Semiotic Chora Research Articles

Beckett’s Not I as a Dramatic Rendition of Kristeva’s Notion of the Semiotic Chora

Samuel Beckett as a dramatist is well-known with his contributions to the landscape of British theatre. His plays reverberate with voices of traumatized, marginalized and war-stricken characters, which function as an implicit criticism of the turbulent atmosphere of the 1900s. When Beckett addresses the problems of his time in a covert way, the playwright deconstructs conventional elements of drama by specifying no plot, no setting or no theme. This Beckettian style also becomes manifest in his use of language which is characterized by the presence of segmented structures, pauses, ellipses and even silence. Considering these tenets of Beckettian drama, the thematic concerns of his theatrical productions are assumed to primarily revolve around the issues of nihilism, language, and ontology. Therefore, Beckett’s plays are thought to be read through the lenses of distinguished theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. From among these theorists, the concepts of the semiotic, the symbolic and the semiotic chora of Julia Kristeva as a poststructuralist thinker provide a fertile ground for a theoretical reading of Beckett’s play Not I (1972). Relevantly, this paper principally examines the applicability of Kristeva’s “semiotic chora” into Beckett’s Not I in all aspects.

Heterogeneity of the Freudian sign: Kristeva’s semiotic Chora and Lacan’s notion of lalangue

In this contribution, our aim is to explore and analyse the interplay between the approaches of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan during the 1970s. By seeking to transcend the limitations inherent in the structuralist framework, both authors endeavour to introduce new concepts that can account for the heterogeneity of Freudian sign. Previous studies examining the relationship between these two authors predominantly focused on Kristeva?s critique of Lacanian structuralist theory during the 1950s. From this standpoint, the semiotic chora is perceived as a force that fundamentally challenges Lacanian concepts. However, it is important to note that Kristeva was acquainted with Lacan?s later teachings, particularly the notion of lalangue that he introduced. Our argument posits that her critique stems from a misinterpretation of certain key concepts that Lacan put forth in the 1970s. Moreover, while Lacan would abandon the dialectical relationship in favour of the logic of triplicity, Kristeva continued to engage with the notion of heterogeneity through the lens of Hegelian dialectics.

From “Woman as Thing” to a “Subject-In-Process”: The Dynamics of Courtly Love in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752)

Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic analysis of “courtly love” concludes that the courtly image of the Knight’s subservience to his Lady actually masks the reality of male domination; however, Žižek’s own analysis seems complicit in the same problematic. Whereas courtly love provides a semblance of agency to the woman, in assuming the male partner as the subject from whose vantage the relationship is theorized, Žižek’s analysis strips the woman of any subjectivity or agency by rendering her an absolute object, a radical Otherness, a monster, and an automaton. While Žižek painstakingly represents the male-subject as the victim-agent in being the director of the masochistic performance, the female is rendered a perpetrator-object who despite enacting the terms of the same contract is termed an inhuman partner and hence a sadist. This lack of complex theorization of the Lady that renders her absolute evil reinforces conventional representation of femininity as evil. Besides, by declaring an impasse in feminism for its tendency to deny women ‘femininity’, Žižek, while bemoaning the inescapability of the asymmetrical love relationship ends up reifying it. While Žižek’s analysis writes the Lady off as a vacuum, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) provides an interesting alternative for theorizing courtly love from the vantage of the Lady via the protagonist, Arabella. A suitable framework for understanding Arabella’s investment in the conventions of courtly love can be found in Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytical model that allows for reconceiving the Lady in courtly love as a subject. While developing on the scholarship that explores the novel’s negotiation of the gendered eighteenth-century English society, I argue that Arabella’s delusional immersion in romances signifies her proximity to the semiotic chora given her preoedipal maternal severance. As such, her preference of the “feminine” form of romance, reflective of the subversive force of the semiotic, represents Arabella’s defiance of the rational, masculine, novelistic discourse of the eighteenth-century symbolic.

Elizabeth Bishop: Abjecting the Other and Estranging the Self

This research sheds light on Elizabeth Bishop’s demonstration of Julia Kisteva’s psychoanalytic concept of “Abjection” and “Estrangement” within the “maternal” space called semiotic chora. This maternal space exhibits abjection and estrangement within the fluid images in the poetic collections – Questions of Travel and Geography III. The mother-child bond celebrated in Bishop’s earlier collections culminates into the process of separation of the child from the mother, and subject from the object. Bishop’s separation from her mother forms new meanings for herself, which resist the identity of the mother, who is no more part of the subject, but an entity outside. Bishop has confronted her mother’s existence on the border of her identity. Yet the struggle to reject the mother’s body, in order to create an “I” becomes an ongoing process, which makes Bishop, as the subject, estranged to her own self. The ambivalent relationship with the mother, being outside the subject, speeds up the process of identity formation of the poet as subject. This, consequently, makes the subject confront her strangeness, owing to the multiplicity of meanings.

The Maternal Body and Reproductive Imagery in Milton: A Kristevan Analysis of the Birth and Womb Images in Paradise Lost

This article analyses Milton’s reproductive imagery and the images of birth and womb in Paradise Lost by deploying Kristevan concepts such as the semiotic chora and the abject. This study draws parallels between the Miltonic dialectic of creation and destruction and the Kristevan dialectic of the semiotic and the symbolic. Hence, it argues that the nativity of Eve and the creation of the universe embody the semiotic chora, while the allegory of Sin and Death, and the description of Chaos represent the abject maternal body. On one hand, positive reproductive images are utilised in the description of the birth of Eve and the creation of the universe. This evokes the impulse to retreat into the semiotic chora, a realm of sheer fullness and opulence, where there is no clear division between self and other. The longing for this realm, this paper claims, corresponds to the fallen human beings’ desire to regress into heavenly oneness. On the other hand, negative images of birth and womb are employed in the accounts of the Chaos and the allegory of Sin and Death. This represents, this article asserts, fear and revulsion that one feels because of reverting into the giant nocturnal uterus, where identities are annihilated and boundaries are shattered as the engulfing and choking womb deforms all distinct forms, shapes, and distinctly defined identities. This dialectical oscillation between a yearning to relapse into the semiotic chora and a deep anxiety over losing one’s autonomy in the devouring womb characterise Paradise Lost.

A Lovely Sleep: A Psychoanalytic Reading of The Cement Garden Through the Theoretical Lens of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva

Ian McEwan is the writer of the most controversial texts of the contemporary British fiction. One of the outstanding examples of his literature of shock, McEwan’s The Cement Garden, is a challenging narrative in the sense that it depicts the disturbing experiences of a family, ranging from incest to death. The fact that these experiences are narrated through an adolescent boy’s point of view makes these even more controversial in the sense that the depiction of events through this narrator’s view is focalized. Through this focalization, the horrifying events experienced by children are narrated as if they were just ordinary experiences which creates a somehow disturbing effect on the reader. However this disturbance also leads the reader to think that the actions of these children and their relationship to their parents and each other also refer to an underlying symbolism pertaining to their psychic conditions. This article aims to reveal and interpret the novel focusing on this underlying symbolism through the lens of Lacan’s concepts of ‘lack’ and the Symbolic order and Kristeva’s concept of ‘semiotic chora’.

Reading A Story about Abjection in The Fifth Child: Monstrous Child and Monstrous Mother

This paper aims to explore how the process of abjection affects an individual’s psychological reality by reading Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child from a Kristevan perspective. At the individual level, Ben, a retarded child born with deformity, is deprived of opportunities to enjoy the experience of semiotic chora, which will help him accept the law of language in the Symbolic. As an abjected monster, he reveals the process of the mother’s abjection operating in both inter-subjective and intra-subjective relationships. At the level of the social unconscious, Harriet, who gave birth to this monstrous child, is an embodiment of the archaic mother, who is essential to but potentially disruptive of the patriarchal order with its uncontrollable generative power. Despite societal suppression she suffer, Harriet shows the ethics of a mature subject based on maternal love by reinstating Ben into their home in spite of family’s disapproval, and by admitting that the monstrous child’s foreign otherness exists not outside but within ourselves.

The Animistic Way: Contemporary Paganism and the Posthuman

This article aims to explore the affinities between contemporary Paganism and the posthuman project in how they approach the non-human natural world. On the one hand, posthumanism explores new ways of considering the notion of humans and how they are linked with the non-human world. On the other hand, Neopaganism expands this reflection to the spiritual domain through its animistic relational sensibility. Both perspectives challenge the modern paradigm where nature and humans are opposed and mutually disconnected. They instead propose a relational ontology that welcomes the “different other.” This integrated relationship between humans and the “other than human” can be understood through the semiotic Chora, a notion belonging to Julia Kristeva that addresses how the subject is not symbolically separated from the world in which it is contained.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Watery Discourse: The Semiotic Chora at play

This paper theorizes the use of water imagery in Elizabeth Bishop’s selected postmodern poetry namely, “The Map”, “The Imaginary Iceberg” and “The Man-Moth”. Speaking in the language of tears, lake, bay, river, strait, sea and ocean, Bishop personifies water for culture and its language. It is on this basis that Bishop comes close to the French psychoanalyst and linguist, Julia Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic chora. Kristeva calls it a space of maternal discourse, where the fluid realm of mother’s body called chora celebrates the fluidity of semiotic desires and expresses them through the symbolic language of the world outside her body. Bishop revisits this bodily space, time and again, to acquire subjectivity through the mother/child bond. Bishop’s poetic language celebrates this relationship between the semiotic (maternal) and symbolic (paternal) realm of language. The symbolic enables the semiotic to express itself, and the semiotic shatters the rigidity of the symbolic meanings through an ongoing process of signification. This reciprocity, through the semiotic chora, makes Bishop’s identity fluid and always in motion towards multiplicity. This plurality brings newness to Bishop’s poetry and engages the researcher with fresh perspectives of outer vision, inner perception, structural patterns and make her poetry eventful.

Problematizing Motherhood

In this paper, I focus on the representation of motherhood from a two-fold perspective by choosing the bestselling Turkish baby diapers advertisements as a case study of broadcasting in Turkish media. The first perspective analyzes the representation of motherhood by applying the concept of “Male Gaze” by Laura Mulvey, according to whom a woman is objectified by the male gaze and becomes a bearer of meaning rather than a maker of meaning. Further, the themes emerging from a careful reading of representations of women in advertisements of baby diapers are discussed. The second perspective consists of looking at discursive strategies of the term “motherhood” by problematizing the fact that baby diapers are always identified with women, thereby also reducing them to commodities in the market. The second perspective applies Julia Kristeva’s “The Semiotic Chora” to reveal the myths about motherhood created by the ruling ideology of the males, and to seek possible alternatives through that perspective.

Body ground red – integrating Peirce, Kristeva and Greimas

Ground (Charles Peirce’s concept) – regardless whether it be taken as motivation or abstractness – affords the proposition that some abstract categories of meaning have acquired their qualities via bodily experience. In order to show this to be the case, the concept of ground will be drawn together with the division (according to Julia Kristeva) between the symbolic and the semiotic, the semiotic chora will be shown to function as an axiologizing thymic category as regard reception of perception (following Algirdas Greimas), and finally it will be proposed that it is this foundation that enables the coherence and inevitability of culture as a whole, being responsible for its stereoscopic quality as well. This procedure will further the haply sacrilegious march towards the emergence of modal semiotics, which allows us to dispense of signs in order to gain an anachronistically novel understanding of our own being.

Notes from the Semiotic Chora

This article argues that diffraction sits at the heart of the affective experience of being in audience. By combining affect theory, new materialism and feminist psychoanalysis, I establish diffraction as a metaphor for grappling with the unnameable 'in-between' of affect and performance, and use performative writing to illustrate the intra-active affective attachments that are formed – only to dissolve again – in moments of performance. By entering into an affective engagement with the audience, theatre and performance's diffractive potential opens up in both cerebral and affective forms: subjects become not-subjects and not-objects; light and shadow takes on meaning in both body and mind; language moves through a multiplicity of forms. In short, theatre and performance's diffraction opens out into affect. Affect, in turn, moves through, around and within bodies, with these new affective realities diffract into feelings, emotions and thoughts that are carried out into public life. Borrowing from Peggy Phelan's (1997) performative writing, this paper uses performative, diffractive writing (and, therefore, urges performative and diffractive reading) in order to evoke the affective experience of being in audience. This matching of form and content aims to disrupt the phallogocentrism inherent to academic writing, offering something 'more-than'. By circling with and around affect, writing, and performance, I am arguing for diffraction not just as a mode of critical inquiry, but a leaky, affective, performative methodology.

Strategies of Desire in Nejoud Al-Yagout’s Poetry

This paper considers the ways by which language is used within the context of poetic expression. Kuwaiti author Nejoud Al-Yagout experiments with the usage of English and Italian in her poetry collections This is An Imprint (2015) and Ounces of Oneness (2016). The work, the author argues, is essentially a desire for an ultimate dissolving of boundaries. Western thought relies heavily on binaries and dichotomies that are set in hierarchies. Reading Al-Yagout’s work as a translingual writer enables us to shift between borders of language and culture. Throughout a close textual analysis of her poetry, we arrive at the premise that Al-Yagout’s work is not only undefined by language and culture, but it is also limitless in its expansive call for a dissolution of boundaries. The speaker is almost always androgynous, to use Virginia Woolf’s term, and searches for a deeper understanding of herself within the borders of society. The author of this paper argues that Al- Yagout’s multiplicity of voice arrives instead within the semiotic chora, and yet, the chora in Al- Yagout’s work is not the maternal, but rather, the Divine.

Mağriplinin Son İç Çekişi Romanında Ana-Oğul İlişkisi ve Kimlik Oluşumu

Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh revolves around the Moor who needs to record his genealogical history in order to survive at a madman’s castle and restore his mother’s reputation. While re-telling his family’s story that originated in Granada, parallel to the history of post-independence India, the Moor makes use of his mother Aurora’s magical realist paintings that combine official History with individual histories. Aurora, the oppressive mother figure, dominates the Moor’s narrative through her paintings entitled “The Moor Cycle” and manipulates his story-telling and identity-formation process. In “The Moor Cycle” paintings, she extols the Moor’s deformed body and associates him with the last Sultan Boabdil of Granada. Reshaping the flow of history, the mother-son relationship and its dynamics are as important as the historical backdrop of the narrative. This parallelism between individual histories and the history of India necessitates an allegorical reading, which gives the key role to ‘Aurora the mother.’ Rushdie’s choice of Aurora as the main source of his postmodern narrative and her haunting influence on the Moor’s identity-formation echo the Mother India myth promoted during the Indian nation-building process. The love-hate relationship between the Moor and Aurora, and its effecs on the Moor’s identity will be analyzed by referring to Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. Rushdie’s association of magical realism with the maternal semiotic chora, his metaphorical use of the Moor’s grotesque body and the abject figures’ potential of breaking the world order based on the law of the father will also be highlighted within the framework of Kristeva’s theory. Therefore, Aurora’s paintings will be read as a feminine form of history-writing that challenges the paternal discourse that writes the official History.

Mothering in the Stepmother Tongue: Maternal Subjectivity and Linguistic Practice in Nancy Huston's Autobiographical Non-Fiction

This article explores Huston's subject position as a mother and writer that emerges in her autobiographical non-fiction written during or reflecting upon the period of her life when her children were born and during their early childhood. The article aims to understand how and why Huston comes to mother in her adoptive ‘stepmother’ tongue, French, and how it is significant in her translingual writing practice. In light of Julia Kristeva's concept of the semiotic chora and its interpretation offered by Alison Stone, this article argues that although Huston's maternal linguistic practice originates in a traumatic early experience of her mother's departure, her embodied use of French with her children performs a restorative and healing function enabling a translingual practice of mothering as well as writing.

Tasmania’s Cupboard: Indigenous and Convict Australia in Carmel Bird’s Writing

ABSTRACTThe writings of Carmel Bird (Patrick White Award 2016) are a suitable literary canvas from which to explore a central concern in the work of a white Australian woman writer of Celtic descent: the need to reconcile herself with two dark chapters of Australia’s history; namely, the convict past and Indigenous genocide. This paper investigates Bird’s controversial focus on Australia’s – particularly Tasmania’s – past dispossession from her debut novel in 1985 to her present-day production. The use of exile, abjection, secrecy and what Julia Kristeva calls ‘the semiotic chora’ – together with different tropes such as Derrida’s crypt, incest, unpleasant corporeity and the neocolonial ghost – allows Bird’s subaltern voices to emerge and break the ‘great Australian silence.’

Quality, Rhetoric, and Choric Regression: Revisiting Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

In this article, I reexamine quality and rhetoric in Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance through Julia Kristeva's semiotic chora. To that end, I review three analyses of Pirsig's novel, reinscribe quality as a prediscursive experience of undifferentiated wholeness, argue that regression back into Kristeva's chora is one way to recover this prediscursive experience, and hypothesize that the rhetoric of Zen is an unstable discourse in which prediscursive energies from the chora disrupt and realign the meanings of signifiers. I conclude by generalizing my work beyond Pirsig's novel to three concepts in rhetorical scholarship.

“Kleng jaa tjeng tjang” – Julia Kristeva and the Transformation of Everyday Language

SummaryThis article examines the role of linguistics in the work of the French psychoanalyst and professor of linguistics Julia Kristeva and shows how she has developed Lacan's theory of the relation between mother, child and language further. Her unique contribution favours the inclusion of the semiotic chora in the relation and focuses on a type of language used by the child when inside the womb that is characterised by pulsating rhythms. Finally, I will show how this theory is put into practice in the clinic itself. Kristeva's project is to address the problem of “the relationship between language and bodily experience” (Oliver 2002: xx) and to show how the bodily drives manifest themselves in language. To argue aspects of Kristeva's views on linguistics, I will refer to a poem by Breyten Breytenbach called “Die tweegeveg” (The duel).

Семіотична хора в дискурсі соціальних комунікацій

Семіотична хора в дискурсі соціальних комунікацій

Maternal Ruptures/Raptures

This article, co-authored by Ildikó Rippel and Rosie Garton of Zoo Indigo Theatre Company, explores two performance works; Under the Covers (2009) and Blueprint (2012), devised and performed by the duo. Both works present live video links to family members of the performers. In Under the Covers the live video was streamed from the bedrooms of the performers’ four young children, and the duo asked the audience to babysit their sleeping children so that they could ‘get on with the show’ (Zoo Indigo 2009). In Blueprint live video links brought the performers’ mothers (four in total) into the performance space.On occasions during the touring of both of these works, the relationship between the live performers on stage and the live streamed family members on screen caused unscripted reactions from the performers on stage. During a performance of Under the Covers, one of the crying babies prompted a let down effect for a breastfeeding performer. In Blueprint the sharing of anecdotes caused a performer on stage to cry. In these occasions the leaking of bodily fluids of milk and tears caused a momentary leakage of the Real into the Symbolic framework of theatre. This article uses the experience of performing these works to argue that the maternal body in performance has the capacity to cause a rupture, a fracture within representation, for a rapturous Real to emerge. The article draws on Psychoanalytical theory, specifically Jaques Lacan’s discussion of the Real, and Julia Kristeva’s writing on the semiotic chora.