Concept
Subject in process
Kristeva's name for the speaking subject as never finished or unified, but continually produced and put in question by the interplay of the semiotic and the symbolic. The French en procès means both in process and on trial. The drives that the symbolic order holds down return in language, unsettle the subject's identity and renew it. Against a structuralism that left out the subject, and against a Lacanian subject fixed by its entry into the symbolic, she set out the idea in essays in Tel Quel (1972–73) and in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974).
Development
1972
introduced by Julia Kristeva
Kristeva introduced the “sujet en procès” in an essay of that title in Tel Quel (nos. 52–53, 1972–73) and developed it in La Révolution du langage poétique (1974), where the subject is both in process and on trial, never fixed by the symbolic order.
In Revolution in Poetic Language: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Nineteenth Century, Lautréamont and Mallarmé (1974)
Relations
- 1972 introduced by Julia Kristeva
Kristeva introduced the “sujet en procès” in an essay of that title in Tel Quel (nos. 52–53, 1972–73) and developed it in La Révolution du langage poétique (1974), where the subject is both in process and on trial, never fixed by the symbolic order.
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.