Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art

Kristeva's depiction of contrariety and anomaly at the heart of postmodernist theory is ingenious, provocative, and challenging. (Contemporary Literature) Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud; what she displaces in the illusion that it has all been said already, that is, she removes the pressure of the signified­­in a word, stupidity; what she subverts is authority­­that of monological science, of filiation. (Roland Barthes)