Julia Kristeva

"The system and the speaking subject"

K. M. Newton

pp. 124-129

in: K. M. Newton (ed), Twentieth-century literary theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1997

Abstract

However great the diversity, the irregularity, the disparity even of current research in semiotics, it is possible to speak of a specifically semiotic discovery. What semiotics has discovered in studying "ideologies' (myths, rituals, moral codes, arts, etc.) as sign-systems is that the law governing or, if one prefers, the major constraint affecting any social practice lies in the fact that it signifies; i.e., that it is articulated like a language. Every social practice, as well as being the object of external (economic, political, etc.) determinants, is also determined by a set of signifying rules, by virtue of the fact that there is present an order of language; that this language has a double articulation (signifier/signified), that this duality stands in an arbitrary relation to the referent; and that all social functioning is marked by the split between referent and symbolic and by the shift from signified to signifier coextensive with it.

Cited authors

Kristeva Julia