Mirror Threshold and Semiotic Force: How the Chora Realm Redefines Symbolic

Introduction

In this essay, I aim to present a comparison of Jacques Lacan’s and Julia Kristeva’s accounts of the subject’s entrance into the Symbolic order, mainly focusing on Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage and Kristeva’s distinction between the Semiotic and the Symbolic. I elaborate on the Kristevan theoretical framework, structured around her pivotal concepts of abjection, the chora, and the thetic phase. I argue that Kristeva deviates from Lacan by emphasizing the chaotic and subversive potentiality of the Semiotic chora and contend that the Kristevan approach provides what can be viewed as an intermediary space. It introduces a continuity (Grosz), and problematizes the clear-cut, abrupt movement into the Symbolic encountered in the Lacanian account. From a Kristevan perspective, the Symbolic as the paternal discursive structure is built on the raw dynamism and motility of the maternal Semiotic. For both Kristeva and Lacan, entering the Symbolic is only possible via the subject’s repression of the maternal. The speaking subject is a split, barred subject who permanently lacks. However, Kristeva emphasizes the repression of the maternal Semiotic and maternal body. Thus, Kristeva reworks the Lacanian edifice by shifting the focus to the maternal and introducing an intermediary space and a continuity via the concepts of the Semiotic chora, the abject, and the thetic phase.

Lacanian Three Orders and The Mirror Stage

In Lacanian theory, the mirror stage is associated with the Imaginary. Before focusing on the mirror stage, I will elaborate on the Lacanian three orders or registers. The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. Lacan describes the three orders as “an unholy trinity whose members could as easily be called [respectively] Fraud, Absence and Impossibility.”¹ They are all present simultaneously within the subject’s psyche and in his psychoanalytic journey, are interdependent and interlinked.

The Real

The Real is undifferentiated, outside language, and resists symbolization. It is associated with a primal, unstructured, amorphous materiality that cannot be communicated or known and is opposed to and mediated by the Imaginary and the Symbolic. It has been compared to the Freudian The Thing and the Kantian thing-in-itself. In the Lacanian psychosexual development of the subject, the Real is the earliest stage (0-6 months of age), where the infant is a bundle of chaotic perceptions, feelings, and needs. He can’t distinguish himself from people and his surroundings and experiences his body as fragmented zones, as the mother pays special attention to them –the “territorialization” of the body, denoting the formation of boundaries and the beginning of socialization. The Real is also associated with “identification with those things perceived as fulfilling your lack: the mother’s breast, her voice, her gaze.”² None of these objects can perfectly fulfill the child’s lack, so he begins forming the psychic conflict of fantasy vs. lack that “continues all his life.”³

The Imaginary

The Imaginary is narcissistic. The subject moves from primal need to unsatisfiable demand. This leads to the formation of the specular ego in the mirror stage (6-18 months of age), where the infant finds the means to escape its condition of fragmentation and loss (lacking the primal dyadic relation with the mother) by identifying with his specular image. This stage is marked by identification: “the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image –an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as witnessed by the use in analytic theory of antiquity’s term, ‘imago.’”⁴ The mirror stage is “the watershed between the imaginary and the symbolic.”⁵

The child perceives an idealized version of himself when he views his reflection, misrecognizing his fragmented bodily experience as a unified self. This reflection serves as a fantasy image, shaping his ego through identification with it. As a result, this stage is marked by both alienation and narcissism. The Imaginary order fosters a misleading sense of wholeness and autonomy, with the ‘Ideal I’ representing a complete and coherent self. According to Lacan, within the symbolic framework, “the I” emerges in an initial form before it becomes shaped through identification with others and before language assigns it the role of a subject. At this stage, the ego’s agency is directed toward a fictional ideal, which remains unattainable in its entirety. No matter how well one integrates conflicting aspects of identity, the subject can never fully resolve the gap between their idealized self and lived experience. The mirror stage thus becomes the moment when the distinction between the self and the other arises, and the individual begins to recognize themselves as an entity within the external world.

The primordial tension and discord between me in the mirror and the reality of my body is formative of me as a subject. Lacan explains: “The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation –and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call ‘orthopaedic’– and, lastly, to the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.”⁶ For Lacan, the conscious ego’s authority as such is impossible due to the split subject of the Imaginary. The conscious ego always struggles to protect its illusory unity via its narcissism, as it is always under the threat of fragmentation. At the conclusion of the mirror stage, the dynamic relationship between the “I” and the social world is established. However, Lacan cautions against viewing the ego as merely rooted in perception and consciousness or structured by the “reality principle.” Instead, he emphasizes that the ego is fundamentally shaped by méconnaissance⁷—a state of misrecognition, ignorance, or a lack of true self-knowledge—which underlies all of its defensive mechanisms.

The Symbolic

When the subject enters the Symbolic, it is separated from the mother, and its imaginary ego dissolves. This results in the emergence of the split subject who lacks. The Symbolic, in the psychosexual development of the child, corresponds to 18 months to 4 years of age and is marked by the entrance into language and culture. It is the linguistic realm as well as the register of radical alterity, “the Other.” “The symbolic is the realm of the Law which regulates desire in the Oedipus complex. It is the realm of culture as opposed to the imaginary order of nature. Whereas the imaginary is characterized by dual relations, the symbolic is characterized by triadic structures because the intersubjective relationship is always ‘mediated’ by a third term, the big Other. The symbolic order is also the realm of death, of absence, and of lack.”⁸ The big Other is the objective spirit, the Symbolic as it exists for an individual subject socio-linguistically.

The Symbolic has a totalizing and universalizing character. For Lacan, when the Symbolic arrives, it is universal, and one doesn’t enter it gradually, as it has always been present. The Lacanian subject is barred within it, as it is castrated due to its division by language. The barred subject ($) is divided due to the tension between primitive need and demand, and it is forever conflicted.

Kristeva’s Theoretical Edifice

First, I will present the Kristevan approach to the Lacanian three orders. In Kristeva’s theory, the chora corresponds to the Lacanian Real (0-6 months of age). In this stage, the infant is a chaotic bundle of perceptions, feelings, and needs. He is not yet separated from the mother and is without any idea of boundaries. He is “closest to the pure materiality of existence … purely dominated by drives.”⁹ A key concept of Kristeva, “abjection” (in 4-8 months of age) refers to the beginning of separation and the formation of boundaries between self and other prior entry into language. I will elaborate on this concept in a further section, but as a preliminary definition, this stage can be described as a breaking away from the mother. It is “a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back into the pre-linguistic stage of the Chora, which means giving up all the linguistic structures by which we order our social world of meaning. Kristeva sees the stage of abjection as a precondition of narcissism.”¹⁰ As such, Lacanian Imaginary order and the mirror stage (6-18 months of age) is complicated by the abject. From 18 months to 4 years of age, the child enters the differential system of language –the world as we know it takes shape, and perceptions stabilize, and the intrusion of the Real’s materiality becomes a ‘traumatic event.’

The Semiotic and the Symbolic

In Kristeva’s theory, the dyad of Semiotic and the Symbolic is central and deeply connected to abjection, chora, and the thetic phase. First, I will elaborate on the Semiotic and the Symbolic.

For Kristeva, the signifying process (significance) is formed by the Semiotic and the Symbolic as interlinked modalities forming the process of the speaking subject: “Without the symbolic, speech would disintegrate into babbling madness; without the semiotic, it would shrivel up in its dryness into a brittle emptiness.”¹¹

The (paternal) symbolic modality is about taking a position that is concerned with meaning, grammar, and syntax. The (maternal) Semiotic is about the subject’s feelings and drives rather than proper grammatical and syntactic rules. (Additionally, we can view the concept of mental speech as well as onomatopoetic speech as belonging to the Semiotic. As such, Kristeva describes Joyce’s writing as the incursions of the Imaginary into the Symbolic.¹²

With regard to the psychosexual development of the subject, “the semiotic is articulated by flow and marks: facilitation, energy transfers, the cutting up of the corporeal and social continuum as well as that of signifying material, the establishment of a distinctiveness and its ordering in a pulsating chora, in a rhythmic but nonexpressive totality.”¹³ For Kristeva, it is “the operation that logically and chronologically precedes the establishment of the symbolic and its subject.”¹⁴ She distinguishes it from the realm of signification. The Semiotic is pre-thetic; it precedes the positing of the subject. The paternal Symbolic is marked by the masculine law and structure, whereas the maternal Semiotic is the realm of crisis, motility, rupture, rhythms, and raw materials: “the semiotic is the locus of the subject-to-be, the constitutive ground of ego-formation. It predates the mirror stage’s identificatory dialectic of self and other.”¹⁵ The Semiotic essentially belongs to the mother-child union, thus, has the character of corporeality, whereas the entry into the paternal Symbolic is marked by a break with the mirror stage.

The Semiotic and the Symbolic also determine Kristeva’s notion of ‘subject in process’ (one of her departures from Lacan), and she suggests that after entering the Symbolic, the subject oscillates between the Semiotic and the Symbolic. His identity is never fixed but always in process.

The Chora

Kristeva adapted Plato’s chora, defining it as “a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stasis in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.”¹⁶ The child in the Chora (0 to 6 months) is a chaotic mix of perceptions, feelings, and needs –the womb and the world is blended. This stage is closest to the Real.¹⁷ The Semiotic is often used together with the chora or sometimes as a replacement. The chora is also “the ‘space’ of the Semiotic.”¹⁸

For Kristeva, like Lacan, the Symbolic is marked by word and discourse –it is the realm of the Father’s Law, whereas the Semiotic Chora is associated with rupture; it “precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality.”¹⁹

Kristeva suggests that the mother’s body mediates between the Semiotic chora and the Symbolic. The mother exists within the Symbolic and simultaneously has a primal bond with the infant. Her body is “what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora.”²⁰ The chora can also be understood as Kristeva’s way of highlighting a transitional space that mediates between the biological and the social before the disruptive rupture caused by language. This space functions both as a container and a separator, existing neither within the mother nor the infant but as an in-between, forming a “third” entity. It serves as an intermediary realm—dynamic rather than static or void, generating meaning and transformation. Conceptually, it is closely tied to the notion of “beginning,” which is not a singular event but something continually revisited and redefined.²¹

The Abject

In the mirror stage, the child distinguishes between self and other, and enters the Symbolic, becoming a speaking subject and forming an identity separate from the mother. In Kristevan’s theory, this act of separation is marked by abjection, where the child separates himself from and rejects the mother to enter language and culture.

Kristeva describes the abject as something (not definable) radically opposed to the subject that is threatened with breaking down meaning and which causes horror and disgust. It is “the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.”²² The abject threatens with dissolving meaning, as the distinction between subject and object or between self and other, preserving “what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be.”²³

In psychosexual development, the abject is situated before the subject enters the Symbolic, defining the moment I separate myself from the mother, realizing a boundary between her and me. The abject serves as a necessary precursor to the narcissism of the mirror stage, emerging only after we establish fundamental distinctions between self and other. It simultaneously signifies the potential collapse of meaning and our response to this threat—a reinstatement of our earliest repression. The abject disrupts identity, structure, and order, challenging established boundaries. Kristeva also links it to the sudden intrusion of the Real into our experience, emphasizing that our reaction to abject material is essentially a reactivation of a pre-linguistic response.²⁴

In the psychoanalytic framework, abjection is directed at what one excludes: the mother. Abjection of the maternal is necessary for the ego and identity to be formed.

The Thetic Phase

The ‘thetic’ is the positing of the subject, described by Kristeva as the “deepest structure of the possibility of enunciation.”²⁵ Kristeva distinguishes the semiotic (drives and their articulations) from the realm of signification, which is a realm of proposition or judgment. This positionality … is structured as a break in the signifying process, establishing the identification of the subject and its object as preconditions of propositionality.”²⁶ Kristeva calls the break that produces the positing of signification ‘the thetic phase.’ All enunciation is thetic. Prior to entry into the Symbolic, the thetic is “the threshold of language.”²⁷ Kristeva describes the thetic phase as the stage in which the imago is established, castration is recognized, and semiotic motility is structured—positioning it as the space of the Other and a necessary condition for meaning-making. In other words, it serves as a prerequisite for the emergence of language. This phase represents a transition between the Semiotic and the Symbolic. The Symbolic realm incorporates aspects of the Semiotic, however their separation for Kristeva is marked by the fundamental division between the signifier and the signified.²⁸

The thetic phase is similar to Lacan’s mirror stage as it is the dialectical relationship of self and other and is marked by the infant’s libidinal investment in his own image. Kristeva follows Lacan’s account, as the theory of the thetic, like the mirror stage, emphasizes ego-formation and the tension between subject, object, and language. Kristeva diverges from Lacan with regard to the thetic signification, which according to her “constitutes the subject without being reduced to his process precisely because it is the threshold of language.”²⁹ The Lacanian emphasis is more on the identification with the image and the transition from the pre-Oedipal to the formation of the ego, whereas the Kristevan emphasis is more on the transition from the Semiotic into language. Kristeva emphasizes or introduces the thetic as an intermediary process or function: “the semiotic exceeds the limits of the symbolic: it reaches beyond the threshold of the sign. By conceiving the thetic phase as a ‘threshold’ -an intermediary determining the relation between the semiotic and the symbolic- Kristeva is able to supplement Lacan’s account of subjectivation with a renewed emphasis on the corporeal.”³⁰ Kristevan’s thetic is about the separation from the maternal, whereas Lacan’s mirror stage deals with the formation of the ego through visual identification.

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The maternal body is an intermediary space, belonging to both the Semiotic and the Symbolic. With this, Kristeva diverges from Freud and Lacan, maintaining that the entry into the Symbolic order is also a maternal function. It does not originate solely in the ‘violent break’ of the Oedipal stage but rather begins in the pre-Oedipal stage.³¹ With her focus on Semiotic chora, Kristeva distances herself from Lacan in two ways: “she extends the history of the subject back beyond Lacan’s imaginary ego … and she recognizes the chora as already social since it is a link with others.”³² With this move, she recognizes the subject as already socialized.

Kristeva, following Lacan, maintains that the relationship to the mother must be repressed for the subject to enter the Symbolic. However, she diverges from him with her focus on the chora as ever-present under the mask of the Symbolic subject. As Grosz writes, “Where Lacan insists on a definitive break between the imaginary and the symbolic, which are separated by the rupture caused by castration, the intervention of the third term, and the repression of oedipal/pre-oedipal desires, Kristeva posits more of a continuity.”³³ Due to this continuity of the prelinguistic within the Symbolic, the Semiotic goes through a transformation in the Symbolic. In “madness, holiness, and poetry” we see moments where “the semiotic overflows its symbolic boundaries.”³⁴ For Kristeva, especially poetry represents the return of the Semiotic in its transymbolic form.

Kristeva also diverges from Lacan by emphasizing the primary narcissism as a stage of an ego-fragility before the formation of the ego as such. In this sense, she emphasizes the destructive aspect of the threatening Lacanian Real before subject and object is differentiated during mirror stage. She utilizes her concepts of maternal chora, the Semiotic, the abject, and the thetic within this framework.

Kristeva’s account of the subject’s entrance into language diverges from Lacan’s, primarily due to her emphasis on the maternal process and function, which Kristeva conveys via the subversive power of the Semiotic chora, the process of abjection, and the thetic phase. In the Lacanian edifice, the transition from the prelinguistic to the Symbolic is more abrupt, whereas Kristeva presents intermediary spaces and continuity. I concur with the perspective that the Kristevan theoretical sphere introduces continuity in terms of the entrance into the Symbolic.

The Kristevan emphasis on the maternal is demonstrated in her view of the Symbolic and the Semiotic: The Symbolic, captured as the patriarchal/paternal discursive register of socio- cultural structures is built upon the chaotic and raw dynamicism of the maternal Semiotic. The Symbolic both presupposes the Semiotic as its condition and simultaneously attempts to repress and tame it as the primal threat directed at its consistency. The Semiotic preserves its corporeal excess that forever eludes signification. The Semiotic as the chaotic maternal always threatens to permeate the Symbolic order.

For both Kristeva and Lacan, entering the Symbolic is only possible by the repression concerning the child’s primary attachment to the maternal body. The speaking subject is a split, divided, barred subject who lacks. However, it is important to note that for Kristeva, the repression of the Semiotic amounts to “a sacrifice of the chora.”³⁵ The chora destabilizes the ego and is deeply connected with the maternal body. The maternal function is demonstrated by Kristeva, again, with the mother’s body viewed as mediating the symbolic sociality.

From a Kristevan perspective, any representation of the relation to the Semiotic has the potential to be subversive as it can harness the power of negativity that challenges the masculine Symbolic. There is always the negating threat of the Semiotic within the Symbolic. As such, the subject carries the Semiotic excess forever as his integration into the Symbolic is never properly achieved. The Kristevan concept of the thetic also introduces continuity, as it does not simply divide the Semiotic and Symbolic into two different orders of the corporeal and the discursive. It is a threshold.

For both Lacan and Kristeva, the subject is ambiguous, split, barred, and is closely connected with the idea of crisis and impossibility. However, on the matter of the subject’s entry into the Symbolic, Kristeva distances herself from the Lacanian edifice with an emphasis on the maternal Semiotic, as well as by favoring an account of continuity.

 

Bibliography & Footnotes