Julia Kristeva and Female Genius

This chapter turns to Julia Kristeva's discussion of female genius. It presents Kristeva's three biographical studies of Hannah Arendt (1999), Melanie Klein (2000), and Colette (2002), published under the collective title Le Génie feminine . Her perspective is predominantly psychoanalytic as she approaches her subject with a certain boldness as she treats female genius as a given rather than defensively pleading the cause. Hence, collectively, the trilogy offers a psychoanalytically grounded account of gender and femininity as part of its reflection on genius. Genius takes a new, explicitly gendered form here and it does so thanks to the mix of literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis that is characteristic of the later years of “French theory.”