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College Literature, 31.4, Fall 2004, pp. 188-202 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/lit.2004.0054
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Revolutionaries without
a Revolution:
The Case of Julia Kristeva
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Kristeva, Julia. 2000. The Sense and NonSense of Revolt:The Powers and Limits of
Psychoanalysis.Trans. Jeanine Herman. New
York: Columbia University Press. $60.00 hc.
$19.50 sc. 288 pp.
Kristeva, Julia. 2002. Intimate Revolt:The
Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis.Trans.
Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia
University Press. $34.00 hc. $19.50 sc. 392
pp.
I tell you this in truth: this is not only the
end of this here but also and first of that
there, the end of history, the end of the
class struggle, the end of philosophy, the
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death of God, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and morals . . .the
end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of
Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse now, I tell you . . . the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and phallogocentrism, and I dont know what else? (Jacques Derrida,Of an Apocalyptic
Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy)
The Rhetoric of Ending and the Mourning to Come
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Kristeva does not ask this question, but I ask it here in order to better
capture the fichue position (to borrow a Joycean expression from Ulysses) in
which she places the subject, the very focus of her reflections on the relevance of the concept of revolt in todays world. Who would revolt were
there 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 exceeds
ones capacity to revolt against, that powerful disembodied knitting machine
called global capital whose handiwork is manifest everywhere but whose origins are ghostly and impossible to pin down, let alone subvertthis is perhaps the case with Hardt and Negris multitude; (2) after the one who would
be willing to revolt but would find literally nothing to revolt against, no visible constellation of power to overturnthis is perhaps the case with
Fukuyamas liberal democrats who seem to have overcome the last frontier
after the collapse of communism; (3) and, strangely enough, after the (no)one
who would not be able to revolt and for whom there would be absolutely
nothing to revolt against anyway. Out of the three possible interpretations of
the question suggested above, only the last one is in piece with Kristevas
argument throughout her two volumes. In the eyes of Kristeva, not only is
there 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 which
Kristeva suspends the political subject prior to rethinking its prospects for
another kind of revolt.
Kristeva expounds that revolt in its political sense is today mired not only
because the political landscape is becoming more and more homogenized as
dissimilarities between parties are waning, but especially because there is no
tangible structure of power against which to revolt, only a power vacuum,
and, gravely enough, no agent available to carry out the incumbent task of
revolt.The harbinger of social change has become nothing more than a patrimonial person (personne patrimoniale), a mere conglomerate of organs
(conglomrat dorganes) hardly capable of recognizing the power-technologies
infused in him, let alone able to neutralize their virulent and hamstringing
effects (2002, 4). The modern subject is, according to Kristeva, a person
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belonging to the patrimony, financially, genetically, and physiologically, a person 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 we
are to consider it against the backdrop of Fukuyamas most recent book
whose title alone, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology
Revolution, chills the spine. For Fukuyama, George Orwells prophetic vision
of a world dominated by information technology and by hovering Big
Brother(s) has come true, and so has come as well Aldous Huxleys prescience
of 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 of
Fukuyamas argument, I think that it draws a picture of the current world
that is in many respects similar to the one Kristeva draws. In very general
terms, there are, according to Kristeva and Fukuyama, two dystopias materializing before our eyes: (1) a virtual rather than real world in which the
media, undergirded by a complex network of information technology, fosters and promotes what Kristeva calls, after Guy Debord, the society of the
spectacle and the culture of entertainment rather than the culture of revolt,
and (2) a biotechnological world, in which the wedge is being slowly but
steadily opened for new technologies to take possession of the human body,
thus managing it at will. According to Fukuyama, this is humanitys most
frightening nightmare and literally the post human stage of mans existence, 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 or
mastering it.
Unlike Fukuyama, a policy maker who goes on in his Our Posthuman
Future to suggest pragmatic solutions to containing this otherwise runaway
world in which the biotechnological revolution resulted, Kristeva is no policy maker but a thinker whose work traverses a wide array of philosophical,
literary, linguistic, and psychoanalytical interests and who is primarily concerned with the ways in which the velocity of the biotechnological revolution might be slowed, as well as the ways in which the hold of the culture
show might be dispelled.As such, she sets herself the task of pointing out the
way for a culture of revolt, a culture that would move us beyond the two
impasses where we are caught today: the failure of rebellious ideologies, on
the 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 happiness, as Freud demonstrated,exists only at the price of revolt (7).
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Intimacy Now; or, the Psychic Tropography of Revolt
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the symbolic and the semiotic, between what is purely linguistic or meaning
proper (the symbolic) and what is not strictly so or linguistic per se (the
semiotic) in that it encompasses the pre- or trans-linguistic organization and
discharge of bodily drives through rhythms, tones, and alliterations anterior
to signs and syntaxes. It is Kristevas unfaltering argument, throughout her
work, that signifiance or significance emerges in the dialectic between the
symbolic 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, on
revalorizing the sensory experience, the antidote to technical hair-splitting
(2002, 5). In other words, much of Kr istevas sense and non-sense of
revolt rests squarely on whether or not we are to accept the conditions on
which her argument is predicated: Kristeva asserts that the semiotic is asymptotic and irreducible to language and intellect, only to contend in the final
analysis that nowhere else can we come closer to psychic revolt than in the
obstinate attempt to activate, articulate, and narrate the semioticthe depository of the unconscious, of sexual fantasies, of oedipal aggression, of incest,
of matricide, among other somatic instincts or drives. It is only at this stage
that we have perhaps to decide whether we can afford to follow Kristevas initially compelling argumentonly, that is, when psychic revolt comes to
mean slowly but overwhelmingly clinical analysis, at which time we realize
that Kristevas version of revolt is costly and therefore inaccessible to those
who lack the economic means and the educational knowledge necessary to
benefit 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 Kristeva
reconciles between her version of revolt as an aspect of the clinical and analytical experience of transference (developed at length in the second volume)
and revolt as Freud presents it in Totem and Taboo: a facet of primitive culture
at the origin of religion (developed mainly in the first volume). In Intimate
Revolt, Kristeva revels in analyzing the virtues of the analytical experience of
transference and counter-transference whose alleged terminus is freedom. It
is not freedom in Sartres sense of condemnation to choice and responsibility but freedom from the guilt of being as such (Heidegger) and from the
vicissitudes of consciousness whose penchant for interiorizing the collective
realism of sin in individual responsibility is unquenchable (Freud). Here
Kri s t evas interp re t ive elaboration of the concept of forgiveness as re b i rth,
as suspension of judgment, as retrieval of the significance (i.e. semiotic
dimension) of the drive, and generally as the unconscious coming to consciousness in transfere n c e (2002, 19) might prove rewarding for those
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does not think that analysis is terminable; unlike Freud, however, she reverses the interminability of analysis into a virtue: no longer inexorable but
open, this interminability will continue to inspire the analysand in his subsequent quest to bond with others.
The question that is left hanging is this: How can we reconcile this amicable version of psychic revolt with the other more political (and violent)
version that Kristeva analyzes, somewhat elegiacally, in Totem and Taboo? How
can we reconcile Kristevas reprisal of Freuds construction of the birth of
Homo religiosis on the pyre of the father of our ancestral historyand in the
wake of guilt and repentancewith the analytical version of revolt as containment of aggression (Freud) or as a license to love, as Kristeva herself contends in Intimate Revolt? My guess is that Kristeva has not been able to banish the political completely from the psychic tropography (the troping of revolt
in the geography of the psyche) in which she attempts to locate it. My guess
soon turns into certitude when Kristeva moves to illustrate what she means
by her version of psychic revolt in the works of the surrealist Aragon, the
existentialist Sartre, and the structuralist Barthes.
Getting the Political out of Revolt
Is the psychic revolt that Kristeva discerns and redeems in the literary
and philosophical texts of Aragon, Barthes, and Sartre separable from its
political import? Moreover, does writerly revolt, for these writers, hold the
same status as political engagement? While Kristeva is aware of the undecidability of the heterogeneous group of surrealists on this issue, all the more so
in the case of Aragon whose suspicion of the political dimension of the literary experience pressed him to join the Communist Party, she attempts to
convince us nonetheless that Aragon was unequivocally an alchemist of the
Word whose non-sense pursuit of ideological revolt (through the spectacle of adherence to the Communist Party) must not blind us to the irremovable sense of psychic revolt that ripples through his entire oeuvre.
Kristevas tone here is intransigent and irascible toward a culture that buries
writers and their works in the shadow of their political or institutional membership. On the other hand, her tone seems apologetic since much of what
she says about Aragon amounts perhaps, as the following confession implies,
to nothing less than a projection of her own non-sense of political revolt
at the time of Tel Quel:There may have been a crisis of love, values, meaning, men, women, history, but I am not going to Abyssinia, I do not belong
to the Communist Party, and if I venture to China or into structuralism, I
come 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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ical action, Kristeva can be said to deny the sensory prior to positing it as a
space where tiny coups could be mounted. Second, what would intimate
revolt amount to if not to sharpening the faculty of critique, of discerning
the contours of ideological apparatuses locally and globally, and of undertaking political action? Should not intimate revolt prepare us for the political
rather than deliver us from it?
In her recent contribution to Mourning Revolution, a special issue of
Parallax, Kristeva reiterates her position that political revolt is over. I cannot
help but remain slightly puzzled by Kristevas appropriation of the rhetoric
of endingnamely, the ending of the subjectin the service of a theory that
would not obtain without the subject. Is her elaboration of intimate revolt
an attempt to trope the subject back into existence? In Mourning a
Metaphor: The Revolution is Over, also a contribution to Mourning
Revolution, Jay points out that the word revolutionwhose astronomical
origins invoke celestial movement and circular or elliptical return to a former placeis nothing more than a mere metaphorical displacement. The
word was used, according to Jay, in the face of events whose violence and
unpredictability seemed impossible to comprehend, but it was not until the
late eighteenth century that it was used in the peculiar and, ever since, more
widespread sense of a utopian tomorrow. By 1989, however, the latter more
promissory meaning of revolution was crashed and we are, according to Jay,
no longer beholden to maximalist fantasies of redemption and epochal
transformation, fantasies whose defeat leaves us feeling impotent and lost
(Kurt, Stahl, and Willis 2003, 19-20). Jay argues, in other words, that there was
a time when we might have needed metaphors such as revolution to fashion
the world according to our own dreams, but that time is over, and we now
need to understand that metaphors are nothing more than metaphors. The
good news is that it may therefore be better to wander forever in the desert
of metaphorical displacement than set up our camp in an oasis that proves
only to be a mirage (20).
Perhaps no one has so far understood this lesson more than Kristeva
since her concept of intimate revolt can be seen as nothing more than a
metaphorical displacement, all the more so since she purports to effect a
return to the original meaning of revolt which is nothing other than
return itself.The original meaning itself is a metaphor: Kristevas return is
thus nothing but a remetaphorization.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. The Illusion of the End.Trans. Chris Turner. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
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