Book
Revolution in Poetic Language: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Nineteenth Century, Lautréamont and Mallarmé
La Révolution du langage poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle, Lautréamont et 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.
Main ideas
- Two modalities of signification, the semiotic and the symbolic, are mixed in every utterance.
- The semiotic chora, borrowed from Plato's Timaeus, is the mobile, rhythmic, drive-laden articulation that precedes the sign.
- The thetic break founds the symbolic order of sign, syntax and judgement.
- In the avant-garde poetry of Lautréamont and Mallarmé the semiotic breaks into the symbolic.
- The speaking subject is a subject in process and on trial, never fixed by the symbolic order.
- In the Holberg Prize committee's words, the theory brings the living body back into language.
What it shows
- 1974
Julia Kristeva introduced The semiotic
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.
- 1974
Julia Kristeva introduced Semiotic chora
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.
- 1972
Julia Kristeva introduced Subject in process
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.
Jacques Lacan influenced Julia Kristeva
Kristeva attended Lacan’s seminar from the late 1960s and built her semiotic/symbolic distinction on, and against, his account of the symbolic order, the mirror stage and the subject of the signifier.