Kristeva's early masterpiece that helped to solidify her reputation in the early 70s as a masterly leftist feminist can now be reread as indicative of the Orientalism of the Paris of the 1970s in which Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Philippe Sollers, and many others championed Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution. This revolution of the Parisian letters of the 1970s has now become a powerful wing of what is euphemistically called Cultural Studies, but which is actually a branch of Mao's Cultural Revolution, being played out today in almost every institution of higher education in America.

This book is the purest Orientalism of the kind that Edward Said complains about. She actually argues that because the future is so bright after the Cultural Revolution that the possibilities are unlimited.

It shows the left's prophetic powers in retrospect.

This book is a sick joke. In spite of her impressive-sounding title, the author knows nothing much about linguistics. The tiny amount of linguistics contained in this book is fragmented, antiquated, unintelligible, and copied out, apparently incomprehendingly, from other books.

There is nothing on sociolinguistics, nothing on psycholinguistics, nothing on historical linguistics, nothing on typology or universals, nothing on cognitive linguistics, nothing on semantics, nothing on pragmatics, nothing on language acquisition, nothing on computational linguistics, nothing on neurolinguistics or language disability, nothing on morphology, nothing on...well, you get the picture. There is nothing on any linguistics done since about 1960, and precious little on anything done earlier.

The few scraps on phonetics are copied from Saussure's 1916 Cours, for god's sake, and they are wrong. The few scraps on phonology are copied from a third-rate American textbook of the 1950s, and Kristeva has clearly not even understood what she has copied -- though, to be fair, the English translator has apparently introduced a blunder not present in the French original. The small amount of syntax is copied incomprehendingly from an ancient American book and from Noam Chomsky's first book, in 1957.

Nobody could possibly learn anything about linguistics from reading this book, which is a positive obstacle to understanding the subject. Most of the book consists of a potted history of linguistics -- there are far better histories available -- and of long chapters on irrelevancies like semiotics and psychoanalysis. There is also a good deal on writing, but Kristeva does not appear to know much about this topic, either.

The book is a disgrace, and I can't imagine why anybody thought an English translation was a good idea. Reading nothing at all is better than reading this mess. A proper rating would be about minus twelve stars, [...]

R. L. Trask
Professor of Linguistics

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