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

These two different subjects produce the self of subjectivity. However, the
textual ‘I’ is not entirely distinct from the living social subject: to a large
extent, the latter is socially structured and positioned by the symbolic’s
textual construction of the ‘I’:
The subject never is. The subject is only the signifying process and
he (sic) appears only as a signifying practice, that is, only when he
(sic) is absent within the position out if which social, historical, and
signifying activity unfolds. (Kristeva 1984: 215)
Subjectivity is never a case of the subject being totally present to itself, but
rather a case of a process of capture and escape, stability and dissolution, a
subject who is continually displacing its own established positions (White
1977: 13). However, the notion of the ‘I’ allows the subject to take control
of any rational communication or discourse, as the symbolic creates both a
subjective and social identity. These identities are threatened when the thetic
is transgressed by the semiotic. This overflow of the semiotic destabilises
identity and is visible in the seditiousness of madness and poetry.
vii The carnival of madness and poetry
Madness is the irruption of an excess of semiotic jouissance that is also found
in the subversiveness of poetry. Kristeva sees poetic logic, like that of
carnival, as both simultaneously a form of logic and its inherent negation, thus
an ambivalent process. This double aspect of poetic language represents a
movement between real and non-real, speech and silence, being and non-
being, where the poetic signifier both refers and does not refer to a referent
(Lechte 1990: 109-110). Poetry draws attention to the semiotic through its
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