From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Kristeva
For other philosophical and psychoanalytic frameworks, see Dostoevsky, Lispector, Beckett.
Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic and semiotic frameworks illuminate the glitch as a structural rupture of language itself. Her concept of the abject—that which exists neither as subject nor as object, but as their impossible border—maps precisely onto Leif's embodied state: a man who cannot walk, cannot see, cannot beat his own heart; a body that is neither autonomous agent nor pure instrument.
The struggle between the semiotic order (pre-linguistic, maternal, rhythmic, corporal) and the symbolic order (paternal law, language, meaning) structures the novel's inability to join. The glitch is their irreconcilable collision: the story cannot be articulated in symbolic language because it exists in the body before language can speak it—in Katita's red, in the sound the earth refuses, in frequencies that bypass the symbolic entirely.
Kristevan scholarship emphasizes the maternal body at the frame's heart: labour, birth, the wound as threshold rather than resolution. Kristeva's subject-in-process—consciousness perpetually undone and remade—describes Leif and Katita not as stable characters but as instruments of return, recursively generated across every loop. The Doctrine of Refusal aligns with Kristeva's ethics of abjection: the refusal to symbolize, clean, or close what resists language [1].
See also
- Subject (Ontological Incompleteness)
- Lispector
- Dostoevsky
- The wound that Weeps—Seven Hours Beneath the Watt Hotel, Newcastle
- Fatherhood, birth and the caught descent
References
- ↑ ██