Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Understanding Kristiva 1.0 (Beta)


Something seems anachronistic about Kristiva’s parlor game of applying the Freudian structure to semiotic analysis. I’m having a really hard time getting this down. She seems to convolute meaning by attempting to coin new terms for already-established terms (semanalysis=semiology (28)). And she seems really intent on literally redefining the study of semiotics. I think the concept of homogeneity of praxis and analysis makes sense but isn't especially useful in the language-structured analysis of the social codes of play, pleasure, or desire; the heterogeneity of post-modernism has subsequently taken care of that. Foucault and Barthes are again brought to mind: The Use of Pleasure and The Pleasure of the Text respectively, both of which I have recently skimmed yet can’t recap for relevance. I need about another week (which I should have in about six months) to nail Kristiva down. If that sounds dirty it’s because neither of us is fully delineating the negative distinctions necessitated by the signified and the signifier (the truth of language and the transcended ego). A psycho-analytical appropriation of semiotic theory might be more appropriately suited to Jung.

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