Customer Reviews

Revolution in Poetic Language (European Perspectives Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The previous reviewer clearly did not understand this intricate and admittedly difficult work in the least - it is certainly NOT an example of the "emperor has no clothes" syndrome. It is, however, a challenging and complicated work that presumes a good deal of exposure to continental philosophy (especially the phenomonologies of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger) and Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis. Kristeva does an impresive and convincing - as well as constructive - job of tying together these overlapping philosophical/ideolgical traditions and ties them into notions of how a subject comes to exist as such in and through a world of language... Going behind the mis-en-abime of Lacan and beyond the linguistic monism of postsrtucturalism, Kristeva gives a living, breathing account of these different themes (of which the previous reviewer seem utterly unaware - but then again, philosophy can be hard)....more later...

I stumbled across the three-star average for this and was appalled. Of course, it is based on one person giving a poor toss-off review and another person giving a positive review, still a toss-off. I identify with what the latter reviewer is doing here. Amazon reviews cannot do this work justice. You have to go soak this in for yourself. All I can say is that it is as life-changing as theory gets. All the rest of us can dream of being so revolutionary and lucid as Kristeva here. That is the use of this book in this era. An important use at that.

In this great book, you will find a whirled stairway to the very innards of that stirring and shaking inquiry called theory. From Saussure to Husserl, from Plato to Freud, and taking on Chomsky, Frege, Hjelmslev and las but not least, Lacan, Kristeva undertakes a criticism which is that of the two most troubling concepts in the western thought: the subject and the sign.
In order to a new and, more and foremost, springing overture to come about, this French psychoanalyst and critic penetrates in the very core of the more intricated authors who built his theories within the sing and the subject; a sign and a subject Kristeva tears apart from the confortable room that eiher in structuralism (with Saussure and Hjelmslev, but also with Noam Chomsky) as in fenomenology (with Husserl)they reside, and finds out the semiotic, this motilities drives whiches allow a freer subject to show up in the very symbolism of language and, even with no destroy it, disrupt it from within, taking over the symbolic whereby all the socials constraints burst into the individual.
Thus, we have in this Etrangere (as Barthes named her) one of the most creative and, hence, one of the most revolutionaries thought the twentieth century give us.

Like contemplating metaforeplay

Never having been a person, but only the very matter itself, I would like to attempt an explanation of a few ideas in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974, 1984) by Julia Kristeva in reaction to the following poem:

Liberty,
Equality,
Fraternity,
Vasectomy.

The beginning of the poem expresses political ideals. The final line brings in a medical procedure that could prevent forthcoming bastards. As a possessor of meaning, the poem would grant a person like me the ability to change character completely as the testosterone that is trapped in the man by vasectomy becomes a motivation for weirdness of an artistic nature like looking or touching instead of being attracted entirely to the sexual object.

Of interest in philosophy is a paragraph on page 58 of Kristeva's book on "the possibilities of truth specific to language." Crossing a boundary between true and false which is shaken by a flow into the symbolic becomes twisted like the fingers of the invisible hand in a social system in which political ideals are assumed to have great symbolic significance and only individuals suffer from being shaken. Life will always be verisimilar if it ends like the paragraph that swallowed mimesis:

Mimesis,
in our view,
is a transgression
of the thetic when
truth is no longer
a reference to an object
that is identifiable
outside of language;
it refers instead
to an object that can
be constructed through
the semiotic network
but is nevertheless posited
in the symbolic and is,
from then on,
always verisimilar. (p. 58).

This book is an exmaple of the "new emperor clothes" effect. Only the 'clever' people can 'understand' it, and other people are afraid to say that don't undertsand, because then they will not be regarded clever.