Kristeva, Julia (1941–)

2. Linguistics

Language, for Kristeva, has transformative capacities. In order to unearth the heterogeneous character of language, considered as in process, Kristeva departs from the ‘generative grammar’ of Chomsky that gained popularity in the 1970s (see Chomsky, N.). The Chomskian view that ‘surface’ structures derive from ‘deep’ structures appeared to reduce the ‘speaking subject’ to a series of translinguistic generalities that privilege systematic structures. In its search for truth, its emphasis on logic, and its adoption of scientific procedures Saussurean linguistics fared no better than Chomsky’s innatist belief in linguistic universals. Although Kristeva would rehabilitate de Saussure’s interest in semiology, she found his implementation of it inadequate to the subject of enunciation, or to what she called the ‘speaking subject’. Kristeva’s desire to attend to the exigencies of the speaking subject is not a matter of returning to a Cartesian self, or a transcendental ego, but rather takes account of the disruptive and disturbing qualities that invade the equilibrium of linguistic frameworks that reduce language to a series of rules, or contain it within a formal system of signs.

Kristeva calls for linguistics to change its object of study. It is no longer the theoretical rules governing language, whether these are conceived as grammatical, or semiological, that should be studied, but rather – and it is here that the influence of Roman Jakobson (see Russian literary Formalism) makes itself felt – ‘poetic language’. Far from harnessing or fixing language by establishing its foundational structures, or stabilizing it within a system, Kristeva focuses on a ‘speech practice’ that involves a dialectic between its ‘signified structure (sign, syntax, signification)’, and a ‘semiotic rhythm’. Although Kristeva uses the term ‘dialectic’ to describe the struggle that takes place between ‘language and its rhythm’, she depends on post-Hegelian and post-Marxist resonances to give meaning to the term. It is Heidegger’s vision of the strife of world and earth as the origin of the work of art, and the work of Mallarmé and Artaud, Lautréamont and Bataille, as well as that of the Russian poets Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov, that Kristeva draws on when she observes, in ‘The Ethics of Linguistics’ (in Desire in Language, 1977), that the poet ‘wants to make language perceive what it doesn’t want to say’.

Wary of neutralizing the specificity of the speaking subject, Kristeva wants to find a way to recapture the ‘rhythm of the body’, to reclaim the ‘semiotic materials’ that other linguistic models tend to obliterate in their fascination with the technical elements of language.