ABSTRACT

Kristeva’s semiotic, however, differs from the standard meaning of semiotics as the science of signs. What Kristeva forwards here is a “semanalysis,” a combination of semiotics and psychoanalysis that aims at revealing how the laws of the symbolic are resisted. In psychoanalytic terms, the semiotic is associated with the pre-linguistic phase and the mother’s body. Indeed, Kristeva associates this semiotic element in poetic language with the mother, the child, pre-linguistic babbling, the pre-Oedipal maternal space, and so on. It exists within language, especially within poetic language, as a potentially subversive, eruptive force. The semiotic, then, can never be entirely constrained by the symbolic; it perpetually infiltrates the symbolic construction of meaning, reintroducing fluidity and heterogeneity within the speaking/writing subject. It reopens the process of creation. Kristeva describes it as the “very precondition” of the symbolic order (Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 50). Insofar as the symbolic order of language is identified with consciousness, we can think of the semiotic as language’s unconscious. The infiltration of the semiotic within language indexes the continual presence of archaic drives, the loss of relation with one’s mother.