J U L I A K R I S T E V A ART, LOVE, MELANCHOLY, PHILOSOPHY, SEMIOTICS AND PSYCHOANALYSIS Julia Kristeva was born in Bulgaria in 1941. Educated in part by French nuns, she was involved early on in her life with Communist Party youth organizations and children"s groups. Since moving to Paris in the 1960s, Kristeva has risen in stature in intellectual circles so that she is now regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the contemporary era. EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 7: "JULIA KRISTEVA"S THEORY OF LOVE" For Julia Kristeva, love embodies both the semiotic and the symbolic, both knowledge and joy (pace Baruch de Spinoza), both language and affect. Kristeva has written of love in a way that is not facile, demeaning, banal, stereotypical, sexist or pornographic. Her pronouncements on love are quite different from those in the "classic" texts of love, such as Ovid"s poems, or the mediaeval Art of Love, or Elizabethan sonnet sequences, or Stendhal"s De...