Marriage as a Fine Art by Julia Kristeva

Author:Julia Kristeva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO021000, Biography & Autobiography/Social Scientists & Psychologists, PSY026000, Psychology/Movements/Psychoanalysis
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-12-20T05:00:00+00:00

It’s no use my trying to come back to life in French; for almost fifty years now my French taste has not always been able to resist the jolts of an early music coiled around a memory that is still vigilant. From these connected vessels there emerges a strange language, a stranger to itself, neither from here nor from there, a monstrous intimacy. Like the characters in Proust’s refound time, whose long years of voluntary and involuntary memories are embodied in immense spaces, I am a monster of the crossroads.

At the intersection of two languages, and of at least two lengths of time, I mold an idiom that seeks what is obvious so as to hollow out pathetic allusions there and, under the smooth guise of these French words polished like the stone of a holy water font, to uncover the dark gilt of Orthodox icons. Giant or dwarf, the monster who struggles out of them takes pleasure in never being content with itself, at the same time as it exasperates the natives—those of the country of origin as well as those of the receiving country.14

And now for a passage taken from Their Gaze Pierces Our Shadows, a collection of the letters between myself and Jean Vanier, the Catholic founder of L’Arche, which set up care homes for the disabled in 140 countries, back in 1964. When I arrived in France, as you witnessed, exile put me into the hospital. I got better thanks to you, among others. Here’s the text:

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