The discussion of poetry, the unconscious & spirituality continues to generate interesting responses. Today, Michael McColl invokes the work and thinking of Julia Kristeva.

Ron,

I've often wondered why more poets have not spoken of the work of Julia Kristeva as influencing or validating their practice. Her account of the way the unconscious disrupts the symbolic order and the "transcendent ego" is persuasive theoretically – if you credit the thought of Freud and Lacan – and provides a model for imaginative writing which ties signification to the body, partly through her account of the "chora," a pre-linguistic yet semiotic order of the drive energies of the body (one example of such order would be the family structure).

With entry into the Symbolic Order - the law, the father, the oedipus complex, etc. – most of the drive energy is bound into these structures but traces of the chora remain inscribed in the body.

"Whether in the realm of metalanguage (mathematics, for example) or literature, what remodels ["tears open" she says earlier in the same paragraph] the symbolic order is always the influx of the semiotic." (from Revolution in Poetic Language).

Perhaps a tendency to keep at a distance whatever seems to emphasize the individual rather than the community (the bourgeois self, or bourgeois individualism, has been heavily critiqued) might account for the relative lack of interest in the part of Kristeva's thought which locates de-stabilization of Order in individual bodily energies.

Kristeva says that "the signifying process joins social revolution" in transgressing boundaries of the "thetic" (stage where hypothetical subject splits off in order to be able to denote an object) and the theological. On a certain level of abstraction, might this connection to the social (or political) would resemble what Language influenced poetries often posit as their political dimension?

Sincerely,

Michael McColl

This may (or may not) be “persuasive theoretically,” but my own sense is that the argument carries me away from, rather than toward, poetry & poetics. In that sense, my own reaction to Kristeva’s work is (has always been) rather close to what it is when I read Chomsky’s linguistic writings: that they may be addressing topics of great interest to me, but from a perspective that is at all usable from my own position as practicing poet. I don’t want a “chora” reducible to “drives,” but rather to explore the complex social terrain figured there – in social terms.

However, to continue the analogy, I’ve found both pre-Chomsky linguists, such as Jacobson, and post-Chomsky linguists, such as Lakoff & the cognitive folks generally, to be of considerable value from the perspective of poetry. Maybe the question isn’t Chomsky or Kristeva at all, but simply the fact that I have yet to find the text(s) that connect their respective discourses to my own concerns.