Julia Kristeva’s works on critical practices in literature have informed the analysis of the primary texts and the discussion concerning the notions of subjectivity, poetry and language, which are part of the theoretical framework. Kristeva’s work is very diverse; since she is an intellectual who has been able to cover a variety of subjects, such as exile, foreignness, citizenship and sexual difference, from a philosophical, literary, feminist and psychoanalyst approach. Her production has been described as “crucial for the constellation for understanding oral and written literature, politics and national identity, sexuality, culture, and nature” (Mcafee 1). Indeed, Kristeva’s texts often invite to rethink certain basic concepts and helped to raise enriching questions, instead of merely providing specific answers to some of the theoretical inquiries.
As an immigrant herself, the topic of migration has been significant in her work as a literary critic and writer. The originality of her production owes itself in part to her revisitation of philosophical and literary theories while producing her own original perspectives on textual analysis. She also attempts to expose the drawbacks of establishing a single linguistic theory capable of comprehending how language works. For Becker-Leckrone, Kristeva attempts to direct the focus of language study towards a consideration of various practices and factors that converge in what she calls “the signifying process” (6). She also notably places the subject at the centre of her literary analytical practice. Instead of seeing language as something distant from the subject, who can merely make use of it, she focuses on the interactive relation between the two.
Kristeva’s analysis proposes new ways of approaching a text that permit us to rethink certain established linguistic theories. For example, she provides alternative guidelines to examine the relationship among author, text, and reader. She continually tries to defy metanarratives of linguistic and literary theories that limit our view on the indefinite possibilities of considering these associations. The effect of the text on the reader and the dynamic interconnections of author, text and reader are aspects which, according to Kristeva, demonstrate dynamic potentialities of literary language that exceed the pragmatic ideals of communication.
Most of Kristeva’s textual analysis work focuses on subjectivity and its relationship with language, an aspect that has been essential to this investigation. Mcafee states that Kristeva provides us with tools that contribute to a better understanding of the connections between language processes and speaking subjects (9). Kristeva brought attention to an alternative definition of subjectivity, a term that was usually reduced by traditional philosophy to a positivist and essentialist idea of the self. The long-established meaning of subjectivity considers that a person is never subjected to anyone, neither to language. Also, under this scheme, language has a mere pragmatic function of communication, as a tool used by the subject to express fixed ideas (Mcafee 1). On the contrary for Kristeva, the subject is dependent on language to exist. Kristeva’s analysis considers subjectivity as a process that can never be completed. According to her point of view, the subject exists because of language; without language, there is no subject (Mcafee 29). For this reason, language is a signifying process mainly because the subject who uses it is always in the process of becoming (30).
In her work Kristeva describes how subjectivity is constantly produced and never completed. As Becker-Leckrone states, Kristeva opts for an approach in which the subject is the protagonist; “his formation, and his corporeal, linguistic, and social dialectic” are aspects that she considers intrinsically connected to language (Becker-Leckrone 7). In Kristeva's view it is impossible to analyse language without scrutinizing the subject of enunciation, asserting that the subject is perhaps “an effect of linguistic processes” (Macfee 15). The subject is not separated from language as an independent entity but is rather the result of the process of signification that takes place through the vehicle language.
As has been already stated, in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) Kristeva examines avant-garde poetry to reflect on how this form of language exceeds the normative standards of traditional linguistics. For Kristeva this genre of poetry allows us to see nuances and aspects of the unconscious that are impossible to perceive in other forms of language. Kristeva asserts that the relationship between words and meanings is not so ostensive in poetry as in different types of literature that do not contain poetic language.
In the discussion on poetic language practices introduced in the previous section, we mentioned that Stanford Friedman acknowledges Kristeva’s conception of poetic language as deeply marked by psychoanalysis and its references to the different parts and processes of the subject. Kristeva associates poetic language to the semiotic aspect of language that is in continual transgression of the symbolic order, in contraposition with what is known as the
“Law of the Father” (Stanford, Mappings 232). According to Stanford, for Kristeva “poetry tends to foreground the semiotic” while “prose, the symbolic” (231). Consequently, a language
with the capacity to disrupt the patriarchal system could potentially embody experiences that most of the narrative texts are unable to transmit. However, as we discussed before, Kristeva abstains from making a sharp distinction between prose and lyric, refusing to propose a binary explanation that precludes the possibility of detecting semiotic traces in narrative texts.
In Revolution in Poetic Language Kristeva states that a text may operate at two levels. First, there is the semiotic-genotext level defined as “a process by which the author organises or manifests semiotic drives and energy”, and the symbolic-phenotext level, a “structured and mappable piece of communication” (McAfee 24-25). In other words, there is one level that can be simply defined as the basic expression of what the texts intend to say, here called the phenotext. Second, the genotext is the level in which is expressed “the semiotic dimension” of the text (24). In his introduction to Kristeva’s 1984 edition of Revolution of the Poetic Language, Leon S. Roudiez elaborates that the semiotic disposition that is “spun by drives and woven” essentially defines the genotext, while the phenotext consists of what comes to a text mainly from society, such as grammar and syntactic restrictions (1-10).
As it was discussed before, in Revolution of Poetic Language, through some examples taken from avant-garde texts – by James Joyce and Stéphane Mallarme, among others – Kristeva argues how these writings allow us to see the magnitude of those processes of signification that are constrained by the way society restricts the semiotic (88). According to McAfee, Kristeva mentions that poetic language, among other characteristics, has the potential to transgress the
“orderly symbolic effort at communication” (McAfee 39). Poetry could be an instrument to express what we are unable to communicate otherwise. The selection of poetry as a literary form to configure gender identity politics and as a mode of expressing an author’s subjectivity is a core aspect that will be addressed through Kristeva’s literary practice, paired with historical analysis.
In Revolution of Poetic Language, Kristeva also expresses her views on the subject and its connection to language. She states that the subject is not unitary; rather, she conceives the subject as fragmented, fluid, and continuously changing. Later in her works, she extends these ideas to other texts and forms of communication, but Kristeva’s subject remains “always in process and heterogeneous” (McAfee 41).
Kristeva also argues that literature helps the author and the reader to work through some of the “maladies that afflict their souls” (McAfee 50). For her, literature has the capacity to be cathartic; she refers to this healing characteristic deeply connected to a process of the subject as abjection. Kristeva considers abjection as “the state of abjecting or rejecting what is other to oneself—and thereby creating borders of an always tenuous I” (McAfee 46). This noteworthy
attribute of literature is particularly observable in this research through the poetry of Charlotte Smith; for instance, in Smith’s text The Emigrants (1793), in which this idea of working through the author’s own crisis is an overt element. In this long blank verse poem, Smith poignantly exposes herself and her sufferings to her readers by disclosing her feelings completely; her exposure calls to mind a protest and a release of what she had kept hidden over a lifetime.
Although Kristeva’s work has been accused of essentialist and sometimes rejected among feminist scholars for that same reason, according to Mcafee “she does not locate biological processes prior to, or anterior to, culture and language, so her theory is not, properly speaking, essentialist” (80). As MacAfee argues, “Kristeva’s philosophy invokes a metaphysics of process”; she rejects a description of the subject that alludes to a biological or organic entity, thus rendering her writings fundamentally incompatible with essentialism (90).
Returning to Kristeva’s proposals on textual analysis, Becker-Leckrone explains that to comprehend Kristeva’s ideas on how “signification takes place in a literary work”, it is imperative to reflect on what is at stake when one reads and interprets a text (5). She calls to question two main premises generally taken for granted when reading a text. According to Becker-Leckrone, Kristeva rejects:
First, that language generates stable textual objects, clear referents of the world or experience, perspicuously to critical understanding; and, second, that criticism may ever stand as an authoritative meta-discourse on such texts. (5-6)
Becker-Leckrone explains that in Kristeva’s work, neither language nor the process of signification is fixed, but are instead a very dynamic and complex set of practices. They together form part of a signifying process and could not be addressed as singular unrelated spheres of practice. This aspect of Kristeva’s views is extraordinarily relevant to the work of a literary researcher. It expands our understanding of how a literary analysis could take place beyond the idea of examining a text from a separate theoretical framework that allows us comprehension. In Kristeva’s view, the subject is not only always in the process of becoming, but the texts are as well. She takes from Barthes the idea that literature is “a production, always in the process of becoming” (Becker-Leckrone 11).
Moreover, Becker-Leckrone also mentions three components that render Kristeva’s perspectives of language and literature unique in comparison to those of her predecessors:
1 a commitment to rigorous and plural interdisciplinarity; 2 an understanding of texts as dynamic “processes” involving forces previously deemed outside the boundaries of the literary work; and 3 a self-consciousness that acknowledges the implication of critical discourse in that which it studies (8)
Kristeva sets forth a vehement critique of linguistics as an instrument that serves only to study language possessing practical, institutional, and social structures while ignoring marginalized discourses. In place of this general perspective of linguistic function, Kristeva urges the employment of critical practices that refuse any claim of objectivity.
Kristeva also jettisons the boundaries separating literary text and theory from critical practice, inviting us to re-think theoretical and meta-discourses as detached instruments to analyse a given text. For Kristeva, whose own work is a fusion of her literary writings and theoretical vision, “critical discourse is itself a text, literature becomes text, so does theory.
Theory is also made of language” (Becker-Leckrone 16). Kristeva quotes Barthes as a scholar who recommends us to re-evaluate “the relationship between theory and literature as one not of application, but of implication” (Becker-Leckrone 16).