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“The Lost Foundation”: Kristeva's Semiotic Chora and Its Ambiguous Legacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Maria Margaroni
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Abstract

The aim of this essay is to reclaim Kristeva's concept of the semiotic chora by re-inscribing it as an intervention in the context of two important postmodern debates. The first debate relates to the philosophical problem of “the beginning before the Beginning.” The second concerns the necessity and possibility of mediation between incommensurable entities: the “demonic” and the social, desire and the Law, material production and representation. I contend: (1) that the introduction of the chora in RPL is part of Kristeva's effort to restore the legacy of a materialist economy of the beginning, as this is glimpsed in Plato's Timaeus from which Kristeva borrows her controversial term; and (2) that the chora constitutes an attempt on Kristeva's part to explore a third space of ambiguous relationality in the context of which our transcendence to the “demonic” lies less “beyond us” than “in-between.”

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Type
Research Article
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Hypatia , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Winter 2005, pp. 78 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by Hypatia, Inc.

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