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.
Development
1974
Julia Kristeva introduced by
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.
Relations
- 1974 introduced by Julia Kristeva
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.
Works
- 1974
Kristeva's state doctoral thesis, defended in Paris in 1973 and published in 1974. Drawing on Freud, Lacan, Hegel and linguistics, it distinguishes two modalities at work in all signification: the semiotic, a rhythmic articulation bound to the drives and organised in the chora, and the symbolic, the order of the sign, syntax and judgement, founded by the thetic break. Poetic language, studied in Lautréamont and Mallarmé, is where the semiotic returns to disrupt the symbolic, and its speaking subject is a subject in process, which in French also means a subject on trial. Margaret Waller's abridged English translation appeared in 1984 as Revolution in Poetic Language.
See also
People
References
- Revolution in Poetic Language: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Nineteenth Century, Lautréamont and Mallarmé1974 Evidence for a relation