ABSTRACT
THE EVOLUTION OF POETIC LANGUAGEl Revolution in Poetic Language (RPL) and Glas were both published in 1974. The texts share certain preoccupations (the Hegelian dialectic, the signification of phonemic patterns for example), and yet it would be difficult to find two texts more different in style and rhetoric: Kristeva's densely theoretical, a performance of strength; Derrida's textual acrobatics playfully disturbing the norms of critical discourse. Despite a more lyrical and more aCcessible style in her theoretical texts since the 1980s, Kristeva continues clearly to separate critical and literary practice, a separation which is only emphasized by her ventures into fiction 2 She makes her position explicit in the preface to Desire in Language, where she argues against "identifying theoretical discourse with art-causing theory to be written as literary or para-literary fiction" and writes of "the necessity of adopting a stance involving otherness, distance, even limitation" (DLix, cf. 145-146). She positions her theoretical work "on the brink of fiction without ever completely toppling over into it" (ix). Perhaps the closest Kristeva comes to toppling in is in "Stabat Mater" in Tales of Love, where an analysis of the maternity of the Virgin Mary is juxtaposed with a very personal, fragmented text on the experience of motherhood. But however poetic this and other recent texts may seem, Kristeva considers them to be other than literary. Derrlda's texts, on the other hand, do not show this same wariness of toppling into and acknowledging their participation in literary discourse. They seem to tumble in and out of literature at times.
