[In the following essay, McCance tracks the changes in Kristeva's approach to “the subject in process/on trial,” addressing the theoretical and practical development in her work from the 1960s through the 1980s.]

The theoretical work that interests me involves the analysis of the work of language, not as something possessing an arbitrary but systematizable nature （the aim of positivist semiology） but rather as a verbal practice whose economy is complex, critical and contradictory （poetic language offers the most striking example of such a practice） … this theoretical work tackles certain critical situations in subjective experience in order to re-examine its models, encourage invention once more or perhaps demonstrate the system's non-validity in the face of certain extreme experiences. I call this preoccupation ethical because, like any theory, it still demonstrates a meaning, or a thesis, or communicates a truth, even if this is contested in the process. But in the event, contrary to moral philosophy, this ethics displays its own degree of jouissance: it is concerned both with what it can and cannot demonstrate, with sense and non-sense, with what is and is not given by the thesis, with truth and whatever resists it. It analyses and so establishes the existence of them all, thereby broadening our view of what we take to be intelligence or society.

I am interested in the question of woman to the degree to which it is located in this same areas of ethics.

———Julia Kristeva, “Talking about Polylogue”

A DEPRESSIVE MOMENT: EVERYTHING IS DYING

Julia Kristeva says in Black Sun （1989a, 8） that in times of crisis or loss, melancholia asserts itself, “establishes its archaeology, generates its representations.” Her essay, “Holbein's Dead Christ” （in 1989a, 106-38）, concerns one of melancholia's representations, Hans Holbein the Younger's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, generated at a time of upheaval and religious crisis in Europe. The date of the painting, 1522, places it on the threshold of the modern and at the point where the Aristotelian-Christian cosmology is in the process of collapsing. The painting depicts the newly dead body of Christ laid out on the slab of a tomb. The corpse is painted life-size and as seen from the side, its chest, hands, and feet bearing the marks of torture, and its head slightly turned toward the viewer to reveal that “the expression of a hopeless grief; the empty stare, the sharp-lined profile, the dull blue-green complexion are those of a man who is truly dead, of Christ forsaken by the Father （‘My God, my God, why have you deserted me?’） and without the promise of Resurrection” （Kristeva 1989a, 110）. That the painting is only twelve inches high, portraying the tomb as narrow and closed and with a low ceiling that bears down on the corpse, “intensifies the feeling of permanent death: this corpse shall never rise again” （110）. Even the sheet which covers the slab on which the corpse is stretched out, signifies the irrevocability of this death: “The very pall, limited to a minimum of folds, emphasizes, through that economy of motion, the feeling of stiffness and stone-felt cold” （110）.

Kristeva opens her essay by quoting Prince Myshkin from Dostoevsky's The Idiot who, on seeing a reproduction of the Holbein painting at Rogozhin's house; exclaims, “Why, some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture” （Kristeva 1989a, 107）. Kristeva herself reads the painting as conveying just such loss of faith. Holbein's is a disenchanted vision, she says; his dead Christ, walled in by black stone, is utterly without transcendence, “without any prospect toward heaven … distant, but without a beyond” （113）. She suggests that the painter's vision of a desacralized world generates his minimalist aesthetic: the pall, reduced to a minimum of folds, “the well-nigh anatomical stripping of the corpse” so as to render death unadorned （110）. Holbein “isolated, pruned, condensed, reduced” （115） his work into a “chromatic and compositional asceticism” （123）, she says. Representing a world devoid of transcendence, “the artist refused to cast an embellishing gaze” （127）.

And just as the artist's minimalist aesthetic suggests to Kristeva the new vision of reality being born in Europe at the time, “another, a new morality resides in this painting” （Kristeva 1989a, 113）. Holbein “leaves the corpse strangely alone” （112）, she says, its isolation heralding the detachment of the newly emerging individual, now “autonomous,” left to rely on its self. The modern subject, “strangely lonesome. Self confident. And close,” betrays “no exalted loftiness toward the beyond.” Moreover, this subject, cut off from heaven, has put the excesses of the body away. Hence, the new morality, like the Holbein painting, will be a study in stone-cold language. It is as if, with the death of Christianity's God, comes the death of medievalism's desiring （erotic and paroxystic） body. As Kristeva suggests in “The Bounded Text” （in 1980a, 36-63）, once “the transcendental unity” supporting the medieval symbol, “its otherworldly casing, its transmuting focus,” gives way and Western culture moves into the “ideologeme of the sign,” the entity under consideration, the body, is reduced and reified, turned into an object “in the strongest sense of the word” and at the same time, the body is valorized, “transformed into an objectivity—the reigning law of discourse in the civilization of the sign” （39-40）.¹

“The Bounded Text,” which first appeared in Sémeiótiké （1969）, precedes the psychoanalytic perspective that informs “Holbein's Dead Christ,” where the transition from medieval to modern is said to constitute a traumatic loss of the Other, a severance of the pole of desire which linked the medieval subject to God. No longer available to Holbein is the sacrificial economy through which death is “destroyed and superseded” （Kristeva 1989a, 131） by being cast as an experience of becoming homologous with the divine, Kristeva says.² And with this loss of （the desire of） the divine Other, goes an entire ascetic and martyrizing tradition that “magnified the victimized aspect” of the sacrifice of the body “by eroticizing both pain and suffering, physical as well as mental, as much as possible” （131）. Thus in the Holbein painting, there is “not a single impulse that betrays jouissance” （138）. With the transcendent pole of desire cut, the body is no longer representable, through sacrificial death, as aufgehoben, and the eroticism of pain is lacking. The modern text “identifies not with desire but with severance” （137）. With melancholia as the symptom of its loss, the new discourse treads “the tightrope—as the represented body—of an economical, sparing graphic rendition of pain … a serene disenchanted sadness … a mastery of harmony and measure” （136）.

At the conclusion of “Holbein's Dead Christ,” Kristeva asks whether it is “still possible to paint when the bonds that tie us to body and meaning are severed?” （Kristeva 1989a, 136）. Is it still possible to paint, or to write, after the death of the body? Kristeva's work can be read as an enactment of this quest, this question of the possibility of a practice of signification, or to use her more theatrical term, of signifiance, which does not retreat into the solace of religion and so reconnect the subject's bond to the divine Other, but which does not function either as a modern metalinguistic or monological system in which “the subject both assumes and submits to the rule of 1 （God）” （Kristeva 1980a, 77）. A monological system is “centered on an entity Descartes called a subject,” who is “not included, dissolved, or implicated in the system” but rather “hovers above it, subdues it, and is absent from it,” she says （1984d, 94）. Although “a fixed point” and “the sole guarantee of the symbolic system and its logical laws,” the monological subject “calls himself ‘we’” and in so doing presupposes that his or her addressee “is made in the image of its ‘we’—an indifferent subject, supposedly everyone, since symbolic systematicity eliminated heterogeneity by eliminating the negative and unfolds, purporting to be transparent, eternally communicable, omnivalent” （95）. Because the addressee is not included in this system save as a mimetic reflection of its addressor-subject, the monological subject/object model of signification is, for Kristeva, as closed, or hemmed in （suturé）, as Holbein's harrowing tomb, as unfolded as his minimalist pall. Kristeva writes, we might say, so as to re-enfold the text.

For her, then, to paint or to write after is not a matter of reproducing the “new morality” announced by Holbein's Dead Christ—although it is, inescapably, a question of what she calls the ethical function of the text （1984d, 232）. Kristeva distinguishes her notion of the ethical from modernity's “‘scientific morality’ that would like to found a normative, albeit apparently libertarian, ethics based on knowledge” （234）. Her ethics is not another moralism grounded in the modern patriarchal and monological subject, another prescriptivism that “preaches the foreclosure of the subject-as-model” （234）. The question of ethics, and thus of writing after modernity and patriarchy cannot be asked apart from “a perspective that takes account of the process/trial of the subject in language or, more generally, in meaning” （233）, she says. In what follows, I will attempt to outline Kristeva's account of the process/trial of the subject, what she calls her theory of le sujet en procès （the subject-in-process/on trial）, as it develops in her writing from 1965 to 1974, and as it relates to what she takes to be the ethical function of the text. I will then turn to her well-known essay “Stabat Mater” as a performance of this “ethical” practice of the text, this process of the subject of trial. I will conclude by considering Kristeva's characterization of her psychoanalytic ethics of the subject-in-process as a postmodern feminist practice.

S'EXILER: TO GO INTO EXILE; TO EXPATRIATE ONE SELF

In 1984, Kristeva wrote the essay, “My Memory's Hyperbole” （Kristeva 1984c） for inclusion in an anthology of female autobiographies edited by Domna Stanton and titled The Female Autograph. Stanton explains in her preface （vii-viii） that she excised bio from autobiography in the volume's title in order to bracket the traditional emphasis on autobiography as the recounting of “a life,” with “that notion's facile presumption of referentiality,” and to suggest that the women's writing in this collection does not so much narrate as “graph the auto.” Kristeva's essay, written in the first person plural, a form which she adopts in place of the objective and authorial “I,” and offered as hyperbole, not to be taken literally, is in keeping with this non-referential understanding of the self. “My Memory's Hyperbole” traces through the evolution of the so-called Tel Quel group in Paris, from the time of Kristeva's arrival late in 1965 until 1974, when the Tel Quel journal folded. The essay does provide a scheme, then, an outline of intellectual and political developments, but written as the auto（bio）graphy of a “we” that remains hyperbolic. As Stanton （1984, x） describes it, Kristeva's essay “confounds generic and genderic boundaries” as it discusses intellectual and political movements in Paris, “analyzing the various scenes, acts, and dramatis personae not merely as a critical observer, but undeniably as a major protagonist.” The essay is written as a dramatization of its self, of the ongoing production-mutation of a hyperbolic “subject-in-the-making” （Kristeva 1981b, 167）, a subject that, Kristeva says, “is alive only if it is never the same” （1984c, 220）.

Kristeva writes as a dramatis persona, a player in the drama, “a revolutionary actor, a ‘scriptor’ of events” （Caws 1973, 3）, in order both to call attention to and to interrogate the detached and stable person-subject that has dominated moral philosophy since John Locke's Second Treatise. Thus Kristeva's writings must be dissociated from the idea of the text as object or propertied product, authored and controlled by the person-subject. Kristeva does not so much give us a treatise on ethics, as a performance of ethics. For her, ethics is, as Leon Roudiez puts it, a “practice of scription” for which the text, as “the visible ‘stage’ （in the theatrical sense）, cannot be envisaged within the myth of representation （mimesis）: it is a ‘performance,’ a ‘production,’ actively involving writer and reader alike; it needs to be conceived as a materiality rather than an outer form enclosing an inner content” （Roudiez 1974, 297）. The text, conceived as such, is what gives the writer identity, graphs the auto, is “a kind of matrix that makes its subject” （Kristeva 1984b, 131）. The text, so conceived, is also constitutive of soma: “Signs are what produce a body,” Kristeva says （132）, again dissociating her understanding of the subject as dramatis persona from the person of private rights, whose assumption of ownership and control of his or her propertied body, places the reified body “before” and “outside” the object-text. Roudiez suggests that this practice of the text as scription “brings to our own critical practice and textual theory something that is unmistakably alien” （introduction to Kristeva 1980a, 11）. It made of Kristeva, on her arrival in Paris, what Roland Barthes called l'étrangère, not just a “foreigner” from Bulgaria,³ and not just an outsider to the standard theoretical scene, but a scriptor whose writing, “the discourse of a crisis in identity” （Kristeva 1984c, 268）, exiles the unified subject.⁴ This practice has, similarly, contributed to Kristeva's ambiguous relation to feminism, particularly within the North American context.⁵

Kristeva says in her preface to Desire in Language （1980a, ix） that writing as scription “assumes the necessity of adopting a stance involving otherness, distance, even limitation” as “the only guarantee of ethics” in a world of technological rationality. We could read her early essays, many of which are published in Séméiotiké （1969）, as attempts to work out this ethical stance involving otherness, and so to move literary criticism and structuralist linguistics from the monological, or “zero-one,” system to what she comes to call a “zero-two” practice of “poetic language.” Kristeva applies the latter term to writing that is open to the subject's production as both an “I” and an other. In Bakhtin's approach to poetic language, for instance, where “the word/discourse is, as it were, distributed over the various instances of discourse that a multiple ‘I’ can occupy simultaneously,” the subject of language “is made up of otherself,” becomes in writing its “own otherness, and thereby multiple and elusive, polyphonic” （Kristeva 1973, 109）. According to Bakhtin's understanding of the carnivalesque, “all poetic language is dramatization, dramatic permutation … of words,” Kristeva says; what it dramatizes is the scene of the subject, in process between representation and rhythm: “On the omnified stage of the carnival, language parodies and relativizes itself, repudiating its role in representation; in so doing, it provokes laughter but remains incapable of detaching itself from representation” （Kristeva 1980a, 79）. In that this dialogical, “zero-two” poetics is simultaneously one and the other, “both representative and antirepresentative” （79）, it allows for what Kristeva calls an “ambivalent ethics” （69）: never simply a rational monologism, and “put together as an exploration of the body” （83）.

In “Pour une sémiologie des paragrammes” （in Kristeva 1969）, another of her early essays, Kristeva uses Ferdinand de Saussure's Anagrammes to develop the notion of a paragrammatical text, the text as an interrelation of texts, a multifaceted juncture of meanings and codes.⁶ Like Bakhtin's dialogical “word,” the poetic paragram is always at least double, and therefore “ambivalent” （Kristeva 1969, 182-83）. The word “ambivalent” comes up again and again, to denote a poetic “doubling” of the subject and language, a doubling that, for instance, Kristeva associates with what she calls the “ethical dimension” of Roman Jakobson's work （“The Ethics of Linguistics” in 1980a, 26-35）. Jakobson's reading of the futurist poets, she says, is an “opening” of monological theory to the “other of the linguistic and/or social contract” （30）, which thereby enables the speaking subject “to shift the limits of its enclosure” （33）. By giving voice to the rhythm inscribed in Mayakovsky's poetry, Kristeva suggests, Jakobson allows us to hear the “silent causality and ethics” （28） at work in poetic language. Again, “ambivalence” allows for ethics in that it opens to heterogeneity, makes room for both sameness and difference: For Jakobson, Kristeva says, language is double, both rhythm and structure, both struggle and law; and therefore the writing subject is never either monological reason or asymbolic rhythm, but an unending dialogical, ethical process-production between the two.

These early essays suggest that, for Kristeva, the ethics of a given discourse “may be gauged in proportion to the poetry that it presupposes” （25）, where “poetry” and “poetic” writing function to “dynamize” structure through a theory-practice of the text as “a free play, forever without closure” （“From One Identity To An Other” in 1980a, 128）.⁷ An ethics based on this zero-two writing emphasizes “the dynamics of production over the actual product” and therefore the otherness （alterité） of what it studies, rather than focusing on a reified and representable object （Kristeva 1969, 39-40）. Kristeva's vocabulary may be, at least in part, idiosyncratic, but her message can be simply put: ethics, in her understanding, cannot be reduced to the pro-positioning of a Lockean individualist subject, with all of the assumptions that system entails. What is needed today, rather, is a theory of the writing-speaking subject as itself a productive activity in language. The ethics of any speaking-writing would then be dependent on the extent to which the subject in language remains open, in any given instance, to a dimension that is supplementary to authoritative propositionality, to the heterogeneity or alterity of an other—the otherness of body, of the other culture, of the other self. In that it opens to this space, the matrix, of the subject, Bakhtin's dialogism is, for Kristeva, “quasi-psychological” （Kristeva 1973, 110）, and a precursor of this needed theory of the subject. She says the same of Saussure's research on poetic language, published in his Anagrammes. Studying Saturnian verse and Vedic poetry, Saussure discovered that each message was a double code: “Each text was another text, each poetic unit had at least a double signification, no doubt unconscious, that was reconstituted through the play of the signifier” （Kristeva 1989b, 293）. What he had isolated was the seemingly-psychoanalytic particularity of poetic functioning: “that supplementary meanings slip into the verbal message, tear its opaque cloth, and rearrange another signifying scene” （293）.

Kristeva's psychoanalytic theory of the subject en procès receives its first systematic elaboration in Revolution in Poetic Language （1984d）. Here, in an attempt “to go beyond the theatre of linguistic representations to make room for pre-or translinguistic modalities of psychic inscription” （Kristeva 1987a, 5）, she borrows the term chora from Plato's Timaeus and uses it to designate both anteriority and heterogeneity. The chora signifies a mythical space or phase “anterior” to the mirror stage and the child's acquisition of language, a preverbal “rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position” （26）; and it also designates a heterogeneousness beyond representation, an unconscious supplementarity that belongs inescapably to the process of signifiance. From the chora emanate the energy charges which Kristeva associates with the operation of the “semiotic” （le sémiotique）. As “articulated by flow and marks: facilitation, energy transfers, the cutting up of the corporeal and social continuum as well as that of signifying material” （40）, the semiotic is distinct from the “symbolic” （le symbolique）, language as representation, meaning, sign. Always “ambivalent,” signification requires both the semiotic and symbolic modalities: even as the metalanguage of a monological subject, signification cannot completely close off the semiotic, and neither is there any possibility of meaningful signification outside the pro-positioning of a conscious subject. The psychoanalytic sujet en procès is interminably in process/on trial between the semiotic and symbolic.

Related to this distinction of the semiotic and symbolic is Kristeva's theory of the text as a production, “a process, an engendrement” （Lewis 1974, 30） which includes both géno-texte and phéno-texte. She uses the latter term “to denote language that serves to communicate.” The phenotext, she says, is a structure that “obeys rules of communication and presupposes a subject of enunciation and an addressee” （Kristeva 1984a, 87）. The genotext, however, is not a linguistic structure but a generative process, “a process, which tends to articulate structures that are ephemeral （unstable, threatened by drive charges, ‘quanta’ rather than ‘marks’） and nonsignifying （devices that do not have a double articulation）” （86）, but which are nonetheless detectable in the phenotext. Although, as Christopher Johnson points out, “the relationship linking the geno-and pheno-texts is one of translation” （1988, 74）, Kristeva does not think of “translation” as the “zero-one” passage from an underlying original to a surface copy. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the genotext and the phenotext, the sort of correspondence which is suggested by Chomsky's Cartesian model of deep structure and surface structure, she says; and the genotext, not an other scene but an ensemble of other scenes, is generative of signifying operations which exceed the limit of sentence-meaning （Kristeva 1969, 281-84）. Through these operations, the genotext imprints its seal in the phenotext, leaves markers （such as the phonemic-phonetic elements or groups of elements which Kristeva calls signifying differentials） which open “the normative usage of language on the one hand toward the underlying and repressed body and semiotic chora, and on the other hand toward multiple displacements and condensations which produce a strongly ambivalent if not polymorphous semantics” （Kristeva 1974, 34）.

This practice of the text as scription, as both genotext and phenotext, therefore as “more-than-a-sentence, more-than-meaning, more-than-significance … always more: more-than-syntactic” （Kristeva 1980a, 168）, is coextensive with what Kristeva calls ethics. “The ethical cannot be stated,” she says in Revolution in Poetic Language; “instead it is practiced to the point of loss, and the text is one of the most accomplished examples of such a practice” （1984d, 234）. A textual practice is ethical when it is ambivalent, where the term again denotes a double, a zero-two, both sameness and difference: “positing and dissolving meaning and the unity of the subject therefore encompasses the ethical” （1984d, 233）. One cannot demand, then, that the text simply “emit a message which would be considered ‘positive’: the univocal enunciation of such a message would itself represent a suppression of the ethical function as we understand it.” Only when it both posits and “pluralizes, pulverizes, ‘musicates’” meaning does the text fulfill its ethical function. There is no authoritative position for a unified person-subject above or outside of this text, she says, setting her understanding of ethics apart from the liberal, social contract model that still dominates in the world today. For Kristeva, the subject of ethics is an exile, a wanderer （égaré）, a subject whose only place, locus, is language and thus whose position （identity meaning） can never be fixed （see Kristeva 1977b）. I turn now to her essay, “Stabat Mater,” which I take to be a practice of this process-trial of the subject.

“REACHING OUT TO THE OTHER, THE ETHICAL”

“No language can sing,” Kristeva says, “unless it confronts the Phallic Mother” （1980a, 191）. If language is to “sing,” that is, to be ethical, it cannot leave this phallic construct “untouched, outside, opposite, against the law, the absolute esoteric code. Rather, it must swallow her, eat her, dissolve her, set her up like a boundary of the process where ‘I’ with ‘she’—‘the other,’ ‘the mother’ becomes lost” （191）.

Perhaps no essay of Kristeva's has garnered more critical attention, especially from feminists, than “Stabat Mater,” an essay that attempts this very dissolution. First published in Tel Quel （1977） as Héretique de l'amour, the essay appears in Histoires d'amour （1983）, and in English translation in Tales of Love （Kristeva 1987b）. It is also printed in English in Poetics Today （1985） and in The Kristeva Reader. Kristeva explains that the title of the essay is taken from the mournful hymn of the Roman Catholic Church, Stabat Mater Dolorosa, attributed to the medieval poet Jacopone da Todi, a meditation on the Virgin Mary in her station at the cross, which opens with the words, “The sorrowful mother was standing.” Kristeva refers to the composer Pergolesi, “who was dying of tuberculosis when he wrote his immortal Stabat Mater” （“Stabat Mater” in 1987b, 252）. Might the hymn, then, and perhaps also Kristeva's essay, be two more of melancholia's representations? For melancholy, which points to a loss, a crisis, can be traced to the subject's being “irrevocably, desperately separated from the mother,” Kristeva says in Black Sun （1989a, 6）; “a loss that causes him to try to find her again, along with other objects of love, first in the imagination, then in words.” Pergolesi, the composer, at the critical moment of his dying, turns in his Stabat Mater to a paradigmatic representation of maternal love: Mary, defying her son's death, the masculine corpse, through love, prompts the outburst, “‘Eia Mater, fons amoris!’ （‘Hail mother, source of love!’）” （1987b, 252）. Pergolesi returns to the lost mother, “the primal shelter that insured the survival of the newborn,” and so “overcomes the unthinkable of death by postulating maternal love in its place—in the place and stead of death and thought” （252）. And Kristeva recalls the same “lost territory” （234）, the primal mother, in her essay “Stabat Mater,” where she takes as her subject Christianity's fantasy of Mary, “doubtless the most refined symbolic construct” （234） through which primary narcissism has been idealized.

The idealization involves less the representation of an archaic mother than “the idealization of the relationship that binds us to her,” Kristeva suggests （1987b, 234）. She takes this relationship as the actual “subject” of her “Stabat Mater,” not however, simply to talk about “it,” to reify primary narcissism as the object of a theoretical discourse, but to enact the idealization's “analysis” （division, dissolution） of the writing subject. As a staging of this narcissistic drama, Kristeva's writing in the essay oscillates between the symbolic re-presentation of primary narcissism and the semiotic processes that are supplementary to the idealization and that expose it for the fantasy it is. In writing the essay, Kristeva says, she wanted to position her self in process/on trial between the semiotic and symbolic: “I wanted to give an image of this contradiction which is on the one hand a description of the universal and the individual, and on the other hand, the involvement of the author … I didn't want to give an impression of coherence, on the contrary I wanted to give an impression of a sort of wound, a scar” （Kristeva 1984a, 24）.

The essay is not coherent. For one thing, it is both a “theoretical or academic discourse … a knowing discourse, a discourse which pretends to some objectivity,” and “a sort of literary poetic text” （Kristeva 1984a, 24）. While the theoretical discourse, the analysis and overview of the historical cult of Mary, dominates the main text, which is placed on the right side of the essay, theory is by no means confined there, but surfaces also in the boldface inserts that interrupt the main text and are printed on the left side of the essay. Thus the typographic fragmentation of the essay does not mark a clear division between the “theoretical” and the “literary” （can such a separation be made?）. Even less does the right side correspond to the rational and paternal symbolic, while “the left-hand column, heavily inked and broken into short sections, lyrically invokes the pre-cultural maternal body” （Jones 1985, 95）. The essay does not simply bifurcate along the line of a binary, left/right, semiotic/symbolic, before/after, female/male fold. To say that it does, that, for instance, Kristeva identifies the semiotic with “femininity,” placed “outside” （to the side of） the patriarchal symbolic, and that “Stabat Mater” thus proclaims a biological essentialism （a conservative apology for motherhood, an exclusion of women from the realm of power）, is to miss the ambivalence of Kristeva's signifying subject, its undecidable process between semiotic and symbolic, which is also the undecidability of a （sexual） identity.⁸ Both the right and the left sides of the essay are always both semiotic and symbolic, both representation and unrepresentability.⁹

Hence the ambivalence of the semiotic chora in “Stabat Mater”: it is “readable” on both sides of the essay and on the levels of both signified and signifier; it is “readable” both as representation, as an idealization of primary narcissism, and as unrepresentable unconscious operations that work within representation to disturb its coherence. As an idealization of the relationship to the primal mother, the chora represents the dreamed recovery of an intra-uterine, neonatal bond with the mother （“recovered childhood, dreamed peace restored” [247]）, whose sheltering love focuses adoringly on the sleeping （male） child, his “forehead, eyebrows, nostrils, cheeks, parted features of the mouth, delicate, hard, pointed chin. Without fold or shadow, neither being nor unborn, neither present nor absent, but real, real inaccessible innocence, engaging weight and seraphic lightness” （247-48）. This idealization of primary narcissism is assimilated by Christianity's Mary, whose virginity, immaculate conception, and assumption into heaven as Queen, gather together “the attributes of the desired woman and of the holy mother” （245） to produce an “incredible construct” （256） of maternal love, centered on the son, beholden to the husband and father （243）. To the consternation of several of her critics, Kristeva represents the fantasy of primary narcissism by folding autobiographical reflections on her own role as phallic mother, reminiscences drawn both from her mothering and from her practice as an analyst, into the historical myth. This is not an exercise in re-membering intended to promote a return to the primeval mother. It is, rather, a procedure of anamnesis （240）, a technique of working through （back-and-forth, between the two columns） Western culture's representation of woman as bound up with a centuries-old narcissistic fixation, a fantasy of originary wholeness which, when posited also as telos, serves as a defense against loss and death.

To expose the fantasy as such is, in part, to introduce a division that is incongruent with the supposed unity of the originary mother-child bond, a “continuous separation,” an “abyss between the mother and the child” （Kristeva 1987b, 254） that is “always already” there in both biology and memory. And the division is “always already” there in the subject of signification, which means that the mythical “territory” is “lost” because it does not, and cannot, exist: for the subject in language, there is no safe place or space, no “extra-symbolic” haven, before or outside the law.¹⁰ Thus the semiotic chora is neither ultimately representable nor localizable, and is “knowable” only as an aftereffect of the genotext, a remainder, a “heterogeneity that cannot be subsumed in the signifier,” and that fractures the narcissistic myth, “extract[ing] woman out of her oneness” （259）. Intonation and rhythm are two markers of this semiotic heterogeneity in “Stabat Mater.” For instance, both columns juxtapose regular sentences with unpunctuated fragments, as well as with sentences “punctuated” so as to introduce semantic and syntactical anomalies: abrupt halts or musicating ambiguities. Intonation and rhythm also work through repetition of phonemes and networks of alliteration （signifying differentials） which, to use Kristeva's words, “establish trans-sentence paths that are superimposed over the linear sequences of clauses and introduce into the logical-syntactical memory of the text a phonic-instinctual memory. They set up associative chains that crisscross the text from beginning to end” （1980a, 169）, and we might say, from column to column, in a procedure of anamnesis which is a passing through and beyond the sign, a spatializing of the textual network. Where intonation and rhythm work by means of the falling/failing of pronouns （the shifting and ambiguous “I”: Kristeva's voice inseparable from Mary's voice, the maternal voice from the voice of infancy, the voice/identity of the poet from that of academic）, signification is destabilized, as is the identity of the sender and receiver.

In all of these cases, the intonational breakthrough is a going-through to the “polylogical body” （Kristeva 1980a, 186）. This is not a phonocentric endeavor, for given that the mark which the genotext leaves in the phenotext is an “illegible seal” that has to be read （Kristeva 1969, 285）, “the eye cannot be excluded by the ear” （Kristeva 1980a, 180） from detecting the heterogeneity in language. For instance, Kristeva's play on the word “perversion” in “Stabat Mater” （in 1987b, 260） must be seen in order to be “heard” as a distortion of the verse au père. Procreation （the mother's pregnancy, childbirth）, as jubilatory “outpouring,” is “feminine perversion” as père-version, she says, as a culturally coded buttress of the father's law and of the repression of body-woman. Contrary to this paternal law, to the father's “proper” name, and distorting of his image in the mirror, “Stabat Mater” practices another kind of perversion: it allows the semiotic chora, figure of the perverse, to insinuate itself into the essay. It is this contamination of primary narcissism by the unconscious that makes “Stabat Mater” an incestuous text. It is a “strange incest” （Kristeva 1980a, 192）, however, where what is being swallowed is an idealization: the phallic mother, destructured-dissolved by traces of the unconscious which are enfolded in the surface text.

A “strange fold” （1987b, 259）. The uncanniness of “Stabat Mater” is not the Unheimliche, the phobic affect, abject, the terrified loathing associated with the body of the pregnant woman and reproduced by feminists who recoil from the essay because they read it as appealing to this familiar body.¹¹ For the body which grafts itself as other within this essay cannot be represented. It is the encounter with this unrepresentable other, this unsaid, Kristeva suggests, which produces the feeling of uncanny strangeness. The Unheimliche “is a destructuration of the self” which results from “a new encounter with an unexpected outside element;” it is “a crumbling of conscious defenses, resulting from the conflicts the self experiences with an other—the ‘strange’—with whom it maintains a conflictual bond” （Kristeva 1991, 188）. The unconscious, the unheimlish place, at once alien and immanent within representation, “our disturbing otherness … that threat, that apprehension generated by the projective apparition of the other at the heart of what we persist in maintaining as a proper, solid ‘us’” （192）, puts “Stabat Mater” into what Jean-François Lyotard calls an economy of deferral.¹² Disposed to go counter to what is proper, to turn the wrong way, change direction, go awry, the essay weaves together both symbolic and semiotic, and so fails to fix an either/or identity for its self.

“WHAT CAN BE OUR PLACE IN THE SYMBOLIC CONTRACT?”

Kristeva associates deferral, “‘that's not it’ and ‘that's still not it’,” with what she calls “a feminist practice,” where the word practice points to scription and thus to “something that cannot be represented, something that is not said, something above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies” （Kristeva 1981a, 137）. In “Stabat Mater,” she links the question of writing after, “after the Virgin” （1987b, 262）, to such a feminist practice, “an heretical ethics, an herethics” （263）, a contemporary ethics “no longer seen as being the same as morality” （262）. Such an ethics, she says, would not avoid “the embarrassing and inevitable problematics of the law,” but rather would seek to give the law “flesh, language, jouissance” （262）; it would be a kind of “WORD FLESH” （235）, situated on the thetic boundary where “speech causes biology to show through” （263）. Writing after would position its self on the border of the semiotic and symbolic, on the place of the wound or the scar,¹³ at the site of, and as the experience of, the limit, and for the purpose of “testing the limits of language and sociality” （1981a, 138）.

Kristeva suggests in “Women's Time” （1981c, 27） that not avoiding the problematic of the law means not exiling women to a foreign land outside patriarchal society, “an a-topia, a place outside the law.” Certain forms of feminism, she says, “revive a kind of naive romanticism” （1981a, 138） in which the belief in an essential female identity goes hand in hand with the utopian dream of a distinct place for women, a countersociety based on the qualitative difference of women from men, and “imagined as harmonious, without prohibitions, free and fulfilling” （1981c, 27）. This dream of a separatist space is also the dream of a female time outside the linear temporality of patriarchal history: for instance, a re-membering of the cyclical body/time of the pre-patriarchal primeval goddess. Such “romantic” and essentialist feminisms are problematic for Kristeva, not only because they posit an unrealizable telos but also because they reinstate a binary order of difference:

As with any society, the countersociety is based on the expulsion of an excluded element, a scapegoat charged with the evil of which the community duly constituted can then purge itself; a purge which will finally exonerate that community of any future criticism. Modern protest movements have often reiterated this logic, locating the guilty one—in order to fend off criticism—in the foreign, in capital alone, in the other religion, in the other sex. Does not feminism become a kind of inverted sexism when this logic is followed to its conclusion? （Kristeva 1981c, 27）

No less problematic, for Kristeva, than this “romantic” avoidance of the law, is the feminist capitulation to it. She aligns a “second generation” of feminisms with such capitulation, as when women attempt to enter the discourse of ethics by assuming the seventeenth-century ideal of homo rationalis, by constructing themselves as “reducible one to the other” （Kristeva 1981c, 20） as Lockean persons. As a “logic of identification” （19） with the ontology and morality of the patriarchal system, its conscious subject and his proprietary rights, these feminisms strive to gain a space for women in linear time. These feminisms claim equality for women as full partakers of the social contract, but in so doing, Kristeva maintains, they also assume that contract's binary model of sexual difference. Kristeva is not here opposing the many goals which the women's movement can and must achieve, “freedom of abortion and contraception, day-care centers for children, equality on the job, etc.” （1981a, 137）. But she is arguing against conformist identification with patriarchal power structures, including the prevailing structure of the social contract. For rather than proceeding as a social contract among equals, even equal men, this structure, in all of its forms, bases itself on a violent and “essentially sacrificial relationship of separation and articulation of differences” （1981c, 23）.

Kristeva suggests that for a third “generation” of feminists, feminists who advocate neither the identification with power nor the constitution of a fetishist counterpower, “the sociosymbolic contract as a sacrificial contract” （1981c, 25） has become a major concern. Recognizing that no signification, no meaningful communication, is possible without separation and positing of differences, these feminists do not promote rejection of the patriarchal symbolic in favor of a harmonious before or outside. But neither do they accept modernity's order of identity and difference as an ontological given. “Without refusing or sidestepping” the logic of separation and syntactical sequence on which language and the social contract are founded, these feminists attempt “to explore the constitution and functioning of the contract” and in particular “to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnameable repressed by the social contract” （24-25）.

“Anthropology has shown that the social order is sacrificial,” Kristeva says （1981c, 29）; but it has also shown that “sacrifice orders violence, binds it, tames it.” She uses the term “religion” to apply to such ordering, such taming, of the sacrificial violence, the violent separation of sameness from difference, that is constitutive of subjectivity and the social contract: “I call ‘religion’ this phantasmic necessity on the part of speaking beings to provide themselves with a representation （animal, female, male, parental, etc.） in place of what constitutes them as such, in other words, symbolization—the double articulation and syntactic sequence of language, as well as its preconditions or substitutes （thoughts, affects, etc.）” （32）. Notwithstanding the affinity which, she says, both separationist and conformist feminists have with such “religion,” Kristeva situates the women's movement “within the very framework of the religious crisis of our civilization” （32）. Rituals and representations of sacrifice, such as the myth of the primal mother, no longer serve to satisfy the fear and anguish associated with symbolic violence. Herein lies the importance for Kristeva of the work of what she calls third “generation” feminists, where “the word ‘generation’ implies less a chronology than a signifying space” （33）: what these writers attempt to explore is the ambivalent space of the signifying bond itself, the “interior” space of “the founding separation of the sociosymbolic contract” （34） where meaning and subjectivity are constructed. This work replaces the “attempt to fabricate a scapegoat victim as foundress of a society or a countersociety … by the analysis of the potentialities of victim/executioner which characterize each identity, each subject, each sex” （34）.

Such work is ethical, Kristeva says. It undertakes its task in order to emphasize responsibility, the responsibility which each of us has to put “fluidity into play against the threats of death which are unavoidable whenever an inside and an outside, a self and an other, one group and an other, are constituted” （1981c, 35）. But although ethical, such work is a perversion, a contamination, of the dominant morality, and in part for this reason, it is undertaken today by what are usually called aesthetic practices （34-35）. The question of “postmodernism,” for Kristeva, and she does pose postmodernism as a question, as a question of writing after, is the inquiry, the exploration, of the ethical, so understood. Like the term generation, “postmodernism” for her, implies less a chronology than a signifying space: it “attempts to expand the limits of the signifiable” （Kristeva 1980b, 137）. Its concern “extends deep within the constituent mechanisms of human experience as an experience of meaning; it extends as far as the very obscure and primary narcissism wherein the subject constitutes itself in order to oppose itself to another” （137-38）. At this level of “interiorization” （a term which, I am suggesting, does not connote modernity's surface/depth model of the text, but the text's surface-spatialization as a network）, and at the threshold where subjectivity is constructed through the demarcation and separation of an other, the “borderline writing” （139） of postmodernism—or of what Kristeva would call third-generation postmodern feminism—attempts to shift the boundaries, the limits, of the subject's enclosure.

For Kristeva, there is melancholy implied in this postmodern feminist “writing-as-experience-of-limits” （1980b, 139）, undertaken in a time of crisis and, as she puts it, “in such an unprotected manner” （141）, that is, without the refuge of religious representations, and so without the defense of an idealized life-giving mother. But the melancholy of this ethical practice is not, for her, the miserable sadness that Holbein sees in the silent, stone-cold cadaver of Christ. It is not the melancholy that results from the modern subject's reification and repression of the body as dead, and as a threat to be abjected. “The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection,” Kristeva says （1982, 4）, but in postmodern feminist （poetic, psychoanalytic, aesthetic） practices, the body comes back to life. For the heterogeneity of the postmodern text, she says, is the heterogeneity of the signifying body, released （“resurrected”?） from its murderous Cartesian enclosure. At the same time, however, if postmodern feminist practices bring the body to life, they do so by putting the unified subject to death: the unified self perishes （L. cadaver, f. cado, cadere, to fall, fall down, fall dead, decay, perish; a dead man's remains）, “literally ‘falls into pieces’” （1989a, 18）¹⁴ in what Kristeva calls the practice of the “text.”

Not the disjunction of either life or death then, but an ambivalence between the two: as representation, l'écriture limite is caught up necessarily in symbolic violence and the threat of death. But as the interminable upheaval/crisis of the signifying subject, it opens to death's unrepresentability: the unrepresentable as index of the death drive, “the ultimate imprint of the death drive,” working as the “nonrepresentative spacing of representation” and so as the dissolution of the transcendental self （1989a, 27）. Etymologically, Kristeva points out, analysis means dissolution: to unbind, dissolve, cut, divide, dislocate, lose （Kristeva 1987a, 7）. Psychoanalysis does not liberate us into self-completion and wholeness, she says. Its “ethical” task, instead, is to record, to dramatize, the crisis of the unified self.

Notes

1. This essay, revised from Posts: Re-Addressing the Ethical by Dawne McCance, is printed here with permission of the State University of New York Press. Copyright 1996.

2. The technical language of this early essay serves perhaps as a reminder that the young literary critic, newly arrived in France, had at one time wanted to go to Duobno in Siberia to become an astronomer or a physicist. Kristeva speaks of her interest in becoming a scientist in “Julia Kristeva: á quoi servent les intellectuels?” （1977a）, an interview with Jean-Paul Enthoven, where she also responds to the charge that her writing is so difficult as to be inaccessible or elitist. “I do not think that in our societies, an intellectual's ultimate vocation is to create a social accord based on clarity, transparency and simplification,” she says. “There are organizations and devices for that. On the contrary, it seems to me that if an intellectual has a reason to exist, it is in the single measure where he affirms and propagates a difference” （my translation）.

3. See Tales of Love here, especially “God is Love,” where Kristeva considers the way in which the Christian understanding of love facilitates the construction of subject identity, how it “favors my leap into the Name of the Father” （Kristeva 1987b, 144）. Significantly, in Christianity, as distinct from Judaism, love requires the death of the body, she says, the killing of the believer's body as condition for identification with the divine ideal. In Christianity, “love is the experience of becoming homologous” but there is no idealizing identification, no setting up of the believer as the subject of the Other, without the death of the lustful body: “The killing of the body is the path through which the body-Self has access to the Name of the Other who loves me and makes of me a Subject who is immersed （baptized） in the Name of the Other” （146）.

4. Kristeva's status as an “exile” has been both romanticized and overlooked. As an example of the former, see the remarks with which Jean-Paul Enthoven opens “Julia Kristeva: á quoi servent les intellectuels?” （Kristeva 1977a）: “First, there is her voice: serious, but with a Bulgarian accent that gives her students from Paris-VII the impression that they are not listening to a professor but to one of those actresses exiled from l'entre-deux-guerres. A delicacy, almost Chinese, with an insane, seductive smile. Her age: at least thirty-five. Finally, her name, that for her alone could have made for this recent emigrant from Eastern Europe a type of secret counselor for melancholic intellectuals” （my translation）. On the other hand, her status as an exile is overlooked by those who deal with her and her writing as, simply, “French,” and as exemplifying “French feminism,” or “French post-structuralism,” or the “post-modernism” of “the French.”

5. The writing subject, Kristeva says, is “a pulverized and shattered being. The individual, insofar as he is a speaking being, witnesses a permanent radical crisis, he is much less an entity—as one would believe through etymology than a contradictory constellation” （Kristeva 1977a, 98, my translation）.

6. As Toril Moi's （1985） title, Sexual/Textual Politics, suggests, the North American women's movement has tended to organize itself as a revolutionary sexual politics, whereas for a “French” feminist philosopher such as Kristeva, social revolution constitutes a revolutionary practice of writing, a textual politics. While much has been written on the divisions that separate Anglo-American and French feminisms, the situation has, I think, changed in recent years with what Kelly Oliver calls the increasing “importation” of the work of such writers as Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. See Oliver's Reading Kristeva （1993, Chap. 7）, for a recent discussion of the problem of “translating” “French” feminisms into the North American context, and also for a consideration of the ambiguous relationships of “textual” feminists （Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray） to the women's movement in France.

7. “I seized upon Saussure's Anagrammes, parts of which Jakobson and Starobinski had published. From this starting point, I tried to establish a ‘paragrammatical’ conception of the literary text as a distortion of signs and their structures that produces an infinitesimal overdetermination of meaning in literature” （Kristeva 1984c, 225）.

8. “In the case of poetic language,” Kelly Oliver writes, “symbolic identity is full of difference and yet maintains its integrity as language. Here the heterogeneity in language is at its most apparent. Poetic language is language that is also not language, language that is other to itself” （Oliver 1993, 182）.

9. In “Stabat Mater,” Kristeva “assumes and glorifies, as only a Christian can, Freud's version of the traditional （modern） view of femininity as motherhood,” Teresa de Lauretis maintains （1989, 269）. Kristeva's positioning of women in an “extra-Symbolic” place “reinforces a long-term, mainstream tendency in Western thought to exclude women, along with madmen and slaves, from cultural centrality; she stays within the Symbolic by affirming the gender logic that locates women outside it,” says Ann Rosalind Jones （1984, 62）.

10. I disagree, then, with Kaja Silverman's reading of the left-hand column as approximating the maternal enceinte or chora. During the course of “Stabat Mater,” Silverman says, this column “moves increasingly in the direction of grammatical propriety and subject-predication. It also enacts a drift toward theory, coming more and more to resemble its symbolic counterpart” （Silverman 1988, 114）. My argument is that, according to Kristeva's theory of the subject-in-process, the symbolic and semiotic are always, inseparably and simultaneously, in play in both columns. My reading of “Stabat Mater” also takes issue with Silverman's contention that in the essay Kristeva is “celebrating” （114） the mother's relationship to a male child. I am suggesting that Kristeva's essay dramatizes the patriarchal fantasy of the mother, including the fantasy of motherhood as the desire to bear the father's male child.

11. Like Lacan, Kristeva suggests that fragmentation or division belongs to the child's “prehistory,” and therefore that the chora （a term she uses to suggest a space or place “anterior” to language） does not imply an original unity, an idyllic and harmonious beginning outside of the Father's binary law. For this reason, the “before” of the chora, like that of Lacan's mirror stage, cannot simply be read into the before/after logic of a developmental history or a diachronic system of language. See Samuel Weber （1991）. Weber suggests that the “future anteriority” of the Lacanian mirror stage is incompatible with the before-after linearity of patriarchal time. As I suggest in the conclusion to this essay, Kristeva would relate “Women's Time,” a time other than patriarchal diachrony, to the “spatialization” of the subject in poetic speaking or writing, so that the women's movement, for her, if is it to be truly revolutionary, must address the issues of both space and time. It must problematize the time of modernity, which, we might say, is the time of history, “time as project, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival” （Kristeva 1981c, 17）. This time gives the order of language, “considered as the enunciation of sentences （noun + verb; topic-comment; beginning-ending）” （17）. And, as Francis Bacon put it in his Temporus partus masculus （The Masculine Birth of Time）, the linear succession of language coincides with the order of nature itself, from which in turn derive “the enlightened predictability of the world” and the task of putting into proper order as “the shape of the history to come” （Reiss 1982, 221）. Kristeva associates the monological （patriarchal） subject with this diachronic order（ing） and time.

12. Abjection is different from “uncanniness” and more violent too, Kristeva says in Powers of Horror （1982, 5）, for abjection—the jettisoning, the radical exclusion-explusion of what is separate, other, not me, threatening to the I's identity, threatening to system and order, and so loathsome （2-4）—“is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin.” In abjection, she says, “nothing is familiar” （5）. And yet, she also says that abjection confronts us “with our earliest attempts to release the hold of the maternal entity” such that, under the law of the father, the mother “will turn into an abject,” and abjection itself will become “a precondition of narcissism” （13）. In the sections of Powers of Horror which examine the place of the mother in Céline's fiction, Kristeva explores further this relation between abjection and primary narcissism, and especially between abjection and the body of the birth-giving woman.

13. Ethics, after modernity's master narratives, begins in search of its rules, Lyotard says: in search of rules for writing which is open （passible） to forgotten difference, to what he calls le différend. What is it to write （paint, speak, etc.） in openness to difference or heterogeneity, so that “the self is essentially passible to a recurrent alterity”? （Lyotard 1991, 59）. The after signifies not a chronological or sequential post, but postponement, writing as self-deferral （différer）. See note 9 above.

14. Kristeva's references to the wound or scar suggest not only the physical, birth-giving rupture but also, more obliquely and thus perhaps more significantly, both the splitting or “tearing” of the subject at the thetic boundary, and the scar of the trauma and triumph of “battle with the Phallic Mother” （Kristeva 1980a, 193）.

15. Lyotard uses the word cadere in Heidegger and “the jews” （Lyotard 1990, 17）, and like Kristeva, in a discussion of the fear and violence that are bound up with writing, and of the need, therefore, to “give space” to the subject.

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