Julia Kristeva’s Semanalysis and the Legacy of Émile Benveniste

This essay describes the legacy of Émile Benveniste in the semanalysis of Julia Kristeva and their Wahlverwantschaft, also on a more personal level. They shared her criticism on semiotics, she followed his footsteps in looking for support in psychoanalytic theory in order to understand the genealogy of the signifying process better, as well as the heterogeneity of “texts” and the nature of the speaking subject. His influence becomes abundantly clear in her “L’engendrement de la formule” of 1969 in which she introduces her concept of semanalysis. While making Benveniste’s concept of signifiance central to her vocabulary, she, at the same time and more so in later years, re-worked this and other notions of Benveniste, such as histoire in relation to discours.