Work
After joining the 'Tel Quel group' founded by Philippe Sollers, Kristeva focused on the politics of language and became an active member of the group. She trained in psychoanalysis, and earned her degree in 1979. In some ways, her work can be seen as trying to adapt a psychoanalytic approach to the poststructuralist criticism. For example, her view of the subject, and its construction, shares similarities with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. However, Kristeva rejects any understanding of the subject in a structuralist sense; instead, she favors a subject always "in process" or "in crisis." In this way, she contributes to the poststructuralist critique of essentialized structures, whilst preserving the teachings of psychoanalysis. She travelled to China in the 1970s and later wrote About Chinese Women (1977).
Read more about this topic: Julia Kristeva
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Oh sure, everyone goes back to the earth at some point, but life itself is a thread that is never broken, never lost. Do you know why? Because each man makes a knot in the thread during his lifetime: it is the work he has done and that’s what gives life to life in the long stretch of time: the usefulness of man on this earth.”
—Jacques Roumain (1907–1945)
“Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)