Sunscapes: subjectivity, creativity and the work of metaphor

In the wake of the ‘linguistic turn’, this paper argues, the twentieth century experienced a ‘poetic turn’, for which Julia Kristeva is partly responsible. The paper focuses on Kristeva’s discussion of the chora in order to reappraise the encounter between Lacan’s imaginary and real on the scene of writing. Kristeva’s chora, I suggest, is the prototype of Lacan’s imaginary symbolic (Lacan 2006 [1971], 67). Colluding with Lacan, Kristeva in Revolution in poetic language (1974) claims that the poetic text can potentially disrupt our tendency to take on fixed identities in language, by enhancing our capacity as subjects-in-process. In the process of decentring the subject, Kristeva’s approach both subverts the Cartesian ego and celebrates Freud’s plural subjectivity and therefore departs from Lacan by positing the primacy of the semiotic. Ironically, by doing so, Kristeva anticipates Lacan’s shift from linguistics to topology, his return to literature and his elaboration of the concept of suppléance (Lacan 2005 [1975-76]). In line with the semiotic ordering principle deployed in the chora, therefore, Lacan’s subject of the imaginary symbolic is comparable to the subject-in-process, one that would both articulate and undermine subjectivity in the act of writing. Yet it is not necessarily the case. This is due to the work of metaphor as organising principle of the unconscious, and hence as structural prototype of suppléance.