On the 50^th Anniversary of La Révolution du langage poétique

This year, 2024, marks the 50^th anniversary of the original French edition of Julia Kristeva’s epoch-making volume, La Révolution du langage poétique. L’avant-garde à la fin du XIX^e siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (1974) (Revolution in Poetic Language. The Avant-Garde at the End of the XIXth Century: Lauréamont and Mallarmé). The work was originally defended in 1973 in Paris as a doctorat d’état ès lettres. On the panel were Jean-Claude Chevalier (supervisor), Henri Lefèbvre, Pierre Albouy and Roland Barthes. The thesis was awarded the highest honour: mention très bien avec félicitations du jury.

Only the first third of La Révolution du langage poétique dealing with basic theoretical issues has been translated into English, namely as: Revolution in Poetic Language (RPL) (1984). And although references to the last two-thirds of the work in question do exist, they are few and far between.

Of course, 50 years on, we want to know what the significance of La Révolution du langage poétique is today. And I will come to that. But initially let me make a few observations to set the scene.

Thus, in a number of respects, this is truly an avant-gardist tome. Firstly, because it is exclusively concerned with analysing the substance of the works of two indisputably nineteenth-century avant-garde authors: ‘Comte de Lautréamont’ (nom de plume of Isidore Lucien Ducasse (1846-1870)) and the poet, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), author of the almost intractably opaque prose poem printed across two pages, Un Coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance). 

Secondly, it is avant-garde (or was in 1974) because its main thesis is that poetic language could be revolutionary, politically speaking. Justification of this thesis stemmed from the notion that the historical context of late-nineteenth century France was of a sort that social and cultural institutions – particularly in the management of the French language – reinforced an incipient conservatism manifest in a hyper-nationalistic fervour, such that the very materiality of avant-garde texts à la Lautréament and Mallarmé could constitute the system’s bête noir. Thus ‘context’ (regarding, for example, marriage and proper use of language) was ingested into the texts in question. For this reason, included at the end of the French text is a ‘synoptic table’ setting out the main social and scientific developments under the Second Empire (1852-1870) and the Third Republic (1870-1940) (Kristeva’s focus for the latter is on the period, 1870-1900). Amongst others, the following points are noted:

The suppression of the French Commune in 1871 and Prussia’s victory over France in the same year. An intensification of the battle of the Church against the State in 1877. In 1879, ‘La Marseillaise’ becomes the national hymn. In 1881, free primary education was introduced. Divorce becomes legal in 1884. The Dreyfus Affair irrupts between 1894 and 1906. From 1870s onward, French colonial expansion occurs apace. Industrialisation takes place in fits and starts: France remains predominantly rural until the 1890s, behind the industrialisation of Germany and England. And language policy has the following features: under the Third Republic the only language allowed in primary school was French. All other languages were forbidden, even in the schoolyard, and transgressions were severely punished. After 1918, the use of German in Alsace-Lorraine was outlawed.

Already, in her Doctorat de troisième cycle (published as Le Text du roman), Kristeva had argued that the modern, novelistic text – unlike folk or fairy tales – was porous and open to incorporating external elements. And so, the context of the text of poetic language is crucial to understanding its aesthetic and political significance. This, at least, is what the untranslated two thirds of La Révolution endeavours to prove by showing that the semiotic, as the ‘materiality’ of language highlighted by the text of poetic language, shocks an outmoded version of the symbolic order based on a fetishistic relation to what is ‘proper’.  

In other words, what the untranslated two-thirds of Kristeva’s text shows is that manipulation of the semiotic chôra occurs through a signifying practice that challenges the foundation of societal institutions: its orthodoxies as regards language, education, art, morality (sexuality), politics, etc. In the context where a society’s language is organised around the Academy, ‘fiddling’ with grammar and syntax, or with clear prose à la Voltaire, the ‘turning inward’ of writing and the text as material object were viewed, at the time (late nineteenth century), as a scandalous travesty. So, this is practice. It is what makes a difference, socially speaking. In terms of the signifying process, practice is what would give the symbolic a transitory jolt. ‘Transitory’ is used advisedly here because a continued suppression of the symbolic leads to psychosis. That is, at stake is ‘the balance between sociality and madness’ (Kristeva 1974: 214-15).   

An ethics of writing fundamentally concerns the semiotic; for, as we now know, the semiotic, while present in the message of the text is not equivalent to this message, which is incarnate in the symbolic dimension of the signifying process. As such, ethics becomes a writing practice. Thus, ‘the text fulfills its ethical function only when it pluralises, pulverises “musicates”’ (233). This implies, too, that it is the material dimension of writing that becomes ethical: the latter is thus found in the opacity and not in the transparency of the text – the text as meaning, which, as such, enables an ideological approach to art (c.f., Sartre). The revolution would derive from what writing is and not from what it says.

Laughter as provoked by Lautréamont becomes the quintessential modality of the text as practice. 

Reading Lautréamont in light of the play of pronouns (‘shifterisation’) and reading Mallarmé through the prism of syntax and grammaticality in order to discover whether or not a communicative text can be recovered are part of Kristeva’s interpretative strategy.

Ultimately, our author concludes that it is the ‘nonsymbolic’ expenditure of drive energy in the semiotic chôra that predominates in poetic language – an expenditure provoked by a ‘throw of the dice’ (Mallarmé) and the manipulation of pronouns (Lautréamont). 

Today – fifty years on – what are we to make of this valorisation of poetic language as revolutionary? A quick response would be to acknowledge that the avant-garde is to a certain extent, passé. Perhaps this was postmodernism’s key message. Who, today, does not spurn tradition in the quest to produce something entirely new?

However, as regards Kristeva’s stance there is more. And it has to do with the positing of the semiotic as fundamentally implicated in the sacrificial origin of society that inaugurates the ‘event’ of language and the symbolic. This is explained in the following passage from RPL:

The regulation of the semiotic in the symbolic through the thetic break which is inherent in the operation of language is also found on various levels of a society’s signifying edifice. In all known archaic societies this founding break of the symbolic order is represented by murder – the killing of a man, a slave, prisoner, an animal. Freud reveals this founding break and generalizes from it when he emphasizes that society is founded on a complicity in the common crime. We indicated earlier how language, already as semiotic chora but above all as a symbolic system, is at the service of the death drive, diverts it, and confines it within an isolated pocket of narcissism (70).

So, the break is a murder, something finite and concrete, to say the least. By way of further elaboration, we see that the artist, comparable to a scapegoat, might well be involved (the work of René Girard is echoed here (see Girard 1979)). Thus, we read: ‘Opposite religion or alongside it, “art” takes on murder and moves through it. It assumes murder insofar as artistic practice considers death the inner boundary of the signifying process. Crossing that boundary is precisely what constitutes “art”’ (70. Emphasis added).  

The artist must, then, make him – or herself the ‘bearer of death’: ‘In this sense, the artist is comparable to all other figures of the “scapegoat”. But he is not just a scapegoat. In fact, what makes him an artist radically distinguishes him from all other sacrificial murderers and victims’ (70. Emphasis added). 

Here, we move into the territory of violence and the sacred. This is where the origin of society lies and the institution of symbolism begins. While this might have seemed innovative in 1974, how does it come across today? This is the question.

There is, then, no doubt that the explanation of the origin of society given by social anthropology strongly influenced Kristeva’s concept (if that is the right word) of the semiotic. Violence and the sacred – that is, the break of discontinuity – is the basis of the positing of the social order and the establishment of this order as the separation from ‘nature’ as continuity. The mother’s body (the chôra, in fact) comes to represent this continuity in the sphere of discontinuity, that is in society, in the symbolic, thus, in logic and language. Perhaps there is no better summation of Kristeva’s understanding of the link between sacrifice and poetry (i.e., poetic language) than the following passage from RPL that occurs towards the end of a detailed consideration of sacrifice: ‘Poetry emerged alongside sacrifice as the expenditure of the thesis establishing the socio-symbolic order and as the bringing into play the vehemence of drives through the positing of language’ (RPL 83. Emphasis added). If we were to be careless and not pay attention to detail, it might seem as though Kristeva reiterates the ‘nature-culture’ divide made famous by Lévi-Strauss. This is, however, to ignore the detail of Kristeva’s more nuanced analysis.

Nevertheless, before proceeding, the positing of language equates, I suggest, to the ‘event’ of language as a finite entity, that is, to something immanent and not something transcendent. In Kristeva’s words: ‘The sacred does not […] celebrate pure violence; it celebrates instead the positing of violence, the “boundary to the infinite”’ (79). ‘Boundary to the infinite’ is Mallarmé’s phrase. It is entirely pertinent to the idea of the finitude of language. 

If the thetic is where ‘positions and their syntheses’ are set up, sacrifice will be the chief mechanism, if not the essential precondition, that gives rise to these positions. Sacrifice, as an act of violence, puts an end to the continual violence in nature. But some of nature’s violence seeps through into the symbolic. As far as the subject is concerned this violence becomes manifest in the drives, in pleasure (jouissance) – in the semiotic, in short. It is a violence then that becomes immersed in the fabric of the symbolic, thus in the social order. Poetic language, but also art in general (‘this semiotization of the symbolic’ (79)), is in touch with such violence, also called the ‘a-symbolic’ (76). Thus, at certain points,

this practice […] of semiotic violence breaks through the symbolic order, and tends to dissolve the logical order, which is, in short, the outer limit founding the human and the social. This practice is the representation that generally precedes sacrifice: it is the laboratory for among other things, theatre, poetry, song, dance – art. That the combat it mimes precedes the sacrificial slaying is less important than the fact that it mimes in the full sense of the term: it repeats not a detached object but the movement of the symbolic economy. By reproducing signifiers – vocal, gestural, verbal – the subject crosses the border of the symbolic and reaches the semiotic chora, which is on the other side of the social frontier (79). 

The symbolic is thus the drive energy’s ‘regulatory’ mechanism, never cutting off drive energy completely, but at the same time endeavouring to mitigate its destructive power.

How exactly, though, does sacrifice bring society and the symbolic into being? Kristeva spends – or is it ex-pends? – a considerable number of words to explain. Thus, we find, for instance, that murder is ‘only one of the phantasmatic and mythic realizations of the logical phase inherent in any socio-symbolic order’ (75).

What now attracts our attention is the role of myth in evoking the positing of violence at the origin of society. The underlying question is: does myth remain today a viable mechanism for explaining the nature of society as founded on violence? This is what needs to be evaluated.  

Pertinent here are Greek myth and tragedy as evocative of the origin of the social that are mentioned in passing by Kristeva. But it is Freud’s description of ‘parricide’ in Totem and Taboo that is of special significance in her commentary. Suffice it to cite here a number of ‘sacred representations’ that are said to evoke sacrifice, including the ‘Dionysian festivals in Greece [that] are the most striking example of the deluge of the signifier, which so inundates the symbolic order that it portends the latter’s dissolution in a dancing, singing, and poetic animality’ (79). Myth thus plays a key role in the evocation of sacrifice and the foundation of the symbolic order. We see, as a result, that murder – sacrifice – is conceived as both destructive and creative in a fairly classical sense: ‘We thus find sacrifice and art face to face representing the two aspects of the thetic function: the prohibition of jouissance by language and the introduction of jouissance into and through language’ (80).

The avant-garde poet – as we have had call to note already – both introduces the jouissance of drive energy into language, but not so much as to become delirious or mad, but just enough to challenge an impotent symbolic, where prohibition and orthodoxy are excessively reinforced. Or, as our author remarks, what is rejected is: ‘the old poetry as a fetishistic guardian of meaning and the subject’ (83-4). Now, with the avant-garde, we have ‘violence surging up through the phonetic, syntactical and logical orders’ (83). Kristeva also mentions that poetry has its roots in ritual (80). Ritual should be understood as a repetition through miming of past events – a reminder to all and sundry of past events, the events of sacrifice, for example. 

From a psychoanalytic angle, the Name-of-the-Father (mythically derived from the account of parricide in the primal horde), stands for the symbolic, while the Mother stands for the ‘mystery’ of nature. Again, this is undeniably an eminently classical rendition, but it is one that Kristeva invokes in her interpretation, for example, of the context of Mallarmé’s poetry. Here, let us cite the passage from La Révolution referring to Freud and the father as symbolic. Clearly, the status of the mother as confirmed by Christianity, is distinct from that of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’. Reference to Moses and Monothesism is a clear evocation of the myth of the primal horde, where the sons commit parricide, but then, in their contrition they establish the Law.

The significance, for Kristeva, of Freud’s theory of the founding murder is confirmed in La Révolution, where it is said that:

Anthropological research and the sociology of history, like the Freudian breakthrough in these domains, designates a sacrifice or a murder, which, more precisely, is for Freud, the murder of the father, at the base of the social edifice. The collectivity exists on condition that murder (of the father) is expelled from its midst. Murder can be suggested but only under a denegation, that is under the form of the power (puissance) that this murder confers on the murderer, suddenly transformed into a priest-sacrificer, the holder, at the same time, of the secret upon which the social contract is based. The social contract and the culpability that it founds, denies the murder and, through it, more generally denies the power of rejection, the irruption of which, we have said, relates to the psychotic structure: in parallel with the institution of the social, the denegation of rejection produces psychosis. (545-46).

Clearly, the upshot of all this is that the theory of the semiotic and poetic language – the putative revolution in poetic language – is fundamentally implicated in the theory of the violent origin of the social and that via the semiotic some of this violence is filtered through into the symbolic. Viewed in this way Kristeva’s thesis evokes the work of Girard, whom she does not fail to acknowledge. And it is Girard’s work that has become increasingly well known in recent times across a wide spectrum of disciplines. When all is said and done, along with Girard and others, Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic as the muted violence that gave rise to the origin of the social is a theory that privileges immanence over transcendence. Would it be too much to say that, today, it is immanence (c.f., Deleuze) that is all the rage, not transcendence? – although it might also be close to the mark to say that Emmanual Levinas’s philosophy that privileges transcendence is making headway.

The key here is that transcendence as infinity does not dispense with finitude (that is, with immanence). It does not isolate finitude as the latter often isolates infinity – or as immanence isolates transcendence. To go beyond totality is not to deny totality. Totality presupposes that there is no ‘beyond’, no exteriority. For if there were, totality would not be what it is, that is, an identity. Hence, Levinas’s emphasis on the multiple rather than the One – the latter conforming to social normality which excludes the other. Perhaps the least that one can say apropos of the semiotic is that it does not lead to a privileging of normality and the identity that underpins this.

Let me conclude, then, by saying that whereas, once, it was immanence (finitude, materiality – the semiotic!) that was revolutionary, today, it may well be transcendence (infinity) that has taken over this mantel. 

References

Girard, René (1979) Violence and the Sacred, trans Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Paperback edition.

Kristeva, Julia (1974) La Révolution du langage poétique. L’avant-garde à la fin du XIX^e siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé, Paris: Seuil.

Kristeva, Julia (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller, New York: Columbia University Press.

Author Bio

John Lechte is Emeritus Professor in Sociology at Macquarie University in Sydney. His latest books are: The Human (2018), Violence and the Image (2023), Philosophy of the Medium (2024).