Extracts from an interview by Julia Kristeva : https://www.msu.edu/user/chrenkal/980/INTEXINT.HTM
"All this is by way of showing you, with as much intellectual honesty as possible, the source of the concept of intertextuality, while at the same time underscoring the difference between this concept and that, for example, of dialogism. I see the following differences. In the first place, there is the recognition that a textual segment, sentence, utterance, or paragraph is not simply the intersection of two voices in direct or indirect discourse; rather, the segment is the result of the intersection of a number of voices, of a number of textual interventions, which are combined in, the semantic field. but also in the syntactic and phonic fields of the explicit utterance. So there is the idea of this plurality of phonic, syntactic, and semantic participation."
"What interested me even more—and this seems to me unique—was the notion that the participation of different texts at different levels reveals a particular mental activity. And analysis should not limit itself simply to identifying, texts that participate in the final texts, or to identifying their sources. but should understand that what is being dealt with is a specific dynamics of the subject of the utterance, who consequently, precisely because of this intertextuality, is not an individual in the etymological sense of the term, not an identity. In other words, the discovery of intertextuality at a formal level leads us to an intrapsychic or psychoanalytic finding, if you will, concerning the status of the "creator," the one who produces a text by placing himself or herself at the intersection of this plurality of texts on their very different levels—I repeat, semantic, syntactic, or phonic. This leads me to understand creative subjectivity as a kaleidoscope, a "polyphony" as Bakhtin calls it. I myself speak of a "subject in process," which makes possible my attempt to articulate as precise a logic as possible between identity or unity, the challenge to this identity and even its reduction to zero, the moment of crisis, of emptiness, and then the reconstitution of a new, plural identity. This new identity may be the plurality capable of manifesting itself as the plurality of characters the author uses; but in more recent writing, in the twentierh-century novel, it may appear as fragments of character, or fragments of ideology, or fragments of representation. Moreover, such an understanding of intertextuality—one that points to a dynamics involving a destruction of the creative identity and reconstitution of a new plurality—assumes at the same time that the one who reads, the reader, participates in the same dynamics. If we are readers of intertextuality, we must be capable of the same putting-into-process of our identities, capable of identifying with the different types of texts, voices, and semantic. syntactic. and phonic systems at play in a given text. We also must be able to be reduced to zero, to the state of crisis that is perhaps the necessary precondition of aesthetic pleasure, to the point of speechlessness..."
"All this is by way of showing you, with as much intellectual honesty as possible, the source of the concept of intertextuality, while at the same time underscoring the difference between this concept and that, for example, of dialogism. I see the following differences. In the first place, there is the recognition that a textual segment, sentence, utterance, or paragraph is not simply the intersection of two voices in direct or indirect discourse; rather, the segment is the result of the intersection of a number of voices, of a number of textual interventions, which are combined in, the semantic field. but also in the syntactic and phonic fields of the explicit utterance. So there is the idea of this plurality of phonic, syntactic, and semantic participation."
"What interested me even more—and this seems to me unique—was the notion that the participation of different texts at different levels reveals a particular mental activity. And analysis should not limit itself simply to identifying, texts that participate in the final texts, or to identifying their sources. but should understand that what is being dealt with is a specific dynamics of the subject of the utterance, who consequently, precisely because of this intertextuality, is not an individual in the etymological sense of the term, not an identity. In other words, the discovery of intertextuality at a formal level leads us to an intrapsychic or psychoanalytic finding, if you will, concerning the status of the "creator," the one who produces a text by placing himself or herself at the intersection of this plurality of texts on their very different levels—I repeat, semantic, syntactic, or phonic. This leads me to understand creative subjectivity as a kaleidoscope, a "polyphony" as Bakhtin calls it. I myself speak of a "subject in process," which makes possible my attempt to articulate as precise a logic as possible between identity or unity, the challenge to this identity and even its reduction to zero, the moment of crisis, of emptiness, and then the reconstitution of a new, plural identity. This new identity may be the plurality capable of manifesting itself as the plurality of characters the author uses; but in more recent writing, in the twentierh-century novel, it may appear as fragments of character, or fragments of ideology, or fragments of representation. Moreover, such an understanding of intertextuality—one that points to a dynamics involving a destruction of the creative identity and reconstitution of a new plurality—assumes at the same time that the one who reads, the reader, participates in the same dynamics. If we are readers of intertextuality, we must be capable of the same putting-into-process of our identities, capable of identifying with the different types of texts, voices, and semantic. syntactic. and phonic systems at play in a given text. We also must be able to be reduced to zero, to the state of crisis that is perhaps the necessary precondition of aesthetic pleasure, to the point of speechlessness..."
