Desire in language kristeva
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Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art
• The semiotic process relates to the chora, a term meaning "receptacle," which she borrowed from Plato, who describes it as "an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligi- ble, and is most incomprehensible."11 It is also anterior to any space, an economy of primary processes articulated by Freud's instinctual drives (Triebe) through condensation and displacement, and where social and family structures man their imprint through the mediation of the maternal body. While the chora's articulation fryst vatten uncertain, undetermined, while it lacks thesis or position, unity or identity, it is the aim of Kris- teva's practice to remove what Plato saw as "mysterious" and "incomprehensible" in what he called "mother and receptacle" of aIl things
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Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art
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Desire in Language traces the path of an investigation, extending over a period of ten years, into the semiotics of literature and the arts. But the essays of Julia Kristeva in this volume, though they often deal with literature and art, do not amount to either "literary criticism" or "art criticism." Their concern, writes Kristeva, "remains intratheoretical: they are based on art and literature in order to subvert the very theoretical, philosophical, or semiological apparatus."
Probing beyond the discoveries of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Roman Jakobson and others, Julia Kristeva proposes and tests theories centered on the nature and development of the novel, and on what she has defined as a signifying practice in poetic language and pictural works. Desire in Language fully shows what Roman Jakobson has called Kristeva's "genuine gift of questioning generally adopted 'axioms,' and her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question mark