Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

Unravelling the Demonic Text 101This formulation goes against the direct confirmation by Bakhtin, that“there can be no dialogical relationships among texts.” Kristeva underlinesthat she replaces the concept of “intersubjectivity” with that of intertextuality,and that her main aim is to capture Bakhtin’s notions of ‘dialogue’ and‘ambivalence’ at the intersection of the two axes of discourse – the word asexisting both between writer and addressee, and as oriented toward an anterioror synchronic literary corpus. 95 It proved difficult, however, to reconcilethe decisively “anti-Saussurean” concept of dialogism with “post-Saussurean” Western theory. Already in La Révolution du langage poétique(1974) Kristeva complained that intertextuality “has been understood in thebanal sense of ‘study of sources,’” and reformulated it in a sense simultaneouslymore general and more specific: “intertextuality denotes this transpositionof one (or several) sign-system(s) into another […]” – the demonstrative“this” pointing specifically at the case of the novel as the result of a redistributionof the sign systems of carnival, courtly poetry and scholasticdiscourse. 96There is finally no way of stopping intertextuality of being either reducedinto a purely formal study of textual relations, or of being radicalisedinto the cheerful insanity of unlimited differance, if the reality of sufferingand death on the other hand, and the joys and tensions in our corporeal existenceare excluded from its theory. Kristeva attempts to ward off these tendenciesby the introduction of chora (enclosed space, womb) as a counterpartof the thetic splitting of the semhotic continuum. Derrida’s project is inKristeva’s eyes guilty of not differentiating properly these aspects that mustbe taken into consideration to become the subject-in-process in the symbolicorder. She claims that “in its desire to bar the thetic and put (logicallyor chronologically) previous energy transfers in its place, the grammatologicaldeluge of meaning gives up on the subject and must remain ignorant notonly of his functioning as social practice, but also of his chances of experiencingjouissance or being put to death.” 97 In her practice as a psychoanalyst,Kristeva has also developed ethics and epistemology as central to theanalytic process. As Toril Moi summarises:The analyst, who is under the ethical obligation to try to cure her patients,is not free to say whatever she likes, to engage in a free play of the signifier.Instead there is a truth in analysis: a correct intervention or a mistakenone. That this ‘truth’ may change from day to day and is utterly de-95 Ibid., 36-7.96 La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris, 1974; pp. 59-60); Kristeva 1986, 111. – MichaelHolquist quotes Tony Bennett’s clarifying extension of Kristeva’s original definition:whereas ‘intertextuality’ comprehends references to “other texts which can be discernedwithin the internal composition of a specific individual text,” Bennett uses‘inter-textuality’ to refer to “the social organization of the relations between texts withinspecific conditions of reading” (Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond [London,1989]; quoted in Holquist 1990/1994, 88).97Kristeva 1974/1984, 142.