Desire In Language Kristeva Pdf File
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Other works by Julia Kristeva published by Columbia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Revolution in Poetic Language. The Kristeva Reader. Tales of Love. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. The unknown: An Initiation. Kristeva's Desire In Language: A Feminist Semiotic Perspective on Language and Literature This paper deals with the challenging view of language and literature held by Julia Kristeva and some of its implications for gender studies and feminist criticism. I shall first approach Kristeva's semiotics of language and experience.
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Full text of ' KRISTEVA READER Edited by Toril Moi 4 o n The Kristeva Reader Julia Kristeva EDITED BY TORIL MOI New York Columbia University Press 1986 Copyright © organization, editorial matter, and introduction Toril Moi 1986. Copyright © in English translations of Leon S. Roudiez (chapters 7 and 10) by Columbia University Press 1986 from their forthcoming book, Julia Kristeva: Tales of Love, Leon S.
Roudiez, translator, New York and Guildford, Surrey. Copyright © in English translations of Sean Hand (chapters 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12) by Basil Blackwell Ltd. Copyright © in original French texts of chapters 2, 4, 5, 9, 11, 12 Editions du Seuil.
Copyright © in original French text of chapter 3 Mouton Publishers Copyright © in original French text of chapter 6 Editions des femmes. Copyright © in original French texts of chapters 7 and 10 Editions Denoel. Copyright © in original French texts of chapters 8 and 13 Julia Kristeva. All rights reserved.
Printed in Great Britain Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kristeva, Julia, 1941— The Kristeva reader. Bibliography: p. Includes index.
Political science. P99.K687 1986 808'.0O16 ISBN 0-231-06324-5 ISBN 0-231-06325-3 (pbk.) Contents Preface VI Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 I Linguistics, Semiotics, Textuality 23 1 The System and the Speaking Subject 24 2 Word, Dialogue and Novel 34 3 From Symbol to Sign 62 4 Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science 74 5 Revolution in Poetic Language 89 II Women, Psychoanalysis, Politics 137 6 About Chinese Women 138 7 Stabat Mater 160 8 Women's Time 187 9 The True-Real 214 10 Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents 238 11 Why the United States? 272 12 A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident 292 13 Psychoanalysis and the Polis 301 Index 321 Preface To think the unthinkable: from the outset this has been Julia Kristeva's project. Scanning with exceptional intensity the whole horizon of Western culture, her writing investigates the terrains of philosophy, theology, linguistics, literature, art, politics and, not least, psychoanalysis, which remains the crucial intellectual influence on her work. Always challenging, original, provocative, her work can lead to no easy consensus.
However controversial, it is nevertheless far too important to be ignored. Speaking across the conventional disciplinary boundaries of the academic world, Kristeva raises the fundamental issues of human existence: language, truth, ethics, love. For me, as for many other women, the fact that this epochal oeuvre has been produced by a woman who often and explicitly chooses to focus on problems of femininity, motherhood and sexual difference is an added incentive to come to grips with her thought. The Kristeva Reader is a comprehensive introduction to her work in English, containing a wide range of essays from all phases of Kristeva's career. The essays have been selected as representative of the three main areas of her writing: semiotics, psychoanalysis and politics. Given the conceptual and theoretical difficulty of her texts, each essay has been provided with a short introduction presenting the basic issues and explicating the central concepts of that specific text. The general introduction to the volume aims to provide an overview of Kristeva's intellectual development and a presentation of the main issues raised by her work.
In order to avoid repetition of similar material, the general introduction does not, as a rule, repeat explanations provided elsewhere in this volume. Instead I have simply added a short, paren- thetical reference to the relevant essay, to enable readers in doubt about specific definitions and ideas to turn to that particular text and its accompanying introduction for further information.
Preface vii Offering at once enough editorial material to help those in search of a basic grounding in Kristeva 's complex, disturbing theories, and a compact, convenient selection of important articles, some of them otherwise hard to come by, The Kristeva Reader is designed for beginners as well as for those already familiar with her work. The introductory pre- sentations of her texts nevertheless presuppose some basic knowledge of psychoanalytic vocabulary, particularly as developed by Jacques Lacan, as well as some knowledge of Jacques Derrida's central ideas. Any current introduction to literary or psychoanalytic theory should provide the necessary background for the complete beginner (see for instance the works by Eagleton, Norris and Wright listed in the bibliography after the general introduction). The Kristeva Reader presents the work of many different translators.
Sean Hand's translations were commissioned specially for this volume. The other texts have been collected from a series of different sources, and apart from some minor stylistic changes they are reproduced as originally printed. Documentation style and terminology may therefore vary slighdy from one essay to another. To intervene in other translators' already published work in order to systematize and streamline their efforts to reconstruct Kristeva's original French in English would seem to be both an insulting and a theoretically useless exercise: there can never be one, true translation of any text, let alone of a collection of thirteen different essays. I would like to thank Julia Kristeva for her continuous support for this project.
Her positive and encouraging responses to various queries have been a steady source of inspiration for my work. My editor at Basil Blackwell, Philip Carpenter, provided much practical help and remained perfectly calm when faced with unexpected obstacles and inexplicable delays.
Sean Hand worked hard to produce the new translations required for this volume. Terence Cave, Terry Eagleton and Jacqueline Rose all provided help and advice on specific points. Needless to say, the responsibility for any remaining errors in the editorial material is mine. Toril Moi Acknowledgements The editor and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to include the material collected in this edition: for 'The System and the Speaking Subject', the editor, Times Literary Supplement; for 'Word, Dialogue and Novel', Basil Blackwell Ltd; for 'From Symbol to Sign', Mouton Publishers (Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co.); for 'Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science', 'Revolution in Poetic Language', 'The True-Real', 'Why the United States?' And 'A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident', Editions du Seuil, Paris; for 'About Chinese Women', Marion Boyars Publishers, London and New York; for 'Revolution in Poetic Language', 'Stabat Mater' and 'Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents', Columbia University Press; for 'Women's Time' and 'Psychology and the Polis', the University of Chicago Press. Introduction The semiotic project In 1966 Paris witnessed not only the publication of Jacques Lacan's Ecrits and Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things), but also the arrival of a young linguist from Bulgaria. At the age of 25, Julia Kristeva, equipped with a doctoral research fellowship, embarked on her intellectual encounter with the French capital.
It would seem that she took the Left Bank by storm. By the spring of 1967 her articles were already appearing in its most prestigious reviews: Critique, Langages - and, not least, Tel Quel. 1 Kristeva's linguistic research was soon to lead to the publication of two important books, Le Texte du roman and Semeiotike, and to culminate with the publication of her massive doctoral thesis, La Revolution du langage poetique, in 1974.
This theoretical production earned her a chair in linguistics at the University of Paris VII. In 1966, initially helped by her compatriot Tzvdtan Todorov, Kristeva soon met and worked with the most important figures of the blossoming structuralist milieu in Paris. Although she started work as a research assistant to Lucien Goldmann, her most important teacher was - and always remained - Roland Barthes. Reviewing her first published book, Semeiotike, in La Quinzaine Litteraire, Barthes wrote: I already owe her a lot and have done so right from the start. And now I have been made to feel again - and this time in its entirety - the force of her work.
Force here means displacement. Julia Kristeva changes the order of things: she always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud: what she displaces is the already- said, that is to say, the insistence of the signified; what she subverts is the authority of monologic science and of filiation, (p. 19) 2 Introduction The reason why Kristeva right from the start of her career in Paris was in a position to inspire her own teachers is to be found in her unique intellectual background. Having equipped her not only with a solid grounding in Marxist theory but also with fluent Russian, her Eastern European training enabled her to gain first-hand knowledge of the Russian Formalists, and - more importandy - of the great Soviet theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work she (along with Tzvdtan Todorov) was instrumental in introducing to Western intellectuals (see 'Word, Dialogue and Novel'). This double heritage, at once Marxist and Formalist, enabled her to make the most of the structuralist impulses she met with in Paris, giving her the confidence and context necessary not only to learn from them but to appropriate and transform them for her own particular project.
A third element, however, must be added to this picture: the philosophy of Hegel. In his excellent review of Kristeva's early work, Philip E.
Lewis remarks on the importance of Hegel for Revolution in Poetic Language, while simultaneously stressing her independent appropriation of the Hegelian concept of negativity. 'Her relations to both Hegel and Marx', he warns, 'are exceedingly complex and never aquiescent, [and] certainly do not allow cursory characterization' (p.
It was, then, this specific and relatively unusual intellectual back- ground that enabled Kristeva to take up a critical position towards structuralism from the outset. Even her earliest work (from 1967-8) exhibits that dynamic, process-oriented view of the sign which in many ways still stands as the hallmark of her theoretical production. 'Semiotics: a Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science' demonstrates precisely her radical attack on the rigid, scientistic pretensions of a certain kind of structuralism, as well as on the subjectivist and empiricist categories of traditional humanism: No form of semiotics, therefore, can exist other than as a critique of semiotics. As the place where the sciences die, semiotics is both the knowledge of this death and the revival, with this knowledge, of the 'scientific'; less (or more) than a science, it marks instead the aggressivity and disillusionment that takes place within scien- tific discourse itself.
We might argue that semiotics is that 'science of ideologies' suggested in revolutionary Russia, but it is also an ideology of sciences, (p. 78 below) Introduction 3 As Roland Barthes put it: Kristeva was always foreign to the theoretical scene she was in, radically subversive even of the new science of semiology (see 'L'Etrangere, pp. In this sense, I think, she was never a structuralist at all, but rather (if labels are to be used) a kind of post-structuralist avant la lettre. In her preface to Desire in Language, she herself gives what is perhaps the best and most accessible summary of her own semiotic project, a summary which also reveals the intensity of her theoretical engagement: Next to structuralism, a critique of Hegelian, Heideggerian, Marxian or Freudian derivation jolted its occasionally simplistic elegance and carried theoretical thought to an intensity of white heat that set categories and concepts ablaze - sparing not even discourse itself. Semanalysis, as I tried to describe it and put it to work in Ernieiomxri, meets that requirement to describe the signifying phenomenon, or signifying phenomena, while analyzing, criticizing, and dissolving 'phenomenon', 'meaning' and 'signifier'. Vii) Her own personal situation as a foreigner in Paris, and as a woman in an extremely male-dominated environment (with one or two excep- tions, the Tel Quel group with which she soon became associated consisted of men), also helped to give shape and edge to her ambitious semiouc project.
'To work on language, to labour in the materiality of that which society regards as a means of contact and understanding, isn't that at one stroke to declare oneself a stranger/foreign [etranger] to language?' She asks defiantly in the first sentence of Semeiotike.
Ten yeas later, she stresses the fact of her femaleness as one of the deter- minants of her theoretical outlook: 'It was perhaps also necessary to be a woman to attempt to take up that exorbitant wager of carrying the rational project to the outer borders of the signifying venture of men... ' (Desire in Language, p. It is, then, in her own exiled and marginalized position as an intellectual woman in Paris in the late sixties, as well as in her specific intellectual lineage, that we can locate the formative influences on Kristeva's early work. Tel Quel: the politics of post-modernism? From her earliest days in Paris, Kristeva's work was associated with the Tel Quel group headed by the novelist and theorist Philippe Sollers, 4 Introduction who later became her husband.
One of her very first articles to be published in France appeared in Tel Quel as early as the spring of 1967 (Tour une sdmiologie des paragrammes', Tel Quel, 29). By the summer of 1970 she had become a member of the editorial board, where she remained until 1983, when Tel Quel liquidated itself and the prestigious series of books published under its imprint, relinquishing its links with the Editions du Seuil, only to re-emerge from the ashes as the new journal L'Infini, now published by Denoel, who also published Kristeva's latest full-length book, Histoires d 'amour (1983). In the late sixties Tel Quel became a centre of gravitation for almost all of the younger generation of structuralist and emerging post- structuralist theorists in France. The Theorie d' ensemble, published as a collective work after the uprising of May 1968, has contributions from Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Marcelin Pleynet and Jean Ricardou as well as Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers and a series of other avant-garde critics. Although Tel Quel never published any of Foucault's books, they did publish Barthes, Derrida, Genette, Todorov, Ricardou and, of course, Kristeva and Sollers, as well as many other works of an 'experimental' nature (whether 'theoretical' or 'creative').
What, then, was the hallmark of this group in the late sixties? If one were to summarize their project in one single concept, it would have to be, I think, the idea of a 'modernist theory' as distinct from a mere theory of modernism. Focusing, like structuralism, on language as the starting-point for a new kind of thought on politics and the subject, the group based its work on a new understanding of history as text; and of writing (ecriture) as production, not representation. Within these parameters, they sought to elaborate new concepts for the description of this new vision of the social or signifying space (Kristeva, with her coinage of terms such as 'intertextuality', 'signifying practice' or 'signifiance', 'paragramme', 'genotext' and 'phenotext', was the main exponent of this specific trend); to produce a plural history of different kinds of writing situated in relation to their specific time and space; and, finally, to articulate a politics which would constitute the logical consequence of a non-representational understanding of writing. 2 The Tel Quel group thus perceived itself and its own avant-garde activity as political, in a way which came increasingly to be identified with Maoism. Their political commitment in the late 1960s, however, can only be understood in the context of May 1968.
Students and other Introduction 5 intellectuals in the 1980s, struggling against a climate of unemployment, recession and increasingly savage cuts in the educational institutions, may have some trouble in understanding the exhilarating effect of the May revolt on students and intellectuals all over the world. It took everybody, including the Left, by surprise: 'The May Revolution in France was foreseen by nobody. It burst upon the world without warning. It did not fit any preconceived pattern*, wrote the young editors of the British New Left Review in their investigation of the 'events' toward the end of that momentous year. 3 Here was what seemed an incipient revolution inspired and instigated by students and some of their teachers, supported and taken over by workers: at one time over ten million workers in France were on strike, in spite of active opposition from the French Communist Party (the PCF) and the communist- controlled sections of the trade union movement. The May revolt was soon rolled back by the state.
The parliamentary elections which followed the uprising produced an overwhelming victory for Gaullism, and the Left massively blamed the PCF for its defeat. For in May and June of 1968 the PCF went to great lengths to prevent the two potentially revolutionary forces - students and workers - from engaging with each other, locking factory gates and sending workers home in order to prevent sit-ins and occupations. Rejecting the unortho- dox methods (occupations, sit-ins, street fighting) of the revolutionary students and workers, the PCF opted decisively for parliamentary politics, thus aligning itself with the liberal democratic institutions of the bourgeois state. In spite of the defeat of the militancy, however, the French - and more generally the European - Left saw May 68 as a tremendous encouragement for their own political activism: the revolu- tion was still possible, Marxist theory was still relevant to contemporary political struggles in the Western world and, most importantly in our context, intellectuals did have a revolutionary role to play after all. 'The May events vindicated the fundamental socialist belief that the industrial proletariat is the revolutionary class of advanced capitalism', wrote the editors of New Left Review. 'It has at the same stroke, made indisputable the vital revolutionary role of intellectuals, of all generations. The combination of the two was precisely the chemical formula which produced the shattering explosion of May' (p.
The reactionary role played by the PCF in this process put an end to the possibility of a meaningful dialogue between the French Left and the Communist Party, which was now perceived as nothing but 6 Introduction the agent of the revisionist regime of the Soviet Union. Many committed left-wingers accordingly looked for other radical alternatives.
The Soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia in August 1968 did nothing to endear the Soviet Union to Western intellectuals. At the same time, the steady escalation of the Vietnam war fuelled the anti- American tendencies of the French Left.
It was in this context that the French gauchistes came to look to China, or to some kind of libertarian anarchism (or at times to a highly confusing mixture of both), for political inspiration. For the Tel Quel group, China seemed to offer a radical perspective compatible with their own theoretical and artistic endeavours. In the late sixties their vision of The People's Republic, firmly rooted on the Left Bank as it was, seems to have constructed the Cultural Revolution as an effort towards the creation of a materialist practice bearing on the sign. Textual productivity, the desire to rewrite history as an open- ended text, the destruction of the monolithic institutions of the sign or the signifying space: all this seemed to euphoric, outside sympathizers to be taking place in Mao's China.
The Red Brigades destroying the material institutions of traditional intellectual power seemed to point a way forward for the West. What Tel Quel did not know then, of course, was that behind the facade of smiling Chinese worker-intellectuals, happily tending pigs or spreading dung in order to increase their understanding of historical materialism, there was another, grimmer reality: the tortured, dead or dying Chinese, intellectuals and non- intellectuals alike, sacrificed to the greater glory of Chairman Mao. The Tel Quel group's interest in China culminated in their three week long visit in April and May of 1974. Kristeva, having been brought up under an East European Communist regime, was probably never as uncritically enthusiastic about China as some other French intellectuals at the time. For her, China could not function as the absolute Other, in the way it obviously did for other members of Tel Quel.
In this way, she also avoided suffering their disillusionment when the truth about the Cultural Revolution became generally known, and Mao turned out to have been a Stalinist wolf in Chinese clothing after all. In a conversation with Rosalind Coward at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London in 1983, Kristeva explained how the 'Chinese experience', coinciding as it did with her encounter with feminism and her own entry into psycho- analysis, made her re-evaluate her political positions and decide to settle for a more localized interest in the individual, thus in effect abandoning her previous interest in a more general, political engagement: 4 Introduction 7 In the meantime we went to China and for me it was more a cultural interest than a political one. There were both interests.
But I wanted to see what can be done when Marxism is developed in a country that possessed a different cultural background, that doesn't have a monolithic religion, that thinks in a particular way, that speaks in a particular way because I think the Chinese character and language indicate not a particular mentality, which would be a racist position, but a different logic of organisation. I wanted to see what could be the difference of a society organised on the basis of the meeting of these two components. And what I saw was very problematic, particularly in the situation of women. Several positive things have been done and said but I couldn't notice any liberation of women in the sense of the Western movements, and of course in different fields, as well. So this was for me a point of re-evaluation of the whole problematic of political involvement.
And personally from the point of view of my own development I thought that it would be more honest for me not to engage politically but to try to be helpful or useful in a narrow field, where the individual life is concerned, and where I can do something more objective and maybe more sharp, and more independent of different political pressures, (p. 25) In 1974 Kristeva published her experience of the women of China in Des Chinoises, translated in 1977 as About Chinese Women. And in the period from about 1974 to 1977 her intellectual interests did undergo an obvious shift: away from the purely linguistic or semiotic work which culminated in Revolution in Poetic Language, and towards a more psychoanalytically oriented examination of the problems of femininity and motherhood, either as embodied in Western representations of women or mothers, or as an area posing new theoretical problems for the psychoanalyst. This shift is not unrelated to the fact that during this period she herself became a mother (her son was born in 1976), and completed her training as a psychoanalyst, starting her own psychoanalytic practice in 1979.
In this volume, the excerpts from About Chinese Women (1974), 'Stabat Mater' (1977), 'The True-Real' (1979) and 'Women's Time' (1979) trace this development of her thought, a development that can be said to culminate in her ambitious study of love in the Western world, Histoires d'amour (1983). Kristeva 's 1977 article 'A New Type of Intellectual: the Dissident', 8 Introduction which presents what one may call a politics ofmarginality, demonstrates at once her loss of belief in collective political action (she describes the politically active intellectual as someone hopelessly caught in the very logic of power he or she is seeking to undermine) and her continued commitment to a politicized analysis of intellectual activity. Microsoft Office 2007 Silent Install Executable there.
'Why the United States?' , also published in 1977, again demonstrates the Tel Quel group's tendency to project their own theoretical and aesthetic positions on to a conveniently distant Other - this time the USA. Since China turned out not to exemplify the revolution of the signifying space after all, Tel Quel looked to the States instead. Their presentation of the USA as a non-verbal culture which to some extent escapes the more repressive aspects of the Law of the Father has come in for harsh criticism from the Left. 5 However, it is important to notice that it is Kristeva herself who sounds a warning note against any such simplistic idealization of the States. In an illuminating presentation of her thought, Jacqueline Rose points out that Kristeva in this interview not only praises 'the 'non-verbal' aspects of modern American culture which draw...on the realms of 'gesture, colour and sound', but [also asks] whether that same non-verbalisation might not also be the sign of a resistance, the almost psychotic hyper-activity of a violent and overproductive culture incessantly on the go'. 6 In the 1980s it would seem that Kristeva, while not seeking to deny the relative importance of the political, refuses to accord it a general or primary status.
Explicitly distancing herself from the slogan that 'everything is political', she argues for the need to elabo- rate a more complex understanding of the apparently non-political aspects of human life. For her, the fact that love or desire cannot be adequately understood by an exclusively political discourse becomes a crucial argument for the widening of the traditional horizons of the Left: The political discourse, the political causality which is dominant even in human sciences in universities and everywhere is too narrow and too feeble in comparison with St Bernard and St Thomas. If we stay with only a political explanation of human phenomena we will be overwhelmed by the so-called mystical crisis, or spiritual crisis - that happens, it's a reality. Every bourgeois family has a son or daughter who has a mystical crisis - it's understandable because of this very schematic explanation of such phenomena as Introduction 9 love or desire simply by politics. So my problem is: how, through psychoanalysis or something else like art, through such dis- courses can we try to elaborate a more complicated elaboration, discourse sublimation of these critical points of the human experience which cannot be reduced to a political causality. (ICA conversation, p.
7 Feminism and femininity Kristeva's relationship to feminism has always been that of a somewhat critical fellow-traveller. This position appears more puzzling, perhaps, in a British or American context than it does in France. For at least some of Kristeva's more negative references to 'feminism' (often deliberately put in inverted commas) would seem to be directed against 'feminism' as defined in Paris by the Psych et Po group (who run the publishing house des femmes) - that is, as a reformist movement consisting of women seeking power within the existing framework of the bourgeois state.
Such a position would be called 'bourgeois' or 'liberal' feminism in English-speaking countries, and as such is not at all representative of the politics of a great many feminist intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. At other times, however, her use of the word comes much closer to the more general English definition of it as a movement seeking to put an end to all forms of patriarchal or sexist power.
At this general level, there is a sense in which Kristeva's texts, concerned as they are with the subversion and disruption of all monolithic power structures, can be taken to support such a goal. Yet the fact that she has apparently remained aloof from the call for explicitly feminist approaches to Western cultural tradition and her clearly stated disapproval of the feminist insistence on the need to politicize all human relationships would seem to indicate a curiously distant relationship to current feminist debates and to feminism in general. In her essay 'From Ithaca to New York' ('D'lthaca a New York'), first published in 1974 and reprinted in Polylogue (1977), Kristeva sets out the double bind of the feminist movement as she then perceived it. Characterizing it as a movement of hysterics (a term which in this context is to be taken as a descriptive, clinical term, much in the way it is used by Helene Cixous in her discussion of Frued's Dora in La Jeune nee, and not as a masculinist put-down), she argues that the hysteric split between non-verbal substance (defined as the body, the 10 Introduction drives, jouissance) on the one hand, and the Law on the other, repeats itself in the demands and activities of the women's movement. The problem is that as soon as the insurgent 'substance* speaks, it is necessarily caught up in the kind of discourse allowed by and submitted to the Law: At the moment, this is all there is, and that's not bad. But will there be more?
A different relationship of the subject to discourse, to power? Will the eternal frustration of the hysteric in relation to discourse oblige the latter to reconstruct itself? Will it give rise to unrest in everybody, male or female?
Or will it remain a cry outside time, like the great mass movements that break up the old system, but have no problem in submitting to the demands of order, as long as it is a new order? (Polylogue, p.
511) Capturing much of Kristeva's continuing unease with feminism, this passage also illuminates her consistent and fundamental project: the desire to produce a discourse which always confronts the impasse of language (as at once subject to and subversive of the rule of the Law), a discourse which in a final aporetic move dares to think language against itself, and in so doing knowingly situates itself in a place which is, quite literally, untenable. In one sense, Kristeva's relatively distant attitude towards feminism stems from her fear that any kind of political idiom, be it liberal, socialist or feminist, will necessarily reveal itself as yet another master-discourse.
Although this danger is real enough, I feel that she here underestimates the truly subversive potential of one of the most unsettling political discourses of our time. This is not to say that Kristeva is wrong to indict the distressing tendency of some contemporary forms of feminism towards simplistic, anti-intellectual analyses of women's position and struggle. It is, however, to argue that this is no reason to reject feminism en bloc. Kristeva has repeatedly criticized liberal or bourgeois feminism for its lack of radicalism (see for instance 'Women's Time' in this volume), although she has reserved her most severe criticisms for French radical feminism or the kind of feminism which emphasizes women's intrinsic difference from men. In an article written for the Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse and published in 1979, she warns against a too rapid valorization of difference: Introduction 1 1 The desire to give voice to sexual difference, and particularly to the position of the woman-subject within meaning and significa- tion, leads to a veritable insurrection against the homogenizing signifier. However, it is all too easy to pass from the search for difference to the denegation of the symbolic.
The latter is the same as to remove the 'feminine' from the order of language (understood as dominated exclusively by the secondary process) and to inscribe it within the primary process alone, whether in the drive that calls out or simply the drive tout court. In this case, does not the struggle against the 'phallic sign' and against the whole mono-logic, mono- theistic culture which supports itself on it, sink into an essentialist cult of Woman, into a hysterical obsession with the neutralizing cave, a fantasy arising precisely as the negative imprint of the maternal phallus? In other words, if the feminine exists, it only exists in the order of signifiance or signifying process, and it is only in relation to meaning and signification, positioned as their excessive or transgressive other that it exists, speaks, thinks (itself) and writes (itself) for both sexes. (*I1 n'y a pas de maftre a langage', pp. 134-5) Although primarily directed against the French 'feminism of differ- ence' and various French theories of an icriture feminine (differently and divergently represented by the Psych et Po group, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray), 8 this somewhat polemical passage highlights Kristeva's own position on the question of femininity: as different or other in relation to language and meaning, but nevertheless only thinkable within the symbolic, and therefore also necessarily subject to the Law. Main- taining such a finely balanced position is far from easy, and Kristeva herself has from time to time written about femininity in terms which would seem to equate the feminine with the 'semiotic' or the pre- Oedipal.
Main article: is the field of images and imagination, and deception. The main illusions of this order are synthesis, autonomy, duality, and similarity. Lacan thought that the relationship created within the between the Ego and the reflected image means that the Ego and the Imaginary order itself are places of radical alienation: 'alienation is constitutive of the Imaginary order.' This relationship is also.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that order structures the visual field of the Imaginary, which means that it involves a linguistic dimension. If the signifier is the foundation of the Symbolic, the signified and signification are part of the Imaginary order. Language has Symbolic and Imaginary connotations—in its Imaginary aspect, language is the 'wall of language' that inverts and distorts the discourse of the Other. On the other hand, the Imaginary is rooted in the subject's relationship with his or her own body (the image of the body). In Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real, Lacan argues that in the sexual plane the Imaginary appears as sexual display and courtship love.
Insofar as identification with the analyst is the objective of analysis, Lacan accused major psychoanalytic schools of reducing the practice of psychoanalysis to the Imaginary order. Instead, Lacan proposes the use of the Symbolic to dislodge the disabling fixations of the Imaginary—the analyst transforms the images into words.
'The use of the Symbolic,' he argued, 'is the only way for the analytic process to cross the plane of identification.' The Symbolic [ ]. Main article: In his Seminar IV, 'La relation d'objet,' Lacan argues that the concepts of 'Law' and 'Structure' are unthinkable without language—thus is a linguistic dimension. This order is not equivalent to language, however, since language involves the Imaginary and the Real as well. The dimension proper to language in the Symbolic is that of the —that is, a dimension in which elements have no positive existence, but which are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences. The Symbolic is also the field of radical alterity—that is, the Other; the unconscious is the discourse of this Other. It is the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the.
The Symbolic is the domain of culture as opposed to the Imaginary order of nature. As important elements in the Symbolic, the concepts of and connive to make of the the regulator of the distance from (' das Ding an sich') and the that goes 'beyond the pleasure principle by means of repetition'—'the death drive is only a mask of the Symbolic order.'
By working in the Symbolic order, the analyst is able to produce changes in the subjective position of the analysand. These changes will produce imaginary effects because the Imaginary is structured by the Symbolic. The Real [ ].