Rewinding Revelationtiontion

Words are not merely symbols.

Words are body.

Are bodily drives, manifest in wave.

Julia Kristeva:

While the symbolic element gives signification its meaning in the strict sense of reference, the semiotic element gives signification meaning in a broader sense.  That is, the semiotic element makes symbols matter; by discharging drive force in symbols, it makes them significant.  Even though the semiotic challenges meaning in the strict sense, meaning in the terms of the symbolic, it gives symbols their meaning for our lives.  Signification makes our lives meaningful, in both senses of meaning--signifying something and having significance--through its symbolic and semiotic elements. 

 The Bridge: The Drive and the Symbol

The Symbol Driven Up and Out The Mouth and The Symbol Itself

The interdependence of the symbolic and semiotic elements of signification guarantees a relationship between language and life, signification and experience; the interdependence between the symbolic and semiotic guarantees a relationship between body (soma) and soul (psyche).

The tones and rhythms of language, the materiality of language, is bodily.   Kristeva's theory addresses the problem of the relationship between language and bodily experience by postulating that, through the semiotic element, bodily drives manifest themselves in language. 

In stead of lamenting what is lost, absent, or impossible in language, Kristeva marvels at this other realm that makes its way into language.  The force of language is living drive force transferred into language.  Signification is like a transfusion of the living body into language.  This is why psychoanalysis can be effective; the analyst can diagnose the active drive force as it is manifest in the client's language.  Language is not cut off from the body.  And, while, for Kristeva, bodily drives involve a type of violence, negation, or force, this process does not merely necessitate sacrifice and loss.  The drives are not sacrificed to signification; rather bodily drives are an essential semiotic element of signification.

LOVE provides the support for fragmented meanings and fragmented subjectivities.  Love provides the support to reconnect words and affects.  She says that "love is something spoken, and it is only that".  Our lives have meaning for us, we have a sense of ourselves, through the narratives which we prepare to tell others about our experience.  

Even if we do not tell our stories, we live our experience through the stories that we construct in order to "tell ourselves" to another, a loved one.  As we wander through our days, an event takes on its significance in the narrative that we construct for an imaginary conversation with a loved one as we are living it.  The living body is a loving body, and the loving body is a speaking body.  Without love we are nothing but walking corpses.  Love is essential to the living body and it is essential in bringing the living body to life in language. 

//M.A.R**