Lynndie England proved women can be just as sadistic as men - but that doesn't signal equality, Julia Kristeva tells Lara Marlowe in Paris

Julia Kristeva fits perfectly one's preconception of a French intellectual, from her student days in the Latin Quarter through the revolt of May 1968 to a plethora of degrees and a flirtation with Maoism, followed by a long career as a much-honoured academic.

Even the apartment across from the Luxembourg Gardens that Kristeva shares with her husband, the novelist Philippe Sollers, reflects their status as luminaries in the constellation of French intellectuals: a leafy courtyard, the tastefully chosen antiques that come with embourgeoisement, the slight sacrifice of living on the third floor without a lift, the peeling paint and worn carpet in the staircase.

Kristeva is a warm, almost motherly figure with mischievous dark eyes who would like to have traded her reputation as a daunting intellectual for a place among "popular" writers. She has written nearly 30 books, mostly serious tomes about semiotics (the study of signs and symbols, particularly language), psychoanalysis and literature. She will talk about her just-completed 1,300 page triptych, entitled Female Genius, as well as Europe, culture and freedom, at a fully subscribed Royal Irish Academy public lecture in Dublin next week (the first in a line of humanities lectures in the Academy Times series).

Kristeva wrote Female Genius - about the historian Hannah Arendt, the woman who invented child psychiatry, Melanie Klein, and the French writer Colette - in the daytime while continuing to teach and to practise as a psychoanalyst.

At night she wrote Meutre À Byzance (Murder In Byzantium), her third detective novel, published this spring. In it a serial killer, police commissioner and journalist cross paths in a futuristic, globalised capital infested with sects and Mafiosi; they share an obsession with Kristeva's native Bulgaria at the time of the First Crusade, in the 11th century. When did she sleep, I ask. She shrugs and quotes Céline: "Without work we wouldn't have anything to do."

French intellectuals are expected to have an opinion on everything, and Kristeva is no exception. But the cliché seems unfair for such an extraordinary mind. Although intellectuals have sometimes been mocked here she is proud to be part of the tradition. Intellectuals are a creation of the French 18th century, she says. "They are people with specialised knowledge, like the encyclopédistes Diderot, Voltaire, Dalembert, who transmitted their knowledge to an entire people, breaking out of the tiny community of experts."

In US universities, where Kristeva teaches for two months a year, "they live in a closed circuit", whereas in France "there is still this tendency to make a gift of one's knowledge to society, in the hope of rendering it more creative, open and generous", she says. "I feel very much at home with that concept."

In Kristeva's second lecture in Ireland next week, an academic seminar at University College Dublin, which is also fully booked, she will discuss "French theory", the name devised by US academics for modern French thought.

"We don't have the same concept of freedom as the Americans," she says. "The Americans' idea of freedom is to adapt yourself to production. There's a sort of generalised engineering, and whoever manages to follow its logic is the freest. You liberate yourself through productivity. This logic of productivity can work to the detriment of human life. What matters is what you produce, not what you are, not how you react to others. The meeting with the other, which is another version of human freedom, does not seem to concern this productivist logic."

President Bush, she adds, is representative of "a part of America that is caught up in the vertigo of productivity and the success of the dollar, of petrol, of globalisation through the Internet". Europeans understand that they must compete in world commerce, Kristeva says. "But we also have a Greek and Christian tradition where the supreme value is revelation - the revelation of one individual to another. That's the basis of French philosophy, literature and art. If Europe can reach an equilibrium between production and revelation we will have given something new to civilisation."

One must not be "stupidly anti-American", says Kristeva. She wants globalisation "to be inseminated by Byzantium", her metaphor for European civilisation. "We mustn't reject America but try to enrich it, by explaining that there is more to life than productivity." Kristeva cites the film-maker Michael Moore, who has just won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for Fahrenheit 9/11, his anti-Bush film, as evidence that some Americans have understood the country's problems. But her stints at Columbia and New School universities, in New York, have shown her "the isolation of the American left, which is shrinking".

Kristeva has become more conservative with passing decades. She faults the left in the US "for developing a politically correct discourse that was too dogmatic, too extreme". The American left marginalised itself by concentrating on gay rights, women's rights and the rejection of globalisation, she says.

Kristeva mentions a recent study at the University of Chicago that showed that most young Americans support Bush. The political culture of the US left got stuck in the 1970s and 1980s, she says. "Which is why most Americans don't understand Michael Moore. Perhaps the torture in Iraq will open people's eyes - if the Democrats know how to manage the situation."

The concept of equality for women can be a trap, Kristeva says. She was outraged by an article in Elle magazine that praised Private Lynndie England, the US soldier photographed taunting naked Iraqi prisoners. "They said, 'Bravo. She's a feminist. Because it shows that women can be wicked too.' There's nothing to be proud of," Kristeva says indignantly. "If women rival men in sadistic abjection, it means the idea of equality was a dead end."

Kristeva sees the Abu Ghraib torture scandal through the eyes of a psychoanalyst, in terms that may displease the gay community. "You have to wonder why a woman feels the need to seduce her man [Specialist Charles Graner, now facing prosecution in Iraq\], who was going to impregnate her, by behaving as sadistically as he did. I have the impression that she behaved with these poor Iraqis the same way the American soldiers did, humiliating them in a sado-masochistic homosexual excitation. A woman wanted to participate in that as if she was a man, and she acted like a homosexual male."

If Lynndie England represents womanhood at its worst, Kristeva wanted to show female genius in her books on Arendt, Klein and Colette. Although she dedicated the triptych to the writer and feminist Simone de Beauvoir, Kristeva is ill at ease with the feminist label given to her in the US. "The first generation of feminists were the suffragettes who obtained the right to vote," she says. "The second generation fought for equal pay, sexual freedom and the right to abortion. Our \ generation talks less about equality and more about difference. We try to see what is the difference between men and women."

The problem with great liberation movements, Kristeva says, is that they often end up creating a form of terror, in the case of women's liberation what she calls mass feminism. Her heroines were geniuses because of their specific individual qualities.

Arendt was the first to realise that Nazism and Stalinism were part of the same phenomenon: totalitarianism. They were totalitarian "because they dared to declare that human life was superfluous". Arendt valued human life above all else, says Kristeva. "The relationship of women to life is of exceptional intensity, much more marked than among men. It is one of the elements specific to women which I found in Klein and Colette as well."

Each achieved in her way "a hymn to life", Kristeva says: Arendt through original concepts, Klein through the practice of psychiatry, Colette through the use of language. "This may be the only antidote that civilisation finds to the culture of death that we see both on the side of the Islamists and in Iraqi prisons."

Kristeva came to Paris on a scholarship at the age of 24. "I am of Bulgarian origin, a French national, a citizen of Europe and American by adoption," she says, summing up her identity. She is constantly pulled between the search for her origins and delight in her status as a permanent migrant. It was on an aircraft between Toronto and London in 1995 that she had the idea of delving in to the identity of a modern-day descendant of a crusader in Murder In Byzantium. Her own surname means "of the cross" in Bulgarian.

If she were to leave only one concept to future generations, Kristeva says it would be "this aspect of crossing borders, of always being foreign, of being at the same time a psychoanalyst, philosopher, semiotician and writer, of not closing oneself in to one discipline, of being a traveller".

Kristeva often quotes Saint Augustine, who said in via in patria: the only homeland is the journey. At the end of Murder In Byzantium Kristeva's alter ego, the journalist Stéphanie Delacour, turns "travel" in to a reflexive verb, saying "Je me voyage" (approximately, I travel myself). Not only does she travel in a physical sense, Kristeva explains, "I travel through myself, I find my own borders."

Is she suggesting that perpetual wandering be a model for others? "I think that being foreign, in the way I mean it in se voyager, is the fate of modern man. Many strangers feel wounded because they do not find their place. They become suicide bombers, try to root themselves in fundamentalism or a deadly ideology. The real message of globalisation is that we are all foreigners. We should all 'travel ourselves' and teach others to live in the journey."