Kristeva, Julia (1941–)

3. Revolution in Poetic Language

By refusing to restrict the significance of language to its meaning – to see in it only a system of representation – Kristeva insists on the materiality of language, on its emergent conditions. In Revolution in Poetic Language, she thematizes the divergent modalities of language under the heading ‘the semiotic and the symbolic’. Kristeva’s analysis of the semiotic is informed by Freud’s notion of instinctual drives or impulses, the unconscious, and the pre-Oedipal. The symbolic is associated with the Freudo-Lacanian notion of post-Oedipal relations, with the function of representation, and with language as a sign-system.

The semiotic drives articulate what Kristeva calls the chora, a term she inherits from Plato’s account of the creation of the universe in his dialogue the Timaeus. The chora is a maternal receptacle, a generative matrix, an eternal place that, Plato tells us, is neither visible nor partakes of form, but is in some way intelligible. Amorphous and formless, Plato calls it the nurse of becoming, a kind of wet-nurse. Kristeva retains the paradoxical quality she sees in Plato’s account of the chora as formless and undetermined, yet capable of receiving form and determination. The chora is neither sign nor signifier, neither model nor copy. It is pre-symbolic, not yet posited, and yet it can be named and spoken of – a process that converts the semiotic into the symbolic, conferring on the semiotic precisely the order, constraint, or law of culture that it resists. Just as Plato’s chora resists definition, although it can be spoken of as if it were identifiable as an entity, so Kristeva constitutes the semiotic by naming it, even as its mobile forces elude conceptualization. In both cases the very utterance involves a loss, a betrayal of what language attempts to say. Yet this is a necessary betrayal, since the semiotic relies upon the symbolic for its articulation – one might say for its very existence – even if it suffers a transformation in the process of coming to representation.

If the semiotic needs the symbolic to represent it, the register of the symbolic requires the irruption and influx of the semiotic if it is to remain capable of change. If, in the interests of the very integrity of the semiotic, the subject cannot repudiate the symbolic, neither can it do without the semiotic. The need that the symbolic has for the excesses of poetic motion, or for the otherness of musical rhythm that marks the semiotic rupturing of the symbolic might be described as an ethical and political exigency.