5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
prelinguistic experience—including feelings, drives and rhythms experienced by the
infant in its pre-Oedipal relation to the mother. According to Kristeva, our semiotic
longing for the pre-Oedipal mother, though repressed with entry to the symbolic,
remains present in the unconscious and cannot be shut off from society and culture.
The semiotic, Kristeva says, is present in the rhythms, slips and silences in speech;
and it is subversive of the Law of the Father since it is rooted in a pre-patriarchal
connection with the feminine. Yet Kristeva denies that the feminine semiotic has any
intrinsic link with gender, because it stems from the pre-Oedipal phase and is thus
prior to sexual difference. Thus, if the semiotic is ‘feminine’, it is a femininity that is
always potentially available to women and men in their efforts to transform gender
power. Kristeva looks to the semiotic as a means of subverting the male-dominated
symbolic order. She finds a clear expression of the semiotic in the writings of avant-
garde authors, such as Mallarme, Lautréamont and Artaud, writing which she feels
defies patriarchal language. Kristeva also locates semiotic subversion in pregnancy.
The psychic experience of giving birth, Kristeva says, reproduces ‘the radical ordeal of
the splitting of the subject: redoubling of the body, separation and coexistence of the
self and of an other, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and speech’ (1986:206).
In her more recent work, especially Black Sun (1989) and New Maladies of the Soul
(1993), Kristeva situates the emotional turmoil produced by contemporary culture
with reference to depression, mourning and melancholia. In depression, argues
Kristeva, there is an emotional disinvestment from the Symbolic, from language as
such. The depressed person, overwhelmed by sadness, suffers from a paralysis of
symbolic activity. In effect, language fails to substitute for what has been lost at the
level of the psyche. The loss of loved ones, the loss of ideals, the loss of pasts: as
the depressed person loses all interest in the surrounding world, in language itself,
psychic energy shifts to a more primitive mode of functioning, to a maternal,
drive-orientated form of experience. In short, depression produces a trauma of
symbolic identification, a trauma which unleashes the power of semiotic energy.
In the force field of the semiotic —rhythms, semantic shifts, changes in intimation—
Kristeva finds a means to connect the unspoken experience of the depressed person
to established meaning, thereby facilitating an emotional reorganization of the self.
The foregoing feminist theories represent one of the most important areas of
contemporary psychoanalytic criticism. They help explain, more clearly than
conventional Lacanian accounts, the ways in which dominant sexual ideologies
penetrate everyday life, and also explore the radicalizing possibilities of a feminine
transformation of gender. But assumptions are made in these theories which need to
be questioned. For one thing, the male-dominated Law is opposed in these accounts