I came across the thought of Julia Kristeva (1941) through her studies of Saint Teresa of Ávila. Her fascination with this universal mystic led her to investigate Teresa’s life and work for years. Of Teresa, she said that she “devoted herself to the constant overcoming of herself.” Of her literary work, she affirmed that “she thinks in a singular way, with her whole being and her vocabulary.” Moreover, she credited Teresa with having discovered the secrets of writing five centuries before us, by “clarifying the strange experience that is thought at the confines of the senses, body and soul together, and playing with language to be in accord with the unspeakable.”

As a result of the innovative contribution that this French thinker of Bulgarian origin injected into the knowledge of the nun from Ávila, I discovered the long academic journey that, given her ability to not stagnate and evolve according to the dynamics of each moment, she had to face as a university professor, linguist, psychoanalyst, writer and philosopher, until becoming very influential in the international field of semiology, cultural theory and gender politics.

Although her image as an intellectual muse of a bygone era may be distant, her cosmopolitanism as a lady admired for her professional and personal achievements remains undiminished. Her more than forty published books, numerous honorary doctorates from American and European universities, and prestigious awards (in addition to academic prizes, she holds the French Legion of Honor) attest to this. Undoubtedly, her insatiable curiosity, evident since her youth when, after earning her doctorate with a dissertation on the origins of the French novel, she contributed to the journal  Tel Quel , has played a significant role .

At that time, this prestigious publication brought together renowned specialists from various fields of research with the aim of opening new avenues of inquiry, and it quickly became a leading voice of the French literary avant-garde. After its exploration of May ’68, Maoism, and structuralism, its research focus shifted around 1980. Since then, it has distanced itself from the major paradigms of social sciences and literary theory that shook the academic landscape of the 1960s and 70s.

Drawn to everyday matters, her thinking turned to issues that may seem intellectually unremarkable but are vitally effective, touching on the nerve centers of people’s daily lives. Her humanistic concerns offer analyses of a wide variety of themes based on her artistic and personal experiences: love, motherhood, female intimacy, melancholy, depression, the experience of being a foreigner, biographical and autobiographical writing, the rights of women, the disabled, the oppressed… And much of this she expresses in the form of beautiful literature, for which she feels an irrepressible passion.

The commitment of her youthful political radicalism she transferred to her mature work as a psychoanalyst, in her attempt to transform the world—on a microscopic and utterly transcendental scale —  through the reconciliation of each individual (“freedom is conjugated in the singular”) with themselves. She knows that all clinical histories ultimately end up speaking of love.

In this sense, he has considered that, if the great moments of Western civilization have been a resurgence of love, one of the aspects of our current crisis is the non-existence of a homogeneous love code, so that each person lives in different times, so that, although we are all citizens of this century, we do not all live in the same century: there are those who are in the 13th century, others in the 15th, etc.

Given her avowed atheism and her knowledge of theological matters, I am deeply moved—as a Catholic—by her acknowledgment of the importance of loving discourse in the constitution of Christianity (“everyone knows that the Christian religion is a religion of love. Churches are full of people who go there to hear that they are loved”). Likewise, I am pleased that, in the face of the current spiritual deficit, she maintains her conviction that “to the horizontality of the internet, marketing, and instant information, we should add the verticality of the inner sanctuary.” Thank you, Julia, for this vision of our faith!

Pedro Paricio. Give me three minutes