SOURCE: “Re-routing Kristeva: From Pessimism to Parody,” in Textual Practice, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 31-46.

[In the following essay, Morris argues that Kristeva's ideas offer the “best direction for an optimistic Marxist-feminist practice and theory.”]

Theory has lost some of the glamour of success. All the radical intellectual iconoclasm of the last two decades seems finally to have come down to an unproductive choice of Althusserian and Lacanian hegemonic essentialism, or the endless play of indeterminacies celebrated by deconstructionists, or the irresistible and omnipresent power of discourse theory. For Marxists and feminists with an imperative to change the world as well as interpret it, this crisis of theory coincides with a crisis of praxis. Marxism has been proclaimed dead, post-feminism, apparently, has arrived. Meanwhile, in lived experience, the structural inequalities of class, gender and race grip lives as harshly as ever. If a theory of political change is to be revitalized a means needs to be found of reconnecting subjects and discourse to the material specificity of the historical moment. As Alan Sinfield has argued, ‘observing textual contradictions, fissures and split subjects does not go far enough’; to be effective as a materialist cultural practice, textual readings must be attentive to ‘the contests to which they have contributed and may contribute … through and beyond any particular text.’¹

Two recent feminist books have made the impasse of theory and practice their starting-point, and both locate the problem in the ahistorical, totalizing tendency of much current theory. In her introductory essay to Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Teresa Brennan diagnoses a ‘stagnant’ and ‘deadlocked’ thinking resulting from the unproductive entanglement of political and psychoanalytical issues within feminism.² The loci of this entanglement are seen by Brennan and other contributors as the totalizing Lacanian concept of the symbolic order and the related debate over essentialism. Brennan argues that these have become obstacles to productive thinking about the relation between psychical reality and the social. What is needed, she urges, is to ‘conceive of a symbolic that is not patriarchal’.³ In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler writes of ‘trouble within contemporary feminism’ which ‘might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism’ or at least cause ‘ever more bitter fragmentation among the ranks’.⁴ Butler too locates the problem in the issues of essentialism, and a universal and unified concept of patriarchal culture.

It seems symptomatic of a loss of interest （or hope?） among feminists in Julia Kristeva's work that it is allotted only one essay in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Despite powerful advocacy by Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Toril Moi, and Jacqueline Rose, the political and material import of Kristeva's work is still frequently misrepresented.⁵ Undoubtedly some of the misconception is due to the nature of Kristeva's writing itself, and particularly to the increasing concern in her later work with the darker influences of the death instincts upon individual psychic well-being. The purpose of this paper is to undo the more general misunderstandings and to argue for a return to the radical insights of the earlier work as providing the basis for a political theory of language and subjects which is open to the processes of history and change. It will be useful to start with Judith Butler's critique of Kristeva since this pinpoints, in a particularly lucid and rigorous form, the two most widespread and fundamental of those misconceptions.

Butler's reading aims to reveal the inadequacy, as she sees it, of Kristeva's concept of the semiotic as the means of subverting the determining Lacanian symbolic order. Lacan's paternal law, writes Butler, ‘structures all linguistic signification’, becoming the ‘universal organizing principle of culture itself’ （p. 79）. Subjects constituted within this law （and all are） are constrained within a unitary identity, their language structured by the law, in turn structuring the world ‘by suppressing multiple meanings … and instating univocal and discrete meanings in their place’ （p. 79）. Against this totalizing patriarchal law Kristeva promotes the subversive challenge of the semiotic, expressing the original prediscursive libidinal multiplicity which characterizes the primary relation of the child to the maternal body. For Butler, this apparently precultural nature of the semiotic constitutes the fundamental weakness of Kristeva's argument. Because Kristeva accepts the Lacanian assumption that culture is identical to the symbolic order and that entry into that order is the founding condition of social identity and even of sanity, the repressive symbolic must always remain hegemonic, Butler claims. Any sustained presence of the libidinal energy of the semiotic within individual life leads to psychosis, according to Kristeva, and within the social formation to the breakdown of cultural life itself. Thus the semiotic anarchism ‘emerges from beneath the surface of culture only inevitably to return there. … By relegating the source of subversion to a site outside culture itself, Kristeva appears to foreclose the possibility of subversion as an effective or realizable cultural practice’ （p. 88）.

The second focus of Butler's critique is upon Kristeva's concept of the maternal which, even more than the prediscursive semiotic, has been a source of misgiving to many feminists. According to Butler, Kristeva inscribes the maternal body with ‘a set of meanings that are prior to culture itself … [Kristeva's] naturalistic descriptions of the maternal body effectively reify motherhood’ and situate maternal heterogeneity within ‘a biological archaism which operates according to a natural and “prepaternal” causality’ （pp. 80, 90）. This mythicizing of the mother as originating source of transgressive pleasure and creativity places the concept of the maternal beyond the particularity and variability of culture and history. Inevitably this raises the question of whether Kristeva's naturalistic discourse of motherhood is not an effect of the symbolic law it is supposed to challenge; whether it does not produce that idealized image of feminine generativity required for the perpetuation of heterosexual reproduction. ‘The female body that is freed from the shackles of the paternal law,’ concludes Butler, ‘may well prove to be yet another incarnation of that law, posing as subversive but operating in the service of that law's self-amplification and proliferation’ （p. 93）.

However, this cogent deconstruction of what Butler takes to be Kristevan theory reproduces the common tendency to identify her work uncritically with that of Lacan and to perceive the relation between the semiotic and the symbolic in terms of stark binary opposition quite absent from Kristeva's own formulation. This misapprehension by Butler is somewhat surprising given that the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem of gender’ she wants to propose depends upon the Kristevan notion of ‘abjection’ as the constitutive process of psychic separation and identity. Butler argues that this wholly constructed nature of self over a void should be recognized and emphasized by means of performative and stylized parodic acts which would destabilize gender identity through ‘subversive laughter [at] pastiche-effect … in which the original, the authentic, and the real are themselves constituted as effects’ （p. 146）. In this way, she claims, cultural configurations of sex and gender could be proliferated until they overwhelm and confound the present binarism of sexual identity, revealing it for the hegemonic fiction that it is. Butler does not seem to recognize that this performative solution （attractive though it is） is vulnerable to the same deconstructive logic that she brings against the Kristevan concept of motherhood. Unless we can conceive of a non-totalizing symbolic such stylized acts would also operate within a universal patriarchal law; their apparent subversion equally an effect of that law, the licenced transgression which underwrites its necessity and continuance.

In this paper I shall attempt to argue that the ‘solutions’ of parody and laughter are central to Kristevan theory, and that her ideas still offer the best direction for an optimistic Marxist-feminist practice and theory, knotting together a causality of language, subject and history. I do not wish to repeat the excellent expositions of Kristeva's work already offered, but to suggest that the prevailing popular misconceptions of it as dependent upon notions of the instinctual and presocial can best be overcome and its political import brought into clearer focus by a return to her earliest writing. In particular, it needs to be re-emphasized that the first influence upon Kristeva was not Lacan and psychoanalysis, but Bakhtin with his insistence upon the subject in history.

Situating the foundation of Kristeva's theory in Bakhtin's work helps to clarify her ideas and underlines the consistently political nature of her perception of language: in Brennan's terms, her interlinking of psychical with social reality. In an essay on Bakhtin written in 1966, ‘Word, dialogue, and novel’, Kristeva recognizes and outlines the four interrelated concepts which were to remain absolutely central to her thinking. Undoubtedly the most important concept Kristeva takes from Bakhtin is the notion of language as dialogic, or intertextual as she renames it. As opposed to a formalist sense of language as an autonomous self-referring system, Bakhtin insists upon a dynamic model of discourse which focuses upon words as multiply overdetermined—saturated with conflicting intent. ‘Only the mythical Adam,’ Bakhtin writes, ‘who approached a virginal and as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word, could really have escaped from start to finish this dialogic inter-orientation’.⁶ In contrast to this mythic ‘innocence’ of a formalist or structuralist view of language, the word within any living utterance ‘enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgements, and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group’, a reactive process which inevitably ‘leave[s] a trace in all its semantic layers’ （p. 276）.

However, even this interaction of the word within a complex semantic field does not exhaust Bakhtin's sense of dialogism:

The word in living conversation is directly, blatantly, oriented toward a future answer-word: it provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the answer's direction. Forming itself in an atmosphere of the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word. （p. 280）

It is for this reason that Kristeva sees Bakhtin as foreshadowing Emile Beneviste's sense of discourse as necessarily intersubjective or dialogic:

Language is possible only because each speaker sets himself up as a subject by referring to himself as ‘I’ in his discourse. Because of this, ‘I’ posits another person, the one who, being as he is completely exterior to ‘me’, becomes my echo to whom I say ‘you’ and who says ‘you’ to me.⁷

Kristeva's acceptance of the Bakhtinian sense of language as conflictual, material, and in process—oriented towards an addressee and a future—indicates how far she is from any unquestioned espousal of a Lacanian concept of the symbolic as a static totalizing order.⁸ On the contrary, as we shall see, Kristeva's subsequent development of psychoanalytic theory functions to provide a more rigorous understanding of Bakhtin's dialectical model of language. All utterances, she claims, in the essay on Bakhtin, are the locus simultaneously of speaking subject and internalized addressee （in effect internalized culture） who is ‘answered’ as well as ‘spoken’ to in each utterance. ‘The writer's interlocutor, then, is the writer himself, but as a reader of another text. The one who writes is the same as the one who reads.’⁹ To this Bakhtinian sense of language as always double Kristeva contributes a third dimension: because the speaking subject is also always split between the conscious and the unconscious, all discourse is inscribed with desire. From thence onwards Kristeva's concern with language, and especially her reading of texts, always brings into play this triple ‘intersection of textual surfaces’ （Desire in Language, p. 65）. Her reading practice re-articulates not just the dialogic interaction of the conscious with the unconscious of the speaking subject, but also the subject's intertextual reading/writing of internalized culture.¹⁰

The second and probably best-known of Kristevan concepts, the ‘revolution’ or conflict of two opposing ‘dispositions’ within language, stems from this first concept of dialogism or intertextuality. In ‘Word, dialogue, and novel’, Kristeva sets out Bakhtin's sense of the continuous struggle between monological and polyphonic discourse, not yet using the oppositional terms ‘semiotic’ and ‘symbolic’ she later deploys: ‘The dialogue inherent in all discourse is smothered by a prohibition, a censorship, such that this discourse refuses to turn back upon itself, to enter into dialogue with itself’ （Desire in Language, p. 77）. Significantly, her emphasis here is upon ‘dialogue’ as the inherent, ‘given’ state of language, with prohibition of that dialogism imposed upon it, rather than a perception of language as inherently univocal and repressive until or unless subjected to destabilization. Bakhtin's concept of monological or unitary language appears to be somewhat similar to the Lacanian symbolic order. Unitary language, Bakhtin writes, ‘is a system of linguistic norms … forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought’ （pp. 270-1）. However, unlike Lacan's apparently totalizing view of the symbolic, Bakhtin goes on to insist that at any given historical moment unitary language has to operate in the midst of heteroglossia. ‘Every utterance participates in the “unitary language” （in its centripetal forces and tendencies） and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia （the centrifugal, stratifying forces）’ （p. 272）. Language, Bakhtin claims, must always be analysed as a ‘contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of [these] two embattled tendencies’ （p. 272）.

This continuous struggle of opposing dispositions leads to the third key concept of Kristevan theory: the dialectical process of ‘negation as affirmation’, sometimes called ‘destructive genesis’. Dialogism shatters the totalizing vision of univocal discourse, as one ideological perspective is relativized against a contending viewpoint. In this death of ‘Truth’ a new ‘ambivalent’ truth is constituted. Kristeva writes, ‘writing reads another writing, reads itself and constructs itself through a process of destructive genesis’ （Desire in Language, p. 77）. Kristeva follows Bakhtin in seeing laughter and especially parody as founding examples of this ‘negation as affirmation’. Bakhtin emphasizes parody as ‘one of the most ancient and widespread forms for representing the direct word of another’. ‘It is our conviction’, he writes, ‘that there never was a … single type of direct discourse … that did not have its own parodying and travestying double’ （p. 53）. Parody is never merely imitation, never just the ‘echo’ of Beneviste; in parody two languages meet in an antagonistic fusion, relativizing the claims of each other's ‘truth’ and hence producing a new ‘thesis’ which in turn can become the object of parody. Bakhtin associates the tradition of parody with that of carnival and the carnivalesque figures of rogue, clown and fool. The parodic discourse of these figures suggests the public and performative nature of social identity. Bakhtin claims: ‘they are life's maskers; their being coincides with their role, and outside this role they simply do not exist’ （p. 159）. Kristeva picks up and elaborates this idea in her discussion of the carnivalesque. ‘A carnival participant’, she writes, ‘is both actor and spectator, he loses his sense of individuality, passes through a point zero of carnivalesque activity and splits into a subject of the spectacle and an object of the game … man and mask’ （Desire in Language, p. 78）.

This perception of carnival as the scene of the splitting of the subject into spectator and spectacle, maker and mask and as the place ‘where prohibitions … and their transgression coexist’ （Desire in Language, p. 79）, leads to the fourth central structuring concept of Kristevan thought: the concept of a ‘traversable boundary’ or ‘threshold’ site between order and its subversion, inside and outside, body and culture, mother and child, semiotic and symbolic. Carnival, Kristeva claims, brings to light the structures ‘underlying the unconscious: sexuality and death’ in its dyadic forms of ‘high and low, birth and agony, food and excrement, praise and curses, laughter and tears’ （Desire in Language, pp. 78-9）. The concept of a ‘threshold’ site has become the most important concern in Kristeva's recent work, rather overshadowing the earlier emphasis upon dialogic conflict. It receives a variety of terminology throughout Kristeva's writing and is most fully explored as ‘abjection’ in Powers of Horror. Essentially, however, the concept remains close to Bakhtin's account of the grotesque Rabelasian carnivalesque body articulated as a boundary site bringing together food and defecation, gluttonous Gargantuan ingestion and obscene expulsions, birth, sex and death, pain and laughter. On the site of the carnivalesque body, Bakhtin writes, ‘death is presented in close relationship with the birth of new life and—simultaneously—with laughter’ （p. 198）.¹¹

These four concepts—dialogism （intertextuality）, a ‘revolutionary’ conflict between prohibitive and transgressive dispositions within language, the dialectical process of negation, and a ‘threshold’ site—structure all of Kristeva's subsequent writing. Her use of psychoanalytic theory provides a more rigorously argued causality for the insights offered in Bakhtin's rather impressionistic account of language. A careful tracing of the trajectory of Kristeva's work from this early basis makes it clear that she never rejects Bakhtin's dialectical model of language for a totalizing symbolic order, nor, as is so often claimed, does she oppose the symbolic with a precultural archaism. For her, all speaking subjects and their discourse, the semiotic disposition as well as the symbolic, are always already implicated in history. ‘The speaking subject’, she writes, ‘can never be dealt with at the level of drive, or through a child at zero degree of symbolism’ （Desire in Language, p. 276）. The child enters the world as the site of polymorphous instinctual drives but these are always already implicated with the social; even in the womb the child hears and responds to the mother's voice.

Kristeva writes in Revolution in Poetic Language,

We emphasize the regulated aspect of the chora: its vocal and gestural organization is subject to what we shall call an objective ordering … dictated by natural or socio-historical constraints. … We may therefore posit that social organization, always already symbolic, imprints its constraints in a mediated form which organizes the chora.¹²

The source of this ordering mediation is the maternal body, experienced by the child as a symbiotic continuum of its own bodily topography. This rhythmic continuum （the chora） of heart-beat, pulse, ingestion and expulsion, light and dark, chill and warmth is crossed and recrossed by fluxes of libidinal energy—undirected polymorphous drives. This motility is ordered （‘articulated’） by means of the primary processes of condensation and displacement which effect discontinuities, temporary stases, repetitions and returns within the flux, organizing it eventually into discrete connections, facilitations and associations. ‘Voice, hearing and sight’, Kristeva writes, ‘are the archaic dispositions where the earliest forms of discreteness emerge. The breast given and withdrawn. … At that point, breast, light and sound become a there: a place, a spot, a marker’ （Desire in Language, p. 283）.

The replete maternal enclosure, locus of polymorphous erotogenicity, is the material foundation of the omnipotent pre-Oedipal mother of the child's imaginary stage before separation and symbolization. It is, however, essential to remember that this pre-Oedipal mother only ever exists in the imaginary. It is, Kristeva writes, ‘an unnameable domain … the secret and unreachable horizon of our loves and desires, it assumes for the imagination, the consistency of an archaic mother’¹³ （my italics）. The actual mother, however, is always fully implicated in social and familial structures. The breast is given and withdrawn according to the constraints and practices of the temporal and cultural world in which she is situated. Even her bodily rhythms and vocal tonality are regulated by its temporality and value systems. Thus from the first moment the mediated regulation of the semiotic is social, and this ordering is the necessary precondition for language acquisition, not an ‘alien’, instinctual, opposing force as Butler and others have claimed.

When Kristeva writes of a pre-Oedipal archaic mother it is always the fantasy constructed within the imaginary she is referring to. As Jacqueline Rose has pointed out,¹⁴ the fact that sometimes her writing seems to endow this mythic figure with its own volitional energy only testifies the more eloquently to the powerful hold it retains upon the structures of our adult fantasies. Indeed, Kristeva confesses as much in admitting that her analysands intuit her own ‘uneasiness’, in dealing with ‘a subjugating mother, precociously and encroachingly loving … but always underhandedly fascinating’.¹⁵ It is not so surprising, therefore, that she has come to protect herself from the underhand fascination of her ‘own precociously lost love’ by positing an imaginary pre-Oedipal ‘father of individual pre-history’ （Tales of Love, p. 11）. For feminists this can seem like a final betrayal; a retreat to the Father as protector against the devouring Mother, who is referred to, in Black Sun, in terms of full Hollywood gothic as ‘the Thing’! In fact, although Kristeva's melodramatic terminology undoubtedly encourages this exasperated response, the ‘father of individual pre-history’ does occupy a positive position within her theory of language, to which I shall return.

Kristeva theorizes the transitional constitution from socially mediated chora into a signifying subject around the central notions of a ‘thetic threshold’ and ‘negation as affirmation’, drawing upon Freud's influential essay on ‘Negation’ and Melanie Klein's concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ objects.¹⁶ Whilst the child is still held within the pre-Oedipal maternal continuum, its experience is organized around the primary impulses of introjection and expulsion. Sensations and objects which contribute to pleasure and satisfaction of needs, like the ‘good breast’, are incorporated as part of the self. Freud sees this impulse of introjection as the working of the life instincts, and the impulse will develop into the mental process of affirmation. Conversely, all that causes undue excitation or distress （the ‘bad breast’） is rejected and expelled beyond the symbiotic boundary. Expulsion is the working of the death instincts and will form the basis of the mental process of negation. For Kristeva the key aspect of negation is its creative capacity to generate process and dispel stasis. Thus the child's primary impulse of rejection （negation） has a positive effect in that it forms the basis for recognizing objects as separate and external to the self. It is this which provides the possibility of differentiation between subjectivity and objectivity upon which self-identity depends. Thus the ‘thetic threshhold’ is simply the boundary site between inside and outside, self and other: the psychic space whereon the subject constitutes itself through the act of positing objects.

Expulsion or negation creates the speaking subject: a subject who substitutes signs for objects. Kristeva writes,

This negativity—this expenditure—posits an object as separate from the body proper, and, at the very moment of separation, fixes it in place as absent, as a sign. In this way rejection establishes the object as real and, at the same time, as signifiable （which is to say, already taken on as an object within the signifying system and as subordinate to the subject who posits it through the sign）.

（Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 123）

Language, in other words, arises from the child's desire to subordinate or master an all-too-powerful reality. Elsewhere Kristeva writes,

‘I have lost an essential object that happens to be, in the final analysis, my mother,’ is what the speaking subject seems to be saying. ‘But no, I have found her again in signs, or rather since I consent to lose her I have not lost her （that is the negation） I can recover her in language.’

（Black Sun, p. 45）

Freud's account of his grandson's ‘fort/da’ game also provides a graphic illustration of the way the sign （representation） extends the child's attempted mastery or subordination of that which was originally expelled outside the self as threatening.¹⁷ By repetitively throwing away and pulling back a cotton reel （an imaginary representation of his absent mother） accompanying this action with the words ‘fort’ and ‘da’, the child discovered a means of gaining a semblance of mastery over a loss he could not actually control.

The fort/da game also demonstrates that it is a misleading simplification to understand the impulses of introjection and expulsion, or the death and life instincts which propel them, as quite separate and distinct. They interact in a continuous dialectical process. The child with the cotton reel expresses simultaneously desire for the mother and aggression towards her in throwing her away: an intense interaction of life and death instincts, of love and hate. Words and other forms of representation which substitute for the expelled or lost object are constituted of this ambivalence. Kristeva's conception of the semiotic is simply this interaction of the life and death instincts, always already mediated by the social into forms of affirmation and negation, and propelled by the latter to produce the sign. She states, ‘In our view, expenditure or rejection are better terms for the movement of material contradiction that generates the semiotic function’ （Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 119）.

This impulse of rejection is associated with desire to subordinate the object; for an aggressive mastery, by means of the sign, of what has refused control or presence as object. This ‘disposition’ for mastery is the indispensable precondition for the constitution of the speaking subject. Undoubtedly, it is also the ‘disposition’ which motivates the centripetal, unifying tendency which Bakhtin assigns to unitary discourse. In other words, the totalizing impulse of the symbolic is essentially an aspect of the functioning of the semiotic—the functioning of negation. However, it is but one ‘disposition’ or tendency within the signifying system, not the system itself as a capitalized ‘Law’ and ‘Order’ which then needs to be subverted by an extralinguistic, presocial force. Indeed, if the symbolic disposition were really a totalizing Law, imposing wholly unitary and discrete meanings, then metalanguage would be neither logically necessary nor possible. In actuality the creative and destabilizing ‘disposition’ of signifying practice is produced by the same semiotic impulse of negation which constitutes the opposing tendency for univocal mastery. The death instincts generate new forms and laughter—negation as creativity.

Words come into being for the speaking subject as always already dialogic and ambivalent. The sign which substitutes for the absent breast is overdetermined with conflicting intent, it is an intertextual site of desire and hate, of the impulse to affirm and to negate. It is this ambivalent dialectic which provides the opening for linguistic creativity and ultimately for the production of new social forms. The sign confers mastery of the absent object upon the speaking subject as a capacity to reproduce as representation that which has been lost. However, this representation is not necessarily identical repetition—an echo—it can be varied to answer the impulse of the presently predominating drive—life or death. Freud writes in ‘Negation’, ‘The reproduction of a perception as a presentation is not always a faithful one; it may be modified by omissions, or changed by the merging of various elements.’¹⁸ Kristeva restates this idea: ‘Rejection therefore constitutes the return of expulsion … within the domain of the constituted subject: rejection reconstitutes real objects, “creates” new ones, reinvents the real, and re-symbolizes it’ （Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 155）. It is the ‘compulsion to repeat’ （characteristic of the death drive）, but to repeat with the difference of an underlying, socially charged ambivalence, which constitutes all forms of creative or innovative thought.

This ambivalence, displaced into signs, accounts for the creative double articulation of language （desire/subject of enunciation; signifier/signified）, but it does not explain the triple dialogism involving an addressee/internalized culture which unites signification fully to history and allows us to conceive of a symbolic which is not patriarchal in any determining sense. Paradoxically, this is the function of the ‘father of individual pre-history’, otherwise called by Kristeva the ‘Third Party’ （Tales of Love, p. 34）. How does the child move from its first auto-eroticism in which its body is a fragmentation of zones, each a site of separate erotic gratification, to narcissism which entails an image of a unified body and embryonic ego? There is no leverage within the closure of mother/child dyad to bring about the ‘new psychical action’ of narcissism. It is on this basis that Kristeva argues for the logical necessity of an Other, a Third Party. The claims of this Other upon the maternal body are ‘an indication that the mother is not complete but that she wants … Who? … it is out of [the child's] “not I” … that an Ego painfully attempts to come into being’, until then ‘the child and the mother do not yet constitute two’ （Tales of Love, pp. 41, 40）. Although Kristeva uses the designations ‘father of individual pre-history’ or ‘pre-Oedipal father’, she concedes that these are wholly imaginary conceptions: that ‘he is simply … a potential presence’, and moreover ‘possess[es] the characteristics of both parents’ （Tales of Love, pp. 43, 202）.

It seems reasonable therefore to see this Third Party as the child's imaginary way of registering the imposition of social reality upon the mother, which necessitates her withdrawal of attention, her absences and her changes of libidinal rhythms: in effect her orientation towards the world beyond the mother/child dyad, directing the child in that worldly direction also. This cuts out the space of a ‘potential presence’—an Other—before the imposition of the reality principle in the form of the Oedipal father's prohibition of the maternal body.

This Third Party constitutes the space which ‘allows for the existence of a potentially symbolic Other’, Kristeva claims; for an ‘external addressee’ who imposes upon the child the necessity to communicate as well as speak. （For those who ‘do not yet constitute two’ the need for communication does not exist.） In that external necessity the child finds its words authenticated. Otherwise, according to Kristeva, ‘Within the empty enclosure of his narcissism, … [words] （drives and representations） could not find an other （an addressee） who alone might have given a signification to their weighty meaning’ （Tales of Love, p. 49）. Thus utterances come to be characterized by a dialogic interaction of desire with necessity, of the subjective with the social, between ‘I say what matters to me’ versus ‘I say for you, for us, so that we can understand one another.’¹⁹ This double positionality of the speaking subject, Kristeva claims, as ‘that of his own identity [and] … that of objective expression for the other … has the advantage of clarifying certain of Bakhtin's positions with reference to dialogism’.²⁰

With the resolution of the Oedipal conflict, the Third Party, comprising characteristics of both mother and father, is subsumed within the superego: internalized culture. Freud describes the super-ego thus:

a child's super-ego is in fact constructed on the model not of its parents but of its parents' super-ego; the contents which fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgements of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to generation.²¹

However the super-ego comprises not only idealizations of both imaginary parents which the child has introjected—its ego-ideal, but also their arbitrary power which it has sought first to reject and then control by representation. It is this ambivalence which creates the possibility of destabilizing the ‘time-resisting’ authority of social forms. The triple dialogism which constitutes us as speaking subjects of an overdetermined language offers us the potential to be the makers of our own history. In our speech the destructive-creative capacities of the death instincts （negation as affirmation） find an opening into social meaning, shaking and remaking its values. It is against this centrifugal tendency that all authoritarian, totalizing codes have to contend.

If ambivalence and dialogism are creative ‘dispositions’ inherent in the very constitution of language, undermining the opposing prohibitive ‘disposition’, then so, too, are laughter and parody. ‘There is one inevitable moment in the movement that recognizes symbolic prohibition and makes it dialectical: laughter’ （Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 222）. Elsewhere Kristeva writes, ‘Laughter is what lifts inhibitions breaking through prohibition （symbolized by the Creator） to introduce the aggressive, violent, liberating drive’ （Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 224）. Laughter is a constant theme throughout Kristeva's writing which has received too little attention in commentaries on her work; it is the bright lining of her black sun of melancholy.

Kristeva notes that the infant's first ‘smile’ or ‘laughter’ appears to be provoked at moments of tension relief, for example, at the point of oral repletion or of anal expulsion. Such moments—ambivalent thresholds where one instinct dies into its opposite—appear to produce involuntary ‘laughter’ （Desire in Language, p. 283）. Likewise, rejection, the impulse to expel disturbing influences, creates the ambivalent threshold between inside and outside, love and hate, upon which knowing laughter is born. Its energy therefore, like that of speech, derives from the death instincts. The ‘fort/da’ response demonstrates the way loss is transformed into a pleasurable game. This form of aggressive playfulness is present in most childhood games of repetition and imitation. The child who scolds or beats a toy is identifying with （introjecting） parental power. However, the scolding voice is not merely an echo; it constructs a parody of power, projecting a mocking image of the authoritative word. The little girl who imitates her mother's cough expresses simultaneously an impulse of loving identification and an aggressive desire to diminish maternal power. Language is born of the need to dominate what is originally threatening and beyond control. In the infant's history her/his original loss is experienced as tragedy, but we learn to replay it as farce. From our first words we are all of us ironists. ‘Laughter always indicates an act of aggression against the Creator,’ Kristeva writes （Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 223）. The black humour with which, throughout history, women and men have faced down the worst of war, death and punishment testifies to the strength of this archaic impulse to defeat power by laughter.

Introjection, the impulse to identify with that which provides satisfaction of need, signified at the Oedipal stage as gender identity with the parent of the same sex, is always destabilized by ambivalence. We mock power even as we imitate its voice. The double positionality of the subject entails that we are always spectators of our own carnivalesque performances; always in some place aware of ourselves as parodists of our own desired identifications. It is for this reason that Kristeva quotes Baudelaire's description of laughter as an indication ‘of a permanent dualism in the human being—that is, the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time’ （Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 223）. Laughter and parody thus always involve pain; they always involve the perception of our own impotence. In recognizing our representation of power or authority as parodic and thereby mastering its threat of annihilation, we must of necessity recognize our own failure to make ourselves in its image. The ‘fake’ or ‘narcissistic seeming’, writes Kristeva, arises ‘because one rarely succeeds in identifying fully with [an] ideal’ and this fakeness ‘challenges the universe of established values [and] pokes fun at them’ （Tales of Love, pp. 126-7）. In this unmasking of power by our laughter, we unmake ourselves. But it is this negation which puts us ‘in process’, opening out the possibility of continuously reinventing those performative parodies of identity that Judith Butler advocates as means of subverting repressive constructions of gender. For Kristeva, the artistic representation of being as performance is Mozart's Don Juan, ‘an artist with no authenticity other than his ability to change, to live without internality, to put on masks just for fun’ （Tales of Love, p. 199）. As such, the figure of Don Juan represents our ‘power to triumph while playing’ （ibid., p. 204）.

Laughter, then, is another of Kristeva's threshold sites, making possible the process of destructive genesis. Such sites always involve risk for the subject who seeks to operate across their ambivalence. They always open into the death instincts; it is for this reason that laughter is frequently painful as well as pleasurable, always shadowed by the fear of annihilation. Nevertheless, such laughter is truly ambivalent, rather than simply destructive. At around three months, the undirected laughter stimulated by drive discharges finds a stable point of reference. The mother's face becomes ‘the privileged receiver of laughter’ （Desire in Language, p. 283）. This affirmative laughter finds its echo in the jubilant recognition with which the infant greets its image in the mirror. From thence onwards laughter or smiles affirm our identity for the other. So laughter simultaneously destroys our unified identity, puts us into process, and gives us back to ourselves from the place of the other.

The question inevitably arises as to whether Kristeva sees women as having the same access as men to the resources of laughter and parody. Her writing on this is contradictory. The playful ‘triumph’ of Don Juan is described as ‘phallic power’; ‘slaves and women are made otherwise’, she writes （Tales of Love, p. 200）. However, in About Chinese Women, she declares that the founding of western civilization upon the cleavage of the two sexes localizes ‘the polymorphic, orgasmic body, desiring and laughing, in the other sex’—that is in women （Kristeva Reader, p. 141）. This seems a surer insight. If laughter derives from the need to mock power and authority so as not to be overwhelmed by it, then it seems reasonable to suppose that those within the social formation who remain marginalized and disempowered after infancy will continue to utilize the defiant laughter of irony and parody. In the triple dialogism of their discourse, hegemonic ‘Truth’ will always be demystified by fusion with its parodic echo. Thus Kristeva writes of women's ‘ironic common sense’ which opposes hegemonic claims for ‘divine’ or ‘universal’ knowledge, and she cites the biblical example of Sarah ‘pregnant at 90, [who] laughs at this divine news’ （Kristeva Reader, p. 140）. The age-old insistence that ‘women have no sense of humour is, of course, the negation which affirms men's fear of this subversive force.

Similarly, those furthest from power can most easily recognize their own ‘faking’ performances of its image; women and slaves have the potential, perhaps, to be the most plural of life's maskers, as indeed Kristeva seems to suggest in ‘Women's time’ （Kristeva Reader, pp. 209-10）. Kristeva writes of the ‘tremendous psychic, intellectual, and affective effort’ a woman must make to overcome her pre-Oedipal identification with the imaginary archaic mother in order to take her place within the social order （Black Sun, p. 30）. Could we not speculate that women achieve this ‘triumph’ through the ambivalent power of laughter? Post-Oedipal gender identification with their mothers offers women the opportunity to recognize their shortfall from the mythic ideal. This double positionality of self/projected self reveals the performative nature of ‘feminine’ gender identity. However, this comic perception is genuinely ambivalent: it ironizes the ‘Truth’ of a unitary or idealized sense of ‘Woman’ or ‘Mother’, but it does not disavow it altogether. This ‘ironic common sense’ prevents women from taking themselves seriously as myth, but preserves a perception of maternal love as a utopian, cherished glimpse of an ideal of communality. As Kristeva argues in ‘Women's Time’, it is the sacrificial and diminishing nature of so many women's encounter with the social order that reactivates an escapist desire for the idealized fantasy of an all-powerful mythic mother as the basis of a counter-society ‘imagined as harmonious, without prohibitions, free and all-fulfilling’ （Kristeva Reader, p. 202）. For men, after the resolution of the Oedipal crisis, ambivalent laughter in relation to the feminine is difficult to achieve. Identification with the pre-Oedipal mother has been securely repressed so that the feminine has become wholly other and unknowable. Hence laughter can only function as a negative and aggressive impulse to diminish an ancient power, located in women and always feared.

Does Kristeva's theory of language as a parodic, triply dialogic signifying practice offer it as an inevitably revolutionary force, as she has seemed sometimes to claim? Obviously not; laughter, it is quite evident, does not serve only libertarian ends. Any force or object which is feared or resented, perhaps especially in the imagination, can become the focus of non-ambivalent, wholly destructive mockery. However, Kristeva's perception of language does provide heartening reassurance that structures of power and authority—whether of class or patriarchy—are not wholly determining forces upon our lives and social identities; that the symbolic order is not a totalizing law imposing upon us an inescapable closure of possibility. Signifying practice is a dialogic alternation of ‘dispositions’ within language; dispositions for both mastery and renewal—as indeed we have always known in our practice if not in our theory.

In terms of practice, her theory also suggests a challenging model of reading; a re-articulation of texts as triply dialogic, a polemical interaction within the word of writing subject, desire, and history as internalized addressee, with univocal meaning always denied by the force of ambivalence. In addition, when reading texts by women we should perhaps be particularly attuned to hidden laughter, the parodic echo, an ironic irreverence. This view of language also suggests the possibility of constructing a genuinely progressive political writing. In the play of an ‘ironic common sense’ those twin dangers to any political discourse—the totalizing desire for a utopian return to an imaginary maternal enclosure or the totalizing authority of complete mastery—are revealed and debunked. This is not to invoke a postmodernist overthrow of all social value. We laugh at ourselves in the name of equality and in laughing with others we recognize and confirm a collective solidarity.

Notes

1. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, ‘Culture and textuality: debating cultural materialism’, Textual Practice, 4, 1 （Spring 1990）, pp. 93, 99.

2. Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan （London and New York: Routledge, 1989）, p. 1.

3. ibid., p. 3.

4. Gender Troubles: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity （London and New York: Routledge, 1990）, pp. ix, 15. Further references will be cited in the text.

5. Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism （London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977）, pp. 122-52; Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics （London and New York: Methuen, 1985）; Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision （London and New York: Verso, 1986）, pp. 141-64.

6. The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist （Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981）, p. 279. Further references will be cited in the text.

7. Emile Beneviste, Problems of General Linguistics （1966） （Miami: University of Miami Press, 1977）, p. 225.

8. Lacan also sees the signifying subject as constituted intersubjectively ‘in the response of the other’, and Lacan's own stylistic eccentricity seems to embrace a ‘semiotic’ multivalency. Nevertheless, his insistent nomenclature of ‘Law’ and ‘Order’ inevitably constructs the symbolic ‘Law of the Father’ as an inescapable universal system, seemingly structuring even the unconscious. Kristeva, on the contrary, has declared that ‘the unconscious is not structured like a language’ （Black Sun, p. 204）. If Lacan tends to overwhelm us with the repressive power of the symbolic, Kristeva, perhaps, is inclined to overstate the irresistible influence of the death instincts.

9. Desire in Language, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez （Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980）, pp. 86-7.

10. For example, this ‘triple dialogism’ informs her reading of Céline in Powers of Horror, of ‘Stabat Mater’ in Tales of Love, and the work of Holbein in Black Sun.

11. Bakhtin's most detailed discussion of carnival and the regenerative Rabelesian body are in Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky （Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968）.

12. Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller with an introduction by Leon S. Roudiez （New York: Columbia University Press, 1984）, pp. 26-7. Further references will be cited in the text.

13. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez （New York: Columbia University Press, 1989）, p. 145. Further references will be cited in the text.

14. Sexuality in the Field of Vision, pp. 157-64.

15. Tales of Love, translated by Leon S. Roudiez （New York: University of Columbia Press, 1987）, p. 11. Further references will be cited in the text.

16. ‘Negation’ in On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 11 （Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984）, p. 438.

17. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ in On Metapsychology, pp. 283-7.

18. ‘Negation’, p. 440.

19. The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi （Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986）, p. 316. Further references will be cited in the text.

20. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez （New York: Columbia University Press, 1982）, p. 195. Further references will be cited in the text.

21. J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis （London: Karnac Books, 1988）, p. 437.