My title riffs on the article penned by Kelly Oliver called “Julia Kristeva’s Feminist Revolutions” in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, which aimed to set the record straight on Kristeva’s feminist credentials and her standing in social theory more generally. Half-responsible (alongside the editorial effort of Toril Moi) for Kristeva’s introduction to an Anglo-American academic readership, Oliver published a slew of instructive articles painstakingly reconstructing a swath of Kristeva’s principal theories and concepts. That Kristeva’s readers across the Atlantic required such hermeneutical heavy lifting is a testament to just how much of an intellectual heavy hitter she is. If Noam Chomsky once denigrated Kristeva as a mere “flaming Maoist” at the outset of a diatribe against the supposed Parisian irrationality of late twentieth-century French intellectual culture, then it is only because he committed the cardinal sin of philosophy: critiquing before understanding.
Indeed the wonder of Kristeva’s prose is at once its terror: that it may be construed along so many lines that run not just parallel to one another but perpendicular as well, ultimately coming to a point, in a standstill, in seeming contradiction. In the early Kristeva’s discourse of high structuralism this degree of interpretability may be called the signifier’s polyvalence, the inherent polysemy of the sign. For the later Kristeva, speaking in a more and more Freudian tongue, this might be deemed—descriptively, not normatively—polymorphous perversity.
The riches of Kristeva’s prose are banked on the wealth of her credit in various intellectual traditions. This has led detractors, commentators, and careful reconstructors alike to deem her a kind of “theoretical terrorist;” apt, not just because of Kristeva’s pivotal role in the théorie ensemble of Tel Quel, first accused of “theoretical terrorism” by Left Bank intellectuals, but due to her very practice of theoretical production. And production is one of the organizing concepts of her original theoretical practice. Within Kristeva’s footnotes and reference lists, one comes across such names as Rudolf Carnap, Gottlob Frege, Willard V. O. Quine, and Chomsky side-by-side with Georg W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, and Jacques Lacan. And even more: the names of Soviet theoretical linguists unknown to North American academe today, Sebastian Shaumyan and Polina Soboleva. And more still! Next to the twentieth-century giants Fréderic de Saussure and Roman Jakobson is seated the lesser-known but just as influential Émile Benveniste. Thus, Kristeva’s work besieges the received fortresses of classical Western European academic writing and study in her explosive mélange of theories and philosophies.
In his last published work, even Fredric Jameson finally reversed course—after decades of consigning Kristeva to the margins of what he’s called “the years of theory”—in proclaiming: “Hers is one of the great modern theoretical oeuvres. I don’t doubt that for a minute. One must have immense admiration for the variety of things she has accomplished.”
In re-introducing Kristeva to the APA blog readership, my aim is to only begin substantiating and elucidating such a prestigious claim. I do so in keeping with the spirit of Kristeva’s so-called terrorism by revisiting a selection of works, lost in translation, from her earliest period, reconstructing the trajectory of her philosophical interventions in the intellectual culture of the long second half of the twentieth century in order to demonstrate the continued theoretical fecundity of both her method and its resultant critical social theory. This retrieval is possible by excavating and re-motivating Kristeva’s notion of “intertextuality,” which (psycho-)analytically furnishes the generative production of the symbolic matrix that yields subject-formation in modern capitalist Europe.
Intertextuality is Kristeva’s concept for reading social relations, but without sacrificing to philosophy the rigor of a properly linguistic analysis. That is to say, intertextuality is not about texts as such, nor does it affirm Jacques Derrida’s alleged dictum (much misunderstood) that there is “nothing outside the text,” as they say. Intertextuality is not Kristeva’s theory of the relationship between social forms and aesthetic forms as such; in fact, it follows in the wake of that theory, written a few years prior as her thesis in linguistics, titled “Text of the Novel: A Semiological Approach to a Transformative Discursive Structure” (1967). Intertextuality, then, is an analytic concept under the umbrella of a synthetic method aimed at uncovering how it is that texts conceived as coherently organized blocs both invest and are invested with social and semantic significance which can or cannot bring about consequences in both the internal integrity of their meanings and the social world in which they are a part.
Too often, according to Kristeva, language is treated scientifically as if it were already postmortem. That is to say, the analysis of language has no synthetic moment: all language analyzed lies inert in a lab. Kristeva is rather interested in the living body of language, how language moves dynamically not just on the page, dead on arrival, but in writing and, therefore, in history. Intertextuality is an analytic that holds together the social and the semantic levels simultaneously under the syntactical arm of history. The practice of writing as sui generis to European history is a privileged instance in the dynamic of capitalism where social relations, subject-formation, and meaning-making tie a knot. “Intertextuality” affords us a grasp on this pecuniary knot. The method of sémanalyse conceived in the tradition of critical philosophy—from Kant to Marx in the strict sense, as a critique of semiotics—allows us a way to maneuver and untie that knot. This maneuver precisely is Marx’s showstopping reveal of the hidden abode of production behind the scenes of classical political economy’s sphere of circulation. Semiology or sémanalyse (often rendered, too, as just “semiotics”) for Kristeva must perform the same act. Retreating from the sphere of linguistic distribution, the front of the stage on which everyone speaks and everyone is understood, we go backstage and find out how the script is produced, how writing comes alive.
Strictly speaking, Kristeva’s sémanalyse is devised in order to intervene in the extant field of semiotics. Kristeva saw the semiotics contemporary to her, comprising Charles Sanders Peirce, Benveniste, de Saussure, and the Soviet school, among others, as an advancement on the logical positivist theories which foundered on the paradox of reference alongside its principle of empirical verification and the black box cognitive linguistics of Chomsky’s generative grammar. These competitors were, in a word, ahistorical; to put it schematically and therefore grossly, still too Kantian and not Hegelian enough. For, according to Kristeva’s aforementioned thesis in linguistics, European culture was no longer one of meaning traditionally conceived in the language of reference and its model of meaning. The advent of the novel—novel indeed in its narrative form—conveys a dramatic shift in European culture’s larger social organization expressed aesthetically, also in the decorative and popular arts, biblical commentary, as well as fine arts. Once a culture of the symbol, Europe was now a culture of the sign. Kristeva attributes this transition to the late medieval period, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, during which time a skeptical philosophy of nominalism usurps the self-evident authority and reality of metaphysical universals, heralding the reassertion of (neo-)Aristotle over (neo-)Plato: “it is no longer the Word (Christ as idea) which retains the meaning; instead it is the combination of ‘markings’ (images of the old man, the sky, the stars) which produce it” (italics in original).
Within the symbol, there is a transcendental closure of the cosmos—God writes the world and its meaning appears transparently to us. We are guaranteed a signifier in the enjoyment of a secure referent. With the sign, we experience transcendental rupture—perhaps the transcendental chaos Kant so feared to lurk behind empirical regularity in his third critique. God’s ink has run dry. Everything becomes all too worldly, and the transcendent architecture of meaning is reduced to immanent expression. This is the retreat to signification as such, famously theorized by de Saussure, composed of an arbitrary link between mobile signifiers and signifieds. De Saussure formalizes this development in culture in line with the demand placed upon the new natural sciences to mathematize (hearkened already by William of Occam with the first stone cast by Galileo Galilei).
Now, in the call to render semiotics scientific, the sign became the mental unity of signifier and signified. Signifiers, the acoustic and morphic constitution of words, pair with the representation called forth in signification. In the strictest sense, signifiers do not refer (no object outside the sign) for semiotics so far is an axiomatic system. Signifiers differ only with respect to their differences between them: this closes the system. But then how is signification taken up by those who speak (and the one who listens?). De Saussure was not expressly concerned with this theoretical problem. Benveniste was. He argued through certain key indexical terms (“I,” “you”) that even the free-floating synchronous system of signs is anchored in a time and place by means of utterance, the énoncé: this is the mode of the address. Yet Benveniste retained the psychological paradigm of linguistics and signification by stressing, like de Saussure, that understanding comes in at the level of the mental act-constitution (as the deflationary or epistemological reading of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology would have it). With the model of the address, however, we achieve the diachronic complement to de Saussure’s synchrony. How, then, to bring them together?
This problem is mirrored in Chomsky’s cognitive linguistics of generative grammar, which argues for “deep structure” to all “surface grammar” in spoken languages. He then postulates, a priori, the conditions of possibility for any intelligible linguistic act. At a time when French philosophy was at pains to disavow its very own René Descartes, Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics was, for the young Kristeva, altogether too Cartesian. Chomsky’s deep structures were innate and postulated to account for language acquisition and development in the human organism. But how, then, do deep and surface grammar come together?
Enter Kristeva. The enunciative address evocative of a sign-system is activated through the speaking subject’s formation as subjected to the law of capitalist social relations, carried by the Oedipal arrangement of the family. Lacan called this the assumption of a position within the symbolic order. Before subject-formation takes place, however, there must be a prior individuation. For the child, this is the break with prehistory, the mother (or primary caregiver), the child’s original unity with the one who rears it; becoming a historical creature proper means carrying forward the expulsion of the child from the body of the mother to the limit and past in learning to speak for oneself as oneself, yet always to another, my mother.
By bringing psychoanalysis to bear on linguistics, Kristeva seeks to suture the wound tearing apart the flesh of speech and language. Language is not about reference per se, or rather, language incessantly reaches beyond reference because language for us is the articulation of our desire, those wants as well as needs translated into a demand for the satisfaction of urges more primal than what words as such may denote in their standard disguises. Thus, signification in the “most meaningful” sense for the speaking subject has less to do with communicative language than it does poetic language, the latter which breaks down the coagulated codes of readymade language into its constituent non-sensical parts. There is more expressed in a baby’s babble than in all the instrumental and technical language of the world.
The science of language is thusly driven from idealism of the mental-act constitution to materialism of the semiotic drive-rupture transgression. Speaking economically, we may say that sense is not principally mental or representative but rather physical and corporeal (this is Kristeva’s primacy of the “suprasegmental”: acoustics, rhythm, intonation, gesture). The model of meaning represents tyrannically: still, it cannot make of a representation of the chaos of the speaking subject’s archaic infant past, lost to memory, present faintly in traces. Freud showed that the dream is a work. Lurking within the images of the dream, its meaning-content, is something unrepresentable, barred by repression, but nevertheless, at work, the latent-content. In analyzing dreams, their content must be translated. Roman Jakobson’s concepts of metaphor and metonymy depict the main mechanisms of this translation. Kristeva made these mechanisms meta, however, in her diagnostic of the fundamentally metonymical nature of all theoretical discourse, that each axiomatic system expresses a yearning for the origin and the beyond: sublimations of the unconscious. As Clarice Lispector’s fugue narrator reminds himself in his philosophical reverie, which opens her last great work, The Hour of the Star, “Yes, but don’t forget that to write anything at all my basic material is the word. So that’s why this story will be made of words that gather in sentences and from these a secret meaning emanates that goes beyond words and sentences.”
For Kristeva, not just in dreams but all language use owes its efficacy (or lack thereof) to the functions of metaphor and metonymy. In psychoanalytical parlance this tends to be rendered as condensation and displacement. Likewise, all sign-systems are beholden to the laws of metaphor and metonymy. Literature especially, the novel as an intertextuality incipient by late medieval times, writes out this process: the bourgeois subject obeying a metaphor, constituted metonymically, operative across the levels of socio-symbol, history, and psychic life.
Kristeva disclaimed being a feminist during the movement and its theory’s fever-pitch in France. Still, she had something to offer feminism that it could not refuse. And even if today Kristeva tends to claim the mantle of psychoanalyst over philosopher, perhaps as an anti-philosopher in Nietzsche’s style, her contributions to philosophy remain—whether as spider-predator or spider-prey. Regardless, the silk is being spun; one need only look to Kristeva’s induction in the Library of Living Philosophers series to see.
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