ABSTRACT
The capacity to differentiate is gained only through a complex developmental process which ends with “entry” into language—or more precisely, entry into logic of difference, the most powerful expression of which is language. The body’s drive-energy, in its ceaseless processes of gathering and dispersal, contain an enigmatic difference which, upon entry into language, is shattered into the differential “this” and “that” of more sharp-edged systems. For Julia Kristeva, what moves the child out of the space of non-difference is not the sudden cutting-off of castration but rather the internal pulsations of the body’s own drives forming the chora. Kristeva calls the aspect of language the semiotic, and its manifestation in language testifies to the archaic origin of language in the oceanic processes of the chora. The Kristevan discourse of semiotic and symbolic stresses the relation not between the general and particular but between system and affect.
