Edith Kurzweil
AN INTERVIEW WITH JULIA KRISTEVA
EK:
When I first knew you, you had written about women in China,
and you were very involved with the publication
Tel Quel.
You were
primarily a writer. Soon you were very much interested in questions
of semiotics and deconstruction. What made you become a psycho–
analyst?
JK:
Well, as soon as I began working in France , I got interested in
literary criticism and in the feminist and political issues you just
mentioned. This led me to try to analyze some of the "avant-garde
writing," which, I believe, begins with Mallarme at the end of the
nineteenth century and goes through surrealism.
(Tel Quel
is an ex–
tension of this movement .) So, in order to apprehend the formal
construction and logic of a work, and of the human experience it ex–
presses, I wanted to understand the psychological functions of lan–
guage in critical situations . Such situations for the most part occur
before language exists - in infants or in the disturbed language of
psychosis . I then tried to analyze the acquisition of language and
psychotic language as critical discourses. For neutral description or
observation are not enough : I had to involve myself to understand
how the people I hear are contributing to the transformation of a
relationship. Therefore, I went into psychoanalytic treatment and
wanted to become a psychoanalyst. This was my intellectual motiva–
tion, but there was a whole range of personal motivations, such as
living in exile, not belonging to a culture or to my native language.
This is a common situation in the modern world , where we often are
strangers in exile and live in hostile surroundings. For me this situa–
tion was painful, and thus it pushed me to know more about myself,
about exile as more than a sociological fact, as part of my psychic
structure: some people choose to be foreigners not only in response
to political pressures but because they have never felt at home any–
where . Psychoanalysis helps in understanding this situation.
EK:
Are you saying that your own personal history pushed you both
towards understanding and studying French literature and, then,
towards understanding yourself via psychoanalysis?
JK:
Yes.
EK:
Why, I wonder, don't more people do that? After all, so many
people have been in similar situations and don't go into psychoanal-
