Page 130 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

FRENCH FEMINISMS

the symbolic, but that that supersession nonetheless creates the
unconscious, as a result of this repression of the earlier desire for the
mother. Because identity with the mother, and with the world, can
never be recovered (except in death), desire moves restlessly thereafter
from object to object, from signifier to signifier. Like meaning itself,
desire too can have no ultimate meaning.
Julia Kristeva is, in many respects, the very model of a modern
Parisian intellectual: a practising psychoanalyst with a chair in
linguistics; a key figure in the group of intellectuals which produced
the journal, Tel Quel; her youthful enthusiasm for both Althusserianism
and Maoism had given way to a much more apolitical, and potentially
even conservative, set of psycho-semiotic preoccupations. Her work
is “difficult”, in what has become almost the habitual French fashion,
and there can be little doubt that part, at least, of its appeal to
Francophile, anglophone feminists arose simply as a result of her
status as a properly “mandarin” intellectual. Hence the way in which
the English-speaking reception of her work was accompanied by
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much the same sort of “theoretical heavy breathing” as Thompson
detected in the initial British response to Althusser. 55
The key Kristevan text is almost certainly Revolution in Poetic
Language (1974). Her central analytical framework here is essentially
Lacanian, though she renames Lacan’s “imaginary” as the “semiotic”.
The semiotic, moreover, is not necessarily repressed, but is, rather, an
alternative mode of signification. Kristeva borrows from Plato the
term chora, meaning womb or enclosed space, to refer to the pre-
Oedipal pulsions with which the semiotic is linked. “Our discourse—
all discourse—moves with and against the chora”, she writes, “in the
sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it… The chora
…is not a sign…it is not yet a signifier either…it is, however, generated
in order to attain to this signifying position…the chora precedes and
underlies figuration…and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic
rhythm”. Once the symbolic order is entered, the semiotic is repressed
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but, according to Kristeva, not thereby superseded. Rather, it continues
to constitute the heterogeneous and disruptive aspects of language.
Where the symbolic is masculine, the semiotic is, not so much feminine,
as like the feminine, that is, repressed and marginal. The semiotic is
thus subversive: it deconstructs the binary oppositions that are
fundamental to the structures of symbolic language. This position is
very similar to that of Cixous and Irigaray. But in Kristeva, the sources

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