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At the Risk of Thinking: An Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva is a biography of the renowned philosopher, semiotician, psychoanalyst, novelist, activist and prolific writer. This biography is authored by Alice Jardine, professor of French literature, post-structuralist and feminist theory and Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. Jardine first met
Kristeva at Columbia University when she was a student there in the 1970's and was Kristeva's research assistant. This was the beginning of a professional and personal relationship that has spanned decades. The book was edited by Mari Ruti, Distinguished Professor of Critical Theory, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Toronto.
Prior to reading this biography, I encountered Kristeva's work through two of her 45 books, Black Sun , a book about depression, and Powers of Horror , an exploration of power and otherness, which introduces the concept of “abjection.” In my search to make sense of myself as a mother of very young children this concept made a lasting impression on me. “Abjection” originated in Kristeva's own experiences as a mother of an infant, and as she returned to Klein and Freud, she found the origins and fear of the “other” and the “foreign” as originating in the pre-oedipal stage “where there is no subject, no object, just attraction and rejection.” This instability between subject and object exists between mother and infant:
This in between state that pulls us in through fascination but then makes us want to spit it out can become frightening. In the adult subject it can lead to the kind of defensiveness… the desire to no longer live “at the border” but to retreat within, to defend oneself (and those like oneself), and to exile (when not to eradicate) the scapegoat seen as causing the invasion of impurity. (p. 196)
Kristeva applied this concept in her study of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a famed French novelist and an antisemite who advocated alliance with Nazi Germ