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Revolution and Poetic Language
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Kristeva's thesis for her Doctorat d'Etat
Intertextuality: To the two processes Freud identified as being at work in the unconscious,
displacement and condensation, Kristeva added a third process, "the passage from one sign
system to another."
The thetic phase of language is altered, involving the destruction of an old system and the
forming of a new one. The new system may use the same or different signifying materials,
as in the "carnivalesque" as described by Bakhtin.
The novel particularly exhibited the potential for embodying a "redistribution" of several
different sign systems.
"Intertextuality," then, is a specific type of coextension in which a variety of diverse
meanings overlap; it refers to the transposition of one or more sign systems into another or
a "field" of transpositions of many signifying systems. The novel provides a particularly good
space for this phenomenon to occur.
Kristeva Glossary
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semiotic - the science of signs (that which creates the need for symbolic),cyclical through
time, pre-Oedipal, and creates unrepressed writing. Exists in children before language
acquisition and has significance.
symbolic - the domain of position and judgment, chronologically follows semiotic (postOedipal), is the establishment of a sign system.
semanalysis - word coined by Kristeva to differentiate her type of linguistic analysis which
is a dissolving of the sign through critical analysis that stresses the heterogeneity of
language.
intertextuality - used to designate the transposition of one or more systems of signs on to
another which is accompanied by a new enunciative and denotative position.
jouissance - total joy or ecstacy achieved through the working of the signifier implying the
presence of meaning.
other - what exists as opposite of, or excluded by, something else.
Other - a hypothetical space or place which is that of the pure signifier, rather than a
physical entity.
chora - a Platonic term for a matrix-like space that is nourishing, unnameable, and prior to
the individual. Chora becomes the focus of the semiotic as the 'pre-symbolic.'
Julia Kristeva
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(b. Bulgaria, 1941-): psychoanalyst, linguist, semiotician, novelist, and rhetorician
1965 - emigrated to Paris for doctoral studies under Roland Barthes. Joined 'Tel Quel
group eventually marrying its head, Philippe Sollers.
1968 - involved in leftist French politics, publishing in Tel Quel.
1970 - part of Tel Quel's editorial board, attended Lacan’s seminars.
1973 - state doctorate in Paris, thesis later published as Revolution in Poetic Language
(1984).
1974 - University of Paris VII, chair of linguistics and visiting appointment at Columbia
University.
1979 - begin psychoanalytic career.
1990 - novel, Les Samourais, published.