Sexuality in the Field of Vision by Jacqueline Rose

Author:Jacqueline Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789605266
Publisher: Verso Books

II ‘A freudful mistake’32

I do not think we should be surprised, therefore, nor too comfortably critical or dismissive, when Kristeva proceeds to fall, at various points throughout her work, into one or other side of the psychic dynamic which she herself describes. The latest book, with its appeal to the ‘father of individual pre-history’, can certainly be seen, as I have already suggested, as a race back into the arms of the law. But Kristeva’s own work, and responses to Kristeva, have equally been marked by the opposite impulse, notably around the concept of the semiotic which has acquired something of an existence of its own, outside the realm of meaning without which, strictly, it does not make sense. The attraction of the theory was always that it pointed to aspects of language which escaped the straitjacket of symbolic norms. But this has also made the theory vulnerable to some very archaic notions of the content of the repressed. Variously, and at times conjointly, Kristeva has attributed to the semiotic: femininity, colour, music, body and affect — concepts whose oppressive lyricism has at times been welcomed by feminism but which feminism has also been the quickest to reject. It is also through these concepts that Kristeva takes her leave of Lacan. The concept of ‘affect’, for example, comes through André Green, a member of the Association Psychanalytique de France founded when its members split with Lacan in 1964 (Kristeva trained as an analyst with this school). Published in 1973, one year before La révolution du langage poétique, Green’s book Le discours vivant developed the concept of affect in Freud as part of a critique of Lacan’s central premise that psychic life is ruled by the exigencies of representation and the linguistic sign.33 In an article published in the journal of the Association in 1979, Kristeva reiterated Green’s critique of Lacan — that Lacan’s concept of language assimilates into itself and absorbs ‘what the dualism of Freudian thought holds to be strangely irreducible: drive, affect’ — although she immediately qualifies: ‘Is there any need to recall that the position which takes the semiotic as heterogeneous does not arise from a concern to integrate some alleged concreteness, brute corporality, orenergy-in-itself into a language suspected of being too abstract…. This semiotic is without primacy and has no place as origin.’34

There is no doubt, however, that the push here is against language itself, even though Kristeva herself is again the best analyst of the dangers this might imply. In an interview in 1977 on the United States, Kristeva praised the ‘non-verbal’ aspects of modern American culture which draw more ‘radically and profoundly than in Europe’ on the realms of ‘gesture, colour and sound’, but then she asked whether that same non-verbalisation might not also be the sign of a resistance, the almost psychotic hyper-activity of a violent and overproductive culture incessantly on the go.35 Even if we do not accept the representation of American culture, Kristeva’s own check on the celebration of a place beyond language is worthy of note.

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