Julia Kristeva interviewed by Vassiliki Kolocotroni

I met Julia Kristeva at the University of Paris VII, where she teaches a course as a member of the Faculty of Sciences of Texts and Documents. I have followed her work over a number of years and I have been especially interested in her writing on the literary and political avant-garde which has informed a large part of my doctoral thesis. In her analysis of the work of Mallarmé and Lautréamont and of its context, I saw the possibility of a critical reading of modernist texts, based on an interaction with - and a continuation of - modern terms and concerns. The intertextual relationship of linguistic, psychoanalytic and political discourses has shaped the theoretical outlook of Kristeva's work and is an ongoing commitment. As a theorist, analyst, intellectual and, since recently, a novelist, Kristeva inhabits a space of multiple allegiances. The following discussion may show that these are manifestations of a consistent critical concern rather than expressions of a specific and specialized interest. In answering my questions, Kristeva offered her views on poetic language and the text, on writing and its connotations and effect in a personal and political context, on love and sexual difference and on the role of the intellectual in the currently changing — and challenging — space which s/he is called to occupy in western societies