From: Leah Sheppard <sheppard-AT-pobox.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: Kristeva's chora
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 19:23:04 -0500 (EST)


Hey Rachel,

This from a lowly undergrad and you will get much more informed
resposes on this list, but if you want to align Kristeva and Lacan,
I think the proper comparison is between the Imaginary and the semiotic?
If the Kristeva and Lacan's Symbolics line up.  Then what is the Real
for Kristeva?  Hm... perhaps the chora.  I get the sense that the
chora actually houses the semiotic.  The Symbolic too?  I'm not sure.  

Here's straight out of my bible of Feminism and Psychoanalysis:
"Kristeva clearly explains the costs and the conditions of the 
acquisition of culture and a Symbolic position: the subject does 
not develop naturally, nor is he or she merely the effects of
'conditioning' or upbringing.  Rather, Symbolic subjectivity is
founded on a constitutive repression (of the maternal, the chora,
the semiotic, the abject).

To explain her notion of the semiotic, Kristeva refers to what Plato,
in the Timaeus, calls the chora.  The chora is 'receptacle, unnameable,
improbable, hybrid, anterior to naming, to the one, to the father and
consequently maternally connoted' (from Desire in Language p133).
The chora is the site of the undifferentiated bodily space the mother
and the child share.  A site for the production of the matrix/womb 
and matter, the chora is the unnameable, unspeakable corporeality
of the inextricably tangled mother/child dyad which makes the
semiotic possible."

Clear as mud, right? :)  Gotta love Kristeva.
--LeaH

 > 
> I've just begun reading Kristeva, and as I understand the chora, it is
> aligned with Lacan's mirror stage, before entry into the symbolic, the Law,
> etc.  But, she posits language, the "semiotic", into this pre-symbolic stage,
> stating that the semiotic is repressed upon entry into the symbolic, but
> recognizable in disruptions in language, namely silences,
> contradictions....(elipses??)....  I seem to see some resemblance of the
> chora, the untheorize-ability of it, to Lacan's REAL.  Does Kristeva align
> the semiotic with the Real in any way?  Also, if anyone could shed light upon
> the chora or ways to read the semiotic in language, I would much appreciate
> it.
> 
> Merci, Rachel
> 
> 
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