Julia Kristeva, (b. Bulgaria, 1941), lives in Paris and writes in French on psychoanalysis, semiotics, and philosophy. Taking up the question of "Why do we speak?" in all of its ambiguities, Kristeva addresses the issues of the relationship of meaning to language, the relationship of meaning to life, and the relationship of language to life.  In fact, Kristeva's most famous contribution to language theory, the distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic elements of signification, speaks to these questions in a revolutionary way, opening pathways rather than resigning us to an impasse.
        Kristeva maintains that all signification is composed of two elements, the symbolic and the semiotic.  The symbolic element is what philosophers might think of as referential meaning.  That is, the symbolic is the element of signification that sets up the structures by which symbols operate.  The symbolic is the structure or grammar that governs the ways in which symbols can refer.  The semiotic element, on the other hand, is the organization of drives in language.  It is associated with rhythms and tones that are meaningful parts of language and yet do not represent or signify something.  In Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), Kristeva maintains that rhythms and tones do not represent bodily drives; rather bodily drives are discharged through rhythms and tones.  In New Maladies of the Soul (1993), she discusses different ways of representing that are not linguistic in a traditional sense.  There, Kristeva says that the meaning of the semiotic element of language is "translinguistic" or "nonlinguistic"; she explains this by describing these semiotic elements as irreducible to language because they "turn toward language even though they are irreducible to its grammatical and logical structures".  This is to say that they are irreducible to the symbolic element of language.  The symbolic element of language is the domain of position and judgment.  It is associated with the grammar or structure of language that enables it to signify something.
        The dialectical oscillation between the semiotic and the symbolic is what makes signification possible.  Without the symbolic element of signification, we have only sounds or delirious babble.  But without the semiotic element of signification, signification would be empty and we would not speak; for the semiotic provides the motivation for engaging in signifying processes.  We have a bodily need to communicate.  The symbolic provides the structure necessary to communicate.  Both elements are essential to signification.  And it is the tension between them that makes signification dynamic.  The semiotic both motivates signification and threatens the symbolic element.  The semiotic provides the movement or negativity and the symbolic provides the stasis or stability that keeps signification both dynamic and structured.
        While the symbolic element gives signification its meaning in the strict sense of reference, the semiotic element gives signification meaning in a broader sense.  That is, the semiotic element makes symbols matter; by discharging drive force in symbols, it makes them significant.  Even though the semiotic challenges meaning in the strict sense, meaning in the terms of the symbolic, it gives symbols their meaning for our lives.  Signification makes our lives meaningful, in both senses of meaning--signifying something and having significance--through its symbolic and semiotic elements.  The interdependence of the symbolic and semiotic elements of signification guarantees a relationship between language and life, signification and experience; the interdependence between the symbolic and semiotic guarantees a relationship between body (soma) and soul (psyche).
By insisting the language expresses bodily drives through its semiotic element, Kristeva's articulation of the relationship between language and the body circumvents the traditional problems of representation.  The tones and rhythms of language, the materiality of language, is bodily.   Kristeva's theory addresses the problem of the relationship between language and bodily experience by postulating that, through the semiotic element, bodily drives manifest themselves in language.  In stead of lamenting what is lost, absent, or impossible in language, Kristeva marvels at this other realm that makes its way into language.  The force of language is living drive force transferred into language.  Signification is like a transfusion of the living body into language.  This is why psychoanalysis can be effective; the analyst can diagnose the active drive force as it is manifest in the analysand's language.  Language is not cut off from the body.  And, while, for Kristeva, bodily drives involve a type of violence, negation, or force, this process does not merely necessitate sacrifice and loss.  The drives are not sacrificed to signification; rather bodily drives are an essential semiotic element of signification.
        In Tales of Love (1983), Kristeva identifies meaning—both the meaning of language and of life--with love.  She describes the contemporary melancholic or borderline personality as a child with no adequate images of a loving mother or a loving father.  Kristeva suggests that (in the West) traditionally Christianity has provided images of a loving mother and a loving father, as problematic as those images might be.  But, with contemporary suspicions of religion, she seems to ask, where can we find images of loving mothers and fathers?  And, without images of loving mothers and fathers, how can we love ourselves?
        For Kristeva, love provides the support for fragmented meanings and fragmented subjectivities.  Love provides the support to reconnect words and affects.  She says that "love is something spoken, and it is only that".  Our lives have meaning for us, we have a sense of ourselves, through the narratives which we prepare to tell others about our experience.   Even if we do not tell our stories, we live our experience through the stories that we construct in order to "tell ourselves" to another, a loved one.  As we wander through our days, an event takes on its significance in the narrative that we construct for an imaginary conversation with a loved one as we are living it.  The living body is a loving body, and the loving body is a speaking body.  Without love we are nothing but walking corpses.  Love is essential to the living body and it is essential in bringing the living body to life in language.

Kelly Oliver
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