Julia Kristeva (Photograph)
I don't like photographs. I fail to recognize myself in those fixed moments and poses, those fragments of lost and forgotten time that leave no impression on me besides an occasional feeling of discomfort that bears little relation to the remnant that I see before my eyes. Still, that remnant is the only one that exists; it alters the moment I actually experienced when it doesn't erase it forever. In our image-filled world, we believe only in what we see. There, I remain a foreigner. If my body and mind still hold interest, I believe you will find them not in what appears to the eyes, but in an invisible intensity of which I seek the meaning, and not the mere appearance.
That said, I accept with a bit of emotion the editor's invitation to include here some photographs, some signs that may bring me closer to the reader. In the end, a child's expression of fear or defiance, an adolescent's pose of joy or attraction, and a few points along my path as a woman and an intellectual have helped me realize with a touch of nostalgia and joy that these flashes of memory continue to flourish inside me.
Through the museum of circumstance, then, I would like to share with you this memory of an ever-present underground life--not a past, but a malleable immanence that never stops developing, however secretly. These photos point to this immanence, like forgotten odors that revive, for lovers only, the very passions that created them.
--Kristeva, Julia Kristeva Interviews (ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman, 1996)