1

Wittgenstein believes there can be no thoughts without language, that even when we think we are thinking in pictures, the pictures are aided by the existence of language,
that to imagine a solitary, lonely image, untethered to and unhinged from language is an impossibility.

D said, that there is a time when we're tethered to the womb where language does not exist yet, is significant,
that the process of signification begins once we physically detach from the mother, is significant,
that all meaning hinges on the point where we see ourselves separate from the mother makes the beginning of the thetic phase, significant. To make meaning then is to realise loneliness, that there's no caregiver, that since the moment language envelops us, we are astronauts in singular pods, hurtling towards demise,
that mother is going to die one day and we will experience the thetic again on her passing, in a new way.

I cry after reading the first few essays by Kristeva because I don't understand anything. McLuhan says, since the dawn of the electric age, the age of illumination and earning the capacity of vision at night, we have developed and harboured a compelling need to understand everything in full——"What does this mean?" we say, affronted by Matisse's Icarus——"What does this mean?" we say, assaulted by Lispector's The Apprenticeship——"What does this mean?" I say, confounded by a cryptic text message from my date.
Trying to understand the meaning in full is an affliction of the electric age.

O said, understanding is overrated, theory is poetry, dare to stand unwavering in the face of a work you don't know how to make sense of.

V suggested, as my assignment for the Kristeva class, I could write Kristeva letters——Dear Julia——we expected it to free up the way for thought by circumventing the fear, we expected I could coherently write something insightful about theory if only the form was changed, if only I was imagining writing the assignment to Kristeva herself. The thing is, I don't think I have anything to say to Kristeva, except maybe ask her——what advice would she give her 28-year-old self?

I am the astronaut in a pod, still orbiting the womb, seeking guidance, wanting advice, searching for someone to parent me, to teach me how to live life not thinking of death. I refuse to write Kristeva a letter to avoid asking her the secret of the universe, the key to living, the exact linguistic-philosophical code that will free me from ever asking myself the question
"Am I doing it right? Is this how life is supposed to be lived?"

I claim I love reading literary theory and get ridiculed, a mention of Joyce elicits boos, philosophy has gotten a bad rep. Anything that prides itself in being dense, without enough context, meant for someone who's already meant to know something else, is criticised,
shut down, foreclosed.

In so many ways, I am still procrastinating writing directly about Kristeva.

D said, Kristeva uses the word 'revolution' in Revolution in Poetic Language in the sense of industrial revolution or green revolution. For her, it is a phenomenon with historicity and everlasting impact. I close my eyes and try and make sense of this abstraction, shelter myself from the visual world as if the red darkness of my eyelids is going to put everything in place, make me understand what I am struggling to.

I barged into O's office and said, reading Kristeva feels like I'm studying a foreign language. O nodded, but that's the only way to pick up a new language, O said, is to continue coming up against its dead ends. I close my eyes again, take a breath as if inhaling this truth and think——so much of the process of trying to understand and
making sense of a difficult thing is just blind belief.

D said, in the foreword to Deleuze and Guattari, the translator relays that the authors urge the reader to read their works like one would listen a record, a new album——Let it play in the background, tune in if something strikes the fancy, let things go if they don't appeal to you, put the record away after it ends, no need to punish yourself to listen to it again, return to it whenever you feel like immersing in its tunes.

2

I let Kristeva play in the background: The semiotic chora is no more than a place where the subject is both generated and negated... Indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation, it is musical, anterior to judgment, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax.

I'm trying not to break my head over the dead ends, await the illumination of a language learned, tussle with it, keep speaking it brokenly until I'm finally enlightened.

To think that the semiotic——sign, signifier, signified, father, son, holy spirit, text, world, critic——
and the symbolic——two across in the NYT crossword, God, the poem——
are inextricably enmeshed and inhabit the same space, a space with movement, therefore time, because there's no space without time and movement without space
a space that is maternal, rhythmic, musical, indifferent to language.

To think that maternal and indifferent are antithetical,
that the thetic is a linguistic severing,
that where there's a child, there's a mother haunting the underworld of linguistic agency.

To realise that Kristeva has written the chora like a fictional female archetype, a mysterious feminine presence that governs the workings of language while being indifferent to it, a deistic goddess, a wise mother, a wilderness, an order, a churning of contradictions, the contradictions adding to the enigma. But what if the chora is a clown, a mischief-loving femininity, governing the underworld of language, indifferent but with wonder, a maternal presence with an affinity to recede into childlike playfulness.

To think that there's play at the heart of signification,
to come up with a word for a thing is a game,
to learn that death is muerte in Spanish is a thrill, a delight, a tickle, a relief.

AG said about the Revolution in Poetic Language, this is a whodunnit.
D asked me, who gets killed?
I said, no one gets killed, something gets made and it's language.

The record plays on, travelling from background to foreground, foreground to background.
I am hanging on to every word as I wash the dishes but cutting strawberries, for example, requires attention, the sharp edge of a knife can make fingers bleed, and the words that stay with me as the pink splices into white are——
Signification in literature implies the possibility of denotation.

Denotation, as in, different from but in the same family as notation, connotation.
Denotation, meaning something that notes down, notates, encapsulates the note,
as opposed to connotation, meaning something that holds another note besides the denotated one. Notation meaning simply the note to note.

Dialectics means a pattern of threes, trinities, trifectas, trios, threesomes, an arrangement in thirds. A mother entertains a child with a fairy-tale in rules of threes. In the Mahabharat, the gods and demons engage in a tug-of-war holding a snake twisted around
a mountain situated in the ocean. The churning of the mountain in the ocean creates a storm
and from the storm, emerge invaluable powers.

Not this, not that, but a secret third thing.
Yes this, yes that, and a secret third thing.

Poetry does a mimesis that apparently creates verisimilitude of the object,
in which things appear to be true, wearing truth's guise, reimagining truth
in the garb of poetic language.

In The Tribute Horse, Brandon Som writes, both knife and knowing begin in silence——what appears but does not say, the ghost of ragged cuttings. The object in poetic mimesis is perhaps twice removed from truth, but a poem leads an unravelling existence, the poet providing the poem with infinite denotation and Bedeutung and the critic gleaning, exploring and engaging with all its connotations. A poem then is both and simultaneously a mystery and a clue.

I thought my essay lacked theoretical evidence and AG said, theory is theory, I won't call it evidence.

We're slowly, steadily getting there, I feel.

In office hours, a student asks me, how do you make notes to understand the reading material for your own classes? I don't know how to tell her I'm struggling, so I say: It's hard. I don't know how to tell her I'm lagging behind and my fridge is empty, so I say: I read what I can. I don't know how to tell her I'm insecure about my level of intelligence and comprehension capabilities so I say: I go through the intro and the conclusion, I highlight keywords, I write down the main argument, I write its uses and limits.

What is Kristeva's main argument? I ask myself and have to refer to three different papers on
Jstor to guess at it. Ezra Pound writes, ... unfinished; I am proceeding // in ignorance and
by conjecture——What a nightmare.

3

Kristeva puts a murder at the heart of her whodunnit: "art" takes on murder and moves through it. It assumes murder insofar as artistic practice considers death the inner boundary of the signifying process. Crossing that boundary is precisely what constitutes "art."

My desperate impulse when confronted with something complex is to do a close reading.

Art doesn't commit a murder or murder something/someone, it takes on murder, like a fun challenge, a rollercoaster activity; it takes murder for granted, assumes death is the fundamental principle driving the language-learning, meaning-making, poetry-writing process.
Kristeva reminds the reader that a sacrifice is a murder, the non-consensual taking of a life,
and art continuously engages with this act.
A sacrifice is not a triadic dialectic, it's a quartet——
a sacrificer——the uttering subject, the authoring writer
sacrifices the object of sacrifice——a lamb, another human, the self
to appease the beneficiary of sacrifice——goddess, deity, language
gains the fruit of their sacrifice——rainfall, harvest, art
Language channels and minimises the death drive, art uses and expands it.

In workshop, I'm asked what my novella is about and I find myself answering——dying, desire and daughterhood, I want to title it "Reject the psychoanalytic thesis entirely" I joke,
it's like Magritte's "This is not a pipe."

I'm trying not to think about the fact that I'm softly grooving to the record, the hesitant rhythmic movements of a person too self-conscious to join the dance floor at a party.

A true dialectic Kristeva points out, has a fourth term: negativity——triplicity is only an appearance in the realm of Understanding.

Negativity, which is different from negation and nothingness, presupposes the thesis and antithesis. The dialectic is actually a four-metred beat that goes Negativity, Thesis-Antithesis, Synthesis, that goes Negativity, Being-Nothingness, Becoming.

Negativity is objective reality, opposite of verisimilitude, but a necessary precursor to poetry. An appearance of truth cannot be based off of nothing, it needs something real to imitate. Still supplying and subverting Platonic logical reasoning even seven years after graduating.
It's impossible to take myself seriously.

That's what I would want to ask Kristeva——Did you experience crippling self-doubt?
When did you stop experiencing crippling self-doubt?
How did you get out of your own way?

But I imagine her to be too consumed by thoughts about language and how it happens, the rupture of identity against attachment, the being subsumed by signification, starting with the meow, ending up with "cat," turning it into She sights a Bird——she chuckles—— // She flattens——then she crawls—— // She runs without the look of feet—— // Her eyes increase to Balls—
And for Kristeva, it seems, the meow and the poem are functionally the same.
At the centre of the revolution within poetic language is a child, is a poet, is a murder of an arcane self refusing to let go of material reality.

The semiotic and the symbolic are separated by the thread connecting the uttering subject to objective reality.

A person concerned with / consumed by the creation of / the death within language perhaps does not have enough time for self-doubt.

4

R said, all philosophy is bogus.
Then why does it save my life every time I study it?

Maybe R is right, maybe every philosopher is finding solace in abstractions, running from
the realities of the real world, maybe Kristeva deserves to be psychoanalysed,
maybe she's the one I shouldn't be taking seriously. Maybe the answer to——will I read this book again? is a resounding No.

But for now, I listen to the record, I skip a couple of songs to the one whose title attracts me and the song goes——(a) subject emerges: the subject, precisely, of desire, who lives at the expense of his drives, ever in search of a lacking object. The sole source of his praxis is the quest for lack, death and language...

Sitting in a literature department overlooking the Pacific Ocean, it's easy to forget that language belongs to everyone, even those who have not chosen to make it their life's mission to think about language. The subject is everyone. Everyone is in search of what they lack, everyone is synthesising the death drive into language, everyone is engaged in poetry.

Italo Calvino writes, a person who knows how to read is forever plagued by the written word, has no escape from it, can't order their mind not to read.

The quest is a desire, the drive a desire. Lack is natural, death inevitable.
Believe it or not, even STEM and Finance majors desire language.

I hate how psychoanalysts talk about desire, I said. Of course, D said, because they talk about it like it's in a can or a bottle.

I think: I didn't get what I wanted from this song, and realise: I have been wanting something from this entire record. I have been wanting insight, clarity, illumination, a new way to think about language and languaging, meaning and meaning-making, I have been wanting Kristeva to save my life.

But theory is theory, not elixir, not antidote.

Every day in the relentless California sun, I walk my shadow to the Arts and Humanities building where it finds shade and dissolves. The salt from the French fries parches my throat. It's all coming together in the literature and philosophy departments. They have the secrets to the universe. Literary theory and epistemology will save the environment, stop the genocide, resolve world hunger. Testable, refutable, falsifiable scientific theories cannot do what Eliot's Four Quartets did, or what McLuhan's tetrad did.

No joke, though, a philosopher is an essential worker.

Kristeva goes: Having deduced (a) heterogeneous economy, we need no longer regard poetic text as a modified, deformed, or incomplete variant of the linguistic structure of everyday communication between two unary subjects.

Instead, poetic text linguistically explores the relation between the semiotic and symbolic by rejecting and creating a new reality corresponding to the new subject rendered through poetry.

Philosophy, she says, used to be concerned with explaining the world, dialectical materialism is concerned with changing the world, transforming the real.

There's only so many ways to begin a sentence that begins a story, until the language folds in on itself, gets pulled in every direction, on all its seams
Language has seams, boundaries that bookend the tongue, choreograph the organ of the mouth,
cut the teeth short, flex against the roof of the throat.

Text equals heterogenous rupture plus rejection, equals jouissance plus death.

5

Line breaks make me nauseous, the winding churn
in the stomach as the car swerves around
a bend? a curve? a bell graph? a supple swinging
transition from chew to gulp, gag to rinse

Kristeva wafts through the speakers: As the text constructed itself with respect to an empty place (...), it in turn comes to be the empty site of a process in which its readers become involved. The text turns out to be the analyst and every reader the analysand.

The text dictates how it's to be read, the addressee has little to do with it.
Meeting the text where it's at, requires a shedding of reality, a shunning
of the ego (content), a puncturing of the thematic, an oozing out
a tumbling down, a spilling over of theory, a proclivity, tenacity
to flounder, reaching, grasping, acclimatising to the dark.

A text renders itself in an image of an empty place, the lightness of sunrays streaming through eucalyptus groves, only existing in the canopies of emptiness between barks, the empty heaviness of a corpse, the shape void of its ashes, soil
coffee grains slipping through the tiny emptiness of netted sieves, the blank space constructed between line breaks,
the rushed crowding of anaphora, enjambment onto a landscape meant to be stared at without
putting it into words, a painting is an utterance.

Empty before or empty after?
Expectant or post-partum?
Anticipating an arrival or decaying in abandonment?
The emptiness of an unsolved mystery or that of a solved one?

In the Translator's Preface to Revolution in Poetic Language, Margaret Waller hints at yet another murder running underneath this text——inasmuch as it replaces the previous work, a translation is not only a transformation of that text but also its elimination: the homage paid is a covert form of parricide.

Poetry as marked with blood, AG said. This text is bleeding. A murder is an elimination, a sacrifice, a cessation, an embodied outgoing, requiring something talonous, fanginal, poised, quiet and kniving.

The murder of the thetic, the sign, the parent, the source text, evoking signification, the authoring subject, the translation.

always already
in itself
for itself
as it were, behind its back
simultaneously depending upon and refusing

Levi-Strauss writes, the shaman provides a sick woman with a language, she finds cure in expression. Buddhist philosophy prescribes a vow of silence, as cure for sansar, industry, investment in the fleeting. Language need not imply an uttering existence, and yet, revolution in poetic language hinges on the subject auteuring their self through the murder

Language is a broken record——