Abstract
The theme of art and literature and its relationship to political agency is one of the core themes of writings of the French-Bulgarian theorist Julia Kristeva. In her best-known work, Revolution in Poetic Language, art and literature are understood as practices that are set in the broader dynamics of a dialectical process.
In our contribution we will pay special attention to this dialectical process. The influence of Freudian psychoanalysis (and its lacanian interpretation) is crucial here, opening the way for Kristeva to confront an approach of contemporary semiology and literary semiotics.
It is psychoanalysis that allows her to see literature as a dialectical process of sign/linguistic and non-sign/non-linguistic elements, and to grasp the social and political function of literature in a specific way: Kristeva's conceptual apparatus thus becomes at the same time a tool for analysing the very nature of discursivity and subjectivity. From this point of view, our contribution will try to answer the following questions: To what extent is the literary practice constitutive for the subject, and to what extent is it constituted by the subject? Is the subject fully political? And if we understand literature and subject in Kristeva's way, what might be the subversive potential of a literary work?