Julia Kristeva Quotes

The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.

Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components – that is doubtless a way to curb mourning.

When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The "sublime" object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.

Abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it --- on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.

[the abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the "I" does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence.

Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation

Or should one recognize that one becomes a foreigner in another country because one is already a foreigner from within?

That faith be analyzable does not necessarily imply a method for getting by without it. . . .

The sadness that overwhelms us, the retardation that paralyzes us, are also a shield—sometimes the last one—against madness

To be deprived of parents - is that where freedom starts?

Can the beautiful be sad? Is beauty inseparable from the ephemeral and hence from mourning? Or else is the beautiful object the one that tirelessly returns following destructions and wars in order to bear witness that there is survival after death, that immortality is possible?

The other that will guide you and itself through this dissolution is a rhythm, text, music, and within language, a text. But what is the connection that holds you both together? Counter-desire, the negative of desire, inside-out desire, capable of questioning (or provoking) its own infinite quest. Romantic, filial, adolescent, exclusive, blind and Oedipal: it is all that, but for others. It returns to where you are, both of you, disappointed, irritated, ambitious, in love with history, critical, on the edge and even in the midst of its own identity crisis; a crisis of enunciation and of the interdependence of its movements, an instinctual drive that descends in waves, tearing apart the symbolic thesis.

He is a foreigner, he is from nowhere, from everywhere, citizen of the world, cosmopolitan. Do not send him back to his origins.

Since he has nothing, since he is nothing, he can sacrifice everything.

To be of no account to others. No one listens to you.

Music, rhythm, rigadoon, without end, for no reason.

Pregnancy = "the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality - such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity.

The foreigner’s friends, aside from bleeding hearts who feel obliged to do good, could only be those who feel foreign to themselves.

During that course in which "I" become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit.

The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, "fear"- a fluid haze an elusive clamminess- no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.

The clean and proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into banished, fascination into shame. Then, forgotten time crops up suddenly and condenses into a flash of lightning an operation that, if it were though out, would involve bringing together the two opposite terms but, on account of that flash, is discharged like thunder. The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth.

And nevertheless, no, I have nothing to say to them, to my parents. Nothing. Nothing and everything, as always. If I tried – out of boldness, through luck, or in distress – to share with them some of the violence that causes me to be so totally on my own, they would not know where I am, who I am, what it is, in others, that rubs me the wrong way.

Já não há histórias de amor. No entanto, as mulheres desejam-nas e os homens também, quando não se envergonham de ser ternos e tristes como as mulheres. Uns e outros têm pressa de ganhar e de morrer. Apanham aviões, comboios suburbanos, rápidos de alta velocidade, ligações. Não têm tempo para olhar para aquela acácia cor-de-rosa que estende os ramos para as nuvens intervaladas de seda azul ensolarada (…) Bem se vê que não há tempo sem amor. O tempo é amor pelas pequenas coisas, pelos sonhos, pelos desejos. Não temos tempo porque não temos amor suficiente. Perdemos o nosso tempo quando não amamos. Esquecemos o tempo passado quando nada temos a dizer a ninguém. Ou então estamos prisioneiros de um tempo falso que não passa.

Along with the sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and the father who proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire; "I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it. "I" expel it. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself with the same motion through which "I" claim to establish myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see the "I" am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death, During that course I'm which "I" become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering the violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it abreacts. It abjects

The depressed narcissist mourns not an Object but the Thing. Let me posit the "Thing" as the real that does not lend itself to signification, the center of attraction and repulsion, seat of the sexuality from which the object of desire will become separated... the Thing is an imagined sun, bright and black at the same time.

But by the way, who is the murderer? The one who does not know my relatives, or myself, as I erect my new life like a fragile mausoleum where their shadowy figure is integrated, like a corpse, at the source of my wandering?

For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, fold-able, and catastrophic. A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines- for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject- constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding.

One who is happy being a cosmopolitan shelters a shattered origin in the night of his wandering.

How can I be without border?

We found so much to say, to share, to learn.... For it wasn't just the Marquis de Sade profile and the sporty thighs-and-calves that seduced me. It was even more, perhaps, or certainly just as much, the speed at which you used to read, and still do.

Living in a piecemeal and accelerated space and time, he often has trouble acknowledging his own physiognomy; left without a sexual, subjective, or moral identity, this amphibian is a being of boundaries, a borderline, or a "false self"--a body that acts, often without even the joys of such performative drunkenness. Modern man is losing his soul, but he does not know it, for the psychic apparatus is what registers representations and their meaningful values for the subject. Unfortunately, that darkroom needs repair.

The questioning of any and all entities, including belief and its objects, is one of Christianity's most impressive legacies; and humanism, its rebellious child, must not be prevented from developing this legacy [ «et l’humanisme, son enfant rebelle, ne saurait être empêché de développer ce legs. » ].

La teoría intimida. Una de las características más descorazonadoras de la teoría actual es que no tiene fin. No es algo que se pueda llegar a dominar, no es un grupo cerrado de textos que se puedan aprender para "saber teoría". Es un muestrario inconexo de escritos que crece sin cesar, pues tanto los recién llegados como los veteranos critican las directrices anteriores defendiendo las contribuciones teóricas de nuevos autores o redescubriendo autores anteriores que en su momento habían quedado al margen. En este escenario intimidador, el protagonismo pasa sin cesar a mano de nuevos autores: "¿Cómo? ¡No has leído a Lacan! ¿Y cómo pretendes hablar de poesía sin tener en cuenta el estadio del espejo en la constitución del sujeto?", o bien, "¿Cómo puedes escribir sobre la novela victoriana sin recurrir a la explicación foucaultiana del despliegue de la sexualidad y la histerización del cuerpo de la mujer sin olvidar la demostración que hizo Gayatri Spivak de cómo afecta el colonialismo a la construcción del sujeto de la metrópolis?". Actualmente, la teoría es como una sentencia diabólica que condena a leer obras difíciles de campos no familiares, en la que el completar una tarea no supone un respiro sino una nueva asignatura pendiente: "¿Spivak? Claro, pero... ¿has leído la crítica que le hizo Benita Parry, y la respuesta posterior de Spivak?" La imposibilidad de dominarla es una de las causas más importantes de la resistencia a la teoría. No importa cuánto creas saber; nunca sabrás con certeza si "tienes que leer" a Jean Baudrillard, Mijail Bajtin, Walter Benjamin, Hélène Cixous, C. L. R. James, Melanie Klein o Julia Kristeva o bien si puedes olvidarlos "sin peligro". (Dependerá, claro, de quién seas tú y de quién quieras ser.) Gran parte de la hostilidad contra la teoría proviene sin duda de que admitir su importancia es comprometerse sin término límite a quedar en una posición en la que siempre habrá cosas importantes que no sepamos. Pero eso es señal de que estamos vivos.

The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you—it is now here, jetted, abjected, into “my” world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue’s full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away.

When the starry sky, a vista of open seas or a stained glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things that I see, hear, or think. The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be. As soon as I perceive it, as soon as I name it, the sublime triggers—it has always already triggered—a spree of perceptions and words that expands memory boundlessly. I then forget the point of departure and find myself removed to a secondary universe, set off from the one where “I” am—delight and loss. Not at all short of but always with and through perception and words, the sublime is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible bounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination.

[Single or lesbian motherhood] can be seen as [one] of the most violent forms taken by the rejection of the symbolic ... as well as one of the most fervent divinizations of maternal power - all of which cannot help but trouble an entire moral and legal order without, however, proposing an alternative to it

Sadness... is a kind of sign or representation – not a verbal one, but one inscribed by one’s whole demeanor. As is the case with all moods or affects (including anguish, fear, and joy), sadness signals to any observer that some kind of energy displacement, stimulation, conflict or transfer has occurred within the subject.

The depressed person is like an orphan in the symbolic realm.

The realm of signs gives the subject a sense, however fictive, of being an “I.

Melancholia is a noncommunicable grief.

Without the semiotic, our language would have no force; it would be devoid of meaning.

No living, speaking being is immune from semiotic disruptions. Moreover, no speaking being could function sanely unless it expresses the semiotic in some way.

Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the Judeo-Christian compound by means of a unilateral call to return to what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same Celinian anti-Semitic fantasy? And this is so because, as I have tried to explain earlier the writings of the chosen people have selected a place, in the most determined manner, on that untenable crest of manness seen as symbolic fact—which constitutes abjection.

One cannot discuss "women's ways of knowing" without mentioning écriture féminine, a French school of language theory whose name was coined by Hélène Cixous. Dating back to the early 1970s, it counts among its other leading lights Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig, who argue that language is by natural masculinist, and that women, when they use it, are wielding an instrument that is foreign to them and that was invented as a means of suppressing them. Therefore it's the task of women to place their own stamp on language, an act that the "French feminists," as they're commonly called, associate with the female body. (Cixous, for example, compares "the desire to write" to "the gestation drive.") It's fair to say that these women's ideas don't easily translate into clear French, let alone clear English.

Geniul" este o invenţie terapeutică ce ne împiedică să murim de egalitate într-o lume fără viaţă de apoi.

This is Radical Exoticism: the rule governing the world. It is not a law, for the law is the universal principle of understanding, the regulated interplay of differences, moral, political and economic rationality. It is a rule - and, like all rules, implies an arbitrary predestination. Consider languages, none of which is reducible to any other. Languages are predestined, each according to its own rules, its own arbitrary determinants, its own implacable logic. Each obeys the laws of communication and exchange, certainly, but at the same time it answers to an indestructible internal coherence; a language as such is, and must forever remain, fundamentally untranslatable into any other language. This explains why all languages are so 'beautiful' - precisely because they are foreign to one another. A law is never ineluctable: it is a concept, founded upon a consensus. A rule, by contrast, is indeed ineluctable, because it is not a concept but a form that orders a game. Seduction illustrates this well. Eros is love - the force of attraction, of fusion, of conjunction. Seduction is the far more radical figure of disjunction, distraction, illusion and diversion, a figure that alters essence and meaning, alters identity and the subject. And, contrary to common belief, entropy is on the side not of universal disjunction but of conjunction and fusion, of love and understanding - on the side of the proper use of differences. Seduction - exoticism - is an excess of the other, of otherness, the vertiginous appeal of what is 'more different than different' : this is what is irreducible - and this is the true source of energy. In this predestined world of the Other, everything comes from elsewhere - happy or unhappy events, illnesses, even thoughts themselves. All imperatives flow from the non-human - from gods, beasts, spirits, magic. This is a universe of fatality, not of psychology. According to Julia Kristeva we become estranged from ourselves by internalizing the other, and this estrangement from ourselves takes the form - among others - of the unconscious. But in the world of fatality the unconscious does not exist. There is no universal form of the unconscious, as psychoanalysis claims, and the only alternative to unconscious repression is fatality - the imputation of everything to a completely nonhuman agency, an agency which is external to the human and delivers us from it.

The work of art that insures the rebirth of its author and its reader or viewer is one that succeeds in integrating the artificial language it puts forward (ne style, new composition, surprising imagination) and the unnamed agitations [Émois] of an omnipotent self that ordinary social and linguistic usage always leave somewhat orphaned or plunged into mourning. Hence such a fiction, if it isn't an antidepressant, is at least, a survival, a resurrection.

truth, matricide, which Klein was the first to have the courage to consider, is, along with envy and gratitude,

Does one write under any other condition than being possessed by abjection, in an indefinite catharsis?

We have difficulty welcoming strangers because of the difficulty we have accepting the stranger within, the unconscious.

To create and maintain a psychic space or inner zone, speaking beings need to revolt against the culture of the show, against rigid symbolic structures, and against homogeneous identities.

On the social level, the normalizing order is far from perfect and fails to support the excluded... When the excluded have no culture of revolt and must content themselves with ideologies, with shows and entertainments that far from satisfy the demand of pleasure, they become rioters.

Happiness exists only at the price of a revolt. None of us has pleasure without confronting an obstacle, prohibition, authority, or law that allows us to realize ourselves as autonomous and free.

There is a very odd logic in society-as-anesthetic: it fulfills desires while simultaneously stripping the subject’s capacity to desire.

Signifiance is the meaning produced by the semiotic in conjunction with the symbolic.

our most basic myth would seem to be not Oedipus’s patricide, but matricide and violence against women. Where is Cinderella’s mother, and where is Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother? The philosopher Julia Kristeva has explained the drive toward matricide as a kind of original, generative anger, expressing a need to destroy the mother, the origin place, to become an individual self. This is messier than an Oedipal reading of history, as the will to matricide is born in confusion and creates only chaos. As Nelson explains, the maternal element returns “via horror, repulsion, the uncanny, haunting, melancholia, depression, guilt.

Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic--it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.