Kautsky, Karl (1854—1938)
Marxist intellectual and political activist. He was born in Prague, but his family moved to Vienna when he was 7 years old. He studied history, economics and philosophy at the University of Vienna. It was there that his active involvement with politics began. He joined the Austrian Social Democratic Party. In 1881 he visited Engels, Friedrich in London and the two became firm friends. In Stuttgart in 1883 he founded the journal Die Neue Zeit (The New Time), and edited it until 1917, which provided him with a basic means of living, even while living abroad, as he frequently did. Kautsky was an outspoken critic of the First World War. After the November Revolution in Germany (the chaotic period from the end of the First World War in November 1918 until the establishment of the Weimar Republic in August 1919), he was given a senior position in the Foreign Office of the briefly reigning revolutionary government, which he used to try to prove Germany’s war guilt. A prolific author, he wrote a biography of Engels as well as a detailed account of Marxism’s economic theory. His writings were held in high enough regard in his own lifetime to attract strong (negative) responses from both Lenin and Trotsky. Further Reading: M. Salvadori and J. Rothschild Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution (1990). khōra (chora) The pre-linguistic or inchoate point of origin of the subject, for which the womb may stand as a figure, though the pre-biotic soup out of which all life is supposed to have emerged according to evolutionary theory might stand just as well. Paris-based, Bulgarian linguist and psychoanalyst Kristeva, Julia adapted the term from Plato’s Timaeus, where it means quite simply a receptacle for meaning, to theorize a semiotic network or nonexpressive totality out of which individual words and meanings are produced. It is for her the potentiality for meaning that must pre-exist meaning-making, but it has no meaning itself. It is in this respect neither sensible nor intelligible, although Kristeva insists it is nonetheless regulated and not anarchic as Derrida, Jacques charges in his account of the concept. As the potential for meaning, the khōra is also the limit or disruption of meaning. It makes its appearance then wherever meaning-production is pushed to its limits, as in modern and postmodern art and literature. In psychoanalysis terms, the khōra is the realm of the drive, which are pre-symbolic, unrepresentable, yet motivating: they give the subject the energy they need to act. Further Reading: J. Derrida On the Name (1995). J. Kristeva Revolution in Poetic Language (1984).