SOURCE: “On Kristeva” in South Carolina Review, Vol. 28, Spring, 1996, pp. 160-64.

[In the following essay, Erickson criticizes Kristeva, claiming that in her hands, structuralism is merely a “pseudo-science.”]

Born in Bulgaria in 1941, Julia Kristeva arrived in Paris in 1965 to study linguistics. She quickly became a fixture in the cutting edge journal Tel Quel, marrying the editor, novelist Phillipe Sollers. She was appointed Professor of Linguistics （the academic department is named “Science of Texts and Documents”） at the Universite de Paris VII and a practicing psychoanalyst. Kristeva was actively consulted during these translations.

In his introduction to Revolution in Poetic Language, Leon S. Roudiez asserts that Julia Kristeva is “among the major theoreticians writing in France, the only woman” （1）. It is presumably because of this sexual distinction that the translator considered, but discreetly refrained, from translating the pronouns whose referent is le sujet as “s/he” and “his/her.” Written for her doctorat d'etat, the work is not composed in a graceful style. For example, the four parts are entitled “The Semiotic and the Symbolic,” “Negativity: Rejection,” “Heterogeneity,” and “Practice.” These are all structuralist buzz words meant to give off an air of, how to say, scientificity. As translator Margaret Waller explains, Kristeva's writing is “a conscious resistance to the strong post-Heideggerian temptation of equating theoretical and literary discourse.”

If there were, in the end, something scientific about this academic monograph, the barbarity of Kristeva's prose could be forgiven. The problem is that structuralism, while it is a scientific method in the hands of, say, a Levi-Strauss, in those of Kristeva, it is only pseudo-science. As a scientist, Kristeva is a poseur. What science, we must ask, is she feigning to advance in this book? It could be a Lacanian psychoanalysis, or a Jacobsonian linguistics, or a Deleuzeola psychohistory, or a Foucaultesque philosophy, or a Barthean literary criticism, but it is not any of these in particular because it is all of these at once. As the Germans say: All in one pot.

Roudiez explains that Kristeva's intent “is to investigate the workings of ‘poetic language’ … as a signifying practice,” and “the revolution in her title refers to the profound change that began to take place in the nineteenth century,” which change concerns not only literature but philosophy, history, linguistics and psychoanalysis. In other words, she aims to research the last century or so of everything the French include in the “human sciences.” It is hard to tell whether her dissertation succeeded in this task, but this abridged translation is, let us say, somewhat thin on certain aspects of the topic.

Since this work fails to be either science or art, the reader is perhaps confused as to what to call it, perhaps tempted to say, as Mark Twain once said, “It's un-american, it's inhuman, it's French.” The blurb from Choice on the dust cover of Tales of Love aptly labels Kristeva “a postmodern polemicist.” Now a theorist cannot be at once a polemicist, not on the ancient acceptations of these terms, anyway, because a theorist is someone who adopts a distant and detached—let us say, godlike—perspective on things and a polemicist is in the middle of things conducting verbal warfare. That is not to say that a scientific disinterest may not be effective camouflage from which to ambush the enemy. Who is Kristeva's enemy? Philosophically speaking, it is the Nietzsche-Heidegger monster, of course, and Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, and even Foucault and Barthes after they went over to the left-Heideggerian, post-structuralist side. Not only does she reject the existential （or Heideggerian） phenomenology of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty that dominated the previous generation of French thought for no better reason than that it is olde chapeau, but she avoids engaging with the post-structuralists that have now supplanted her own generation.

In the Preface to Desire in Language, Kristeva explains that the essays collected there “embody a form of research that recasts several disciplines traditionally kept apart and therefore proceeds with effort, tension, and a kind of passion familiar to pioneers,” and goes on to express misgivings about their reception among English-language readers, given that in France “the 1960s witnessed a theoretical ebullience that could roughly be summarized as leading to the discovery of the determinative role of language in all human sciences.” In other words, the French structuralists found out that all the disciplines of the human sciences could be united under the rubric of semiotics or semiology or her own neologism, “semanalysis.” In our own post-structuralist climate, in which the concept of “unified science” appears naive, a quaint relic of more heady times, we can now recognize how deluded Kristeva was in her pretensions.

In Kristeva, the unification of the human sciences was not to be attained by establishing a theoretical foundation or paradigm that grounds them all, but rather in the deployment of a monologue in which the several subject matters are thrown together in a continuous discussion. It is thus not her semiotics but her stylistics that achieves the apparent unification, but such unification is only apparent. Or as the structuralists say, the significance is all on the surface, theory giving nothing more than an illusion of depth. In short, Kristeva's early work is a grand tour de force, but like all tours it gets to new places only by turns. If this is Tuesday, it must be Sophia. …

In fairness to Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language and Desire in Language count as juvenilia, as much effervescence as ebullience. Unreadable they are, and it must have been hard on her to play the role of female enfant terrible for which she had been cast. While Kristeva does display a broad if superficial learning in these essays, and an impressive but misguided intellect, she does not compare with America's answer to her, Susan Sontag. Sontag wrote much more lucidly during this epoch, and was equally profound without Kristeva's pseudo-philosophical posturing.

But then something fortunate and not altogether fortuitous happened. This change took place somewhere in the midst of Desire in Language, where the essays on Giotto and Giovanni Bellini are clearer and more sensitive than the early ones. What happened was that Kristeva matured into a writer of less theoretically ambitious but more thoroughly executed works, such as Powers of Horror and Tales of Love. Perhaps this change was the result of her following better Francophone minds than her own in a wholesale abandonment of structuralism. Despite her reputation in America as a leading French post-structuralist, there is no forthright recanting of structuralism in these two books, and without that measure of contrition we should not be too quick to judge that she is an apostate of the semiotic faith. Perhaps the change in style was a product of the fact that she was eventually well enough accepted to forsake her starkly scientific coloring. In any case, she relaxes enough to find a voice of her own, a voice that we shall see below has a distinctly womanly character to it.

What she did was to get down off her theoretical high-horse and keep her nose to the interpretive grindstone. Her problem was always a short gulp of air: she can write for only about five or seven pages on a subject before she gives out for lack of inspiration. When she was all over the place, setting the several special disciplines of the human sciences to rights and addressing forty different themes in the course of a book, her thinking appeared to be somewhat uninviting. But when she clumps together forty different pieces of the stuff, all on the same general topic （horror, love … ）, into a homogeneous mass, it is a huge chunk of, excuse my French, bourgeois, which is what we look forward to from a French literateur these days, ne c'est pas?

If the writer gives us not only a couple dozen fresh albeit petite ideas, but expresses him/herself in an attractive manner, we are pleased as Punch/Judy. In Kristeva's case, her prose improved when she ceased implying that she had something of cosmic importance to say on every page, which just gave the reader the impression that he/she was just too naive and/or dull to see the point.

Kristeva assumes a clinically detached tone when addressing her topics. This device gives the appearance of scientific neutrality, thus protecting her against the charge of special pleading. Yet this very tone has the rhetorical effect of pleading for toleration and acceptance of what she is describing, as if to say that nothing human is beneath contempt. Such a rhetorical strategy plays into the “politically correct” agenda when we are anesthetized to the practices and fantasies of sexual perverts, but backfires when she uses the same tone with fascists. The incongruity of her attitude is especially marked when, after discussing Dostoyevsky, Proust, Joyce, Borges, Artaud, Plato, Aristotle, Freud, Georges Bataille, Mary Douglas and the Bible, she dedicates nearly half of Powers of Horror to the homosexual anti-Semite Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

This last consideration raises the question of how useful she is to American feminists. The question has been a vexed one since her essay “Women's Time” （anthologized in The Kristeva Reader and elsewhere）. Received in the United States as an anti-feminist screed, it is one of the most subtle statements about feminism yet produced.

Like many women intellectuals of the first eau （Joyce Carol Oates comes immediately to mind）, Kristeva refuses to play the feminist game of torturing language into “non-sexist forms” or plugging the feminist program in little asides. Remaining aloof from an （in our view, misguided） linguistic reformism, as well as from the boosterism of the women's liberation movement, helps Kristeva to escape the ghetto of women's studies and become an important intellectual as such.

Nevertheless, an informal Kristeva biography reveals that seven out of ten essays or reviews about Kristeva in English were written by women. This statistic indicates what otherwise might be expected, namely, that her popularity in the United States owes something to her being a woman herself. As the crown of recent French feminism, Kristeva serves American feminism just by being as brilliant as she is, by being one of the points of consensus in the new feminist cannon.

In turn, this matter leads us to inquire whether there is anything specifically womanly in her intellectual performance. One such aspect we have already mentioned. For her clinical acceptance of anything she discusses no matter how “evil” or “disgusting” by conventional standards is surely an expression of mother-love, such that whereas father-love demands achievement and conformity to standards, mother-love is given just for being. Hers is a mind overflowing with the milk of ontological security for the weak and the twisted. She implies as much in the Introduction to Tales of Love: “Let us follow, through time, but also immoderation, and under the hold of personal predilection as love demands, some of the major ideas about love that have made up our culture; some of the major myths that have fascinated it; some of the manners of speech that have twisted even into language signs the spellbinding power of that necessary madness.”

What Love demands in Tales of Love is that she discuss Freud, Plato, the Bible, Ovid, Plotinus, Dante, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, Don Juan, Romeo and Juliet, the Troubadours, Jeanne Guyon, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Bataille. （Love's cannon and Horror's not being far apart.）

Another aspect of her womanly voice is her occasional insertion of autobiographical tidbits, emotionally charged ones at that, in the manner of confessional literature, which has emerged as a specifically woman's genre. “I remember,” she begins, “a discussion among several jeunes filles of which I was one.” Elsewhere she refers to her abjection upon marrying （Sollers） in order to get a work visa to France.

A third part of her feminist appeal is the frequency with which she cites or discusses women such as Antigone, Molly Bloom, Madam Bovary, Mary Douglas, Nicolosia Bellini, Ginevra Bocheta, Catherine Francblin, Anna Freud, Mathilde Freud, Michelle A. Freeman, Jeanne Guyon, Luce Irigaray, Edith Jacobsen, Nora Joyce, Katherine of Hungary, Melanie Klein, Annette Lavers, Christine Leroy, Micheline Levowitz-Treu, Violette Morin, Sylvia Plath, Madam de Renal, Anna Rinversi, Jacqueline Risset, Maria von Rysselbergh, Lou Salome, the Shulamite, Susan Sontag, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the Sphinx, Domna Stanton, Phyllis Trible, Louise Vinge, Marina Warner … everybody but Susan Warner. Appearing in Kristeva is like making the cover of Rolling Stone.

Fourth, there is the choice of theoretical concepts that she develops and deploys: abjection, apocalyptic, carnivalesque, expenditure, fetishism, jouissance, Menippean, paragram, phallicism, pulsion, semiotic chora, the feminine subject, symbolic disposition, maternal time. Many of these stress the sinister sister, the dark underside of things.

Going beyond the specifically feminine characteristics of her thinking, Kristeva is much the product of her time, her essays following the passing modes of the day: Chinese communism, Platonic inversion, and the like. Her specialized and sometimes faddish vocabulary, as well as her stylistic peculiarities, make most of her writing quickly obsolete. Kristeva is one of those generalized French intellectuals, clerks of the mind, whose writings, while consumed by a broad cultural clientele when they are current, lack the depth or universality to endure as decisive statements of fundamental concerns or even as documents essentially expressive of their own times.

Works Cited

Julia Kristeva, et al, ed. Essays in Semiotics. Approaches to Semiotics series #4. New York, Mouton, 1971.

Julia Kristeva. On Chinese Women. New York: Urizen, 1977. Out of print. [Trans. of Des Chinoises, Editions des femmes, 1974; four chapters also trans. In the The Kristeva Reader.]

———. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. European Perspectives Series. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. 305 pp. Out of print. [Trans. of eight essays from Polyogue, Editions du Seuil, 1977, and two essays from Semiotica [in Greek]: Recherches pour une semanalyse, Editions du Seuil, 1980.]

———. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. European Perspectives Series. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. 219 pp. [Trans. of Pouvoirs de l'horreur, Editions du Seuil, 1980.]

———. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. Intro. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. 271 pp. [Abr. Trans. of La revolution du language poetique, Editions du Seuil, 1974.]

———. The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 327 pp.

———. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. 414 pp. [Trans. of Pouvoirs de l'horreur, Editions Denoel, 1983.]

———. Language the Unknown: An Introduction to Linguistics. Trans. Anne M. Menke. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. 328 pp. [A textbook.]

———. In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. European Perspectives Series. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. 80 pp.

———. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. 300 pp. [Trans. of Soeil Noir.]

———. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. [Trans. of Etrangers nous-memes, 1988.]