Revolution in Poetic Language

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.

ISBN-13: 9780231214599

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Publication Date: 01-09-2024

Pages: 304

Series: European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism

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.”

What People are Saying About This

Toril Moi

Students and scholars of psychoanalysis, semiotics, linguistics, and feminist theory alike will rejoice to see Julia Kristeva's "La Revolution du langue poetique" now finally appearing in English... A crucially important book.

— French Studies

Alice Jardine

A lucid and creative consideration of the status and stakes of contemporary cultural criticism, it is an essential reading for students of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - and a monumental challenge to all of us.

— Alice Jardine, Harvard University

French Studies - Toril Moi

Students and scholars of psychoanalysis, semiotics, linguistics, and feminist theory alike will rejoice to see Julia Kristeva's "La Revolution du langue poetique" now finally appearing in English... A crucially important book.

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Table of Contents

Translator's Preface
Introduction, by Leon S. Roudiez
Prolegomenon
Part 1. 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 2. Negativity: Rejection
1. The Fourth "Term" of the Dialectic
2. Independent and Subjugated "Force" in Hegel
3. Negativity as Transversal to Thetic Judgment
4. "Kinesis," "Cura," "Desire"
5. Humanitarian Desire
6. Non-Contradiction Neutral Peace
7. Freud's Notion of Expulsion Rejection
Part 3. Heterogeneity
1. The Dichotomy and Heteronomy of Drives
2. Facilitation, Stasis, and the Thetic Moment
3. The Homological Economy of the Representamen
4. Through the Principle of Language
5. Skepticism and Nihilism in Hegel and in the Text
Part 4. Practice
1. Experience Is Not Practice
2. The Atomistic Subject of Practice in Marxism
3. Calling Back Rupture within Practice - Experience-in-Practice
4. The Text as Practice, Distinct from Transference Discourse
5. The Second Overturning of the Dialectic after Political Economy, Aesthetics
6. Madoror and Poems, Laughter as Practice
7. The Expenditure of a Logical Conclusion: Igitur
Notes
Index Show More