Julia Kristeva explicates her foundational distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic and explores their interrelationships. Linking the psychosomatic to the literary and the literary to a larger political horizon, she questions the premises of linguistic, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and literary theories.

Translator's PrefaceIntroduction, by Leon S. RoudiezProlegomenonPart I. The Semiotic and the symbolic1. The Phenomenological Subject of Enunciation2. The Semiotic Chora Ordering the Drives3. Husserl's Hyletic Meaning: A Natural Thesis4. Hjelmslev's Presupposed Meaning5. The Thetic: Rupture and/or Boundary6. The Mirror and Castration Positing the Subject as Absent from the Signifier7. Frege's Notion of Signification: Enunciation and Denotation8. Breaching the Thetic: Mimesis9. The Unstable Symbolic. Substitutions in the Symbolic: Fetishism10. The Signifying Process11. Poetry That is Not a Form of Murder12. Genotext and Phenotext13. Four Signifying PracticesPart II. Negativity: Rejection14. The Fourth "Term" of the Dialectic15. Independent and Subjugated "Force" in Hegel16. Negativity as Transversal to Thetic Judgment17. "Kinesis," "Cura," "Desire"18. Humanitarian Desire19. Non-Contradiction Neutral Peace20. Freud's Notion of Expulsion RejectionPart III. Heterogeneity21. The Dichotomy and Heteronomy of Drives22. Facilitation, Stasis, and the Thetic Moment23. The Homological Economy of the Representamen24. Through the Principle of Language25. Skepticism and Nihilism in Hegel and in the TextPart IV. Practice26. Experience Is Not Practice27. The Atomistic Subject of Practice in Marxism28. Calling Back Rupture within Practice: Experience-in-Practice29. The Text as Practice, Distinct from Transference Discourse30. The Second Overturning of the Dialectic after Political Economy, Aesthetics31. Madoror and Poems, Laughter as Practice32. The Expenditure of a Logical Conclusion: IgiturNotesIndex