Session Minutes on Kristeva Julia

University of Zurich        Nadzhyie Velishaieva

English department         Session minutes on J.Kristeva

Dr.des. Elizabeth Kollmann        Session 10

“Methods & Theory”: Reading Critical Theories        20.11.2015

 Julia Kristeva (born 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a professor at the University Paris Diderot. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory and feminism after publishing her first book, Semeiotikè, in 1969. Her sizable body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. She is among the prominent figures in structuralist thought, while her works have also been recognized as having an important place in post-structuralism.

An abject

1. It is something what disturbs our identity system.
2. It is part of us. We can’t get rid of it.
3. It is the place for a meaning collapses, the distinction between life and death.
4. It is something that disturbs us, but in the same way fascinates us. The abject is important for us to become individuals.
5. It is something like rejection, for the borders of our subjectivity.

   A subjective horror one, and therefore one’s body, experiences when one is confronted with what she terms one’s “corporeal reality,” or a breakdown in the distinction between what is self and what is other. Kristeva claims that within the boundaries of what one defines as subject – a part of oneself – and object – something that exists independently of oneself – there resides pieces that wereonce categorized as a part of oneself or one’s identity that has since been rejected – the abject. The concept of abjection is best described as the process by which one separates their sense of self – be that physical and biological, social or cultural – from that which they consider intolerable and infringes upon their ‘self’, otherwise known as the abject. The abject is, as such, the “me that is not me”.

Subject’s development

When the baby is born it doesn’t have any borders.

1. Semiotic chora- the oneness of a person with the surrounding (when the baby is born he/she doesn’t understand him/herself like a separate individual person).
2. Thetic break- that moment, when the child realizes, if the using of language helps to give the message to surrounding. He/she realizes that it’s a separate being. An abjection- are borders. From Kristeva's psychoanalytic perspective, abjection is done to the part of ourselves that we exclude: the mother. We must abject the maternal, the object which has created us, in order to construct an identity
3. The mirror stage- a child recognizes (6-18 months) that he/she is something separate, complete.
4. The symbolic realm- the time, when we are starting to use language, or different times of norms and lows. For to become the proper subjects of society.

Art instead of religion

   An abject (according to Kristeva) is always present, and that’s not good for a subject. We need always to push away the things, which are not good for us. Religion gave us the borders for what is good and what is bad. But now religion has gone. And for to replace it we have an art. Now we are not saying to everything: that’s wrong. We are trying to question the abject.

Conclusion

   An abject it is something what we will always have in our life. It is a part of ourselves; it’s something what we are always pushing away for to become a subject. It is something that after all fascinates us.