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International Colloquium ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William D. Melaney (American University in Cairo) The unique place of art in Julia Kristeva’s semiotic approach to language and culture is inseparable from the epistemological assumptions that inform her work. The purpose of this paper will be to revisit Kristeva’s theoretical tour de force, Revolution in Poetic Language, as an original attempt to redefine the mimetic in terms of a ‘textual’ approach to signifying practices. This paper, written in English, will explore how Kristeva re-conceptualizes traditional mimesis in a way that remains faithful to the most provocative claims of modern thought. An important assumption of the paper is that, in contrast to what tends to be dominant in poststructuralist thought, the new semiotics presumes the conflictual nature of human reality and whatever is produced within the more limited sphere of human culture. The notion of ‘avant-garde’ versus classical mimesis will be examined comparatively in order to show how Kristeva strains the limits of aesthetic representation. The political importance of this revised view of mimesis will be related to implicit assertions concerning human culture itself The paper covers three related issues. First, we will demonstrate the importance of trial and struggle to the intellectual alliance of Hegel and Freud that sets Kristeva at odds with structuralism and phenomenology. In bringing together negativity and rejection, Kristeva also distances herself from the ‘grammatological’ approach to language that emerges in Derrida’s early work. The new semiotics may be poststructuralist in the minimal sense of providing a genetic account of semiotic life that no longer sustains Lacanian models; however, it also provides a radicalized version of Paul Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of conflict” that is irreducible to formal descriptivism. Second, Kristeva’s semiotic account of avant-garde poetry will be contrasted to what emerges as ‘classical’ mimesis in traditional criticism. This account goes beyond Eric Auerbach’s well-known defense of mimetic realism and compares instead to Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic approach to modern art and literature. Kristeva’s references to specific poets (Mallarmé, Laeutreamont, Rimbaud, et. al.), allow her to identify a type of mimesis that cannot be used to conceal the semiotic ‘mechanisms’ through which art appears to the discerning witness. Finally, the place of mimesis in human culture will be shown to be complementary to its role in the new semiotics. Kristeva argues that the artist might be better situated for achieving what the psychoanalysts hope to achieve therapeutically. The ‘event’ of sacrifice, which is specific to all cultures, provides the artist with a site of intervention for demonstrating mimetically how actual practices can be challenged and even overturned. The political implications of semiotics were already present in Kristeva’s ‘textual’ model for interpreting signifying practices, just as they anticipate a critical position that has allowed her to reaffirm a belief in the sensible imagination during more recent years.
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