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College Literature, 31.4, Fall 2004, pp. 188-202 (Article)
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10.1353/lit.2004.0054
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Hirtler, Kurt, Ola Stahl, and Ika Willis, eds.2003. Mourning
Revolution. Special issue ofParallax 9.2,April-June 2003.
NewYork:Routledge. $100 electronic copy. 113 pp.
Kristeva, Julia. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt:The
Powers and Limits ofPsychoanalysis.Trans. Jeanine Herman. NewYork:
Columbia University Press. $60.00 hc.$19.50 sc. 288 pp.
Kristeva, Julia. 2002. Intimate Revolt:ThePowers and Limits of
Psychoanalysis.Trans.Jeanine Herman. NewYork: ColumbiaUniversity
Press. $34.00 hc. $19.50 sc. 392pp.
I tell you this in truth: this is not only theend of this here
but also and first of thatthere, the end of history, the end of
theclass struggle, the end of philosophy, the
Revolutionaries withouta Revolution:
The Case of Julia Kristeva
Nouri Gana
Nouri Gana teaches at the
University of Monteal. His work
has appeared in American
Imago, tudes Irlandaises,
Law and Literature, Theory
and Event, and Mosaic.
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death of God, the end of re l i gi o n s , the end of
Christianity and morals . . .theend of the subject, the end of man,
the end of the West, the end ofOedipus, the end of the
earth,Apocalypse now, I tell you . . . the end of lit-erature, the
end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of
psycho-analysis, the end of the university, the end of
phallocentrism and phallogo-centrism, and I dont know what else?
(Jacques Derrida,Of an ApocalypticTone Recently Adopted in
Philosophy)
The Rhetoric of Ending and the Mourning to Come
Certainly Derridas inventory is far from being complete, but it
recreateswith gripping poignancy the frenzy in which death
certificates havebeen meted out to all repositories of thought, of
hope, and of life writlarge. By virtue of enumerating, enlisting,
and discerning the far reaches ofthe rhetoric of ending and of the
apocalyptic imagination underpinning it,Derridas account itself can
be said to participate in what it seeks to outflankin the first
place.Yet, perhaps Derrida cannot be held accountable for
thehairsplitting entrapments of this discursive
graveyard-whistling; perhaps thisis, after all, the crime (or
logic) of philosophy itselfa discourse that cannothelp folding back
or receding into a reflection on its genesis and, by impli-cation,
on its ending. More than anything else, perhaps philosophy is, asD
e rrida himself intones, fond of quasimythical metadiscourses that
can intran-s i g e n t l y, i r a s c i bl y, and in an ove r l o
rd l y way declare its dissolution or, to useD e rri d a s own wo
rd , its c a d a v ri s s e m e n t ( l i t e r a l l y, its
reduction to a corp s e ) .
Not infrequently, the philosophical rhetoric of ending has
unwittinglyoverlooked its implication in an indissoluble
contradiction that, while con-tending that the ending has been
reached, not only participates in it but alsolives through it, that
is, in many respects survives it in order to announce it.Who (or
what) would announce the end were there nothing to beannounced? Of
course, such a rhetorical question implies that, should therebe an
end or an apocalypse, no one would survive it in order to report
it: theend would be the end of everything, period! For that is
also, as Derridarightly conjectures,the end of the metalanguage
concerning eschatologicallanguage (81). I am not here suggesting
that there is no hors texte, no out-side, from which the end could
be announced by a meta-being, only thatthere is, practically, no
ending whatsoever that humanity can pronounce orannounce, let alone
ascertain. On the other hand, Who (or what) wouldannounce the end
were there nothing to be announced? is a question thatalso implies
not only that the end (associated, for so long, with the end of
themillennium) proved not to be an endonly a mere illusion, which
is exact-ly the position held by Jean Baudrillardbut also that
nothing really willever end without leaving remains, without coming
back under the banner of
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hauntology, a theme Derrida belabors in Specters of Marx. By and
large,whether we have missed the end or fallen prey to the
returning ghosts of ourprecursors, it is important to stress (1)
that the rhetoric of ending is indisso-ciable from the rhetoric of
mourning, from the ethical impossibility of therebeing such a thing
as a successful mourning la freudienne any longer(Derrida 1994),
and (2) that while philosophy cannot, much perhaps to thedistress
of Derrida and Kant before him, completely banish the
apocalyptictone from its discourse, it can nonetheless invent its
own contrapuntal rhet-oric that would, parodying Shakespeares
Edgar, remind us that, The end isnot/As long as we can say This is
the end.
Yet, it would be unfair to restrict the obsession with the
rhetoric of end-ing to the realm of philosophical discourse as
sucha discourse that isaddicted to drawing attention to itself even
at the risk of compromising itsvery existence in the process. No
one who has read and reflected upon themany heterogeneous
tendencies of (literary and critical) theory since the1950s would
fail to notice at least two things: (1) the hectic proliferation
ofnew theories, each of which purporting vociferously or reticently
to effecta Khunian paradigm shift (thus, academics, who have an
unyielding strain fororder, are bewildered by the plethora of such
shifts that they have grownwary of classifying and opted instead
for portmanteau prefixes as post- orneo- to relieve themselves from
the burden of differentiating such that weare now going through a
period of immense disarray given that we are prac-tically past all
the posts), and (2) the celebratory and intransigent tonewith which
the death or ending of an age or a discursive practice and
thebeginning of another is announced.
As they parade in theoretical discourses today, announcements of
end-ings are more often than not masks of new beginnings, of the
good news,as it were, that awaits the puzzled and perturbed reader
of Francis FukuyamasThe End of History and the Last Man. The end of
history is the proverbialformula that Fukuyama makes use of in
order to hammer home the morecontentious thesis of the triumph of
liberal democracy. Likewise, MichaelHardt and Antonio Negri dress
the obsolete word empire with the newclothes of globalization,
whose emergence as a new form of sovereignty ismaterializing on the
pyre of the sovereignty of nation-states. According toHardt and
Negri, the end of imperialism, the decline of the nation-state,
andthe emergence of what in their own parlance is a decentered and
deterrito-rializing apparatus of rulea kind of global space of
sovereignty that has nooutsideprovide the conditions of possibility
of a new form of counter-Empire, a new form of political
subjectivity (much of which neverthelesshinges on unlocatable and
unmediated grains of resistance) that they callin a strange
admixture of bombast, Marxism, and messianismthe multitude.
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Unfortunately, the inimitable ability of the new Empire to
manage dissent, ifnot to warrant and sanction it, leaves little
room for the multitude to makesignificant, let alone revolutionary,
changes.
Whether it has to do with the end of history or with the end of
impe-rialism and the nation state or any of the items inventoried
by Derrida in theepigraph, the rhetoric of ending deployed by a
variegated number of theo-rists today is in fact a function of the
more encompassing rhetoric of seduc-tive reasoning that these
theorists make use of in order to persuade the read-er of the
necessity and validity of the alternative venue(s) of reflection
whichthey propose.This applies not only to Fukuyama and Hardt and
Negri, butalso to, among many others, Arthur Donatos After the End
of Art, GianniVattimos The End of Modernity,Daniel Bells The End of
Ideology, and, not sur-prisingly, to Julia Kristevas recent twin
books, The Sense and Non-Sense ofRevolt and Intimate Revolt, in
which she elaborates a theory of psychic revolton the pyre of
socialist and political revolution. Of course, after the welter
ofcommentary and the plethora of books that followed the collapse
of theSoviet Empire, it hardly needs to be restated here that the
promise of a pos-sible socialist revolution, while crucially
attenuated by such an event, hascontinued to provoke disparate
reactions. A recent special issue of Parallaxtitled Mourning
Revolution attempts to capture this disparity by bringingtogether a
variety of essays by Kristeva, Martin Jay, Alain Badiou,
andBenjamin Arditi, among others.
While Kristeva and Jay contend, as will become clear in due
course, thatrevolution is no longer a politically and socially
useful concept, BenjaminArditi argues quite persuasively that
revolution can still play a vital role in ourpolitical life even in
the face of its practical impossibility. Drawing extensive-ly on
Derridas thinking of the ethics of the impossible, Arditi was able
toconclude in his piece tiltled Talkin but a Revolution: The End
ofMourning that revolution is precisely what unfolds in the spacing
or playbetween the promise that entices us to demand the impossible
and the con-tinually deconstructible figures of possibility aiming
to flesh out the prom-ise (Kurt, Stahl, and Willis 2003, 85). For
Arditi, we lose nothing by think-ing the impossible, but we open up
more roads into the possible.Adopting amore versatile approach,
Badiou declines to reflect on the possibility orimpossibility of
revolution today but presents instead a reflection on thewhole
question by means of an aporia:If you think that the world can
andmust change absolutely, that there is neither a nature of things
to be respect-ed nor pre-formed subjects to be maintained, you
thereby admit that theindividual can be sacrificed (73). In other
words, the individual as suchasa natural beinghas nothing intrinsic
to his nature that merits preservation;all claims for preserving
the individual must therefore be claims about his
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essence rather than his naturehis unnaturalness (73). The
remainder ofBadious contribution to Mourning Revolution consists of
mapping variationson this unnaturalness of the human subject.
Implicitly, the demand for rev-olution is presented as an effect of
this unnaturalness. Since the human sub-ject as such, whether for
Sartre or Lacan, is precisely that which lacks essenceand being, it
is only by dissolving itself into a project which exceeds it thatit
concretizes its essence (74). Ironically, striving for essence
turns out to be,in Badious analysis, no more than a
twentieth-century obsession with a for-mality: demonstration.To
demonstrate is to evacuate the empty and vacantposition of an
existence without essence and to melt into the we-subjectthat
emerges out of the collection of otherwise isolated individuals
(78). Itbears repeating here that after the collapse of the
communist camp and thetriumph of capitalism, demonstrations have
become, at least for Hardt andNegri, new forms of militancy.While
Badiou is reticent about the politicalimport of this new form of
militancy which came to stamp the twentiethcentury, Kristeva
contends that the age of militancy is well behind us.
In her own autobiographical essay, My Memorys Hyperbole,
whichfirst appeared in 1983 in Infini, the journal that replaced
Tel Quel, Kristevadates her disenchantment with the Communist Party
back to the late 1960s,that is, to the early years of her
affiliation with the Tel Quel group. Kristevaexplains that the Tel
Quels belief in the permanent subversiveness of theCommunist Party
ceased as soon as the latter began its campaign to
institu-tionalize and appropriate, on behalf of the establishment,
those currents ofthought and aesthetic creation that would have
remained marginal withoutit (15). She comments on the later visits
of members of the Tel Quel (her-self included) to China after the
1974 Cultural Revolution as amounting tonothing more than an
inauguration of the return to the only continent theyhad never
ceased to believe in: internal experience.The present two
volumes,with their insistence on the end of militancy and their
call for a return to inti -macy, can therefore aptly be seen as
variations on a persistent theme.
Yet, if Kristeva could be seen to have withdrawn from any active
engage-ment in politicsand from any belief in a socialist
revolution, for that mat-terduring the early years of her
involvement with Tel Quel, it is wrong toconclude that she ceased
thenceforth to reflect on the concept of revolution.On the
contrary, her whole oeuvre reveals her continually rediscovering
thesame entelechy, the same impasse of political revolution, always
trying toinventory a new language of salvaging it, always trying to
displace it intoother realms of experience, be they poetic (as she
suggests in her very firstbook of 1974, Revolution in Poetic
Language) or psychic (as the present twinvolumes under review here
attest).This seems to me to be Kristevas idio-syncratic way of
working through the demise of socialist revolution, her way,
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in other words, of mourningin the Freudian sense of the
withdrawal ofaffective ties from a lost (ideal) object and of the
establishment of new tieswith a new objectrevolution in its lost
political sense: rediscovering andreinventing it anew in poetic and
psychic locales. But first, how does Kristevasort through the
reasons that the task of situating revolt at the level of thepsyche
is of a pressing urgency today?
Who Would Revolt We re There Nothing to Revolt Against?
Kristeva does not ask this question, but I ask it here in order
to bettercapture the fichue position (to borrow a Joycean
expression from Ulysses) inwhich she places the subject, the very
focus of her reflections on the rele-vance of the concept of revolt
in todays world. Who would revolt werethere nothing to revolt
against? is formulated thus in order that it asks (1)after the one
who would be willing to revolt even against that which exceedsones
capacity to revolt against, that powerful disembodied knitting
machinecalled global capital whose handiwork is manifest everywhere
but whose ori-gins are ghostly and impossible to pin down, let
alone subvertthis is per-haps the case with Hardt and Negris
multitude; (2) after the one who wouldbe willing to revolt but
would find literally nothing to revolt against, no vis-ible
constellation of power to overturnthis is perhaps the case
withFukuyamas liberal democrats who seem to have overcome the last
frontierafter the collapse of communism; (3) and, strangely enough,
after the (no)onewho would not be able to revolt and for whom there
would be absolutelynothing to revolt against anyway. Out of the
three possible interpretations ofthe question suggested above, only
the last one is in piece with Kristevasargument throughout her two
volumes. In the eyes of Kristeva, not only isthere no one capable
of revolt today, but there is also nothing to revolt against.This
is the qui and contre qui, the who and against whom, impasse in
whichKristeva suspends the political subject prior to rethinking
its prospects foranother kind of revolt.
Kristeva expounds that revolt in its political sense is today
mired not onlybecause the political landscape is becoming more and
more homogenized asdissimilarities between parties are waning, but
especially because there is notangible structure of power against
which to revolt, only a power vacuum,and, gravely enough, no agent
available to carry out the incumbent task ofrevolt.The harbinger of
social change has become nothing more than a pat-rimonial person
(personne patrimoniale), a mere conglomerate of organs(conglomrat
dorganes) hardly capable of recognizing the
power-technologiesinfused in him, let alone able to neutralize
their virulent and hamstringingeffects (2002, 4). The modern
subject is, according to Kristeva, a person
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belonging to the patrimony, financially, genetically, and
physiologically, a per-son barely free enough to use a remote
control to choose his channel ( 4 ) .
This picture of the modern subject Kristeva draws is even
gloomier if weare to consider it against the backdrop of Fukuyamas
most recent bookwhose title alone, Our Posthuman Future:
Consequences of the BiotechnologyRevolution, chills the spine. For
Fukuyama, George Orwells prophetic visionof a world dominated by
information technology and by hovering BigBrother(s) has come true,
and so has come as well Aldous Huxleys prescienceof a
biotechnological world in which babies are no longer hatched in
situ(i.e. in wombs) but in vitro. Without getting entangled in the
entrails ofFukuyamas argument, I think that it draws a picture of
the current worldthat is in many respects similar to the one
Kristeva draws. In very generalterms, there are, according to
Kristeva and Fukuyama, two dystopias materi-alizing before our
eyes: (1) a virtual rather than real world in which themedia,
undergirded by a complex network of information technology,
fos-ters and promotes what Kristeva calls, after Guy Debord, the
society of thespectacle and the culture of entertainment rather
than the culture of revolt,and (2) a biotechnological world, in
which the wedge is being slowly butsteadily opened for new
technologies to take possession of the human body,thus managing it
at will. According to Fukuyama, this is humanitys mostfrightening
nightmare and literally the post human stage of mans exis-tence,
which would lead to what C. S. Lewis called the abolition of
man,that is, the negation of man in the process of technologically
surpassing ormastering it.
Unlike Fukuyama, a policy maker who goes on in his Our
PosthumanFuture to suggest pragmatic solutions to containing this
otherwise runawayworld in which the biotechnological revolution
resulted, Kristeva is no pol-icy maker but a thinker whose work
traverses a wide array of philosophical,literary, linguistic, and
psychoanalytical interests and who is primarily con-cerned with the
ways in which the velocity of the biotechnological revolu-tion
might be slowed, as well as the ways in which the hold of the
cultureshow might be dispelled.As such, she sets herself the task
of pointing out theway for a culture of revolt, a culture that
would move us beyond the twoimpasses where we are caught today: the
failure of rebellious ideologies, onthe one hand, and the surge of
consumer culture, on the other (2000, 7).Kristeva thinks that it is
incumbent upon us to resurrect a culture of revolt,not because we
can no longer aspire for political revolt but because happi-ness,
as Freud demonstrated,exists only at the price of revolt (7).
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Intimacy Now; or, the Psychic Tropography of Revolt
In order to restore us to/to us this culture of revolt, Kristeva
undertakesto trace its writerly manifestation in the experiences of
Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, and Roland Barthes.
Although the two volumesdeal with different texts by each of these
above-mentioned writers, theyoverlap, almost exquisitely, insofar
as the argument of both is concerned. Iwill not therefore alternate
between each but will instead deal with both ofthem
simultaneously.
Attentive to the linguistic difficulties of the task at hand, to
the automaticassociation of the concept of revolt with the
political and the ideological,Kristeva undertakes first to wrest
it, etymologically, from the overly narrowpolitical sense it has
taken in our time in order to bring to light its rich-ness,
polyvalence, and plasticity and relate it thereof to the
intimatesphere of the psyche (2000, 3). In this respect, she
contends that the termrevoltwhose Latin lineage (volvere) implies
movement and return, aswell as reversal, detour, etc. (3)did not
come to lose its initially celes-tial origins in favor of more
overtly political and historical purchases until theearly beginning
of the eighteenth century.
Kristeva complains that the word revolt has been repetitively
used inrelation to the suspension of old values such that the new
nihilistic values areswallowed wholesale, rather than questioned in
turn like the old ones. Assuch, the pseudo-rebellious nihilist, far
from being a man in revolt, is in facta man reconciled with the
stability of new values (2002, 6). Kristeva goeson to propound that
the technological development, the desacralization ofChristianity,
along with the abandonment of the Augustinian introspectiveand
self-questioning quest (se quaerere) in favor of the immutability
of being,have all combined among themselves in such a manner as to
result in theparalysis of the will, on which totalitarianism
preys:I can never sufficientlyemphasize the fact that
totalitarianism is the result of a certain fixation ofrevolt in
what is precisely its betrayal, namely, the suspension of
retrospectivereturn, which amounts to a suspension of thought
(6).
Kristeva begins both of her volumes by effectuating yet another
returnto Freud, perhaps in competition with Lacan but certainly not
laLacanienne. Indeed, her championing of Freuds models of language
inchapter three of her first volumeand her contention that the
unconsciouscannot be mapped onto Saussures linguistics of
signifier-signifiedtakes aimat Lacan, who famously claimed that the
unconscious is structured like a lan-guage. Of course, we are here
treading on familiar Kristevian grounds: eversince her early years
of apprenticeship which culminated in the publicationof Revolution
in Poetic Language (1974), Kristeva has adhered with fascinatingbut
predictable consistency to a cornerstone theoretical distinction
between
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the symbolic and the semiotic, between what is purely linguistic
or meaningproper (the symbolic) and what is not strictly so or
linguistic per se (thesemiotic) in that it encompasses the pre- or
trans-linguistic organization anddischarge of bodily drives through
rhythms, tones, and alliterations anteriorto signs and syntaxes. It
is Kristevas unfaltering argument, throughout herwork, that
signifiance or significance emerges in the dialectic between
thesymbolic narrow reference and the semiotic broad horizon.
Much of what Kristeva means by poetic or psychic revolt, then
and now,hinges on the restitution of the semiotic functionality of
language, that is, onrevalorizing the sensory experience, the
antidote to technical hair-splitting(2002, 5). In other words, much
of Kr istevas sense and non-sense ofrevolt rests squarely on
whether or not we are to accept the conditions onwhich her argument
is predicated: Kristeva asserts that the semiotic is asymp-totic
and irreducible to language and intellect, only to contend in the
finalanalysis that nowhere else can we come closer to psychic
revolt than in theobstinate attempt to activate, articulate, and
narrate the semioticthe depos-itory of the unconscious, of sexual
fantasies, of oedipal aggression, of incest,of matricide, among
other somatic instincts or drives. It is only at this stagethat we
have perhaps to decide whether we can afford to follow Kristevas
ini-tially compelling argumentonly, that is, when psychic revolt
comes tomean slowly but overwhelmingly clinical analysis, at which
time we realizethat Kristevas version of revolt is costly and
therefore inaccessible to thosewho lack the economic means and the
educational knowledge necessary tobenefit from the luxury (of
revolt) it promises to deliver.
This might not be the kind of that Hardt and Negris multitude
asks for,but it is certainly not the kind of revolt that such a
multitude can afford.While bearing this in mind, let us try to
assess the extent to which Kristevareconciles between her version
of revolt as an aspect of the clinical and ana-lytical experience
of transference (developed at length in the second volume)and
revolt as Freud presents it in Totem and Taboo: a facet of
primitive cultureat the origin of religion (developed mainly in the
first volume). In IntimateRevolt, Kristeva revels in analyzing the
virtues of the analytical experience oftransference and
counter-transference whose alleged terminus is freedom. Itis not
freedom in Sartres sense of condemnation to choice and
responsibili-ty but freedom from the guilt of being as such
(Heidegger) and from thevicissitudes of consciousness whose
penchant for interiorizing the collectiverealism of sin in
individual responsibility is unquenchable (Freud). HereK ri s t eva
s interp re t ive elaboration of the concept of forgiveness as re b
i rt h ,as suspension of judgment, as re t ri eval of the s i g n i
f i c a n c e ( i . e. s e m i o t i cdimension) of the drive, and
generally as the unconscious coming to con-sciousness in transfere
n c e ( 2 0 0 2 , 19) might prove rewa rding for those
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(Hegelians and Freudians alike) interested in the traps of
consciousness inthe road to happiness.
It is, however, in The Scandal of the Timeless, chapter three of
IntimateRevolt, that Kristeva delivers a sustained and compelling
philosophical argu-ment on the concept of the timeless
(lhors-temps/Zeitlos), on its role andimportance vis--vis the
transferential experience of analysis. Kristeva arguespersuasively
that while human existence is intrinsically linked to time,
theanalytical experience reconciles us with this timelessness,
which is that of thedrive, and more particularly the death drive
(2002, 12)that which feedson what, according to Kristeva, Freud
calls the symptom of being con-scious (27).While one cannot here
but admire Kristevas diligent construc-tion of the different
figures of the timelesswhich range from the memo-ry trace and
working through to interminable analysisone nonethe-less wonders
what has become of psychic revolt in the process. Is psychicrevolt
here indissociable from the jouissance of psychic aggression at
work inthe death drive that the Homo analyticus (the analyst)
brings to the fore? Thisquestion is of grave consequences as to the
theoretical valences of Kristevasconcept of psychic revolt, all the
more so if we are to consider it in relationto two Freudian texts:
Remembering, Repeating and Working-Throughand Totem and Taboo, both
of which Kristeva quotes.
In Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, Freud insists
thatthe significance of the transferential experience of analysis
lies in its ability tobring forth a playground of psychic
transferal and struggle (between the ana-lyst and the analysand)
whose success or failure depends on the analystscapacity to dispel
the hold of repetition compulsion into the more laboriouswork of
remembering. Specifically, what might amount to psychic revolt
onthe part of the analysand and to analytical triumph on the part
of the analystis nothing less than the moment of mastering the
repetition compulsion andthe Zeitlos underpinning itof keep[ing] in
the psychical sphere all theimpulses which the patient would like
to direct into the motor sphere(Freud 1968, 153). The clinical and
analytical experience in Freud has themerit of releasing the
subject from the unconscious compulsions (of aggres-sion, of the
death drive) that he would readily act out in the
outer-world,rather than spell out and contain in the interior world
of the psyche. Kristevais not perhaps unaware of this facet of
psychic revolt (as a break out of themould of repetition
compulsion), but she tends to stress a less finite aspect ofrevolt
which she associates with the experience of transference itself.
Thebulk of Kristevas understanding of psychic revolt in Intimate
Revolt is dedi-cated to insisting that, once analysis is over, the
analysand will be opened upto innumerable opportunities of
identification, to the re-creation of thetransferential dynamic
with other others (2002, 40). Like Freud, Kristeva
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does not think that analysis is terminable; unlike Freud,
however, she revers-es the interminability of analysis into a
virtue: no longer inexorable butopen, this interminability will
continue to inspire the analysand in his subse-quent quest to bond
with others.
The question that is left hanging is this: How can we reconcile
this ami-cable version of psychic revolt with the other more
political (and violent)version that Kristeva analyzes, somewhat
elegiacally, in Totem and Taboo? Howcan we reconcile Kristevas
reprisal of Freuds construction of the birth ofHomo religiosis on
the pyre of the father of our ancestral historyand in thewake of
guilt and repentancewith the analytical version of revolt as
con-tainment of aggression (Freud) or as a license to love, as
Kristeva herself con-tends in Intimate Revolt? My guess is that
Kristeva has not been able to ban-ish the political completely from
the psychic tropography (the troping of revoltin the geography of
the psyche) in which she attempts to locate it. My guesssoon turns
into certitude when Kristeva moves to illustrate what she meansby
her version of psychic revolt in the works of the surrealist
Aragon, theexistentialist Sartre, and the structuralist
Barthes.
Getting the Political out of Revolt
Is the psychic revolt that Kristeva discerns and redeems in the
literaryand philosophical texts of Aragon, Barthes, and Sartre
separable from itspolitical import? Moreover, does writerly revolt,
for these writers, hold thesame status as political engagement?
While Kristeva is aware of the undecid-ability of the heterogeneous
group of surrealists on this issue, all the more soin the case of
Aragon whose suspicion of the political dimension of the lit-erary
experience pressed him to join the Communist Party, she attempts
toconvince us nonetheless that Aragon was unequivocally an
alchemist of theWord whose non-sense pursuit of ideological revolt
(through the spec-tacle of adherence to the Communist Party) must
not blind us to the irre-movable sense of psychic revolt that
ripples through his entire oeuvre.Kristevas tone here is
intransigent and irascible toward a culture that burieswriters and
their works in the shadow of their political or institutional
mem-bership. On the other hand, her tone seems apologetic since
much of whatshe says about Aragon amounts perhaps, as the following
confession implies,to nothing less than a projection of her own
non-sense of political revoltat the time of Tel Quel:There may have
been a crisis of love, values, mean-ing, men, women, history, but I
am not going to Abyssinia, I do not belongto the Communist Party,
and if I venture to China or into structuralism, Icome back (2000,
113).
Her insistence on the non-sense of political revolt threatens to
dilute,when it comes to Sartre, the considerable risks he took in
his political action,
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especially in Frances colonial war against Algeria. Moreover,
while whoeverreads Sartres existentialist manifesto, Existentialism
and Humanismwhoseemphasis on the moral responsibility involved in
the condemnation to free-dom cannot be overstatedwill not fail to
note its consistency with his choicenot to accept the Nobel Prize,
Kristeva reads it as an emblem of the senseand non-sense of revolt
(2000, 150). For Kristeva, Sartre wanted to set, onthe one hand, an
example for writers who might want to dissociate theircontinual
revolt from honorific institutions. On the other hand, she
claimsthat his concern to detach himself from Western conformism
had blindedhim, and he adhered completely, without the spirit of
revolt demanded else-where, to a certain leftist propaganda of the
time (152). Of course, Kristevamisses here the portion of doom and
condemnation involved in revolt, whichSartre carefully elaborates
in his writings and for which the Nobel Prizeaffair is, in my view,
a dazzling example. By and large, I think the power ofKristevas
analysis of Sartre, especially in Intimate Revolt, lies in the
centralconceit of its polemic, which is to read Sartre not only
against himself butalso against the backdrop of the present, in
which the virtual is alienating uswith the foundational ngatits (by
which Sartre means the copresence ofnothings and identity) at the
heart of being.The thrust of Kristevas argumentpoints to the
pertinence of Sart re s work on the imagination to the necessityof
building psychic dams firm enough to counter the flood of images of
thesociety of the spectacleKri s t eva s b t e - n o i r e t h
roughout her two vo l u m e s .
Kristeva presses forward in her remapping of different types of
textsthrough the lenses of the theory of psychic or intimate revolt
by turning herprobing gaze, in an admixture of mourning and
melancholia, to her deceasedteacher: Barthes. Kristeva takes good
care to steer Barthes clear of the ter-rorist charges foisted on
him by his detractors who are in point of factalarmed by the
subversiveness and negativity of his writing, a negativity
thatworks against the transparency of language and the symbolic
function ingeneral (2000, 210-11). Kristeva shows the extent to
which negativity iscentral to Barthess desubstantifying project of
writinga project thatundoes the plenary and hackneyed communicative
thrust of language in theservice of the transformative, the
unfamiliar, that is, the antilanguage(Joyce) that is sacrificial
(Bataille) that also bears witness to the social struc-ture in
upheaval (211). Barthes demystifies the latent ideological
structure ofmyth, which is otherwise veiled under the linguistic
sign; in so doing, heexercises an interpretive revolution in that
his exercise is not neutral but clearand lucid. For Kristeva,
Barthes is a demystifier of social proprieties, norms,trifles, and
sweet nothings, as well as a decoder of intimacy: his
writingsseductively move the reader from the sensorial realm of
taste and fashion intothe more overtly political realm of ideology;
his discursive wanderings do not
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halt without making a political incision (2002, 83), without
crystaliz[ing]an island of meaning in a sea of negativity (2000,
213).The reader will notfail to notice the heart of a failed poet
beating here and there in Kristevasprose, but her reading of
Barthes is lucid and rewarding.
In the fleshing out of her own concept of psychic revolt to the
writingsof Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes, Kristeva finds herself
overtly involved in thespecific historical and cultural
circumstances that inform these texts.Kristevas project would have
been better served had she attempted to rec-oncile her
pronouncement of the death of revolutionist ideologiesand ofthe
alleged necessity of pursuing a low form of revolt (une forme basse
de larvolte), a form of tiny revolutions (r-volte infinitsimale),
in order to preservethe life of the mind and of the species (2002,
5)with the ways in whichshe then proceeds to investigate a number
of texts whose historical contextis traversed by the promise of
socialist revolution, even if there is also in thema fringe of open
texture that warrants what Kristeva means by intimaterevolt.A good
deal of what passes for psychic revolt in Kristevas reading
ofAragon, Sartre, and Barthes certainly does fall under the heading
of the polit-ical, but the very idea that intimate revolt could
somehow compensate for orreplace political revolt is in the final
analysis self-defeating and impertinentto these texts themselves:
the sense of intimate revolt in Aragon, Sartre, andBarthes is
indissociable from the political and revolutionary horizon
thatinforms it; it is, moreover, within a hairs breadth of morphing
into politicalaction. To the extent that her readings of these
authors might bring them(especially Aragon who is, according to
Kristeva, hardly read today) back tothe attention of the candid
reader, she performs a laudable task; to the extentthat she reads
these authors to hammer home her vision of psychic revolt,she has
not perhaps convincingly delive red us from the political.T h i s ,
h ow-eve r, must remain a methodological pro blem that threatens to
attenuate thep remises of the thesis of psychic revolt writ large;
by no means does itu n d e rmine the many moments of insight that
fill her separate readings ofeach author.
There are, of course, other more general problems that arise in
relationto the broad strokes of Kristevas argument: first, if the
subject is no longeranything but a marketable collection of organs,
how would it be reconciledto the sensory? To the extent that such
revalorization of the sensory, theintrospective, and the
self-reflexive is possible, would it not present itselfunder the
guise of the culture show? With no fringe of free will, no
penum-bra of critical distance, and with no allowance that the
subject can somewhatexceed the power structures of which s/he is a
product, there can hardly beany possibility for revolt whatsoever,
even the kind of revolt in miniature thatKristeva elaborates in her
two treatises. By emptying the subject of any polit-
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ical action, Kristeva can be said to deny the sensory prior to
positing it as aspace where tiny coups could be mounted. Second,
what would intimaterevolt amount to if not to sharpening the
faculty of critique, of discerningthe contours of ideological
apparatuses locally and globally, and of undertak-ing political
action? Should not intimate revolt prepare us for the
politicalrather than deliver us from it?
In her recent contribution to Mourning Revolution, a special
issue ofParallax, Kristeva reiterates her position that political
revolt is over. I cannothelp but remain slightly puzzled by
Kristevas appropriation of the rhetoricof endingnamely, the ending
of the subjectin the service of a theory thatwould not obtain
without the subject. Is her elaboration of intimate revoltan
attempt to trope the subject back into existence? In Mourning
aMetaphor: The Revolution is Over, also a contribution to
MourningRevolution, Jay points out that the word revolutionwhose
astronomicalorigins invoke celestial movement and circular or
elliptical return to a for-mer placeis nothing more than a mere
metaphorical displacement. Theword was used, according to Jay, in
the face of events whose violence andunpredictability seemed
impossible to comprehend, but it was not until thelate eighteenth
century that it was used in the peculiar and, ever since,
morewidespread sense of a utopian tomorrow. By 1989, however, the
latter morepromissory meaning of revolutionwas crashed and we are,
according to Jay,no longer beholden to maximalist fantasies of
redemption and epochaltransformation, fantasies whose defeat leaves
us feeling impotent and lost(Kurt, Stahl, and Willis 2003, 19-20).
Jay argues, in other words, that there wasa time when we might have
needed metaphors such as revolution to fashionthe world according
to our own dreams, but that time is over, and we nowneed to
understand that metaphors are nothing more than metaphors.Thegood
news is that it may therefore be better to wander forever in the
desertof metaphorical displacement than set up our camp in an oasis
that provesonly to be a mirage (20).
Perhaps no one has so far understood this lesson more than
Kristevasince her concept of intimate revolt can be seen as nothing
more than ametaphorical displacement, all the more so since she
purports to effect areturn to the original meaning of revolt which
is nothing other thanreturn itself.The original meaning itself is a
metaphor: Kristevas return isthus nothing but a
remetaphorization.
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