Revolution in Poetic Language

In this great book, you will find a whirled stairway to the very innards of that stirring and shaking inquiry called theory. From Saussure to Husserl, from Plato to Freud, and taking on Chomsky, Frege, Hjelmslev and las but not least, Lacan, Kristeva undertakes a criticism which is that of the two most troubling concepts in the western thought: the subject and the sign. In order to a new and, more and foremost, springing overture to come about, this French psychoanalyst and critic penetrates in the very core of the more intricated authors who built his theories within the sing and the subject; a sign and a subject Kristeva tears apart from the confortable room that eiher in structuralism (with Saussure and Hjelmslev, but also with Noam Chomsky) as in fenomenology (with Husserl)they reside, and finds out the semiotic, this motilities drives whiches allow a freer subject to show up in the very symbolism of language and, even with no destroy it, disrupt it from within, taking over the symbolic whereby all the socials constraints burst into the individual. Thus, we have in this Etrangere (as Barthes named her) one of the most creative and, hence, one of the most revolutionaries thought the twentieth century give us.

The previous reviewer clearly did not understand this intricate and admittedly difficult work in the least - it is certainly NOT an example of the "emperor has no clothes" syndrome. It is, however, a challenging and complicated work that presumes a good deal of exposure to continental philosophy (especially the phenomonologies of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger) and Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis. Kristeva does an impresive and convincing - as well as constructive - job of tying together these overlapping philosophical/ideolgical traditions and ties them into notions of how a subject comes to exist as such in and through a world of language... Going behind the mis-en-abime of Lacan and beyond the linguistic monism of postsrtucturalism, Kristeva gives a living, breathing account of these different themes (of which the previous reviewer seem utterly unaware - but then again, philosophy can be hard)....more later...