1 March 2011

Julia Kristeva: Semiotic Voyage

by Pradip Biswas



 

 














Julia Kristeva, the poststructuralist icon in post-modern literature, is a vigilant outsider. Thus is she widely known among the women filmmakers of the international cinema. Often addressed as “bonkers”, Kristeva could defy any slanging match pelted against her works and her semiotics. She is famous for discovering “inner garden” that helps her followers to make shape of intimacy, call for digression in conventional codes and iconoclast in defining cold-layered “modernism” running strong in time-flows.

While this film scholar and semiotic analyst took some women directors and their films from France , Peru and Danemark, he finds an unique conflation of Kristeva’s semiotics found in interpretation and those image-oriented films of the said filmmakers. The women directors are Claire Denis, Claudia Llosa and Sussane Bier whose films have a close propinquity with feminist agenda. As always, Kristeva seems to be associated with three concepts she now likes to pass off as gaff. Le semiotique is the glittering idea that speech thrives on through sub-verbal codes as by what is actually said. According to her the real pulse of signification is done in the "cleavage between words and meanings". Such proclivity of Kristeva indicates the sub- or pre-verbal construct is something that, in a way, she now associates with the liturgy of the Orthodox Church. Said she:” "All my childhood was bathed in this.”

The critic John Sutherland of Britain has noted: “The second of Kristeva's hallmark ideas is what she calls `abjection’. Why, Kristeva inquires, are we fascinated by things that disgust and horrify us?.” Sutherland refers to Kristeva’s understanding that reveals:  "There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced."

For the entire write up follow the link :  http://www.thescape.in/newsdetail.asp?newsid=1906

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