ABSTRACT
Julia Kristeva's life and career are marked by paradox. She is often called a "French feminist", although she is neither French nor, according to some of her harsher critics, feminist. Born in Bulgaria in 1941, three years before the Soviet takeover in September 1944, Kristeva was raised in a family attentive to music, literature, art, and religion. Because they were not Communist Party members, her family members were denied access to the educational system of the privileged "red bourgeoisie". Even in the early phase of her career in linguistics, psychoanalysis was prominent in Kristeva's work. Kristeva's background in linguistics provides an important foundation for her psychoanalytic theory of the self: She incorporates semiotics and psychoanalysis, emphasizing language or speech as a crucial component of subjectivity. Kristeva describes this destabilization inherent in the "subject in process" in terms of two "orders": the symbolic and the semiotic.
