Julia Kristeva (Bulgarian: ) (born 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently,

, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory and feminism after publishing her first book Semeiotik in 1969. Her immense body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. Together with Roland Barthes, Todorov, Goldmann, Grard Genette, LviStrauss, Lacan, Greimas, and Althusser, she stands as one of the foremost structuralists, in that time when structuralism took major place in humanities. Her works also have an important place in post-structuralist thought.

One of Kristeva's most important propositions is the semiotic. Kristeva's use of the term 'semiotic' here should not be confused with the discipline of semiotics suggested by Ferdinand de Saussure. For Kristeva, the semiotic is closely related to the infantile preOedipal referred to in the works of Freud and mainly Melanie Klein and the British Object Relation psychoanalysis, and to the Lacanian (pre-mirror stage). It is an emotional field, tied to our instincts, which dwells in the fissures and prosody of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words. In this sense, the semiotic opposes the symbolic, which corresponds words with meaning in a stricter, mathematical sense. She is also noted for her work on the concepts of abjection (a notion that relates to a primary psychological force of rejection, directed toward the mother-figure), and intertextuality.