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On Julia Kristeva’s “the Ethics of Linguistics”

I am always amazed by the fact that language seems to be the only means we have in order to support the optimistic claim that “no one is an island.” However, the very means we rely upon creates problems, such as representation and interpretation, from which language scholarships derive.

I am seized by the critique of Kristeva (and Jakobson) about poststructuralists’ confidence in their “metalinguistic theory” that enables them to grasp “‘pure signifiers’” (443). That is, being suspicious of the linguistic articulation and examining its “gaps’ will lead to the path of “truth.” Thus, the target of analysis, for poststructuralists, is not the “speaking subject,” but language or “the subject of enunciation.”

I once had fun with such “systematic” practices, but now I feel how distance and inhuman such analysis could be! Once commenting on the fact that Emerson failed to establish a “metadiscourse” as to examine his perspective of the “transparent eye ball,” I seemed to claim that I saw better. It was easy for me to say, without any sense of engagement. My confidence reflected the same desire, probably as poststructuralists, to seek for a metadiscourse that “systematized” and “crystallized” everything.

Reading Kristeva, I sense an ethical dimension regarding the practices of metadiscourse that affirms systematic, conventional structure. If I reading her in a moderate manner, “poetic language” does not exists in a certain genre (such as poetry), but exists in discourses that dare to subvert and provoke governing rules that have been sustained our existence and cultivated our ideology (for me, such as the works Marx, Nietzsche),allows “interaction” and “contradiction” that in turn demands painful self-reflexivity and self-criticism ("the resurgence of an 'I' coming back to rebuild an ephemeral structure in which the constituing struggle of language and society would be spelled out" 443:445).