Page 84 - Critical and Cultural Theory

TEXTUALITY
discovers that it lacks something vital, that it cannot ever merge
with others. This sense of loss produces desire, the insatiable
longing to restore the infant's world of undifferentiation. Thus,
the thetic is also related to the semiotic because it insistently draws
us back into the imaginary domain of pre-linguistic wholeness.
The thetic, then, is a borderline form of textuality.
The semiotic is repressed by the symbolic, yet it survives in adult
discourse through bodily (non-verbal) qualities of language such
as tone, rhythm, laughter and silence and through experimental
texts that capitalize on rhetorical displacement, disruption and
contradiction. Therefore, the semiotic retains the potential ability
to defy the symbolic by creating a playful excess over precise
meaning. Texts which bring the semiotic back onto the scene
exemplify the notion of jouissance: a highly physical form of
pleasure comparable to sexual orgasm which infiltrates the
symbolic order and shakes it up: Tn cracking the socio-symbolic
order, splitting it open, changing vocabulary, syntax, the word
.
itself .. jouissance works its way into the social and symbolic'
(Kristeva 1984: 79).
In Powers of Horror, Kristeva refines her approach to the rela-
tionship between textuality and the body. She argues that children
develop into adults by constructing themselves as individual texts
through physical processes of great intensity (Kristeva 1982). In
order to enter the symbolic order, the subject must differentiate
itself from others in specifically bodily ways: the budding subject
is required to shed everything which culture perceives as unclean,
improper, disorderly, asocial or anti-social: namely, the abject.
'Abjection' is the term used to describe the processes through
which we get rid of the defiling elements that threaten our textual
frame. However, the ability to develop a symbolic identity is insis-
tently challenged by those borderline parts of the body through
which abject materials pass and the materials themselves: blood,
semen, urine, faeces, tears, milk, sweat, etc. These deny the body's
self-containedness, for they are neither fully contained within the
body nor wholly external to it. As the subject endeavours to cast
off the abject so as to define itself as an autonomous text, it soon
realizes that its mastery of the abject is inevitably incomplete -
just as any decoding of a text and any unweaving of its fabric are
always provisional. The abject ceaselessly returns, disrupting our
boundaries and our identities. Thus, it is a metaphor for all sorts

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