International Colloquium
30 Oct - 1 Nov 2009
Institute of Romance Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

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Arantzazu Saratxaga (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)
Birth´s Drama In Kristeva: The Uterine Membrane as the Origin of Strangeness

As you may know, Julia Kristeva has a notable political career, especially in the field of feminism, although her relations with feminist circles and movements in France was quite controversial. Kristeva was regarded as a key proponent of French feminism together with Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. Kristeva had a remarkable influence on feminism and feminist literary studies in the US and the UK. Kristeva made a famous disambiguation of three types of feminism in "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul (1993), while rejecting the first two, including that of Simone de Beauvoir, her stands are sometimes considered as rejective of feminism in common; in fact, Kristeva tried to propose the idea of multiple sexual identities against the joined code of "unified feminine language". Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory and feminism after publishing her first book Semeiotikè in 1969. But Kristeva’s biography and political life, far from being limited to feminist studies extends to a rich intellectual territory. Julia Kristeva  is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. To speak about Kristeva and politics doesn’t mean to speak about Kristeva’s political activities but rather about political accuracy, implication or political reading of the French philosopher’s thoughts.  In this seminar I would like to develop a political (polis) drift using two explanative instruments: semiotics and psychoanalysis. One of Kristeva's most important propositions is the semiotic. For Kristeva, the semiotic is closely related to the infantile pre-Oedipal referred to in the works of Freud and mainly Melanie Klein and the British Object Relation psychoanalysis, and to the Lacanian (pre-mirror stage). It is an emotional field, tied to our instincts, which dwells in the fissures and prosody of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words. In this sense, the semiotic opposes the symbolic, which corresponds words with meaning in a stricter, mathematical sense. She is also noted for her work on the concepts of abjection (a notion that relates to a primary psychological force of rejection, directed toward the mother-figure), and intertextuality.  She tries to build a theory of the Otherness from the literary and psychoanalytical studies of the Uncanny. The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche -- literally, "un-home-ly") is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange. The concept of the Uncanny was later elaborated on and developed by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay The Uncanny, which also draws on the work of Hoffmann (whom Freud refers to as the "unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature").