[In the following essay, Ziarek “situates Kristeva's theory of semiotics in the context of the controversial debate about the status of the maternal body in her work,” and associates her linguistic theory with “the alerity of the maternal body.”]

I.

The intense debate around Kristeva's work among many feminist theorists indicates that her thought generates questions of central importance to any feminist project devoted to revision of culture and discourse. One of the most controversial among those issues that Kristeva's theory incessantly confronts and submits “to an interminable analysis” is the role of the maternal in the production of discourse. As she herself claims, it is not only a theoretical enterprise but also a matter of ethics and, I would claim, of politics as well. No wonder then that the explicit relation between discourse and the maternal body constitutes at once the most promising and the most problematic aspect of her work.¹ On the one hand, her theory of semiotics opens a specifically feminine point of resistance to the phallocentric models of culture. On the other hand, because the semiotic is associated with the prediscursive libidinal economy, the grounds and the effectiveness of that resistance appear problematic at the very least.

This controversy is reproduced in numerous interpretations of Kristeva, which I am schematically organizing here into two groups. The first one—for instance, Toril Moi （1985, 150-67）, Jane Gallop （1982, 113-31）, Carolyn Burke （1987, 107-114）, Mary Jacobus （1986, 169）, and Susan Rubin Suleiman （1985, 366-71）—emphasizes different aspects of subversion in Kristeva's work. The second—Kaja Silverman （1988, 101-40）, Ann Rosalind Jones （1984）, Jacqueline Rose （1986, 151-57）, Eleanor Kuykendall （1989, 180-95）, Elizabeth Grosz （1989, 97）, and Judith Butler （1990, 89-91）²—responds that such resistance rests on a problematic relation between the maternal and culture and in fact works to exclude the feminine subject from the symbolic. More specifically, the questions generated in response to Kristeva's reliance on the prediscursive maternal economy have concerned the source of subversion, the political efficacy of her theory, the position of the female subject, and the issue of female agency. Does Kristeva, in spite of her intentions, blindly repeat the traditional cultural gesture that relegates women to a precultural, prediscursive position? Can her maternal source of resistance lead to any significant transformation of cultural paradigms? Does it empower the female speaker? Can it address the issue of female agency? And finally, does her elaboration of the maternal outside the symbolic order boil down to a crude version of essentialism, if not a mute biologism?

In order to advance the existing debate, it is more productive at this point to examine how Kristeva challenges the very distinctions between the prediscursive and the discursive, the precultural and the cultural, and to what degree her conceptual revision is effective. Kristeva's writings make it clear that these distinctions are not neutral or self-evident but are implicated in operations of exclusion, power, and control over the production and interpretation of discourse.³ In other words, not only is the division between the linguistic and nonlinguistic shifting and open to revision, but also the decision about what aspects of signification fall on one or the other side of this divide is culturally produced and rests on gender presuppositions. As Kristeva constantly reminds her readers, linguistic analyses are not free from ethical and political decisions, especially when they refer to the role of the maternal in the production of discourse. In this context, I am particularly interested in the following issues: Why have the particular features of signification, coded as maternal, been relegated to the prediscursive position? How can we read this prediscursive in the larger context of Kristeva's theory of signification? Why does Kristeva need this prediscursive economy in order to arrive at a completely different understanding of what counts as discursive in cultural practices? Is it possible to comprehend the “prediscursive chora” as an attempt to disclose a signifying economy （the trace, the rhythm） prior to the logic of the sign predicated on the separation and discontinuity between subject and object, signifier and signified? And if so, how does Kristeva negotiate the passage between this signifying economy and the maternal body?

Beginning with Revolution in Poetic Language （1984）, Kristeva has insistently stressed the task of rethinking the maternal body as inseparable from the rethinking of language. In that first work, Kristeva opens her analysis of semiotics with avant-garde literature, as if to suggest that a different language lesson, provided by poetry rather than structuralist linguistics, is in order before one can refigure the cultural significance of the maternal body. Because poetry can perform “one of the most spectacular shatterings of discourse” and remain a linguistic practice nonetheless, it reveals for Kristeva “the limits of socially useful discourse and attests to what it represses: the process that exceeds the subject and his communicative structures” （Kristeva 1984, 16）. By exploding the ideological constraints of the subject and discourse, poetic practice can disclose “the limits of formalist and psychoanalytic” approaches to language and bring into the open the signifying process that they exclude. And yet poetic practice is not revolutionary in and of itself. Kristeva asks a larger question: under what historical circumstances could this poetic process correspond to socioeconomic change, and under what conditions is it neutralized as a harmless “esoterism” and “aestheticism”? This approach to the maternal body, via poetry on the one hand and a larger socioeconomic analysis of the capitalist modes of production on the other, warns Kristeva's readers from the outset against the hasty conclusion that the attempt to think the maternal is a plunge into a mute biology, or a mere mystification of the prelinguistic unity between the mother and the child. Rather, I would argue, Kristeva's parallel discussions of poetry and body suggest a displacement of natural primacy by a strategic redistribution of positions, a departure from natural origins. It implies from the outset that the question of the mother will be bound up with the task of the redefinition of language as a social practice rather than being simply an escape into a prelinguistic fantasy of the maternal paradise.

I would like, then, to repeat Kristeva's detour and focus on her theory of semiotics in order to underscore its two problematic aspects—the heterogeneous and the prediscursive—which have not been sufficiently addressed in the numerous interpretations of her work. First of all, Kristeva's insistence on heterogeneity should be taken in a double sense: not only as the infolding of body and language but also as the infolding of the two signifying economies. Kristeva attempts to think the processes of signification that are not reducible to semantics, symbolization, and the bipolar structure of the sign. By uncovering “disquieting” and heterogeneous elements of signification in a variety of disciplines （especially in linguistics, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology）, Kristeva is concerned with the forms of otherness and multiplicity excluded by unifying orders of discourse. In this context, the thought of “irreducible” heterogeneity does not intend to ground language and culture in “a natural and pre-paternal causality” （Butler 1990, 89-91）; rather, it anticipates a different understanding of language that takes into account interweaving of heterogeneous elements. In Kristeva's own words, such irreducible heterogeneity “goes by various names according to the conceptual framework of the theory that posits it and the level of its operations. But the name always designates something irreducible, a disquieting heterogeneousness, outside the transcendental enclosure within which we are otherwise constrained by phenomenology and its relative, linguistics” （Kristeva 1983, 40-41, italics added）.⁴ Moreover, Kristeva's analysis of the traces of heterogeneity in the linguistic and psychic economy breaks away from the phenomenological constraints of both linguistics and subjectivity—that is, from the view of entities as clearly separated, distinct, and self-contained.⁵

Now I would like to turn to the second troublesome aspect of Kristeva's theory—the so-called move beyond language. For many feminist critics, Kristeva's association of the maternal with the prelinguistic moment evokes the most oppressive hierarchies of phallocentrism （the maternal body belongs to nature, the paternal law to culture）—hence the justified responses of caution, if not straightforward resistance, to that part of Kristeva's theory. Yet, if we situate Kristeva's analysis of “the maternal territory” in the larger context of poststructuralism, then her emphasis on the prediscursive is strategic: it indicates both the limitations of structuralist linguistics and the need to rethink the process of signification.

The thought of heterogeneity leads Kristeva to supplement the tradition of structuralist semiotics （which perceives language as a sign system） with the analysis of “what falls outside the system and characterizes the specificity of the practice as such” （Kristeva 1986b, 26）. Her investigations in Revolution in Poetic Language and in her later work Desire in Language analyze what traditional linguistics excludes—“a crisis or the unsettling process of meaning” within the signifying phenomena. Kristeva passionately advocates a new linguistics （and later a new psychoanalysis） that would not only classify the signifying phenomena but would also embrace within them moments of multiplicity, disruption, and undecidability. To carry out such analysis, she proposes to turn from the theory of language as a universal sign system to language as a “signifying process” in order to underscore both systematicity and transgression in every signifying practice, which she calls symbolic and semiotic disposition, respectively. Kristeva's signifying process defies the fundamental Saussurian distinction between langue （language as a collective sign system） and parole （its individual usage） because each signifying practice is not merely a manifestation of a general code but results from the dialectic between the systematicity of signs and the transgression of drives. Therefore, only on the level of the specificity of signifying practices （which are invariably both more and less than underlying code） can we observe the traces of heterogeneity and transgression （Kristeva 1986b, 31）. Kristeva's understanding of signification implies also a different understanding of culture, no longer conceptualized in terms of a general symbolic system but in terms of the specificity and multiplicity of signifying practices. Such decentering of the semantic/cultural field offers the most promising political implications （although not always explicitly elaborated by Kristeva） of her work.⁶

This turn from the theory of language as a sign system to the specificity of the signifying practices is not only advocated by Kristeva but also produced by her revision of the signifying process. Kristeva refers the symbolic level of language—that is, the dimension of sign, syntax, and, in Lacanian terminology, the realm of the paternal law—to the presymbolic economy of the drives, characterizing the complex exchanges between the mother and the child prior to individuation of the subject and object. Borrowing the term from Plato's Timaeus, Kristeva calls this heterogeneous and defused field of drives the semiotic maternal “chora” （the Greek word for space, place, locality）.⁷ Contrary to some interpretations of the chora as a return to essentialism and biologism, the chora is a cultural phenomenon because it consists of the cultural forming and ordering of the drives: “they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body—always already involved in a semiotic process—by family and social structures” （Kristeva 1984, 25）. Kristeva stresses on numerous occasions that what is at stake here is the structure and the economy of the drives and not the mere presence of the biological body: “The position of the semiotic as heterogeneous does not derive from a desire to integrate, within a language …, a supposed concreteness, a raw corporeality, or an immanent energy” （Kristeva 1983, 36）. More akin to rhythm and mobile traces than structure, it describes regulated movements and their “ephemeral” stasis, moments of gathering and irruptions, which lead to no identity, no body proper.

When Kristeva characterizes the specificity of the semiotic and the symbolic from the perspective of the genealogy of the subject, she points out that the choric rhythm of accumulation and dissolution is sublated at the moment of language acquisition into a thetic stage—that is, the stage of the bipolar division of the signified and the signifier and the formation of syntax. In order to describe the transformation of the semiotic into the symbolic, Kristeva deploys the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung, which has a double meaning of “negation” and “conservation.” Yet these references to Hegel underscore not only the fact that the symbolic is produced by a dialectical operation but also that this operation fails to subsume entirely the semiotic heterogeneity: no “signifier can effect the Aufhebung of the semiotic without leaving the remainder” （Kristeva 1984, 51）. Because of these residues—or traces—of the first symbolizations, the symbolic level of language is just a certain stage, constantly open to the irruption of heterogeneity into the unity of the signifier: “All poetic ‘distortions’ of the signifying chain … may be considered in this light: they yield under the attack of the ‘residues of the first symbolizations’ （Lacan）, in other words, those drives that the thetic phase was not able to sublate … by linking them into signifier and signified” （Kristeva 1984, 49）.⁸

This irruption characterizing the economy of the drives within the symbolic level of language constitutes the third pseudomoment or level in Kristeva's dialectic—that is, a postsymbolic level of every signifying practice but most visible in poetic language, which is characterized as “a ‘second-degree thetic’, i.e., a resumption of the functioning of the semiotic chora within the signifying device of language” （Kristeva 1984, 50）.⁹ In Kristeva's account, then, the semiotic is both a presymbolic and postsymbolic moment. Clearly, the second moment attracts Kristeva's attention because the articulation of the drives can become a practice, a text, only when it enters language, “appropriating and displacing signifier.” Moreover, Kristeva will claim that the semiotic that precedes symbolization is only a theoretical presupposition, a theoretical fiction if you will, “justified by the need of description”: “Only theory can isolate [the semiotic] as ‘preliminary’ in order to specify its functioning” （Kristeva 1984, 68）. In other words, theory does not describe a natural psychic development but produces this genealogical description: “Theory can ‘situate’ such processes and relations diachronically within the process of the constitution of the subject because they function synchronically within the signifying process of the subject himself, i.e., the subject of cogitatio” （Kristeva 1984, 29）. This is an extremely important point: here Kristeva postulates the theory of the chora in order to account for the moments of undecidability and transformation working always already within the subject and the culture itself （on the synchronic level）: “Language as social practice necessarily presupposes these two dispositions, though combined in different ways to constitute types of discourses, types of signifying structures” （Kristeva 1980, 134）. The chora, then, can be read as a theoretical construction （rather than a natural stage） enabling us to see and to explain the constant disruptions of the symbolic stability （that is supposed to be secured by the paternal law） not as mere accidents or lapses into psychosis but as the necessary and regulated effects of the process of signification.¹⁰

II.

Bearing in mind some of the conclusions of Kristeva's linguistic analysis, especially the fact that the semiotic is not just a simple return to the economy of the drives but the reinscription of the symbolic as such, let us turn to the other “site” of Kristeva's proceedings, the “site” of the maternal body. Such reinscription of the symbolic （the fact that the symbolic in the pure form does not exist） demands departure from the theory of language as a sign system to the analysis of the multiplicity and specificity of signifying practices. Otherwise, we will keep perpetuating the notion that Kristeva places the mother “beyond language” （i.e., beyond signification）.¹¹ Clearly, in Kristeva's theory both poetry and the semiotic process of the maternal body have the potential to disrupt language as a social code:

The speaker reaches this limit （of the symbolic） … only by virtue of a particular, discursive practice called “art.” A woman also attains it … through the strange form of split symbolization （threshold of language and instinctual drive, of the “symbolic” and the “semiotic”） of which the act of giving birth consists. （Kristeva 1980, 240-41; italics added）

We are encouraged to reconceptualize the maternal function as another instance of the infolding of the semiotic and the symbolic, as “a radical form of split symbolizations,” which unsettles the positioning of both consciousness and body and introduces, in Kristeva's terms, “wandering” or “fuzziness” in place of semantic/logical connectives （Kristeva 1980, 136）.

However, because it is very difficult to sustain this duplicity of/about the maternal body in her own discourse, Kristeva invariably produces in her interpreters signs of impatience and a desire to correct her texts, that is, to give one disposition—the semiotic or the symbolic—primacy over the other. Before suggesting my reading of the maternal body in Kristeva's texts, it would be useful to follow the course of one of the most compelling corrections offered by Kaja Silverman （1988, 101-40）. The trajectory of Silverman's reading proceeds from a refutation of the chora as a prelinguistic origin to its placement within the symbolic as the negative Oedipus complex. The hypothesis of the negative Oedipus complex also radically revises both Freud's and Lacan's accounts of femininity because it transfers the little girl's erotic investment in the mother from the prelinguistic, pre-Oedipal to the symbolic level of language and desire. In this way, the chora receives clear representational support and therefore can challenge the paternal law “from within representation and meaning” （Silverman 1988, 123-24）. If I nonetheless object to Silverman's interpretation, it is because I read the chora as already a signifying economy and because I claim that it is impossible to incorporate this maternal signification without deconstructing the symbolic order, which excludes semiotic signification in the first place. Moreover, I suspect that the inclusion of the maternal in the symbolic order compromises Kristeva's insistence on choric otherness: “it is imperative that we recognize the unconscious mother for who she is,” that we “situate the daughter's passion for the mother … firmly within the symbolic” （Silverman 1988, 125, 123; italics added）. The irony of this revision is indeed the “firm” assimilation of the choric to the thetic operation and a foreclosure of Kristeva's most radical discovery—that is, the heterogeneity of discourse.

In order to underscore the insufficiency of the symbolic construction as a tool for both linguistic and psychoanalytical analysis, Kristeva introduces the notion of the semiotic as a material yet nonphenomenological trace. Like Silverman, Kristeva claims that the semiotic does not exist apart from the symbolic, but she insists that its status within the symbolic should be described as a nonphenomenological trace. The fact that the semiotic never becomes a part of the symbolic, that it never enters the nexus of the signs but instead disrupts their order, does not mean that it is not linguistic. On the contrary, for Kristeva the semiotic is perhaps the most important linguistic force. Yet what is characteristic about the semiotic trace is that it cannot be turned into either an alternative origin or an independent symbolic position:

For to imagine the autonomy of the “trace,” the “pictogram,” or the “cryptogram” with respect to language's own thetic position, or to envisage some logical or chronological precedence to its impact, would be to give a helping—that is, a theoretical—hand to the maintenance of the notion of the maternal phallus. … Thus this semiotic mode has no primacy, no point of origin. When I hear it in echolalias … asyntactical and alogical constructions—in all of these divergences from codified discourse …—the semiotic chora appears within the signifying process as the trace of the jouissance. （Kristeva 1983, 36-38）

Kristeva demands that we read the semiotic chora neither as an alternative, more authentic origin （such an origin is indeed only a fantasy） nor as an alternative independent position within the symbolic, but as traces of alterity and heterogeneity operating within the linguistic and psychic economy.

Although articulated on the psycholinguistic rather than textual level, Kristeva's notion of the semiotic trace participates in a deconstruction of presence and the order of the sign similar to that of Derrida's trace. Like Kristeva, Derrida defines the trace as a mark of difference within every identity, a mark “retaining the other as other in the same” （Derrida 1974, 62; italics added）.¹² Kristeva finds Derrida's notion of the trace most promising in the project of deconstruction and acknowledges in “grammatology” a parallel attempt to think a signifying economy irreducible to the symbolic order and the concept of the sign. Through the notion of the trace Kristeva can find certain analogies—especially in the explorations of otherness, heterogeneity and the critique of logocentrism—between the semiotic and the grammatological: Derridean trace and writing “both can be thought of as metaphors for a movement that retreats before the thetic but, sheltered by it, unfolds only within the stases of the semiotic chora.” And, “we may posit that the force of writing [écriture] lies precisely in its return to the space-time previous to the phallic stage—indeed previous even to the identifying or mirror stage” （Kristeva 1984, 141, 143）. Such status of the semiotic does not imply that it is ineffective or futile, but, I suggest, it questions the fundamental metaphysical notions of presence, origin, identity, and the notion of the sign itself. By insisting on these analogies between Derrida and Kristeva, I do not want to foreclose some important differences between their positions. For instance, Kristeva repeatedly criticizes Derrida for failing to address the subjective and sociopolitical implications of his theory. Nonetheless, deconstruction remains an important, though often unmentioned, context for assessing the linguistic innovations of Kristeva's semiotics.

The event of motherhood and pregnancy represents for Kristeva another resumption of the semiotic chora within the symbolic figuration of the body. Although Kristeva's account of pregnancy complements her analysis of poetic language, it also provides a new critical perspective. Specifically, it allows Kristeva to develop the implications of the maternal trace in terms of alterity—that is, to discuss otherness prior to the constitution of both a separate ego and the subject/object dichotomy. And since Kristeva claims that the choric remains one of the permanent traces in the economy of subjectivity, she conceives of the subject constituted and re-marked by the maternal otherness, which enables our ethical orientation in the world. She claims that the event of pregnancy splits the subject and asserts otherness within the intimacy of the self, shattering the symbolic inscription of the body that constitutes it as “mine” and separate from the others.¹³ Kristeva's analysis of the maternal alterity is expressed most explicitly in “Stabat Mater,” which appeared first under the telling title “Héréthique de l'amour” （“Love's Heretical Ethics”） in Tel Quel （1977）. As Mary Jacobus suggests, Kristeva wants to rewrite here the Christian representation of motherhood （and by extension, the figurations of motherhood seen from the symbolic perspective） as an ethics of otherness, “emphasizing the difficult access to a radical Other demanded by maternity” （Jacobus 1986, 169）. The entire effort of Kristeva's writing is to initiate a different discourse on maternity, transgressing the limits of the symbolic logic of separation on the one hand and the mystifications of unity and resemblance on the other.

Such is “motherhood's impossible syllogism”: “Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on” （Kristeva 1980, 237）. What is peculiar in this description is the fact that the maternal body, the “site of splitting,” becomes a space of othering, resistant both to symbolic inscription and to the “presence” of the signifying subject. Unlike it is the case with the famous Lacanian model of the sign—two doors bearing the inscriptions of Ladies and Gentlemen, where the signifying space is a destination of sorts, different for a little boy and a little girl.¹⁴—no one can enter this maternal space, no one is there “to signify what is going on.” When Gallop reads that particular passage from Kristeva, she stresses the fact that it is impossible to occupy that maternal position, that any posture of speaking from that site is a “fraud.”¹⁵ Or rather, I should say that any attempt to transform the maternal body into a coherent signifying position is a fraud, precisely because it is a heterogeneous site, constantly doubling itself and separating itself from itself. The maternal body, then, becomes paradoxically a nonsite, an impurity and a distance encroaching on the positionality of the symbolic language.

If, for Lacan, the first construction of bodily identity occurs at the mirror stage—that is, at the moment when the child recognizes for the first time his or her mirror image and receives from it a false sense of stable identity—then Kristeva's understanding of the maternal role can be described （to borrow the phrase from the title of Rodolphe Gasché's book） as “the tain” of this mirror. The “tain” refers to the silver lining at the back of the mirror, which produces the specular stage of representation without itself appearing on it.¹⁶ However, since Lacan does not acknowledge the maternal function on that specular stage of the mirror representation, her trace is barely marked in his text by such peculiar understatements as the “human or artificial support” of the infant or “the obstructions of his support.” Curiously, Lacan would install on that stage a mechanical “trotte-bébé” rather than the figure of the mother （Lacan 1977, 1-2）. Although erased from the moment of theoretical and specular reflection,¹⁷ the maternal trace functions not only as a “support” of the infant but also as the silver lining of the mirror itself. However, at stake in Kristeva's theory is not only a gesture of acknowledgment of the maternal role in the construction of the subject, but also, and more important, a radical revision of the phenomenological model of reflection. The maternal trace clouds the “purity” of that reflection and questions the possibility of a separate unitary identity closed upon itself.

This double approach to the maternal body as a nonreflective “site” of radical othering （thought as “infold” rather than noncoincidence and separation） and as a “site” of symbolic inscription is most visible in “Stabat Mater.” Although the essay associates in a reductive way the feminist discussions of motherhood either with a rejection of motherhood as an institution or with an acceptance of its traditional representations, it does argue for a new, and a specifically feminist, understanding of the maternal. The difficult access to the radical discourse of maternity within the major symbolic articulations is dramatized by the form of the essay, split into two columns—one, an analytical account of the Christian vision of virginal maternity as a necessary complement to the Word; the other, a poetic description of pregnancy and birth. I read the “poetic” column neither as Kristeva's desire to appropriate the style of creative writing nor as universalization of her own experience of maternity, but rather as a stylistic device recalling the analyses of poetry in Revolution in Poetic Language. In short, the form of the essay represents Kristeva's methodology evident in all of her writings: it demonstrates that the space for an alternative feminist discourse on maternity can be cleared only after rigorous interrogation of the cultural representations of motherhood. As Carolyn Burke argues, the essay performs “both an examination of the conceptual and social limits imposed upon ‘motherhood’ in Western culture and a reimagining of that central relationship” （Burke 1987, 113）.¹⁸

According to Kristeva, the Christian construction of virginal maternity represents a curious compromise. On the one hand, Christianity explicitly supplements the internal coherence of the Word with the heterogeneity of the maternal body. Yet because of this dangerous addition, the heterogeneity of the maternal body is consistently neutralized, purified, and eventually homologized to the symbolic order of the Word. The development of the Marian cult, and especially the dogma of Immaculate Conception and Assumption, aims to foreclose the gap between the flesh and the Word: “the Virgin Mother occupied the tremendous territory hither and yon of the parenthesis of language. She adds to the Christian trinity and to the Word that delineates their coherence the heterogeneity they salvage” （Kristeva 1986a, 175）. This ordering of the maternal libido results in the powerful and soothing construction of the unique virginal maternal body that does not know sin, sex, or death.

In contrast to this religious discourse （but also in contrast to the dominant scientific and psychoanalytic discourses as well）, the poetic language might be better equipped to sustain painful and joyful “lucidity” about motherhood against the indolence of habit and consciousness:

A mother's identity is maintained only through the well-known closure of consciousness within the indolence of the habit, when a woman protects herself from the borderline that severs her body and expatriates it from her child. Lucidity, on the contrary, would restore her as cut in half, alien to its other—and a ground favorable to delirium. （Kristeva 1986a, 179）

Perhaps inseparable from this “closure of consciousness” or “indolence of habit,” the dominant cultural constructions of motherhood continuously skirt the traces of maternal jouissance, submit it to the stability of paternal law, and misconstruct the othering process as the maternal bond of the generality of the species.

How does this indolence of habit and consciousness restrict understanding of otherness that the experience of maternity demands? At the end of her essay, Kristeva seems to say that from the perspective of the symbolic order otherness can be read in only two ways. On the one hand, the articulation of otherness is determined by the topography of the sign with its gap between the signified and the signifier: “discontinuity, lack, and arbitrariness: topography of the sign, of the symbolic relation that posits my otherness as impossible” （Kristeva 1986a, 184）. Dictated by the structure of the sign, this thought of alterity is comprised under the rubric of separation and noncoincidence. In the symbolic order of language, the Other is inaccessible and unattainable. For Lacan, it leads to the “excentric” notion of the subject, split between the “the place I occupy as the subject of the signifier” and “the place I occupy as the subject of the signified” （Lacan 1977, 165）. Entirely subordinated to the theme of （decentered） identity, this thought of alterity functions as a reference point from which a separate subject position can be established. On the other hand, alterity is perceived as natural, as “resembling others and eventually the species.” Outside the field of language, otherness is neutralized in terms of resemblance.¹⁹

Yet, maternal lucidity rests on neither of these approaches and demands the articulation of otherness beyond the symbolic/natural opposition. It pursues the thought of otherness to a point where no “identity holds up”: “The child, whether he or she, is irremediably an other. … I confront the abyss between what was mine and is henceforth but irreparably alien. Trying to think through that abyss: staggering vertigo” （Kristeva 1986a, 179）. The vertigo of thought points to the impossibility of thinking the otherness of the child （and, consequently, the mother's “sameness”） in terms of relations; the alterity is neither inaccessible to me nor similar to me, but radically interrupts “my relation” to myself, to “my” body. Unlike the clear separation and noncoincidence between the signifier and the signified, the subject and the Other, the maternal body requires the thought of alterity in terms of infolding, as the imprint of the other within the same. As a site of infolding of the “other” and the “same,” the maternal body renders the fundamental notions of identity and difference strikingly insufficient—these crucial philosophical categories indeed no longer “hold up.” Therefore, such an inescapable imprint of otherness makes the maternal body impure, turns it into a “catastrophic fold of being.”

Such articulation of the maternal in terms of othering places Kristeva's thought in the tradition of heterology （from Platonic symploke as the interweaving of heterogeneous strands, to the contributions of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, and Derrida, to mention just a few thinkers directly discussed in her work）. In most general terms, heterology can be defined as a theory of the Other. This tradition represents various attempts of thinking otherness, which resists incorporation into the unifying orders of discourse but on which both thought and discourse depend for their possibility. What is at stake here is not only a departure from the homogeneous notions of thought and language （understood as a system/order） but also a different approach to otherness. As Rodolphe Gasché argues, heterological thinking articulates otherness prior to the principles of contradiction and negativity （which anticipates dialectical resolutions） and independently from the process of self-definition.²⁰ Rather, otherness is perceived as always already inhabiting every identity and interrupting every principle of thought. Likewise, Kristeva's refiguration of the maternal in terms of this radical alterity inevitably leads to a “catastrophe” of both the signifier and dialectics: “no signifier could uplift it without leaving a remainder;” she is “a catastrophe of being that the dialectics of the trinity and its supplements would be unable to subsume” （Kristeva 1986a, 182-183）. From this perspective, the maternal body is not merely a form of embodiment and a kind of primordial shelter but, as Suleiman emphasizes, a most primordial site of division （Suleiman 1985, 368）: always already a nonnomadic body subject to internal splitting, “a crossroads of being,” which the event of pregnancy intensifies and “brings to light and imposes without remedy.”

The process of division in the maternal body implies not merely a separation of the mother and the child but also an inscription of alterity and distance into every identity and linguistic practice: “A mother is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh. And consequently of language—and it has always been so” （Kristeva 1986a, 178）. Because for Kristeva pregnancy is the most radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject, it can be a basis for a demystification of “the identity of the symbolic bond itself.”²¹ Just as the maternal body is interrupted, imprinted, and increased by grafts and folds of otherness, so Kristeva postulates a similar interruption in the construction of every identity: “This process could be summarized as an interiorization of the founding separation of the socio-symbolic contract, as an introduction of its cutting edge into the very interior of every identity whether subjective, sexual, ideological, or so forth” （Kristeva 1986c, 210）.

Moreover, Kristeva explicitly claims that such resumption of the maternal economy within language is quite distinct from erecting the myth of the archaic mother as an alternative origin or a lost presence. She denounces the nostalgia for the presence of the maternal body as a phantasm, as a utopian “belief in the omnipotence of an archaic, full, total englobing mother with no frustration, no separation, with no break-producing symbolism” （Kristeva 1986c, 205）. Kristeva's construction of motherhood as an impossible space of radical othering where “no one is present to signify,” where no “identity holds up,” indeed “challenges precisely this myth of the archaic mother.”

In the context of Kristeva's analysis of the maternal body that so strongly emphasizes both the shocking discovery of the abyss in the mother's relation to her child and inscription of otherness in her relation to her own body, the only continuity between the mother and the child is the paradoxical “continuity” of love and pain:

What connection is there between myself, or even more unassumingly between my body and this internal graft and fold, which, once the umbilical cord has been severed, is an inaccessible other? My body and … him. No connection. （Kristeva 1986a, 178）

One does not give birth in pain, one gives birth to pain: the child represents it and henceforth it settles in, it is continuous. Obviously you may close your eyes, cover up your ears, teach courses, run errands … think about objects, subjects. But a mother is always branded by pain, she yields to it. （Kristeva 1986a, 167）.

For Kristeva pain is an emotional response to this abyss within the self, to the wound within the maternal body, as well as to the “intimate” inaccessibility of the child. Pain registers on the emotional level a disconnection in the relation of the mother to herself and to her child. Like the negativity of jouissance, pain accompanies a maternal lucidity that embraces her borderline existence as a “continuous” distancing from herself and from her child. But for Kristeva pain is inseparable from joy and laughter as a certain overflowing of identity and difference. There can be no unity between mother and child “except for” this pain and this mutual “overflowing laughter where one senses the collapse of some ringing, subtle, fluid identity or other, softly buoyed by the waves.”

Having brought Kristeva's two privileged sites of semiosis in such a close proximity, I also should stress their continuous drifting apart. Kristeva suggests that although both poetic practice and the semiotic process in the maternal body disrupt the fragile symbolic stability, our response to them is fundamentally different. Since semiotic discontinuity is so much more threatening to the mastery of the subject and the stability of social codes when it is associated with the mother, maternal lucidity is constantly erased and subordinated to the demand for the presence of the maternal body as a form of embodiment and a warranty of symbolic coherence:

On the other hand, we immediately deny it; we say there can be no escape, for mamma is there, she embodies this phenomenon; she warrants that everything is, and that it is representable. … Because if, on the contrary, there were no one on this threshold, if the mother were not, that is if she were not phallic, then every speaker would be led to conceive of its Being in relation to some void, a nothingness asymmetrically opposed to this Being, a permanent threat against, first, its mastery, and ultimately, its stability. （Kristeva 1980, 238; italics added）

This strategy of denial and daring thinking in the terms of hypothetical otherwise （“because if, on the contrary”） is symptomatic of Kristeva's own discussion of motherhood. Because a similar denial coupled with a demand for presence is not directed at poetic language, because we are more likely to bracket poetic practice as marginal deviation from the “normal” patterns of communication, Kristeva's （and her critics'） analysis of poetic semiosis is much more radical than her discussions of maternity, which surprise us with occasional notes of timidity and retrenchment. Kristeva's semiotic analysis of the maternal body inscribes, after all, the abyss and alterity into the very site of domesticated normalcy （or what is perceived as such） and into the construction of every subject. Therefore, if the avant-garde poet can be easily thought of as a modern Dionysus, pregnant Madonnas invading that Nietzschean position still evoke the specter of monstrosity.²² Kristeva herself occasionally claims that the potentially dissident role of motherhood has to be counterbalanced with its more traditional role of preserving the social order.

In spite of these reservations, I think that Kristeva's work is of considerable importance to feminism. First of all, her theory provides conceptual tools for diagnosing the limitations of what counts as discursive, especially in the context of representations of the feminine and the maternal. Second, she demonstrates that cultural productions, although no doubt profoundly shaped by patriarchy, are not as monolithic as the Lacanian concept of the paternal symbolic realm would have us believe. There are a number of texts, Kristeva claims, written both by male and female writers, that undermine this limited notion of discourse as necessarily phallocentric. But the most promising aspect of Kristeva's thought is that it provides the ground for renegotiating the position of the feminine speaker. Even though Kristeva only vaguely postulates a subject-in-process, or a subject-on-trial, without specifying what this process/trial could mean for feminine subjectivity, she does demystify the “nature of the symbolic bond” that places women in a subordinate position. Her theory of language as encompassing both the maternal and the paternal signifying economies makes it possible to question and revise rigid notions of sexual identities and subject positions in culture. Similarly, her theory of the subject re-marked by otherness from within and inserted into multiple discursive practices supports the argument for the multiplication of differences within the concept of femininity itself: “I am in favor of a concept of femininity which would take as many forms as there are women” （Kristeva 1989, 114）. And indeed, it is this aspect of her theory I find most productive.

Notes

1. Kristeva has also been criticized for her apparent antifeminism and her unclear relation to feminist politics. What is at stake here is Kristeva's valorization of the “third generation” of feminists who seek to subvert the very notion of sexual identity over both the liberal feminists postulating equality and the feminists postulating specificity of the female identity. For further discussion, see Kristeva （1986c, 187-214） and Grosz （1989, 63-70）.

2. One of the most important questions that Butler raises is about Kristeva's exclusion of the figure of the lesbian.

3. In this sense, Kristeva implicitly elaborates the questions of discourse and power raised by Foucault （1972, 215-39）.

4. This is one of the few articles in which Kristeva, while paying homage to Lacan, reiterates the differences between her position and his. Her critique of Lacan is precisely addressed to his homogeneous concept of language: “la langue … is nevertheless homogeneous with the realm of signification, even going as far as to assimilate what the dualism in Freudian thought regarded as strangely irreducible” （Kristeva 1983, 35）.

5. At this point we should recall Kristeva's ongoing engagement with the thought of Husserl in an attempt to uncover the systematic complicity between the presence of the transcendental consciousness and the linguistic operations of sign and syntax. She stresses the fact that every signifying act, in addition to the expression of meaning, reasserts the presence of Being because “it simultaneously posits the thesis （position） of both Being and ego” （Kristeva 1980, 132-35）.

6. This point differs radically from the usual negative assessments of Kristeva's politics. Judith Butler, for instance, claims that “by relegating the source of subversion to a site outside of culture itself, Kristeva appears to foreclose the possibility of subversion as an effective or realizable cultural practice” （Butler 1990, 88）. However, this criticism does not take into account that for Kristeva, culture—like signification—is no longer reducible to the realm of the symbolic paternal law but manifests itself through the multiplicity of signifying practices.

7. In Timaeus, Plato gives his account of cosmology twice. Revising the first story, Plato introduces the third category—“chora”—in addition to the prior distinction between the eternal pattern and the created copy. “Chora” not only functions as a receptacle receiving the created forms but also “in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible” （Plato 1969, 1178）. Concerning Kristeva's appropriation of the Platonic term, Jacqueline Rose reminds us that Plato describes the chora as maternal because the mother is seen in his text as “playing no part in the act of procreation” （Rose 1986, 153-54）. Yet Kristeva is interested in the term because already in the Platonic text it is caught in a “bastard reasoning,” which on the one hand insists on the distinction between the passive and the active, but on the other hand describes chora as both the passive receptacle and the active movement. For a more detailed discussion, see Kristeva （1984, 239-40, nn. 12 and 13）.

8. This aspect of Kristeva's work is emphasized by Lewis （1974, 29）.

9. In her earlier article, Domna C. Stanton interprets these irruptions of the semiotic as manifestations of negativity and dissidence （Stanton 1987, 75）.

10. Judith Butler argues that what Kristeva discovers as a natural prediscursive maternal subversion is in fact an effect of culture rather than its “secret cause.” From that she concludes that by placing the source of subversion outside culture, Kristeva forecloses the possibility of the effective subversion as a cultural practice （Butler 1990, 90-93）. As I try to demonstrate, Kristeva quite self-consciously starts her analysis from the effects of disruptions already within the culture and accounts for them not as mere accidents befalling the symbolic but as necessary consequences of the process of signification.

11. See, for instance, Rose （1986, 154）: “It seems to me that the concept of the semiotic, especially in those formulations which identify it with the mother and place it beyond language, is the least useful aspect of Kristeva's work.” The irony is that of course Rose is right—Kristeva indeed does take us beyond language thought as structure and system in order to propose a new logic of signification based on the signifying practice. It is the failure to explain the relation between language and signifying practice, the relation that is not reducible to distinction between langue and parole, that results in such conclusions.

12. See Kristeva （1984, 140-146） for a critique of Derrida's deconstruction.

13. Elizabeth Grosz, on the other hand, interprets Kristeva's emphasis on the maternal alterity merely as “the overtaking of woman's identity and corporeality by a foreign body,” ignoring in this way Kristeva's effort to demystify the very notion of identity and rigid sexual difference （Grosz 1990, 161-63）.

14. Lacan revises Saussure's model of the sign （the arbitrary connection between signifier and signified） in order to stress the primacy of the （phallic） signifier and to inscribe the sexual difference into the very structure of language. The image of the two identical lavatory doors demonstrates that it is the signifier alone that inscribes the sexual difference into signification （Lacan 1977, 151）.

15. Jane Gallop interprets this point as Kristeva's attempt to de-phallicize the mother and reveal behind this reassuring construction an empty space that no one can occupy （Gallop 1982, 117）.

16. Gasché employs the phrase to indicate the substructures underlying the philosophy of reflection: “This book's title, The Tain of the Mirror, alludes to that ‘beyond’ of the orchestrated mirror play of reflection that Derrida's philosophy seeks to conceptualize. Tain … refers to the tinfoil, the silver lining, the lusterless back of the mirror. Derrida's philosophy, rather than being a philosophy of reflection, is engaged in the systematic exploration of that dull surface without which no specular and speculative activity would be possible” （Gasché 1986, 6）. In a similar way, Kristeva's exploration of the maternal categories examines that “dark continent” without which no specular/speculative activity of psychoanalysis would be possible.

17. Kristeva analyzes the mode of withdrawal of the maternal economy from the constitution of the subject as the process of abjection. What is original in her analysis is that the mode of maternal disappearance is not neutral: it is a violent process of expulsion, a spasm of vomiting that consumes also the subject and destabilizes the boundaries of subjectivity （Kristeva 1982, 3-10）.

18. By contrast, Domna Stanton sees limitations of this revisionary project and asserts that the maternal “I” in “Stabat Mater” is an exception to a more typical articulation of the mother as “a passive instinctual force that does not speak” （Stanton 1989, 164）.

19. Although she interprets only the “natural” aspect of otherness in motherhood, Susan Rubin Suleiman suggests that it can provide “a privileged means of entry into the order of culture and of language” （Suleiman 1985, 367）.

20. For an excellent discussion of heterology in the philosophical context, see Rodolphe Gasché （1986, 81-105）. Gasché argues that Derrida's heterology opposes “the uninterrupted attempt to domesticate” otherness in the history of philosophy. Although Kristeva situates her analysis of otherness on the level of psychoanalysis and linguistics rather than philosophy, the implications of her arguments are very similar.

21. Carolyn Burke likewise stresses Kristeva's critique of the very notion of identity and her subsequent rejection of that brand of feminism that is “caught in the concept of a separate identity” （Burke 1978）.

22. This last image I owe to Fred Dallmayr, who, during our discussion about Kristeva, attempted to compare her theory with Nietzsche's.

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