Revolution in Poetic Language By Julia Kristeva

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Revolution in Poetic Language By Julia Kristeva

• The Author
• Linguist, literary critic, cultural theorist,
• and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva has
• been one of the central figure of French
• intellectual life in the late twentieth and
• early twenty-first century.

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• 2.Main contribution
• Kristevas main contribution to contemporary
• theory lies in her elucidation of the process by
• which preverbal experiencebodily drives and
• effectsenters into language and activates
• creative, transformative, and something
• revolutionary modes of cultural production. (2165)

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• Kristeva diverges from other contemporary
  theorists, especially structuralist and
  poststructuralist theorist in her insistence on
  the corporeal origins of subjectivity and of
  artistic practice. She has emphasized the
  importance of prelinguistic, instinctual, and
  sensory components of both subjectivity and
  signification. (2165)

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II. Revolution in Poetic Language (1974)

• A. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva
  maintains that all signification entails the
  dialectical interaction of the symbolic and the
  semiotic. The semiotic represents the discharge
  of pre-Oedipal instinctual energies and drives
  within language it is associated with what
  Kristeva calls chora. The semiotic chora, which
  precedes and underlies figuration, is connected
  to the maternal body. Her thesis is that the
  eruption of the semiotic within the symbolic is
  what provides the creative and innovative impulse
  of modern poetic language. (2166)

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• B. Kristeva finds two forces competing for
  expression in the language of poetry the
  symbolic and the semiotic. The symbolic is
  that aspect of language that allows it to refer.
  The semiotic dimension of language cannot be
  known except in the moments where it breaks
  through the symbolic. (2166)
• C. Kristevas thinking is influenced by Lacan,
  but she has a different thought she proposes the
  term semiotic. The semiotic is closely
  connected with femininity, but it is by no means
  a language exclusive to women, for it arises from
  the pre-Oedipal period which recognizes no
  distinctions of gender. (2166)

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From Part I. The Semiotic and the Symbolic2. The
Semiotic Chora Ordering the Drives

• I. Kristeva borrowed the term chora from
  Platos Timaeus to denote an essentially mobile
  and extremely provisional articulation
  constituted by movements and their ephemeral
  stases. Chora represents neither something for
  someone nor someone for another it is, however,
  generated in order to attain to a signifying
  position. Although the chora can be designated
  and regulated, it can never be definitively
  posited. (2170)

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Chora

• Is
• Generated in order to attain to this signifying
  position
• Precedes and underlines figuration and thus
  specularization
• Vocal and kinetic rhythm
• A receptacle, nourishing and maternal (2171)
• physical ? social Its vocal and gestural
  organization is subject to an objective
  ordering, which is dictated by natural or
  socio-historical constraints (2171)

• (2170-71)
• Not
• A sign, a position, nor a signfier
• A model or copy

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Semiotic vs. Symbolic

• Chora as the pre-symbolic -- a modality of
  signifiance in which the linguistic sign is not
  yet articulated as the absence of the object and
  as the distinction between the real and the
  symbolic (2171).
• (p.2172) Pre-Oedipal driveswhich are both
  destructive and assimilating, i.e. including
  displacement and condensation, absorption and
  repulsion
• (p. 2173) drive attack against stasis, chora a
  place where the subject is both generated and
  negated.

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• The symbolic social language social effects
  constituted through objective constraints of
  biological difference and historical
  considerations (p.2171) ? organize the chora
  through an ordering (mediation) but not
  according to a law.
• The mothers body as mediation between the
  symbolic order and the semiotic chora

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Semiotic Drives ? symbolization

• The semiotic rhythm text is the terrain of
  operating signifying process (p.2172)
• Checked by biological and social constraints (or
  the symbolic)
• Semiotic marks voice, gesture, color a
  psychosomatic modality connecting the physical
  and the social (2173)

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The Thetic as Rupture

• All enunciation, whether of a word or of a
  sentence, is a thetic. It requires an
  identification, so the subject must separate from
  and through its images as well as its objects. We
  can say that the thetic phase of the signifying
  process is the deepest structure of signification
  and proposition. (2175)

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• Freuds unconscious theory and Lacanian
  development show that thetic signification is a
  stage attained under certain precise conditions
  during the signifying process. (2176)

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Genotext and Phenotext

• I. By distinguishing between the genotext (the
  energies that bring a text about) and phenotext
  (the linguistic structure that results), Kristeva
  tries to capture the trace of what in a subject
  brings a text into being, not what the text
  signifies. (2177)

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• II. The genotext can be regarded as languages
  underlying foundation. We use the term
  phenotext to denote language that serves to
  communicate, which linguistics describes in terms
  of competence and performance. The phenotext
  is a structure while the genotext is a process.
  (2177)

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