Until I started this book, I would have said that Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason was the most obtuse and inaccessible book I've ever read. Congratulations, Kristeva, for writing something to which I have no access, and saying something that my ears are unwilling or unable to hear. I could not say with any certainty what she wrote here, what she meant by it, or whether it has any validity (although her indebtedness to Freud and Marx argue "not"). I am nearly certain that my coworker recommended it to me as a joke, in fact, and muttered to himself as he handed it over, "Let's see this pompous ass pretend to understand it."
Many, faced with the challenge of a similarly inscrutable text, would approach it with a microscope, a dictionary, and a pair of tweezers, trying to pull apart the threads of meaning, the entangled and knotted definitions of coined words, the off-handedly knowing allusions to other works, so irrelevant or alien that they may as well be apocryphal. But not I. I know that what Kristeva wrote and what I read may or may not have anything to do with each other; the courtship between writer and reader always takes place on opposite sides of a glass panel--a literary conjugal visit that can only frustrate those who desire to touch solid flesh.
I do not lament this barrier. Like all realities, it is only frustrating to the extent that one expects it to be other than it is, to the extent that one expects to ask the author, "What do you mean?" and to have her answer you in no uncertain terms. But in Kristeva, as in anything worth reading, uncertain terms are an indispensable part of the texture. There do exist those authors, writers of pop psychology, self-help, and how-to, who do all of the thinking for you. But there is more arousal in concealing than in revealing, and more pleasure in tmesis than in thesis.
And so the inaccessibility of a text, the opacity of that window between prisoner and visitor, is not a hindrance, but a liberty. The more distant the author is from the reader, the freer this latter is to look at the text, not as a communique, but as a spilt deck of tarot cards: a collage of symbols that hold only the meaning one carries to them. Insofar as Kristeva could not possibly be more distant from me, I was entirely liberated to, as Roland Barthes suggests,
". . .skim or to skip certain passages (anticipated as "boring")
in order to get more quickly to the warmer parts of the anecdote (which are always
its articulations: whatever furthers the solution of the riddle, the revelation
of fate): we boldly skip (no one is watching) descriptions, explanations, analyses,
conversations; doing so, we resemble a spectator in a nightclub who climbs onto
the stage and speeds up the dancer's striptease, tearing off her clothing . . ." (The Pleasure of the Text, 11).
And so I did. I went entire pages without worrying what was being said, waiting for some swath of flesh to peek through the layers of fabric, my wandering brain detached from my attentive eyes. And when the author turned around too quickly, revealing something succulent in the folds between sentences, my brain snapped back to attention for a while, piecing together meanings that may or may not have actually been there.
It is not surprising that I came away from this exercise rather emboldened than enlightened. Whether she wanted to or not, Kristeva added her semiotic chora and her semantothetic rupture to the list of dichotomies that currently propel my deeper moments. The semiotic and the semantic, the personal self and the public self, the biological drives and the social drives, the genotext and the phenotext, all of the polarities that she isolates only fed the Taoist monster that is incubating in me. And, whether she meant to or not, she offered a new way of resolving it.
The object (in a nearly grammatical sense) that is formed by the thetic mistakes itself for the subject that lives in the chora. As the semantic and symbolic systems become more and more complex, the subject who originally thought them--driven by social, sexual, logical, and other drives--cannot help but become enveloped by them, and mistake itself for the object of which it speaks. For Kristeva, this results in negativity, nothingness, and an assortment of other processes drawn heavily from discredited psychoanalytical instincts. For me, however, it results in a different type of nothingness: an anomie, a loss of identity, a morass of sentences of which I am the object, the desired, the valued, the appreciated, the loved. Entangled in this accusative skein, I realize I have lost track of the nominative. I have become Me. Where, and whom, am I, so smothered by m-commanding case assignors that the subject now isn't even sure if he exists?
