ABSTRACT
Julia Kristeva is one of the most original thinkers of our time. She is one of very few philosophers for whom the speaking being becomes a crucial constellation for understanding oral and written literature, politics and national identity, sexuality, culture, and nature. Where other thinkers might see these fields as separate domains, Kristeva shows that the speaking being is “a strange fold” between them all – a place where inner drives are discharged into language, where sexuality interplays with thought, where the body and culture meet. Under Kristeva’s gaze, no border stands untouched by the forces on either side of it. To live is to be in a state of change, to be nearly under siege from a variety of forces. This is one reason why much of her work focuses on the “borderline” patients who frequent psychoanalysts’ couches. They manifest the very same conditions we all do when the affective dimensions of living disrupt our even mental keel. Kristeva’s work shows how what we call subjectivity is always a tenuous accomplishment, a dynamic process never completed.
