Among French linguists and semiologists, Julia Kristeva is probably the most uncomfortable thinker: she is the theoretical head of the Tel Quel group. Her studies on literary text analysis and semiotics have had an influence on the development of new methodologies and ideas in the cultural and social sciences far beyond France. This book is the first German translation of one of her main programmatic works: an examination of symbolic structures. Based on the poetry of Lautréamont and Mallarmé and on the insights of Freud and Lacan, Julia Kristeva attempts to reformulate the logic of subjective speech, to define language as the practice of the subject. She sees the linguistic innovations of the literary avant-garde at the end of the last century as an indication of the fact that (and how) two inertias can be separated.