From: squigle-AT-panix.com
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 11:34:01 -0500
Subject: Re: Kristeva's chora


Mary,

I'm hardly an expert on Kristeva myself, but...I've been working on Lacan,
Zizek, Irigaray and others and so my interest was piqued by something you
said to Rachel:

>By suggesting that Lacan missed the importance of the taproot and that he
>and Freud both missed the importance of the pre-paternal semiotic which is
>the condition for the possibility of the Oedipus or the symbolic, Kristeva
>and Lacan might best be thought _not_ to match up and correlate somewhere
>between the Real and the semiotic chora.  To me it is almost like Kristeva
>has brought in a new field to engage psychoanalysis.  She does not claim a
>fit between the semiotic and the REal because she is bringing a new field,
>one that does not forget the difference of the pre-paternal,
>out of which to think with and against the Lacanian orders.  That means
>the fit isn't going to be one-to-one with the Real.

The idea that the chora might be a concept Kristeva uses to introduce a
"new field" suggests an excess or gap between the real and the symbolic
that is necessary for the symbolic to exist.  In other words, some part of
the real must be repressed in order to have reality.  The repressed element
then comes back as fantasy.  Could this "new field" be a realm of fantasy
in which reality itself is not yet fully constituted?

Timothy

--------------------------------
Timothy R. Quigley, Faculty
New School for Social Research
squigle-AT-panix.com
quigleyt-AT-newschool.edu
http://www.panix.com/~squigle
-------------------------------




     --- from list french-feminism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---