File spoon-archives/french-feminism.archive/french-feminism_1997/97-03-25.044, message 205


Date: Sun, 22 Dec 1996 07:23:26 +0200
From: Vadim Linetski <picador-AT-luckynet.co.il>
Subject: Re: Kristeva's chora


Leah Sheppard wrote:
> 
> 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
> >
> >
> >      --- from list french-feminism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
> >
> 
>      --- from list french-feminism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
21 March 97
i've discusssed the issues you queried about in my recent "THE PROMISE
OF EXPRESSION..." in eleventh issue of PERFORATIONS (1997):
http://ww.pd.org/topos/perforations/perf11/unspkable_chld.html
also available via:
http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc/postmodern.html#linetski
hope you'll find smth of interest
vadim


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