by Samuel Delaney
This essay investigates the significance of Kristeva’s philosophical debt to Lacan. I will outline the affinities and divergences of their positions, before arguing that Kristeva’s contribution to psychoanalysis does not involve the wholesale rejection of Lacanian theory. Instead, Kristeva makes her own use of Lacan in order to theorise what the latter, for the most part, ignored: feminine subjectivity and feminist praxis. Like Lacan, Kristeva stresses the unstable nature of subjectivity. We find the same emphasis on paradox and indeterminacy, and the same dialectical conception of language’s subjectivising function. However, Kristeva’s notion of the maternal semiotic effects a political displacement within psychoanalysis. It allows Kristeva to explore the possibility of a feminist ethics immanently, that is, within the conceptual parameters of Lacanian theory. Describing this displacement will also allow me to defend Kristeva against the charge of essentialism. I will take up Ziarek’s argument and contend that the maternal semiotic is not an essentialist category, but a ‘theoretical fiction’[i]—a postulate that highlights the fraught and contradictory nature of patriarchal subjectivation. Kristeva’s task is not to advance an essentialist interpretation of feminine subjectivity, but to reframe psychoanalytic concepts by drawing out their latent ethical and political implications. Before making this argument, I will discuss Kristeva’s theoretical inventory. Specifically, her notions of the semiotic, the maternal chora, and the thetic respectively.
Against the orderliness and integrity of the symbolic order, the semiotic can be understood as a discourse of crisis and rupture. Perhaps it is better described as a non-discourse: the very point at which the elements of discursivity (identity, lawfulness, meaning etc.) break down. According to Kristeva, the semiotic precedes signification and the emergence of the subject. It corresponds to Freud’s pre-Oedipal stage to the extent that it refers to the affective dimensions of experience—that is, to corporeality and to the presence of the instinctual drives prior to their symbolic integration. This means that its effects are registered prior to the child’s imaginary identification with the symbolic order: a process defined in terms of the mirror stage (Lacan) and the sublimation of pre-Oedipal investments through castration (Freud). In other words, the semiotic is the locus of the subject-to-be, the constitutive ground of ego-formation. It predates the mirror stage’s identificatory dialectic of self and other and therefore any “distinction between subject and object.”[ii] Grosz characterises the semiotic as an “anarchic […] circulation of sexual impulses […] traversing the child’s body before sexuality is […] hierarchically subsumed under the primacy of genitality.”[iii] It consists of “non-signifying raw materials”, of the “energies, rhythms, forces and corporeal residues necessary for representation.”[iv] The semiotic is therefore a repository of those elements required for the emergence of signification and subjectivity. It is necessarily related to the symbolic, which plays the more active, and indeed more violent, role as a catalyst for subjectivation.
As the process of subjectivation unfolds, the symbolic order exerts pressure on the semiotic by organising its components. In Freudian terms, the pre-discursive polymorphous desire of infantile sexuality is initially governed by the semiotic and the pleasure principle. It is then harnessed, refashioned, and repressed according to the injunctions of the reality principle. This process describes the interchange between the semiotic and the symbolic. As Kristeva writes:
Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body—always already involved in a semiotic process—by family and social structures.[v]
The symbolic order, as the discursive register of familial and social structures, canalises the raw energy of the semiotic in order to maintain itself. The symbolic therefore presupposes the semiotic as its condition of possibility. Here we can observe the dialectical nature of the relationship between the two orders. The regime of signification, the symbolic order, is erected upon that which escapes the signifier as its non-signifiable point of excess and indivisible remainder. It is here that the most important characteristic of the semiotic emerges—its corporeality. Insofar as the semiotic concerns the body prior to both the image and the sign, it reveals the disturbing presence of the non-discursive within the very structure of discursivity. The symbolic disavows its corporeal origin: it represses the semiotic element which invariably threatens its consistency. As we shall see below, the corporeality of the semiotic and the necessity of its repression concerns the child’s primary attachment to the maternal body, or chora.
Kristeva frames the disavowal and repression of the semiotic as a sacrifice of the chora. The chora designates the ‘space’ of the semiotic. It is difficult to define, however, as any “theoretical description of the chora is itself part of the discourse of representation.”[vi] Its articulation can only be provisional and indeterminate. In other words, the symbolic forecloses the subject’s access to the semiotic. As that which precedes speech and signification, the semiotic escapes all definition. Nonetheless, the notion of the chora allows for an indeterminate designation of the semiotic. Its function as a concept is paradoxical—the chora represents the unrepresentable and names the unnameable:
Our discourse […] moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it. Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitely posited: as a result, one can situate the chora […], but one can never give it axiomatic form.[vii]
In terms of subjectivation, the chora decentres the ego, drawing it away from symbolic homogeneity and towards the heterogeneity of the corporeal semiotic. The chora “opens up within the subject this other scene of pre-symbolic functions.”[viii] The most significant aspect of the chora is therefore its correspondence with the child’s pre-Oedipal attachment to the maternal body. Positioning herself in relation to Freud rather than Lacan, Kristeva writes that “the oral and anal drives, both of which are […] structured around the mother’s body, dominate this sensorimotor organisation” (i.e., the organisation of the semiotised body). [ix] In this way, “the mother’s body […] mediates the symbolic law organising social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora.”[x] The maternal chora therefore stands between the semiotic and the symbolic. It accounts for their interpenetration: simultaneously a constitutive and destabilising force in relation to ego-formation. Hence, Kristeva writes that the maternal chora “is no more than the place where the subject is both generated and negated, the place where his unity succumbs before the process of charges and stases that produce him.”[xi] On this account, any representation of the maternal relation to the semiotic brings to light a negativity that threatens the terms of patriarchal discourse and the process of subjectivation. The maternal chora is the representative of non-identity, persistently disrupting the symbolic order which operates on the basis of identity, meaning, truth, and so on. Integration into the symbolic—the realisation of subjectivity—therefore necessitates a sacrificial gesture. The child must detach itself from the maternal chora. This occurs during the thetic phase.
The thetic phase is analogous to Lacan’s mirror stage. It involves the child’s libidinal investment in its own image. This image functions as a provisional unity, or gestalt, allowing the child to both constitute and detach itself from a realm of objects through which the other is instantiated. Hence, the thetic phase introduces the dialectical relationship of self and other. In terms of language and signification, the thetic “is structured as a break in the signifying process, establishing the identification of the subject and its object as preconditions of propositionality.”[xii] In other words, language allows for the constitution of a realm of objects through which the subject can recognise itself as a self—that is, as a subject engaged in some objectifying activity. It follows that “all enunciation, whether of a word or of a sentence, is thetic.”[xiii] Thus far, Kristeva follows Lacan’s description of signification and subjectivation. Like the mirror stage, the notion of the thetic offers a de-centred and dialectical account of ego-formation that emphasises the relationship between language and self-recognition. Moving beyond Lacan, however, Kristeva writes that thetic signification “constitutes the subject without being reduced to his process precisely because it is the threshold of language.”[xiv] Recall that the semiotic exceeds the limits of the symbolic: it reaches beyond the threshold of the sign. By conceiving the thetic phase as a ‘threshold’—an intermediary determining the relation between the semiotic and the symbolic—Kristeva is able to supplement Lacan’s account of subjectivation with a renewed emphasis on the corporeal.
As we have indicated, the corporeality of the semiotic refers to the child’s pre-Oedipal attachment to the maternal chora. Importantly for Kristeva, the process of detachment from the chora—which designates the child’s symbolic integration and subjectivation—is never completely successful. This is because the corporeal residue of the semiotic can only ever be re-organised and sublimated during the thetic phase, rather than eliminated altogether. As Kristeva writes:
Language-learning can […] be thought of as an acute and dramatic confrontation between positing-separating-identifying and the motility of the semiotic chora. Separation from the mother’s body, the fort-da game, anality and orality, all act as a permanent negativity that destroys the image and the isolated object even as it facilitates the articulation of the semiotic network, which will afterwards be necessary in the system of language where it will be […] integrated as a signifier.[xv]
In other words, the negativity of the semiotic is always present withinthe symbolic. The thetic is not that which divides the semiotic and symbolic into discrete orders, one corporeal and the other discursive. It is rather an “anticipation of the symbolic from within the semiotic, as well as the residues of the semiotic in the symbolic.”[xvi] Once again, these residues relate to the enduring and unendurable presence of the maternal body, which is mutilated and transformed into the raw material of discourse, into the abject other of the symbolic. This disavowal is necessitated by the ‘permanent negativity’ of the maternal semiotic, the traces of which undermine successful symbolic integration. Therefore, in Lacan and Kristeva we find the same emphasis on the unstable and ambiguous nature of the subject. We see a process described in terms of rupture, crisis, and impossibility. However, by incorporating the maternal semiotic into her account of subjectivity, both as its ground and as the source of its negation, Kristeva opens up a conceptual space in which the politically subversive implications of Lacanian psychoanalysis can be made explicit.
Kristeva’s notion of the ethics of the maternal, or herethics, highlights the political significance of her reformulation of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Herethics is “founded on the relationship between mother and child during pregnancy and birth.”[xvii] Following Lacan, the mirror stage’s dialectic of self and other annuls the narcissism of primary identification by separating the child from the mother. The symbolic order then represses the matrilineal connection through the castration and Oedipalisation that occurs once the (male) child has recognised himself as subject. However, Kristeva argues that a daughter’s own experience of motherhood re-establishes a matrilineal connection, allowing her to by-pass castration. This involves an oblique return to primary narcissism, the result of which is paradoxical: narcissistic self-identification gives way to love and respect for the (m)other. As Kelly Oliver explains, “if the mother loves an Other, it is her own mother. And she loves her mother not only as an Other, but also as herself, now a mother.”[xviii] The narcissism of maternal love can be observed in what Kristeva describes as “the homosexual facet of motherhood.”
By giving birth, the woman enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own mother; they are the same continuity differentiating itself. She thus actualises the homosexual facet of motherhood, through which a woman is simultaneously closer to her instinctual memory, more open to her own psychosis, and consequently, more negatory of the social, symbolic bond.[xix]
This homosexual facet reflects the inherent negativity of maternal experience. A woman’s proximity to psychosis refers to her capacity to recognise herself as caught within the scission of the semiotic and the symbolic. This leads to the experience of a subjectivity split between the injunctions of symbolic discourse and the instinctual memory of the non-discursive semiotic. But this splitting prefigures the possibility of assuming a subject-position which the symbolic attempts to foreclose. Oliver writes that “to suppose the mother is the master of her gestation preserves her identity. […] She is the master of a process that is prior to the social contract […], a process that is pre-symbolic.”[xx] We can therefore observe another paradoxical claim: for Kristeva, returning to the non-identity and heterogeneity of the semiotic allows the mother to assume—within the symbolic—the fragile identity of an ethical subject whose narcissism has given way to the respect for motherhood as such. According to Kristeva, pregnancy is the experience of heterogeneity par excellence. The experience of giving birth constitutes a corporeal re-entry into the semiotic and therefore “explodes […] the dividing line between nature and culture.”[xxi] However, one could question whether the invocation of nature suggests an essentialist or biologistic interpretation of motherhood: whether motherhood is a stable form of identity that is ontologically prior to the social constitution of subjectivity.
In describing maternal ethics in terms of pregnancy—an explosion of nature into the realm of culture—Kristeva certainly opens herself up to the charge of essentialism. One could easily mistake her notion of the maternal as signifying the possibility of a return to primordial nature. It must be stressed, however, that Kristeva’s project is not ontological. It is not the case that the semiotic literally precedes the symbolic as its natural and biological foundation. As Ziarek argues, Kristeva “claim[s] that the semiotic that precedes symbolisation is only a theoretical presupposition, a theoretical fiction […] justified by the need of description.”[xxii] In other words, the semiotic does not transcend the symbolic. It is not pre-discursive in the sense of being the constitutive and fully determinable ground of discourse and signification. It is better understood as a provisional name for the negativity and contradiction already contained within the regime of signification. In relation to herethics, the semiotic functions as an explanatory principle necessary for any critical examination of the relegation of women and mothers to alterity. More than this, it opens up a conceptual space in which feminine identity and intersubjectivity can be re-imagined. Therefore, it is not that Kristeva forces a naturalistic dimension into Lacan’s linguistic account of subjectivation which the latter would find inadmissible. Rather, the concept of the semiotic involves a broadening of Lacanian theory. By emphasising the corporeality of the maternal relation, and the process by which this relation is disavowed, Kristeva’s approach simultaneously enriches the psychoanalytic account of the ego and develops its ethical and political implications for feminine subjectivity.
We can understand Kristeva’s divergence from Lacan through her reconceptualisation of subjectivity in terms of the maternal semiotic: that is, in terms of corporeal experience and the libidinal investment unique to motherhood. This allows Kristeva to explore the possibility of a maternal ethics emerging from within the limits of patriarchal discourse. Lacan does not concern himself with such a possibility, but it nonetheless lies implicit in his account of the symbolic order and ego-formation. As the product of its contradictory and ambiguous nature, maternal discourse is wedded to the terms of the symbolic order. Therefore, the semiotic cannot be understood as a realm of nature prior to culture, or as the primordial locus of feminine subjectivity. Rather, the exploration of the maternal semiotic involves the immanent traversal of patriarchal discourse—the identification and exploitation of its contradictions. In making her own use of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Kristeva articulates both the crisis of patriarchal culture and the possibility of its subversion.
Samuel is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts with an extended major in philosophy. His interests include the history of Western philosophy, particularly early modern rationalism and German idealism, as well as aesthetics, critical theory, and Marxism. More recently, he has devoted his attention to the metaphysics of Kant and Hegel. He would like to pursue a PhD and hopes to write a dissertation on the influence of Kant’s Critique of Judgement on subsequent philosophy.
ENDNOTES
[i] Ewa Ziarek, “At the Limits of Discourse: Heterogeneity, Alterity, and the Maternal Body in Kristeva’s Thought,” Hypatia 7, no.2 (Spring 1992): 66.
[ii] Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversion: Three French Feminists (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 43.
[iii] Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 43.
[iv] Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 43.
[v] Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 93.
[vi] Kristeva, “Poetic Language,” 92.
[vii] Kristeva, “Poetic Language,” 94.
[viii] Kristeva, “Poetic Language,” 95.
[ix] Kristeva, “Poetic Language,” 95.
[x] Kristeva, “Poetic Language,” 95.
[xi] Kristeva, “Poetic Language,” 95.
[xii] Kristeva, “Poetic Language,” 98.
[xiii] Kristeva, “Poetic Language,” 98.
[xiv] Kristeva, “Poetic Language,” 99.
[xv] Kristeva, “Poetic Language,” 100-101.
[xvi] Grosz, Sexual Subversions, 45.
[xvii] Kelly Oliver, “The Abject Mother,” in Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-Bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 66.
[xviii] Oliver, “Abject Mother,” 66.
[xix] Julia Kristeva, “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini,” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 239.
[xx] Oliver, “Abject Mother,” 66.
[xxi] Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suileman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 115.
[xxii] Ziarek, “Discourse,” 96.
WORKS CITED
Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversion: Three French Feminists. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1989.
Kristeva, Julia. “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini.” In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, 237-70. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.
Kristeva, Julia. “Stabat Mater.” In The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Susan Rubin Suileman, 99-118. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Kristeva, Julia. “Revolution in Poetic Language.” In The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, 89-137. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993.
Oliver, Kelly. “The Abject Mother.” In Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-Bind, 48-68. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Ziarek, Ewa. “At the Limits of Discourse: Heterogeneity, Alterity, and the Maternal Body in Kristeva’s Thought.” Hypatia 7, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 91-108.
Featured photo by Artur Ignatov on Unsplash
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