Symposium: A “Dictatorship of Relativism”?

RETHINKING “NORMATIVE
CONSCIENCE”
The Task of the Intellectual Today

Julia Kristeva

It is common knowledge that the “intellectual” is an Enlightenment figure whose

prototypes date back to the French encylopedists Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot.
In the aftermath of the crisis of religion to which these names are connected, the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave rise to new forms of thought that were
to become the “human and social sciences” or, more simply, the “humanities.”
These disciplines progressively filtered into the university, notably the Ameri-
can university, though there remain “media personality” intellectuals outside the
academy committed to the same radical overhaul of thought. In taking over from
theology and philosophy, the humanities replaced the “divine” and the “human”
with new objects of investigation: social bonds, the structures of kinship, rites
and myths, the psychic life, the genesis of languages, and written works. We have
by these means acquired an unprecedented understanding — one that disturbs
complacency and hence meets with resistance and censorship — of the richness
and risks of the human mind. Still, as promising as these territories are, thus
constituted they fragment human experience; heirs to metaphysics, they keep
us from identifying new objects of investigation. Crossing boundaries between

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DOI 10.1215/0961754X-2007-005
© 2007 by Duke University Press

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 compartmentalized fields does not in itself suffice to construct the intellectual
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life that we need now. What matters is that from the outset the thinking subject
should connect his thought to his being in the world through an affective “trans-
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ference” that is also political and ethical. In my own case, the clinical practice
of psychoanalysis, the writing of novels, and work in the social domain are not
“commitments” additional to my theoretical and scholarly work. Rather, these
activities are an extension of a mode of thinking at which I aim and which I con-
ceive as an energeia in the Aristotelian sense: thought as act, the actualization of
intelligence.
In my experience — to take the most relevant instance — the interpreta-
tion of texts and behavior, notably in the light of psychoanalysis, opens up a
new approach to the world of religion. The discovery of the unconscious by
Freud showed us that far from being “illusions” — while nevertheless being illu-
sions — religions, beliefs, and other forms of spirituality shelter, encourage, or
exploit specifiable psychic movements that allow the human being to become a
speaking subject and a source of culture or, conversely, a source of destruction.
The reverence for law, the celebration of the paternal function, and the role of
maternal passion as the child’s sensorial and prelinguistic support are examples of
this process at work. My analytic practice has convinced me that when a patient
comes for psychoanalysis, he is asking for a kind of forgiveness, not to ease his
malaise but to find psychic or even physical rebirth. The new beginning made
possible through transference and interpretation I call for-giveness: to give (and to
give not just to oneself) a new self, a new time, unforeseen ties. In this context, we
recognize the complexity of the internal experience that religious faith cultivates,
but we also bring to light the hate that takes the guise of lovers’ discourse, as well
as the death drive channeled to merciless wars and political vengeance.
A new conception of the human is in the process of being constituted out
of contributions from fields in the humanities where transcendence is considered
immanent. The new conception is of the human as synonymous with the desire
for meaning, and of that desire as inseparable from pleasure, which is rooted in
sexuality and which decrees both the sublimity of culture and the brutality of
“acting out.” The intellectual today is confronted with a difficult, historic task
commensurate with our now-difficult juncture in the history of civilization. The
task is neither more nor less than to coax this new type of knowledge to emerge
progressively. In order to do so, we use the technical terms of our specific fields
but without reducing them to their strict meaning, which is always too narrow. By
positioning ourselves at the interface of the diverse disciplines of the humanities,
we give ourselves the opportunity to clarify, even if only a little, the enigmas we
have still to comprehend: psychosis, murderous hate, the war of male and female,
maternal madness, nihilism, passion, sublimation, and belief.
An Intellectual Countercurrent: Böckenförde, Habermas, Ratzinger

221
Of what specific relevance are my remarks about the task of the intellectual at the
present time to the theme of this symposium? The homily of Cardinal Ratzing-

K r i s t e v a • A “ D i c t a t o r s h ip o f R e l a t i v i s m” ?
er’s that is our topic here forms part of an intellectual current that runs counter
to the radical overhaul of thought that I have been describing. Two of the most
prestigious spokesmen for this countercurrent are Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen
Habermas, who recently (though before Ratzinger’s election as pope) became
collaborators in each other’s projects. Having remarked the failure of rational-
ist humanism to avert or cope with twentieth-century totalitarianism — and
having predicted that it would yet fail to prevent the economic and biological
automatization threatening the human species in the new century — Ratzinger
and Habermas jointly diagnosed the problem as confusion on the part of mod-
ern democracies in the absence of a reliable “higher” authority to regulate the
frenetic expansion of liberty.1 This joint declaration by the theologian and the
philosopher implies that a return to faith is the only way possible to establish
the moral stability required for us to face the risks of freedom. In other words,
since constitutional democracies need “normative presuppositions” to found
“rational law” — and since the secular state does not provide an intrinsically “uni-
fying bond” (Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde) — it is imperative that we constitute a
“conservative conscience”: a normative conscience that would be either fueled by
faith (Habermas) or by a “correlation between reason and faith” (Ratzinger).
To counterbalance this hypothesis, let me suggest that we are already con-
fronted, notably in advanced democracies, with prepolitical and transpolitical
experiences that render obsolete any appeal for a normative conscience or for
a return to the reason/revelation duo. For these pre- and transpolitical experi-
ences head us toward a reconstruction (without recourse to the irrational) of
the humanism derived from Aufklärung. The Freudian discovery of the uncon-
scious, and the literary experience that is inseparable from theoretical thought,
are positioned at this key point in modern development. Their respective con-
tributions — contributions to bringing greater complexity and sophistication to
Enlightenment humanism — are not yet understood. In their pre- and transpo-
litical effects, Freud’s discovery and those of literary theory, are likely to found
the “unifying bond” that secular, political rationality has until now lacked. In any
case, it is on the basis of this hypothesis that, I believe, we should conceive and
develop our alternative to the arguments offered us by the trio of Böckenförde,
Habermas, and Ratzinger.
Our fundamental problems may be religious, as this trio claims, but the
clash of religions about which so many are now so concerned is merely a surface

1.  Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, “Les fonde-

ments pré-politiques de l’Etat démocratique,” Esprit 306
(July 2004): 5 – 28.
 phenomenon. The real problem that we face at the beginning of this new mil-
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lennium is not one of religious wars, but rather of a rift that divides those who
want to know that God is unconscious from those who prefer not to know. Our
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globalized media have bought into the preference for being pleasured by God’s
existence, fueling the show that affirms his existence with the whole of their
imaginary and financial economies. The media have joined in not wanting to
know, in order to better enjoy the virtual — to take pleasure in hearing promises,
and being satisfied with promises, of goods guaranteed by the promise of a supe-
rior Good. This situation, due to the globalization of denial, which is integral
to it, appears without precedent in human history. Saturated with enterprises,
seductions, and disappointments, our televisual civilization is propitious for belief
and encourages the revival of religions.
Nietzsche and Heidegger warned us: modern man experiences “the absence
of a sensible and supersensible world with the power to oblige.” The annihilation
of divine authority, and with it all authority, be it state or political, does not neces-
sarily lead to nihilism. Nor does it lead to the systemic flip side of nihilism, which
is fundamentalism with its attack on infidels. Hannah Arendt long ago remarked
that, by making the divine a value, even a “supreme value,” transcendentalists
arrive, themselves, at a nihilistic utilitarianism. I would say that the alternative
to the nonchoice between mounting religiosity and its counterpart, narrow nihil-
ism, can be found in the vast continent of the human sciences, which we should
try not to occupy but to vivify.
This task is one for specialists in every humanities discipline. In studying
literature, for instance, the specialist will experience how language transverses
sexual, gender, national, ethnic, religious, and ideological identities. Students of
literature, whether open or hostile to psychoanalysis, elaborate a risky, singular,
yet shareable understanding of the desire for meaning anchored in the sexual
body. The study of literature, of writing, upsets the metaphysical duo reason versus
faith. Those involved in the literary experience, and in a different but complicit
manner, those who are involved in the psychoanalytical experience, or who are
attentive to its issues, know that the oppositions reason/faith and norm/liberty are
no longer sustainable if the speaking being that I am no longer thinks of myself as
dependent on the supratangible world, and even less on the tangible world, “with
the power to oblige.” We also know that this I who speaks reveals himself as he
is constructed in a vulnerable bond with a strange object or an ek-static, ab-ject
other: this is the “sexual thing” (others will say: the object of the sexual drive of
which the “carrier wave” is the death drive). This vulnerable bond with the sexual
thing and within it — by which the social or sacred bond is shored up — is none
other than the heterogeneous bond, the very fold, between biology and mean-
ing on which our languages and discourses depend and through which they are
modified so that, in turn, they modify the sexual bond itself.
 In this understanding of the human adventure, literature and art do not

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constitute aesthetic decor (nor can philosophy and psychoanalysis claim to bring
salvation). But each of these experiences, in its diversity, offers itself as a labo-

K r i s t e v a • A “ D i c t a t o r s h ip o f R e l a t i v i s m” ?
ratory for new forms of humanism — or rather, for the new conception of the
human that, as I have said, we have pursued and must continue to pursue. Under-
standing and accompanying the speaking subject in his bond to the sexual thing
gives us an opportunity to face up to the new barbarisms of automatization, with-
out seeking recourse in the safeguards upheld by infantilizing conservatism, and
free of the short-term idealism with which a mortifying rationalism deludes itself.
And yet, if the project I am depicting, undertaken within the human sciences,
suggests an overhaul or even reconstruction of humanism, putting the project
to work and dealing with its consequences can only be, in Sartre’s words, “cruel
and long drawn out.”
I was part of the generation that objected to soft humanism with its vague
idea of “man,” emptied of his substance, and its utopian fraternity harkening back
to the Enlightenment and the postrevolutionary social contract. Today it seems
to me not only important but also possible to approach these ideals in a new,
more positive manner. For I am persuaded that modernity, which we too often
disparage, is a decisive phase in the history of thought. Modern thought, which is
neither hostile nor indulgent toward religion, may be our one good option as we
face, on the one hand, mounting obscurantism and, on the other, the technologi-
cal management of the human species.
To plead for the reconstructive role that the humanities can play in the
highly threatened social and political realm is, to say the least, difficult. I insist,
however, on our need to plead. Intellectuals must fight against the temptation to
give into depression. The case that we in the humanities have been making that
normative conscience, normative presuppositions, utilitarian nihilism, and the
supposed need of democracies for authority are based on obsolete and discredited
assumptions must be heard in public spheres. And so we must participate coura-
geously and appropriately in the “democracy of opinion” that our society of the
spectacle has become. This symposium might be viewed as an example.

Ideality: An Adolescent Malady

As my contribution, I would like to outline here the sort of response that an
intellectual in the human and social sciences can make to the kind of dilemmas
that tend to call up statements of reproach and retrenchment from Ratzinger,
Habermas, and other apostles of normative conscience. Thinking especially of
the rioting and arson in French suburbs during 2005, I want to discuss something
that concerns me as a parent, writer, psychoanalyst, and intellectual: namely, the
“malady of ideality” specific to adolescents.
 The “polymorphous perverse” child wants to know where babies come
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from and constructs himself as a “theoretician”; the adolescent, on the other

hand, is starving for ideal models that will allow him to tear himself from his par-
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ents and meet the ideal partner, get the ideal job, and “turn himself into” an ideal
being. Seen from this angle, the adolescent is a believer. Paradise is an adolescent
invention with its Adams and Eves, Dantes and Beatrices. We are all adolescent
believers when we dream about the ideal couple or the ideal life. The novel as a
genre was built on adolescent figures: enthusiastic idealists smitten with the abso-
lute but devastated by the first disappointment, depressed or perverse, sarcastic
“by nature” — eternal believers and therefore perpetually rebellious, potentially
nihilists. You know them: they have been chiming their credo from the courtly
novel to Dostoevsky and Gombrowicz. This “malady of ideality” confronts us
with a prereligious and prepolitical form of belief: it is a matter of needing an
ideal that contributes to the construction of the psychic life but that, because it is
an absolute exigency, can easily turn itself into its opposite: disappointment, bore-
dom, depression, or even destructive rage, vandalism, all the imaginable variants
of nihilism that are all just appeals to the ideal.
Civilizations commonly referred to as primitive have long used initiation
rites, including initiatory sexual practices, to assert symbolic authority (whether
religious for the invisible world, or political for the visible) while justifying what
today would qualify as perverse behaviors. Medieval Christianity, among other
religions, used mortification rituals and excessive fasting to channel the anorectic
and sadomasochistic behaviors of adolescents and, in doing so, either downplayed
or glorified them. Modern society, which is entirely incapable of understanding
the structuring need of ideality, combines its destruction of the family fabric and
weakening of authority with a failure to deal innovatively with adolescence. This
incapacity and failure are blatant in the French crisis involving adolescents of
North and West African descent — adolescents who are victims not only of bro-
ken families and the devaluing of authority, but also of social misery in its various
kinds, including discrimination. How could we in France have imagined that
they would “enter the established order” without first satisfying the structuring
need of ideality? How can we imagine restoring order by repressing these tattered
psyches? Certainly those who led in the expressions of social unrest, as well as the
younger participants, need to be sanctioned. However, for the authority of law to
be acknowledged, the legal code must address psychic lives capable of integrating
it. These immigrant adolescents need urgent help in reconstructing their psychic
lives, beginning with their recognizing that beneath their own vandalism is a
long-neglected need to believe.
This malaise of immigrant adolescents is widespread, but especially wor-
risome in France because there it arises from a quite radical depth. Although we
should not underestimate the manipulation of religion by the pyromaniacs, or

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the communal reflex underlying the need for recognition expressed by destruc-
tion, the unrest in French suburbs did not bespeak a religious conflict. Nor did

K r i s t e v a • A “ D i c t a t o r s h ip o f R e l a t i v i s m” ?
these reckless acts constitute a backlash against the law forbidding “the wearing
of religious signs” in public spaces. France’s religious authorities disapproved of
the violence; immigrant parents in no way condoned their children’s delinquent
behavior. Here was not a case of violence between ethnicities and religions (such
as we do see elsewhere). All parties concerned strongly denounced the failure of
integration, to which the immigrants aspired. The objects burned were envied
symbols: cars, supermarkets, warehouses full of merchandise — so many signs of
“success” and “wealth,” so many things valued by families and friends. As for the
schools, day care centers, and police stations set on fire — these were and remain
signs of the social and political authority of which these adolescents would like to
be a part. Is it Secular France that one wants to destroy when booing its (previ-
ously adulated) minister of the Interior? Is it Christianity that is attacked when
one burns a church? The blogs said “Fuck France” in a frenzy of sexual desire
that illumined no program or discourse or concrete complaint. On the political
side, the need for an ideal, for recognition and respect, has crystallized in a single
struggle, an enormous one judging by the suffering it has exposed and by the
extent of the changes it necessitates: the struggle against discrimination.
Can it be that we have not yet arrived at the supposedly looming “clash of
religions”? Or that our adolescent pyromaniacs are as yet incapable of donning
the cloak of religion to satisfy their need for ideality? Those who promote these
notions go so far as to indict French secularism for abolishing religious norms
that serve as safeguards. Clearly, I do not share this opinion. It is a view based on
belief in normative conscience, a belief that, as I have said, we must undertake dif-
ficult intellectual labors to get beyond. The crimes of our “underprivileged teens”
disclose a more radical phase of nihilism, a phase whose arrival is made known
only after or beneath the “clash of religions.” This kind of violence is more seri-
ous than religious violence because it seizes the moving forces of civilization at
an even deeper level, in the prereligious need to believe, constitutive of psychic life
with and for the other. It is to this space that the parent, teacher, and intellectual
are being called. While insisting on pragmatism and generosity from the political
spheres, we ourselves must come up with ideals adapted to modern times and the
multiculturality of souls. It is up to us to do so. For adolescent nihilism makes it
abruptly apparent that, from now on, any religious treatment of such revolt will
find itself discredited, ineffective, and unfit to ensure the paradisiacal aspira-
tion of these paradoxical believers, these nihilistic believers — yes, necessarily
nihilistic now. We are confronting a crisis whose source is prereligious (though
it is a crisis of belief, of ideals) and prepolitical (though it affects the foundation
 of human bonds) — a crisis that, contra Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas,
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who have made clear they understand the crisis, no religion or established moral
order or ideal of normative conscience will ever resolve. Resolution will demand
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understanding of and for the human soul, along with a generosity that free intel-
lectuals can acquire but that standards of normative conscience are intended to
extinguish.