Poetic Mimesis in Kristeva

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the figure of the break in the framework of the early Kristeva's conceptualization of the mimetic faculty in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), treating it as closely related to poetic language and the dreamwork. Kristeva supplements the psychoanalytic terms displacement and condensation with a third mode of transformation in language, namely transposition. Transposition always operates between two levels of the semiotic process, the genotext and the phenotext. I will examine the mechanism of the dream within a dream in Freud and poetic mimesis in Kristeva. In order to subvert the contemporary logic of authenticity, they use break and doubling in a way similar to the operation of the text-within-a-text device. Poetic enjambment is seen as material discontinuity in language. The key point of this article is that one should not forget about poetry.