Introduction

Abstract

One of the major contributions of Julia Kristeva in all the diverse fields of study she has worked in since her emergence as a theorist of semiotics and avant-garde literature in the mid-1960s is her attention to the body and the bodily. Some of her central concepts of that period, such as the semiotic, semanalysis, the chora, and signifiance, have helped theorists in the Arts and Humanities but also in the Social and Medical sciences do justice to the complex vulnerability of the subject-in-process/on trial at the crossroads between biology and language. It is significant that she comes to develop the concept of the subject-in-process/on trial in a 1972 essay on Antonin Artaud, whose corporeal understanding of writing enabled Kristeva to theorize a literary experience that refuses to aestheticize psychic or bodily suffering and that aims to become a laboratory for the incubation of new, less species-arrogant perceptions of the human.