Changing the Alphabet: Event as Revelation

Abstract

At every turn Julia Kristeva has attempted to articulate new forms that will host the human experience of exile. Whether traversing the subjective body or plumbing the interiors of speech, her writing probes those territories that gleam on the edge of consciousness. The fire of tongues that ignites in every speaking being when the resources of the unconscious are imaginatively translated into signs expresses Kristeva’s belief that although becoming a subject requires a journey away from our maternal origins, these can be reinvoked in incandescent fashion through representation. However, despite a readjustment of focus in recent years, Kristeva still argues that whatever the ecstatic illumination afforded by the material richness of signs, it is always played out against a backdrop of emptiness, violence and death. In Chapter 1 I used the image of the unreadable map to illustrate the way literature and poetic language intensify the experience of separation and rebirth. Without experiencing a sense of disorientation, of dislocation, we remain prisoners of banality. Kristeva seems to believe then that even if all subjects must undergo separation, to experience it as a perpetual state of life makes one vulnerable to a superior form of knowlege. It opens us to a new, imaginative reconstruction of ‘speaking in tongues’.