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For the uninitiated, reading Julia Kristeva's New Maladies of the Soul is a daunting experience. She is a “difficult” writer, and many readers will conclude that their inability to understand Kristeva's latest book must be due to their own intellectual deficiencies. The author of numerous studies published by major university presses, Kristeva is a leading French intellectual, a renowned practicing psychoanalyst and Professor of Literature and Humanities at the University of Paris. Her wide-ranging familiarity with history, politics, literature, linguistics, cinema, and psychoanalysis requires a reader who is equally learned—and, in truth, few readers have the training or intellectual equipment to appreciate her forays into so many different disciplines. If Kristeva's psychoanalytic studies do not pose the same challenge that Joyce's convoluted novels posed to unsuspecting readers earlier in the century—exasperated by readers' complaints that they did not understand Finnegans Wake, Joyce noted that it had taken him 17 years to write the novel, and that anyone who wished to understand it had to devote a lifetime—New Maladies of the Soul nevertheless requires years of study, if only to understand the poststructural tradition upon which it is built.
And yet ambiguities abound in New Maladies of the Soul which no amount of rereading can clarify or resolve. As if to anticipate readers' difficulties, Ross Guberman concedes in the Translator's Note that while he has attempted to make his translation as clear and readable as possible, even to the point of occasionally sacrificing Kristeva's “syntactic or stylistic idiosyncrasies for the sake of lucidity and rhetorical ease,” he has been obliged to use her highly technical psychoanalytic and semiological terminology. “Although this vocabulary should not pose a problem for those