200382390 Reading (with) Psychoanalysis January 2013

Laplanche Seduces Kristeva: [Re]locating the [M]other in ‘Semiotic’ Discourse

Jean Laplanche and Julia Kristeva’s work on the formative stages of infantile

development converge around a particular chronological moment within the child’s life: the

initial encounter and subsequent relationship with the parent or caregiver. It seems strange,

then, that they make little or no reference to the other’s work. This is perhaps all the more

surprising in Laplanche, whose work on the “other” begs for a re-reading of the Kristevan

project. Such a bringing together, I think, would elaborate a ‘fruitful confrontation’ between

two esteemed psychoanalytic thinkers.1 In this paper, I wish to explore how Laplanche’s

attempts to put the “other” back into psychoanalytic discourse, through a re-appropriation of

Freud’s abandoned seduction theory, can have discernible implications on Kristeva’s

‘semiotic’ and ‘symbolic’2 apparatus by [re]locating the absent [m]other3 within her work.

My point of intersection will be the metaphorical “child” at the centre of psychoanalytic

discourse upon whom both of their theories are played out, and who inevitably comes to bear

the “proof” of such theories. I propose to use this symbolical “child” as the space where

Kristeva’s and Laplanche’s works simultaneously meet and separate.

In her work, Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva posits a ‘signifying process’

that constitutes subjecthood through the interweaving of two ‘modalities’: the ‘semiotic’ and

the ‘symbolic’.4 The first of these, the ‘semiotic’, is a pre-linguistic metapsychological space

prior to – but inevitably bound-up with – a socio-linguistically constructed “reality”. It is a

fluid ‘vocal or kinetic rhythm’ that precedes definitive positionality and therefore any

1
Dominique Scarfone, ‘Laplanche and Winnicott meet…and survive’, in Sex and Sexuality: Winnicottian
Perspectives, ed. Lesley Caldwell (London: Karnac, 2005)
<http://www.academia.edu/246524/Laplanche_and_Winnicott_Meet_and_Survive> [accessed, December
2012], p.33.
2
Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, Chapter 5 of The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986), p.92.
3
Within this paper I differentiate between the ‘mother’ (as a term that transcends a single subject) and the
[m]other, which emphasises the fundamental and singularly “otherness” of the person that comes to occupy this
terminological space.
4
Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, Chapter 5 of The Kristeva Reader, p.92.

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separation of subject and object.5 Composed of an elementary ‘chora’ – a generative space of

‘drives’ and ‘primary processes’ that ‘connect and orient the [child’s] body to the mother’ –

this is arranged according to an internal ‘biological code’ and a secondary external ‘social

organization’ from the mother.6 Despite being ‘social’ this supplementary ‘organization’ is

not a full symbolic position – an important discrepancy in Kristeva’s work that I will return to

later in the essay. To reposition this through a certain Laplanchean prism, the ‘semiotic’

could be described as the Ptolemaic human condition par excellence – a limitless, infinitely-

expanding self that assimilates all internal drives and undifferentiated external objects into a

complete centre.7 Only a particular separation within this centre – a rupturing of the

‘semiotic’ by the ‘symbolic’ – can demarcate the limits of the self and other. Kristeva posits

this ‘symbolic’ as a ‘system of finite positions’ inherent within language and meaning that

creates an external world that is not only a collection of objects, but an innumerable number

of empirical socio-linguistic norms.8 Presupposing this movement into language, externality

and sociality are two nodal points of signification: the ‘mirror stage’ where the child

discovers their existence as a defined subject/object, and ‘castration’, which reveals the

otherness of the mother’s body.9 Both of these ‘separations’ pave the way for the ‘sign’ that

splits the subject and ‘posits [this] subject as signifiable’ – that is, located within the

jurisdiction of ‘symbolic’ signification.10

Unlike Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’ and ‘symbolic’, Laplanche’s theory of the sexual is not

centred on “language” (its presence or absence), but a ‘message’.11 More specifically a

5
Ibid., p.94.
6
I use quotation marks around the term ‘biological’ throughout this essay when referring back to Kristeva’s
initial premise; Ibid. pp.93-95.
7
See Jean Laplanche, ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’, trans. Luke Thurston, in Essays on Otherness,
ed. John Fletcher (London & New York: Routledge, 1999)
8
Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, Chapter 5 of The Kristeva Reader, p.101.
9
Ibid., p.100.
10
Ibid.
11
By using the italicised term sexual I am drawing on Laplanche’s definition of Freud’s ‘enlarged sexuality’.
See Jean Laplanche, ‘Gender, Sex and the Sexual’, Chapter 9 of Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, trans.
Jonathan House and Nicholas Ray; ed. John Fletcher (New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2012),
p.169 and p.181.

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‘message’ between caregiver and child that is inherently ‘enigmatic’.12 He uses the term

‘message’ to reinforce its non-verbal nature (a message can, after all, be communicated

through gesture and behaviours). The adult communicates with the child via conscious or

preconscious messages that are primarily gestural, transmitted by the adult as they perform a

‘code’ dictated by ‘acquired’ social norms as well as an ‘innate’ biological ‘attachment’.13

These are the simple caregiving tasks the parent performs – from bathing to breast-feeding

and all points in between. Within this conscious transfer of messages between adult and child

there is, however, a simultaneous ‘intervention of the unconscious’ which distorts it.14 This

unconscious is fundamentally sexual, constituted from the adult’s repressed infantile

sexuality, itself brought into being in the relationship with the adult’s own caregiver and

‘reactivate[d]’ once again by the child.15 It is worth noting that this unconscious sexuality

does not become conscious; it is as ‘enigmatic’ for the parent as it is for the child. This

‘infantile unconscious of the adult’ is therefore always already implicated in the ‘adult-

infans’ relationship.16 In breast-feeding, for example, the child receives not only the

conscious message represented by the milk, but also its unconscious distortion inherent

within the breast as both an alimentary and a ‘sexual organ’.17 Both functions are related in

what Laplanche terms an ‘essential contiguity’ for the child.18 In such a situation the child

receives nourishment from the milk and a parallel sexual satisfaction from the ‘stimulation of

lips and tongue by the [mother’s] nipple’.19 This sexual satisfaction constitutes a ‘drive’

inseparable from and ‘propped upon’ the ‘nonsexual vital function’, which is to say, the

12
Jean Laplanche, ‘Starting from the Fundamental Anthropological Situation’, Chapter 5 of Freud and the
Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, p.112.
13
Ibid., p.117.
14
Ibid., p.111.
15
Ibid..
16
Ibid., p.111.
17
Jean Laplanche, ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’, trans. Luke Thurston, in Essays on Otherness, ed.
John Fletcher (London & New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 78.
18
Jean Laplanche, ‘The Order of Life and the Genesis of Sexuality’, Chapter 1 of Life and Death in
Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977), p.20.
19
Ibid., p.17.

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child’s vital ‘instinct’ – the assuagement of hunger.20 The mouth becomes an ‘erotogenic

zone’ that registers the sexualised enigmatic message communicated through the mother’s

caregiving.21 This ‘zone of care’ thus becomes a location of particular maternal attention that

brings with it ‘the first erotogenic maneuvers [sic.] from the adult’.22 Breast-feeding therefore

constitutes the point of contact between two ‘erotogenic’ zones: the nipple and the mouth; it

becomes the scene par excellence of the [m]other’s transferred ‘sexual’ distortion and the

birth of the child’s ‘sexuality’. Lacking the ‘genetic sexual organisation’ that would allow it

to understand these messages the child represses them, forming its unconscious.23 In this

sense the primal miscommunication on the part of the adult is simultaneously bound-up with

the child’s inability to ‘translate’ it, such that there can be no temporal distinction between

the miscommunication of the message being sent and its reception – they are inseparable

from one another.24

For Laplanche this adult-infant communication can be located within a particular

‘semiotic’ situation.25 The term ‘semiotic’ he borrows from Jakobson is a way of broadening

the notion of communication to include what is non-verbal alongside a verbal ‘linguistic

system’.26 He uses this term in order to account for the fact that, in his words, ‘the human

speaks’, meaning the inherent, biological and ‘non-verbal adult/child codes’ that would

transcend species ‘cannot be equated with [those] between an animal and its young’ because

the adult has already entered into socio-linguistic structures.27 The implication would be that

if [wo]man were not a speaking subject these ‘non-verbal adult-child codes’ would, in fact,

be the same as the non-verbal codes within the animal kingdom; that is to say, fundamentally

20
Ibid., p.16.
21
Ibid., p.23.
22
Ibid., p.24.
23
Jean Laplanche, ‘Starting from the Fundamental Anthropological Situation’, Chapter 5 of Freud and the
Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, p.110.
24
Jean Laplanche, ‘Failures of Translation’, Chapter 6 of Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, p.131.
25
For this essay I will use retain the italics to reference Lapanche’s ‘semiotic’; Ibid., p.124.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., p.115.

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and solely biological. Yet it is because ‘the human speaks’ that he acknowledges this innate,

biological non-verbal as being ‘profoundly influenced, retroactively, by spoken language.’28

They are thus not separate entities along an evolutionary continuum – an animal non-verbal

evolving into a human verbal; instead, the verbal intervenes in what is not verbal from the

beginning of the adult-child interaction. Laplanche thus undermines the fundamental position

of the biological within the adult-child relationship and demonstrates how a certain ‘social’

aspect is always already implicated.29 It is important at this point to define the term ‘social’,

which is often only discernible in Laplanche’s work through its absence. By it I mean the

broader normative discourses inherent within language that have already informed the

speaking subject’s reality. In this sense it bears a number of similarities to Kristeva’s

definition of the ‘symbolic’. Importantly, however, the ‘social’ is not confined to language,

allowing us to go beyond her distinction between a non-speaking entity and a speaking

subject. It is not the fact that the caregiver enters language, but that the sociality of this

language – its norms – inscribes its traces on the adult, constituting them as an inherently

social subject. Thereafter, regardless of whether they use the verbal (words) or the non-verbal

(gestures and behaviours) to speak to the child, both are always already fused with the

‘social’; constituting one half of the socio-linguistic nature of the ‘symbolic’. It is the ‘social’

of the ‘symbolic’ that constitutes Laplanche’s ‘semiotic’.

The ‘social’, however, is not an irreducible monolithic discourse a la Lacan; its codes

are administered to the child by small groups of ‘friends and blood relations’ – the ‘socius’ –

who inscribe their own ‘unconscious or preconscious expectations’ onto the child’s body. 30

These codes are idiosyncratic in that sense. However, it is important to acknowledge the

traces of a broader ‘social’ that is always at work within the already-socialised adult

caregivers. Although ‘the inscriber […] is not the social in general’, they are at least partly
28
Ibid., p.115.
29
Jean Laplanche, ‘Gender, Sex and the Sexual’, Chapter 9 of Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, p.181.
30
Ibid., p.181 and p.184.

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the social in absentia.31 The inscriptions are thus an idiosyncratic rendering of desires that are

informed by overarching socio-linguistic norms; not because the language that informs the

‘non-verbal adult/child codes’ in Laplanche’s theory is inherently ‘Symbolic’, but because it

is always already ‘social’.32 Laplanche himself writes: ‘Communication does not only occur

with the language of bodily care; there is also the social code, the social language; there are

also the messages of the socius […]’.33 Here, there is a concurrent ‘social code’ that is

operating within the adult-child interaction as well as ‘the messages of the socius’. Thus the

‘socius’ and the ‘social’ are, to a certain extent, inseparable from each other. To communicate

with the child is to become a ‘socius’, but to communicate in the first place is to already be

‘social’. It is true that Laplanche does not make direct reference to the ‘social’ in the same

way that Kristeva writes of the ubiquitous symbolic, preferring instead to premise the

idiosyncratic nature of the ‘socius’ as the determining factor in the adult-child relationship.

However, this social normativity cannot be denied, constituting as it does the categories that

are filtered down to the ‘socius’ and thence to the child. Within the terms of this elaboration

the ‘semiotic’ is a means not only of including ‘forms of communication other than verbal

forms’ – of incorporating a kind of primitive non-verbal communication between adult and

child alongside language – but is a space that reveals the infection of this non-verbal by the

sociality of language. It thereby undermines the notion that what is ‘social’ must remain

within the confines of language and the ‘symbolic’.

The Laplanchean ‘semiotic’ collapses the non-verbal/verbal and non-

linguistic/linguistic binaries through the term ‘communication’; something that has profound

31
Ibid., p.181.
32
Lacan defines the ‘Symbolic’ (with a capital ‘S’ as opposed to Kristeva’s lower case ‘s’) as a ‘dimension of
symbolization’ inherent in language that implicates the subject’s ‘body’ when they speak. The difference
between Lacan and Kristeva lies in the latter’s attempts to think outside of this ‘symbolic’ through the
‘semiotic’, rather than positing it as completely originary. See Jacques Lacan, The Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), pp.1278-1310,
(p.1281).
33
Jean Laplanche, ‘Gender, Sex and the Sexual’, Chapter 9 of Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, p.184.

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implications for Kristeva’s ‘semiotic/symbolic’ framework.34 It is important to note that

although both theorists use the term ‘semiotic’ they are not analogous; as Laplanche writes:

‘[…] the author of an intellectual work […] makes a home of it’.35 Arguably this is no less

true of an author’s terminology. Nevertheless the two terms do overlap very significantly.

Kristeva underpins her definition with a ‘biological’ foundation that is always “before

language”. In this sense her term looks forward from a developmental childhood state that is

chronologically prior to language – a primordial situation before ‘symbolic’ realisation. For

Laplanche, on the other hand, it serves as a terminological means of looking past ‘linguistic

system[s]’ to account for a space outside of language but still within the realm of

communication. He works backwards to undermine this notion of a pure non-relational,

‘biological’ (or animal) situation; there is no uncorrupted state before the implication of the

‘social’/ ‘socius’ because there is/was always a ‘socius’ and therefore already a ‘social’.

These two definitions of the ‘semiotic’ are thus not mutually exclusive, but can instead be

situated along an arc of revision through the point of contact embedded in their shared

linguistic unit. The theorist may make a ‘home’ of their language, but it is a home that has

always already been inhabited by an/other, in this case by Laplanche. However, my reason

for using Laplanche to rethink Kristeva is not simply one of chronology; that is, it is not

because Laplanche is the most recent “tenant” that I am premising his formulation of the

‘semiotic’. Rather, it is because of what his definition (indicative of his theoretical oeuvre in

general) reveals about the dark spaces in Kristeva’s theory – namely, seduction and the

presence of the other. To be sure, Kristeva does not completely negate the “other’s”

implication in the child’s semiotic development; after all, it is the mother that ‘mediates the

symbolic law’.36 However, her theory depicts the mother as inseparable to the child’s

34
Jean Laplanche, ‘Starting from the Fundamental Anthropological Situation’, Chapter 5 of Freud and the
Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, p.110.
35
Jean Laplanche, ‘Failures of Translation’, Chapter 6 of Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, p.121.
36
Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, Chapter 5 of The Kristeva Reader, p.95.

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‘semiotic’ (and Ptolemaic) perception of her, reducing her to little more than a ‘maternal

enclosure’ and negating her fundamental “otherness”.37 This positioning speaks towards

“otherness” not as a ‘foundational originary moment’, but one that is internalised within the

child.38 In such a move the mother becomes an assimilated “other”, and loses her ‘radical

alterity’.39

Laplanche’s work, I would argue, allows the re-insertion of this absent [m]other; the

replacement of an internalised mother-figure with the ‘originary primacy’ of [m]other as a

separate subject.40 It is true that Laplanche’s work posits a primary caregiver rather than

orienting it solely around the mother; however for consistency with Kristeva’s work I shall

maintain the mother as this central caregiver. More importantly, such an intersection between

two theories [re]locates the presence of the [m]other within the ‘socius’ and the ‘social’.

Wrenching the Kristevan mother away from the child’s ‘semiotic’ perception of her and

placing her back within the ‘socius’ entails a repositioning of the mother-child relationship in

light of Laplanche’s terminology. Broadly speaking the term transfers agency from the child

back to the adult (the “other”), such that the child is no longer the protagonist in their own

development through an identification ‘with’ the mother, but is instead identified ‘by’ her.41

Kristeva’s work already postulates a certain ‘social organization’ that is inscribed by the

mother onto the ‘semiotic’ child. However, as we have already alluded to, Kristeva’s ‘social’

comes with a particular discrepancy. She conflates two meanings: on the one hand linking it

to the ‘social’ inherent within the ‘symbolic’, particularly by invoking the Roman ‘society’

that first established a ‘Law’ upheld by language, whilst on the other, defining it as an

individual metaphyschological arrangement by the mother; something more akin to

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Laplanche’s ‘socius’.42 Within the remit of our reading we can redefine her definition of

‘social organization’ as an ‘organization’ by the ‘socius’, thereby taking account of the

mother’s interaction with the child as well as her place within a sociality. Kristeva

acknowledges that this ‘organization’ is ‘always already symbolic’ but is ‘mediated’ by the

mother such that the ‘chora’ is arranged ‘not according to a [symbolic] law but through [a

symbolic] ordering.’43 In what way does this ‘ordering’, which is derived from the

‘symbolic’, differ from its ‘Law’? In an empirical sense, it does not. It is the text’s infantile-

centric viewpoint that – enveloped in the kernel of the ‘semiotic’ – attempts to negate the

‘symbolic’ at work on the pre-‘symbolic’ child’s body and differentiate between the two. The

mother is both the carrier of the ‘symbolic’ and yet also somehow a buffer zone against it.

However, such a formulation places the mother in a liminal space between the “outside” of

the child’s ‘semiotic’ and the “inside” of an inescapable ‘symbolic’. It is only when we

remove the mother from this transcendental state by restoring her fundamental “otherness” it

becomes clear that this ‘ordering’ can only ever be the ‘Law’ in its totality. The prelapsarian

‘semiotic’ is thus undermined by the ‘alterity’ of the adult engaging with it. As we have

already distinguished, this ‘socius’ is a derivative of a broader ‘social world’ inherent in the

‘symbolic’.44 Thus the ‘ordering’ is an inscription by the ‘socius’, which is simultaneously

‘parasited’ by the ‘social’ and therefore by the ‘symbolic’.45 The ‘symbolic’ is implicated in

the child’s ‘semiotic’ state from the start. Through this particular critical lens, one can see

that Kristeva’s attempts to position the semiotic as a “pure” pre-linguistic space are always

problematized by the presence of the [m]other as a carrier of symbolic ‘Law’. To position her

as a mediating force is to place the mother-child relationship in a ‘semiotic’ vacuum and to

deny the agency of the caregiver. Her two definitions of the ‘social’ always threaten to
42
Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, Chapter 5 of The Kristeva Reader, p.127.
43
Ibid., p.94.
44
Jean Laplanche, ‘Failures of Translation’, Chapter 6 of Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, p.129.
45
Jean Laplanche, ‘Starting from the Fundamental Anthropological Situation’, Chapter 5 of Freud and the
Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, p.117.

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collapse into one. The ‘social organization’ from the [m]other, which is ‘always already

symbolic’, is forever giving way to the ‘social’ inherent within the ‘symbolic’: an altercation

played out within her dualistic terminology.

To follow the argument to its logical conclusion this implication of the ‘symbolic’ in

the ‘semiotic’ through the ‘social’ space in between (inherent in the [m]other), undermines

the fundamental ‘biological’ situ of the ‘semiotic’. As Laplanche makes clear in ‘Gender, Sex

and the Sexual’, the ‘prescription’ of messages from the beginning of the child’s life renders

problematic any simple distinction between a rudimentary ‘biological’ state and an entry into

language and its ‘social’ implications.46 This is no more apparent than in what the ‘enigmatic

message’ can reveal in the ‘semiotic’/ ‘symbolic’ apparatus. I would argue it is possible to

see the “child” as the point of intersection between these two psychoanalytic frameworks:

perfectly ‘semiotic’ in Kristeva’s terms, but simultaneously receiving the distorted messages

from the adult. If we remember, this originary ‘semiotic’ state is primarily drive-based.

Kristeva, however, does not make a point of separating sexual drives from non-sexual

processes – they are irreducibly intertwined within her work. Have we not seen a similar

situation in Laplanche’s writing on the ‘vital function’ and the sexual ‘drive’? This is true,

although, as we have argued, Kristeva’s term neglects the influence of the “other” that

Laplanche posits as central to this early infantile state. A way out of this terminological bind,

I would argue, is the term “intersemiotic”, which can account for this duality in the child – a

single term to bring together the vital ‘instinct’ and the sexual ‘drive’ analogous to Kristeva’s

‘semiotic’ state – alongside the implications of the “other” within Laplanche’s ‘semiotic’.

Showing where these two psychoanalytic theories overlap through this single linguistic unit

can locate the implications of Laplanche’s work within Kristeva’s theoretical apparatus. We

already know from Laplanche’s writing on this particularly ‘semiotic’ situation that the child

46
Jean Laplanche, ‘Gender, Sex and the Sexual’, Chapter 9 of Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, p.181.

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is exposed to the ‘enigmatic message’ from the [m]other as she tends to the child. This allows

us a way in to a Laplanchean re-reading of Kristeva. The Kristevan child is completely

‘semiotic’ – an amorphous bundle of ‘drives’ and ‘primary processes’. It is at the same time,

however, tended to by the [m]other. This connection brings with it a number of implications

for the child when applied to Kristeva’s discourse. As we have seen, the mother is the

proponent of a certain ‘ordering’ or ‘assignment’ of the child – both conscious and

unconscious; that is, the [m]other’s conscious caregiving is distorted by her unconscious

desires and fantasies.47 This, in a sense, constitutes an ‘ordering’ of the child’s unconscious

vis á vis Kristeva by bringing it into being through the child’s repression of these ‘enigmatic

messages’. As a fundamental and originary constitution of sexuality this occurs on a level of

communication outside of any social structures. However, once this sexuality is implicated in

conscious inscriptions on the child’s body (also through these desires and fantasies), the child

is subject to the full brunt of social normativity. The parent brings with them both their

unconscious fantasies and their conscious ‘social’ inscriptions that the child is exposed to in

their ‘semiotic’, preverbal state: the ‘social’ and therefore the ‘symbolic’ are always already

present.

Why does Kristeva neglect the presence of the ‘symbolic’ inherent in the “other” in

order to premise this originary ‘semiotic’ situation? In part this is because of an initial ‘going-

astray’ she shares with Freud. 48 Her adoption of Freudian thought after his abandonment of

the seduction theory in the Three Essays means that the external adult becomes intermingled

with the child’s ‘phantasies’.49 This perhaps explains why the mother becomes a cultural

‘fantasy’, a ‘lost territory’, within some of Kristeva’s work; a derivation of a fantasied mother

47
Here, I am taking Laplanche’s term ‘assignment’ to mean both the parent’s unconscious ‘assignment’ of the
child’s ‘sexual’ as well as the conscious ‘assignment’ that the parents unconscious plays in inscription. See Jean
Laplanche, ‘Gender, Sex and the Sexual’, Chapter 9 of Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006, p.184.
48
Jean Laplanche, ‘The Unfinished Copernican Revolution’, in Essays on Otherness, p.61.
49
Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), p.361.

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that was irreducibly caught up in the fabric of infantile desire.50 This restricts the involvement

of the “other” in the dawn of the sexual by reducing the presence to a ‘fantasy of the other’,

leading to a ‘de-realisation’ of the adult within ‘the childhood scene’.51 Laplanche’s work

with Freud’s seduction theory, however, allows for a fruitful re-thinking of Kristeva’s

‘semiotic’/‘symbolic’ apparatus. Laplanche’s writing on the sexual ‘enigmatic message’

emphasises the role of the [m]other and permits a renegotiation of the strict demarcation

Kristeva posits between the ‘semiotic’ and the ‘symbolic’, through Laplanche’s interweaving

of the ‘biological’ and the ‘social’ – to which her terms are inevitably bound. Kristeva’s

duplicitous ‘social’ in particular attempts to account for the presence of a ‘symbolic’ “other”,

whilst simultaneously absenting this “other” from that ‘symbolic’. In order for the mother to

remain present within her work and yet not be part of a ‘symbolic’ that would in any way

corrupt the child’s ‘semiotic’ state, Kristeva must resort to a sort of halfway house where the

mother’s originary “fall” into the ‘symbolic’ is negated by this ‘semiotic’. The [m]other is

ingested by the child and removed from her ‘symbolic’ situation by being depicted as

inseparable to the child’s semiotized distortion of her. Through Laplanche’s assertion that the

‘human speaks’, and is therefore never outside of language’s prescribed norms, however, we

are able to elaborate on Laplanche’s term, ‘social’; a term that bears the traces of ‘symbolic’

normative codes not restricted to the verbal or linguistic. When applied to Kristeva this term

reveals the presence of the ‘symbolic’ within the ‘semiotic’ and problematizes this originary

‘biological’ situation. The “seduction” of the child by the adult thereby undermines the notion

of a discernible fundamental ‘semiotic’ or ‘biological’ state because the ‘social’ – through the

adult – is implicated in the child’s development from zero-point; the adult’s inscriptions are

the idiosyncratic desires and ‘social’ residues of a ‘symbolic’ always already at work.

50
Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, Chapter 7 of The Kristeva Reader, p.161.
51
Jean Laplanche, ‘The Theory of Seduction and the Problem of the Other’, International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 653-666, (p.659).

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Word Count (including footnotes): 4325

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