24 / The Semiotic and the Symbolic
the same signifying process. We shall call the first "the semiotic"
and the second "the symbolic." These two modalities are insepara-
ble within the signifying process that constitutes language, and the
dialectic between them determines the type of discourse (narra-
tive, metalanguage, theory, poetry, etc.) involved; in other words,
so-called "natural" language allows for different modes of artic-
ulation of the semiotic and the symbolic. On the other hand, there
are nonverbal signifying systems that are constructed exclusively
on the basis of the semiotic (music, for example). But, as we shall
see, this exclusivity is relative, precisely because of the necessary
dialectic between the two modalities of the signifying process,
which is constitutive of the subject. Because the subject is always
both semiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he produces can
be either "exclusively" semiotic or "exclusively" symbolic, and is
instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both.
2.
The Semiotic Chora
Ordering the Drives
WE UNDERSTAND the term "semiotic" in its Greek sense:
crr]/ji€lov= distinctive mark, trace, index, precursory sign, proof,
engraved or written sign, imprint, trace, figuration. This etymolog-
ical reminder would be a mere archaeological embellishment (and
an unconvincing one at that, since the term ultimately en-
compasses such disparate meanings), were it not for the fact that
the preponderant etymological use of the word, the one that im-
plies a distinctiveness, allows us to connect it to a precise modality
in the signifying process. This modality is the one Freudian psy-
choanalysis points to in postulating not only the facilitation and
the structuring disposition of drives, but also the so-called primary
processes which displace and condense both energies and their in-
scription. Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of
the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course
of his development, they are arranged according to the various
constraints imposed on this body—always already involved in a
semiotic process—by family and social structures. In this way the
drives, which are "energy" charges as well as "psychical" marks,
articulate what we call a chora- a nonexpressive totality formed by
the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of move-
ment as it is regulated.
We borrow the term chora11 from Plato's Timaeus to denote
an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation con-
stituted by movements and their ephemeral stases. We differen-
tiate this uncertain and indeterminate articulation from a disposition
that already depends on representation, lends itself to phenom-

26 / The Semiotic and the Symbolic
enological, spatial intuition, and gives rise to a geometry. Al-
though our theoretical description of the chora is itself part of the
discourse of representation that offers it as evidence, the chora, as
rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimili-
tude, spatiality, and temporality. Our discourse—all discourse—
moves with and against the cfiora in the sense that it simultane-
ously depends upon and refuses it. Although the chora can be
designated and regulated, it can never be definitively posited: as
a result, one can situate the chora and, if necessary, lend it a to-
pology, but one can never give it axiomatic form. 12
The chora is not yet a position that represents something
for someone (i.e., it is not a sign); nor is it a position that repre-
sents someone for another position (i.e., it is not yet a signifier
either); it is, however, generated in order to attain to this signi-
fying position. Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and
underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only
to vocal or kinetic rhythm. We must restore this motility's ges-
tural and vocal play (to mention only the aspect relevant to lan-
guage) on the level of the socialized body in order to remove mo-
tility from ontology and amorphousness' 3 where Plato confines it
in an apparent attempt to conceal it from Democritean rhythm.
The theory of the subject proposed by the theory of the uncon-
scious will allow us to read in this rhythmic space, which has no
thesis and no position, the process by which signifiance is con-
stituted. Plato himself leads us to such a process when he calls
this receptacle or chora nourishing and maternal, 14 not yet unified
in an ordered whole because deity is absent from it. Though de-
prived of unity, identity, or deity, the chora is nevertheless subject
to a regulating process \reglementation\, which is different from that
of symbolic law but nevertheless effectuates discontinuities by
temporarily articulating them and then starting over, again and
again.
The chora is a modality of signifiance in which the linguis-
tic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as
the distinction between real and symbolic. We emphasize the reg-
ulated aspect of the chora: its vocal and gestural organization is
subject to what we shall call an objective ordering \ordonnancement\,
\S
which is dictated by natural or socio-historical constraints such
as the biological difference between the sexes or family structure.
We may therefore posit that social organization, always already '"]
symbolic, imprints its constraint in a mediated form which orga-
nizes the cfiora not according to a daw (a term we reserve for the
symbolic) but through an ordering. 15 What is this mediation?
According to a number of psycholinguists, "concrete op-
erations" precede the acquisition of language, and organize pre-
verbal semiotic space according to logical categories, which are
thereby shown to precede or transcend language. From their re-
search we shall retain not the principle of an operational state' 6
but that of a preverbal functional state that governs the connec-
tions between the body (in the process of constituting itself as a
body proper), objects, and the protagonists of family structure. 17
But we shall distinguish this functioning from symbolic opera-
tions that depend on language as a sign system—whether the
language [langue] is vocalized or gestural (as with deaf-mutes). The
kinetic functional stage of the semiotic precedes the establishment
of .the sign; it is not, therefore, cognitive in the sense of being
assumed by a knowing, already constituted subject. The genesis
of the functions18 organizing the semiotic process can be accu-
rately elucidated only within a theory of the subject that does not
reduce the subject to one of understanding, but instead opens up
within the subject this other scene of pre-symbolic functions. The
Kleinian theory expanding upon Freud's positions on the drives
will momentarily serve as a guide.
Drives involve pre-Oedipal semiotic functions and energy
discharges that connect and orient the body to the mother. We
must emphasize that "drives" are always already ambiguous, si-
multaneously assimilating and destructive; this dualism, which has
been represented as a tetrad 19 or as a double helix, as in the con-
figuration of the DNA and RNA molecule, 20 makes the semiotized
body a place of permanent scission. The oral and anal drives, both
of which are oriented and structured around the mother's body,21
dominate this sensorimotor organization. The mother's body is
therefore what mediates the symbolic law organizing social rela-
tions and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora22
28 / The Semiotic and the Symbolic
which is on the path of destruction, aggressivity, and death. For
although drives have been described as disunited or contradic-
tory structures, simultaneously "positive" and "negative," this
doubling is said to generate a dominant "destructive wave" that
is drive's most characteristic trait: Freud notes that the most in-
stinctual drive is the death drive. 23 In this way, the term "drive"
denotes waves of attack against stases, which are themselves
constituted by the repetition of these charges; together, charges
and stases lead to no identity (not even that of the "body proper")
that could be seen as a result of their functioning. This is to say
that the semiotic chora is no more than the place where the sub-
ject is both generated and negated, the place where his unity suc-
cumbs before the process of charges and stases that produce him.
We shall call this process of charges and stases a negativity to dis-
tinguish it from negation, which is the act of a judging subject
(see below, part II).
Checked by the constraints of biological and social struc-
tures, the drive charge thus undergoes stases. Drive facilitation,
temporarily arrested, marks discontinuities in what may be called the
various material supports [materiaux] susceptible to semiotization:
voice, gesture, colors. Phonic (later phonemic), kinetic, or chro-
matic units and differences are the marks of these stases in the
drives. Connections or functions are thereby established between
these discrete marks which are based on drives and articulated
according to their resemblance or opposition, either by slippage
or by-condensation. Here we find the principles of metonymy and
metaphor indissociable from the drive economy underlying them.
Although we recognize the vital role played by the pro-
cesses of displacement and condensation in the organization of
the semiotic, we must also add to these processes the relations
(eventually representable as topological spaces) that connect the
zones of the fragmented body to each other and also to "exter-
nal" "objects" and "subjects," which are not yet constituted as
such. This type of relation makes it possible to specify the semiotic
as a psychosomatic modality of the signifying process; in other
words, not a symbolic modality but one articulating (in the larg-
est sense of the word) a continuum: the connections between the
The Semiotic and the Symbolic I 29
(glottal and anal) sphincters in (rhythmic and intonational) vocal
modulations, or those between the sphincters and family protag-
onists, for example.
All these various processes and relations, anterior to sign
and syntax, have just been identified from a genetic perspective
^"previous and necessary to the acquisition of language, but not
identical to language. "Theory can "situate" such processes and
relations diachronically within the process of the constitution of
the subject precisely because they function synchronically within the
signifying process of the subject himself, i.e., the subject of cogitatio. Only
in dream logic, however, have they attracted attention, and only in
certain signifying practices, such as the text, do they dominate the
signifying process.
It may be hypothesized that certain semiotic articulations
are transmitted through the biological code or physiological
"memory" and thus form the inborn bases of the symbolic func-
tion. Indeed, one branch of generative linguistics asserts the prin-
ciple of innate language universals. As it will become apparent in
what follows, however, the symbolic—and therefore syntax and all
linguistic categories—is a social effect of the relation to the other,
established through the objective constraints of biological (in-
cluding sexual) differences and concrete, historical family struc-
tures. Genetic programmings are necessarily semiotic: they in-
clude the primary processes such as displacement and
condensation, absorption and repulsion, rejection and stasis, all
of which function as innate preconditions, "memorizable" by the
species, for language acquisition.
Mallarme calls attention to the semiotic rhythm within
language when he speaks of "The Mystery in Literature" |"Le
Mystere dans les lettres"]. Indifferent to language, enigmatic and
feminine, this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfet-
tered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musi-
cal, anterior to judgment, but restrained by a single guarantee:
syntax. As evidence, we could cite "The Mystery in Literature" in
its entirety. 24 For now, however, we shall quote only those pas-
sages that ally the functioning of that "air or song beneath the
text" with woman:
30 / The Semiotic and the Symbolic
And the instrument of Darkness, whom they have designated, will
not set down a word from then on except to deny that she must
have been the enigma; lest she settle matters with a wisk of her
skirts: '1 don't get it!"
—They [the critics) play their parts disinterestedly or for a minor
gain: leaving our Lady and Patroness exposed to show her dehis-
cence or lacuna, with respect to certain dreams, as though this
were the standard to which everything is reduced.25
To these passages we add others that point to the "mysterious"
functioning of literature as a rhythm made intelligible by syntax:
"Following the instinct for rhythms that has chosen him, the poet
does not deny seeing a lack of proportion between the means let
loose and the result." "1 know that there are those who would re-
strict Mystery to Music's domain; when writing aspires to it." 26
What pivot is there, I mean within these contrasts, for intelligibil-
ity? a guarantee is needed—
Syntax—
. . .an extraordinary appropriation of structure, limpid, to
the primitive lightning bolts of logic. A stammering, what the
sentence seems, here repressed (. . .]
The debate—whether necessary average clarity deviates in a de-
tail—remains one for grammarians. 27
Our positing of the semiotic is obviously inseparable from
a theory of the subject that takes into account the Freudian pos-
iting of the unconscious. We view the subject in language as de-
centering the transcendental ego, cutting through it, and opening
it up to a dialectic in which its syntactic and categorical under-
standing is merely the liminary moment of the process, which is
itself always acted upon by the relation to the other dominanted
by the death drive and its productive reiteration of the "signifier."
We will be attempting to formulate the distinction between semi-
otic and symbolic within this perspective, which was introduced by
Lacanian analysis, but also within the constraints of a practice—
the text—which is only of secondary interest to psychoanalysis.
3.
Husserl's Hyletic Meaning:
A Natural Thesis Commanded
by the Judging Subject
IT SHOULD now be clear that our point of view is very different
from that of an immanent semiotics, anterior to language, which
explores a meaning that is always already there, as in Hjelmslev.
Equally apparent is our epistemological divergence from a Carte-
sian notion of language, which views thought as preconditioned by
or even identical to natural factual data, and gradually considers it
innate. Now, however, we would like to stress another phase of
epistemological justification, which modern theory on the seman-
tico-syntactic function has recently taken up: indeed, more and
more, Husserlian phenomenology seems to be taking the place of
Cartesianism in modern elucidations of the language act.
Husserlian phenomenology will concern us here only in-
sofar as it intersects current linguistic preoccupations, which is to
say at two points:
On the one hand, drawing its inspiration from phenome-
nological considerations, one trend in generative grammar tends
to consider syntactic competence not simply as a natural precon-
dition of actual syntactic activity, but as a product of the con-
scious or intentional transcendental ego, which judges or speaks
and, simultaneously, brackets all that is heterogeneous to its
consciousness. This bracketing \Einklammerung\s presented as an
objectivity which is always already present in linguistic activity in
the form of a nominal category referring to a "thing" al-
ways/already meant and apprehended. 28 This slide from Carte-