Semiotic and Symbolic 3
in poetry or in the echolalias of children."
Kristeva's theory based on Freud's concept and three part division of individual psyche,
Conscious, Unconscious and Preconscious reveals the connection of symbolic disposition in
poetic language with subject's Conscious and the semiotic disposition with subject's
Unconscious. To make a translation from Kristeva's terms to Freud's terms, the modern poetry
language depends on the subject's Conscious and Unconscious joint functioning.
The subject of modern poetry has the function of "a split subject in action", and is always "on
trial", as the two processes semiotic and symbolic are used together. This interplay is called
"heterogeneity" and is the place where the signifying process occurs in a text , "a site in which
the energies of the unconscious simultaneously attack the formal conventions of language 858p1515i and
are supported by them "
"Kristeva's semiotic is a drive- affected dimension of human experience that disrupts (even as it
interfuses with) the symbolic. The conception of semiotics may be postuled as a meditation
between the real, which is beyond or other language, and the symbolic, between what is ineffable
and what is articulated through language. According to Kristeva's formulations, semiotic is a
process rather than a system".(Barzilai Shuli, March 1991)
Another reader of Kristeva's work, Ed
Block from
connection she makes between the individual psyche and language: "She argues that the
individual psyche, like language itself, is the result of cultural no less that psychological and
even biological forces. From this position she demonstrates that only the postmodernist writer's
critically reflexive dissection and reworking of the writer's relation to language can dramatize as
Semiotic and Symbolic 4
it explores the modern alienation of human beings from their language and from their productive
and political lives."
Julia Kristeva's theory is based on her investigation of the poetry of Stephane Mallarme and
Comte de Lautreamont, two major French symbolist writers.
Mallarme poetry is considered one of the most difficult to translate in English, because the
meaning is very strict connected to the sound and gives a kind of expression in which words gain
definition from their context, the rhythm also gains importance over punctuation.
Mallarme himself said about poetry: "You don't make a poem with ideas, but with
words!" His poetry employs condensed figures and unorthodox syntax. He believed that the
point of a poem was the beauty of the language. While Mallarme's poetry is about the musicality
of language, Lautreamont 's is about tone. His most important work is a beautiful narrative prose
poem "The songs of Maldoror"(1869), which main character is filled with violence, obscenity,
and he celebrates the principles of Evil. New York Times writes about his work:
"Lautreamont's style is hallucinatory, visionary.this new fluent translation makes clear its
poetic texture and what may be termed its subversive attraction."
The work of those two French writers stands for Kristeva's theory of semiotic and symbolic.
Their work is an expression of subject's self, the semiotic is showed by musicality and rhythm
and tone.
The theory of semiotic and symbolic, the necessity of their joint functioning applies not only to
modern poetry. The theory of "subject on trial" has been applied and is well represented in
theater, and more precisely in Alfred Jarry's famous play Ubu Roi (1896). The subject of this
play, Pere Ubu, "is without a doubt, semiotic motility personified". The continuing interplay of
Semiotic and Symbolic 5
semiotic and symbolic is showed by Ubu's language which "reveals his obsessions with eating,
eliminating, and accumulating, and yet his instinctual energies constantly meet with the
resistance of various forms and constrains - meaning syntax, the demands of order, and even the
structure of tragedy that Jarry parodies." (Laurie Vickroy, 1990)
The presence of unconscious is reveled by the use of obscenities (the subject of the play says
"merdre"), which according to Kristeva, "are connected to psychosomatic functioning".
Some of Kristeva's readers could find her theory "radical", as Bedient Calvin, a professor of
English at the
Poetry as Shaterred Signification. Bedient gives as examples a few American poems to
demonstrate
that Kristeva's model of modern text is wrong: "The Malay - took the
Emily Dickinson, "The Attic which is Desire", by William Carlos William, "The End of
Beauty", by Jorie Graham. Using those three poems Bedient is trying to demonstrate that they
resists to the symbolic order. He criticized the idea of subject always on trial, but as Toril Moi, a
professor of
Comparative literature at the
account of the semiotic process in language for a complete theory of poetic language".
Julia Kristeva's theories may be confusing, but is clear how they draw from the Freudian theory
of unconscious, "which cast the subject as split, as decentered in the tension between conscious
and unconscious processes", and is important not to say that the subject of modern poetry is
simply unconscious , as Bedient does.
Ultimately we may conclude that Kristeva's work provides a new analyze and a new point of
view of language and art existing in our culture which can be useful to psychopathology of
Semiotic and Symbolic 6
language and literature, from a different perspective than Freud, keeping away the abnormal that
can only draw wider conclusions for a normal operation of society.
Semiotic and Symbolic 7
References
Barzilai Shuli (1991, March). Borders of Language: Kristeva's Critique of Lacan. Retrieved
of
Bedient Calvin (1990). Kristeva and Poetry as Shattered Signification. Retrieved October 20,
2006, from Critical Inquiry , 4, (pp.807 - 829). Web site: https://www.jstor.org/
Bedient Calvin (1991). How I Slugged It out with Toril Moi and Stayed Awake. Retrieved
https://www.jstor.org/
Ed Block (1983). Desire in Language. Retrieved
Literature, XXIV, 4, by
the Board of Regents of the
site: https://www.jstor.org/
from https://www.egs.edu/resources/kristeva.html
Hutton Christopher (1992, May). Reviewed work(s): Julia Kristeva by J. Lechte. Retrieved
https://www.jstor.org/
Jones Ann Rosalind (1984). Julia Kristeva on femininity: The Limits of a Semiotic Politics.
Retrieved
Language (n.d.). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition.
Retrieved
Semiotic and Symbolic 8
https://dictionary.reference.com/browse/language
Moi Toril (1991). Reading
Kristeva: A Response to Calvin Bedient. Retrieved
from Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 639 - 643. Web site: https://www.jstor.org/
Vickroy Laurie (1990). Ubu-en-proces: Jarry, Kristeva, and Semiotic Motility. Retrieved
https://www.jstor.org
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