Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Born in Bulgaria in 1941, Julia Kristeva grew up in an intellectual family. Her father was a practicing Orthodox Christian despite periods of religious oppression by the Bulgarian communist government. Her mother, on the other hand, was a Darwinian atheist. Kristeva attended a Dominican school staffed by French-speaking nuns and later the Alliance Française. After attending university in Bulgaria, she won a research fellowship to study in France, and she moved to Paris in 1965. She studied with some of the most important French scholars of the day and became part of the influential “Tel Quel group,” made up of philosophers and critics who published in the Tel Quel literary journal. In 1967, she married Phillippe Sollers, a novelist and the founder of Tel Quel.

Although Kristeva’s early works were in the field of linguistics, where she distinguished herself with her exploration of the Semiotic as opposed to Symbolic order and introduced the concept of the subject-in-process, her interests and research were wide-ranging, and she soon turned to psychoanalysis as her primary field. In addition, she quickly established herself as a force in structuralist and poststructuralist philosophy.

Kristeva is a prolific writer and has published work in fields such as linguistics, literary criticism, cultural analysis, art, politics, and feminist theory.