On negativity in Revolution in Poetic Language

On negativity in Revolution in Poetic Language

Sina Kramer

Published online: 14 August 2013

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language offers a challenge to theories

of the subject in psychoanalysis, linguistic theory, and in philosophy. Central to that

challenge is Kristeva’s conception of negativity. In this article, I trace the devel-

opment of the concept of negativity in Revolution in Poetic Language from its root

in Hegel, to rejection, which Kristeva develops out of Freud. Both are crucial to the

development of the material dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic that

makes up Kristeva’s subject-in-process/on trial. I argue that a clearer understanding

of Kristeva’s conception of negativity helps us to better appreciate the force of

Kristeva’s challenge, both philosophically and politically. Finally I argue that

Kristevan negativity also helps us to clarify the relation between the delimited space

of politics and its conditions, laying the groundwork for constitutive exclusion as

political critique and opening a space for the possibility of political re-constitutions.

Keywords Kristeva � Freud � Hegel � Negativity � Constitutive exclusion

Cecilia Sjoholm writes in Kristeva and the Political that ‘‘[t]he writings of Kristeva

were, already from the start, politically motivated.’’1 Like several other thinkers of

her generation, Julia Kristeva inherited from Hegel the concept of negativity—the

force of mediation in the Hegelian dialectic, or the force that brings identity and

difference into relation.2 Kristeva, like Derrida, Irigaray, and Adorno, took up the

S. Kramer (&)

Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA, USA

e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]

1 Sjoholm (2005, p. 2).2 See, for instance, the determinations of reflection in the doctrine of essence, in part two of Hegel’s

Science of Logic. Hegel (1998).

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Cont Philos Rev (2013) 46:465–479

DOI 10.1007/s11007-013-9272-y

task of thinking negativity beyond or otherwise than determinate negation, or the

limited sense in which they claimed Hegel had resolved a more radical underlying

negativity.3 These thinkers saw a radical potential in Hegel’s philosophy that had

been repressed, suppressed, or disavowed in the ultimate resolution of all

differences in Absolute Spirit, or in the enclosed, self-contained idealist system

Hegel set forth. These attempts to push the idea of negativity and mediation beyond

its Hegelian boundaries are already a political endeavor. While not an interrogation

of political institutions or structures, they center on mediation, relation, identity and

difference, concepts fundamental to the problem of living with others. More

specifically, these theories of negativity represent an attempt to think politics in

relation to its outside—to think the conditions of politics, the unthought of or the

underside of politics. Negativity as a mode of mediation and relation is therefore

crucial to these theorists in thinking the political, especially in thinking the bases for

critique and for change in relation to the delimited domain of the political.

Kristeva’s intervention in particular brings the thinking of negativity to bear on the

constitution of the material and psychic subject. Kristeva brings the tools of

psychoanalysis and Marxist materialism together in this work in order to, as she puts

it, ‘‘give the advances of dialectical logic a materialist foundation’’ through thinking

the negativity of the subject.4

In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva levels a striking critique of

subjectivity as it has been understood through psychoanalytic theory, linguistic

theory, and philosophy. Many of these theories assume the existence of a unified

subject and object prior to language. Kristeva critiques this view as being the

product of a transcendental ego. Instead, she seeks to uncover a notion of the subject

as a sort of fragile process through its symptoms in art, poetic language, and

theoretical texts. She calls this processural subject the subject-in-process, or the

subject on trial [sujet en proces]. The text of Revolution in Poetic Language is itself

a text-in-process, in that Kristeva relies upon philosophical concepts as far as they

can take her, and then willingly abandons them for richer, more useful concepts. In

what follows, I will trace out the movement from negativity, as Kristeva develops it

out of Hegelian philosophy, to rejection, as she develops it out of Freudian

psychoanalytic theory. I show how far she relies upon negativity, what its

conceptual limitations are, and where and why she moves to rejection as a more

accurate concept for describing the relation between the semiotic and the symbolic,

in the subject in process/on trial, and in poetic and theoretical texts. I argue that

Kristeva’s refinement of negativity from Hegelian negativity to Freudian rejection

throughout Revolution in Poetic Language clarifies the unthought conditions of

politics by critiquing the hypostasization of politics and by determining a space

from which the domain of politics under current conditions may be challenged,

altered, or re-constituted. Ultimately, I argue that Kristevan negativity lays the

groundwork for the development of a theory of constitutive exclusion as political

critique.

3 See, for instance, Derrida’s Glas (1990), Irigaray’s I Love to You (1996), and Adorno’s Negative

Dialectics (1981).4 Kristeva (1984, p. 15).

466 S. Kramer

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1 From negation to negativity: Hegelian dialectics

The concept of negativity is central to Kristeva’s project and to the conception of

the subject as/in process. Kristeva takes up this concept from Hegel; as Diana Coole

describes it in Negativity and Politics, Hegel ‘‘glimpsed the instability that

negativity’s process guaranteed and, in this sense, Kristeva presents her own work

as ‘the direct successor of the dialectical method.’’’5 In order to distinguish the

instability of negativity, however, it must be separated from negation. Kristeva

associates negation (along with Hegel and Freud) with the logic of contradiction and

determinate negation and with ‘‘the act of the judging subject,’’ a subject which has

already entered the symbolic order, language, and reason.6 Negativity, on the other

hand, she associates with excess, with the primary processes, with heterogeneity and

with ‘‘infinitesimal differentiation.’’7 This negativity is a disruptive movement, what

Kristeva calls a ‘‘liquefying and dissolving agent’’ that is the condition of the

possibility of anything like a stable subject, but that is also the possibility of that

subject’s dissolution and fragmentation.8 Kristeva reads Hegel as having subordi-

nated this negativity to determinate negation and the ultimate unity and identity of

spirit, in what she will point to as a paranoid impulse constitutive of human subjects.

This subject-in-process/on trial is predicated on the concept of the semiotic that

Kristeva develops in Revolution in Poetic Language. Kristeva’s articulation of the

semiotic is an intervention in psychoanalytic discourse, but not simply so: it bears

possibilities for disrupting the traditional philosophical notion of the unified,

univocal, self-identical subject and all discourses that rely on the positing of such a

subject. The semiotic is a time or a space logically and chronologically prior to the

symbolic. The symbolic is that time or space in which a subject becomes a speaking

subject, brought into language and into the social norms that come with it. In

psychoanalytic terms, the symbolic would be the other side of the oedipal drama,

the castration complex, or the mirror stage. However, these transitions are usually

treated as definitive breaks that consolidate the ego or bring the subject definitively

into language or the symbolic by means of the law of the father or the phallic order.

Kristeva refers to these transitions as the thetic stage. Instead of emphasizing the

break between the pre-linguistic ‘‘subject’’ and the subject of the symbolic,

Kristeva’s thetic stage is, as Beardsworth emphasizes, a phase: it does not form a

firm boundary between the symbolic and the semiotic, but is rather porous and

traversable.9 This puts the symbolic and the semiotic into a kind of dialectical

relationship with each other, and it means that the semiotic continues to effect the

symbolic, even after the subject in process/on trial enters the symbolic.

Kristeva’s processural conception of the subject is itself a critique of traditional

conceptions of the subject as unified or self-identical. Kristeva sees those

conceptions of the subject as theologizations of the thetic, or as evidence of the

5 Coole (2000, p. 209).6 Kristeva (1984, p. 28).7 Kristeva (1984, p. 126).8 Kristeva (1984, p. 109).9 Beardsworth (2004, p. 50).

On negativity in Revolution in Poetic Language 467

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positing of a transcendental ego. In some places Kristeva argues that the positing of

a transcendental ego is a kind of paranoid response to the threat of the semiotic and

the ways in which it can disrupt subjectivity. The semiotic is therefore the time or

space which both produces and disrupts subjectivity; as Kristeva writes, it is ‘‘no

more than the place where the subject is both generated and negated, the place

where his unity succumbs before the process of charges and stases that produce him.

We shall call this process of charges and stases a negativity to distinguish it from

negation, which is the act of the judging subject.’’10

While I will later discuss the politics of the specific negativity Kristeva develops,

Kristeva does not advocate anything like a philosophy or a politics of the semiotic,

as a ‘‘return’’ to the semiotic is impossible. The work of the negativity of the

semiotic can only be understood from the position of the symbolic, and anything

resembling a ‘‘return’’ to the semiotic would take the subject out of language, out of

reason, and into madness. There can be, therefore, no ‘‘pure’’ negativity; while this

negativity is a necessary condition, it is not sufficient. The subject must develop the

sort of second order negativity—the logical negation Freud describes in his

‘‘Negation’’ essay—that brings a subject to representation and begins the transition

from affect to the intellect.

Kristeva critiques psychoanalytic theory, both in Freud and in Lacan, as

overemphasizing the split between the symbolic and the semiotic. Rather than

viewing the split as absolute, which would serve to theologize the sources of the

split (in the castration complex or in the mirror stage), Kristeva instead wants to

emphasize the permeability of the split and the dialectical relation between each

side. Kristeva therefore separates the semiotic and the symbolic with the thetic

stage, in which the movement from semiotic to symbolic is decisive, but also

emphasizes the traversability of the thetic and the dialectical relation of semiotic

and symbolic—a dialectic that she argues is constitutive of the subject.11 Kristeva

sees symptoms of this traversability in psychoanalytic practice, in poetry and art, as

well as in the theoretical texts of Freud and Hegel.

Kristeva locates the earliest resources for the negativity of the semiotic in Hegel.

Dialectical thinking began the possibility of thinking as a process, and as a

fundamentally ambiguous one: the negativity that makes a process possible does not

necessarily have a guaranteed outcome. It is nevertheless ultimately a productive

process. Kristeva refers to Hegel’s concept of negativity [Negativitat] as the ‘‘fourth

term’’ of the Hegelian dialectic.12 She locates this notion of negativity somewhere

between the abstract ‘‘ineffable’’ negativity of mere nothingness [Nichts] and

determinate negation in the Science of Logic.13 Negativity in fact makes up the

relation between the two and mediates them. As such, it would make up that

movement of passing-over-into between being and nothing that Hegel describes in

the opening section of the Logic. It would not however be reducible to the

determinate negation that is ushered in with the moment of becoming, to which the

10 Kristeva (1984, p. 28).11 Kristeva (1984, p. 24).12 Kristeva (1984, p. 109).13 Ibid.

468 S. Kramer

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movement of being and nothing give way in the Logic. Kristeva’s critique of Hegel

here gestures to a more fundamental notion of negativity operating throughout his

text, one that is cut off from the very beginning, as it is subordinated to the logic of

determinate negation in the operation of the Aufhebung.14 This more fundamental

negativity as the ‘‘fourth term’’ operates as a sort of suppressed resource to the

Hegelian dialectic, in the same way that Derrida theorized the concept of diversity

[Verschiedenheit] does, or that Irigaray theorized that the feminine does.

The two most important characteristics of negativity that Kristeva takes from

Hegel are the emphasis on movement or process, and the relationality or mediation

of dialectics. Kristeva consistently describes negativity as a kind of rhythm.15 Of the

negativity of the semiotic chora, she writes: ‘‘deprived of unity, identity, or deity,

the chora is nevertheless subject to a regulating process [reglementation], which is

different from that of the symbolic law.’’16 The semiotic chora is subject to no law,

and it has no law of its own—this would be already to conceive of it on the register

of the symbolic. The semiotic does however have a particular order, a kind of

economy that Kristeva writes is ‘‘analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm.’’17 This

order remains heterogeneous to the logic of determinate negation, as it remains

heterogeneous to the order of the symbolic. The relational negativity represented in

the Hegelian logic as nothing [Nichts], Kristeva writes, ‘‘is precisely that which

remains outside logic (as the signifier of a subject), what remains heterogeneous to

logic even while producing it through a movement of separation or rejection,

something that has the necessary objectivity of a law and can be seen as the logic of

matter.’’18 Because Kristeva sees this heterogeneity of negativity as relational,

however, the semiotic is not simply ineffable, as it is not the abstract nothing of the

Hegelian dialectic. Rather, the semiotic both produces and disrupts the symbolic

order, but can only be understood from a position within the symbolic. Moreover,

the semiotic already has its own peculiar order through a kind of material dialectic,

a ‘‘logic of matter,’’ or as Coole writes, ‘‘a bio-logic… a literal singing of the

flesh.’’19 This relational, mediational rhythm is made up of the drives within the

body of the developing ‘‘subject,’’ and of the rhythm of the voice and touch of the

mother, from which the ‘‘subject’’ in its earliest, pre-oedipal development has not

yet differentiated itself. The body of the mother thus acts as the site of mediation

14 One could perhaps compare this practice—including a more radical negativity at the beginning in

order to ultimately exclude it—to Hegel’s lectures on world history, in which the peoples of Africa are

included in the world order in the beginning, only in order for Spirit to leave Africa, to sublate it, never to

return again.15 Coole also relies heavily on the language of rhythm in her discussion of negativity, Nietzsche, Hegel,

Adorno, Kristeva, and Deleuze.16 Kristeva (1984, pp. 26 and 239, fn 12, 13). Kristeva adopts the term chora after the Timaeus, in which

Plato describes the chora as the spatial container or the receptacle in which what is appears. As Kristeva

notes, chora has an ambiguous ontology, since Plato describes it as something that must be posited as

original, and yet is approachable only by means of what he calls a ‘‘bastard reasoning.’’ Cf also Derrida’s

essay on chora, ‘‘Khora,’’ in On the Name (1995).17 Ibid.18 Kristeva (1984, p. 112).19 Coole (2000, p. 206).


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between the semiotic and the symbolic: Kristeva writes, ‘‘The mother’s body is

therefore what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes

the ordering principle of the semiotic chora.’’20

This is then where Kristeva will begin to depart from Hegel. Instead she turns to

Freud to draw out what might be meant by a logic of matter. This logic will not be a

static one—it will retain the sense of rhythm that Kristeva sees in the Hegelian

dialectic, but it will be more suitably taken up by a material dialectic, a material

rhythm, akin to the rhythm of the drives in the Freudian primary process, or the

rhythm of the voice and touch of the mother in its relation to the child. Hegel will

have provided a basis for the rhythm and relationality of negativity, but ultimately

this notion of negativity will be only so useful to Kristeva.

Because of negativity’s inextricability from its better-known brother, determinate

negation (and its subordination to determinate negation in Hegel), and because of its

lack of reference to the material, Kristeva will ultimately abandon negativity for

rejection, a term she takes up from Freud. This move to Freud gets Kristeva closer

to the material basis of the subject-in-process/on trial. But while psychoanalytic

theory offers a fuller account of the development of subjects in that their psychical

development is something between biological and cultural, psychoanalysis also

tends towards a hypostasization of the subject similar to the one Kristeva diagnosed

in Hegel. Kristeva encounters this paranoid theologization of the thetic in the

founding myths of psychoanalysis. She therefore interrogates that first founding

myth of psychoanalysis, the oedipal myth, and especially its role in bringing the

‘‘subject’’ to language. Here she draws on object-relations theorists such as Melanie

Klein in order to think how a subject is prepared for language. Though she finds

symptoms in Freud of the repression of the kind of negativity that she sees at work

in subjectivity, she turns to Freud for a clearer articulation of negativity, more in

line with the material aspect of the semiotic. This will become the concept of

rejection.

2 From negativity to rejection: Freudian matters

First, however, Freud will also assist us in better understanding the distinction

between negativity and negation in Kristeva. She draws here on Freud’s 1925

‘‘Negation’’ [Verneinung] essay. In this essay, Freud describes the process of

repression, a question posed to him by some fascinating things that have come up in

the course of psychoanalytic practice. This is the problem of how repression

functions as a negation in the form of a judgment, but does not seem to affect the

content of what is negated or repressed. It is by means of this interrogation that

Freud comes to the conclusion that ‘‘we never discover a ‘no’ in the unconscious

and that recognition of the unconscious on the part of the ego is expressed in a

negative formula.’’21 The function of repression is made possible by the function of

negation in the development of the child’s psyche before the oedipal drama and the

20 Kristeva (1984, p. 27).21 Freud (1961, p. 239).

470 S. Kramer

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castration complex. This takes place in Freud’s essay through two kinds of

judgment, which describe what we could call two orders of negation: the first is a

kind of affective negation, while the second is a kind of intellectual negation. Freud

describes both forms of negation as working in tandem to posit a subject that can

distinguish itself from objects as unified and self-identical.

The relation of these two moments of negation to each other is fundamental to

Freud’s analysis. Freud does not use the term negativity in this essay, but the two

functions of negation that he discusses are very different. Freud conceives of them

as distinct, but not separated absolutely, or not alien to each other; rather he thinks

of them as on a kind of continuum, or perhaps as implicitly dialectically related. The

first negation Freud associates with the primary processes, or with ‘‘the affective

process,’’ and the second negation he associates with ‘‘the intellectual function.’’22

They are separated by what we could think of as two levels of judgment. Jean

Hyppolite effectively describes these two levels of judgment, and the different kinds

of negation at work in each, in his 1956 commentary on the essay in Lacan’s

seminar. Hyppolite refers to the first as ‘‘judgment of attribution,’’ and the second a

‘‘judgment of existence.’’23

At issue in judgments of attribution is the beginning of the separation between

inside and outside, or what Hyppolite refers to as ‘‘a primary myth of inside and

outside,’’ which is only intelligible from this side of the process of separation.24

This fraught process begins with introjection and ejection, in which the ‘‘subject’’

judges between good and bad things by introjecting those things that it finds good,

or taking them into itself, and ejecting those things which are bad, or pushing them

out from itself. Freud identifies this form of judgment with what he calls ‘‘the

oldest—the oral—instinctual impulses’’ and the ‘‘original pleasure-ego.’’25 This

judgment, then, expresses itself with eating or incorporating those things that the

‘‘subject’’ finds good and spitting out those things that it finds bad. In this way, the

‘‘subject’’ is able to consolidate its ego with these early, ‘‘good’’ attributes, while

what is external to the ‘‘subject’’ is deemed bad. The distinction between inside and

outside, between ‘‘subject’’ and ‘‘object,’’ is at this stage still unclear; the boundaries

between the two remain fuzzy and flexible until the ‘‘subject’’ passes fully through

what Kristeva would call the thetic stage, or through something like the oedipal

drama.

Judgments of existence still have to do with the distinction between ‘‘subject’’

and ‘‘object,’’ between ‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside,’’ but they take place in a different

register than that of judgments of attribution. Through this judgment, the initial

negation in the affective process is itself negated, and that negation in turn becomes

symbolized. This judgment Freud calls ‘‘reality-testing,’’ in which the ‘‘subject’’

begins to represent an absent object as a sign, and then must re-find it in his or her

perception. Through the function of this judgment, a ‘‘subject’’ begins to distinguish

22 Freud (1961, p. 236).23 Hyppolite (1988, p. 294). Hyppolite’s analysis of Hegel, in works such as Logique et existence (1953),

was also definitive in the French reception of Hegel.24 Ibid.25 Freud (1961, p. 237).


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what is real, i.e., what is outside and objective, from what is unreal, i.e., what is

inside and subjective.26 The significant advance made by the ‘‘subject’’ here is the

move to representation or symbolization, in which the ‘‘subject’’ represents an

absent thing with a symbol. With this move, the ‘‘subject’’ develops from affect to

intellect, from the ‘‘original pleasure-ego’’ to the ‘‘definitive reality-ego.’’27 Freud

writes that ‘‘a precondition for the setting up of reality-testing is that objects shall

have been lost which once brought real satisfaction.’’28 It is clear from this that the

movement from affect to intellect is subtended by the separation from the mother. It

is through this negation of negation, the repression of the first affective negation,

and the sublimation into representation of the loss of the object (the breast or the

mother) that the ‘‘subject’’ is brought into language, freed from the demands of the

pleasure principle, and brought into the intellect. Hyppolite writes of this moment

that ‘‘[p]erhaps what is born here is thought as such, but not before the content has

been affected by a negation.’’29

While Freud’s ‘‘Negation’’ essay can surely be read in many ways, two of these

ways decisively belong to Lacan and to Hyppolite. Lacan would perhaps read this

essay as an affirmation of the role of the paternal law in the child’s coming to

language and the role of the phallus as signifier. This however would again risk the

transcendentalization or theologization of language, the thetic, the symbolic, or the

role of the phallus, in that it puts too decisive a break between the semiotic and the

symbolic. Hyppolite’s reading of Freud’s essay offers, especially to Kristeva, a

reading more open to the ‘‘mobile law’’ of the semiotic and the dialectical relation

between it and the symbolic. Hyppolite writes that if affect and intellect are on a

continuum, if the affective

is itself situated within the distinctive field of the human situation, and that, if

it engenders intelligence, it is because it already, from its beginnings, brings

with it a fundamental historicity. There is no pure affective on the one hand,

entirely engaged in the real, and the pure intellect on the other, which detaches

itself from it on order to grasp it once again.30

The affective, and here we might say the semiotic as well, is already more than

biological: it will already implicitly have social forces within it. This will have

significant implications for feminist critiques of psychoanalysis, critiques that

Kristeva initiates through her analysis.

One major point of contention that Kristeva takes up with regard to Freud’s

‘‘Negation’’ essay will be the way in which Freud seems to associate both levels of

negation with the pleasure principle and with the oral drive in particular. In the first

order of negation, both introjection and ejection come from the oral drive and are

associated with the pleasure principle and the ‘‘original pleasure-ego,’’ while at

stake in the second order of negation is the absence of the pleasurable object: the

26 Ibid.27 Ibid.28 Freud (1961, p. 238).29 Hyppolite (1988, p. 292).30 Hyppolite (1988, p. 293).

472 S. Kramer

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‘‘subject’’ comes to represent this absence with a sign in order to deal with the

trauma of separation from this pleasure-giving object (which, we should remember,

only becomes an object on the basis of this representation). Prior to that moment,

because the subject does not distinguish itself clearly from objects, the ‘‘subject’’

experiences this loss of ‘‘object’’ partly as a loss of self. Freud focuses on the

pleasure that comes from the oral drive—the pleasures of incorporation and

unification—and on the absence of that pleasure, negated in representation and

written into the symbol. In this movement to the symbolic and language, Kristeva

writes, ‘‘[t]he symbolic function is thereby dissociated from all pleasure, made to

oppose it, and is set up as the paternal place, the place of the superego.’’31 Freud

opposes the pleasure from the oral drive in the first instance to the absence of

pleasure and the symbolic sublation of that absence. This is the function of the

paternal prohibition, which assists the ‘‘subject’’ in separating from the mother by

prohibiting incest or re-unification with her, and by teaching the ‘‘subject’’ that the

mother’s desire lies elsewhere, with the phallus. But associating pleasure with

orality alone, Kristeva argues, is only half of the story; indeed, even Hyppolite in his

commentary on Freud’s ‘‘Negation’’ essay notes that the role of orality and the

pleasure ego in both orders of negation is striking.32

The effect of such an emphasis on the oral drive, and the ‘‘negation’’ of the

pleasure in introjection and ejection that derives from it, is the establishment of an

absolute break between one order of negation and another. This amounts to the

theologization of the thetic and the positing of a transcendental ego mentioned

earlier. Kristeva locates this tendency in Freud at work in this essay, and notes in it a

certain anxiety in the need to establish the borders of the subject as fixed. Kristeva

reads Freud against this tendency, along with Hyppolite, we might say, to uncover

the relation between the two forms of negation, and to focus not on their separation

but on the way in which this subject is never established as a unified, self-identical

subject once and for all, but is instead developed through and continuously

challenged by pre-oedipal, semiotic negativity.

Contra Freud, then, who configures the pre-oedipal scene as a matter of oral

pleasure and the symbolized absence of such pleasure, Kristeva will emphasize the

pleasure associated with anality, the drive associated with aggressivity, destruction

and the death drive, and particularly the pleasure from anal rejection. Kristeva notes

that Freud is curiously silent on the subject of anality in the ‘‘Negation’’ essay.33

The anal drive, rather than finding pleasure in incorporation and unification, would

instead find its pleasure in separation or expulsion.

Instead of identifying the first-order judgment (or the affective judgment) with

the primary processes and with negativity, Kristeva uses the notion of rejection to

open up Freud’s configuration of the pre-oedipal development of the subject. In

focusing on the role of rejection in coming to symbolization rather than on the

absence of the pleasure-giving object in the oral stage and its role in bringing the

‘‘subject’’ to symbolization, Kristeva emphasizes the dialectical relation between

31 Kristeva (1984, p. 149).32 Hyppolite (1988, p. 294).33 Kristeva (1984, p. 149).


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the semiotic and the symbolic. She thereby resists the theologization of the thetic

that she sees at work in the ‘‘Negation’’ essay, and what she sees as the over-

emphasis on the ‘‘paternal place’’ in the ‘‘subject’s’’ initiation into language and

culture. Readers such as Coole tend to identify the primary processes at work in the

first order of judgment in the ‘‘Negation’’ essay entirely with the semiotic.

Kristeva’s use of rejection is very close to this, but I argue that she focuses on

anality specifically in order to draw out the way in which the negativity at work

there mediates the biological and the social, and can also return to threaten the

symbolic. As Kelly Oliver has noted, Kristeva’s reading of rejection establishes it as

a logic of excess, rather than the logic of lack or prohibition established by Freudian

negation.34 Kristeva’s use of rejection is thus closer to the reading of Freud that

Hyppolite gives in his commentary on the ‘‘Negation’’ essay: focusing on rejection

underscores the mediation between affect and intellect, between orality and

genitality (through the mediating negativity of anality), and between drive and

signification.

Rejection, then, is a material negativity which is both biological and social, both

material and cultural, and which mediates both of these. Kristeva consistently

associates rejection with ‘‘scission,’’ ‘‘separation,’’ ‘‘explosion,’’ ‘‘impulse,’’ and

‘‘collision.’’35 She writes that ‘‘scission’’ and ‘‘separation’’ are perhaps better terms

when the operation of this negativity is considered from the perspective of a subject

already well within the symbolic, and that other terms (such as ‘‘explosion,’’ or later

shattering) are more useful when describing the operation of this negativity within a

text or a discourse.36 Rejection is preferred in reference to the developing ‘‘subject,’’

to emphasize the subject in/as process. The pleasure taken in separation that is

typical of anality could be considered a means of the developing ‘‘subject’’ to

protect itself from the trauma of separation. One of the steps in the process of

rejection is the suppression or repression of the material rejected object, which can

then only be represented by a sign or a symbol. Kristeva writes that ‘‘[r]ejection is

thus a step on the way to the object’s becoming-sign, in which the object will be

detached from the body and isolated as a real object.’’37 Insofar as the ‘‘subject’’

separates itself in large part from the maternal body, the materiality that will be

repressed by this ‘‘subject’’ will include feces, urine, and other bodily excesses, but

will primarily be the body of the mother.

Kristeva picks up the concept of negativity as the repressed ‘‘fourth term’’ of the

dialectic in Hegel as the ‘‘liquefying and dissolving agent’’ that nevertheless does

not destroy. Hegelian negativity allows Kristeva to think the subject as a mobile

process and as the dialectical relation between the symbolic and the semiotic.

However, the subordination of negativity to determinate negation leads, Kristeva

writes, to the ‘‘erasing of heterogeneity within the Hegelian dialectic.’’38 In order to

make a place for heterogeneity and in order to develop negativity as a material

34 Oliver (1993, p. 44).35 Kristeva (1984, pp. 113, 116, 146, and 147, respectively).36 Kristeva (1984, pp. 147 and 148, respectively).37 Kristeva (1984, p. 151).38 Kristeva (1984, p. 112).

474 S. Kramer

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logic—a ‘‘logic of matter’’ heterogeneous to logic, ‘‘even while producing it’’—

Kristeva turns to rejection.39 Rejection allows for a materialist negativity that is

richer, more mobile, more heterogeneous and more dialectical than negativity,

whether in the Hegelian dialectic or in the Freudian analysis of the role of judgment

in pre-oedipal ego formation.40

3 A Kristevan politics of negativity

I have focused thus far on the specific development of Kristevan negativity in

Revolution in Poetic Language. But as I noted in the introduction, the development

of this account of negativity was already a political intervention. Insofar as

negativity allows for mediation and relation, politics is already at stake in it. And

insofar as negativity opens up the space of critique, the ability of thought to raise

itself above its conditions and to challenge, interrupt, or explode them, then it also

always carries within it the kernel of revolution. In this section, I focus on the

political meaning of Kristevan negativity, though I maintain that the seeming

separation between politics and negativity is heuristic rather than substantive.

Because Kristeva insists upon theorizing the subject, the negativity she develops

risks being read as primarily an ethical concern, rather than a political one. For

instance, Maria Margaroni has defended Kristeva against the claim that she, like

other postmodern thinkers, has evacuated the concept of mediation and expressed a

deep skepticism about its value, retreating instead into an ethics of incommensu-

rable difference.41 While it is beyond my present aim to defend postmodernism

(especially as it seems here to take the guise—as it so often does—of a ready-made

foe), this reading of Kristevan negativity is insufficient for several reasons. First, to

insist that focusing on the subject is not political ignores the vast contribution of

feminism to political thought, which brought the formation of the subjectivity of

women in particular to the forefront as a political concern. As Jacqueline Rose

argues, ‘‘It was, after all, feminism which first argued that subjectivity (the

‘‘personal’’) was a political stake.’’42 Second, the presumption of the opposition

between the ethical and the political tends to hypostasize the distinction between

them, obscuring the (negative) dialectical relation between them. Resistance to this

hypostasization is precisely what is at issue in Kristeva’s theorizing of negativity in

39 Ibid.40 While this is beyond the purview of the present piece, Kristeva later abandons the concept of rejection

for the concept of abjection in works such as Powers of Horror. Abjection marks what we might call a

more violently ambiguous experience: abjection is the marking of not-me, before this not-me is

symbolized, or before it can be marked as object, and it is characterized by a simultaneous repulsion and

fascination. For reasons both conceptual and peculiar to her own political-theoretical development,

Kristeva shifts her analysis from conditions for political revolution in art and literature in works such as

Revolution in Poetic Language, to the lack of resources for working through semiotic excess in the

symbolic in later works such as Powers of Horror (1982), Tales of Love (1987), and Black Sun (1992).

For good analyses of this shift, see Sjoholm (2005) and Beardsworth (2005).41 Margaroni (2005, pp. 93-4).42 Rose (1993, p. 48). As Rose notes in this article, however, Kristeva may herself be partially

responsible for the idea that her work is concerned more with ethics than with politics.


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the first place. Kristeva’s semiotic chora, her revision of the mirror stage or the

oedipal drama, and her development of the ‘‘heterogeneous practice of signifiance’’

are already aimed at, as she put it, ‘‘the political horizon’’ from which literary

practice as the transformation of the subject is inseparable from the transformation

of society.43 Finally, as Iris Marion Young has pointed out, we may have good

reasons to be suspicious of attempts to so clearly disregard critiques such as

Kristeva’s as non- or a-political. Young argues that the current dominant ideology

of political thought, what she refers to as the ‘‘distributive paradigm,’’ rests on a

‘‘depoliticization of public life.’’44 This restriction or narrowing of politics is itself

an anti-democratic political strategy we ought to be skeptical of since it cuts off the

domain of the political from its (political) conditions in much the same way, and

with the same transcendentalizing move, as the subject of the symbolic order is cut

off from the material conditions of the symbolic order in the semiotic chora.

While I contend that the negativity Kristeva develops in Revolution in Poetic

Language is political, it is true that a politics of negativity is not necessarily a

politics of institutions, representatives, and the rule of law. Instead, I argue that

Kristeva’s conception of negativity challenges political institutions and structures in

the same way that it challenges the transcendentalization of the thetic stage and of

the subject in the transcendental ego—by putting them on trial/in-process, or by

uncovering the repressed processes that make up those institutions and structures.

As Coole writes,

Politics is primarily… the domain of collective life. As such, it concerns the

shared institutions, rules, customs, values and practices that facilitate

coexistence. Equally, however, it is about the strife, the unruly processes

and normative disagreements that the engendering and imposition of such

power entails. While the consensus and conflict involved in collective life are

partially formalised in a domain defined as the political, its legitimacy and

effects are under continual negotiation at all levels of intersubjective life, so

politics is practiced here, too. This negotiation renders politics an unstable,

dynamic process; one whose strategies and contingencies may be constrained,

but never wholly contained, by the more formal institutions of the political

which are therefore themselves in process.45

Coole’s description of politics as ‘‘negotiation’’ and as an ‘‘unstable, dynamic

process’’ describes the politics of negativity in Kristeva’s thought. Coole’s reference

to ‘‘negotiation’’ indicates the negotiation between the political and its outside, the

political and its conditions, rather than negotiations within the political, such as

those between political representatives, for instance. This is indeed the kind of

political critique in which Kristeva is engaged in Revolution in Poetic Language—

the analysis of the relationship or the negotiation between the restricted domain of

the political and its conditions. The concept of negativity Kristeva develops in RPL

43 Kristeva (1984, p. 17).44 Young (1990, p. 75).45 Coole (2000, p. 7).

476 S. Kramer

123

challenges the transcendentalization of the political and puts the domain of the

political itself in process.

Negativity in Kristeva’s thought, especially in Revolution in Poetic Language,

allows for the thinking of a subject-in-process rather than a subject who makes an

absolute break into the symbolic, whether through the mirror stage or through the

oedipal drama. Thinking the subject as a process, as the dialectical relation between

the semiotic and the symbolic is, as Sjoholm notes, a political intervention from the

beginning. This allows for the refiguration of the symbolic, not as instantiating a

transcendental ego, as Kristeva puts it, but rather as dialectically related to the

semiotic chora, to the speaking body, and thereby opening up the symbolic to

reconfiguration. The negativity of the semiotic ‘‘prevents,’’ as Sjoholm writes, ‘‘the

symbolic from becoming hypostasised… It breaks through static structures and

motivates new formations of subjectivity and social and economic relations.’’46

Insofar as the symbolic is instantiated by the law, and insofar as it delineates the

space of the political, it is therefore open to rupture and to dis- and re- assembly

through the semiotic.

Sjoholm notes that this aspect of Kristeva’s thought brings her close to Derrida,

in that it is an attempt to think, as Kristeva puts it, ‘‘an ‘outside’ that is in fact

internal to each closed set.’’47 This makes the semiotic chora quite similar to

Derrida’s ‘‘quasi-transcendental.’’ ‘‘Quasi-transcendental’’ is one of the ‘‘non-

synonymous substitutions’’ that Derrida uses to describe the operation of

deconstruction within a particular text; ‘‘quasi-transcendental’’ refers specifically

to the function of Antigone or of the sister in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,

analyzed in Derrida’s 1974 work, Glas. The ‘‘quasi-transcendental’’ describes the

internal exclusion of an empirical element that serves a transcendental function,

rendering it neither entirely empirical nor entirely transcendental. It serves as the

lynchpin or the keystone of the system, but an unconscious one: it is repressed or

disavowed. The ‘‘quasi-transcendental’’ is an ambiguous negativity that defines a

simultaneous condition of possibility and condition of impossibility.

If the Kristevan semiotic chora is the ‘‘quasi-transcendental’’ of the symbolic,

then we could describe the semiotic chora as the condition of possibility as well as

the condition of impossibility of the symbolic order. The semiotic chora is the

condition of possibility of the symbolic order in that it prepares the way for the

‘‘subject’’ to enter into the symbolic order, through the organization of drives in the

relation between the developing ‘‘subject’’ and its ‘‘other,’’ the body of the mother.

It is the condition of impossibility of the symbolic order, however, in that the

semiotic chora still affects the symbolic, interrupting it or disrupting it in its

‘‘liquefying’’ capacity. This fundamentally ambiguous relation between ‘‘inside’’

and ‘‘outside’’—the outside of the inside that is repressed within the inside but

nevertheless essential to its operation—is the mark of the particular sense of

negativity Kristeva develops in Revolution in Poetic Language.

Negativity is also a way for Kristeva to recover the repressed heterogeneity of the

symbolic and of Hegelian negation. But because the semiotic can only be

46 Sjoholm (2005, p. 35).47 Kristeva (1984, p. 14).


123

approached via the symbolic, there can be no return to the semiotic, and therefore no

‘‘pure’’ heterogeneity nor any politics of the semiotic as such. This highlights

Kristeva’s rigorous insistence on the dialectical relation between the symbolic and

the semiotic, even as she attempts to think the ways in which the semiotic can

rupture or explode the symbolic in poetic language. This insistence on dialectical

relation between the semiotic and the symbolic indicates that the heterogeneity

Kristeva attempts to recover here will not be a pure undifferentiated plenitude,

especially as she argues that the semiotic lays the groundwork for entrance into the

symbolic, as the body of the mother (obviously already within the symbolic)

transmits the symbolic to the subject through their rhythmic bodily interactions. The

semiotic is not, therefore, a kind of lost origin or an ineffable beyond. Because the

semiotic is only approachable from within the symbolic, read through those place

where the semiotic leaks or bursts through the symbolic, the semiotic is

fundamentally in relation to the symbolic by virtue of the dialectical negativity

between them. The semiotic cannot be such an ineffable beyond or an undiffer-

entiated plenitude, precisely because it is the body of the mother, already within the

symbolic, that helps to organize the rhythm of the semiotic chora.

Because Kristevan negativity is fundamentally material, it opens the space for a

rethinking of materialist politics, or the renegotiation between the delimited domain

of politics and its material conditions. Since these conditions are bound up with the

body of the mother, and since the mother is ultimately a culturally and not a

naturally or biologically determined position, it indicates a specifically feminist

materialist politics. The structure and process of Kristevan negativity thus lays the

groundwork for what Judith Butler will later theorize as the ‘‘constitutive outside’’

in works such as Bodies that Matter and The Psychic Life of Power, and what I

describe as constitutive exclusion (in order to emphasize the rhythm of this

negativity).48 Constitutive exclusion describes both a structure and process by

which a political body is constituted through the exclusion of some form of

difference intolerable to it. This excluded difference is, however, retained within the

political body, but under an epistemological block—this ‘internal excluded’ is

repressed, disavowed, or abjected. The ambiguous negativity of this relation—the

‘‘‘outside’ that is in fact internal to each closed set,’’ as Kristeva puts it—allows us

to think constitutive exclusion as political critique.

If the rhythm of relation and mediation is central to the question of living with

others, then negativity will have its place in politics. Negativity is not itself a stable

concept, however. Everything rests on what kind of negativity is put into play. This

is what makes Kristeva’s refinement of negativity in Revolution in Poetic Language

so significant. Ultimately, what is at stake in this rhythm of negativity is greater

clarity about the possibilities of affecting, altering, revolting against, and re-

constituting the domain of the political by means of the negotiation of politics in

relation to its conditions. At stake are the very possibilities for critique. By laying

the groundwork for thinking the negotiation of politics and what it represses,

disavows, abjects, or constitutively excludes, Kristeva’s conception of negativity in

Revolution in Poetic Language allows us to think the political itself in process.

48 Butler (1993); Butler (1997).

478 S. Kramer

123

Acknowledgment Many thanks to Chris Buck, Tina Chanter, Andrew Dilts, Jana MacAuliffe, Heather

Rakes, and an anonymous reviewer for Continental Philosophy Review for their invaluable advice in the

development of this piece.

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Documents

On negativity in Revolution in Poetic Language