Semiotic Mapping
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#01
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.81
POWERS OF HORROR > MATERNAL AUTHORITY AS TRUSTEE OF THE SELF'S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY
Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that both excrement and menstrual blood as defilements share a common root in maternal/feminine authority, which operates as a pre-symbolic "semiotic" mapping of the body—a binary primal charting of clean/unclean, orifices and surfaces—that language and culture must repress in order to constitute the symbolic order; this repression of maternal corporeality is the structural precondition of the paternal/phallic/linguistic register.
It is a 'binary logic,' a primal mapping of the body that I call semiotic to say that, while being the precondition of language, it is dependent upon meaning, but in a way that is not that of linguistic signs nor of the symbolic order they found.