ABSTRACT
The true, authentic and original, the one and only … ? Competing claims to represent the authentic Derrida and Kristeva abound. They tend to be made on the basis of context: Derrida and/or Kristeva need to be read in terms of French intellectual life, the history of philosophy, psychoanalysis and/or semiotics, in terms of their predecessors in these fields, their early work, the history of Tel Quel, French feminism, Russian formalism, Marxism, Judaism, Catholicism, etc. Readers making these claims tend to select their corpus from within the corpus of Derrida's/Kristeva's writings accordingly, favoring the philosophical or the literary, the early or the late, the semiological or the psychoanalytical. And alongside these claims there are often indications of other people's misappropriations.
