Revolution in Poetic Language: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Nineteenth Century, Lautréamont and Mallarmé

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.