The semiotic

In Kristeva's theory of signification, the modality of meaning bound to the drives and the body, laid down in the infant's pre-Oedipal tie to the mother before it enters the symbolic, the order of the sign, grammar, judgement and social law that opens with the mirror stage and the Oedipus complex. The semiotic shows in rhythm, intonation, sound and breaks of syntax rather than in what words denote. Every utterance mixes the two modalities, and poetic language, psychosis and avant-garde writing are where the semiotic disrupts the symbolic most visibly. Kristeva set it out in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) and distinguished it from semiotics as the science of signs.