The literary theoretician, psychoanalyst and writer Julia Kristeva explores the question of the need to “believe”: with new interpretations of some of Freud’s central terms, she aims to overcome the stereotypical view that religious experience reduces people to the “Future of an Illusion”.

Kristeva has formulated the theory that the “Need to Believe” precedes the “Will to Know” as an anthropological constant. Julia Kristeva teaches at the University of Paris Denis Diderot. After her lecture, she will take part in a discussion with Sigrid Weigel, director of the Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin.