The career of one of the leading intellectuals of the generation of the 1960s, Julia Kristeva, offers us an occasion to examine more in detail the constitution of new power-ideas. Towards the end of 1966, the Bulgarian linguist Julia Kristeva arrived in Paris to do graduate work at the Ecole pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in the literary sociology seminar of another émigré, the Romanian-born sociologist of literature Lucien Goldmann. At the same time, Kristeva also began to participate in Roland Barthes’s seminar, as she later recalled:

Two years later Kristeva published an article about Mikhail Bakhtin in Critique (Critique, April 1968), a journal edited by Georges Bataille until his death in 1962 that introduced foreign books to the French reading public (Patron 2003). With this article, Kristeva brought Bakhtin’s postformalism to the West. Bakhtin’s name was undoubtedly already familiar in expert circles, but Kristeva must be credited with bringing him to wider intellectual consciousness. Kristeva’s timing was right, and she served to reinforce the formalist and postformalist fashion that had already begun in Paris. Kristeva made an immediate and powerful impression on Barthes. Barthes announced that he was an admirer of Kristeva and that they were friends: Kristeva had taught Barthes as much as he had taught Kristeva. Barthes described Kristeva’s book Séméiotiké (Kristeva 1969a) as follows:

When Barthes in 1973 served as one of the opponents at Kristeva’s Ph.D. defense, he refused to comment on Kristeva’s work (Buleu 1973: 15, Encrevé 1987). He regularly published reviews of Kristeva’s works in journals like Critique.