Revolution in Poetic Language

by Julia Kristeva

In Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva explicates her foundational distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic and explores their interrelationships. Linking the psychosomatic to the literary and the literary to a larger political horizon, she questions the premises of linguistic, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and literary theories.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Poetry, Theory, Psychoanalysis, Literary Criticism, Linguistics

290 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 1974

About the author

Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII and author of many acclaimed works. Her Columbia University Press books include Hatred and Forgiveness (2012); The Severed Head: Capital Visions (2014); and, with Philippe Sollers, Marriage as a Fine Art (2016).

Reviews

[Théo d'Or]

Soit dit en passant, bien souvent, un livre plein d'idées s'imprime dans ma mémoire à travers le prisme d'une seule idée, et cela, du moins dans mon cas, est dû à une mémoire sélective d'ordre perceptuel, ou, plus précisément, l'elfe qui vit dans mon lobe frontal gauche fait à peu près ce qu'il veut. Alors, qu'en est-il de le silence de la poétique? Kristeva célèbre le silence comme espace fertile, dans la poésie, les blancs entre les vers sont des respirations, des échos de non-dit, des espaces où le sens se cache et se révèle. Dans le poème " Traduire le silence de Rimbaud " de Roméo Fratti, le poète s'interroge sur la possibilité de rendre compte du langage des choses muettes, qui échappe à la parole humaine. Il utilise le blanc typographique comme un signe de ce silence, qui crée un contraste avec les mots et les images. Le blanc est à la fois une absence et une presence, qui invite le lecteur à écouter et à comprendre ce qui n'est pas dit . L'objectif est bien de définir la quantité d'inconnu, en d'autres termes de proposer une traduction intuitive et irrationnelle de l'inconnu. Cette notion d'inconnu peut elle-même être définie comme une réalité supposée totalement occultée par la connaissance scientifique.
Le silence qui clôt le poème n'est pas celui de la traduction, c'est celui du manque, c'est le silence du poète contraint à la reserve qui s'interroge sur les possibilités de la traduction.
Finalement, comme je l'ai déjà dit, ce truc est tout ce que me dicte l'elfe dans mon lobe frontal gauche , en parlant de la révolution de Kristeva .

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say about this classic of (how to even classify it?) psychoanalytic, linguistic, philosophical, Marxist literary analysis? I could say that this book is alternately infuriating, challenging, sublime, and exquisite. But I imagine that you know that if you're reading these reviews. I could say that I think you should read this book...But chances are, you will if you are reading these reviews.

Instead, let me be productive for you. To understand this book, you need to have a passing familiarity with the following subjects (and this list is far from complete):

Hegel
Marx
Lacan
Freud
Biology (geno- and phenotype can be useful to approach how Kristeva uses geno- and phenotext)
Plato
Barthes
Chomsky
Feuerbach
Derrida
Bataille
Heidegger
Deleuze and Guattari
Frege
Hjelmslev
Husserl

And, again, I'm sure there are others I could add to this list but that I can't think of at the moment. Basically, if you do not at least recognize some of the names on the list above, you are not equipped to tackle this book...yet. Each of the above authors is worth getting into; Kristeva just makes them that much more rewarding to have read with her deceptively slim book.

[Mohammed omran · Rating 4 out of 5]

نجد أن الأحداث السياسية والتاريخية التي عرفتها أوروبا وخصوصا فرنسا كانت غنية بحيث اسهمت كثيرا في بناء الفكر الغربي خلال القرن التاسع عشر. وتشكل المرحلة الفكرية الإيديولوجية رافدا مهما لبناء فكر الشاعر. وتبدو على مستوى امتلاكه القدرة على صياغة رؤية فكرية حول المجتمع وحول التيارات السائدة في الفترة التي عاصرها. وفي المرحلة الأسطورية المتخيلة، تذهب الكاتبة، إلى تفكيك بعض الأساطير وخصوصا المرتبطة بالدين وبالإيديولوجية لإعادة صياغتها وإضفاء الطابع الأسطوري على الواقع. وهكذا يمنح هذا البعد الأسطوري المتخيل المجال لتحليل وتركيب التاريخ والإيديولوجيا في علاقتهما بالواقع. وهذه المراحل لا يمكن التعرف عليها إلا من داخل النص. ويجب أن لا ننسى جانب التفاعل النفسي الذي تدرسه، و يحرك الشاعر ويجعله يشكل المكونات الدلالية التركيبية والإيقاعية داخل النص. وهنا لابد من الإشارة إلى أن هذا الفصل الأخير يبرز هكذا مجال اشتغال التناص عند الكاتبة حيث نصادف خطابات متعددة منها الخطاب الإيديولوجي والخطاب الاجتماعي والخطاب التاريخي والخطاب الديني والخطاب الثقافي والخطاب الشعري. هذه الخطابات تشكل نسق الدلالي وبنينته.تخلص الكاتبة بعد هذه الفصول الثلاثة إلى خاتمة، إدراك متفجر" كما سمتها، حيث تشرح فيها كيف أنها حاولت أن تعطي وصفا سيميائيا للغة الشعرية قصد تحديد خاصياتها داخل النصوص في نهاية القرن التاسع عشر. وكيف كشفت على ما يسميه فرويد غريزة الموت، التي تكون في أساس الفاعلية الدالة، تحركها كقوة داخل اللغة لأجل كل ممارسة سيميائية. وهكذا ينفرد النص بوضعية إنتاج المتعة بإدخال هذا التوظيف الغريزي داخل الإدراك. ويصبح اللغة الوحيدة القابلة للتدليل عليها، بإعادة الإنتاج. ويبقى أن هذا النص يشكل خطابا يشتغل بالانفعالات الغريزية داخل المحفل الرمزي-اللساني، بإدماجه داخل الجهاز الاجتماعي.ومن وجهة نظر جوليا كريستيفيا، لقد كان للتحول الذي عرفته نهاية القرن التاسع عشر، وعلى الخصوص داخل النسق الاجتماعي الرأسمالي الذي يعرف توسعا نقديا هائلا، أثره على اللغة الشعرية سمح بإيجاد هذا التغيير السيميائي كذلك وجعلها تخرق ذلك الثابث في العروض وفي التركيب وفي معانيها ومنحها فرصة الانفتاح والإنتاج والتوليد المتجدد.إن الأطروحة النظرية التي يقوم عليها فكر جوليا كريستيفا تظهر بشكل جلي في كتابها"ثورة اللغة الشعرية"، فهي تطرح ضمنه نظرية جديدة لسيرورة إنتاج المعنى داخل اللغة عبر ثنائية السيميائي والرمزي. إن الأمر يتعلق بخلق نموذج حيث لا يكون المعنى دائما معطى، بل هو تلك الدينامية التي هي "فعل التدليل". وهذا يعني أن ندرك النص كجهاز لتاريخ اللسان والممارسات الدالة التي نكون قادرين على معرفتها، أو كمجموعة من المشاهد الرمزية التي تحيلنا رمزيتها إلى إنتاج الدلالة التي تتمظهر على سطح النص. وهذا يعني أننا سنشتغل على المستوى الأعمق للغة.يمكن أن نعتبر كتاب ثورة اللغة الشعرية الأساس الذي انطلقت منه الكاتبة لطرح التحليل السيميائي، وهي ما تزال تصرح بذلك برغم كتاباتها المتعددة والوازنة في مجال السيميائيات والرواية، وأنه من أهم المصادر التي يمكن أن نقف عندها في مجال التنظير السيميائي.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a book you read, but study. This was her doctoral thesis and a revolution indeed in 1974, so you have to engage that aspect. The first 100 pages is ground zero for her investigation and theory of semiotics and the symbolic, so it's interesting to follow that progression, although it's like being in a graduate seminar from the first paragraph. Five stars for being a revolutionary book, but a one on the readability scale.

[isaac smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not understand this one bit. Reading "Revolution in Poetic Language" cover to cover is like completing a mile swim: you cannot exactly stop midway, even if you are barely doing anything. Coming to me for my reading of this book would be like coming to a 7/11 for fresh produce because you live in a siloed off food desert. How desperate are you?


Kristeva's "Revolution in Poetic Language" challenges the conventional understanding of language as a mere system of representation. Instead, she emphasizes the materiality of language and its emergent conditions. She distinguishes between two modalities of language, the semiotic and the symbolic.


Drawing on Freudian concepts such as instinctual drives, the unconscious, and the pre-Oedipal, Kristeva associates the semiotic with these elements. She employs the term "chora," borrowed from Plato's Timaeus, to describe the semiotic as a maternal receptacle, a generative matrix that is formless and undetermined yet capable of receiving form. The chora is pre-symbolic, resisting definition but still able to be named and spoken of, albeit at the cost of betraying its true nature.


On the other hand, the symbolic, influenced by the Freudo-Lacanian notion of post-Oedipal relations and language as a sign-system, relies on the semiotic for its articulation. The symbolic, which represents order and constraint, requires the irruption and influx of the semiotic to remain open to change. This interplay between the semiotic and the symbolic is seen as an ethical and political necessity, as the excesses of poetic motion and the otherness of musical rhythm disrupt the symbolic and challenge established norms.


Basically, Kristeva emphasizes the materiality of language and the divergent modalities of the semiotic and the symbolic. She explores the pre-symbolic nature of the semiotic as well as its relationship with the symbolic, highlighting the ethical and political significance of their interplay.


When reading texts by poets like Lautréamont, Mallarmé, and Artaud, the conventional process of deciphering meaning through lexical, syntactic, and semantic operations is insufficient. Instead, Kristeva suggests retracing the path of their production as a means of engaging with the transformative power of poetic language. By tracing the path of production, readers can tap into the raw energy and creative impulses that inform the work.


Kristeva posits that poetic language functions as a site where jouissance, a form of intense pleasure, traverses the confines of social codes, thereby transforming them. This process introduces a complete rupture within linguistic structures and the formation of the speaking subject. To comprehend poetic language, we must approach it as a practical and semiotic form of expression that reconfigures the temporal dimension of enunciation and meaning.


The figures of Lautréamont and Mallarmé, emerging at the close of the 19th century, exemplify this experience that disrupts phonetics, lexicon, syntax, logical relations, and even the notion of a "transcendental ego." The crisis faced by the bourgeois state, paternal rights, and religion dismantled a subject and its discourse that had persisted for two millennia. Building upon this revolution, the avant-garde of the 20th century delves deeper into this transformative process.


Now, for a more in-depth look at what is basically notes, and that’s it. Enjoy.


The semiotic and symbolic modalities are intertwined in the signifying process that constitutes language. The dialectic between them determines the type of discourse present, such as narrative, metalanguage, theory, or poetry. "Natural" language allows for different modes of articulating the semiotic and symbolic. The subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, resulting in signifying systems that are indebted to both modalities.


The theoretical description of the chora, although part of the discourse of representation, precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality. Discourse depends on and simultaneously refuses the chora. While the chora can be located and regulated, it can never be definitively posited or given an axiomatic form.


The chora is a mode of signifiance where the linguistic sign is not yet expressed as the absence of an object or as the distinction between the real and symbolic. It exists prior to these articulations within language.


The kinetic functional stage of the semiotic occurs prior to the establishment of signs and is not a cognitive process assumed by an already constituted subject. Understanding the functions that organize the semiotic process requires a theory of the subject that goes beyond reducing the subject to mere understanding and instead explores the realm of pre-symbolic functions within the subject.


The semiotic chora serves as a space where the subject is both generated and negated. It is where the unity of the subject succumbs to the dynamic processes of charges and stases that give rise to the subject.


The semiotic is a psychosomatic modality of the signifying process that articulates a continuum. It is not a symbolic modality but rather involves connections between bodily functions such as glottal and anal sphincters and their relationship to elements within the family, exemplifying rhythmic and intonational vocal modulations, among other examples.


The semiotic, consisting of drives and their articulations, is distinguished from the realm of signification, which involves propositions and judgments. The positionality within the realm of signification functions as a break in the signifying process, establishing the subject's identification with its object as a precondition for propositionality. This break, referred to as a thetic phase, produces the positing of signification. All enunciation, whether a word or a sentence, is thetic and necessitates the subject's separation from and through its image and objects.


Thetic signification is a stage that occurs under specific conditions within the signifying process. It constitutes the subject without being reduced to the subject's process because it serves as the threshold of language.


The thetic, or thetic phase, posits the object that can be signified. It establishes signification as both a denotation of an object and an enunciation of a displaced subject, absent from the signified and the signifying position.


The terms "subject" and "predicate," or more specifically, "noun" and "verb," can be seen as two modalities of the thetic. They represent interconnected elements of the thetic process, involving positing and being posited, linking and being linked. Denotation and enunciation are inseparable from the thetic process and are thus interchangeable and reversible.


Mimesis involves constructing an object not based on truth but on verisimilitude. The object is posited as separate, noted but not denoted, and relies on a subject of enunciation who differs from the transcendental ego. This subject does not suppress the semiotic chora but elevates it to the status of a signifier, which may or may not conform to the norms of grammatical expression. This connoted mimetic object is internally dependent on the subject of enunciation.


Any transgressions of the thetic boundary involve a crossing between true and false. These transgressions persist as long as signification is maintained, but they are inevitably disrupted by the influx of the semiotic into the symbolic. Mimesis, in this perspective, becomes a transgression of the thetic when truth no longer refers to an object identifiable outside of language. Instead, truth is linked to an object that can be constructed through the semiotic network and is always verisimilar once posited in the symbolic realm.


The thetic, while necessary, is not exclusive. The semiotic, which precedes it, continually disrupts and transcends it. This transgression of the thetic leads to various transformations in the signifying practice known as "creation." Whether in the realm of metalanguage or literature, the symbolic order is remodeled by the influx of the semiotic.


The text signifies the un-signifying, incorporating the functioning of the semiotic within the signifying practice. This functioning operates independently of meaning or even in defiance of it. The text challenges the notions that everything signifies or that everything is mechanistic. Instead, it presents a dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic, two heterogeneous operations that are mutually dependent and inseparable from each other.


Once the break that establishes the symbolic has occurred, the chora, which we previously referred to, assumes a more precise status. Though originally a precondition for the symbolic, the semiotic operates within signifying practices through a transgression of the symbolic. It exists practically within the symbolic and necessitates the symbolic break to achieve the complex articulation observed in musical and poetic practices. In considering the thetic, the semiotic should be represented as a "second" return of instinctual functioning within the symbolic. It manifests as a negativity introduced into the symbolic order and as a transgression of that order.


The term "genotext" encompasses both semiotic processes and the emergence of the symbolic. The genotext includes drives, their arrangement, their division within the body, as well as the ecological and social systems surrounding the body, such as objects and pre-Oedipal relations with parents. The symbolic aspect involves the formation of objects and subjects and the establishment of nuclei of meaning through semantic and categorical fields.


The term "phenotext" refers to language used for communication, which is described in linguistic terms as "competence" and "performance." The phenotext is constantly fragmented and divided, and it cannot be reduced to the semiotic process that operates through the genotext. The phenotext is a structure that can be generated, following the principles of generative grammar. It adheres to communication rules, presupposes a subject of enunciation, and involves an addressee. On the other hand, the genotext is a process that moves through zones with relative and transient boundaries, constituting a trajectory that extends beyond the univocal exchange of information between two fully formed subjects.


It is only in recent times or during revolutionary periods that the practice of signification has incorporated within the phenotext the plural, heterogeneous, and contradictory process of meaning. This includes the flow of drives, material discontinuity, political struggles, and the fragmentation of language.

[samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

• Introduction
o Her aim here is to investigate the workings of "poetic language" (a notion to which I shall presently return) as a signifying practice, that is, as a semiotic system generated by a speaking subject within a social, historical field. The "revolution" in her title refers to the profound change that began to take place in the nineteenth century, the consequences of which are still being sustained and evaluated in our own time
o What Kristeva actually does in the following pages is to impress large bodies of philosophical, linguistic, and psychoanalytic texts (concurrently submitting them to critical analysis) in the service of her main argument, namely that the nineteenth-century) post-Symbolist avant-garde effected a real mutation in literary "representation"
o She traces manifestations of the semiotic disposition to show how the writing practice parallels the logic of the unconscious, drive-ridden and dark as it might be….an archaic revolt. Poetic language constitutes a semiotic system THESIS.
o Her semiotic is one component of the signifying process (the other being the symbolic)
o Division is not identical with ucs/cs, id/superego, nature/culture, there are analogies here though. Semiotic/symbolic opposition envisaged here operates within, by means of, an through language
o She’s doing textual analysis, not literary—relegating esthetic and formalistic considerations to background.
o The text analyzed is the effect of the dialectical interplay between semiotic and symbolic dispositions.
o Think of the etymology: texture, “ a disposition or connection of threads, filaments, or other slender bodies, interwoven. The text cannot be thought of as a finished, permanent piece of cloth; it is in a perpetual state of flux as different readers intervene, as their knowledge deepens, and as history moves on
 The nature of the threads thus interwoven will determine the presence or absence of poetic language
o Writing subject includes the ucs
o Part of the original version of this book has not been translated. This is a 600 page doc diss!
• Prolegomenon
o Our philosophies of language, embodiments of the Idea, are nothing more than the thoughts of archivists, archaeologists, and necrophiliacs.
o Fascinated by the remains of a process which is partly discursive, they substitute this fetish for what actually produced it.
o IT seems possible to perceive a signifying practice which, although produced in language, is only intelligible through it. By exploding the phonetic, lexical, and syntactic object of linguistics, this practice not only escapes the attempted hold of all anthropomorphic sciences, it also refuses to identify with the recumbent body subjected to transference onto the analyzer.
o Signifying practice—a particular type of modern literature—attests to a ‘crisis’ of social structures and their ideological, coercive, and necrophilic manifestations.
• I. The Semiotic and the Symbolic I. The Phenomenological Subject of Enunciation
o Modern linguistic theories consider language a strictly ‘formal’ object –one that involves syntax and mathematicization
 language defined by arbitrary relation between signifier and signified; the acceptance of the sign as substitute for the extra-linguistic; its discrete elements; its denumerable, or even finite, nature.
 But language defers any interrogation of its “Externality”
o Two modalities of the same signifying process
 1. The semiotic
• There are nonverbal signifying systems that are constructed exclusively on the basis of the semiotic (music eg)
 2. The symbolic
 They are inseparable within the signifying process that constitutes language and the dialectic between them determines the type of discourse (narrative, metalanguage, theory, poetry, etc.) involved
 Subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, so no signifying system he produces can be either exclusively one or the other.
• 2. The Semiotic Chore Ordering the Drives
o Semiotic in its Greek sense: a distinctive mark, trace, index, precursory sign, proof, engraved or written sign, imprint, trace, figuration.
o This modality is the one Freudian psychoanalysis points to in postulating not only the facilitation and the structuring disposition of drives, but also the so-called primary processes which displace and condense both energies and their inscription
o Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body—always already involved in a semiotic process—by family and social structures.
o In this way the drives, which are "energy" charges as well as "psychical" marks, articulate what we call a chora- a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.
 We borrow from Plato to denote an essentially mobile and provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases
 Rupture and articulations (rhythm)
 Chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitively posited. No axiomatic form. Not yet a position, not a sign. Not a signifier either though.
 The chora is a modality of signifiance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic.
 Social organization via symbolic mediates and organizes chora. Constrains it.
 Drives involve pre-Oedipal semiotic functions and energy discharges that connect and orient the body to the mother
 Various processes and relations, anterior to sign and syntax. Necessary to acquisition of language but not identical to language.
 Our positing of the semiotic is obviously inseparable from a theory of the subject that takes into account the Freudian positing of the unconscious
 We view the subject in language as de-centering the transcendental ego, cutting through it, and opening it up to a dialectic in which its syntactic and categorical understanding is merely the liminary moment of the process, which is itself always acted upon by the relation to the other dominanted by the death drive and its productive reiteration of the "signifier."
• 3. Husserl’s Hyelic Meaning: A Natural Thesis Commanded by the Judging Subject
o We shall see that when the speaking subject is no longer considered a phenomenological transcendental ego nor the Cartesian ego but rather a subject in process/on trial \sujet en proces], as is the case in the practice of the text, deep structure or at least transformational rules are disturbed and, with them, the possibility of semantic and/or grammatical categorial interpretation
• 4. Hjelmslev’s Presupposed Meaning
o Meaning is a substance preexisting its formation in an expression
o Meaning as “amorphous mass, unanalyzed entity”
o The semiotic is articulated by flow and marks: facilitation, energy transfers, the cutting up of the corporeal and social continuum as well as that of signifying material, the establishment of a distinctiveness and its ordering in a pulsating chora, in a rhythmic but nonexpressive totality.
o The functioning of writing (ecriture), the trace, and the gramme…points to an essential aspect of the semiotic. Precedes the symbolic and its subject.
o We can envisage a heterogenous functioning, what Freud called “psychosomatic”
• 5. The Thetic: Rupture and/or Boundary
o Semiotic vs symbolic (The realm of positions)
o Break in signifying process establishes the identification of the subject and its object as preconditions of propositionally. The thetic phase is the break, which produces the positioning of signification
o All enunciation is thetic
o It requires an identification; in other words, the subject must separate from and through his image, from and through his objects. This image and objects must first be posited in a space that becomes symbolic because it connects the two separated positions, recording them or redistributing them in an open combinatorial system
o Some nonlanguage is thetic! separates object from subject.
o There exists only one signification that of the thetic phase.
• 6. The Mirror and Castration Positing the Subject as Absent from the Signifier
o Mirror stage produces spatial intuition at the heart of the functioning of signification
 From that point on, in order to capture his image unified in a mirror, the child must remain separate from it, his body agitated by the semiotic motility discussed already, which fragments him more than it unifies him in a representation
o Castration
 puts the finishing touches on the process of separation that posits the subject as signifiable, which is to say, separate, always confronted by an other: imago in the mirror (signified) and semiotic process (signifier)
 The mother occupies the place of alterity. Her replete body, the receptacle and guarantor of demands, takes the place of all narcissistic, hence imaginary, effects and gratifications; she is, in other words, the phallus.
 The discovery of castration detaches the subject from his dependence on the mother and the perception of this lack makes the phallic function a symbolic function—the symbolic function.
 The subject, finding his identity in the symbolic, separates from his fusion with the mother, confines his jouissance to the genital, and transfers semiotic motility onto the symbolic order.
o The thetic phase—the positioning of the imago, castration, and the positing of semiotic motility—as the place of the Other, as precondition for signification
o The thetic phase marks a threshold between two heterogenous realms: the symbolic and semitoic.
o Poetic distortions of the signifying chain and the structure of signification may be considered in this light: they yield under attack of the residues of first symbolizations.
o Pre-Oedipal stages (Klein) are “analytically unthinkable” but not inoperative.
o After thetic, the supposedly characteristic functioning of the pre-Oedipal stages appears only in the complete, post-genital handling of language, which presupposes, as we have seen, a decisive imposition of the phallic
o To regress refuse past thetic is to give way to fantasy or to psychosis. Resumption of the functioning characteristic of the semiotic chora within the signifying device of language.
o This is precisely what artistic practices, and notably poetic language, demonstrate
• 7. Frege’s Notion of Signification: Enunciation and Denotation
o But when this subject reemerges, when the semiotic chora disturbs the thetic position by redistributing the signifying order, we note that the denoted object and the syntactic relation are disturbed as well.
o The text is not a return, this isn’t Hegelian dialectic. Instead it involves both shattering and maintaining position within the heterogeneous process-, the proof can be found in the phonetic, lexical, and syntactic disturbance visible in the semiotic device of the text
o The sentence is not suppressed, it is infinitized. Similarly, the denoted object does not disappear, it proliferates in mimetic, fictional, connoted objects.
• 8. Breaching the Thetic: Mimesis
o Mimesis is, precisely, the construction of an object, not according to truth but to verisimilitude, to the extent that the object is posited as such (hence separate, noted but not denoted); it is, however, internally dependent on a subject of enunciation who is unlike the transcendental ego in that he does not suppress the semiotic chora but instead raises the chora to the status of a signifier, which may or may not obey the norms of grammatical locution. Such is the connoted mimetic object.
o Although mimesis partakes of the symbolic order, it does so only to re-produce some of its constitutive rules, in other words, grammaticality
o Poetic mimesis is led to dissolve not only the denotative function but also the specifically thetic function of positing the subject
o Poetic mimesis maintains and transgresses thetic unicity by making it undergo a kind of anamnesis, by introducing into the thetic position the stream of semiotic drives and making it signify.
• 9. The Unstable Symbolic. Substitutions in the Symbolic: Fetishism
o Fetish: has to do with denying the mother’s castration.
Fetishism is a compromise with the thetic
o it is the thetic, and not fetishism, that is inherent in every cultural production, because fetishism is a displacement of the thetic onto the realm of drives. The instinctual chora articulates facilitations and stases, but fetishism is a telescoping of the symbolic's characteristic thetic moment and of one of those instinctually in- vested stases (bodies, parts of bodies, orifices, containing objects, and so forth). This stasis thus becomes the ersatz of the sign. Fetishism is a stasis that acts as a thesis.
o isn't art the fetish par excellence, one that badly camouflages its archaeology?
o The poetic function converges with fetishism: it is not, however, identical to it. What distinguishes the poetic function from the fetishist mechanism is that it maintains a signification
o The text is completely different from a fetish because it signifies; in other words, it is not a substitute but a sign (signifier/signified), and its semantics is unfurled in sentences
o THE UNFURLING SEPARATES
o The semiotic (analog and digital) thereby assumes the role of a linguistic signifier signifying an object for an ego, thus constituting them both as thetic.
o These movements, which can be designated as fetishism, show (human) language's characteristic tendency to return to the (animal) code, thereby breaching what Freud calls a "primal repression."
• 10. The Signifying Process
o Once the break instituting the symbolic has been established, what we have called the semiotic chora acquires a more precise status.
o Although originally a precondition of the symbolic, the semiotic functions within signifying practices as the result of a transgression of the symbolic.
o Therefore the semiotic that "precedes" symbolization is only a theoretical supposition justified by the need for description. It exists in practice only within the symbolic and requires the symbolic break to obtain the complex articulation we associate with it in musical and poetic practices
o Semiotic eruptions as a this negativity has a tendency to suppress the thetic phase, to de-syn-thesize it. In the extreme, negativity aims to foreclose the thetic phase, which, after a period of explosive semiotic motility, may result in the loss of the symbolic function, as seen in schizophrenia.
o "Art," on the other hand, by definition, does not relinquish the thetic even while pulverizing it through the negativity of transgression.
• 11. Poetry that is not a form of murder
o There can be no language without a thetic phase
o The social and the symbolic are synonyms
o Structural anthropology studies thetic productions: positions, dispositions, syntheses, i.e. structural relations.
o What becomes of the semiotic in this symbolic arrangement? What about the semiotic motility preceding the break that establishes both language and the social?
o There are two types of events in the social order [that] may be viewed as the counterpart of the thetic moment instituting symbolism, even though they do not unfold according to the logic of the signifier’s depletion, which structural anthropology detects in social symbolism
 The first is sacrifice: this violent act puts an end to previous (semiotic, presymbolic) violence, and, by focusing violence on a victim, displaces it onto the symbolic order at the very moment this order is being founded.
• Sacrifice sets up the symbol and the symbolic order at the same time, and this "first" symbol, the victim of a murder, merely represents the structural violence of language's irruption as the murder of soma, the transformation of the body, the captation of drives.
• sacrifice an ambiguous function, simultaneously violent and regulatory.
• Sacrifice is the thetic that confines violence to a single space, making it a signifier
• Murder is only one of the phantasmatic and mythic realizations of the logical phase inherent in any socio-symbolic order.
• Sacrifice, by contrast, is the reign of substitution, metonymy, and ordered continuity (one victim may be used for another but not vice-versa)
• Sacrifice resembles not a language but the unconscious, which is the unspoken precondition of linguistic systematization
• Sacrifice presents only the legislating aspect of the thetic phase: sacred murder merely points to the violence that was confined within sacrifice so as to found social order.
• NORMATIVE SACRIFICE IS A GOOD CLEAN THETIC. OTHER VIOLENCE IS SEMIOTIC.
• Attention to the representation that generally precedes sacrifice
o It is the laboratory for, among other things, theater, poetry, song, dance—art
o By reproducing signifiers—vocal, gestural, verbal—the subject crosses the border of the symbolic and reaches the semiotic chora, which is on the other side of the social frontier. The reenacting of the signifying path taken from the symbolic unfolds the symbolic itself and—through the border that sacrifice is about to present or has already presented on stage—opens it up to the motility where all meaning is erased.
o Art—this semiotization of the symbolic—thus represents the flow of jouissance into language. Whereas sacrifice assigns jouissance its productive limit in the social and symbolic order, art specifies the means—the only means—that jouissance harbors for infiltrating that order.
 OH ART IS THE SECOND aspect of the thetic function.
 Sacrifice is the prohibition of jouissance by language
 Art is the introduction of jouissance into and through language.
• 12. Genotext and Phenotext
o Genotext: semiotic processes (drives, their disposition, the division of the body, ecological and social systems surrounding the body such as objects and pre-Oedipan relations) and the advent of the symbolic (the emergence of object and subject, and the constitution of nuclei of meaning involving categories)
 Not linguistic
 It is a process that articulates structures that are ephemeral (unstable, threatened by drive charges, ‘quanta’ rather than ‘marks’
 Nonsignifying
o Phenotext: language that serves to communicate
 Linuguistics describes this in terms of ‘competance’ and ‘performance’
 Constantly split up and divided and is irreducible to the semiotic process that works through the genotext.
 Is a structure. Obeys rules of communication. Presupposes a subject of enunciation.
• 13. Four Signifying Practices
o Narrative
 Levi Strauss myth semanticizes
o Metalanguage
 Sutures the signifying process
o Contemplation
 strew

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“1) that the hyle, which is always functional (in the Hus-serlian sense) since it is signifiable, apprehended, or named, appears directly to thetic consciousness, 2) that it is the projection of consciousness' positionality, and 3) that the same is true for everything that may appear heterogeneous to the noematic network of phenomenology-from "perception" to the phenomenological "drives" making up the ante-predicative sphere. Thus it seems to us that, in the framework of the Cartesian subject as in that of the transcendental ego, no heterogeneity vis-à-vis predicative articulation is possible which is not already the projection of the subject's positionality.“

“The fundamental protodoxa is obviously Being, the irreducible archontic position; but when this protodoxa is presented as intimately linked to the judgment which expresses it because and to the extent that the latter is thetic, the question can be reversed: isn't that which posits the doxa of Being logically and practically a positing of judgment or of cogitation which is always thetic to the extent that what it posits is an "I"?
In other words, before being a "natural thesis" or a "thetic function" of judgment, isn't thesis above all a thesis of the "I"?
Therefore, shouldn't the question be what the "I" produces rather than the operations of that "I"? Far from positing the judging "I" as origin, for us such a question merely places the thetic and doxic within the signifying process that goes beyond them, and it raises a new question: How is the thetic, which is a positing of the subject, produced? In this reversal we are not eliminating the question of Signification (Bedeutung) as the utterance of a posited (thetic) subject with regard to an object. Instead we are showing that Be-deutung, the Thetic, and the Subject are producible in order to open up research on the semiotic conditions that produce them while remaining foreign to them. The semiotic can thus be understood as pre-thetic, preceding the positing of the subject. Previous to the ego thinking within a proposition, no Meaning exists, but there do exist articulations heterogeneous to signification and to the sign: the semiotic chora. Though discrete and disposed, the chora cannot be unified by a Meaning, which, by contrast, is initiated by a the-sis, constituting, as we shall see, a break up.”

“structural linguistics often eliminates from the semiotic the drives that underly it and the role they play in establishing the subject. But when linguistic structuralism becomes a method of structural anthropology, the drives that form the foundation of structural dichotomies command the investigator's attention. Yet, even then, they are removed once again, and structuralism retains only the image of the unconscious as a depository of laws and thus a discourse. Since they are considered solely from the point of view of their relationship to language, and deprived of their drive bases, these structural operations depend on the phenomenological reduction, just as they depend on what this reduction is able to make visible: thetic symbolic functioning (see Section 5, following). It has therefore been necessary to see these operations as similar to Freud's "primary processes," fill them with drives or even dissolve them in the undecidable grammè in order to remove them from their phenomenological refuge and define them, specifically, as processes forming the signifier, logically anterior to the grammatical sequences the Cartesian subject generates, but synchronous with their unfolding.”

“Therefore we could consider that which has been relegatea to the terms "subject" and "predicate" or, more narrowly, "noun" and 'verb," as two modalities of the thetic, representing the posited and positing, linked and linking elements—denotation and enunciation-that are indissociable from the thetic process and, consequently, permutable or reversible. The positing, linking, as-sertive, cohesive element, the one that completes the utterance and makes it finite (a sentence), in short, the element in which the spatio-temporal and communicational positing of the speaking subject is marked, is the element with the predicative function.
It may be, but is not necessarily, what morphology identifies as a
"verb." But at the same time, as Benveniste shows, variable predication itself is the "seat of an invariant" which simultaneously posits an extra-linguistic reality (réel) and phrastic completion and ensures the relation between the two orders. This is, in fact, what we have called a thetic function, demonstrating that assertion and intra-syntactic completion are inseparable
Conceiving the signifying process as a thetic negativity thus leads us to relativize the classic terms "subject" and "predicate" and see them as mere "subsets" (characteristic of certain languages or linguistic theories) of a more general relation which is actually in play between two indissociable modalities of the thetic (posited-positing, linked-linking, modified-modifier, etc.) The relations between Kurytowicz's "modifier" and "modified." Straw-son's "feature concepts" or "feature-placing statements" or Shau-myan's "applicational generative model"6 on a technical linguistic level would also seem to corroborate the inseparability of the thetic and syntax. Their indivisibility implies that signification (Bedeu-tung) is a process in which opposable "terms" are posited as phenomena but can be identified as the two faces (denotation-enun~ ciation) of the thetic break up.”

“The semiotic (analog and digital) thereby assumes the role of a linguistic signifier signifying an object for an ego, thus constituting them both as thetic. Through its thetic, altering aspect, the signifier represents the subject-not the thetic ego but the very process by which it is posited. A signifier indebted in this manner to semiotic functioning tends to return to it. In all its various vac-illations, the thetic is displaced toward the stages previous to its positing or within the very stases of the semiotic—in a particular element of the digital code or in a particular continuous portion of the analog code. These movements, which can be designated as fetishism, show (human) language's characteristic tendency to return to the (animal) code, thereby breaching what Freud calls a
"primal repression." The thetic-that crucial place on the basis of which the human being constitutes himself as signifying and/or social—is the very place textual experience aims toward. In this sense, textual experience represents one of the most daring explorations the subject can allow himself, one that delves into his constitutive process. But at the same time and as a result, textual experience reaches the very foundation of the social-that which is exploited by sociality but which elaborates and can go beyond it, either destroying or transforming it.”

“In taking the thetic into account, we shall have to represent the semiotic (which is produced recursively on the basis of that break) as a "second" return of instinctual functioning within the symbolic, as a negativity introduced into the symbolic order, and as the transgression of that order.
This transgression appears as a breach leffraction| subsequent to the thetic phase, which makes that phase negative and tends to fuse the layers of signifier/signified/referent into a network of traces, following the facilitation of the drives. Such a breach does not constitute a positing. It is not at all thetic, nor is it an Aufhebung of "original doxy" through a synthesizing spiral movement and within the pursuit of the exhaustion of truth undertaken by Hegelian absolute knowledge. On the contrary, the transgression breaks up the thetic, splits it, fills it with empty spaces, and uses its device only to remove the "residues of first symbolizations" and make them "reason" ["raisonner"| within the symbolic chain. This explosion of the semiotic in the symbolic is far from a negation of negation, an Aufhebung that would suppress the contradiction generated by the thetic and establish in its place an ideal positivity, the restorer of pre-symbolic immediacy.8 It is, instead, a transgression of position, a reversed reactivation of the contradiction that instituted this very position.”

“it sets itself up as a substitute for the initially contested thetic, thus giving rise to the aesthetic fetishism and narcissism supplanting theology.”

“to the logic of the signifier's depletion, which structural anthropology detects in social symbolism.
The first is sacrifice: this violent act puts an end to previous (semiotic, presymbolic) violence, and, by focusing violence on a victim, displaces it onto the symbolic order at the very moment this order is being founded. Sacrifice sets up the symbol and the symbolic order at the same time, and this "first" symbol, the victim of a murder, merely represents the structural violence of language's irruption as the murder of soma, the transformation of
the body, the captation of drives.”

“Social anthropology does not yet seem to have systematically studied the history of the different forms and internal changes of the structure of sacrifice. But it does take a big step forward by associating the sacrificial with the social.? It is only from this position bordering on the social that sacrifice can be viewed not only as an imposition of social coherence but also as its outer limit.
On the other side of this boundary is the a-symbolic, the dissolution of order, the erasing of differences, and finally the disappearance of the human in animality. In this light one might well reread Robertson Smith, who ascribes to rites the function of maintaining the community between man and animal.'s Pierre Vidal-Naquet has recently shown the close structural, functional, and historical imbrications of the hunt and sacrifice in Greek myth and tragedy, so close that they are expressed in the same vocau-lary and give rise to figures of transition such as hunters, the ephebi, and the Furies.”

“even though it can be seen in language, the genotext is not linguistic (in the sense understood by structural or generative linguistics). It is, rather, a process, which tends to articulate structures that are ephemeral (unstable, threatened by drive charges, "quanta" rather than "marks") and nonsignifying (devices that do not have a double articulation). It forms these structures out of: a) instinctual dyads, b) the corporeal and ecological continuum, c) the social organism and family structures. which convey the constraints imposed by the mode of produc-tion, and d) matrices of enunciation, which give rise to discursive
"genres" (according to literary history), "psychic structures" (ac-cording to psychiatry and psychoanalysis), or various arrangements of "the participants in the speech event" (in lakobson's notion of the linguistics of discourse). 108 We may posit that the matrices of enunciation are the result of the repetition of drive charges (a) within biological, ecological, and socio-familial constraints (b and c), and the stabilization of their facilitation into stases whose surrounding structure accommodates and leaves its mark on symbolization.
The genotext can thus be seen as language's underlying foundation. We shall use the term phenotext to denote language that serves to communicate, which linguistics describes in terms of "competence" and "performance." The phenotext is constantly split up and divided, and is irreducible to the semiotic process that works through the genotext. The phenotext is a structure (which can be generated, in generative grammar's sense); it obeys rules of communication and presupposes a subject of enunciation and an addressee.
…If these two terms-genotext and phenotext-could be translated into a metalanguage that would convey the difference between them”

“Metalanguage may be said to suture the signifying process by eliminating the negative charge, by subordinating negativity to affirmation, and by reducing instinctual dyads to positivity. Once it has helped constitute the real object as such and, hence, symbolism. the negative charge seems to withdraw into this symbol- ism and become subsumed by the Bejahung Freud speaks of. s The object is thus posited as real only if it is forever dissociated from the positivity directly observing it, hovering over it, meta-; overhanging it, raising it, as in a meta-physics, meta-body, meta-logic, and meta-language. The object is forever cast out, and made inaccessible as such; though it has no existence of its own, it can be constructed, deduced, and known from a position in front and above. Material discontinuity is thus posited as the predicate of a syllogism and assimilated within it as a complement to be constructed in utterances; metaphysics is indissociable from a meta-logos.
In this signifying device-metalanguage the social organism is a hierarchy that subsumes family zones and, especially, individuals directly, without the intermediary of the clan. The Greek city-state, Royalty, and the Republic are, each in its own way, hierarchies, structures in dominance, 19 which more or less di-rectly, in more or less mediated fashion, subordinate human en-tities. Even when this mediation passes through the family (as in feudalism), the family as social function operates within a totality that dominates and represses it: its autonomy as a unit of production is relativized within the State, which has the last—in fact the only—word.
The matrix of enunciation that lies within this topos is centered on an entity Descartes called a subject. The subject draws its posi-tion, its isolation within the signifying process, from the reduction of the negative, from the absorption of material discontinuity into affirmation and symbolism-from its abutment against the constraint of state control. Checked on all sides, the signifying process can only be realized within the enclosure these obstructions allow it. The process then becomes thought. From the Stoics to Descartes and after, 20 metalanguage has found its bearings in the various manifestations of this cogitation: the subject-predicate clause, syllogisms, and deductive logic, all supported by the matrix of the sign and the system.”

“Society protects itself from negativity precisely by producing such social groups the "spe-cialists of the negative,
" the contemplatives, "theoretical" and
"intellectual" types-which represent negativity as sublimated and set apart. Through them, society purges itself of negativity and endlessly calls itself into question so as to avoid breaking apart.”

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second reading (after some 25 years) of Kristeva's masterpiece. I must say, it holds up marvelously. Deeply informed by, deeply engaged with, Derrida, Lacan, Freud, and Klein--yet negotiating a position with relation to them that seems to me wholly unique and, after all these years, still wonderfully evocative and inspiring. It recalls a giddy grad student's enthusiasm (mine, not hers, though I think she must have been about fourteen when this was written?) that has, well, choric heterogeneity in the revisting.

[Nadalkaz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kristeva is undoubtedly at the forefront of psychoanalytic debate. Not easily accessible though, owing to the pragmatic translation and enormous use of appropriated terminology which is like reading a foreign language at times. Her theory of the 'subject in process' is genuinely enlightening but this is definitely a book to take your time with.

[Kat Dixon · Rating 3 out of 5]

a seminal text but not the best beach read

[Dimis · Rating 3 out of 5]

With the distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic, Kristeva thematizes the element of meaning that is only just being formed, or the magma of being. For the first time I have found convincing analyzes and structures for many essential experiences, whereby important theory genealogies are also brought together. It is also about a topic that is one of the most important for me: language and the body.
My biggest issue with the book, and for this reason this rating, is that it is written in a very sophisticated way and if you don't have the rudimentary concepts and knowledge of the subject, you can close the book right away.

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Damn this book for being so useful. I was hoping to only read a couple of chapters but I've been sat at my dining table for hours reading 75% of the book. This critical theory is going to be vital for my dissertation argument.

[Hayley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of this went over my head and requires more in depth understanding, but it provided a fresh and unique perspective to the field. Relating the semiotic and linguistic to phenomenological and Freudian theory proved super intriguing.

[Laura]

Wird in "We are Feminists" in Bezug auf die feministische Theorie erwähnt (S. 57)

[Miranda Chen]

Read Part One: The Semiotic and the Symbolic.

[Sunblinding · Rating 5 out of 5]

They just don't write doctoral theses like they used to, goddam. Took the big boys to task and did it in better style than any of them managed by a country mile.

[ddalgiix · Rating 3 out of 5]

her ideas are very interesting but it was so so difficult to read

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kristeva's magesterial doctoral thesis for the Dr. d'´Etat in literature, she seeks to discern origins of the modern European novel and travels back to the early tradtions of the same in the later Middle Ages via the works of poets and trouvères. Kristeva breaks new ground in this study in two ways: for one, her focus on semiotics which in the early 1970s was not something considered in textural studies of the novel very much and secondly, her emphasis on non-novel (e.g., works of the trouvères) variants that pre-dated the modern novel in form.

La révolution du langage poétique is availible in English translation as The Revolution of Poetic Language, however, the editors and translators at Columbia University Press I feel did a great disservice in only translating about a third of the entire work: the English translation contains Kristeva's general thesis and arguments on theory, but omits her actual literary examples that formulate the foundation for her arguments. Therefore, I highly recommend reading the original French if possible: if you're interested enough to read Kristeva's dissertation, chances are you want to read the whole thing, no? I read the English translation first and kept coming to the conclusion I needed the original because I couldn't understand how she was coming to her arguments: well, of course not, as the translation provided none of her background research. Once I tracked down the French version I found it to be a beautiful, compelling, and well-reasoned work that I've since applied in a variety of ways to my own literary studies.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

San Juan de la Cruz wrote of stammering, of babbling when in ecstatic union with a living mystical presence.

era cosa tan secreta
que me quedé balbuciendo
toda ciencia trascendiendo.



The poet would not have excluded the ecstacies of babbling babes (infants in union with the maternal form and entwined lovers cooing incoherently) from sharing in such states.

In the body-minds of yoginis and yogis, Kristeva's 'semiotic' interbreeds deliciously with tantric transcendental lokas unveiled by bija mantras and goddess linguistics, not to mention, Mississippi mud.

To wit:


http://flavors.me/moonmango82

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/2...


Enjoy,

J.

[Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kristeva's Chora has allot of explanatory power, and it's a decent challenge to post-enlightenment western metaphysics. Cultures recovery from the Cogito and a substantial feminist critique of culture seem to go hand in hand if you follow the account of gender given in Lewis's "The Nameless Isle". It's account of the maternal can serve as a kind of sounding board to Kristevas less-mythic-more-social observations of the Mothers function. Gender essentialism FTW.

[Olivia (Livvy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting stuff here, but I really don't have the linguistics knowledge to wrap my brain around it.

[Lauren · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not enjoying this because I'm not understanding it. I'm putting it in my To Reread pile for now.

[Chelsea O'Byrne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A slog at times but worth it. Her ideas are both radical and eternal. I'm not really sure about all the Freud stuff but I respect her commitment to the game.