Bodies in Exile: Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todоrov’s Contributions to the Philosophy of the Body

Both going from Bulgaria to Paris to do their doctorates in philosophy, Julia Kristeva and Tzetan Todorov contributed to the development of the philosophy of the body in France. In the period 1965 – 1975 they were able to bring their Bulgarian culture to both structural analysis and narrative. The singularity of their contributions is to make between intertextuality and intercorporeality a dialogue that is both theoretical between linguistics, semiotics and psychoanalysis but also practical with the questions of barbarism, horror and the colonization of bodies. Refusing to submit to the totalitarianism of power and fascist languages, from the Nazis to the regime of authoritarian communism, Todorov and Kristeva place the subject’s desire at the center of his corporality. They are thus part of the debate where the philosophy of the body becomes a central question in France through the work of Claude Bruaire, Michel Serres, Michel Onfray and Michel Foucault but also initially under the impetus of the feminist criticism of Simone de Beauvoir, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Monique Wittig.