Concept
Semiotic chora
Kristeva borrowed the word from Plato's Timaeus, where chora is the receptacle or nurse of all becoming, for the rhythmic, mobile arrangement of drive charges and their stases that forms in the infant around the mother's body before any sign, subject or object exists. The chora is ordered by bodily and social constraints but not by law or representation, and it can be grasped only through its effects on language, its pulses and ruptures, never named directly. It is the ground from which the semiotic enters signification. Kristeva set it out in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), and it has been read as the mother–infant bond and as the time before the mirror stage.
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- The semiotic
- Introduced by
- Julia Kristeva
- Key works
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introduced by
- Julia Kristeva 1974 Kristeva borrowed the chora from Plato’s Timaeus and redefined it in 1974 as the mobile, rhythmic articulation of drives that precedes and underlies the sign.