kristeva and derrida

Derrida’s thinking of the “chora” appears 16-22 years after Kristeva’s publication of “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in 1974 (to which I will turn briefly in a moment). Already, in “Semiotics” (1968), and already in conscious relation to Derrida, Kristeva was articulating a certain reading of Freud and Saussure (among others). However, she was also beginning, in a sense, to accuse Derrida...

This passage works to complicate the categories of linguistics, semiotics and psychoanalysis. It will no doubt have Scott Eric Kaufman rolling his eyes in all sorts of directions (just allow me to repeat Michael Bérubé's remark the other day: that even Kristeva had (and has) long since given up the kind of nonesensical jargon Lacanese for which she and others were so widely ridiculed by Alan Sokal et al.):

"Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body -- always already involved in a semiotic process -- by family and social structures. In this way the drives, which are ‘energy’ charges as well as ‘psychical’ marks, articulate what we call a chora: a non-expressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.

We borrow the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases. We differentiate this uncertain and indeterminate articulation from a disposition that already depends on representation, lends itself to phenomenological, spatial intuition and gives rise to geometry. Although our theoretical description of the chora is itself part of the discourse of representation that offers it as evidence, the chora, as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality and temporality. Our discourse -- all discourse -- moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it. Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitely posited: as a result, one can situate the chora, but one can never give it axiomatic form....Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm.
(Kristeva, "Revolution in Poetic Language," in Moi, 93-94).

To borrow Zizek's mantra: Is there not a metaphysical urge lurking in this movement of simultaneous “dependence” and “refusal”?

Kristeva’s distinction...placed the semiotic within the prelinguistic space of drives and energy charges that precedes but also participates in the construction of the speaking subject. Associated with the term “chora,” meaning “receptacle” or “womb,”...the structure of the semiotic was essentially instinctual and dual for Kristeva. As a period of indistinction between itself and its mother’s body, the infant was without a sense of “otherness,” without object (for the object is seen as identical to the self), and without the intervention of a paternal third party who separates and differentiates. Despite her claim that the semiotic is a heterogeneous space before the constitution of identity and, therefore, without an ontologically feminine specificity, it has been, as her critics point out, consistently linked throughout her work to the maternal as opposed to the paternal. The symbolic, on the other hand, has always been equated with the paternal realm of identity and of communicative language. It places the subject within a normalizing triadic relationship in which the paternal third party becomes an agent of separation and difference constituting an object for the subject and vice versa.”
(Brandt, 266).

What would seem to be at stake is Kristeva’s often slippery appropriation of Plato's term, in describing the chora as a “mother” or “wet nurse” -- a space yet “preceding evidence, language, subjectivity and sexual difference...

The theory of the subject proposed by the theory of the unconscious [read: Lacan, but also Melanie Klein] will allow us to read in this rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which significance is constituted. Plato himself leads us to such a process when he calls this receptacle or chora nourishing and maternal, not yet unified in an ordered whole because deity is absent from it (Kristeva, "Revolution in Poetic Language," in Moi, 94)..

Kristeva’s reading of Plato thus poses a conceptual dilemma, one which may position her quite near Derrida in some ways, but which she seeks to “resolve” in a manner that is undoubtedly at odds with, or at the very least rather inhospital toward Derrida’s insistence on ‘im-possibility.'

The desire to give voice to sexual difference, and particularly to the position of the woman-subject within meaning and signification, leads to a veritable insurrection against the homogenizing signifier. However, it is all too easy to pass from the search for difference to the denegation of the symbolic. The latter is the same as to remove the ‘feminine’ from the order of language (understood as dominated exclusively by the secondary process) and to inscribe is within the primary process alone, whether in the drive that calls out or simply the drive tout court. In this case, does not the struggle against the ‘phallic sign’ and against the whole mono-logic, monotheistic culture which supports itself on it, sink into an essentialist cult of Woman, into a hysterical obsession with the neutralizing cave, a fantasy arising precisely as the negative imprint of the maternal phallus?...In other words, if the feminine exists, it only exists in the order of significance or signifying process, and it is only in relation to meaning in signification, positioned as their excessive or transgressive other that it exists, speaks, thinks (itself) and writes (itself) for both sexes (Kristeva, “Il n’y a pas de maître à langage”, 134-135, as quoted by Moi, 11).

As Moi astutely notes, the above passage is perhaps most revealing onto the question of Kristeva’s “finely balanced” or slightly problematic “position on...feminity: as different or other in relation to language to meaning, but nevertheless only thinkable within the symbolic, and therefore also necessarily subject to the Law” (Moi, 11). I might venture (rather violently, perhaps) to suggest that one aspect of this act of balancing would appear to be a subtle prioritizing of the symbolic over the semiotic (such as here) or vice versa (such as in the passage on the ‘chora’ quoted earlier), depending precisely on which of these two spaces or destinations is being more immediately linked with the feminine.

Although the possibility of a responsible comparison is perhaps becoming less and less likely (if ever it was possible) -- and not wishing Kristeva to appear to dominate the space of this discussion, -- let us hold up a passage from Derrida. Here he is suggesting (in my reading), that the “concept” itself is at once the phallus and the possibility of castration (in the deeper sense of the phallus’s disappearance or “culpable ending”), beyond any formalization of the “fetish:”

One will always be able to take the tallith for a fetish, on condition of an upheaval in the axioms of the theorem of restricted fetishism and a formalisation -- I attempted in Glas and elsewhere -- of generalised fetishism. At the moment of the verdict, this theory would no longer be merely a theory, it would take into account, at the end of the day, with the whole history engaged in it (from Exodus to Saint Paul to Freud to everything that is implied and placed en abyme in A Silkworm of One’s Own), this thought of the event without truth unveiled or revealed, without phallogocentrism of the greco-judeo-paulino-islamo-freudo-heideggeriano-lacanian veil, without phallophoria, i.e., without procession or theory of the phallus, without veiling-unveiling of the phallus, or even of the mere place, strictly hemmed in, of the phallus, living or dead. Thus culpable ending of the phallus, the edges of this cut which support the veil and hold it out like a tent or an awning, a roof, a canvas, this theoretical toilet of the phallus is none other that the concept, yes, the concept in itself. The phallus is the concept, you can’t oppose it, any more than you can oppose a “sexual theory”. Unless you do something different, you can only oppose to it another concept or another theory, a knowledge like another. Very little. It is not enough to have concepts at one’s disposal, you have to know how to set them, like one sets sails, often to save oneself of course, but on condition of knowing how to catch the wind in one’s sails: a question of force, concepts and veils are there only in view of this question of force (Derrida, “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” in Anidjar, 350-351).