In Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva explicates her foundational distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic and explores their interrelationships. Linking the psychosomatic to the literary and the literary to a larger political horizon, she questions the premises of linguistic, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and literary theories.
"Translator's Preface Introduction, by Leon S. Roudiez Prolegomenon Part I. The Semiotic and the symbolic 1. The Phenomenological Subject of Enunciation 2. The Semiotic Chora Ordering the Drives 3. Husserl's Hyletic Meaning: A Natural Thesis 4. Hjelmslev's Presupposed Meaning 5. The Thetic: Rupture and/or Boundary 6. The Mirror and Castration Positing the Subject as Absent from the Signifier 7. Frege's Notion of Signification: Enunciation and Denotation 8. Breaching the Thetic: Mimesis 9. The Unstable Symbolic. Substitutions in the Symbolic: Fetishism 10. The Signifying Process 11. Poetry That is Not a Form of Murder 12. Genotext and Phenotext 13. Four Signifying Practices Part II. Negativity: Rejection 14. The Fourth ""Term"" of the Dialectic 15. Independent and Subjugated ""Force"" in Hegel 16. Negativity as Transversal to Thetic Judgment 17. ""Kinesis,"" ""Cura,"" ""Desire"" 18. Humanitarian Desire 19. Non-Contradiction Neutral Peace 20. Freud's Notion of Expulsion Rejection Part III. Heterogeneity 21. The Dichotomy and Heteronomy of Drives 22. Facilitation, Stasis, and the Thetic Moment 23. The Homological Economy of the Representamen 24. Through the Principle of Language 25. Skepticism and Nihilism in Hegel and in the Text Part IV. Practice 26. Experience Is Not Practice 27. The Atomistic Subject of Practice in Marxism 28. Calling Back Rupture within Practice: Experience-in-Practice 29. The Text as Practice, Distinct from Transference Discourse 30. The Second Overturning of the Dialectic after Political Economy, Aesthetics 31. Madoror and Poems, Laughter as Practice 32. The Expenditure of a Logical Conclusion: Igitur Notes Index"
Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 “for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature.”
Reviews for Revolution in Poetic Language
A crucially important book. -- Toril Moi * French Studies * A lucid and creative consideration of the status and stakes of contemporary cultural criticism, it is essential reading for students of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and a monumental challenge to all of us. -- Alice Jardine, Harvard University
