Abstract
When Roman Jakobson, on the basis of his exploration of the problem of aphasia, identifies two aspects that characterize language - metaphoricity and metonymy - , he touches on an important issue that will become a central concern of some of his successors. This issue is the materiality of language.
From the point of view of the aphatic himself, metaphoricity and metonymy express two extreme ways of relating to the material of language. A productive elaboration of this thesis in the history of semiotics has been provided by Julia Kristeva, who radicalizes Jakobson's conclusions by working with the core concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis.
In this paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the theoretical premises that allow Kristeva to assign a privileged role to metaphor, one that consists in the constant opening of the sphere of the sign towards the corporeality of the subject. To illustrate some important aspects, I will turn to Vítězslav Nezval's novella Sexual Nocturne, where the connection between language and corporeality plays a central role.