ABSTRACT
The last chapter focused on Kristeva’s theory of language. In discussing her views, we kept broaching a thought I have reserved for this chapter: any study of language is a study of the subject (i.e. “the subject” as an abstract person). Now we can finally attend to this idea and go further: the subject is an effect of linguistic processes. In other words, we become who we are as a result of taking part in signifying processes. There is no self-aware self prior to our use of language. At the same time, language is a signifying process because it is used by someone who is herself a process. Language as Kristeva studies it is inseparable from the beings that use it. And these beings, speaking beings (parlêtres, she calls them, combining the French words for speaking and being), are themselves constituted through a variety of different processes.
