Julia Kristeva was a noted French-Bulgarian psychoanalyst who treated many women for depression, and who also advocated for the disabled, under the banner of “Liberty, equality, fraternity… and vulnerability.”

When French psychoanalysis took the linguistic turn toward language — and the human individual as constructed by language — she articulated a more feminine notion of meaning-making, based on the deepest intuitions of the body for rhythm, tone, voice, and the mother.

She called this “semiosis”, or simply, significance, and without it, all meaning as generated by grammar and rules, and as applied to a factual world, are sterile. A good example of pure significance might be a piano concerto — whose fluid tonal patterns mark out something like meaning, but never stable, and never quite a clear ‘picture’.

While her mentor, Jacques Lacan, related the acquisition of language and its discipline to the Father, Kristeva associated “significance” (semiosis) with the memory of the Mother. She also believed that this feminine space in the psyche was the unconscious that haunts language and dreams.

I might put it like this.

In the strictest sense of language, I cannot claim that God exists. There is no rule of inference, no proof, no science that warrants a truth claim of this sort.

And yet, faith may be more akin to patterns of significance inscribed by waves upon a shore… altogether beyond the semantics of what can be proved or disproved.

This is why Sufism talks about love and faith as akin to an ocean.