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Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art
Desire in Language traces the path of an investigation, extending over a period of ten years, into the semiotics of literature and the arts. But the essays of Julia Kristeva in this volume, though they often deal with literature and art, do not amount to either "literary criticism" or "art criticism." Their concern, writes Kristeva, "remains intratheoretical: they are based on art and literature in order to subvert the very theoretical, philosophical, or semiological apparatus."
Probing beyond the discoveries of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Roman Jakobson, and others, Julia Kristeva proposes and tests theories centered on the nature and development of the novel, and on what she has defined as a signifying practice in poetic language and pictural works. Desire in Language fully shows what Roman Jakobson has called Kristeva's "genuine gift of questioning generally adopted 'axioms, ' and her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question marks."
Probing beyond the discoveries of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Roman Jakobson, and others, Julia Kristeva proposes and tests theories centered on the nature and development of the novel, and on what she has defined as a signifying practice in poetic language and pictural works. Desire in Language fully shows what Roman Jakobson has called Kristeva's "genuine gift of questioning generally adopted 'axioms, ' and her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question marks."
305 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 1980
48 people are currently reading
3303 people want to read
About the author
Julia Kristeva
203 books805 followersJulia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII and author of many acclaimed works. Her Columbia University Press books include Hatred and Forgiveness (2012); The Severed Head: Capital Visions (2014); and, with Philippe Sollers, Marriage as a Fine Art (2016).
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November 17, 2021The author Julia Kristeva is a real revelation for me, a consciousness of our days, and if I were to summarize it for a non- specialist reader, I would say she's a kind of Freud, but a Freud who practices a multidisciplinary reading of literary texts, and, moreover, she make an alloy of linguistics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, arts, and puts in a biographical and historical context the formal or conceptual progresses of avant- garde, or authors that she studies them.
Born in Bulgaria during WW II, then living the communist regime in Sofia, and from the age of 24 in France ( pretty close to my area..) - Kristeva became a reference name among the first hundred proeminent intellectuals in the world.
Reading Kristeva, it seems to me that her exile and her status as a foreigner led her to an immersion into the very flesh of language, to the point of pure abstraction. Julia Kristeva does not make up at all her firm analyzes and opinions, about France and about the world today, in general. One of the remarks she makes says everything ( or almost ) - about her personality and experience in the humanities :
" Why exactly in France does xenophobia take this form of joking hatred, of venomous selfishness, which claims to be innocent ? Is it because of that dechristianization here is more radical without the humanism of the age of enlightenment having given a compass to freedom of thought ? Look at the editorial field of the book, the trash- naturalism is the place of vulgar evacuation of a generation reduced to a deplorable state, without ideas, without solutions.
Dubious editors and authors who enjoy cutting in live flesh in everything that excites them. This french-style jihadism diverts a depressed marketing. [...] Today, civilization tends to be strictly classified as economic and that's all. In this context, can culture still have the capacity to interrrogate the history and logics of civilizations ? "
Hard questions. A culture analyst I predict will not be easily forgotten.
Born in Bulgaria during WW II, then living the communist regime in Sofia, and from the age of 24 in France ( pretty close to my area..) - Kristeva became a reference name among the first hundred proeminent intellectuals in the world.
Reading Kristeva, it seems to me that her exile and her status as a foreigner led her to an immersion into the very flesh of language, to the point of pure abstraction. Julia Kristeva does not make up at all her firm analyzes and opinions, about France and about the world today, in general. One of the remarks she makes says everything ( or almost ) - about her personality and experience in the humanities :
" Why exactly in France does xenophobia take this form of joking hatred, of venomous selfishness, which claims to be innocent ? Is it because of that dechristianization here is more radical without the humanism of the age of enlightenment having given a compass to freedom of thought ? Look at the editorial field of the book, the trash- naturalism is the place of vulgar evacuation of a generation reduced to a deplorable state, without ideas, without solutions.
Dubious editors and authors who enjoy cutting in live flesh in everything that excites them. This french-style jihadism diverts a depressed marketing. [...] Today, civilization tends to be strictly classified as economic and that's all. In this context, can culture still have the capacity to interrrogate the history and logics of civilizations ? "
Hard questions. A culture analyst I predict will not be easily forgotten.
August 29, 2017
First thing, this is not a book you just pick up because you like literature and art. If you do like literature and art from an observer point of view, this book is not for you. Desire in Language is a meta-analysis before the term 'meta-analysis' had meaning or was known.
If you're someone who's fascinated by language, how it's used, how it's formed, how it can affect people, theories of explanation, theory of mind, understand semiotics beyond the Wikipedia explanation, go for it. This is one heck of a read.
If you're someone who's fascinated by language, how it's used, how it's formed, how it can affect people, theories of explanation, theory of mind, understand semiotics beyond the Wikipedia explanation, go for it. This is one heck of a read.
April 1, 2013
Do you like having sex? Good, then do that instead of reading any of this.
June 2, 2024
• Not "applying" a theory, but allowing practice to test theory, letting the two enter into a dialectical relationship.
• The semiotic process relates to the chora, a term meaning "receptacle," which she borrowed from Plato, who describes it as "an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligi- ble, and is most incomprehensible."11 It is also anterior to any space, an economy of primary processes articulated by Freud's instinctual drives (Triebe) through condensation and displacement, and where social and family structures make their imprint through the mediation of the maternal body. While the chora's articulation is uncertain, undetermined, while it lacks thesis or position, unity or identity, it is the aim of Kris- teva's practice to remove what Plato saw as "mysterious" and "incomprehensible" in what he called "mother and receptacle" of aIl things-and the essays presented in this collection also proceed in the direction of such an elucidation.
• The symbolic process refers to the establishment of sign and syntac, paternal function, grammatical and social process, as increasingly manifest in language," results from a particular articulation between symbolic and semiotic dispositions; it could be termed "catastrophe," given the the word has in Rene Thom's theory
• The speaking subject is as belonging to both the semiotic chora and the symbolic device, and that accounts for its eventual split nature.
• The signifying process may be analyzed through two features of the text, as constituted by poetic language: a phenotext, which is the lan- guage of communication and has been the object of linguistic analysis; a genotext, which may be detected by means of certain aspects or elements of language, even though it is not linguistic per se.
• the "Other" refers to a hypothetical place or space, that of the pure signifier, rather than to a physical entity or moral cate- gory. Lacan: "The unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the other" versus "The Other is, therefore, the place in which is constituted the I who speaks with him who hears."
• 1
• Ethics used to be a coercive, customary manner of ensuring the cohesiveness of a particular group through the repetition of a code-a more or less accepted apologue. Now, however, the issue of ethics crops up wherever a code (mores, social contract) must be shattered in order to give way to the free play of negativity, need, desire, pleasure, and jouissance, before being put together again, although temporarily and with fuH knowledge of what is involved.
• No longer will it be possible to read any treatise on phonology without deeiphering within every phoneme the statement ‘here lies a poet."
• Poetic discourse measures rhythm against the meaning of language structure and is thus always eluded by meaning in the present while con- tinually postponing it to an impossible time-to-come
• 2
• Rather than a discourse, contemporary semiotics takes as its object several semiotie practices which it considers as translinguistic; that is, they operate through and across language, while remaining irreducible to its categories as they are presently assigned.
• In this perspective,(the text is defined as a trans-linguistic apparatus that redistributes the order of language by relating communicative speech, which aims to inform directly, to different kinds of anterior or synchronic utterances., The te)(tis therefore a productivity, and this means: first, that its relationship to the language in which it is situated is redistributive (destructive-constructive), and hence can be better approached through logical categories rather than linguistic ones; and second, that it is apermutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken [rom other texts, intersect and neu- tralize one another.
• Bakhtin’s “literary word” as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character), and the contemporary or earlier cultural context
• Menippean discourse is both comic and tragic, or rather, it is serious in the same sense as is the carnivalesque
• Linguistic units and structures no longer determine writing, since it is not only or not specifically discourse directed at someone else. Displacements and facilitations of energy, discharges, and quantitative cathexes that are logically anterior to linguistic entities and to their subject mark the constitution and the movements of the "self," and are manifested by the formulation of symbolic-linguistic order.2 Writing would be the recording, through symbolic order, of this dialectic of displacement, facilitation, discharge, cathexis of drives (the most characteristic of which is the death drive) that operates-constitutes the signifier but also exceeds it; adds itself to the linear order of language by using the most fundamental laws of the signifying process (displacement, condensation, repetition, inversion); has other supplementary networks at its disposal; and produces a sur-meaning.
• [On Beckett’s corpus] It includes everything: a father's death and the arrival of a child (First Love), and at the other end, a theme of orality stripped of its ostenta- tion-the mouth of a lonely woman, face to face with God, face to face with nothing (Not 1).
• Racked between the father (cadaverous body, arousing to the point of defecation) and Death (empty axis, stirring to the point of trancendence), a man has a hard time finding something else to love. ********
• The Maternal Body: Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on. ‘It happens, but I'm not there." "I cannot realize it, but it goes on." Motherhood's impossible syllogism
• This becoming-a-mother, this gestation, can possibly be accounted for by means of only two discourses. There is science; but as an objective dis- course, science is not concerned with the subject, the mother as site of her proceedings. There is Christian theology (especially canonical theology); but theology defines maternity only as an impossible elsewhere, a sacred beyond, a vessel of divinity, a spiritual tie with the in- effable godhead, and transcendence's ultimate support-necessarily virginal and committed to assumption. *****
• if we suppose her [a mother] to be master of a process that is prior to the social-symbolic-linguistic contract of the group, then we acknowledge the risk of losing identity at the same time as we ward it off.
• This move, however, also reveals, better than any mother ever could, that the maternal body is the place of a splitting, which, even though hypostatized by Christianity, nonetheless remains a constant factor of social reality. Through a body, destined to insure reproduction of the species, the woman-subject, although under the sway of the paternal function (as symbolizing, speaking subject and like all others), more of a filter than anyone else-a thoroughfare, a threshold where "nature" confronts "culture." To imagine that there is someone in that filter-such is the source of religious mystifications, the font that nourishes them: the fantasy of the so-called "Phallic" Mother. Because if, on the contrary, there were no one on this threshold, if the mother were not, that is, if she were not phallic, then every speaker would be led " to conceive of its Being in relation to some void, a nothingness asymetrically opposed to this Being, a permanent threat against, first, its mastery, and ultimately, its stability. BITCHHHH****
• And yet, through and with this desire, motherhood seems to be impelled also by a nonsymbolic, nonpaternal causality.
• Such an excursion to the limits of primal regression can be phantasmatically experienced as the reunion of a woman-mother with the body of her mother
• The semiotic process relates to the chora, a term meaning "receptacle," which she borrowed from Plato, who describes it as "an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligi- ble, and is most incomprehensible."11 It is also anterior to any space, an economy of primary processes articulated by Freud's instinctual drives (Triebe) through condensation and displacement, and where social and family structures make their imprint through the mediation of the maternal body. While the chora's articulation is uncertain, undetermined, while it lacks thesis or position, unity or identity, it is the aim of Kris- teva's practice to remove what Plato saw as "mysterious" and "incomprehensible" in what he called "mother and receptacle" of aIl things-and the essays presented in this collection also proceed in the direction of such an elucidation.
• The symbolic process refers to the establishment of sign and syntac, paternal function, grammatical and social process, as increasingly manifest in language," results from a particular articulation between symbolic and semiotic dispositions; it could be termed "catastrophe," given the the word has in Rene Thom's theory
• The speaking subject is as belonging to both the semiotic chora and the symbolic device, and that accounts for its eventual split nature.
• The signifying process may be analyzed through two features of the text, as constituted by poetic language: a phenotext, which is the lan- guage of communication and has been the object of linguistic analysis; a genotext, which may be detected by means of certain aspects or elements of language, even though it is not linguistic per se.
• the "Other" refers to a hypothetical place or space, that of the pure signifier, rather than to a physical entity or moral cate- gory. Lacan: "The unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the other" versus "The Other is, therefore, the place in which is constituted the I who speaks with him who hears."
• 1
• Ethics used to be a coercive, customary manner of ensuring the cohesiveness of a particular group through the repetition of a code-a more or less accepted apologue. Now, however, the issue of ethics crops up wherever a code (mores, social contract) must be shattered in order to give way to the free play of negativity, need, desire, pleasure, and jouissance, before being put together again, although temporarily and with fuH knowledge of what is involved.
• No longer will it be possible to read any treatise on phonology without deeiphering within every phoneme the statement ‘here lies a poet."
• Poetic discourse measures rhythm against the meaning of language structure and is thus always eluded by meaning in the present while con- tinually postponing it to an impossible time-to-come
• 2
• Rather than a discourse, contemporary semiotics takes as its object several semiotie practices which it considers as translinguistic; that is, they operate through and across language, while remaining irreducible to its categories as they are presently assigned.
• In this perspective,(the text is defined as a trans-linguistic apparatus that redistributes the order of language by relating communicative speech, which aims to inform directly, to different kinds of anterior or synchronic utterances., The te)(tis therefore a productivity, and this means: first, that its relationship to the language in which it is situated is redistributive (destructive-constructive), and hence can be better approached through logical categories rather than linguistic ones; and second, that it is apermutation of texts, an intertextuality: in the space of a given text, several utterances, taken [rom other texts, intersect and neu- tralize one another.
• Bakhtin’s “literary word” as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character), and the contemporary or earlier cultural context
• Menippean discourse is both comic and tragic, or rather, it is serious in the same sense as is the carnivalesque
• Linguistic units and structures no longer determine writing, since it is not only or not specifically discourse directed at someone else. Displacements and facilitations of energy, discharges, and quantitative cathexes that are logically anterior to linguistic entities and to their subject mark the constitution and the movements of the "self," and are manifested by the formulation of symbolic-linguistic order.2 Writing would be the recording, through symbolic order, of this dialectic of displacement, facilitation, discharge, cathexis of drives (the most characteristic of which is the death drive) that operates-constitutes the signifier but also exceeds it; adds itself to the linear order of language by using the most fundamental laws of the signifying process (displacement, condensation, repetition, inversion); has other supplementary networks at its disposal; and produces a sur-meaning.
• [On Beckett’s corpus] It includes everything: a father's death and the arrival of a child (First Love), and at the other end, a theme of orality stripped of its ostenta- tion-the mouth of a lonely woman, face to face with God, face to face with nothing (Not 1).
• Racked between the father (cadaverous body, arousing to the point of defecation) and Death (empty axis, stirring to the point of trancendence), a man has a hard time finding something else to love. ********
• The Maternal Body: Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on. ‘It happens, but I'm not there." "I cannot realize it, but it goes on." Motherhood's impossible syllogism
• This becoming-a-mother, this gestation, can possibly be accounted for by means of only two discourses. There is science; but as an objective dis- course, science is not concerned with the subject, the mother as site of her proceedings. There is Christian theology (especially canonical theology); but theology defines maternity only as an impossible elsewhere, a sacred beyond, a vessel of divinity, a spiritual tie with the in- effable godhead, and transcendence's ultimate support-necessarily virginal and committed to assumption. *****
• if we suppose her [a mother] to be master of a process that is prior to the social-symbolic-linguistic contract of the group, then we acknowledge the risk of losing identity at the same time as we ward it off.
• This move, however, also reveals, better than any mother ever could, that the maternal body is the place of a splitting, which, even though hypostatized by Christianity, nonetheless remains a constant factor of social reality. Through a body, destined to insure reproduction of the species, the woman-subject, although under the sway of the paternal function (as symbolizing, speaking subject and like all others), more of a filter than anyone else-a thoroughfare, a threshold where "nature" confronts "culture." To imagine that there is someone in that filter-such is the source of religious mystifications, the font that nourishes them: the fantasy of the so-called "Phallic" Mother. Because if, on the contrary, there were no one on this threshold, if the mother were not, that is, if she were not phallic, then every speaker would be led " to conceive of its Being in relation to some void, a nothingness asymetrically opposed to this Being, a permanent threat against, first, its mastery, and ultimately, its stability. BITCHHHH****
• And yet, through and with this desire, motherhood seems to be impelled also by a nonsymbolic, nonpaternal causality.
• Such an excursion to the limits of primal regression can be phantasmatically experienced as the reunion of a woman-mother with the body of her mother
maybe
June 24, 2019
"Love is the time and space where "I" give myself the right to be extraordinary."
Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist and novelist, Julia Kristeva was born #OnThisDay in 1941 ReadMoreWomen
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June 9, 2023Yeah idk what she's saying alas
July 19, 2025
po tych książkach łatwo stwierdzić, nad czym aktualnie pracuję xd
ale polecam ten tytuł każdemu, kto jest zainteresowany tym, jak teksty się przenikają i są ze sobą w ciągłym dialogu
ale polecam ten tytuł każdemu, kto jest zainteresowany tym, jak teksty się przenikają i są ze sobą w ciągłym dialogu
August 29, 2025
Good survey of essays from Kristeva’s semiotic works, big standout essays for me are “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” and “How Does One Speak to Literature?”. Will say though I prefer her work on psychoanalytic topics
December 14, 2020
Her best idea was the introduction of the "abject" to the subjectively objective narrative universe of discourse. It reads well in context with the "Fatal Strategies" of Jean Baudrillard. I arrogated to add the "adject" as substantial part to the substanceless media games of virtual dialectics...
unfinished
July 10, 2015such a big library fine, and i'm still not done. might be better to buy this one.
February 22, 2012
oh boy too theoretical
Read
May 8, 2024partially read because i decided not to pursue this framework for my final paper—though i enjoyed the chapters i read, kristeva has such a way with language in terms of the psychoanalytical view of literature: for example the 3rd and 4th chapter eloquently shows the insistence of a semiosis in mere dialogue and approaching not only reading literature but as proposed in the title and the following essays of italian painters.
loved her work ever since reading her theory on the abject, can’t wait to reread this or use it soon for an essay, but not paper ready since im still actually so scared though enamored by her writing nut not entirely sold on the french’s obsession with linguistics (and half semiotic) as a field of reading and analysis .
returned to the library too soon (today’s the last borrow date)
loved her work ever since reading her theory on the abject, can’t wait to reread this or use it soon for an essay, but not paper ready since im still actually so scared though enamored by her writing nut not entirely sold on the french’s obsession with linguistics (and half semiotic) as a field of reading and analysis .
returned to the library too soon (today’s the last borrow date)
May 11, 2022
“The other that will guide you and itself through this dissolution is a rhythm, text, music, and within language, a text. But what is the connection that holds you both together? Counter-desire, the negative of desire, inside-out desire, capable of questioning (or provoking) its own infinite quest. Romantic, filial, adolescent, exclusive, blind and Oedipal: it is all that, but for others. It returns to where you are, both of you, disappointed, irritated, ambitious, in love with history, critical, on the edge and even in the midst of its own identity crisis; a crisis of enunciation and of the interdependence of its movements, an instinctual drive that descends in waves, tearing apart the symbolic thesis.”
June 5, 2021
My first time getting familiar with the meaning of intertext, intertextualilty and the dialogue between textx. No wonder, J. Kristeva had done its utmost to reveal the phenomena understudy -- I wirte my final qualification work (=diploma) on Tolkien's literary pieces regarding the realtionship between The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings with Bible (OT&NT). J. Kristeva alongside M. Bakhtin did a great job revealing intertextual relations; dialogie between two or more texts.
May 12, 2024
Deep dive into language, art, psychoanalysis, blending semiotics with Freud and Lacan to shed new light on language and narratives. Her key terms like the semiotic, symbolic, and intertextuality has reshaped critical theory, showing us that texts are not isolated. Dense and/but rewarding for those interested in understanding how language influences our ideas of self, desire, and culture. If you're fascinated by the ways language shapes our world, read Kristeva.
July 19, 2024
A fascinating but difficult read. Can't say I got all of it, but when I did it was primarily because I was familiar with the material being discussed (Barthes, Blanchot, etc.).
January 31, 2025
Excellent for theatre reaserch
not-read
October 12, 2009This has been on my shelf for over ten years, and I have never plodded my way all the way through it...
February 7, 2016
About semiotics in literature and art
Read
March 20, 2019*SIGHS* it took me so long to finish this book
Read
May 30, 2019I only have such a base and superficial understanding of these concepts. I borrowed this from the library and two weeks will not be enough for me to truly understand this text.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews