Acta Nova Humanistica: A Journal of Humanities Published by New Bulgarian University

Engendering the Formula: Engendering a Notion in the Early Kristeva

Bogdana Paskaleva — 2024-12-30

The present text is focused on the genealogy of one of Julia Kristeva's early notions - the notion of formula that appeared first in Semeiotiké (1969). The origin of the notion can be traced back to an earlier linguistic theory - that of Sebastian Shaumyan and Polina Soboleva. Kristeva integrated some of Shaumyan-Soboleva's central notions in her essay "L'Engendrement de la formule." She used, the notion of formula, in the first place, but also two other concepts that formed the basis for the functioning of the formula, the concepts of phenotypical and genotypical language that also appear in her later work. The present text claims that Kristeva didn't simply adopt these notions but presented several very important critical remarks. She re-modelled them, endowing them with a new meaning. Thus, we explore the terminological consequences of the transformations introduced by Kristeva, namely replacing language in the phrase phenotypical and genotypical language with the new concept of text and, hence, giving rise to the new terminological couple, phenotext and genotext.

Poetic Mimesis in Kristeva

Kamelia Spassova — 2024-12-30

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the figure of the break in the framework of the early Kristeva's conceptualization of the mimetic faculty in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), treating it as closely related to poetic language and the dreamwork. Kristeva supplements the psychoanalytic terms displacement and condensation with a third mode of transformation in language, namely transposition. Transposition always operates between two levels of the semiotic process, the genotext and the phenotext. I will examine the mechanism of the dream within a dream in Freud and poetic mimesis in Kristeva. In order to subvert the contemporary logic of authenticity, they use break and doubling in a way similar to the operation of the text-within-a-text device. Poetic enjambment is seen as material discontinuity in language. The key point of this article is that one should not forget about poetry.

The Beheading: Salome’s Gesture in the Works of Wilde, Moreau and Beardsley

Lilia Trifonova — 2024-12-30

The paper explores the problem of female subjectivity in nineteenth-century literature and visual art, focusing on the figure of Salome in the play by Oscar Wilde and the paintings of Gustave Moreau and Aubrey Beardsley. The biblical story of the Jewish princess Salome and John the Baptist, as well as the fascination with the severed head served on a silver platter, is of interest to Julia Kristeva in her book The Severed Head: Capital Visions. For Kristeva, John the Baptist can be thought of as “the figure of the figure,” he sets the course of the figure of “prophecy in actuality.” On the other hand, Kristeva sees Salome as the divine castrator who incorporates the powers of horror. She is the one who invites us to experience the figure of John the Baptist in its severing and its dance. By this manner, Salome is a singular figure who possesses the capacity of that which goes beyond representation.
In the nineteenth century, we can see a shift in the artistic perspective through which Salome’s story is introduced. Using Kristeva’s theory, this paper will propose the term “disfigure” to refer to Salome as one who disfigures the whole. Beyond the tragic delight for the audience that such a gesture of “disfiguring” brings, it is a site of a turning point in the history of the reception of Salome’s figure in art. She is not just the seductive dancer, the object of perverse male gaze, but also the subject, the doer, and agent of the “incision”.

The Figure of the Imaginary Father in the Autobiographical Writing of M. Yourcenar

Francheska Zemyarska — 2024-12-30

In the present paper I read Marguerite Yourcenar’s autobiographical trilogy Le labyrinthe du monde through Kristeva’s concept of the imaginary father. My interpretation aims to trace the way the androgynous figure of the imaginary father acts in a liberatory way and also stimulates Yourcenar’s own work. The retroactive invention of an imaginary origin is associated with the figure of a loving father. Yourcenar traces her genealogy – on the one hand, she identifies with her familial lineage; on the other, she claims that the composition of her ancestry relates much more to her literary precursors and her fictional characters. Yourcenar’s identification appears not on the side of matricide and the powers of horror, but exactly the opposite – on the side of the imaginary father and creative potential.

Intertextual References from Michelangelo Buonarroti’s The Creation of Adam and Walt Disney/Pixar’s Computer-Animated Film Luca

Elena Lazaridou — 2024-12-30

This essay discusses the intertextual references in the artwork The Creation of Adam and in scenes from the animated film Luca. The scene depicting the “touch of the finger-tips” (Walter Pater) between God and man will be discussed in connection with various scenes from the film. The intertextual references will be analyzed with semiotic tools, redefined through their intertextual interaction, and given a new meaning arising from their new environment.

Black Sin: Confessions of a Melancholic

Frances L. Restuccia — 2024-12-30

Challenging Freud’s contention that the origin of religion is the need for a protective Father – rather than an oceanic feeling of eternity – Augustine’s Confessions (as I read it) indicates that such an oceanic experience generated the concept of original sin, in order to justify a theological procedure for returning to that ecstatic experience, thereby laying the foundation for Christianity. Kristeva’s theory of melancholia facilitates our realization that Christianity springs from a wish for maternal fulfillment, a propensity to cling to the plenitude that occupies the void of das Ding. Augustine’s melancholic subjectivity as it operates in his formation of Christianity allows us to grasp the psychosexual underpinnings of the concept of original sin, with its ironic capacity to compel belief in a purity of spiritual oneness. Through his analysis of City of God and Against Julian in Confessions of the Flesh, Michel Foucault not only underscores Augustine’s obsession with sex but also suggests that the consumption of the forbidden fruit might “be understood in a sexual way.” The Christian son/daughter therefore, ideally, fuses with the mother-Church to experience an oceanic state of completeness prior to sexual differentiation, an all-embracing fullness that enables a (Monica-inspired) victory – through evasion – over the Law of the Father, the disease of desire, and its concomitant lack. Although Augustine held psychoanalytic theory within his perceptual and conceptual grasp, he veers off personally as he imbibes mystical milk. Yet in doing so, he instigated two thousand years of Christianity: thanks to Augustine, Imaginary maternal protection can be enjoyed through the jouissance of an oceanic feeling, celebrated in dozens of Madonna del Latte paintings.

On Melancholy and Allegory (Kristeva and Benjamin)

Joanna Neykova — 2024-12-30

In this text I focus on the notion of melancholy in the work of Julia Kristeva, mainly in Black Sun (1987), in relation to Walter Benjamin's concept of allegory developed in his 1928 monograph Origin of the German Trauerspiel as well as in his later work, the Arcades Project (1927-40). This essay is an exploration of how Kristeva's theory of artistic practice as a way out of melancholy's abyss relates to Benjamin's idea of an allegorical mode of expression. Both artistic practice and the allegorical are situated in an intermediate realm between the absence of language and the never-ending accumulation of signs.

The Subject Who Says “I Suffer”: The Semiotic in the State of Singularity

Lenka Vojtíšková — 2024-12-30

The aim of this text is to explore how Kristeva deals with the question of unity and singularity in her early work, particularly in Revolution in Poetic Language. In particular, the conceptual pair of the semiotic and the symbolic, which is commonly subject to schematic evaluation, is confronted: the symbolic is a unifying element in discourse, whereas the semiotic is a pluralizing or destructive force, and the latter is favored by Kristeva over the former. I will argue, however, that the above-mentioned characteristics do not exhaust this pair of concepts. I will read Revolution in Poetic Language alongside Georges Bataille’s texts, where he deals with the notions of heterogeneity, homogeneity, and experience, and I will try to highlight the intersections with Kristeva’s work. I will also take into account Kristeva’s own reading of Bataille. I turn to Kristeva’s 1972 “Bataille, Experience and Practice” to emphasize important aspects of her work, where unity is clearly privileged. I focus on the moment when the dissolution of unity results not in the emergence of a plurality (of the text) but of a singular experience, for which she finds inspiration in Bataille, and which becomes an important theme in her later work.

Julia Kristeva and a Collective Semiotic in a Social Body

Anand Raja — 2024-12-30

Julia Kristeva distinguishes between the semiotic and the symbolic as they apply to the individual human body. This essay argues that there is a similar application to the social, political, economic, and cultural body. This “social body” possesses its own collective semiotic, which could be seen as bringing about social change in a Lotmanian semiosphere, the space of meaning generation without which language cannot exist. In the semiosphere, strategic communication can lead to either hegemony or counter-hegemony, where organic intellectuals, charismatic authority, and meta-signs emerge and in which system and lifeworld fuse in a postmodern hyperreal. Such a hyperreal is the result of a collective semiotic playing at multiple levels. This has similarities to Kristeva’s fourfold signifying practices in a collectivity: the collective and the individualistic dimensions of sociology interpenetrate her work.

Les anges déchus (la maladie de l’infini, le corps politique de l’Empire et la psychose)

Albena Stambolova — 2024-12-30

This article treats the possible plausible or non-plausible analogies between the psychosis and the political corps of the empire. The arguments follow three steps: 1) Lacan’s structure of the psychosis; 2) Kristeva’s explanation of the abject; 3) the contemporary vision of the empire. The point at issue is the association of the ignorance of boundaries and the non-recognition of others, the strangers, the universal rights of humans, the hiatus of the low? And the difference of those two phenomena.

Kristeva on Exile, Artificial Intelligence, and the One-dimensional Universe

Tanya Loughead — 2024-12-30

In the beginning of the twenty-first century, when algorithms are monitoring our most intimate activities, the data-driven relationships created by digital hyperconnectivity attempt to reduce the distance between us and flatten our differences. Kristeva’s question, “Can the ‘foreigner’ […] disappear from modern societies?” (Kristeva 1991, 1), raises concerns about this ostensibly frictionless future. She sees the difference inherent in foreignness as a flux of possibilities to be explored, rather than a quality to be homogenized, as data algorithms do. However, the desire to encounter the “essential enigma” of foreignness (Kristeva 1991, 33; emphasis in original) both with regards to an external Other and to our own unconscious, has been rendered not only redundant but progressively vestigial by the intellectual, cultural, and material vacuums created by artificial intelligence (AI). In an age when the superficial comfort of hyperconnectivity proclaims to alleviate the sense of being uprooted “from a family, a country or a language,” Kristeva reminds us that “[w]riting is impossible without some kind of exile” (Kristeva 1986, 298). To attempt to resurrect the potential of dissidence Kristeva sees in exile would be to dissolve AI’s maniacal efforts to categorize identity in favor of disarticulating it – a task at the heart of Kristeva’s intellectual project. It would also imply undermining the centrality of efficiency in neoliberal societies, because the quest for efficiency culminates in a system for the accounting-like management of life as well as in the adolescent “malady of ideality” (Kristeva 2019, 322), which seeks to extract a neatly structured order from the disorganized plurality of human activity at the nexus of the semiotic and the symbolic. This essay aims to provide not only a Kristevan critique of AI’s flattening of life’s dimensions, but also open potential avenues for revolt based on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and political work.

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Editorial Board — 2024-12-30