Kristeva’s Social Theory: A Lacanian Critique for Education
This research aims to provide a symptomatic reading of the work of Julia Kristeva. A symptomatic reading is one that constructs the problematic or the unsaid of the text. As a symptomatic reader, I attempt to occupy a position within a theoretical discourse that interrogates the texts by Kristeva and those that surround her work. In doing so, my aim is to make visible the suppressed and excluded discourses within Kristevan theory and which have enabled that theory to make sense in particular ways. The specific systems of meaning in Kristeva’s work that I will interrogate coalesce around her theory of the semiotic and the symbolic, which is presented as a revolutionary theory of subjectivity in relation to the social. Kristeva’s theory will be critically examined in terms of how it is formulated in relation to the theories of Althusser, Hegel and Lacan. Each chapter aims to displace an accepted or dominant interpretation by Kristeva and also by her readers. In reconstructing the problematic that is concealed in Kristeva’s work, I will explore how her theory maintains an Althusserian approach to social theory, and how this underlies her critique of Hegel and Lacan. In the final chapters on Lacan, my argument is that Kristeva’s critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis is inherently flawed and that this, therefore, leads her psychoanalytic work into ethically difficult areas. In the last chapter, on education and transference, I will show how certain educational applications of Kristevan psychoanalysis culminate in the very same ethical problems. These ethical difficulties, I will argue, are avoided by Lacanian psychoanalysis and, therefore, by its application to education.
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