Kristeva Julia (b.1941), Bulgarian-born French linguist, practicing psychoanalyst, widely influential social theorist, and novelist. The centerpiece of Kristeva’s semiotic theory has two correlative moments: a focus on the speaking subject as embodying unconscious motivations (and not simply the conscious intentionality of a Husserlian transcendental ego) and an articulation of the signifying phenomenon as a dynamic, productive process (not a static sign-system). Kristeva’s most systematic philosophical work, La Révolution du langage poétique (1974), brings her semiotics to mature expression through an effective integration of psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), elements of linguistic models (from Roman Jakobson to Chomskyan generative grammar) and semiology (from Saussure to Peirce and Louis Hjelmslev), and a literary approach to text (influenced by Bakhtin). Together the symbolic and the semiotic, two dialectical and irreconcilable modalities of meaning, constitute the signifying process. The symbolic designates the systematic rules governing denotative and propositional speech, while the semiotic isolates an archaic layer of meaning that is neither representational nor based on relations among signs. The concept of the chora combines the semiotic, translinguistic layer of meaning (genotext) with a psychoanalytic, drive-based model of unconscious sound production, dream logic, and fantasy life that defy full symbolic articulation. Drawing on Plato’s non-unified notion of the maternal receptacle (Timaeus), the chora constitutes the space where subjectivity is generated. Drives become ‘ordered’ in rhythmic patterns during the pre-Oedipal phase before the infant achieves reflexive capacity, develops spatial intuition and time consciousness, and posits itself as an enunciating subject. Ordered, but not according to symbolic laws, semiotic functions arise when the infant forms associations between its vocal gesticulations and sensorimotor development, and patterns these associations after the mother’s corporeal modulations. The semiotic chora, while partly repressed in identity formation, links the subject’s preverbal yet functional affective life to signification.
All literary forms – epic narrative, metalanguage, contemplation or theoria and text-practice – combine two different registers of meaning, phenotext and genotext. Yet they do so in different ways and none encompasses both registers in totality. The phenotext refers to language in its function ‘to communicate’ and can be analyzed in terms of syntax and semantics. Though not itself linguistic, the genotext reveals itself in the way that ‘phonematic’ and ‘melodic devices’ and ‘syntactic and logical’ features establish ‘semantic’ fields. The genotext isolates the specific mode in which a text sublimates drives; it denotes the ‘process’ by which a literary form generates a particular type of subjectivity. Poetic language is unique in that it largely reveals the genotext.
This linkage between semiotic processes, genotext, and poetic language fulfills the early linguistic project (1967–73) and engenders a novel post-Hegelian social theory. Synthesizing semiotics and the destructive death drive’s attack against stasis artfully restores permanence to Hegelian negativity. Poetic mimesis, because it transgresses grammatical rules while sustaining signification, reactivates the irreducible negativity and heterogeneity of drive processes. So effectuating anamnesis, poetry reveals the subject’s constitution within language and, by holding open rather than normalizing its repressed desire, promotes critical analysis of symbolic and institutionalized values. Later works like Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980), Etrangers à nous-mêmes (1989), Histoires d’amour (1983), and Les Nouvelles maladies de l’âme (1993) shift away from collective political agency to a localized, culturally therapeutic focus. Examining xenophobic social formations, abjection and societal violence, romantic love, grief, women’s melancholic poison in patriarchy, and a crisis of moral values in the postmetaphysical age, they harbor forceful implications for ethics and social theory. See also BAKHTIN, FEMINISM , FREUD, POST- MODERN , SEMIOTICS , STRUCTURALIS. P.Hu.