ABSTRACT
This chapter uncovers the intellectual engagements that have led Julia Kristeva to replace the analysis of capitalism and class struggle with an affirmation of the workings of the unconscious. It discusses the definition of pleasure as being based on the Freudian notion of polymorphous sexuality. The chapter argues that Kristeva's affirmation of pleasure is conceived as a logic of pleasure and sacrifice. This means that enjoyment is the ultimate motivator of the formations of subjectivity, and that sacrifice, or the giving up of enjoyment, is only the momentary giving up of a pleasure that is to be retrieved in a new form. Kristeva's notion of the political emerged at a scene were art, philosophy, politics and ways of living just in general were subject to experimentation. Establishing a sphere that precedes the inscription of the symbolic, if not in a temporal than at least in a logical sense, the subject of the semiotic challenges Lacanian theory.
