Editing Julia Kristeva (section)

==Scholarly reception==
[[Roman Jakobson]] said that "Both readers and listeners, whether agreeing or in stubborn disagreement with Julia Kristeva, feel indeed attracted to her contagious voice and to her genuine gift of questioning generally adopted 'axioms,' and her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question marks."<ref>''Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art'', Columbia University Press, 1980 (In Preface)</ref>

[[Roland Barthes]] comments that "Julia Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the last prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by, could be take &#91;sic&#93; pride in; what she displaces is the already-said, the déja-dit, i.e., the instance of the signified, i.e., stupidity; what she subverts is authority -the authority of monologic science, of filiation."<ref>Roland Barthes, ''The Rustle of language'', p 168</ref> 
 
[[Ian Almond]] criticizes Kristeva's ethnocentrism. He cites [[Gayatri Spivak]]'s conclusion that Kristeva's book ''About Chinese Women'' "belongs to that very eighteenth century [that] Kristeva scorns" after pinpointing "the brief, expansive, often completely ungrounded way in which she writes about two thousand years of a culture she is unfamiliar with".<ref>Ian Almond, ''The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard'', I.B.Tauris, 2007, p. 132</ref> Almond notes the absence of sophistication in Kristeva's remarks concerning the Muslim world and the dismissive terminology she uses to describe its culture and believers.<ref>Ian Almond, ''The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard'', I.B.Tauris, 2007</ref> He criticizes Kristeva's opposition which juxtaposes "Islamic societies" against "democracies where life is still fairly pleasant" by pointing out that Kristeva displays no awareness of the complex and nuanced debate ongoing among women theorists in the Muslim world, and that she does not refer to anything other than the Rushdie fatwa in dismissing the entire Muslim faith as "reactionary and persecutory".<ref>Ian Almond, ''The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard'', I.B.Tauris, 2007, pp. 154–55</ref>

In ''[[Impostures intellectuelles]]'' (1997), physics professors [[Alan Sokal]] and [[Jean Bricmont]] devote a chapter to Kristeva's use of mathematics in her early writings. They argue that Kristeva fails to show the relevance of the mathematical concepts she discusses to linguistics and the other fields she studies, and that no such relevance exists.<ref>[[Alan Sokal]] and [[Jean Bricmont]], ''Intellectual Impostures'', Profile Books, 1998, p. 47</ref>