‘Language the Unknown’

Abstract

To open language up to ‘materiality’, to make of it a ‘work’, is ‘immediately to make oneself a stranger to language.’ (Sém: 7) With these words Kristeva argues that that function as social beings we most take for granted — speech — bears a radical alterity which returns in literature to mock our certitude and give body to our dreams. Language is the Unknown that lies just beyond our line of vision. It is the new sublime, overpowering and mastering us in the same way Africa and the Americas awed the colonial explorers. How can we come to terms with this unhomely place which gives us speech and then changes the rules of the game, dissolving ‘us’ in the process? For exile alters the shape of subjective space, according to Kristeva. The person who is in exile lacks a sense of her own proper place, a home. Her dislocation is acute, and where language is always represented as the unknowable stranger, the normally comfortable relationship between body and subjectivity breaks down. Reading Kristeva, I recognise my own position to be an unstable one — divided between the space occupied by an ego who judges and a subject-in-process moving from one form of subjectivity and another. Intentional (female) actor one moment; deprived of agency, sex and place in the next, ‘my’ interactions with the Kristevan text comprise vulnerability as well as a need to master.

More than any other, the criticism of … [Julia Kristeva] conveys the impression of possessing the complexity and the scope of a genuine work of literature, the intricacy of a city which has its avenues, its dead-ends, its underground labyrinths and panoramic lookouts.

With apologies to Paul de Man.

The stranger, the foreigner, thinks he is in control, but he has been precipitated into someone else’s dream.

Angela Carter