Time and Narrative as Subjects-in-process through Julia Kristeva\u27s Feminine Genius

This dissertation explores an overlooked resource in thinking the relationship between narrative and identity: Julia Kristeva\u27s intellectual biographies, the Female Genius Trilogy. I articulate a Kristevian account of narrative by reading the Trilogy, which focuses on the lives and work of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, an the French literary writer Colette, alongside Kristeva\u27s theoretical works and the texts of thinkers who have influenced her work. By situating the Trilogy within the trajectory of Kristeva\u27s thought, I explain that, through time, Kristeva has shifted her emphasis from revolution through poetic language, in which affective elements in language rupture the law-like structure of language and the symbolic order it constructs, to a conception of intimate revolt -- the questioning and displacement of the past that occurs by searching for the roots of identity -- which brings together time, narration, and poetic language. Kristeva distances herself from feminism as a mass movement in favor of an emphasis on the singularity of each individual, and although her focus in the Trilogy is on the singularity of each of her geniuses, her work illustrates that singularity only develops in affective, co-constructive relationships with others that are established through narration. These relationships entail an affective identification with an other that destabilizes identity, allowing access to the semiotic, affective, associations that underlie words and the unconscious timeless in which they are imbedded. By narrating this destabilization, the subject links the semiotic and symbolic aspects of language to linear time, which restabilizes identity and reworks the uncovered associations implicit in words. Because, for Kristeva, the subject is constructed from language through time, these alterations result in a restructuring of the subject\u27s affects and his or her relationship to language and the world it constructs. Kristeva\u27s biographical texts embody the realization of her overarching project because her interpretation of the lives and works of her geniuses draws out her own singularity and is an instance of intimate revolt since she constructs her own thoughts in part through her narration of these lives, making her narrative approach rooted in both theoretical insight and practice