Kristeva, Mimesis, and Sacrifice

Abstract

Sacrifice haunts the work of Julia Kristeva. Drawing upon the work of Jacques Lacan and social anthropologists (such as Robertson Smith, Hubert and Mauss, Evans-Pritchard, and Levi-Strauss), she outlines a contemporary criticism of ideology. For her, the genesis of the subject occurs in the two phases of the thetic, which a rupture and/or a boundary with the unconscious or semiotic chora. This genesis of the subject in the two phases of the thetic (the mirror stage and castration) a scene of (what may be called) sacrifice. Sacrifice traditionally has been interpreted as a violent action that effects the revelation of that overcomes the aspect of the sacrifice. Sacrifice pays. One gets a return on one's investment. In the thetic, the rhythm of drives and their stases characteristic of the unconscious or semiotic chora confined (through sacrifice) to generate the signification of the symbolic order. This necessary confinement of semiotic violence through sacrifice (which tends toward the unicity of theological or ideological truth, which in turn represses the semiotic) subsequently interrupted by mimesis and poetic language, which deploy the expenditure of semiotic violence and question the very principle of the ideological. I want to suggest that perhaps the boundary between sacrifice and mimesis (or poetic language) not distinct. Mimesis or poetic language the reversed reactivation of the contradiction that institutes the thetic characteristic of the symbolic. The reversed reactivation of the contradiction that institutes the thetic a reversed reactivation of the contradictory sacrificial process insofar as it understood as simultaneously violent and confining or regulatory. The poet mimics sacrifice, for the poet, according to Kristeva, comparable to the scapegoat. But the poet not merely a scapegoat insofar as the poet's practice, setting itself up as a substitute for the thetic moment (rupture and/or boundary) instituting symbolism, does not allow his or her function to become harnessed (as the case with sacrifice, which tends toward the unicity of theological or ideological truth). The poet dwells with this rupture, at this boundary. The poet is the subject in process/on trial (en proces). And the truth of this moment articulated by a new dialectic. But, I will argue, this scapegoat (who not merely a scapegoat) remains governed (despite Kristeva's intentions) by the logic of sacrifice, insofar as this moment remains the revelation of (whether this the unicity of traditional doxy or the plurality of the new dialectic that likewise vulnerable to theologization). Kristeva wants to prevent such theologization (which she correctly attributes to sacrifice), but the way she describes mimesis (as a reversed reactivation of sacrifice) only sets the stage for another form of theologization. Her work must, therefore, be relentlessly corrected. It must be withdrawn from the tendency to sacrifice that haunts mimesis. Mimesis and Sacrifice In Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), Kristeva posits the ontological status of the unconscious or semiotic chora. Kristeva borrows the term chora from Plato's Timaeus to denote a nonexpressive totality formed by the rhythm of drives and their stases in a motility that as full of ruptures as it of ephemeral regulating stases (a regulation that is, however, different from the symbolic law). Although drives have been described as contradictory structures, insofar as they are simultaneously negative and positive, this doubling generates a dominent destructive wave that these drives' most characteristic trait, and the most instinctual drive, according to Freud, the death drive. In this way, the term drive denotes waves of attack against stases, which are themselves constituted by the repetition of these charges; together, charges and stases lead to no identity (not even that of the body proper) that could be seen as a result of their functioning. …