Kristeva and Intertextuality

In Revolution and Poetic Language, Kristeva’s thesis for her Doctorat d'Etat, she further developed her concept of intertextuality. To the two processes Freud identified as being at work in the unconscious, displacement and condensation, Kristeva added a third process, “the passage from one sign system to another.” Inherent in this process she saw an alteration of the thetic phase of language involving the destruction of the old system and the forming of a new one. The new system may use the same or different signifying materials, as in the “carnival” as described by Bakhtin. She argued that the novel particularly exhibited the potential for embodying a “redistribution” of several different sign systems. “Intertextuality,” then, is a specific type of coextension* in which a variety of diverse meanings overlap; it refers to the transposition of one or more sign systems into another or a “field” of transpositions of many signifying systems. The novel provides a particularly good space for this phenomenon to occur.

An Interview with Kristeva

Margaret Smaller conducted this interview in New York City in 1985. It was published in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. The translation is by Richard Macicsey. Kristeva speaks lucidly about her well-known notion of intertextuality, expressing her intellectual debt to Bakhtin's notion of dialogism while emphasizing that the intersection of voices surrounding an utterance concerns not only the semantic field but the syntactic and phonic fields. She introduces a psychoanalytic element into the notion of intertextuality by suggesting that the intertextuality of the creator and the reader make them “subject-in-process” whose psychic identity is put into question.

Commenting on Nerval, Kristeva then contrasts modern poetry, described as more “openly regressive” and direct, with the modern novel, which is said to result from a “working-out” of the self. She claims that the modern novel could thus be seen as a “kind of continuous lay analysis.” Other questions have to do with melancholia (Kristeva was working on Back Sun at the time ot this interview). Psychoanalysis (which is said to link theory and practice more fortuitously than does Marxism or political commitment), and the political structure of the United States. Kristeva concludes by discussing her plans for writing fiction, including the project that would eventually become The Samurai.

* Coextension: An overlapping of sorts, but instead of involving two originally separate things, coextension concerns one thing which can operate in several ways in different contexts. E.g., an F sharp is the same key on a piano as a G flat, but to identify that note with the former term in the latter’s key would introduce contextual distortion. The notion has interesting ramifications for postmodern theories of polysemy.