Revolution and poststructuralism

Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language [La revolution du langage poétique] first appeared in French in 1974. It was translated in much abridged form in 1984. The abridgement is no doubt due to the great length and scope of the original text, which had 640 very dense pages. Like Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Lyotard's Discours, figure, the book is Kristeva's long thesis for a French doctorate (doctorat d'état). The three books are testament to the very high quality achieved in this now less prevalent form of academic work. Indeed, a consideration of the change from long, relatively rare and immensely time-consuming works to shorter more standardized ones would benefit from a poststructuralist study as to the forces at work and the values that are slipping away to be replaced by others.

The French title should be understood as “the revolution of poetic language” as well as “revolution in poetic language”. This is because Kristeva does not only believe that there is a revolution in poetry and literature towards the end of the nineteenth century (with Mallarmé and Lautréamont), but that this revolution and later ones in twentieth-century literature (with Joyce, Artaud and Pound) constitute a social, linguistic and political revolution. Her thesis is therefore much more than a claim about a dramatic change in art. It is a claim about the revolutionary power of art.