Entretien de François Richard avec Julia Kristeva sur Dostoïevski face à la mort ou le sexe hanté du langage

Julia Kristeva, responding to the questions of François Richard, explains the origin of her book on Dostoyevsky, and then goes on to develop her thinking at the frontiers of psychoanalysis and literature, drawing on her double experience as a novelist and psychoanalyst. Employing intertextual writing, she explores the polyphony in which the Dostoyevskian ego is scattered and reunited around a complex split. She proposes innovative metapsychological hypotheses on the lability and movement of a plurality of splits that divide and constitute the human being – the speaking subject – prior to repression, in an infantile sexual burgeoning entangled with adult passions. The solution is sublimation, if we want to avoid crime and perversion and curb epileptic seizures. The sublimatory processes of the great novelist are illuminated in their relationship to orthodox religion, where emotional submission is required, but where at the same time a multiple and creative origin is assumed. This is followed by reflections on our current historical situation, where the West and Russia are torn apart, as well as an invitation to listen to the “organless eroticism” of Dostoyevsk’s language as a solution for our 21st century, which is plagued by unbinding and the death drive.