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Reading Kristeva: A Response to Calvin BedientAuthor(s): Toril MoiReviewed work(s):Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Spring, 1991), pp. 639-643Published by: The University of Chicago Press

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Critical Response

I

Reading Kristeva: A Response to Calvin Bedient

Toril Moi

Recently my attention was drawn to Calvin Bedient's essay "Kristeva and

Poetry as Shattered Signification" (Critical Inquiry 16 [Summer 1990]:807-29).

I must confess that I found Bedient's account of Kristeva's theories

quite shocking. Since, on the whole, critical essays rarely upset me, myown reaction was quite puzzling to me. What is there in Bedient's prose tounsettle me so? It certainly can't be his style or tone: he has produced a

perfectly even-tempered essay. Refraining from imputing selfish or dis-honest motives to the theorist he wants to disagree with, Bedient never

argues adfeminam, and takes much trouble lucidly to explain why he disa-

grees with Kristeva. There is every reason to commend him for his honest

style of argumentation. There can be no doubt that his essay is produced

purely byhis concern to take issue with a

theoryhe

trulybelieves to be

incapable of accounting for the way in which poetry-and particularlymodern poetry-actually works.

What causes my unease must therefore be something else. It may of

course be the fact that Bedient's account of Kristeva's theory of languagein RevolutionofPoeticLanguage is wrong. His is not a somewhat skewed, or

slanted, or one-sided presentation of her views, but-as far as I can see-atotal misreading. Briefly put, Bedient's mistake consists in takingKristeva's account of the semioticprocessin language for a complete theoryof

poetic language.He does not seem to have noticed Kristeva's account of

the symbolic, her repeated insistence that language-the signifyingprocess-is the product of a dialectical interaction between the symbolicand the semiotic, or even her definition of the "thetic."

Critical Inquiry 17 (Spring 1991)

01991 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/91/1703-00011$01.00. All rights reserved.

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640 Critical Response Toril Moi

Pace Bedient, Kristeva neverspeaks of art as a semiotic chora(p. 807).To state that "Revolutionn PoeticLanguage posits that poetrysacrificestheol-

ogy, or the thetic, to traces of nonsymbolized drive" (p. 809) is absurd.Bedient apparently also believes that "Kristeva effectively dismisses both

intelligence ... and a formal sense as points to consider in analyzing the

'textual practice' of poetry," and that she sees "ideas" as "hopelessly con-

taminated by theology and what it constitutes, the murder of the soma"

(p. 812). He also believes that for Kristeva there is a "distinction between

the sign as thesis and the body as rejection, n a strict dichotomy," a distinc-

tion which somehow leaves no space for the imagination (p. 826). Such

statements lack any foundation in her writing.

Expanding on this perception of Kristeva's theory, Bedient goes on toclaim that there is no place for the aesthetic, for form, genre, or "even the

raw subject matter" (p. 812) in Kristevan poetics. For Kristeva, accordingto Bedient, a poem is simply a "random 'accumulation' of stases"(p. 813).The "theory of the revolutionary poetic splatter of drive," he writes, "is

held at the expense of the poet's passionate powers of synthesis" (p. 816).In Kristevan theory according to Bedient the poet becomes "not a 'sub-

ject' so much as a bundle of nerve impulses hostile to the 'edifice' of iden-

tity,indeed to all cultural molds"

(p. 808).In

fact,Bedient

argues,the

Kristevan model discounts any conceivable kind of conscious intelligence,

leaving us with nothing but a "direct and angry art of the body" (p. 825),

reducing poetic rhythm to nothing but the "accidentally perceptible partof the nerve ends' rage" (p. 814).

Kristevan linguistic theory draws on the Freudian theory of the

unconscious, which casts the subject as split, as decentered in the tension

between conscious and unconscious processes. Bedient seems to believe

that this amounts to saying that the subject simply is the unconscious.

Kristeva's painstaking account of the relation between the body, thedrives, and language tries to show how the body may be perceived as the

material point of departure for the linguistic process, how its limits also

become a constraint on our language. But the body never is language, it

never dominates language, and language cannot be reduced back to thedrives. It is not correct to argue that for Kristeva the body-the semiotic,the "chora"-dominates poetic language or any other kind of language. Atthe most it may be capable of exerting a certain disruptive pressure on

Toril Moi, professor of comparative literature at the University of

Bergen and professor (adjunct) at Duke University, is the editor of TheKristeva Reader (1986) and the author of Sexual/Textual Politics:Feminist

Literary Theory 1985). Her most recent book isFeministTheoryand Simonede Beauvoir (1990).






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Critical Inquiry Spring 1991 641

symbolic-communicative-discourse. What interests Kristeva is to

develop a theory of the way in which the semiotic, under certain historical

circumstances, may come to mark certain texts more strongly than previ-ously. Even the most cursory reading of the French text of Revolution in

Poetic Language shows that Kristeva spends much time discussingLautreamont's and Mallarme's conscious artistic, political, aesthetic, and

formal intentions. If Bedient has not noticed this, it is because his under-

standing of the basic theoretical concepts of Kristeva leaves much to be

desired.I now feel obliged to provide some evidence for this claim, even at the

cost of sounding like a schoolmistress. The project in the theoretical part

of Revolution(the only part translated into English) is quite explicitly a lin-guistic one. By developing a new understanding of language-all lan-

guage, not just poetic language-as a dialectical process of the semiotic

and the symbolic as uttered by an embodied, speaking subject, Kristeva

wants to lay the ground for the detailed investigation of the poetry of

Mallarme and Lautreamont which follows in the original French edition.

For Kristeva there is no language which is not inscribed in the symbolicorder. The semiotic is "inherent in the symbolic," Kristeva writes, it is

"part of a signifying practice that includes the agency of the symbolic."'The thetic is not "theology" (although it may be "theologized" by certainsocial practices and ideologies; see RPL, p. 78). The thetic is the momentof positing, a moment of enunciation or utterance. "All enunciation,whether of a word or a sentence, is thetic. It requires an identification,"Kristeva writes (RPL, p. 43). Explicitly arguing against the refusal of the

thetic, she insists that practice is not possible without the thetic, "as if a

text, in order to hold together as a text, did not require a completion, a

structuration, a kind of totalization of semiotic motility" (RPL, p. 51).The thetic thus produces both language and the speaking subject.

But if the thetic were an utterly stable, impermeable moment of utterancedivorced from bodily and social structures, the semiotic would never markor disrupt the smooth surface of symbolic language. This is why Kristeva,

focusing on the drives and negativity, seeks to show how the thetic can betheorized as permeable, mobile, as subject to disruption. The thetic bearsthe marks of the body in the very act of utterance. It is the "threshold

between two heterogeneous realms: the semiotic and the symbolic,"Kristeva writes (RPL, p. 48). Without the thetic, language does not exist.

Kristeva, then, does not seek to do away with the "wholemind of the

poet," as Bedient puts it (p. 814). On the contrary, she tries to develop amore complex understanding of the workings of that whole mind. Ofcourse she posits meaning,form, and aestheticsas crucial moments of the

poetic process. The originality of Kristeva's project is that she also tries to

1. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York,

1984), p. 81; hereafter abbreviated RPL.






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642 Critical Response Toril Moi

account for the processes that work to disrupt such symbolic structures.

Bedient's mistake is that he persists in thinking that she sees nothing but

such disruption.I realize that the purpose of Bedient's paper is to show that Kristevan

theory is unhelpful as a theory of modern poetry. This may very well be

the case: powerful arguments may surely be found to support his view. My

point is that Bedient's account of Revolution in Poetic Language is so mis-

leading that it sheds no light whatsoever on its potential value-or lack of

it-for readers of modern poetry. It is necessary-still-to distinguishbetween a reading and the theoretical argument based on it. Of course,

every reading also reveals a position, a point of view. All theoretical or crit-

ical debate nevertheless presupposes a reading-interpretation-of the

text(s) in question. For debate to be possible at all-let alone interestingor relevant-the readings it mobilizes must be reasonably accurate.

"Accuracy"is not a God-given universal perspective. Rather, I see "accu-

racy" and "precision" as historically variable concepts constructed-not

always without contradictions-in specific institutional and social con-

texts. One such context, I take it, is constituted by literary critics in the

U.S. academy today. I simply cannot believe that Bedient's account of Rev-

olution in Poetic Language would be called accurate or correct by very

many of my colleagues in this country.All this nevertheless does not explain why Bedient's essay unsettled

me as much as it did. His is certainly not the first wrongheaded account of

Kristeva that I have read. A more usual reaction would be simply to shrugand put his paper away. Pondering this question, I realize that my feelingof shock may stem less from Bedient's essay than from the fact that it was

published in CriticalInquiry. CriticalInquiry still carries much intellectual

capital in the American academic world. To saythat it is a prestigiousjour-nal is to saythat what CriticalInquirypublishes gets legitimated by the veryfact of being published there. Such a journal therefore has a particular

responsibility to ensure that the essays it chooses to consecrate satisfy at

least some minimal standards of research and accuracy of reading. One

must assume that the editor and several readers selected Bedient's paperfor publication because they truly consider it an excellent example of criti-

cal reading and scholarship. This is what unsettles me. Bedient himself, of

course, has nothing to explain. He has simply sent his essay to Critical

Inquiry and had the pleasure of having it accepted for publication. But

CriticalInquiryhas a lot of explaining to do. Am I to believe that nobody n

the presumably highly qualified network of readers employed by Critical

Inquiryis capable of detecting a garbled account of a particular theory for-

mation if they see one? Or am I supposed to believe that they noticed the

problems in Bedient's account, but decided that such things do not mat-

ter? Is Bedient's paper published as a result of some new editorial policythat has not yet been communicated to the rest of us?If so, I think we have

a right to know what it is.






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Critical Inquiry Spring 1991 643

Even this, however, is not enough truly to disturb me. The truth is

that what really upset me about Bedient's essay is the fact that, howeverunwittingly, it intervenes directly into a far more important concern ofmine: teaching. This semester I have been teaching Kristeva to a class of

twenty graduate students. Every one of them wrote a more accurateaccount of Revolutionin PoeticLanguage than Bedient. Most of them also

put their thorough understanding of Kristeva's project to excellent criti-

cal use by roundly taking her to task for a whole series of political and

theoretical shortcomings. I was extremely impressed with them. But-

and this is the point-they did not have a good time reading Revolution.

Because it is such a difficult text, I made them spend an enormous amountof time on it. We struggled through the most arcane conceptual discus-

sions for hours on end. The reading of this text made us all feel frustrated,

impatient, even exasperated. The best thing I can say about this teachingexperience is that Kristeva's incessant quotation of Frege, Husserl, and

Hegel did not fail to produce a certain desperate sense of humor in theclass.

The only excuse I have for making my students (and myself) suffer inthis way is the idea that at the end of such labors they will have acquired

sufficient insight and understanding to be able to put the theory to preciseuse and/or to produce an informed critique of its presuppositions and

implications. I naively took that to be the point of intellectual work. What

am I to say to them when they see that CriticalInquirypublished a paper ofBedient's quality? Why should they struggle to achieve certain standardsof insight and accuracy when one of the most prestigious publications intheir field clearly doesn't mind if they don't? CriticalInquiryowes them an

explanation.






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