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

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Spaltung - The Split

The philosophical, psychoanalytic, theological and hermeneutical works of Julia Kristeva present a paradigm of  multidisciplinarity in the good sense of the term. The synthetic approach of common problems substitutes their mere addition. Converging in the figure of Narcissus, the history of the self in the Western tradition embraces, from Plato to present times, all questions concerning the original split in the subject. Therefore, the need is to figure out the clinical and the critical sense of the splitting. The unattainability of the subject for itself leads to a series of reduplications. On the philosophical level, Kristeva borrows  the formula „two in one“ from Hannah Arendt, one of the heroines of female genius. Arendt stresses the Socratic definition of thinking considered as an lifelong ongoing dialogue within the subject.
What are the epistemological and moral implications of this dualism? Complicating matters even more, the Christian tradition, from Saint Paul to Augustine, identifies the abysmal dualism with the relation of man to God, grounded in gaps not in synthetic thinking. Breaking with this putative difference, Nietzsche discovers the double nature of the human will as its own power without overcoming its double nature. After all, the fundamental forces of the self: autonomy and heterogeneity, unity and plurality, command and obedience reappear in the history of literature throughout the centuries. Kristeva’s analysis of literature contains the most telling examples of this very structure.