Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art

319 Pages·1980·22.18 MB·English

by  Julia Kristeva

European Perspectives: ASeries of the Columbia University Press

by Leon S.
by Thomas lice
Leon S. oudiez
u
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kristeva, Julia, 1941-
Desire in language ..
(European perspectives)
Eight of the 10 essays included were originally
published (in French) in the author's Polylogue
and two in the author's I,TJf.UiWTixi]: Recherches
pour une semanalyse.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
I. Criticism-Addresses, essays, lectures.
2. Semiotics-Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Lin
guistics--Addresses, essays. lectures. 4. Art-Addresses,
essays, lectures. L Title. II. Series.
PN98.S46K7413 808'.001'41 80-10689
ISBN 0-231-04806-8
ISBN 0-231-04807-6 (pbk)
Columbia University Press
New York
Copyright © 1980 Colurn bia U niversity Press
Polylogue Copyright © 1977 I:ditions du Seuil
LTJf1tiwTix~: Recherehes pour une semanalyse copyright © 1969 Editions du Seuil
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6
Preface Vll
Acknowledgments xii
Introduction by Leon S. Roudiez
1. The Ethics of Linguistics 23
2. The Bounded Text 36
3. Word, Dialogue, and Novel 64
4. How Does One Speak to Literature? 92
5. From One Identity to an Other 124
6. The Father, Love, and Banishment 148
7. The Novel as Polylogue 159
8. Giotto's Joy 210
9. Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini 237
10. Place Names 271
Index 295

The essays that have been collected here for English-Ianguage readers were
written over a span of some ten years; to the extent that their aim does not
presuppose the writer's neutrality but, on the contrary, her involvement,
presenting them today amounts to a test of memory for me. Furthermore,
as they embody a form of research that recasts several disciplines tradi
tionally kept apart and therefore proceeds with effort, tension, and a kind
of passion familiar to pioneers-presenting them in another language,
within a different culture, surely leads one to measure, more than one ordi
narily would, the difference in mental and intellectual habits that persist in
spite of recently increased cultural exchanges between the United States
and Europe.
The memory I alluded to is of course a personal one, but it is also his
torical. Following upon the phenomenological and existentialist shock of
the postwar period, the sixties witnessed a theoretical ebullience that
could roughly be summarized as leading to the discovery of the determi
native role of language in aB human sciences. If it be true that the light
thrown on the enigma constituted by meaning as weIl as by society came
from the relationships discovered between them and the structures of lan
guage (to the extent that it is an object of linguistics), one did neverthe
less, from then on and in parallel fashion, question the metaphysical
premises on which rest not only the sciences of language but their
exportation to other domains. Thus, next to structuralism, a critique of
Hegelian, Heideggerian, Marxian, or Freudian derivation jolted its occa
sionally 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 define it and put it to work in
-:Z1J/J-ElWTlX~, meets that requirement to describe the signifying
phenomenon, or signifying phenomena, while analyzing, criticizing, and
dissolving "phenomenon," "meaning," and "signifier."
viii PREFACE
radieal instrumentalities to me as germane to such
a in semiology.
The first, located within that selfsame theoretieal thought, involved a
questioning of meaning and Hs structures, giving heed to the underlying
speaking subject. Such an insertion of subjectivity into matters of lan
guage and meaning unfailingly led one to confront a semiology stemming
from Saussure or Peirce with Hegelian logic and with Husserl's
as in a more specifically linguistic fashion, it
resumed Benveniste's masterly undertaking and necessarily led to a lin
guistics of enunciation. Finally, mindful of the splitting of subjectivity
implied by the discovery of the unconscious, and taking advantage of
the breakthrough accomplished by Lacan in French psychoanalysis,
sem analysis attempted to draw out its consequences with respect to the
different practices of discourse (in literature and particularly in the novel
and in the contemporary novel). That means that references to "dia
lectics," "practice," "subject," etc., are to be understood as moments
within an analytical process, one involving the analysis of meaning, struc
ture, their categories and relationships-not at all in the purity of the
source from wh ich they sprang.
I envisioned the second instrumentality of this analytical project as
having to be made up of the specijic object it needed to assign itself in
order to emphasize the limits of a positivist knowledge of language and
to induce research, harried by the specificity that the subject of the
theory believes it can detect in that object, to attempt to modify its very
theoretical apparatus. That uncanny object, pre-text and foil, weak link
in human sciences and fascinating otherness for philosophy, is none other
than art in general, modern art and literature even more particularly.
The essays of l;7]f.tElWTlX~ (1969) and even more so those of Polylogue
(1977) are committed to it (and to works by Celine, Beckett, and Sollers
among others).
One will perhaps better understand, now, why the essays presented
here, even though they often deal with literature or art, do not amount to
either "art criticism" or "literary criticism." Their concern remains
intratheoretical: they are based on art and literature, or more precisely
on adesire for art and literature on the part of their writer, in order to
try to subvert the very theoretical, philosophical, or semiological
apparatus. I hope the reader will also perceive, in this ambitious clarifi-
PREFACE ix
is there remains
to deal with the desire for
remain in our world of [ec.on()101121c:al
toward the absolute but toward a quest for a !ittle more an
impossible truth, concerning the of our con-
dition as speaking beings. That, after all, is in my opinion the funda
mental lesson taught us by Roman Jakobson, who reached one of the
high points of language learning in this century by never losing sight of
Russian futurism's scorching odyssey through a revolution that ended up
strangling it.
Readers will also notice that a change in writing takes place as the
work progresses. The starker style, tending toward a kind of formaliza
tion, of the earlier essays, changes progressively as a psychoanalytic
trend is accentuated (as weIl as interest in literary and artistic practices),
making way for a more personal style. And yet, this does not go so far as
identifying theoretical discourse with that of art-causing theory to be
written as literary or para-literary fiction. If there is a strong post
Heideggerian temptation leading in that direction, the choice I have
made is entirely different.
lt assumes the necessity of adopting a stance involving otherness,
distance, even limitation, on the basis of which a structure, a logical dis
course is sutured, hence demonstrable-not in a banal sense but by giving
serious consideration to the new post-Freudian rationality that takes two
stages into account, the conscious and the unconscious ones, and two cor
responding types of performances. Such a theoretical stance could weH
be termed metaphysical. Still, if contemporary thought is often reluctant
to adopt it, one must recognize that such a stance is the only guarantee of
ethics, that of knowledge as weH as of all discourse. should this be
so?
The most telling answer to that question is provided by what will also
be the second argument in favor of such a theoretical one rest
ing on the brink of fiction without ever completely toppling over into it:
it is provided by my experience as analyst. The daily attention given to
the discourse of the other confirms, if need be, that the speaking being
PREFACE
and reductive
made up of universals causes us to suffer, the call
on the issuing from those borders where sig-
...U U ...i UJl ........" "',
nification vanishes, hurls us into the void of a psychosis that appears
henceforth as the reverse of our universe, saturated with
interpretation, faith, or truth. Within that vise, our only chance to avoid
neither master nor slave of meaning lies in our ability to insure our
of it (through technique or knowledge) as weIl as our passage
through it (through play or practice). In a word, jouissance.
Having recourse to psychoanalysis, as I attempt to do, in this work, in
order to shed light on a number of borderline-practices of meaning and
signification (practices of art and literat ure), bears, I hope, no relation to
that "plague" that Freud, once more the prophet, promised America
when he brought his discovery of the unconscious to its shores. Grafted
on to semiology, analysis here is not restricted to themes or phantasms;
rather, it scrutinizes the most subtle, the most deeply buried logic of
those unities and ultimate relations that weave an identity for subject, or
sign, or sentence.
What was necessary was undoubtely adesire for language (is this
another way of saying, "sublimation"?), a passion for ventures with
meaning and its materials (ranging from colors to sounds, beginning with
phonemes, syllabies, words), in order to carry a theoretical experience to
that point where apparent abstract ion is revealed as the apex of archaic,
oneiric, nocturnal, or corporeal concreteness, to that point where mean
ing has not yet appeared (the child), no longer is (the insane person), or
else functions as a restructuring (writing, art).
was also necessary to be a woman to to take up
that exorbitant wager of carrying the rational project to the outer borders
of the signifying venture of men .... But that is another matter, of which
this volume nevertheless bears the discreet trace.
In short, the problem of truth, truth of 13.1lguage but also of the dis-