Concept
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.
Development
1974
introduced by Julia Kristeva
In her 1974 state doctoral thesis Kristeva set the semiotic, the drive-charged, pre-verbal modality of signification, against the symbolic, and made their interplay the basis of her account of poetic language.
In Revolution in Poetic Language: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Nineteenth Century, Lautréamont and Mallarmé (1974)
Relations
- 1974 introduced by Julia Kristeva
In her 1974 state doctoral thesis Kristeva set the semiotic, the drive-charged, pre-verbal modality of signification, against the symbolic, and made their interplay the basis of her account of poetic language.
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.