SOURCE: “The Abject Maternal: Kristeva's Theoretical Consistency” in Women and Language, Vol. XVI, No. 2, Fall, 1993, pp. 32-7.

[In the following essay, Caputi examines Kristeva's writings on motherhood.]

Many feminists have become disenchanted with Julia Kristeva. They argue that she is too psychoanalytic, too postmodern, too given to rarified forms of discourse to contribute meaningfully to feminist scholarship. Her angrier critics dismiss her as an intellectual comfortably ensconced within elitist Parisian circles, circles which produce their own revered avant garde, tout favored authors and newfangled forms of analysis, yet appear oblivious and inaccessible to the rest of the world. Kristeva has become excessively recherche, these critics maintain; the darling of contemporary theory, her arcane writings no longer hold interest for those concerned with practical, immediate feminist issues.

Most damning, certainly, is such critics' assertion that Kristeva has become apolitical. Indeed, many feminist scholars interpret her Powers of Horror and Tales of Love as blatant capitulations to the status quo, writings which buy into masculinist principles, endorse patriarchal structures, and have lost any political edge.¹

This apparent capitulation by Kristeva comes as a real disappointment to many feminists, especially those who viewed her earlier writings as promising harbingers of a new dialogue between high-powered theory and political practice, a dialogue which would meaningfully impact feminism. Instead of informing a political praxis, however, the above-mentioned texts exhibit an interest in such issues as motherhood, love, and E. T. Unquestionably, a considerable transformation has taken place in this author. Jacqueline Rose asks: “What has happened to Julia Kristeva?”²

Here, I will attempt to answer this question by focusing on Kristeva's writings on motherhood. I choose to focus on motherhood not simply because of its centrality to Kristeva's later works, but because this theme clarifies Kristeva's transformation, and renders it less disappointing than it at first appears. Although I do not wish to exonerate those unsettling aspects of Kristeva's apparent support for the status quo, I believe that an examination of her writings on motherhood affirms her continued importance to feminist scholarship.

KRISTEVA'S DISENCHANTMENT WITH POLITICAL IDEOLOGY

In 1984, Kristeva stated openly that she had lost interest in political movements and ideologies, and now concerned herself exclusively with individuals. “I am not interested in groups,” she claimed, “I am interested in individuals.”³

This pronouncement summed up a definitive shift which had occurred in her writings, given that she formerly expressed enthusiasm and support for the politics of the left. Trained in linguistics and psychoanalysis by Lucien Goldmann, Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, Kristeva had been associated throughout the seventies with the journal Tel Quel, for which she and her husband, novelist Philippe Sollers, worked. This publication featured articles which specifically addressed issues of modernist culture, the falseness of bourgeois ideology, the promise of the avant garde, and the impact of the left in Europe. Yet it was not only Kristeva's involvement with Tel Quel which illustrated her commitment to theories and practices of an explicitly social, leftist nature: her earlier writings clarify the extent to which she believed in the possibility of meaningful social change, indeed of revolution, to be impacted via a highly sophisticated approach to the topics of language and meaning. In this vein, Kristeva's assertion of the connection between language and revolution, articulated with special clarity in her Desire in Language （1980） and Revolution in Poetic Language （1984）, explains the enormous popularity she garnered in the seventies. Scholars, including feminist scholars, looked to her writings as indicators of the profound social change which lay ahead, change which would influence not only political ideology, institutions, and practices, but the very way in which human beings interact socially.

Yet between her disillusioning trip to China in 1974, and Tel Quel's ultimate abandonment of all overtly political discourse,⁴ Kristeva gradually renounced interest in revolution, and lost faith in all forms of socialist, collectivist discourse. Her relationship to feminism, already highly problematic, became even more estranged. Surely the disappointing realities of Mao's China and the aftermath of May 1968 in France explain Kristeva's repudiation of political discourse to a degree. However, I believe that her articulation of the connection between language and revolution already adumbrated what would become her retreat into individualism and concern with such issues as motherhood. I would argue that even her earlier, “revolutionary” works suggest that this retreat might occur, indicating her preference for a theory which more closely resembles a psychoanalytic cure. Explaining this abiding tension between the social and the personal sheds new light on Kristeva's apparent abandonment of politics. Furthermore, it reveals the capacity to which even her writings on motherhood continue to hold interest for feminist scholars.

KRISTEVA'S ABIDING INTEREST IN SEMANALYSE

Kristeva has consistently been interested in a semiotic approach to language and meaning, and has sought to investigate the way in which the process of signification works to constitute the individual in culture. This focus on semiotics illustrates her eagerness to move beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries between linguistics, rhetoric, and poetics, and to explore, not how meaning is produced structurally, but how it is apprehended and in turn produced by persons using language. In other words, Kristeva focuses on all that is heterogeneous and unsystematic to the study of language, all that evades the traditional approach to the process of signification. Her insistence on semiotics—to use her term, on semanalyse—defies the constraining tendencies of the established disciplines, and takes issue with their implicit or explicit positing of a transcendental human subject whose relationship to meaning remains putatively systematic, consistent, and codifiable. Hence, in “The System and the Speaking Subject” she writes:

Semiotics must not be allowed to be a mere application to signifying practices of the linguistic model—or any other model, for that matter. Its raison d'etre, if it is to have one, must consist in its identifying the systematic constraint within each signifying practice … but above all in going beyond that to specifying just what, within the practice, falls outside the system. … The moment of transgression is the key moment in practice: we can speak of practice wherever there is a transgression of systematicity, i.e., a transgression of the unity proper to the transcendental ego.⁵

Kristeva's distaste for organized, predictable approaches to language and meaning is clear: for her, the ways in which meaning is produced and exchanged are far more complex, subtle, and recalcitrant for any structural, systematized method of investigation to comprehend. Her aim is to produce a richer and more variegated understanding of meaning while affirming meaning's refractory nature. This of course follows from her indebtedness to Lacanian theory. She believes that language remains forever enmeshed in the initial loss of the mother's body, precipitated by the oedipal. Language thus founds itself upon lack, absence, a gap which speech attempts to fill. Hence the speaking subject acclimated to the Symbolic announces lack, not fullness or closure, in the act of speech. As against logocentric claims regarding the metaphysics of presence, for Kristeva our use of words represents a failing attempt to recover that unmediated realm of the maternal Imaginary. We strive to suture the gap which the Symbolic itself created given the initial loss of mother. Language reveals desire. Kristeva comments:

Through the mouth that I fill with words instead of my mother whom I miss from now on more than ever, I elaborate that want, and the aggressivity that accompanies it, by saying … [O]ne is rightfully led to suppose that any verbalizing activity, whether or not it names a phobic object related to orality, is an attempt to introject the incorporated items. … Language learning takes place as an attempt to appropriate an oral “object” that slips away …⁶

Here we have the distinction between the Imaginary and Symbolic realms as they have consistently informed Kristeva's writings. For her, drawing upon the Imaginary realm and its attendant semiotic approach to meaning effectively deconstructs the Symbolic's ideological premises which give cohesion to the speaking subject: since the latter is only held together in speech, a critical approach to language can effectively disrupt his or her unicity. Indeed, Kristeva's semanalyse thus insists on the weakness of language, the provisionality of meaning, and the fictional nature of human identity due to its discursive grounding. With semanalyse, fixed meanings and rigid definitions yield to jouissance, an impulse approximating orgasm which “breaks the symbolic chain, the taboo, the mastery,”⁷ and returns the speaking subject to an unmediated, bodily, “maternal” relationship to meaning.

Experiencing linguistic jouissance allows one to become a specialist in the unconscious, a witch, a bacchanalian, taking her jouissance in an anti-Appolonian, Dionysian orgy. … A marginal discourse … （a） pregnancy: an escape from the temporality of day-to-day social obligations, an interruption of the regular monthly cycles, where the surface—skin, sight—are abandoned in favour of a descent into the depths of the body.⁸

POETIC LANGUAGE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF NEGATIVITY

That mode of expression which most articulates jouissance, which is most “maternal,” is poetic language. In its self-conscious abjuration of Symbolic logic, poetic language carries out the project of semanalyse, lending credence to the claim that a connection between language and revolution indeed exists. We recall that, early in her career, Kristeva believed that semanalyse truly had resonance in the social domain. An analysis of discourse's negativity, the radical hermeneutics to which this analysis gives rise, and the promotion of poetic language would, she believed, help further the cause of revolutionary movements. Apparently, the two spheres were not as discrete to her then as they appear to be now, but overlapped and complemented one another. How else are we to interpret her Revolution in Poetic Language, which appeared in 1974? “The text is a practice that could be compared to political revolution,” she writes, “… one cannot be transformed without the other … [M]imesis and poetic language do more than engage in an intra-ideological debate; they question the very principle of the ideological … And thus, its complexity unfolded by its practices, the signifying process joins social revolution.”⁹

Early on, then, textual analysis clearly resonated with social issues: semanalyse was not a strictly private undertaking.

It must be said, however, that not everyone accepted this proposition; some cautiously endorsed Kristeva's project, while others expressed open incredulity. Publications such as Revolution in Poetic Language gave rise to several articles questioning the validity of Kristeva's claims, articles which speculated on how semanalyse might tangibly translate into empirical reality. Philip E. Lewis, for instance, queries the project of semanalyse, asking how a semiotic dissolution of the subject's unicity can be apprehended in the social sphere.¹⁰

And given that semanalyse never professes to entirely dismantle the Symbolic—even the avant garde can never be entirely contrapuntal—how “revolutionary” an interpretation is it? In light of Kristeva's current position, however, such questions are now irrelevant: Kristeva no longer cares about the social apprehension of the semiotic. For her, there are only individual solutions.

Indeed, the negativity so crucial to semiotics and poetic language explains Kristeva's ultimate renunciation of explicitly political discourses. Her rootedness in semanalyse offers insight into why she now repudiates ideological discussions and positions which earlier she endorsed. With its insistence on marginality and dissonance, its disbelief in systems and uniformity, and its consequent distaste for any form of language which appropriates human subjectivity, semanalyse rejects ideological discourse. At its root, semiotics seeks to disrupt all allusions to a unified truth, a centered human subject, a “correct” political position; it rebuffs all assertions that smack of metaphysical underpinnings. Semanalyse represents a distinctly negative practice inasmuch as it never condones any definitive claims to truth, but forever seeks to tease out the unconscious, the unrepresentable, the irrational present in all forms of human expression. Thanks to this negativity, it remains attuned to the unconscious, to the outside-of-language, and to the maternal. Yet examples of political discourse lacking this negativity unfortunately abound: in Kristeva's eyes, many forms of feminism and marxism represent examples of this. Hence in her article, “Women's Time,” she asks:

Does not feminism become a kind of inverted sexism when this logic is followed to its conclusion? … [P]rotest movements, including feminism, are not “initially libertarian” movements which only later … fall back into the old ruts of the initially combatted archetypes. Rather, the very logic of counter-power and of counter-society necessarily generates, by its very structure, its essence as a simulacrum of the combatted society or power. In this sense, modern feminism has only been but a moment in the interminable process of coming to consciousness about the implacable violence … which constitutes any symbolic contract.¹¹

Hence this theoretical elaboration of her disaffection with politics explains Kristeva's increased distancing from feminism and marxism in favor of analyses strictly concerned with individuals. She sums up: “We try not to be political.”¹²

This exposition on Kristeva's commitment to semanalyse highlights the actual consistency in her writings, and in her politics in general. Semanalyse has always sought to impact change via a disruption of language; for Kristeva, revolution begins with a calling into question of the subject's identity, and a recognition of its fictional status. She has always focused on the tenuousness of human identity. Despite her writings' diversity, Kristeva has sought consistently to scrutinize how the unrepresentable, the unconscious, the outside-of-meaning articulates itself in culture. Hence her current privileging of the individual over the social represents more of an awakening to the inherent irreconcilabilities which separate traditional political discourse from her own preferred semanalyse than a real change in her argument. Traditional political discourse cannot accommodate “the ravages of the unconscious:”¹³ it cannot argue according to Symbolic precepts, yet also proceed in the name of semiotic dissonance.

Thus, in answer to Rose's question, “What has happened to Julia Kristeva?” we respond that she has lost interest in her former investigation of how semanalyse might inform conventional politics, but has otherwise remained theoretically consistent. Indeed, Rose herself suggests that Kristeva's “idea of social transformation has long approximated the idea of an analytic cure.”¹⁴ In a shift which to some appears as an endorsement of the status quo, Kristeva retains her semiotic approach to meaning, but no longer upholds a specific political position.

MATERNAL ABJECTION: A “HERETHICAL” POLITICS

It is Kristeva's promotion of motherhood which most anger her feminist critics. Indeed, can we really say that Kristeva has changed only little, given the insistence on motherhood which pervades her later writings? The reprinting of her essay, “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love confirms the importance which motherhood holds for Kristeva. This essay, which borrows its title from a Latin text by the same name and explores the Church's reverence for the Virgin Mary, explains why Kristeva deems mothering not only an important enterprise, but a profoundly ethical human undertaking. In fact, “Stabat Mater” was originally entitled “Herethique de l'Amour.” I believe that a closer analysis of this essay clarifies how a former member of the Tel Quel collective, for a while interested in Maoism, can now be so centrally focused on mothering.

The institution of motherhood assumes theoretical consistency with the rest of Kristeva's writings once we recognize its resonance with the concept of semanalyse. We recall the negative value which Kristeva assigns her semiotic approach to meaning: “[t]he semiotic activity … introduces wandering or fuzziness into language and … stems from the archaisms of the semiotic body.”¹⁵

For Kristeva, it is these “archaisms” which bridge a gap between her interest in language and the institution of motherhood; viz., between a semiotic approach to meaning and the empirical process of bearing and rearing a child. Pregnancy, birth, lactation, differentiation: all of these break down or disallow the physical and psychic boundaries between mother and child, and thus invoke the “wandering” or “fuzziness” of the negativity which Kristeva celebrates.¹⁶

For instance, the relationship between fetus and mother, two beings inextricably linked yet also distinct, invokes the dynamic between the semiotic and Symbolic realms upon which semanalyse focuses. Just as semanalyse challenges the binary oppositions which support the Symbolic's logic, so does motherhood disallow discrete categorizations between two beings, giving expression to a form of existence based on the transgression of already unclear boundaries. Motherhood allows for a literal enactment, a dramatic playing out of the semiotic disruption of Symbolic hegemony: it exists as a fundamentally negative enterprise which blurs the distinctions between self and other, thereby fueling the dionysian creativity of semanalyse. Because motherhood disallows the subject's unicity, it represents “a permanent calling into question”¹⁷ of language, culture, and human subjectivity. According to Kristeva, this allows the semiotic to challenge the very limits of the Symbolic.

This subversive blurring of distinctions, this eradication of discrete boundaries is disturbing and disruptive. Yet, as we shall see, it is also ethical. Maternal abjection, the reject of culture, contains a deeply moral dimension. “Stabat Mater” clarifies how both qualities can coexist in Kristeva's concept of the maternal.

Even before the appearance of Powers of Horror, “Stabat Mater,” first published in 1977, had explored the numerous ways in which the repressed semiotic, intimately bound up with the maternal body, expresses itself in culture. The memory of an existence which preceded one's acculturation, an existence relived through forms of expression which are immediate, bodily, and unstructured by language, forever informs one's acclimation to the cultural mandates of the Symbolic. According to Kristeva, there is always something primal, maternal, and “abject” which threatens the Law of the Father: the semiotic exists as a creative force, but is also disruptive, overwhelming, even terrifying in its ability to recall the archaic and unmediated in the face of cultural law and order. Hence the semiotic expresses itself not only through the aesthetic charm of poetic language, but in all that calls into question the limits of culture by invoking taboo: for instance death, incest, and scatology. Like Powers of Horror, “Stabat Mater” amply suggests that the semiotic realm of the abject maternal is as creative and life-affirming as it is disgusting, horrifying, and unpredictable. This negativity, Kristeva's abject maternal, proves subversive only if it resonates with the repressed, the unconscious, and the outside-of-language; this means that it assumes violent and terrifying connotations. Here, Kristeva clarifies the connection between the maternal pre-oedipal, abjection, and the limits of culture:

Abjection preserves what existed in the archaisms of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be—maintaining that night in which the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out. … Discomfort, unease, dizziness stemming from an ambiguity that, through the violence of a revolt against, demarcates a space out of which signs and objects arise.¹⁸

The pre-oedipal maternal, then, is creative and life-affirming, but also deeply unsettling. Rose terms Kristeva's semiotic “no ‘fun’.”¹⁹ This explains why the writings of those avant garde authors so celebrated by Kristeva are not merely charming, unusual, or creative in the ordinary sense. Rather, these writings reveal themselves as truly unsettling, for they seek to disturb, dismay, horrify, and even disgust the reader. Distinctly unconventional in both form and content, these texts always work against traditional prose, striving to carry their reader to language's “other side”—traverser, to use Kristeva's term—and to disrupt the typical notion of what literature “ought” to do.

Indeed, “Stabat Mater” illustrates the violent, disruptive aspects of the semiotic. Yet this essay also explains the ethical dimension of motherhood by demonstrating how pregnancy, gestation, and birth are processes which embody alterity, difference, and concern for the other. It does this by using textual style and format. Specifically, the essay presents a detailed account of the Church's regard for the Virgin Mary, an account which is intermittently interrupted by a diffused, free-flowing stream of consciousness alluding to Kristeva's own pregnancy and the birth of her son. Hence various short, frequently ungrammatical segments of prose dramatically disrupt and physically intervene throughout the longer, more conventional essay. In this way, the reader is literally presented with a smaller, inchoate “body” of text emerging from one that is larger, more commanding, and more easily accessible. There is a birth taking place, a woman suffering contractions, the disorderly semiotic violently pushing against the logic, order, and hegemony of the Symbolic. This birth, this heretical gesture of disobeying the law, is therefore ethical given that it pushes culture to its limits, forcing it to resist the totalizing claims to truth which characterize the Symbolic.

In its admission of jouissance, the maternal thus remains inherently recalcitrant; its abjection disallows the unicity, hierarchy, and hegemony which only the Law of the Father can ensure. Its “permanent calling into question” demands a recognition of difference, an awareness of the other. Hence Kristeva endorses motherhood because it so literally enacts the dissolution of unicity toward which semanalyse strives. “The mother calls herself as totality, as self, into question,” writes Jane Gallop of Kristeva's maternal, “because within ‘her’ is something she does not encompass, that goes beyond her, is other.”²⁰ Kristeva herself assures us that this ‘other,’ this outside-of-language, challenges the subject's very ability to hold itself together in speech:

Belief in the mother is rooted in fear, fascinated with a weakness—the weakness of language … [t]he immeasurable, unconfinable maternal body … is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh. And consequently a division of language—and it has always been so.²¹

Hence calling forth the weakness of language, so typical of semanalyse and commensurate with the post-structuralist enterprise, lends motherhood an ethical dimension inasmuch as it forces recognition of the other. The abject maternal remains inherently deconstructive, disallowing hierarchy and insisting that the unrepresentable, the unconscious, the outside-of-language be articulated within culture. This articulation may take numerous forms. For instance, Kristeva insists that the Virgin's milk and tears, alluded to in the traditional “Stabat Mater's” description of Mary grieving at the site of the Crucifixion, and in numerous paintings of her nursing the Christ Child, represent metaphors for non-speech, invoking the semiotic realm and the return of the repressed. Similarly, Kristeva claims that painting and music—two art forms of which Mary is the patron saint—give poignant expression to the abject maternal. “Stabat Mater” closes with an exhortation that we listen to Pergolesi's musical rendition of that Latin text, that we go beyond Symbolic speech into an art form wherein the abject maternal articulates itself.

Viewed in this light, Kristeva's insistence on the ethical underpinnings of motherhood appears consistent with even her earliest writings. While she has undeniably abandoned formal politics and retreated into the private realm, her commitment to the disruptive, deconstructive importance of the semiotic has not changed. Rather than focus on the connection between the psychic and social spheres, she now channels her investigation of semanalyse into an endorsement of motherhood given the latter's embodiment of the analytic processes she advocates. Of course, such an endorsement proves troubling to many feminists, who view it as a capitulation to the status quo. Feminist politics, they argue, should be “carried out in public, in groups, and with an eye toward making a political difference.”²² Yet if maternal abjection represents the site of semiotic inquiry, it indeed carries forward the work of semanalyse.

Does semanalyse make a political difference? It is certainly not carried out in public. I believe that Kristeva's writings can be faulted for consistently promoting an analytic enterprise too privileging of privatized meanings and individualized, idiosyncratic solutions. Yet she has always been a theorist primarily interested in bringing the psychic to bear on the social, and in exploring how the unconscious articulates itself in culture. Feminism cannot afford to become a discourse unattuned to such articulations.²³ In light of this fact, Kristeva's writings remain centrally important to feminist scholarship.

Notes

1. See Ann Rosalind Jones, “Julia Kristeva on Femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politics,” in Feminist Review, No. 18, November 1984, pp. 56-73; Jacqueline Rose, “Julia Kristeva—Take Two,” in Sexuality in the Field of Vision, New York: Verso Press, 1986, pp. 141-164; Jennifer Stone, “The Horrors of Power: A Critique of ‘Kristeva,’” in The Politics of Theory. Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature. July 1982. Colchester: University of Essex, 1983, pp. 38-48.

2. Rose, p. 141.

3. Quoted in Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, New York: Methuen and Company, Ltd., 1985, p. 168.

4. Tel Quel has transformed itself into L'Infini, a journal which rejects all politics as totalitarian, and which many regard as disappointingly in service to the status quo.

5. From “The System and the Speaking Subject,” quoted in Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 26-27/29.

6. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, p. 41.

7. Quoted in The Kristeva Reader, p. 154.

8. From About Chinese Women, quoted in The Kristeva Reader, p. 154.

9. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, translated by Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, p. 17/61.

10. Philip E. Lewis, “Revolutionary Semiotics,” in Diacritics, 4, no. 3, Fall, 1974, pp. 28-32.

11. Quoted in The Kristeva Reader, pp. 202-203.

12. Quoted from Jones, p. 56.

13. Rose, p. 164.

14. Rose, p. 147.

15. Jones, p. 59.

16. For a feminist analysis of the process of differentiation, see Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination, New York: Pantheon Books, 1988; Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1978; Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise, New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

17. Quoted from Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction, p.122.

18. Powers of Horror, p.10.

19. Rose, p.155.

20. Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction, p.123.

21. Quoted from The Kristeva Reader, p.175/177-178.

22. Jones, p.71.

23. For an excellent discussion of why feminism must remain “oppositional,” see Joan Cocks' The Oppositional Imagination: Feminism, Critique and Political Theory, New York: Routledge, 1989.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books. 1988.

Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: The University of California Press. 1978.

Cocks, Joan. The Oppositional Imagination: Feminism, Critique, and Political Theory. New York: Routledge. 1989.

Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Harper and Row. 1977.

Gallop, Jane. The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1982.

———. Reading Lacan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1985.

Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Julia Kristeva on Femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politics.” In Feminist Review, No. 18, November 1984, pp. 56-73.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Translated by Alice Jardine and Thomas Gora. New York: Columbia University Press. 1980.

———. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. 1982.

———. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. 1984.

———. Tales of Love. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. 1989.

Lewis, Philip E. “Revolutionary Semiotics.” In Diacritics, 4, no.3, Fall, 1974, pp. 28-32.

Moi, Toril, editor. The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia University Press. 1986.

———. Sexual/Textual Politics. New York: Methuen and Company, Ltd. 1985.

Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. New York: Verso Press. 1986.

Stanton, Domna. “Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva.” In The Poetics of Gender. Nancy K. Miller, editor. New York: Columbia University Press. 1986. pp. 157-182.

Stone, Jennifer. “The Horrors of Power: A Critique of ‘Kristeva.’” In The Politics of Theory. Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature. July 1982. Colchester: University of Essex, 1983. pp. 38-48.