Revolution in Poetic Language

"Revolution and Time does for Julia Kristeva's life and work what she accomplished in her own biographies of Colette, Hanna Arendt, and Melanie Klein. It considers her life and intellectual development in the context of the significant social and cultural upheavals of the second half of the twentieth century, which still resonate today. Beginning with her early years in Bulgaria and her communist, Orthodox Christian, and Thracian Orphic influences and her training in linguistics and psychoanalysis and subsequent academic career in France (and at Columbia University), Miglena Nikolchina shows how both her theoretical writings and her fiction have been shaped by avant-garde art and literature and their potential for both personal and social transformation. She traces the turning points in her thinking resulting from her encounters with the work of Bakhtin, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Roman Jakobson, Judith Butler, and others and how they shaped her influential contributions to poststructuralism, semiosis, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, and (through her concept of transhumanization) twenty-first-century technological advances in electronic art and artificial intelligence. The recent spy scandal will also be addressed; Kristeva claims that the dossiers shared by the Bulgarian government are in fact records of its surveillance of her"--