Chora

"Discourse here meets its limit--in itself, in its very performative power.  It is what I propose to call here the mystical.  There is here a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act; walled up, walled in because this silence is not exterior to language.  [...] Since the origin of authority, the founding or grounding, the positing of law cannot by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground.  This is not to say that they are in themselves unjust, in the sense of "illegal" or "illegitimate."  They are neither legal nor illegal in their founding moment.  They exceed the opposition between founded and unfounded...The fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news.  One may even find in this the political chance of all historical progress."  (Derrida, Acts of Religion, 242)

"Here one notices that there are cases in which, posed in terms of means/end, the problem of law remains undecidable.  This ultimate undecidability, which is that of all problems of law...is the insight of a singular discouraging experience.  Where is one to go after recognizing this ineluctable undecidability? Such a question opens, first, upon another dimension of language, upon a beyond of mediation and so beyond language as a sign.  Sign is here understood, as always in Benjamin, in the sense of mediation, as a means toward an end.  It seems at first that there is no way out, and so there is no hope."  (Derrida, Acts of Religion, 285)

Let me attempt to make my general disposition, such as it is, explicit.  I am tempted to subscribe fully to Derrida's reading of, and resistance to Benjamin, and thus in certain respects against Agamben.  To subscribe fully to the disquiet Derrida outlines, and to the questions he poses, in this already much-cited, seminal essay, "Force of Law:  The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority.'"   Above all, perhaps, to not be in too much of a hurry, as Derrida was fond of saying (in that yesteryear still blissfully ignorant of "teh! serious" weblogs, we can only assume). 

There are some real differences here, as Adam alluded to earlier (Agamben calls the likewise leaping conclusion of Derrida's essay on Benjamin a peculiar misunderstanding, and understandably so, since surely it's fair to say that Derrida is addressing his remarks in no small part to Agamben's Benjamin, so to speak).  For Agamben's fullest response, as far as I am aware, the reader is encouraged to consult Homo Sacer I (above linked).  The differences here could certainly be sketched out in many ways, using everyone from Kant to Heidegger to Schmitt as one's primary filter (not to mention Blanchot, Wittgenstein, Montaigne or Pascal, Rawls or Sam Weber and so on, all of whom appear in Derrida's historico-philosophical sketch).  But perhaps some summary schematics can at this point be posed, or repeated, both for the sake of clarity and complexity (if not for the added benefit of driving the larger panopticon crazy with shades of ambivalence).  Derrida is useful in this way.   But first it should be plainly noted:  even where he claims to be leaving "Benjamin the last word," Derrida is picking up where Benjamin left off, specifically there where Benjamin states:

The realm of ends, and therefore also the question of a criterion of justness, is excluded for the time being from this study.  (279)

The question of justice, as I believe Paul Passavant touched on earlier, runs strongly through Derrida's larger project, in which the ideas of a just decision, a justice to-come, and a certain 'messianicity without messianism' are at least suggestively, elliptically or implicitly, opposed to Benjamin's (and Agamben's) perceived messianism.  Not that any of these ideas are so easily understood, of course.  But perhaps it is not merely coincidental that in another nearby essay,"Faith and Reason," Derrida's discussion of these topics repeatedly returns to a single, rather enigmatic word:  "chora" (which he borrows from Plato, and borrows it not for the first time, as we shall see).  Would it be accurate to suggest that this Platonic "chora" is invoked at least partly in response to Benjamin's meditations on "divine violence," as described, in some literary fashion, by the story of Korah?  I don't know.  It is possible, I suppose, that Derrida has been responding to this essay, in one form or another, for some time.

As Agamben in Homo Sacer I explicitly agrees, every interpretation of this at once highly schematic and inductive, and strangely-leaping essay of Benjamin's hinges on the final gesture, or as Marc Lombardo notes, "last sequence" that performs a sort of signature, there where Benjamin invokes "divine violence" and makes as if (in Derrida's reading) to sign in the very name of God hirself.  (Derrida describes this as "a coup de théâtre that [he] could not swear was not premeditated from the moment the curtain went up."

I'd like to begin (this will have been a rather lengthy, Christie+n post, be thoust forewarned) -by revisiting two sections from "Force of Law" where Derrida is at his most direct and accessible.  The first begins on  page 291 of Acts of Religion and goes until page 293 (say, are these links working?  alternatively one could just GoogleBookSearch within Acts of Religion for, oh, the phrase, "If one trusts the Benjaminian schema" and go from there). 

In a paragraph that goes to the heart of these questions of a 'law of oscillation' (between law-creating and law-preserving violence), but also concerning agency and indeed power, Derrida reads/writes:

Divine violence is the most just, the most historic, the most revolutionary, the most decidable or the most deciding.  Yet, as such, it does not lend itself to any human determination, to any knowledge or decidable "certainty" on our part.  It is never known in itself, "as such," but only in its "effects" and its effects are "incomparable."  They do not lend themselves to any conceptual generalization.  There is no certainty (Gewissheit) or determinant knowledge except in the realm of mythic violence--that is to say, of law, that is, of the historical undecidable.  "For only mythical violence, not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects..."

To be schematic, there are two violences, two competing Gewalten:  on one side, decision (just, historical, political, and so on), justice beyond law and the state, but without decidable knowledge; on the other the certainty of the undecidable but without decision.  In any case, in one form or another, the undecidable is on each side, and is the violent condition of knowledge or action, but knowledge and action are always dissociated.  (291)

In what is perhaps something of an aside to 'Jean-Luc Nancy (?), he then wonders out loud where "deconstruction" (in the singular?  does it exist? etc.) may fall in this schema, and whether this "discourse on the undecidable" is "rather Jewish (or Judeo-Christian-Islamic), or rather Greek?"  He decides, (perhaps somewhat predictably) that it is everywhere, and yet at once perhaps something else entirely, "without filiation" and he says so in anticipation of "more ample and coherent work" [?] "on the relations between this deconstruction, what Benjamin calls 'destruction [Zerstörung]' and the Heideggerian 'Destruktion.'"

In any case, "it is always necessary that the other sign and it is always the other that signs last."  So Derrida frames and quotes this last sequence of Benjamin's.  Benjamin, who has just so memorably defined myth itself as the "bastardization" of divine violence with law:

And then, as soon as he has taken responsibility for this interpretation of the Greek and the Jew, Benjamin signs.  He speaks in an evaluative, prescriptive, non-constative manner, as we do each time we sign.  Two energetic sentences proclaim what the watchwords [MB] must be, what one must do, what one must reject, the evil or perversity of what is to be rejected.  'But one must reject all mythical violence, the violence that founds law, which one may call governing violence.  One must also reject the violence that preserves law, the governed violence in the service of the governing.'

Then there are the last words, the last sentence.  Like the evening shofar, but on the eve of a prayer one no longer hears.  No longer heard or not yet heard--what is the difference?
Not only does it sign, this ultimate address, and very close to the first name of Benjamin, Walter.  It also names the signature, the sign and the seal, it names the name and what calls itself die waltende.

But who signs?  It is God, the Wholly Other, as always.  Divine violence will always have preceded but will also have given all the first names.  God is the name of this pure violence--and just in essence:  there is no other, there is none prior to it and before that it has to justify itself.  Authority, justice, power, and violence all are one in him.
The other signs always, here is what signs perhaps this essay:  essay of signature, which carries itself in its truth, to wit, that always the other signs, the wholly other, and tout autre est tout autre...divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred execution, can be called sovereign violence [die waltende heissen]....sovereign means, for whoever knows how to read, secret...for whoever can read, at once crossing the name of the other.  For whoever receives the power [in French, force] to unseal, but as such also keeping it intact, the undecipherability of a seal, the sovereign and not an other.
(Acts of Religion, 293)

 

For a fuller treatment of these themes, one would have to (re)visit The Gift of Death, but in short, Derrida raises two questions:  What are the real stakes of this (Benjamin's) gesture?  And in what precise sense, if not the one in which Benjamin would seem to wish it, exactly, would such a "rejection" ever be (im-)possible?

In his "Post-Scriptum"--a more autonomous and overtly political segment--Derrida apparently gets himself in trouble with Agamben.  At first he pokes a little fun (at himself as well as Benjamin): 

This strange text is dated.  Every signature is dated, even and perhaps all the more so if it slips in among the names of God and only signs by pretending to let God himself sign. 

but quickly turns more serious, if careful still, to so qualify his remarks:

If this text is dated (Walter, 1921), we have only a limited right to convoke it to bear witness either to Nazism in general (which had not yet developed as such, or to the new forms assumed there by the racism and the anti-Semitism that are inseparable from it, or even less to the "final solution":  not only because the project and the deployment of the "final solution" came later and even after the death of Benjamin, but because within the history itself of Nazism the "final solution" is perhaps something that some consider an ineluctable outcome, and inscribed in the very premises of Nazism, is such a thing has a proper identity that can sustain this sort of utterance, while others--whether or not they are Nazis or Germans--can think that the project of a "final solution" is an event, even a new mutation within the history of Nazism and that as such it deserves an absolutely specific analysis.  For all of these reasons, we would not have the right or we would have only a limited right to ask ourselves what Walter Benjamin would have thought--in the logic of this text (if it has one and only one)--of both Nazism and the "final solution."

At this point, I will simply encourage the reader to re-visit GoogleBookSearch, particularly for the final sequence of Derrida's essay.  Here's page 297.  The following page 298, the last one of the essay, seems unfortunately blocked, so, in the spirit of fair use....well, here 'tis:

What I find, in conclusion, the most redoubtable, indeed perhaps almost unbearable in this text, even beyond the affinities it maintains with the worst (the critique of Aufklärung, the theory of the Fall and of iriginary authenticity, the polarity between ordinary language and fallen language, the critique of representation and of parliamentary democracy, etc. ), is a temptation that it would leave open, and leave open notably to the survivors or the victims of the "final solution," to its past, present or potential victims.  Which temptation?  The temptation to think the holocaust as an uninterpretable manifestation of divine violence insofar as this divine violence would be at the same time annihiliating, expiatory and bloodless, says Benjamin, a divine violence that would destroy current law [...] When one thinks of the gas chambers and the cremation ovens, this allusion to an extermination that would be expiatory because bloodless must cause one to shudder.  One is terrified at the idea of an interpretation that would make of the holocaust an expiation and an indecipherable signature of the just and violent anger of God. It is at that point that this text, in all its polysemic mobility and all its resources for reversal, seems to me finally to resemble too closely, to the point of specular fascination and vertigo, the very thing against which one must act and think, do and speak.  This text, like many others by Benjamin, is still too Heideggerian, too messianico-Marxist are archeo-eshatological for me.  I do not konw whether from this nameless thing that one calls the "final solution" one can draw something that still deserves the name of a lesson [ensiegnment]. But if there were a lesson to be drawn, a unique lesson among the always singular, thus infinite and incommensurable), the lesson that we could draw today––and if we can do so then we must [it si nous le pouvons nous le devons]––is that we must think, know, represent for ourselves, formalize, judge the possible complicity among all these discourses and the worst (here the "final solution").  In my view, this defines a task and a responsibility the theme of which I have not been able to read in either Benjaminian "destruction" or Heideggerian "Destruktion." It is the thought of difference between these destructions on the one hand and a deconstructive affirmation on the other that has guided me tonight in this reading.  It is this thought that the memory of a "final solution" seems to me to dictate.  (Derrida, from the last page of the nearly 70-page essay, "Force of Law:  The Mystical Foundation of Authority," Trans. Mary Quaintance, in Acts of Religion, Routledge, 2002)

There are some rather pointed jabs in all of that.  (Jabs to which, to my knowledge at least, Agamben has not yet responded.  But maybe others have?  Maybe at the very least this is all to clear the way for what might be (yet another) interesting starting point, specifically to read this passage alongside Agamben, or for that matter alongside anyone else to whom it may turn out to be addressed.)

It is time to wrap this up.  This post will not have begun to live up to its title--not yet--but maybe that is just as well.  From the start, I think, it may have been trying to tell a bit too much.  I began with the intention, eventually, of moving from a more careful analysis of Derrida's 'just decision' to a far more speculative probing of the "chora," as refined in "Faith and Knowledge."  The latter is not an easy concept (in Derrida's appropriation of Plato's term) to grasp, or an easy text, to say the least.  In lieu of that post--for now--I will simply share some central, potentially orienting quotes for those who may be interested.

In a different vein, the feminist psychoanalyst and early Tel Quel member (and beloved of editor in chief, Sollers), Julia Kristeva, has some things to say about the "chora."  As I remember, it is unclear who is first to borrow the term from Plato.

Lots of apologies for cutting and pasting from an old paper...(which I hope won't become, you know, a habit).

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To think the “chora” for Derrida is to think the true meaning of responsibility, and also to suggest a new kind of politics.

Chora, the “ordeal of chora” would be, at least, according to the interpretation I believe justified in attempting, the name for place name, and a rather singular one at that, for the spacing which, not allowing itself to be dominated by any theological, ontological or anthropological instance, without age, without history and more “ancient” than all oppositions (for example, that of sensible/intelligible), does not even announce itself as “beyond being” in accordance with a path of negation, a via negativa.  As a result, chora remains absolutely impassible and heterogeneous to all the processes of historical revelation or of anthropo-theological experience, which at the very least suppose its abstraction.  It will never have entered religion and will never permit itself to be sacrilized, sanctified, humanized, theologized, cultivated, historicized.  Radically heterogeneous to the safe and the sound, to the holy and the sacred, it never admits of any indemnification.  This cannot even be formulated in the present, for chora never presents itself as such.  It is neither Being, nor the Good, nor God, nor Man, nor History.  It will always resist them, will have always been (and no future anterior, even, will have been able to reappraise, inflect or reflect a chora without faith or law) the very place of an infinite resistance, of an infinitely impassible persistence <restance>: an utterly faceless other.
    [...] The question remains open, and with it that of knowing whether this desert can be thought and left to announce itself “before” the desert that we know (that of the revelations and the retreats, of the lives and deaths of God...) or whether, “on the contrary,” it is “from” this last desert that we can glimpse that which precedes the first <l’avant-première>, what I call the desert in the desert.  The indecisive oscillation, that reticence...already alluded to above between revelation and revealability...between event and possibility or virtuality of the event), must it not be respected for itself?  Respect for this singular indecision or for this hyperbolic outbidding between two originarities, the order of the “revealed” and the order of the “revealable,” is this not at once the chance or every responsible decision and of another “reflecting faith,” of a new “tolerance”? (Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Anidjar, 58-59).

A genuinely responsible decision then, or as Kierkegaard famously puts it, the moment of decision which is "a madness" (and writing itself, of course, involves such things), must seek to go through the space of its own undecidability, which is also to say through the “ordeal of chora:” 

“A decision that would not go through the test and ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision; it would only be the programmable application or the continuous unfolding of a calculable process.  It might perhaps be legal; it would not be just.”
(Derrida, “Force of Law,” in Anidjar, 252)

Perhaps not unlike Blanchot before him, Derrida insists on the pervasive inescapability of this fallen zone--a zone of relentless contradiction (though perhaps never simply blocking, unified nor stable)--and the simultaneous imperative (il faut) for what may be called a new kind of ethics (as Agamben likewise quite compellingly argues, an ethics beyond the traditional terrain of ethics.  In the latter's sense an ethics also beyond dignity; an ethics above all of the witness, rooted by the former at least in a fervent and profound atheism (if anybody qualifies as an athiest, it is Derrida):

I believe only in death and in death precisely as impossible, for which reason I am obsessed with, curious about, and convinced of mortality.  Rather, it was a matter of preparing a reading of this dash that I thought it necessary to draw right in the middle of the word “im-possible,” of the im-possible.  Perhaps there we find the reason for signing this autumn evening with the word falls, and of giving to a painting as blue as the falling of water its true title, falls.  It is not a question of crossing out deconstruction with one stroke, nor of finding in deconstruction or deconstructions features tired and drawn from a too long career, over the course of which one would have taken too much pleasure in penetrating a culture.  Rather, it is a question of doing justice to a trait, a hyphen, a joining and thus a separation, a dash drawn in the heart of the impossible.  In other words, this im-possibility is everything but impossible; in any case, it calls for an other reflection on what possible, power, potentiality, dynamic, dynamis, “I can,” “I can be,” and “maybe” all mean.  And the entire business of deconstruction seems to me more and more concerned precisely with deconstructing, with all its consequences, this semantics of the possible opposed to the impossible, the possible as virtual opposed to the actual or the act, the possible versus the real, dynamis opposed to energia, and so on.  There you go...(Derrida, “Deconstructions:  The Im-possible,” in Cohen, Sande and Lotringer, 18).

The above remarks are themselves interesting to situate historically.  Generally, or to the best of my knowledge, Derrida’s thinking of the “chora” appears 16-22 years after Kristeva’s publication of “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in 1974 (to which I will turn briefly in a moment).12  Already, in “Semiotics” (1968), and already in conscious relation to Derrida, Kristeva was articulating a certain reading of Freud and Saussure (among others).  However, she was also beginning, in a sense, to accuse Derrida....[long story deleted]

This passage works to complicate the categories of linguistics, semiotics and psychoanalysis.  It will no doubt have Scott Eric Kaufman rolling his eyes in all sorts of directions (just allow me to repeat Michael Bérubé's remark the other day: that even Kristeva had (and has) long since given up the kind of nonesensical jargon Lacanese for which she and others were so widely ridiculed by Alan Sokal et al.):

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 non-expressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.
    We borrow the term chora from Plato’s Temaeus to denote an essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted by movements and their ephemeral stases.  We differentiate this uncertain and indeterminate articulation from a disposition that already depends on representation, lends itself to phenomenological, spatial intuition and gives rise to geometry. Although 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, verisimilitude, spatiality and temporality.  Our discourse -- all discourse -- moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it.  Although the chora can be designated and regulated, it can never be definitely posited: as a result, one can situate the chora, but one can never give it axiomatic form....Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm.
(Kristeva, "Revolution in Poetic Language," in Moi, 93-94).

To borrow Zizek's mantra:  Is there not a metaphysical urge lurking in this movement of simultaneous “dependence” and “refusal”?

Kristeva’s distinction...placed the semiotic within the prelinguistic space of drives and energy charges that precedes but also participates in the construction of the speaking subject.  Associated with the term “chora,” meaning “receptacle” or “womb,”...the structure of the semiotic was essentially instinctual and dual for Kristeva.  As a period of indistinction between itself and its mother’s body, the infant was without a sense of “otherness,” without object (for the object is seen as identical to the self), and without the intervention of a paternal third party who separates and differentiates.  Despite her claim that the semiotic is a heterogeneous space before the constitution of identity and, therefore, without an ontologically feminine specificity, it has been, as her critics point out, consistently linked throughout her work to the maternal as opposed to the paternal.  The symbolic, on the other hand, has always been equated with the paternal realm of identity and of communicative language.  It places the subject within a normalizing triadic relationship in which the paternal third party becomes an agent of separation and difference constituting an object for the subject and vice versa.”
(Brandt, 266).

What would seem to be at stake is Kristeva’s often slippery appropriation of Plato's term, in describing the chora as a “mother” or “wet nurse” -- a space yet “preceding evidence, language, subjectivity and sexual difference...

The theory of the subject proposed by the theory of the unconscious [read: Lacan, but also Melanie Klein] will allow us to read in this rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which significance is constituted.  Plato himself leads us to such a process when he calls this receptacle or chora nourishing and maternal, not yet unified in an ordered whole because deity is absent from it (Kristeva, "Revolution in Poetic Language," in Moi, 94)..

Kristeva’s reading of Plato thus poses a conceptual dilemma, one which may position her quite near Derrida in some ways, but which she seeks to “resolve” in a manner that is undoubtedly at odds with, or at the very least rather inhospital toward Derrida’s insistence on ‘im-possibility.'

The desire to give voice to sexual difference, and particularly to the position of the woman-subject within meaning and signification, leads to a veritable insurrection against the homogenizing signifier. However, it is all too easy to pass from the search for difference to the denegation of the symbolic.  The latter is the same as to remove the ‘feminine’ from the order of language (understood as dominated exclusively by the secondary process) and to inscribe is within the primary process alone, whether in the drive that calls out or simply the drive tout court.  In this case, does not the struggle against the ‘phallic sign’ and against the whole mono-logic, monotheistic culture which supports itself on it, sink into an essentialist cult of Woman, into a hysterical obsession with the neutralizing cave, a fantasy arising precisely as the negative imprint of the maternal phallus?...In other words, if the feminine exists, it only exists in the order of significance or signifying process, and it is only in relation to meaning in signification, positioned as their excessive or transgressive other that it exists, speaks, thinks (itself) and writes (itself) for both sexes (Kristeva, “Il n’y a pas de maître à langage”, 134-135, as quoted by Moi, 11).

As Moi astutely notes, the above passage is perhaps most revealing onto the question of Kristeva’s “finely balanced” or slightly problematic “position on...feminity:  as different or other in relation to language to meaning, but nevertheless only thinkable within the symbolic, and therefore also necessarily subject to the Law”  (Moi, 11).  I might venture (rather violently, perhaps) to suggest that one aspect of this act of balancing would appear to be a subtle prioritizing of the symbolic over the semiotic (such as here) or vice versa (such as in the passage on the ‘chora’ quoted earlier), depending precisely on which of these two spaces or destinations is being more immediately linked with the feminine.
    Although the possibility of a responsible comparison is perhaps becoming less and less likely (if ever it was possible) -- and not wishing Kristeva to appear to dominate the space of this discussion, -- let us hold up a passage from Derrida.  Here he is suggesting (in my reading), that the “concept” itself is at once the phallus and the possibility of castration (in the deeper sense of the phallus’s disappearance or “culpable ending”), beyond any formalization of the “fetish:” 

One will always be able to take the tallith for a fetish, on condition of an upheaval in the axioms of the theorem of restricted fetishism and a formalisation -- I attempted in Glas and elsewhere -- of generalised fetishism.  At the moment of the verdict, this theory would no longer be merely a theory, it would take into account, at the end of the day, with the whole history engaged in it (from Exodus to Saint Paul to Freud to everything that is implied and placed en abyme in A Silkworm of One’s Own), this thought of the event without truth unveiled or revealed, without phallogocentrism of the greco-judeo-paulino-islamo-freudo-heideggeriano-lacanian veil, without phallophoria, i.e., without procession or theory of the phallus, without veiling-unveiling of the phallus, or even of the mere place, strictly hemmed in, of the phallus, living or dead.  Thus culpable ending of the phallus, the edges of this cut which support the veil and hold it out like a tent or an awning, a roof, a canvas, this theoretical toilet of the phallus is none other that the concept, yes, the concept in itself.  The phallus is the concept, you can’t oppose it, any more than you can oppose a “sexual theory”.  Unless you do something different, you can only oppose to it another concept or another theory, a knowledge like another.  Very little.  It is not enough to have concepts at one’s disposal, you have to know how to set them, like one sets sails, often to save oneself of course, but on condition of knowing how to catch the wind in one’s sails:  a question of force, concepts and veils are there only in view of this question of force (Derrida, “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” in Anidjar, 350-351).

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Works Cited
Anidjar, Gil, ed. Acts of Religion. New York and London: Routledge, 2002.

Brandt, Joan. Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Poststructuralist French Theory and Poetry. Stanford: Stanford U.P., 1997.

Cohen, Sande and Lotringer, Sylvère, eds. French Theory in America. New York and London: Routledge, 2001.

Ellen K. Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson, and Emily Zakin, Eds. Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Ed. Léon S. Roudiez, translated by Alice Jardine, Thomas A. Gora and Léon S. Roudiez. Oxford: Blackwell/New York: Columbia, 1980.

Kristeva, Julia. “My Memory’s Hyperbole,” The Female Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, Ed. Domna Stanton. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1987.

Kristeva, Julia. Proust and the Sense of Time. Trans. Stephen Bann. New York: Columbia U.P., 1993.

Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia U.P., 1984.

Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Rudiez. New York: Columbia U.P., 1987. Moi, Toril, ed. The Kristeva Reader. New York: Columbia U.P., 1986.