Julia Kristeva is one of those writers I feel I should read. And I did make a real effort after finding a new work from her, Hatred and Forgiveness (translated by Jenaine Herman), in the “new books” at the London Library. But I have to confess that I find the psychoanalytical approach to life seriously hard going – and frequently hard to stomach.

But I was pleased to learn this text marked her receipt of the Holberg Prize, and I did like the way in a historical survey of female writers she picked out as “the first female intellectual”, Anne Comnena (Anna Komnen). This is Kristeva’s account:
“…she was the author of a superb history of the crusades and the reign of her father, the Emperor Alexis I. This was the nomumental Alexiade, in fifteen volumes. Born in 1083, Comnena began writing this work in 1138 at the age of fifty-five, and completed it ten years later: as the first female historian, she offers us an interpretation of this period that is very different from those of western chroniclers such as William of Tyre or Foucher de Chartes. This devotee of what would later be called orthodox Christianity was nevertheless raised on the Greek classics and a fervent reader of Homer and Plato. She was sensitive, melancholy and indeed romantic, a girl who was proud of her father: she was a philosopher and a politician, and her writing shows an awareness of the need for European unity, which was such an important issue at that time.” (p.5-6)

I also found her interesting on…

On the virgin status of Mary:
“Her virginity constitutes the major scandal: our sensibility and simple reason can only denounce the dreadful inequty this virginity exposes, women’s exclusion from sexuality: a punitive chastity that seems to be the price women must pay for admission to the sacred– and to representation.” (p. 64)

On Colette:
“..the amorous Colette, endlessly betrayed and endlessly betraying, declared herself beyond romantic passion, “one of the great banalities of existence” from which one had to escapre, provided one was capable of participating in the plurality of the world – in a fulfillment of the ego through a multitude of ‘gay, varied and plentiful’ connections.” (p. 224)

On Georgia O’Keeffe:
“…you probably had to be a modern woman to decide that the sparest and most final image of death was the pelvic bone: this basin at the bottom of the spine that houses the lower abdomen and sexual organs, and that, deprived of flesh, is nothing but a coarse ring – the void itself…. THe Pelvis series… recall the Taoist representation of the sky, and Pi, a circle of jade with a hole, symbol of male emptiness.” (p. 243)