Morphing Moonlight: Gender, masks and carnival mayhem- The ...

enunciative position. The phallus demands that the child give up an
attachment to the mother and subject itself to the law of the father, the law of
language and social values. The child thus sublimates the primal drives to
the law of the symbolic by repressing them. The child can only obtain a
speaking position once it recognises the difference of the other and accepts
the law governing its interaction with others (Grosz 1989: 47). Within the
subject, the mirror phase and the castration complex, as part of the thetic,
represent a unifying force which holds the drives in check, forcing them to
accept the boundary of the reality principle:
As a traversable boundary, the thetic is completely different from an
imaginary castration that must be evaded in order to return to the
maternal Chora. It is clearly distinct as well from a castration
imposed once and for all, perpetuating the well-ordered signifier and
positing it as sacred and unalterable within the enclosure of the
Other. (Kristeva 1984: 51)
The thetic acts as an ordering principle for the drives setting up their
relations vis-à-vis the imaginary and establishing the symbolic (Grosz 1989:
47).
v The symbolic (Le symbolique)
In Kristeva’s theory, the term ‘the symbolic’ is equally specialized. The
word ‘symbolic’ is generally understood as meaning ‘exhibiting or
expressed by resemblance or signs’ (New shorter Oxford English dictionary
1993: 3183). For Kristeva, the symbolic is an extension of the thetic and its
role is to organise the impulses and drives into a reified and structuring
communication system, which includes grammar, logic, syntax and the
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