    LANGUAGE AND SEMIOTICS

  1.  DOMINIQUE DUCARD: The Semiotic Chora and the Inner Life of Language

  2.  JOHN LECHTE: Language, Literature, and the Founding Murder in the Work of Julia Kristeva

  3.  ELÉANA MYLONA: Julia Kristeva Between the Semiotic and the Symbolic: The Process of Signifiance

REPLY TO DOMINIQUE DUCARD, JOHN LECHTE, AND ELÉANA MYLONA

II. THEORY OF LITERATURE

  4.  PHILIPPE FOREST: Birth of the Novel, Yesterday and Today

  5.  MARIAN HOBSON: Julia Kristeva’s Farewell to Philosophy

  6.  MARIA MARGARONI: Artaud’s Madness and the Literary Obscene: Humanism and Its Double in Julia Kristeva

  7.  MIGLENA NIKOLCHINA: Signifiance and Transubstantiation: The Returns of the Avant-Garde in Kristeva’s Philosophy of Literature

REPLY TO PHILIPPE FOREST, MARIAN HOBSON, MARIA MARGARONI, AND MIGLENA NIKOLCHINA

III.  PSYCHOANALYSIS

  8.  BERNARD BRUSSET: Julia Kristeva: Original and Innovative Contributions at the Core of Psychoanalytic Theory

  9.  JEAN-LOUIS BALDACCI: Abjection, Reliance, and Sublimation

10.  JEAN-FRANÇOIS RABAIN: Julia Kristeva, Reader of Aragon

REPLY TO BERNARD BRUSSET, JEAN-LOUIS BALDACCI, AND JEAN-FRANÇOIS RABAIN

IV.   ART AND AESTHETICS

11.  ANISH KAPOOR: Dear Julia

12.  ELAINE P. MILLER: Julia Kristeva on the Severed Head and Other Maternal Capital Visions

13.  CARIN FRANZÉN: An Antidote to the Crisis of Contemporary Culture: Rereading Kristeva on Duras

14.  FRANÇOISE COBLENCE: Aesthetics According to Julia Kristeva

REPLY TO ANISH KAPOOR, ELAINE P. MILLER, CARIN FRANZÉN, AND FRANÇOISE COBLENCE

V. PHILOSOPHY IN THE NOVELS

15.  DAVID UHRIG: No Present Apart

16.  PIERRE-LOUIS FORT: Julia Kristeva and the Detective Novel: Fiction and Metaphysics

REPLY TO DAVID UHRIG AND PIERRE-LOUIS FORT

VI.   MELANCHOLY, LOVE, AND THE SACRED

17.  EDWARD S. CASEY: Depression: Heading Down and Out

18.  ALINA N. FELD: Melancholia: Passing Through and Beyond

19.  MICHAL BEN-NAFTALI: A Baroque Reading of Tales of Love

20.  KEREN MOCK: Language and Sacredness in the Quest for Subjectivity

REPLY TO EDWARD S. CASEY, ALINA N. FELD, MICHAL BEN-NAFTALI, AND KEREN MOCK

VII. DESIRE, KNOWLEDGE, AND BELIEF

21.  ROBERT HARVEY: Of Incredibility in the Need to Believe: A Philosophical Exploration

22.  ALAIN DELAYE: The Need to Believe and the Desire to Know

REPLY TO ROBERT HARVEY AND ALAIN DELAYE

VIII. THEORY OF REVOLT

23.  EMILIA ANGELOVA: Abjection and the Maternal Semiotic in Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt

24.  SARAH K. HANSEN: Intimate Revolt at the Margins of Community and the Hope of Postcoloniality

25.  DANIEL COHN-BENDIT: Hannah Arendt Prize Speech 2006

REPLY TO EMILIA ANGELOVA, SARAH K. HANSEN, AND DANIEL COHN-BENDIT

IX.   THE MATERNAL

26.  ROSEMARY BALSAM: The Controversial Nature of Kristeva’s Maternal Reliance

27.  RACHEL BOUÉ-WIDAWSKY: Maternal Eroticism and the Journey of a Concept in Kristeva’s Work

28.  FANNY SÖDERBÄCK: Maternal Enigmas: Kristeva and the Paradoxes of Motherhood

REPLY TO ROSEMARY BALSAM, RACHEL BOUÉ-WIDAWSKY, AND FANNY SÖDERBÄCK

X.  PHILOSOPHY OF PUBLIC HEALTH

29.  CHARLES GARDOU: The Intimate Face of a Common Thought and Action

30.  EIVIND ENGEBRETSEN: Evidence-Based Medicine and the Irreducible Singularity of Being: Kristeva’s Contribution to the Medical Humanities

31.  MARIE ROSE MORO: The Polyglot Imaginary, a Poetics, and a Clinic

32.  JEAN VANIER: Their Look Pierces Our Shadows

REPLY TO CHARLES GARDOU, EIVIND ENGEBRETSEN, MARIE ROSE MORO, AND JEAN VANIER

XI.   ETHICS AND POLITICS

33.  CECILIA SJÖHOLM: From Denial to Forgiveness: Kristeva, Arendt, and Radicalization

34.  EWA PLONOWSKA ZIAREK: A Materialist Ethics of Psychoanalysis? Reflections on Matter, Forgiveness, and Vulnerability

35.  NOËLLE MCAFEE: Kristeva’s Latent Political Theory

36.  KELLY OLIVER: The Democracy of Proximity and Kristeva’s New Humanism

REPLY TO CECILIA SJÖHOLM, EWA PLONOWSKA ZIAREK, NOËLLE MCAFEE, AND KELLY OLIVER

PART THREE:  BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE WRITINGS OF JULIA KRISTEVA

INDEX

PREFACE

Julia Kristeva is beyond all doubt one of the seminal thinkers of her generation. One major indication of this fact is the extraordinary breadth of her work. Kristeva’s life of the mind provides a critical analysis of the present and includes the experiences and thought of a psychoanalyst in linguistics, philosophy, and literature. Studies in Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Arendt, among others, accompany and enrich an encounter in psychoanalysis and literature across a broad front. Throughout Kristeva’s writings, the problem of meaning and representation in modern societies and cultures is prominent. Thanks to her early attention to philosophies of language and the sciences of meaning, she has earned a central place in semiotics, whose domain her work has extended.

Kristeva has transformed semiology through the notions of intertextuality, dialogism, and semanalysis. Her distinctive conceptual dyad, the semiotic and the symbolic, specifically includes in semiotics the speaking being from psychoanalysis. Her writings, increasingly grounded in psychoanalysis as an art of treating the faculty of thought and an investigation of the conditions for mentalization and verbalization, have sought a new humanist vision for our times. It is a vision in which the positivity of scientific thought and understanding cannot stand alone but must be supplemented by what has come to be known as negativity. Affirming the unity of the human spirit means, for her, both keeping a stake in the legacy of Enlightenment thinkers and redrawing the philosophical and psychoanalytic paths of negativity from Hegel to Freud and since. This involves not only the disruption of consciousness but also the unleashing of the death drive. On the one hand, the psychic drive, desire, and affect are included as aspects of the faculty of thought, while, on the other hand, psychoanalysis itself is pushed past its traditional boundaries—crossing over into philosophy, literature, and religion. The overall effect is a realignment of the cultural vectors that make up our contemporary lives.

The movements of Kristeva’s thought yield a multifaceted work that extends from semiotics and the theory of literature to psychoanalytic theory and practice, a philosophy of affect and passion, a thinking on religion, novel writing, and an expanding public philosophy with far-reaching discussions on the maternal, public health, disability, and the place of fundamentalism in contemporary cultures. Obviously, such a multidisciplinary oeuvre—by a woman and a stranger/foreigner from Bulgaria who made France her home and French her language in the mid-1960s—could not easily be organized into the more established philosophical categories for a volume in the series. This volume—only the second dedicated to a woman in the Library of Living Philosophers—has required a section on the maternal, one on public health, and one on the theory of revolt if it is to capture the intellectual output of this rigorous, audacious spirit. Julia Kristeva never contents herself with the status quo in her intellectual domains, both acknowledging modernity’s break with tradition—theorized by Arendt—and choosing the transvaluation of cultural forms over the outright rejection of ideas. Those conversant with the Library of Living Philosophers may also be surprised to find that the usual style of the replies—a subject philosopher’s critical response to his or her critics— sometimes gives way to other values and approaches. Thus, in adhering to the principle of dialogue in philosophy and the series’ goal of creative interaction with the contributors, Kristeva’s replies include singular motifs, such as salutations to the interventions of her interpreters or a textual responsory, like the meditative chant sung in alternation.

The intellectual autobiography in Part I provides access to this dialogue by relating theory to Kristeva’s life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It shows her knowledge of both Western and Eastern European culture and thought, including Byzantine art and religion, the Marxist-Hegelian tradition, and Russian formalism, while also memorializing the care of her parents, who gave not roots, but wings through a childhood that witnessed the Nazi and Stalinist invasions of Bulgaria, and her young life under Soviet communism. The autobiography portrays her entry into the intellectual ferment of France in the 1960s, followed by the prolific output of writings in her adopted language, as well as her research, teaching, and alliances in the United States, and international collaborations on many concerns of the two centuries, including thinking in dark times and the renewal of humanism.

In line with the chronological development of Kristeva’s oeuvre, Part II begins with her early attention to the history of linguistics, including Saussure and the twentieth-century attempt to articulate the question of enunciation (Benveniste, Barthes). What emerges from her work in semiotics and the theory of literature as a kind of philosophical writing is her emphasis on semiology as a method of analyzing literary works that opens up into history, sociology, and culture. Kristeva’s enhancement of semiological models through the Freudian theory of the unconscious appears above all in the notion of signifiance, part of a fundamental categorial triad whose continual refinement is a marked feature of her writings. Signifiance, the process of meaning, is at the intersection of the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic—the prelinguistic or translinguistic modalities of meaning—is heard in the speech of analysands and the sonorous or stylistic movements of literary writing. The notion of the symbolic (syntactic-semantic functioning) covers language systems or structures together with their generations and transformations. As is shown throughout the volume, signifiance arises in literary and poetic texts, in the transferential movements of psychoanalysis, and in thought, art, and life.

Part II brings together authors from many fields to analyze the components and developments of Kristeva’s multifaceted work in its theoretical, cultural, clinical, and political aspects. The complex journey assembled here begins in sections I and II with her work in language, semiotics, and the theory of literature. Section III illuminates her choice of psychoanalysis for the theoretical and practical grounding of her thought, demonstrating her innovations in this field and its role in her reading of literature. Section IV turns to Kristeva’s appeal for contemporary art and aesthetics, including feminist aesthetics. One essay goes to the depths of the meaning of her notion of abjection for art. Others reveal the importance of aesthetic experience or artistic practice as a search for sensation or lost time (Proust). These orientations in Kristeva’s relation to art and literature are carried into her own novel writing, which is considered in section V. The two essays on her fictional narrative consider it as autobiography, as style and structure, and as a way of thinking or of continuing analytic practice. One of them also delves into the metaphysical dimension of her series of philosophical, historical, and political detective novels.

Kristeva’s inclusion of the phenomenological idea of Being in her psychoanalytic clinic—a rare one—shows up in her widely received notions of abjection, love, and depression/melancholy. These are taken up in section VI, with emphasis on their links with phenomenology or their crossroads with religion and the sacred. In two connected essays, depression is approached as a felt phenomenon, rather than a pathology, and melancholy is taken beyond individual affliction to melancholia’s theological dimensions. The third essay explores Kristeva’s writing on love in terms of Being and the baroque. In the final essay in this section, the ideas of abjection, love, and melancholy appear in the relation between language and the sacred. Section VII turns to Kristeva’s inheritance of the long debate on faith and knowledge, evaluating in markedly different ways her unique connecting of the (prereligious) need to believe with the desire to know. One of the two illuminates her emphasis on traversing religion in secularized modernity, showing both the unusual critical attention she gives to the Christian female mystics as well as what has been called her mystic atheism.

The multifaceted nature of Kristeva’s oeuvre is especially apparent in the wide reception of her theory of revolt. In section VIII, one author relates this idea to the philosophy of Levinas, recovering the link between the idea of intimate revolt and traumatism. Another takes up the view that Kristeva’s conception of revolt situates the psyche on political terrain, so that the idea of revolt, considered as a condition for community—an intimate politics that unsettles identity politics—can be questioned in relation to colonial or Eurocentric logics of alterity. The idea of revolt also animates the speech celebrating the award to Julia Kristeva of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in 2006, published here in English for the first time.

Kristeva’s innovations in psychoanalysis come back into clinical as well as philosophical focus in sections IX and X on her idea of the maternal and her philosophy of public health, respectively. The former brings out the manifold facets of Kristeva’s writing on the maternal, with one author questioning the enigmas it sets for motherhood and for feminist writing on maternity. Two others focus on her signature conception of maternal reliance, which underlines the mystery of maternal passion in the child’s early development. The idea of maternal reliance in Kristeva’s oeuvre brings out more fully the conditions of mentalization and verbalization, which are conditions of representation, imagination, separation, and human bonds. Building on this, the dialogue on the philosophy of public health presents precise and moving contributions to contemporary work in the medical humanities as well as work with disability, experiences of migration in the transcultural clinic, and teenage involvement in fundamentalism—an ideality disorder.

Kristeva’s widely received conception of the maladies of ideality appears again in the final section of Part II, where the attention given to the issue of radicalization emphasizes both her work on Arendt and her own renewal of thinking on the problem of evil and forgiveness. Another essay formulates Kristeva’s ethics of forgiveness in terms of a dynamic materialism that is distinguished by the conceptions of heterogeneity and temporality that permeate Kristeva’s writings. A third, concerned with globalization and the rise of nationalism and populisms today, constructs the question of a latent political theory in Kristeva’s thought. The final essay returns to Kristeva’s concern for the perpetual refoundation of humanism, revisiting her thinking on disability and its critique of an economy of performance, in order to bring out an emphasis on meaning making. The attention given to the idea of a democracy of proximity (prefigured in Merleau-Ponty and Levinas) considers Kristeva’s extension of democratic values, rights, and responsibilities through the ideas of vulnerability, listening, hospitality, and singularity.

One more element of this multifaceted oeuvre must be mentioned. This is Kristeva’s attunement to singularity, in which she aligns herself with Duns Scotus and the notion of haecceitas. She is committed to a singular universal and affirms singularities as constitutive, irreducible, incommensurable, or without limits: singularities that appear not only in psychoanalysis or literature (the singular processes in the flesh of words) but also in revolt, ethics, and singular chances in the third millennium, as she describes it here.

Kristeva’s significance for feminist philosophy and the philosophy of race is often a focus in the anglophone reception of her writings, not least in the United States, where her ideas of the stranger and revolt are leading considerations. Some essays in sections VIII and XI attempt to bring Kristeva’s thought into relation with an abiding commitment and sensitivity not only to the particular sufferings of groups in human communities but also to the innovations that may spring from these particulars. Kristeva’s emphasis on the struggles for and risks of identity comes to the fore in her replies. Certain aspects of this dialogue reveal a difficulty—more than a polemic, perhaps—in the relation between, on the one hand, Kristeva’s writing practice in Europe (a Europe that is not homogeneous but itself divided, as she herself insists) and, on the other hand, her translation and reception in a North American setting. The dialogue may provide a chance for further advancing the debates on the social and political implications of Kristeva’s thought.

Amidst her multifaceted and challenging life’s work, Kristeva calls herself a monster of the crossroads and an energetic pessimist for our times. An attentive reading of her oeuvre will reveal the intellectual and cultural strengths of this stance. The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva contributes to and encourages such a reading. As always, the aim of this volume in the Library of Living Philosophers is to provide interpretive and critical discussion that will lead scholars, students, and new readers further into first-hand contact with the thought of the principal figure.

***

The arrangements for this volume began with the work of a prior editor of the Library of Living Philosophers, Randall E. Auxier, who saw the idea for the volume through the process of approval by the Editorial Board and had the first meeting with Julia Kristeva. After an intervening period in which an interim editor supervised the series, the present editor began again on this volume, starting with the compiling of the contributors’ list in consultation with Julia Kristeva, and seeking funding to support the preparation of the volume. The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.

One of the first objectives was to find the right translators and bibliographer, a task aided by Julia Kristeva and by Jennifer Crewe at Columbia University Press, publisher of Kristeva’s works in English. Lorna Scott Fox (translator of Kristeva’s novel, Teresa, My Love) made the English version of Je me voyage, an interview with Samuel Dock, for the intellectual autobiography in Part I of the volume. Armine Kotin Mortimer (translator of Kristeva’s novel, The Enchanted Clock) made the English versions of eleven of the contributors’ essays and all of Kristeva’s replies for Part II. The Library of Living Philosophers is also grateful to Hélène Volat for Part III, the bibliography of Kristeva’s life’s work.

The LLP acknowledges the continued support and cooperation of our publisher, Open Court, especially Kerri Mommer, whose long experience with the series and ready advice was essential in bringing this volume to fruition. Kyle Lake provided his expertise in typesetting once again. Southern Illinois University provided a sabbatical for the editor as well as graduate assistants to support the preparation of the volume. Kevin Cales, David Gray, Ryan Grunberg, Donnie McMann, Leslie Murray, Nick Popow, Mohsen Saber, and Amy Stewart all worked diligently in support of some part of the process. Amy Stewart also contributed her professional skills to the indexing. I thank the Office of Sponsored Projects Administration at Southern Illinois University Carbondale for their support in the application for and administration of the NEH grant, and Jeletta Brant, the Department of Philosophy’s office manager, for helping the process along. Anthony Steinbock’s support as a colleague and chair of the Department of Philosophy was greatly appreciated.

SARA G. BEARDSWORTH

EDITOR

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY CARBONDALE

MARCH 2020

PART ONE

INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JULIA KRISTEVA

Notes for the writing of Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature.

INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

JE ME VOYAGE:

A JOURNEY ACROSS BORDERS AND THROUGH IDENTITIES

Conversations with Samuel Dock

Translated by Lorna Scott Fox

FOREWORD BY SAMUEL DOCK

JULIA KRISTEVA: AN ELSEWHERE HERE AMONG US

I will never forget our first meeting. That face, with its high cheekbones, incisive gaze, and beaming smile. She’s smartly dressed, self-possessed but relaxed, and I warm to the strength that she exudes. She welcomes me into her home, me, my tape recorder, and my questions. We sip China tea in her quiet and luminous apartment. She reminisces, I urge her on. The book is a two-hander. I’m in awe of her, she finds it amusing, I nudge the theoretician back to lived experience, to her feelings, she plays along, or not, we push on. I enjoy her sense of fun, we laugh, and this sharing attenuates the lurking melancholy of an autobiographical exercise.

The intellectual heaped with titles and awards lets memories emerge, retracing her journey in my company. She’s not severe at all—she’s concentrated. Exacting. Decorously reserved, as well. Intensely there. She watches me, the psychoanalyst analyzing the psychologist, and vice versa, we understand each other, a bond is formed, the very essence of what we are about together. Her fingers clasp her teacup as she confides, muses, smiles. The charm works. With expressive precision, intellectual brilliance, and subtle probing into affects, she reveals herself as I shadow her. She has built her singularity in that elsewhere.

I listen to her story. Retracing the maze of existence, we find where the thread begins. A childhood in communist Bulgaria, studies, exile, encounters and lovers, marriage to Sollers, a marriage like one of the fine arts, and a son named David. And ever and always work, often travel, China, books, Freudian analysis, feminism in the wake of Simone de Beauvoir, poetry, disability. Trials, bereavements, and works have sprung from all of this. Julia Kristeva has turned errancy into vital motion, grief into insight, a taste for art and literature into caring, into a taste for others. Her gaze, wholly trained on me, moves through me in quest of others. I feel the plenitude of this impalpable collusion, this meeting in the truest sense.

Do you know Julia Kristeva? Not really, though she’s famous, but not in France. I myself discovered her thanks to Marie-France Castarède, a psychoanalyst with whom I cowrote a book about generational clash, and who advised me to attend one of her lectures. So, one evening I went to hear her speak in a bookshop not far from Montparnasse. It was the launch of Pulsions du temps. Her razor-sharp mind, benign empathy, insatiable curiosity, and hypnotic whirlwind of ideas tackled the current status of the Freudian legacy, the European crisis, same-sex marriage, the valorization of motherhood, the need to believe. I was as much struck by her acuteness as by the breadth of her investigative range.

I read Pulsions du temps.¹ And then I wrote an enthusiastic review for the Huffington Post.² In our chaotic times, when language is falling apart and psychic life is in decline, Julia Kristeva sets out to put humanism on a new footing. The day the article appeared, she sent a brief thank-you email. I felt honored.

A few months later, Claude Durand, the president and CEO of Éditions Fayard, suggested I undertake to write her life in dialogue form, a project at the intersection of biography and psychological research: Julia hoped that I would do it. Hadn’t she got the wrong name? No, it was me she wanted! I am a clinical psychologist and a writer, but not so much an intellectual or artist, I feel, as a craftsman, a workman first and foremost. I write with as much wariness as gusto until realizing I need to write more, revise, invent, reinvent myself all over again. Did I have what it took to foster the uncovering of her intimate self, which she has protected for so long?

It took me months to read everything she’d written. The novels, from The Samurai to The Enchanted Clock; the female genius trilogy—Arendt, Klein, Colette; the panoramic nonfiction, Black Sun, Powers of Horror, Tales of Love; and all the rest. Months to become familiar with her theoretical contributions when teaching at Paris 7 or across the Atlantic, and to chart her many battles … Months to sketch out the key lines of a life devoted to creation and sublimation, and to glimpse, beyond theory and on the far side of fiction, her own little madeleines, her rough edges, her secret chasms.

Now that I am to let you, the reader, into our work, I feel a pang of nostalgia. I’ll miss the talking and the laughing. I enjoyed letting her do what she excels at: developing and clarifying her thoughts, as we roamed through territories she’d lost then found again. I hope you will take equal pleasure in following the steps of this exceptional woman, so endearing and inventive. For my part, I’ll never forget it.

A destiny, an oeuvre. A multiverse, she calls it. Is she a recognizable foreigner, a familiar stranger, a serene rebel? Her thinking reaches to the hard kernel of humanity that reveals the torments and wonders of otherness in oneself, beyond oneself.

Julia Kristeva? A distant elsewhere, and yet so close. An elsewhere here among us.

I. GROWING UP IN BULGARIA

Some men like me ’cause I’m happy

—Billie Holiday

Samuel Dock. Whether due to lack of curiosity or to xenophobia, the indifference in France to your Bulgarian beginnings is surprising. You’re a war baby, after all.

Julia Kristeva. When I was small, I often heard this Russian song:

Dvadtsat vtorovo iyunya,

Rovno v chetyre chassa,

Kiev bombili, nam obyavili,

Chto nachalassya voyna.

(On twenty-second June,

On the dot of four o’clock,

Kiev was bombed and we were told

The war had just begun.)

I was born two days after the outbreak of war. At around four or five years old I became aware that my birthday was connected to the grand beat of a global conflict … and ultimately to the sensation of being consumed in an explosion, no room for me, I’m just a splinter in a world in the throes of destruction. Then Bulgaria tumbles into the communist bloc, cue reconstruction, shortages, oppression and promises, the cold war … We were living in Sliven at the time, my birthplace, a town in southeast Bulgaria. Near the Balkans. Though I was tiny, I could tell there was a war. We were always going down to the cellar, and we listened to the BBC. We’d wait for the drumming jingle of Radio London, and I can still see the tense faces of the grown-ups as they listened to those enigmatic messages, their fear was infectious. My family was staying with some communist teachers, résistants living under the radar. The uniform of a German officer prowling the courtyard, the blackness of the night as we ran through the streets seeking shelter, a flare tearing the sky to warn of a bombardment: can these be the memories of a three-year-old child? Or are they reconstructions based on what I heard later? The reason I mention such flashbacks is because, with hindsight, it seems it was around them and against them that our family ties grew most solidly knotted.

S.D. You’ve more often waxed lyrical about the scents of the Valley of the Roses, the joys of the Black Sea, your homeland as a sublime cradle, sensually recalled. These darker memories are unfamiliar. You’re bringing them up for the first time, I believe.

J.K. Probably because I’ve grown more at ease with my shadows and fractures … much like the Nivi of my latest novel, The Enchanted Clock. She represents me more faithfully than other characters.

S.D. This fragmentation springs from that first trauma, and will be developed across others, as we’ll discuss later. In parallel, all the same, there were some cohesive and reassuring aspects to your early childhood, however stricken it was by history. I’d like to dwell on these a little.

J.K. Thanks to my parents, it was a fairly sheltered period in spite of everything. Two photographs obstruct my memory like screens, but they also bring associations flowing back, and make me feel like a toddler again.

The first shows a landau I’ve been lifted out of. I’m standing next to it, little black shoes on a white towel. My parents wanted to immortalize the moment when I stood upright for the first time! My mother, Kristina, is behind me. Her perfume will always be with me—a cloud of silk and essence of rose, the navy-blue caress of her dress. I can’t see her, I’m leaning back on her presence, she envelops me like a cosmic breast, the maternal feminine is available. My mother studied biology before deciding not to teach and to take care of her children instead, without apparent regret. Oh, I haven’t, to be sure, forgotten the silence drowned by her smile, slightly disenchanted but at peace, I think, whenever her university days were mentioned. Some might read into this a mark of spirituality, the discretion of the sacred. In fact, what my mother transmitted to me was simply that femininity encompasses maternal reliance without guilt or frustration. I’ve never understood how women could take themselves to be a second sex. For me, femininity expresses what is undeniable or irrefutable about life. Effortlessly, wholeheartedly, spontaneously. As my mother did.

In the second picture, a bit later, I’m in the world facing the world, that is, facing the photographer. We’ve been out shopping, my father Stoyan and I. I’m carrying a melon and he, two watermelons. He’s bent over me and I snuggle into that masculine refuge with the marveling trust that precludes the least whit of loneliness. I am not losing myself in the other, we are two indivisible entities, but I smile with my father’s smile. This incorporation of paternal maleness, as silly as it is simple and unconditional, is also the solidity that constituted me, made me into the person I am, notwithstanding exiles and traumas.

S.D. You’ve often defined yourself in terms of travel, motion, foreignness … Isn’t it this solid confidence in your parents that allowed you to break through borders, geographical or mental, and unfold your thinking?

J.K. There speaks the analyst in you! The conclusions you draw from what I said are correct, but I prefer to remain in the story, where the facts neither confirm nor disqualify frailty or endurance but punctuate at best a suspended moment … To recount one’s analysis so as to avoid doing it, no thanks, I’m trying to continue it on the other side of the couch, that’s vital.

S.D. As you please! In Pulsions du temps, you talk very affectionately about the alphabet festival in Bulgaria you took part in as a child. You were, you embodied a letter in the parade—is that where your early love of language could have come from?

J.K. In our family, culture took pride of place. Books, piano, singing, theater, opera … and sports, as well. My father was fanatical about physical culture. Were we unusual? Not really. That allegiance—be it escapism or resistance—strikes me as a prevalent feature of that part of Europe, the scene of a constant to-and-fro of influences, upheavals, and wars. Bulgaria stands as a crossroads country, still overlooked despite its entrance into the European Union. Even today the Balkans are a powder keg—think of Sarajevo. At the same time, with all the more reason perhaps, the cult of letters or the alphabet sustained those peoples and especially the Bulgarians throughout their history. Proximity to the Greek miracle is another factor: as an example … to be surpassed? That being said, Bulgaria is the only country I know of that celebrates the alphabet. May 24, the feast day of the brothers Cyril and Methodius, became a festival of Culture.

S.D. Tell us about these two Orthodox saints.

J.K. The most recent research is divided on their background (were they Slavs or Greeks?), but we Bulgarians say their mother was a Slav and their father a high official of the Byzantine Empire. The brothers received an outstanding education and after they were ordained, Pope Adrian II sent them to preach to the Slavic peoples of Moravia. To carry out this mission they invented an alphabet for translating the Scriptures into Slavonic, the ancient language of the region. In Passions of Our Time, I go into the details of their story: trouble with the Vatican (we’re in the ninth century, before the great schism of 1054); Cyril dies and is actually buried in the Vatican, while Methodius returns with his disciples to Bulgarian soil.³ Literacy first takes off there, before spreading to Russia and farther afield. The University of Sofia is now named after Clement of Ohrid, the most famous of those missionaries of the written word.

Between the ages of seven and twenty-four, I took part in this unlikely festival alongside the entire people of culture: schoolchildren, their parents clapping wildly from the sidewalks, but also teachers, students and professors, writers, journalists, publishers, librarians, artists and painters … We each sported a letter of the alphabet, surrounded by flags and floral displays, parading down streets hung with lights and suffused with music, scents, words. The letters free-floated on moving bodies or came together to form slogans, snatches of poetry, names of the great authors of our cultural memory.

S.D. What was your slogan, then?

J.K. It changed every year. I’ll never forget those times. From the outside, I can see it’s hard to comprehend how family life could ever be so anchored in this precious alphabet that, from the religiosity of its beginnings, had become altogether secular—the beating heart of the social and political pact. The festival itself transmitted an obvious, unconditional certainty: in order to be, it was absolutely necessary to take your place in the alphabet, by doing well at school, college, and the rest. But at the same time you were summoned, through the same cultural tool, to play on your keyboard, to say I by appropriating the letters, by writing.

S.D. After the end of the Second World War, your father, who shared none of the ideals of the communist regime, urged you to study foreign languages, with a kind of cosmopolitan philosophy.

J.K. He declared that his one aim in life was to get his daughters out of the guts of hell, his grim metaphor for our country. There’s no other way than by learning languages, that’s all, you’ve got to speak foreign languages. And become financially independent, of course. Dad claimed that the intestinal reference was in the Gospel, but I only ever found it in Dante, in the last canto of the Inferno, the Ninth Circle: the intestine, burella in Italian, lying on the ground, is the image of a broken heart. Was this his obsession, his secret family romance? He’d say that the patronymic Kristev, literally of the cross, didn’t come out of nowhere, it came down to us from the crusaders who had a cross sewn onto their clothing, yes, really, it’s a fact that they went through Thrace (the region of his natal village), as early as the eleventh century! My disbelieving face would send him apoplectic. I don’t need archives to prove it! In any case, it’s so long ago that they’d have disappeared by now. I just know, that’s all. To me, this belief unsupported by any historical evidence made him look bad, but I couldn’t help being impressed by his hypothetical etymology. So much so that I used it in Murder in Byzantium!

S.D. The Bulgarian cultural environment was auspicious, and the alphabet festival acted as an institutional spur to reading and writing. Still, the family played a key role in your intellectual formation, I think. According to Daniel Sibony, a child will read if he is close to someone who enjoys reading. Did your parents read stories to you? How did they pass on the love of letters—your basis for life?

J.K. Precisely by reading. Reading was fundamental. They read us fairy tales, Bulgarian classics, and the great works of Russian literature, and pushed us to read them. At meals we’d talk about our schoolwork, particularly Russian and French classes. My father had studied theology, and then medicine; he was passionate about literature. Following the war, the communist government started sending all the young doctors to practice in the countryside. My father opted to drop medicine and stay in Sofia, to make sure his daughters went to a good school. He was very religious and went into church management, earning just enough to get by as a family, while doing various editing and Russian translation jobs to supplement his income. He also sang at Mass and in several religious and secular choirs. He had an extraordinary ear for music, which my sister Ivanka inherited. The spirituality he cast over the family collided with my mother’s highly secular, scientific rationality. She brought her biology studies to bear in defense of Darwinism during our cultural debates at the dinner table. However, it would have been unthinkable for a woman of her upbringing to go so far as to quarrel with her husband.

It was left to me to brandish the torch of argument! Poor darling Dad, I called him a dinosaur, a relic, a fossil. He didn’t take it lying down, there was always a fight. (Laughter) My sister would back me up, but with relative mildness. So I was the one who bore the brunt of punishment. In the corner, on your knees! Guilty and proud of it, I played the part of the boy who rebels against paternal obscurantism, no less! My mother would rebuke me for going too far, but deep down she was quite pleased to have a daughter who dared to be her spokesman. Later, although she felt lonely—both us girls had left the country—she supported my choice to live as an emancipated woman in Paris. She thought I’d gone because of my father’s temper, because he was always punishing the cheeky girl who talked back. She had no idea that between him and me, it was total love!

S.D. A person who doesn’t rebel is dead inside.

J.K. Exactly. I couldn’t stay still, I needed to protest. In our house, you see, the atmosphere was highly cultured, but not at all conventional, more of a goad to the critical spirit. My father played along and took my stubborn teenage outbursts seriously, so much so that his impassioned reactions couldn’t shut me up, and our showdowns got out of hand! I must have understood, subconsciously, that this performance of paternal attention in some way warranted my opposition, which ratcheted up as a result.

S.D. In your writings, you’re more discreet about your sister.

J.K. Ivanka was born when I was three-and-a-half. She was named after our maternal grandfather, Ivan. In 1945, the country went communist and we left Sliven. On our way to Sofia we stopped in Yambol, where my mother’s parents lived. My father, orphaned of both his parents, had been adopted by Jordana, a widowed friend of the family who was also to be my nurse. My parents assured me that my own name, Julia, was a modern version of that of this adoptive grandmother, Jordana. A name whose etymology harks back to the river of the Bible, the Jordan.

S.D. Might you, in a certain sense, have lost your mother?

J.K. You don’t know how right you are! When my mother went into labor, at home, I was sent off to play with my little friend Anna, who lived next door. I couldn’t stand her mother, a cold, elegant lady, a schoolteacher I believe, always mincing coquettishly around while my mother’s belly grew bigger. I can see it now: I’m terribly thirsty, I long for a big glass of water, but the witch makes me drink out of a little spoon. Practically by the drop. Strange, isn’t it! The foible of an overcautious mother, who only infuriated me on that day? Is it a memory at all? Or a reverie disguising the frustration caused by my sister’s arrival? Regressing to babyhood, I fly into a rage, violently shove both spoon and lady away, and the lady complains to my father. The shame! I get a severe scolding at home, but at least I’ve managed to distract momentarily from THE baby. Then I refuse to drink, for two days. Proud of my anger and of vanquishing my thirst. Hadn’t I defied the witch from the height of my three-and-a-half years, and scorned her little spoon? Mom had forsaken me to breastfeed an intruder. I wasn’t angry with her, not at all, I took everything on myself. But I worked my revenge … on the neighbor.

Another scene, just afterwards. We’re in Sofia, strolling through the Rose Garden, I pull free from my mother and run off as fast as I can, I fall over, bleeding knees, stagger to my feet, she catches up, white-faced and scared: What is it? Show me! I don’t snivel or whine, ever. It’s nothing, I’m fine … Are you alright, mom? That phrase would become legendary in our family.

S.D. Which of you is the mother, which is the daughter? … Identification, projection, envy and gratitude, reparation of harm …

J.K. I was so imbued with her wholehearted availability as a mother, with that cloud of perfume and reasoned vigilance, and then with the stormy partiality of my father, that I wasn’t aware of feeling shaken by the arrival of the little newbie. On the other hand, my status as the elder, absorbing the parents’ attention, must have weighed heavily on her as the little one. We were very close, our complicity was stronger than our rivalry. It was thanks to my sister that, very soon, I found myself admiring the talents of a fellow but superior female without feeling jealous. Yes, that can happen! My father had a very fine singing voice but didn’t play an instrument. He passed on his love of music to us. I used to dread singing lessons, in which I performed with distinctly less brilliance than in other subjects. To be honest, I was awful! (Laughter) … Ivanka, on the other hand, was marvelous. She has perfect pitch, like my son David. My parents bought her a piano and a violin, and she got into the highly selective music school in Sofia, where budding talents could cultivate their gifts while following the standard curriculum. We’d regularly attend her concerts, she was amazing! I clapped wildly, full of awe. Even now, I can still hear her practicing for the next concert, Paganini, Bach, Shostakovich …

S.D. Maybe because you were so confident and secure in your own path.

J.K. The mere fact of another world than mine existing, alien and unattainable, filled me with respect, a kind of thankfulness … with not the least flicker of conflict, I think. Well, alright, it was annoying, because she was always sawing away in the next-door room, the sound made it hard to think, I missed the silence! My mother used to say to me: You don’t know how to hate. True, but it isn’t only a virtue, as Mom thought. It’s also a weakness, as I would realize later, when I came under attack. A weakness whose source may well lie in my lack of jealousy when listening to Ivanka play Mozart’s Fifth Violin Concerto.

S.D. Did your sister remain in Bulgaria?

J.K. No, she continued her studies at the Music Conservatoire in Moscow, under some eminent musicians including Igor Oistrakh. Then she went to Switzerland, helped by Pierre Boulez to obtain a scholarship to the Music Academy in Basel. She did a doctorate in music and then became a professor at the University of Paris-Saint-Denis, specializing in classical, modern, and contemporary music.

S.D. The fact remains that she shared with your father a realm from which you were excluded. Where did she fit into the family dynamic? You were the insurgent, the boy, but what about her? What was her relationship with your parents?

J.K. It’s true I don’t regard her as a rebel, possibly because I took that role for myself. And yet, more secretive and intuitive than me, more sensitive and exacting, she asserted her freedom—in the face of conventional expectations and with great strength and courage, in both Berlin and Paris. After a concert-hall career she moved into music theory, producing a very meticulous and personal body of work under the pen name of Ivanka Stoïanova.

S.D. While it may seem that the father occupies a larger place in your writings, there are passages concerning your mother which I personally find very moving. You pay her a magnificent tribute in Murder in Byzantium:

I’ve just got back from the cemetery filled with tears and silence. The nighttime face of our sunny silence. My mother was one who inhabited the kind of silence that I’ve been trying to describe to you. She was the most reserved kind of woman, some would say the least hysterical, and it wasn’t because she was depressed. You think that can’t exist? But yes, this woman exists, my mother, and don’t be shocked if I use the present tense, she’s here, between us. Our silence is so transparent that I believe I never felt the need to speak to you about her, or not that much, it’s possible. OK, so here I go, yet with a good bit of silence. In mourning, to