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Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics,and Politics in the Work ofJulia Kristeva

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Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, andPolitics in the Work of Kristeva

yanulada


Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, andPolitics in the Work of Kristeva

Edited by

Kelly Oliver and S. K. Keltner

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany

© 2009 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoeverwithout written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval systemor transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic,magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NYwww.sunypress.edu

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and politics in the work of Julia Kristeva / edited by Kelly Oliver and S. K. Keltner.

p. cm. — (Suny series, insinuations)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-4384-2649-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Kristeva, Julia, 1941—

Criticism and interpretation. I. Oliver, Kelly, 1975- II. Keltner, S. K.PN75.K75P79 2009194—dc22

2008036293

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

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Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Politics from ‘a bit of a distance’ 1S. K. Keltner

PART I. TWO STATEMENTS BY KRISTEVA

1. A Meditation, a Political Act, an Art of Living 19Julia Kristeva, translated by S. K. Keltner

2. Decollations 29Julia Kristeva, translated by Caroline Arruda

PART II. THE VIOLENCE OF THE SPECTACLE

3. Meaning against Death 49Kelly Oliver

4. Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular: Encountering the (Mulholland) Drive 65

Frances L. Restuccia

5. Julia Kristeva and the Trajectory of the Image 79John Lechte

6. The Darkroom of the Soul 97Robyn Ferrell

7. Julia Kristeva’s Chiasmatic Journeys: From Byzantium to the Phantom of Europe and the End of the World 107

Maria Margaroni

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PART III. INTIMACY AND THE LOSS OF POLITICS

8. Love’s Lost Labors: Subjectivity, Art, and Politics 127Sara Beardsworth

9. Symptomatic Reading: Kristeva on Duras 143Lisa Walsh

10. What Is Intimacy? 163S. K. Keltner

11. Fear of Intimacy? Psychoanalysis and the Resistance to Commodification 179

Cecilia Sjöholm

12. Humanism, the Rights of Man, and the Nation-State 195Emily Zakin

13. Kristeva’s Uncanny Revolution: Imagining the Meaning of Politics 213

Jeff Edmonds

14. Religion and the “Rights of Man” in Julia Kristeva’s Work 229Idit Alphandary

Contributors 241

Index 245

vi

Acknowledgments

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“A Meditation, a Political Act, an Art of Living” is a translation of the text ofJulia Kristeva’s speech to the University of Paris VII Denis Diderot in May2005. The symposium was organized to celebrate her reception of the presti-gious Holberg Prize in the fall of 2004. A revised version has been published asthe first chapter of her most recent collection of essays, La haine et le pardon(Paris: Fayard, 2005). “Decollations” is a translation of a chapter from Kristeva’sVisions capitales (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1998), the catalog of amuseum exhibit that Kristeva organized in the spring and summer of 1998 aspart of the Carte Blanche program initiated by the Department of Prints andDrawings at the Louvre. The editors wish to express their gratitude to JuliaKristeva for contributing the text of her speech and for allowing it, along withthe selection from Visions capitales, to be translated for this volume.

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Introduction

Politics from “a bit of a distance”

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S. K. Keltner

Julia Kristeva’s relationship to modern and contemporary social and political discourses is complex, ambiguous territory. Though she has claimed that the “prob-lem of the twentieth century was and remains the rehabilitation of the political”(1990, 45; 1993, 68) and that our world is a “necessarily political” one (1987, 242;1989, 235), exactly how her works are to be related to social and political thoughtis difficult to clarify. The difficulty is tied to both her chosen object domain, as thatof singularity or what she tends to call, more and more, the intimate, and her in-terdisciplinary approach, which includes the entire human and social sciences, butwhich privileges psychoanalysis and aesthetics. Aside from her broad-reach culturaland political essays that have appeared in such publications as the popular FranceCulture, Kristeva’s major, book-length works are not easily classified as social orpolitical texts, and even bracket more familiar political approaches. Revolution inPoetic Language (1974) and the revolt books of the 1990s, for example, reinforce hercommitment to psychoanalytic and aesthetic discourses. In the latter, she expresslyavoids an analysis of “political revolt” in order to concentrate her efforts on whatshe calls “intimate revolt.” The works of the 1980s, including her interrogation of“the foreigner” in Strangers to Ourselves (1988), are concerned with the fate of individual, psychic life in modern societies. Her biographical trilogy on female ge-nius neither explicitly elaborates a recognizably feminist thought nor does her choice or treatment of Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Sidonie-GabrielleColette viscerally strike a feminist sensibility as immediately sensible. Furthermore,her turn to detective fiction and her privileging of the work of Proust over the past two decades pursues venues that avoid direct confrontation with the socio-political problematics of modern societies. Kristeva’s chosen object as the singular

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or intimate and her chosen approach through psychoanalysis and aesthetics seemsto limit the relevance of her work to social and political thought. Nevertheless,both Kristeva and her readers persistently remind us to think through the prob-lematic of the relation between her object and approach, on the one hand, andmore traditional and familiar social and political discourses and themes, on theother. This volume does not suggest that there is a one-to-one correlation, such thatKristeva’s psychoanalytic and aesthetic approach to intimacy might be translatedinto social and political thought. It is questionable as to whether such a translationis not only possible, but desirable. Our concern is, rather, how might we clarifythat tension, and what is the value of doing so? All of the chapters presented here, including Kristeva’s own chapters, interrogate this essentially ambiguous gap between a psychoanalytic and aesthetic approach to intimacy and social andpolitical thought.

As the chapters in this volume show, to raise the question of the relation-ship between the intimate and the public requires attention to the sense inwhich Kristeva’s concern for the intimate is not a concern for the private indi-vidual in opposition to what is more properly “social” or “political”. Rather, Kris-teva’s concern with the intimate is a concern for a border or threshold that is atonce the border of affectivity and discourse, the social bond, and historical being.In a lecture addressed to Columbia University and subsequently published as“‘Nous Deux’ or a (Hi)story of Intertextuality” in the Romanian Review (2002),Kristeva claims that the concepts and themes addressed in her work share the“common point” of a “frontier,” “border,” or, she says, “even better, ‘threshold.’”This “threshold” indicates the object domain of Kristeva’s interrogations into theprocesses governing subjectivity and language and introduces an equivocationinto traditional, metaphysical distinctions, including mind/body, affect/word,nature/culture, subject/object, individual/society, private/public, and present/past. Moreover, “threshold” represents not only a spatial and temporal meaning,as in the space of a passageway or a transitional interval, but also a “social melt-ing spot,” “a political openness,” and a “mental plasticity.” For Kristeva, this frag-ile threshold is both permanently and historically in crisis.

Sara Beardsworth has aptly called the modern shape of this border “thetendential severance of the semiotic and the symbolic” (2004, 12). Kristeva’s ar-ticulation of the semiotic and symbolic is most rigorously presented under thoseterms in the early work, Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), and her subse-quent work may be seen as the attempt to bring further precision to this primaryproblematic. The semiotic and the symbolic are two modalities of significationthat are never experienced as separate, but are theoretically separable as twotendencies within signification. The “symbolic” roughly refers to the domain ofsymbolic representation, which includes law, grammar, logic, structure, andform. The “semiotic” roughly refers to the affective, corporeal elements of lan-guage that contribute to meaning, but do not intend or signify in the way thatsymbols do: one may think of the rhythms and tones of poetry or music, or the

Introduction 3

affective dimension of language that is part of but remains heterogeneous tothe symbol. The semiotic is thereby “outside” of the symbolic as the excessivedemand of affective, corporeal existence to accomplish expression, though thisdemand is qualified by its being conditioned by sociohistorical structures ofmeaning. Kristeva describes this threshold as “heterogeneity vis-à-vis language”(1998b, 9). The relation between the semiotic and the symbolic makes signifi-cation possible, even when one is emphasized at the expense of the other, as in“purely” formalistic enterprises of thinking like math or logic or in “purely” ex-pressive music. Kristeva’s distinction entails both a theory of language and acorrelative theory of the subject qua speaking being as “in process” or “on trial”(le sujet-en-procès). The subject is not substantive, but a movement, an event, oran affective relating that takes place at a certain linguistic, affective thresholdthat is at once also social and historical. The “subject-in-process” is the relatingof semiotic and symbolic that avoids both traditional logic, which would opposethem, and dialectical logic, which would absorb one into the other. It is, in-stead, a fragile border that conditions the speaking being. Drawing on Bataille’sconcept of inner experience, Kristeva has described this border as “always a con-tradiction between the presence of the subject and its loss, between thought andits expenditure, between linkage (logos) and its separation” (1973/1995, 248).Beardsworth’s naming of the modern shape of this border “a tendential sever-ance” locates the modern problematic of social and symbolic discourses in thehistorical loss of those resources that enable the giving of form and meaning tothe semiotic. Such a diagnosis does not implicate Kristeva’s thought in a con-servative call for the recovery of traditional forms of meaning and their socialorganizations. Rather, we confront the need to negotiate this modern crisis ofrepresentation, which puts at risk psychic life itself. As she says in “A Medita-tion, a Political Act, an Art of Living,” quoting Rimbaud, “it is necessary to beabsolutely modern!” Kristeva finds psychoanalysis and aesthetics to be privi-leged sites that reveal and work through this crisis, and thereby provide mod-els for thinking through the social and political problematic more generally.

Kristeva herself has called attention to the tension between her object andapproach, on the one hand, and social and political discourses, on the other, andhas insisted on its importance for modern societies. Just after 9/11, in abroad-reach essay entitled “Intimité voilée, intimate violée,” Kristeva claims thatthe social and political scene of modern societies has the effect of “making ap-pear as minor” both her object and the discourses she chooses to interrogate(2001/2003, 50). And yet, she insists, those concerns would be beneficial tolegal and political judgment. In “Le Désir de Loi” in La haine et le pardon (2005),Kristeva analyzes the failure of the integration of law and desire that besetsmodern civilizations from a psychoanalytic perspective. She diagnoses the “newmalady of civilization” as the loss of what she calls “the symbolic value of law”:“I imagine that this value of Law in psychoanalysis leaves jurists perplexed. Itseems to me, however, that beyond the microcosm of psychoanalysis, it is not

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without interest to the social field itself ”—that is, she continues, “if we do notwant Law to remain a ‘dead letter.’” The “dead letter” of law, she claims, is“deeply rooted in the life of the City, the experience of [the analysand], and inthe much sought after speech of ‘just authority’” (2005, 344). Psychoanalysisdraws our attention to a problematic of law and politics that remains un-accounted for in contemporary social and political discourses. Kristeva’s thought,we may conclude, is political in the sense that she diagnoses the failure of po-litical discourses in modern societies and seeks those moments in which thecrises afflicting modern subjectivity are revealed and worked through. In TheFuture of Revolt she claims that the interrogation of those moments is essentialto the future of politics (1998c, 11; 2002, 223).

The question of politics, and its failures, in Kristeva’s work requires thatwe remain attentive to the manner in which her chosen discourses (psycho-analysis and aesthetics) and her chosen object domain (singular psychic life)foster a distance that is essentially critical. In the opening of her first book on theculture—or lack thereof—of revolt, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, Kristevaclaims that the political remains the horizon of the work, but that she will “ap-proach things from a bit of a distance” (1996, 5; 2000, 1). Indeed, Kristeva’s ap-proach to the concept of revolt as a concept that is not inherently political insistson a perspective that casts the question of political revolt as seemingly periph-eral to her task. Such a position on “revolution” was established as early as her1974 Revolution in Poetic Language in which she argued that revolution nolonger takes place in the sociopolitical domain, but rather in modern poetic lan-guage. However, this distance must be clarified as strategic. For example, inStrangers to Ourselves, a book on the stakes of otherness in growing multina-tional and international societies, Kristeva defends her interrogation of “artsand letters” as constituting a necessary distance from the commonplace, for thesake of the question of politics, in this case that of the Western nation-state’s ne-gotiation of otherness.

People will object . . . there is no point in pouring over the archives ofthought and art in order to find the answers to a problem that is, whenall is said and done, very practical, one might say even commonplace.And yet, do we have any other recourse against the commonplace andits brutality except to take our distance by plunging into it—but in ourminds—confronting it—but indirectly? Facing the problem of the for-eigner, the discourses, difficulties, or even the deadlocks of our pred-ecessors do not only make up a history; they constitute a culturaldistance that is to be preserved and developed, a distance on the basisof which one might temper and modify the simplistic attitudes of re-jection or indifference, as well as the arbitrary or utilitarian decisionsthat today regulate relationships between strangers. (1988, 151–152;1991, 104; translation altered; emphasis mine)

Introduction 5

Kristeva’s approach establishes a reflective and creative distance for the sake ofensuring that we not lose sight of the need to rehabilitate psychic space in mod-ern societies, and she insists that the interrogation and promotion of singularpsychic life functions as a guarantee against cultural and political homogeniza-tion. Kristeva’s concept of revolt culture, for instance, tracks a form of revoltthat is not, properly speaking, political revolt, but which she thinks is essentialto the formation of a critical disposition, which also marks a distance from andagainst the political and cultural homogenization of the society of the specta-cle. For Kristeva, to foster reflective and creative distance from the spectacleopens the possibility of the emergence of new cultural and political horizons.The present collection seeks to provide a sustained interrogation of this com-plicated problematic from a variety of perspectives and across the various con-texts and moments that constitute Kristeva’s present oeuvre.

Two Statements by KristevaPart 1 of this collection includes two never before translated pieces by Kristeva.The first, “A Meditation, a Political Act, an Art of Living” (2005) is the text ofa speech delivered to the University of Paris VII Denis Diderot in May 2005.The symposium celebrated her reception of the prestigious Holberg Prize inthe fall of 2004, which was established by the Norwegian government as theequivalent of the Nobel Prize in the human and social sciences. This essay con-tains Kristeva’s most recent, public reflections on the contemporary social andpolitical import of psychoanalysis and the modern artwork. Kristeva addressesfirst the recognition of psychoanalysis, which distinguishes it in the human and social sciences, and, second, the significance of her own personal his-tory and identity—a “European citizen” of “French nationality, Bulgarian ori-gin, and American adoption”—in becoming the first laureate of the prize. Arevised version of the piece has recently appeared as the opening chapter of hermost recent collection of essays, La haine et le pardon.

The context of Kristeva’s reflections here is an overarching concern for thecontemporary collapse of what she calls “places of thinking.” Kristeva argues thatpsychoanalysis and literature are “two experiences of language” that constitutejourneys of return to oneself; that is, they initiate a self-interrogation constitutiveof “interiority” and relations to others. The experiences of psychoanalysis and lit-erature are politically salient because they point toward new articulations of free-dom, on the one hand, and new forms of sociopolitical binding for late modernsocieties, on the other. Kristeva characterizes the criticism of psychoanalysis andart as the inability to ground the “unifying link” that motivates fundamental so-ciopolitical binding. In defense of psychoanalysis and the artwork, she says: “Theirrespective contributions to the complication of the humanism of Knowledge isnot understood, in its pre- and transpolitical significance, as capable of foundingthis ‘unifying link,’ which lacks a political, secular rationality. Such is nevertheless

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the hypothesis . . . that I would like to defend.” Kristeva contextualizes these experiences of language within the failures of two authorities—modern secularhumanism and religion—and marks their recasting of the social bond with theterm “partager.”Partager has its closest English equivalent in “to share,” but in itsdouble sense: in the sense of having a connection, but also in the sense of divid-ing, as in “sharing out.” The essay argues that literature and psychoanalysis con-stitute “an ethical and philosophical horizon of a revision of the subject itself ” andthe concept of freedom that accompanies it. Kristeva outlines two distinct mod-els of freedom: one that is traditionally suited to American capitalism and an-other that is “reinforced and clarified by the radical experiences de partage del’impartageable” and is conditioned by the experiences of writing and psycho-analysis. In this context, Kristeva addresses some of the most pressing social andpolitical issues of our time: the relationship between religion and politics, capi-talism, fundamentalism, media, technology, the loss of language to articulate mod-ern experience, university politics, obligation, law, right, sex and sexuality, natureand culture, and biology and the social. Finally, Kristeva’s own personal history andidentity is significant for its crossing of national, cultural, and political bordersand marks the distinction of a cosmopolitan citizen and an intellectual who affords insight into the sociopolitical problematic that she diagnoses.

The second piece by Kristeva, “Decollations,” is the translation of a chap-ter from Visions capitales (1998a)—the catalog of a museum exhibit that Kris-teva organized in the spring and summer of 1998 as part of the Carte Blancheprogram initiated by the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Louvre. Inthe preface to the catalog Kristeva asks whether we are “inevitably slaves of theimage” and suggests that there is another possibility of our relation to the image:that of confronting an experience of the sacred. For Kristeva the image is per-haps the last link we have with the sacred: “with the terror that provokes deathand sacrifice, with the serenity that follows from the pact of identification be-tween sacrificed and sacrificing, and with the joy of representation indissociablefrom sacrifice, the only possible crossing” (1998a, 11). Privileged within thisaim to uncover what Kristeva takes to be one of the last remaining experiencesof the sacred is the act of beheading or decollation. The exhibit includes anarray of historical images of beheadings and confronts the difficult task of ex-amining violence by and against women, including reactions against sexist op-pression. The exhibit, and this chapter in particular, is significant for Kristevascholarship in that it renders concrete her prior analyses of the position ofwomen in relation to death and violence, not only as the victims of violence,but also as the bearers of violence and death in the cultural imaginary (cf. Pow-ers of Horror, Black Sun, and Strangers to Ourselves). Kristeva insists that theimage, particularly the image of decollation, allows us to confront the libidinalimpact of the mother, both the loss of her and her threat to us. The artisticimage of decollation negotiates two types of anxiety: first, the anxiety over theloss of the mother and its corollary fear of the mother as all-powerful; second,

Introduction 7

the anxiety, for men, of the threat of castration and its corollary fear of the castrated mother. The image accommodates unconscious anxiety by sublimat-ing the death drive. Kristeva’s return to the act of decollation addresses the his-torical development of our relationship to violence, which culminates in animage culture that has become “complacent” in its “manner of seeing settledhorror, increasingly conformist, pretentious, theatrical, mummified.” The imagemay function to settle horror, but it also carries within it the possibility of its experience and transformation.

The Image and the Violence of the SpectacleIn posing the question of her exhibit, Visions capitales, in terms of the signifi-cance of the image as an experience that opposes enslavement to it by negoti-ating the destructive element of the drive, Kristeva offers a counterpossibility forthe image in a society dominated by, what she calls following Guy Debord, thesociety of the spectacle. The chapters in part 2 examine Kristeva’s analyses of thecrisis of representation and the subsequent collapse of psychic space by the spec-tacle’s colonization of the psyche. Further, each offers an account of the imagethat challenges the violence of image culture and draws primarily from her threebooks that carry the subtitle “The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis”—TheSense and Non-Sense of Revolt, Intimate Revolt, and, more recently, La haine et lepardon. The significance of those analyses is examined in relation to the imagein film, photography, the media, and Kristeva’s own fictional writings.

Kelly Oliver’s chapter, “Meaning against Death,” outlines the social and po-litical stakes of the violence of the spectacle. She draws on Kristeva’s insistenceon the “dead letter” of Law from La haine et le pardon and her insistence in Vi-sions capitales that the image can sublimate the death drive to examine the vio-lent fate of the crisis of representation that Kristeva’s work tracks. Oliver claimsthat what is at stake here is the question of meaning itself, particularly the mean-ing of acts of violence that saturate image culture and fuel the society of the spec-tacle. Kristeva claims in La haine et le pardon that the “failure of the integrationof Law in desire” finds tragic expression today in the sexually exploitative dramaof the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. She insists that the “the young people of FortAshby” are not exceptions, but rather “the banal subjects of the banal planetaryvillage” (2005, 346). Oliver follows through on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic accountthat the new malady of our civilization lies in the disintegration of prohibitionand enjoyment. The failure is not reducible to a weakening of prohibition, butrather what Oliver calls “the colonization of the psyche” by the economy of thespectacle and the heightened forms of technological policing, which put at riskthe possibilities of the intimate production of meaning. The result of the disin-tegration is “hatred without forgiveness.” That is, the result is the free reign of vi-olent impulses and indulgences or the purification of abjection due to the lackof our capacity to fore-give meaning to desire. According to Oliver, “It is as if the

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subject occupies an abyss between law and desire and therefore takes refuge fromviolent repression through regression.” Such is the reason why the prison guardsof Abu Ghraib defend themselves “in all innocence” as “just having fun.” Oliverclaims that they occupy a time prior to responsibility, which she explores througha theory of perverse regression to an infantile enjoyment of sadomasochisticpleasure without guilt. Kristeva herself claims in the conclusion to her “Le Désirde Loi,” “The desire of the other is diverted by a manic jouissance that is fed bythe sexual victimization of others.” There is, she continues, an “urgent necessityto remedy the psychosis that today separates the desire for Law from the desire forthe other” (2005, 348). Thus, the disintegration of law and desire in the new mal-ady of civilization has as its consequence the disintegration of social and ethicalbonds, giving rise to hatred as the form the subject/other border takes. Oliverlinks her analysis of perverse regression to vulnerability as the narcissistic woundthat constitutes the speaking being. The lack of forgiveness that besets our anx-ieties over vulnerability is essentially linked to the absence of discourses that em-phasize a passion for life. In this context Oliver examines the images of violencein art, cinema, and media and delineates the images of female suicide bombersand images of women as bearers of sexualized violence, like those of LynndieEngland, as “amorous disasters.”

Frances Restuccia is also concerned to emphasize the absence of forgive-ness as an act that bestows meaning to suffering in the context of image culture.“Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular: Encountering the (Mul-holland) Drive” chronicles Kristeva’s account of intimate revolt—constitutedby intimacy, time, forgiveness, and revolt—to contextualize the import of Kris-teva’s account of fantasy and the cinematic image. Acknowledging that Kristevais not known as a film theorist, Restuccia explicates the significance of Kristeva’swork on the cinematic image for film analysis as well as the significance of thefilmic image for Kristeva’s search for a rehabilitated revolt culture in which af-fectivity is interrogated and expressed by the imaginary, and which subsequentlychallenges the emptiness of the society of the spectacle in which psychic life isin danger of being lost. The “thought specular” represents a cinema that chal-lenges the specular robotization of subjectivity. This “other cinema” fulfills Kris-teva’s fourfold requirement of intimate revolt: intimacy, time, forgiveness, andimage. Cinema is capable of thinking the specular by distancing us from it.Restuccia examines David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive as exemplary of Kristeva’sthought specular. Restuccia says that insofar as Lynch’s film represents “fan-tasy’s paralyzing takeover of the psyche,” it also enables the spectator to freeherself or himself from fantasy to establish a critical distance and, thereby, bothself-relation and relation to the spectacle. Through a play on the psychoana-lytic notion of “drive” in Mulholland Drive, Restuccia offers a psychoanalyticaccount of the film that privileges Lynch’s film as an accomplishment of that“other cinema” Kristeva praises: a filmic image and an image of film that rein-scribes subjectivity’s intimate depths within the specular image.

Introduction 9

John Lechte also engages Kristeva’s relationship to film theory. “Julia Kristevaand the Trajectory of the Image” examines her account of the cinematic image,her treatment of Sartre’s “mental image,” and their relationship to the role of Debord’s “society of the spectacle” in Kristeva’s work. Lechte provocatively situatesher thought in relationship to Deleuze’s cinematic work on the image to explicatethe significance of Kristeva’s analysis of the image as a “dynamic force in the for-mation of subjectivity.” He claims that Kristeva’s approach to the image opens alevel of thinking that is not reducible to a traditional psychoanalytic account andputs her thought in relation to Deleuze’s inauguration of a “cinematic turn” in con-temporary analyses of the image. Lechte examines Kristeva’s relationship to Sartre’s“mental image” to demonstrate what is unique in Kristeva’s thought on the image:that it historically tracks an ontological shift in our conception of the relationshipbetween the image and reality. He claims that two conceptions of reality are atstake: “one that is virtual and as such is not real (the psychic image that gives riseto fantasy), and another that has come to be real despite being virtual (media im-ages).” Further, because Kristeva follows Sartre’s linking of the image to nothing-ness, it challenges the thingliness of the image as diagnosed by Debord and insteademphasizes an articulation of psychic space that is irreducible to the traditionalsubject/object dualism of other psychoanalytic accounts. Kristeva’s psychoanalyticsemiology instead demonstrates the synthetic process of subjectivity formed in andthrough images. The image as the dynamic framework of a synthetic process ulti-mately draws Kristeva’s work in close proximity to Deleuze’s own account of theimage in his film books.

Robyn Ferrell’s “The Darkroom of the Soul” also emphasizes the impor-tance of the image for Kristeva’s account of modern subjectivity and the mediaconstruction of reality. She takes as her starting point Kristeva’s claim in NewMaladies of the Soul that “[m]odern man is losing his soul, but he does not knowit, for the psychic apparatus is what registers representations and their mean-ingful values for the subject. Unfortunately, that darkroom needs repair” (1995,8). Ferrell explores Kristeva’s description of “the darkroom of the soul” in thecontext of press photography to gauge the significance of Kristeva’s psychoan-alytic semiotics for articulating contemporary psychic life as shaped by the dom-inance of the image. Ferrell claims that photography, though it is distinguishedfrom the cinematic image in its representation of reality, can be understood asa visible language grounded in the photograph as utterance. The relation to re-ality that is assumed in our way of seeing the press photograph reduces the pho-tograph to a repetition of reality. However, press photography harbors a paradoxin which the striving for neutral realism is undermined. Following Barthes, Fer-rell describes the photographic image as mythical; that is, the photograph car-ries out a signification that makes meaning possible. With the press photograph,faith in the reality of the image underwrites the vision of the image. Ferrell linksthe mythic photographic image to Kristeva’s account of the sacred and the pro-duction of meaning. The darkroom, Ferrell argues, is a succinct analog of the

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psychoanalytic account of subjectivity insofar as the photographic process—andeven more so in the inclusion of the darkroom in digital cameras—presents re-ality and the production of that reality. Though the image is deceptive in thatit is underwritten by belief in its faithfulness to reality, the image of the dark-room makes visible the production of a meaningful narrative.

Like the preceding authors, Maria Margaroni’s concern is with the socio-historical status of the image in modern societies. She provocatively traces thefailures and possibilities of the image through Kristeva’s relationship to Byzan-tium in both her literary and her theoretical texts. “Julia Kristeva’s ChiasmaticJourneys: From Byzantium to the Phantom of Europe and the End of theWorld” chronicles the allegorical mode of Kristeva’s form of detective narration,in general, and the iconomy of the image in Kristeva’s latest detective novel, Mur-der in Byzantium, in particular. Margaroni follows what she calls “Kristeva’s pre-carious leap into Byzantium” as an historical and conceptual space for addressingpolitical concerns over the nation and its future, image culture, the fate of psy-chic life, and the possibilities of conceptualizing freedom. Kristeva finds in theiconomy of Byzantium, Margaroni argues, a culture of images, but one that restores to the image a critical economy of “seeing” against the ever-growing “society of the spectacle.” Utilizing an allegorical mode of writing, Kristeva’s novelbrings to the fore the opposition of two competing principles of freedom that arecomplicated by the figure of Byzantium. Byzantine iconography marks an econ-omy of the image that is irreducible to the spectacle and instead leaves its markas a trace or inscription of what remains hidden. As such, it denotes, Margaroniargues, a passage from the invisible to the visible that inscribes heterogeneity inthe symbol. Byzantium, the figure of a lost, archaic origin and other of Europe,allows Kristeva to think the history and, simultaneously, a “future anterior” ofEurope. Margaroni situates Kristeva’s “phantom Europe” within the broaderimaginary of both discourses on Byzantium and those on that of a future Europe.In so doing, she outlines the benefits and the limits of Kristeva’s, as well as others’, topos of Byzantium as “a desirable, impossible Europe.”

Intimacy and the Loss of PoliticsPart 3 approaches the difficult question of what it means to bring Kristeva’s approach to intimate, singular psychic life through psychoanalysis and aesthet-ics into dialogue with social and political philosophy. Each of the chapters in thissection delineates Kristeva’s political thought according to her relation to theloss of politics in the modern world.

Sara Beardsworth’s “Love’s Lost Labors: Subjectivity, Art, and Politics”traces the destructive element of the drive in contemporary societies back to aloss of symbolic resources that could adequately negotiate the vulnerability ofthe speaking being as the fragile border between affect and symbol. Beardsworthdistinguishes between what she elaborated in her Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis

Introduction 11

and Modernity as “the loss of loss” and what she calls here “the loss of the lost.”Beardsworth argues that Kristeva’s thought of artistic sublimation turnsHegelian negativity into a dynamic of loss that is revealed in and through theFreudian account of subjectivity and that to clarify what politics might mean forKristeva, she must thematize the sublimatory dynamic of the artwork.Beardsworth distinguishes between the psychoanalytic and aesthetic positionsthat Kristeva adopts along the lines of her distinction between the intimate andthe public. Whereas psychoanalysis interrogates what is intimate, art makes it-self public. While the two cannot be rigidly distinguished, Kristeva’s “politics”nevertheless requires that we take into account the aesthetic dimension, partic-ularly its negativity, as exemplary. Beardsworth argues that the deepest momentof Kristeva’s thought is that of loss. The “loss of loss” articulates the conditionof the modern subject in conditions of modern nihilism; that is, Beardsworthsays, in conditions where historical being is “blocked.” It marks our inability toconfront and work through loss, which is the effect of the failure of politics inthe secular aftermath of religious authority. The loss of loss signals the failureof negativity to provide form and meaning to the affectivity of semiotic/symbolic collapse. The dynamic of loss is not simply one element of subjectiveprocess, but, according to Beardsworth, “present’s love’s lost labors,” where lovemarks the positive dynamic of subjectivity missing in modern societies. ForKristeva, Beadsworth argues, Freudian psychoanalysis brings this vision intoview. Within this problematic Beardsworth analyzes the significance of the fig-ure of the maternal feminine in Western cultures as what has been lost. This shecalls “the loss of the lost,” and it is in the artwork that the maternal feminineoften functions to negotiate Western culture’s relationship to loss.

Lisa Walsh’s “Symptomatic Reading: Kristeva on Duras” also returns toKristeva’s diagnosis of modern culture as melancholic and her privileging of theartwork as capable of working through loss. Walsh focuses explicitly on Kris-teva’s readings of Duras in Black Sun and in La haine et le pardon, and she con-fronts the controversial status of Kristeva’s reading of Duras—namely, that Duras’s work cannot be considered to be literature as such. Kristeva’s claimthat Duras’s work is not literature raises questions regarding what literature isfor Kristeva and, in relation to our concerns in this volume, its relation to cur-rent social and political realities. Walsh questions Kristeva’s claim that Duras’swork cannot be considered literature as such and situates Kristeva’s reading ofDuras within Duras scholarship. She defends Duras against Kristeva’s claimwhile at the same time she seeks to delineate the function of literature for Kris-teva in modern societies. Both readings take place around the question of thevalue and work of artistic sublimation within what Walsh calls, following Duras,la chambre noir of literature’s object domain. Walsh situates her return to Durasagainst Kristeva within Kristeva’s 2003 preface to the Chinese edition of Pow-ers of Horror. In it Kristeva describes how literature can be both a form of ter-rorism and its antidote. Walsh emphasizes this distinction between what Walsh

12 S. K. Keltner

calls “authentic” literature, a form of political therapy, and literature that participates in violence and destruction. Whereas Kristeva continuously privi-leges avant-garde literature as an exemplary accomplishment within the cul-tural failure of semiotic/symbolic disintegration, Duras’s work represents anoncathartic melancholia that, Kristeva warns, is potentially dangerous to herreaders. Walsh argues, on the contrary, that Duras’s work as the exploration ofla chambre noir “might become a singular, and as such political and ethical, havenfor an increasingly victimizing and victimized population” which would allowfor an intersubjective connection as an essential production of meaning itself.

S. K. Keltner’s “What Is Intimacy?” also recalls Kristeva’s readings of Durasas representative of a modern failure. She situates Kristeva’s reading of Duras inrelationship to Freudian psychoanalysis, Arendtian political phenomenology, andHeideggerean ontology to track the genealogy of Kristeva’s analysis of the mod-ern constitution of intimacy, in which Duras plays a central role. Keltner arguesthat Kristeva’s emphasis on the term “intimacy” from the mid-1990s to the pres-ent should be contextualized within her analyses of intimacy in the 1980s inPowers of Horror, Black Sun, and Strangers to Ourselves. The survey of the conceptof intimacy in Kristeva’s oeuvre reveals a significant relationship to both Arendt-ian and identity politics, which Kristeva is generally seen to warn against, as wellas opens a reading of the significance of the emergence of Freudian psycho-analysis as conditioned by a nationalist conception of intimacy.

Cecelia Sjöholm’s chapter, “Fear of Intimacy? Psychoanalysis and the Re-sistance to Commodification,” argues that the significance of Kristeva’s reclaim-ing of the concept of intimacy—the object of the psychoanalytic, aesthetic, andphilosophical practices—is to be sought in a resistance to commodification. Kris-teva links intimacy to sensorial experience as a necessary moment of singularpsychic life that protects against the commodification of the psyche in consumerculture. However, as Sjöholm shows, Kristeva’s trajectory is unique: “Looking atphilosophy and psychoanalysis, anything connected with the concept of intimacyis usually discarded as unreliable, corruptible, and full of disguises and lures.”Sjöholm analyzes Kristeva’s insistence on intimacy in relationship to the morepopular psychoanalytic and philosophical warning against the concept in thework of Lacan, Kant, Habermas, Adorno, and Arendt. Sjöholm returns intimacyto the Enlightenment, critical theory, and Arendtian concern for public spaceand political community. She demonstrates that the intimate as a space of emo-tions, feelings, and sexuality—as constituted by the bourgeois novel—is not asubjective depth that transcends social and political space, but is rather a culturalproduct constructed in the historical development of bourgeois public space.Critical theory demonstrates that intimacy as emotion, feeling, or desire is sus-ceptible to commodification and, even further, as Arendt has shown, threatenspublic life itself. Though psychoanalytic practice would seem to affirm intimacyinsofar as it physically occupies intimate, private spaces in practice, analytic the-ory distances itself from intimacy. Sjöholm argues that the emphasis on Oedi-

Introduction 13

pus aligns psychoanalytic theory with universality and law. Any concern for intimacy as the domain of emotion, feeling, and desire is subordinate to law; andpsychoanalysis, like critical theory and Arendtian political phenomenology, in-sists that a resistance to the discourses of intimacy is simultaneously a resistanceto the commodification of the unconscious. Sjöholm demonstrates that for Kris-teva intimacy reconfigures the soul/body dichotomy and is the “domain” in whichsensations are linked to signification. Rather than being that which is suscepti-ble to commodification, intimacy is precisely that which protects against the col-onization of singular psychic life. Kristeva’s reclaiming of intimacy is to be seen,Sjöholm argues, as a response to philosophic and psychoanalytic devaluations ofintimacy and is an act that resists the very universalization and law that those dis-courses have banked on. For Kristeva, public or political community may verywell depend on it.

Emily Zakin’s “Humanism, the Rights of Man, and the Nation-State” ex-amines the relationship between Arendt and Kristeva. She links Arendt andKristeva’s political thought to the question of the political’s modern legitima-tion crisis and argues that for Kristeva the political is that which must be in-terminably “worked through.” Zakin situates her reading of Kristeva and politicsin the context of Slavoj Žižek’s recent inversion of Dostoyevsky’s famous claimabout the death of God in The Brothers Karamazov. In the New York Times(March 12, 2006), Žižek claims: “If God exists . . . everything . . . is permitted.”Žižek here marks what Zakin calls “the legitimation crisis” of modernity’s re-placement of religious authority with secular authority and its fateful realizationin the resurrection of God in politics necessitated by the crisis. Zakin addressestwo points that Žižek raises as the context for her reflections on Hannah Arendtand Julia Kristeva: first, the crisis of European political structures and, second,the loss of all transcendent values and any ultimate ground of law. For Zakin,Žižek can aid in evaluating the significance of Arendt and Kristeva’s work in-sofar as he insists that our political being is constituted in our relations to oth-ers in the world and that the public space of appearance may allow us to rethinkthe question of political legitimacy. Zakin does not pursue these issues in Žižek’sown thought, but takes his insights into the crisis of legitimacy, as well as thoseof Foucault and Lefort, as the clue to negotiating Arendt and Kristeva’s signif-icance. She concludes that Kristeva’s psychoanalytic supplements Arendtian political phenomenology.

Jeff Edmond’s chapter, “Kristeva’s Uncanny Revolution: Imagining theMeaning of Politics,” examines Kristeva’s relationship to the political as an uneasyone and links the question of politics in Kristeva to an interminable “workingthrough.” In spite of her various and multiple contributions to social and politi-cal problems, Kristeva’s more direct claims about the political express ambiva-lence. Edmonds explains the significance of Kristeva’s claim that politics isultimately enigmatic as evidence for its importance. He argues that Kristeva’s refusal to directly answer questions concerning the political as such is not a

14 S. K. Keltner

rejection of politics, but “of the simplistic and fetishistic repetition of the political as a criterion for thinking.” The persistence of the question of politicsreveals a deeper problem: its inability to represent and give meaning to human ex-perience. Edmonds argues that Kristeva’s distance from the political is preciselyan attempt to reinvigorate political discourse by insisting on the necessity of link-ing it to experience and imagination. He argues that Kristeva’s work is neitherapolitical nor directly political, but occupies a marginal position that allows for acritique of contemporary political fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is charac-terized as a purely symbolic bond that is not governed by concrete, material ties,but rather by fantasy and a logic of exclusion that cements the social-symbolicbond. Kristeva’s “political” work seeks to disrupt fundamentalisms and reopen thequestion of political solidarity on new terrain. Edmonds argues that Kristeva pro-vides a notion of solidarity based not on the mediation of the father, but on whathe calls “an active working through of the loss of that authority.” This workingthrough of the loss of the ground of authority becomes the political task that theimaginary must bear. Edmonds concludes that Kristeva’s ambivalent relationshipto the political is strategic insofar as the refusal to answer the question “What isthe political?” calls on the imaginary for ceaseless interpretation.

Idit Alphandary’s chapter, “Religion and the ‘Rights of Man’ in Julia Kris-teva’s Work,” concludes the volume by examining the correlation between reli-gious and psychoanalytic subjectivity in Kristeva’s work through attention tothe relationship between language and desire. Drawing on the seminal texts ofthe 1980s and Kristeva’s epistolary exchange with Catherine Clément in TheFeminine and the Sacred, Alphandary analyzes the conditions of “meaningful ex-periences” in our narrative capacities. She takes as her point of departure Kris-teva’s claim in In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (1985/1987a)that the structure of the unconscious and the structure of monotheism can berelated according to a primary narcissistic wound around which symbolic ca-pacities are acquired, specifically in relation to Kristeva’s rehabilitation of thematernal function in psychoanalysis. Alphandary provocatively situates thiscomparison in relation to the “Rights of Man” and argues that Kristeva’s analy-sis of the “power” of “religious narrative” illuminates the significance of the roleand need for narrative in secular life.

ReferencesBeardsworth, Sara. 2004. Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity. New York:

State University of New York Press.Kristeva, Julia. 1973/1995. “Bataille, Experience and Practice.” On Bataille: Crit-

ical Essays. Ed. and trans. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons. Albany: State Uni-versity of New York Press.

———. 1974. La révolution du langage poétique: l ’avant-garde à la fin du XIXesiècle. Lautréamont et Mallarmé. Paris: Seuil.

Introduction 15

———. 1980. Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Seuil.———. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.

New York: Columbia University Press.———. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York:

Columbia University Press.———. 1985. Au commencement était l’amour: psychanalyse et foi. Paris: Hachette.———. 1987a. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. Trans.

Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press.———. 1987b. Soleil noir, dépression et mélancolie. Paris: Gallimard.———. 1988. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard.———. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.

New York: Columbia University Press.———. 1990. “La Nation et le Verbe.” Lettre ouverte à Harlem Désir. Paris: Edi-

tions Rivages.———. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York:

Columbia University Press.———. 1993. “The Nation and the Word.” Nations without Nationalism. Trans.

Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.———. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York:

Columbia University Press.———. 1996. Sense et non-sens de la révolte: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse

I. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard.———. 1997. La révolte intime: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse II. Paris:

Librairie Arthème Fayard.———. 1998a. Visions capitales. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux.———. 1998b. “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva.” Parallax, 4 (3): 5–16.———. 1998c. L’avenir d’une révolte. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.———. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of

Psychoanalysis, vol. 1. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 2002. “‘Nous Deux’ or a (Hi)story of Intertextuality.” Romanic Review( January–March).

———. 2001/2003. “Intimité voilée, intimité violée.” Chroniques du temps sensi-ble, Première édition (28 novembre; mercredi 7 heures 55 [2001–2002]).Paris: Éditions de l’Aube.

———. 2005. La haine et le pardon: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse III. Paris:Librairie Arthème Fayard.

yanulada


PART I

TWO STATEMENTS

BY KRISTEVA

��

yanulada


1

A Meditation, a Political Act,an Art of Living

��

Julia KristevaTranslated by S. K. Keltner

It is with emotion that I first address myself to each of those who have honoredme with their contribution.1 Of course, I will not comment on what I heard asso many offerings of intelligence and complicity, offerings which will not fail tonourish my research in the future. Neither will I respond to the implicit or ex-plicit questions that each contribution posed. Well beyond the narcissistic pleas-ure I felt in listening to you, I have been overwhelmed and amused by thiswoman with multiple faces that your praise knew how to surprise and take holdof in the “atypical” person that I am—it is at least what one says to me in orderto be nice to me. In truth, I had not even suspected the existence of this womanunder the atypical and cumbersome gravity from which, it seems to me, I willnever undo myself, whatever may be the voyages that transport me in the mul-titude of spaces, cities, disciplines, and languages.

Is it an immoderate ambition, or a specifically feminine relationship totime—which would retain especially profusion and blossoming—that makesme receive your interventions as so many openings and not conclusions? Open-ings of questions and of projects that you have given me the honor to read inmy writings and my actions, which testify to your ingenuity as intellectuals, andtrace for me new courses of research and of debate.

I will hold myself to two of these courses, which are:

After this day, what sense to give the creation by the Norwegian Govern-ment of the prestigious Holberg Prize which comes to fill, magnificently,

19

20 Julia Kristeva

in fact the forgetting of the human and social sciences in the Nobel prize list?

To what chance of my personal history do I owe the good fortuneand honor, no less surprising, of being the first laureate, me, the Eu-ropean citizen, of French nationality, of Bulgarian origin and of Amer-ican adoption?

I. The response to the first question—which bears on the distinction, bythe Holberg Prize, of the human and social sciences, with an explicit mentionof psychoanalysis—implies to my sense a preliminary interrogation: what power[pouvoir] do the human sciences have today?

Contrary to what they would like to make us believe, the collision of reli-gions is in fact only a superficial phenomenon. The problem of the beginningof the third millennium is not the war of religions, but the weakness and theemptiness that henceforth separates those who want to know that God is uncon-scious, and those who prefer to not know it, in order better to enjoy the spectacleannouncing that He exists. The globalized media supports, with all of its imagi-nary and financial economy, this second preference: to want to know nothing inorder better to enjoy the virtual. In other words: to enjoy seeing promises, and tobe content with promises of goods, guaranteed by the Promise of a superior Good.This situation, because of the globalization of the denial that is consubstantialto it, is without precedent in the history of humanity. Saturated by enterprisesof seductions and deceptions, our cathodic civilization is revealed to be favor-able to the belief. And it is why it has favored the melting pot of religions.Catholicism—to my eyes the most aesthetic of all religions—in its genius, hasperfectly understood this new phase of History. Consequently, and successfully,which we know, it comes to propose its candidacy to a magistère well deservedover all other beliefs.2 The recent theological and political triumph of the Vat-ican is only the beginning of this process destined to get worse.

I recall you to the preliminary question: what can the human sciences do,which, to go against the current of this wave, insist on wanting to know? Mustthey be suffocated between the dust of asbestos and the fossil rules of the nine-teenth century which solidified the borders between the disciplines? Must theyperish in the confused battles of a chase for university careers where they are con-fined to the management of specialized and bloodless discourse? Must they be lostin the meanderings of so powerful techniques that they have no chance of appeal-ing to the dormant souls of a generation without language and without writing,who must be content with promises alone of improbable and underpaid “posts”?This perspective, which I caricature with difficulty, leads the most hurried to aban-don us in order to hurry into the doors of the “Star Academy,” neo-candidates forneo-roles in a media neo-universality. While the others, the dullest, are made thestudious archivists of an antimodern nostalgia, who in passing go so far as to include Roland Barthes himself in their mortal, inevitably mortal, ennui.

A Meditation, a Political Act, an Art of Living 21

To both I say: wake up, light up, reread Rimbaud: “It is necessary to be absolutely modern!” But how is this possible? And Where is this possible? Atthe University? That is a new one!

Nietzsche and Heidegger have warned us: modern man suffers “the ab-sence of a sensible and suprasensible world with the power to obligate.” This an-nihilation of divine authority, and with it of all other authority, state or political,does not lead necessarily to nihilism. But how to know it today without beinglulled to sleep by a strictly rationalist humanism or a romantic spirituality?

I claim that the alternative to rising religiosity, as to its inverse, which is nar-row-minded nihilism, already and precisely comes from these places of thinkingthat we test, not to occupy, but to make life. Which we? We who are in thisroom, in the light of the Holberg Prize, with our accomplices from work in theHexagon3 and abroad, we for whom the stowing in the vast continent of thatwhich one calls, to be quick, “the human and social sciences,” is essentially dueto our implication in literature and psychoanalysis.

I have named here two experiences of language that damage the metaphysi-cal pair reason versus faith, around which scholasticism was formerly constituted,and which was recently updated by the dialogue between a postmodern philoso-pher and a cardinal on the way to becoming pope.

After having noted that rationalist humanism had failed in the totalitari-anism of the twentieth century, and having announced that it would fail in theeconomic and biological automation that threatens the human species in thetwenty-first century, the two interlocutors agreed to announce that our moderndemocracies are completely lost [déboussolées] by dint of being deprived of a “su-perior” reliable authority, alone capable of regulating the wild course of free-dom. This convergence of the philosopher and the theologian implies that thereturn to faith is essential as the sole and unique recourse, suitable to impose amoral stability facing the risks of freedom. In other words, since constitutionaldemocracies have need of “normative presuppositions” in order to found “ratio-nal right,” and the secular State does not have at its disposal a “unifying bond”(Böckenförde), it would be essential to constitute a “conservative consciousness”that is nourished by faith (Habermas), or that may be a “correlation between rea-son and faith” (Ratzinger).

In counterpoint to this hypothesis, one may think that we are confronted rightnow, in advanced democracies in particular, by prepolitical or transpolitical expe-riences that make obsolete all appeal to “normative consciousness” and to the rea-son/revelation pair, since they are heading for a radical reform of humanismstemming from the Aufklärung4 without recourse to the irrational. It is precisely atthis sensitive point of modernity that the literary experience—with the theoreti-cal thought from which it is inseparable—and the Freudian discovery of the un-conscious is situated. Their respective contributions to the complication of thehumanism of Knowledge is not understood, in its pre- and transpolitical signifi-cance, as capable of founding this “unifying bond,” which lacks a secular, political

22 Julia Kristeva

rationality. Such is nevertheless the hypothesis—an alternative to the concert ofBöckenförde/Habermas/Ratzinger—that I would like to defend.

Those who are exposed to the literary and psychoanalytic experience, orare simply attentive to their stakes—as we who are here—know that the oppo-sition reason/faith or norm/freedom is more tenable if the speaking being that Iam is no longer thought as dependent on a suprasensible world and even less ona sensible world “with the power to obligate.” They also know that this I thatspeaks is unveiled to itself insofar as it is constructed in a vulnerable bond witha strange object, or an ec-static other, an ab-jet: the sexual thing (others will say:the object of sexual drive of which “the carrier wave” is the death drive). Thisvulnerable bond to the sexual thing and in it—on which the social or sacredbond is propped up—is no different from the heterogeneous bond—biologyand sense—on which our languages and our discourses depend, which as it turnsout modifies, and which, conversely, modifies the sexual bond itself.

In this apprehension of the human adventure opened by literature and psy-choanalysis, literature and art do not constitute an aesthetic decor, no more thanphilosophy or psychoanalysis claim to provide salvation. But each of these ex-periences, in their differences, is offered as the laboratory of new forms of hu-manism. To understand and accompany the speaking subject in its bond to thesexual thing gives us a chance to face up to the new barbarities of automation,free of recourse to the safeguards of infantilizing conservatism, and of the short-sighted idealism of banalizing and mortifying rationalism.

Nevertheless, if the adventure that I sketch, to the listening of literatureand the human sciences of the twentieth century, suggests a revision and evena radical reform of humanism, the consequences would only be, to paraphrasea word of Sartre, “cruel and long-term.”

Cruel, because they unveil to us a humanity endowed with an extravagant,amoral freedom, which respects only the singularity of the vulnerable beingsthat we are, in the crossroads of biology and sense, and whose exceptional real-izations—those of “great” writers, artists, philosophers, et cetera—call us con-tinuously to mobilize our own genius, which is no different than the ability, itmight be any, to be surpassed in thinking. There is no other means to escape the“banality of evil,” which threatens the bond—amorous, familial, religious, orpolitical—than to oppose it with the capacity of the speaking being, bound bythe sexual thing to its biological destiny, to put in question all identity proper—sexual, national, economic, cultural, et cetera—in other words, to widen thepowers of thought. Only in this ethical and philosophical horizon of a revisionof the conception of the subject itself, of the human, can these experiences thatimpassion us at the University, well named Denis-Diderot, [sic] be concretized:I speak for example of the creation of the Institute of Contemporary Thought,which seeks to carry out a revision of the disciplines in the confluence of biology-law-psychoanalysis-semiology-literary theory.

That is to say that no authority, “obligation,” or instance would know how


for the long term to aggravate this putting in question that we know henceforthto be inherent in the desire of men and women, just as in their thought, itselfunderstood as sublimation of their desire in creativity. If such is the case, wemeasure, with literature and psychoanalysis, and their constitutive crises thatmark the culture of the twentieth century, the risks of thought and of life thatbring on the human adventure. But it is also with literature and psychoanalysisthat our understanding is opened, with amoralism and what lies beyond it, sothat the risk of the anthropological bond (sexual and linguistic) equally com-prises limits and regulations in the sharing [partage]5 between singularities.

I employ here the word sharing [partage] in the strong sense of “to share”[partager]: to take part in particularity beyond the separation that imposes ourdestiny on us, to participate without forgetting that each is “its own part” [chau-cun est “à part”],6 in order to recognize “its” unsharable part [“sa” part im-partageable], irreducible even to the irreparable, and inassimilable in any savingcommunity. The writer and analyst make this sharing of the unsharable [partagede impartageable] in a bond always recommencing the everyday experience; itleads them to a radical strangeness made of solitude and solicitude. I am not sat-isfied by any preexisting doxa, but am created indefinitely, infinitely, in the suc-cession of radical reformulations and in the adjustment of the meeting of desires.

You understand, that which I designate as a humanism attentive to thespeaking being in its indivisible bond to the sexual thing leads us to an experi-ence of risky freedom that it returns us to affirm. It is a question of freedom assharable [partageable] singularity.

If it suddenly appears, in counterpoint, in the conjunction between the religiosity and the nihilism of the planetary era, this model of freedom no lessfinds its sources in an ancient tradition. I even claim that it is not only essentialto European culture, but that it constitutes today the specific contribution, sus-ceptible to opening the spectacular impasses of a globalization in search of faith.

In order to situate it better in the history of thought, let us return brieflyto this foundation of modern rationalism that are The Critique of Pure Reason(1781) and The Critique of Practical Reason (1789). We are in the century ofLudvig Holberg. Kant defines freedom not negatively as an “absence of con-straint,” but positively as a possibility of “autocommencement.” Identifiyingfreedom in this way with the initiative of Selbst, of Self or of Me [Moi], thephilosopher opens the way to an apology of enterprising7 subjectivity, if youpermit me this personal reading of his “cosmological” thought. Simultaneously,however, Kant does not fail to subordinate the freedom of enterprising Reason,whether it is pure or practical, to a Cause. Divine or moral cause controls in thelast instance free initiative, and from this makes entrepreneurial freedom par-ticipate in the same logic of cause and effect, but remains protected, untouch-able, inaccessible to the desire of thinking.

I would extrapolate by saying that in a society more and more dominatedby technique, freedom thus conceived progressively becomes a capacity to adapt

24 Julia Kristeva

to a “cause” always exterior to the “self,” to the “speak-being” [parlêtre]8 and toits “sexual thing.” Nonetheless, and little by little this productivist causality be-comes less and less moral, and more and more economic, to the point that itreaches its proper saturation, it brings the necessity of a support through itssymmetrical guarantee that is the moral and/or spiritual causality. In this orderof thought, which favors Protestantism (I make allusion to the bonds betweencapitalism and Protestantism brought to the fore by Max Weber), freedom ap-pears as a freedom to adapt itself to the logic of causes and effects: to the logicof production, of science, and of economy, itself supported by the interdicts ofmoral reason. The logic of globalization and that of liberalism are the outcomeof this freedom, in which you are free . . . enclosing you in the process ofcauses-effects in search of goods, and/or of the supreme Good. The supremecause (God) and the technical cause (Dollar) end up appearing, under the spot-light of a technical globalization eager for belief, as the two variants, in solidar-ity and copresent, that sustain the functioning of our freedoms within this logic,which one could call the instrumentalization of the speaking being.

I do not deny the magnitude or the benefits of this freedom of adaptation,which culminates in calculative-thinking and in science. I think that it is a cap-ital moment of the development of humanity acceding to the technique and tothe automation of the species. American civilization is better adapted to thisfreedom. Europe assumes it, because it invented it and practices it, in its ownway. I say only that this freedom is not the only one.

There is another model of freedom. It appears in the Greek world, at theheart of philosophy, with the pre-Socratics, and is developed by the intermedi-ary of Socratic dialogue. Without being subordinated to a cause, but without ig-noring it—transversal therefore to the categories of cause-effect concatenationthat are in themselves the premises of scientific and moral reason—this funda-mental freedom resides in the being of the speech that is opened up. In desiring, itgives itself, and in presenting itself thus as other to itself and to the other, free-dom is freed. This liberation of the being of speech in the encounter betweenthe one and the other was brought to the fore in the discussion Heidegger un-dertook with the philosophy of Kant (1930 seminar, published under the titleThe Essence of Human Freedom). It is a question of inscribing freedom in theessence of the speech of man as the immanence of infinite questioning, beforeand although freedom is thus fixed in the enchainment of causes and effects, andin their mastery that will be no less itself submissive to infinite interrogation.

Fear nothing, I will not go further in this very schematic reading of thetwo models of freedom that I have related back to Kant and Heidegger. Whatinterests me today is to insist on the horizon of emptiness that divides the mod-ern world into “belief ” and “knowledge,” under the connotations of this secondmodel of freedom. It is the writer, working in the identity of the national lin-guistic code as well as in the fantasies that build a cultural tradition, in order topreserve it and to modulate it, who is the privileged holder of it. Holberg him-


self did not find a more efficient solution to the barbarities of his time than tomake himself the Scandinavian Molière, in order to make fun of the enthusi-asms and the language, in the enthusiasm of the maternal language itself. AndI do not forget the libertine, his contemporary, defying the proprieties of socialcauses-effects in order to make appear and to formulate his dissident desire: hehas no equivalent in the militant of any “sexual community,” but rather and par-adoxically in the desire of life, including sexual, which the most vulnerable andthe most excluded people claim as a political right. I think, naturally and there-fore, of the transference and countertransference of the analytic experience, whereto take part in the unsharable [part à l’impartageable] of the other gives me, atlast, a chance to think, which is no different from thinking from the place of theother. The writer, the libertine, the analysand/analyst: some figures that it isvery necessary to call revolutionaries (from the Sanskrit +vel, “unveiling” [dévoile-ment], “reversal” [retournement]), which I understand as the only tenable sensetoday of this word, the one who inscribes the privileges of the singular personin the bond, in order to reinterrogate conventions. In the last page written be-fore her death, Hannah Arendt dreamed of an optimal political bond, which itseems to her must be the equivalent of the bond instituted by the exchange ofaesthetic judgments: taste in lieu and place of the tribunal. This concern forsharable [partageable] singularity in a bond stimulating creativities, knowinghow to reconcile laughter and taste, is it not already at the foundation of Knowl-edge? The Rights of man, and the motto of the French Revolution, “Liberty,Equality, Fraternity,” which radically reinforced the advances of English habeascorpus, before the Terror destroyed the ambitions of it by the erection of asupreme Being by obligations and/or by maliciousness, came to legitimate thetyranny of the masses?

We are the inheritors of this second model of freedom, reinforced and clar-ified by the radical experiences of the sharing of the unsharable [de partage del’impartageable] which are the experience of writing and, in another way, of thepsychoanalytic adventure. Would we be able to deepen them and synthesizethem in order, not to fill in, but to interrogate the emptiness that separates “be-lief ” and “knowledge,” and which dangerously opens [creuse] the crisis of theplanetary era? Such is the question that imposes itself on us, by the grace andthe gravity of this extraordinary gesture of a government that has revived thememory of Baron Holberg and the European eighteenth century, in order to ex-tract us from the academic routine, and to make us recapture confidence in therisks of thought, facing the fantasies of the certainties of salvation.

II. It remains for me to speak to you about what led me to the reflectionthat I have just submitted to you in conclusion to your homage to my research,without explaining to you in detail my course, or summarizing my books toyou—you have generously made it through this day, and I had the chance to riskmyself, on the occasion of the colloquium at Bergen, the native city of Holberg,

26 Julia Kristeva

which gathered together last December the speakers of five nationalities. I willmake three confessions to you, filtered through the remarks of two great Frenchwriters, to which I have for a long time devoted my work. These words ofProust, first: “Ideas are the successors of griefs.” I hear these words reverberate,this evening, with my history as an exile and as a woman, but also with the con-flict of civilizations that our world traverses today. It is without end that we askourselves how it is possible that griefs do not lead to melancholy and to death,but to this strange enigma that is the life of the spirit. It is without end, and itis fortunate.

Next, this declaration of Colette: “Being reborn has never been above myforces.” Is it an exorbitant pretension, or a capacity, rather feminine, of eternalreturn, of blossoming more than of adaptation, of renaissance, of renewal? Andif yes, by what condition?

Finally, this motto of the heroine in my last novel, Murder in Byzantium,Stéphanie Delacour: “I travel myself.” You may notice that she expresses herselfby neologisms, like Julia Kristeva at her beginnings. And since this journalist isa cultivated woman, to say “I travel myself ” is, in fact, her way of summarizing afundamental axis of our European culture: from Saint Augustine, who recog-nized only one fatherland, that of traveling, precisely: “In via, in patria,” to Freud,who specified: “There where it was I must become.” In other words, for the hero-ine who resembles me, the traversal of borders—geographic, between disciplinesand constituted discourses—is only possible if the man or the woman who trav-els succeeds in displacing their own interior borders: “I travel myself.” From thissole condition ideas succeed griefs, and being reborn is never above our forces.

You see that the key to my nomadism, to my interrogation of consecratedknowledge, is no different from psychoanalysis understood and practiced as ajourney that reconstitutes psychic identity itself. And, I repeat, I am very happyto note that the Holberg Prize has expressly distinguished the Freudian dis-covery among the human and social sciences.

More than two centuries later, I salute therefore Ludvig Holberg who in-spired in the Jury the idea of making me the first laureate of the prestigiousPrize that carries his name. It is thanks to him that we gather together today. Ithank you again for your patience and for your friendship, which I have felt inso strong and close all day long. Please accept all of my profound gratitude.

NotesI would like to thank Yvonne Stricker for her invaluable comments and sug-gestions on this translation. All of the following notes are mine. —Translator

1. The following text is the speech that Kristeva gave to the University ofParis VII Denis Diderot on May 10, 2005. A symposium was organized to cel-ebrate her reception in the fall of 2004 of the prestigious Holberg Prize.


2. Le magistère is a third year degree, taken after completing two years atuniversity. It is equivalent to a master’s degree.

3. France.4. “Enlightenment.”5. The term “partager” has several senses that imply connecting and sev-

eral that imply division. It is as if the English “to share” had both of its senses:“to have the same as” as in “I share your view” or “I share your pain” or “to sharea meal,” as well as the sense of “to share out” or “to divide up and divvy out; toallot.” The primary senses of the French term are to dismember, divide intopieces; to give someone a part of something; to participate in something at thesame time as someone else or to sympathize with; to be in solidarity with; (anold or literary sense) to give someone what they deserve; to be alloted; to divide,to fragment; to be divided (i.e., split in deciding something); to divide a societyor people into opposed or even hostile groups (i.e., a society divided on an issue).Some senses are about sharing where two parties participate together in onesame thing and some of them are about one thing being divided or shared out,you might say, into two parts. Further, partage has a very strong sense of allot-ment; it is the legal term for the division of goods that takes place among own-ers, especially in inheritance.

6. Literally, each is “on his own.”7. Entreprenant(e) has the connotation of being (sexually) forward and is

also etymologically linked to entrepreneuriale (entrepreneurial).8. The term usually translated “speaking being” in Kristeva’s work is

“l ’être parlant.”

yanulada


2

Decollations

��

Julia KristevaTranslated by Caroline Arruda

John the Baptist, prefigurer par excellence, lends his image to the representationof the invisible par excellence: the passage/transition.1

In the future, the representation is ready to accommodate the mythic andbiblical memory of decollations. There exists, for better or worse, a history of de-capitation in different civilizations that we complete through reconstruction.2

Texts, myths, fantasies detail a thousand and one variants of decapitated heads.The significance of their history and their local color becomes the echo of thetormented vision of the artist, who seizes and revives them, each time in an in-creasingly modern fashion, in the graphic gash or in the crimson hue of thework. The representational artist relies primarily on those texts that are assumedto be familiar and in which an interpretation is implicitly recommended to theviewer, but which are interpreted in an increasingly liberal fashion, realized inthe drawing, in the strong sense of the word “illustrated.” In this back and forthbetween past and present, text and image, which constitutes the ruse of the Il-lustration, the representation of our pitiable excesses is liberated from guilt: therepresented carnage satiates the more or less repressed or dominated violence ofindividuals and nations. That having been done, this genre of representations se-cretly imposes a new metaphysics, which could potentially be an antimeta-physics. It is necessary to scrutinize the sacrificial limits of visibility itself withthe tools of illustration, and to revisit the economy of transfiguration—analchemy where the representation emerges from mourning, from renunciation,from castration, from death. There is a beyond [au-delà] of death, says artisticexperience, there exists a resurrection: it is nothing other than the life of the

29

30 Julia Kristeva

trace, the elegance of a deed, the grace or brutality of colors, when they dare todisplay the threshold of the human psyche. There, decapitation is a privilegedspace. Exultation, shout for joy!

Luca Cambiaso (b Moneglia, 1527/d Madrid, 1585, Mercury Beheading Argus,c. 1560s, Musée du Louvre, Paris)3 seizes on a nervous trait, an implacable parsi-mony, a Mercury preparing to decapitate Argus. He knew without a doubt thatArgus or Argos, the prince of Argos, son of Medea, had one hundred eyes andwent by the name of “the Argus Panoptes,” the “all-seeing.” Mercury-Hermes, thewinged god of voyagers and merchants, lulled him to sleep with the sound of his flute and killed him. Hera, who had been charged with guarding the cow Io,then scattered his eyes over the peacock’s tail. “One hundred eyes or one hundredheads?” Max Ernst will ask much later on, although about a woman.4 TheGreco-Roman legend is, in this case, nothing more than Cambiaso’s drawing. The painter transformed himself into the man of one hundred eyes. Is it Argus thatyou see, supplicating at the bottom of the drawing paper, or Cambiaso himself,who offers himself in sacrifice [supplice] to the Mercury of his fantasies, his friends?In contrast to psychoanalysis, the aesthetic experience revisits and exhausts the logics of the sacred.

The young David cutting off the monster Goliath’s head is no longer onlya text.5 With regard to the biblical sovereign who, at a young age, delivered aidto king Saul to defeat the Philistines and had a life of complex adventures, themajority of painters withhold the most spectacular scene: “So David prevailedover the Philistine with a sling and a stone, striking down the Philistine andkilling him; there was no sword in David’s hand. Then David ran and stood overthe Philistine; he grasped his sword, drew it out of its sheath, and killed him; thenhe cut off his head with it.”6 The Hebrew text’s polysemy, the meanderings ofpast and future history, which associate David with the musical arts, a passion forlove and political acumen, are, in many artists’ paintings, cinemascopically frozenon the cleansing nature of power. Donning the magnitude of a Greco-Romansculpture, Martin van Heemskerck’s David (b Heemskerck, 1498/d Haarlem,1574, David and Goliath, 1555, Musée du Louvre, Paris) has long forgotten hisinfantile fragility and brandishes his immense, bare sword over the impotentbody of a defeated Goliath. This masterful example of Mannerism adeptly trans-fers signs, memories, ideas from one register to another, from one history to an-other, from solemnity to eroticism. We are at the antipodes of the compassionaroused by John the Baptist even while considering the Baptist to prefigure God’speace: Salome does not stop herself from soliciting the interested applause ofthose who discreetly appreciate the cutting act. The history of the Jewish peoplecame to restore decollation’s power of salvation, in reality and fantasy alike. In thefuture, the meaning of the mortal scene can be inverted, the killing justified.More than Miserablism: the artist, like the viewer/spectator, is on the side of thevictor. The right to behead is recognized: the just cause justifies all excess, a right-eous return of the repressed. One will never say by how much the interpretation

Decollations 31

of the biblical text was permitted to exceed the hypocrisy of a certain kind ofembellished Christianity and to render accessible a meditation, literary as muchas pictoral, on libratory violence. Personal violence, violence of the young, vio-lence of the exiled and the oppressed. A release from the sustained humiliations,the injustices inflicted on them, the daily killings.

Next to David is the impetuous Judith beheading Holofernes, which fasci-nates us the most; Judith rehabilitates the image of a warrior femininity, castrat-ing, merciless. Salome, although responsible for the death of the predecessor toJesus, is not unable, as we will see, to attract some admiration, particularly dur-ing periods of religious crisis. But Judith the liberator, intransigent in her fightagainst the Assyrian general, assumes all the glory that the unconscious owes tothe all-powerful mother. A mother whose medusan head we dread only becausewe know that she may take our own; that which does not prevent us, in the guiseof vengeance, to imagine her without her own. The fantasy of the mother, whois dreaded because she is castrated, inverses itself in the apotheosis of the man-hunter [la femme de tete],7 who does more than castrate—who decapitates themost pitiless man: revenge against the tyranny of fathers, against a devouringand mortified femininity. Judith is the positive of Gorgon, her magnificent andtriumphant version: “It was the twelfth year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar,who ruled over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh.”8 Holofernes, generalin chief of the Assyrian army, pillages the Jewish towns and villages, taking pos-session of the water sources and the springs. Revolted by the oppression, Judith,true daughter of Israel, wife of Manasseh, “beautiful and lovely to behold,”9 de-cides to take action. She says her prayer: “Please, please, God of my father, [. . .]Make my deceitful10 words bring wound and bruise on those who have plannedcruel things against your covenant, and against your sacred house, and againstMount Zion, and against the house your children possess.”11 Having infiltratedHolofernes’s camp through trickery on banquet day, “Judith was left alone in thetent, with Holofernes stretched out on his bed, for he was dead drunk.”12 “Shewent up to the bedpost near Holofernes’s head, and took down his sword thathung there. She came close to his bed, took hold of the hair of his head, andsaid, ‘Give me strength today, O Lord God of Israel!’ Then she struck his necktwice and with all her might cut off his head. Next she rolled his body off the bedand pulled down the canopy from the posts. Soon afterward she went out andgave Holofernes’s head to her maid, who placed it in her food bag. Then the twoof them went out together, as they were accustomed to for prayer.”13 In additionto the Bible implying Judith’s seduction—Does not Holofernes “succumb” firstto the charms of this beautiful woman?—it also suggests a savage dimensionunchecked by the murder that justified the plea for Israel’s survival. From thenon, the warring act obtained a sacred value: opening not an indeterminate beyond, but the political and vital durability of a people.

Freud takes up the story of Judith by way of Hebbel’s tragedy “Judith andHolofernes,”14 which gave him the opportunity to approach a writer for whom

32 Julia Kristeva

the “paternal complex” could have advocated empathy for women and renderedJudith as a virgin. Not only does defloration, Freud advances, attach woman toman, “it also unleashes an archaic reaction of hostility toward him.” As a result,decapitation, which is a symbolic substitute for castration, appears as an act ofvengeance against defloration.15

Although the biblical text makes no mention of Judith’s virginity, it does notfail to sexualize the relationship between Judith and the Assyrian general, more-over rendering the woman the initiator of the seduction. It does not stop until theact of penetration and even defloration are alive in the female neurotic as rape, ifnot killing, and provoke a desire for vengeance in the feminine unconscious. Thisindisputable given in clinical analysis should be confirmed by the fact that manexperiences an intense fear of castration during the sexual act. The anxiety of los-ing his organ while penetrating the vagina, aggravated by the rupture of the hymen,is reinforced by possible gestation and the potential birth: would woman not cap-ture the male’s penis to become pregnant “all alone”? If woman can live her life asa violated and avenging virgin, ready to decapitate, man for his part experienceshimself, phantasmagorically, as castrated-decapitated by the mother who takes hisorgan and does not return it except in the form of the child’s head-body. Moreover,when a woman reaches motherhood, the maternal vocation only provisionally ap-peases his castration anxiety. For those who do not give birth, the production of anoeuvre—and better yet of a visual object [objet à voir]—comes to fulfill this threat.Artemisia Gentileschi (b Rome, 1593/d Naples, 1652/3) marvelously revealed thisaspect of the feminine œuvre, which consists in combating the rapist’s phallicpower, not to mention the deflowered receiver’s passivity, in the manner of the day . . . through a painting. The most spectacular of these realizations is preciselythe painting, not of the scene of the rape that Artemisia herself would come to endure, but inversely that of the decapitation of a man by the legendary Judith( Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1611–12, Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodi-monte, Naples). In revenge, no form of paternity shelters man from this anxietysince the child, and particularly the male child, revives the dread of castration andkilling. Thus Freud is unjustified in emphasizing the violated woman’s unconsciousvengeance, which transforms her into a head-cutter. But it goes without sayingthat this is man’s fear of venturing into this originary valley and his malaise in theface of the [female] parent’s power, which imposes on the masculine fantasy theimage, at once dangerous and thus exciting, of a castrating woman who does nothesitate to sacrifice . . . the essential organ [l’organe capital].

Rembrandt, who knew to decapitate Saint John the Baptist, also dedicatedhis drawing pencil to Judith (Rembrandt van Rijn, b Leiden, 1606/d Amster-dam, 1669, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, c. 1628-1635, Musée duLouvre, Paris). For this masterly decollation, he left only a whirl of traces abovethe headless cadaver that is difficult to recognize. The economy of traces nev-ertheless reconstructs the resolute postures of the two women: Judith stretch-ing out her left arm as though to draw her victim aside, the old maidservant

Decollations 33

charged with obscuring the trophy. Bartholomeus Spranger (b Antwerp, 1546/dPrague, before Sept. 27, 1611, Judith and Holofernes, ?1606-1607, Musée duLouvre, Paris) adds white highlights with his feverish, brown-inked quill torender visible the trembling of the cut flesh. Cristofano Allori (b Florence,1577/d Florence, 1621) is interested, above all else, in the grip of this master-ful woman: Study for a sleeve and a closed fist holding a lock of hair (c. 1613, Muséedu Louvre, Paris) was intended for his painting Judith and Holofernes (we are familiar with many versions: Florence, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti; Paris,Collection Pourtalès), where Judith is rendered as the painter’s mistress, thebeautiful Mazzafirra. Study for the head of Holofernes (c. 1613, Musée du Lou-vre, Paris), in which we recognize the head of the painter, is also a preparatorysketch for the painting Judith and Holofernes (1613) in the Galleria Palatina inthe Palazzo Pitti in Florence. To the Naturalist’s Judith the butcher is opposeda victimizing and sacrificial self-portrait: the emasculated painter offers his frus-tration and his resignation to his impassible executioner. In both studies, thepastel adds an air of grace to the curved drawing style, where the savage femi-nine, the interrupted/suspended pleasure of the castrated man, and the artist’svengeance, which renders his sadomasochistic drama visible, are combined.Bernardino Cavallino (?)16 (b Naples, bapt. 25 Aug 1616/d Naples, ?1656, Judith’s Servant, 17th cen., Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt) is one ofthose rare painters who prefer the maidservant: is this because she collects thehead and he likes to feel his/her/their [ses] hands around the cut “member?”Even more popular, Raffaellino del Garbo (b Florence, ?1466/d Florence, 1524,Judith, last quarter 15th cen./first quarter 16th cen., Musée du Louvre, Paris)composes a Botticellian, but nevertheless decisive, Judith: with a juvenile ten-derness, she contemplates the head of an elderly Holofernes, vexed because heallowed himself to be brought to a brutal end by such innocence. A small paint-ing attributed to Correggio17 (Allegri, Antonio [called Correggio], b Correggio,?1489/d Correggio, 1534), Judith and her Servant, around 1510, Musée desBeaux-Arts, Strasbourg), tightly composed and imposing due to the force ofnocturnal gravity, portrays the two women shoving the beheaded chief into a bagby the lugubrious light of a torch that illuminates the maidservant’s monstrousface. In order to believe that when a woman reaches to place her hand on aman’s principle organ, it is necessary to fear witchcraft and other spells.Veronese, by his own lights, sees the servant as black, next to a blond and royalJudith (Veronese, Paolo, b Verona, 1528/d Venice, 1588, Judith and Holofernes,after 1581, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen).

At some distance from the primordial [capitale] act, Delilah is satisfied withcutting Samson’s hair to deprive him of the force that his hair possesses and to de-liver him to the Philistines. As an attenuated variant of decapitation, this humil-iating act secretly retains the dread and pleasure of castration, just as it does forher, the one who anticipated the killing. Delilah appears as a younger and pejo-rative version of Judith, who precedes her and who finds herself corrected in her.

34 Julia Kristeva

A Philistine, an enemy of the Jewish people, she dares to attack the celebratedjudge of the Hebrews (the twelfth century B.C.E.) who was the soul of the resist-ance against the Philistines. “Finally after she had nagged him with her wordsday after day, and pestered him, he was tired to death. So he told her his wholesecret [. . .] ‘If my head were shaved, then my strength would leave me; I wouldbecome weak, and be like anyone else’ [. . .] She let him fall asleep on her lap; andshe called a man, and had him shave off the seven locks of his head [. . .] So thePhilistines seized him and gouged out his eyes. They brought him down toGaza.”18 The story makes it clear to us that the judge, as he succumbed to the se-ductress’ charms, lost divine protection. It is, however, nothing but a passing trial,for Yahweh is seized by pity for him. Samson retrieves his hair and his power andsucceeds in destroying the edifice that sheltered the Philistine princes, as well astheir people, as they gathered together for a ceremony. “Then Samson said, ‘Letme die with the Philistines.’ He strained with all his might; and the house fell.”19

Rembrandt does not detest the triumph of his heretical Delilah, who flees,with scissors in one hand and the locks of the judge’s hair in the other, whileSamson is left entangled in an inextricable mêlée of arms and legs (The Blind-ing of Samson,20 1636, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main).

More modern and already expressionist, the Swedish sculptor Johan TobiasSergel (b Stockholm 1740/d Stockholm, 1814, Samson and Delilah, 1776, Muséedu Louvre, Paris) renders the subject in brown ink and blood-red, suggesting alascivious embrace more than just the simple brutality of the pernicious Philis-tine. The Rococo and Mannerist torsos come to anxiety’s aid: no, it is not cas-tration, protests Sergel who, upon his parents’ death, falls into an intense andsudden melancholy and, twenty years later, creates Samson and Delilah duringthe same period as his famous series Hypochondria. This friend of Füssli was, likemany of those who inspired the theme of decollation, a dark prince of melan-choly, which he tried to combat by paying homage to revisited ancient art andby tentatively eroticizing his sacrifices.

But the feminine avenger is not the only one to seduce artists. Samson alsotakes on followers, such as Philippe-Laurent Roland (b Pont-à-Marc, 1746/d Paris, 1816, Samson, 1783, Musée du Louvre, Paris), who sculpts a bust of ared Samson, apparently coming to regain his hair: could we not admire a manwho loses, but also regains, his virility in order to better die for his cause!

One has difficulty juxtaposing a woman who abandoned herself to decap-itation to this series of decapitating women—in chronological order, Delilah, Ju-dith, and Salome. Still, the Bible relates the story of Jezebel who loses her head.The daughter of the king of Tyre, wife of Ahab, mother of Athalie, whomRacine would come to celebrate, this idolatrous queen erected a temple to Baaland favored absolutism in conjunction with the corruption of justice. GustaveDoré (b Strasbourg, 1832/d Paris, 1883) left us one of the few representationsof her ( Jehu’s Companions Finding the Remains of Jezebel, 1866, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris). Jehu, receiving God’s mission to destroy the house

Decollations 35

of his master Ahab, is charged with punishing “the many whorehouses and sorceries of [ Joram’s] mother Jezebel.”21 Jezebel, a sorceress and witch as muchas the daughter of a king, deserves to be eaten by dogs: “Jezebel heard of it; shepainted her eyes, and adored her head, and looked out of the window [. . .] Jehuentered the gate [. . .] Two or three eunuchs looks out at him. He said, ‘Throwher down.’ So they threw her down; some of her blood spattered on the wall andon the horses, which trampled on her [. . .] But when they went to bury her, theyfound no more than the skull and the feet and palms of her hands.”22

Though rare, this reminder of the feminine skull evokes for us the prehis-torical cranial rites, about which at least one hypothesis maintains that theywere performed more frequently on female subjects (Skull of Young Woman Cov-ered with Plaster, c. 7000–6000 B.C.E., National Museum, Damascus)23 and theterrifying Medusas. For better or for worse, our ancestors appear to be con-cerned first and foremost with woman’s head: the Venus of Willendorf orBrassempouy’s young woman are there to bear witness to it. Of course, morethan one queen has been decapitated: I recall Anne Boleyn, Marie Stuart,Marie-Antoinette; you can surely think of others. It is always true that, as weapproach modern times, men become increasingly interested in decollation.Castration obligates them to be! What could one truly cut off of a woman? onemight ask oneself. Unless we accept that the scarcity of female decapitationsexpresses a fundamental repression, the more difficult it is to admit the follow-ing: one aims at the mother’s head [on vise à la tête], she is the primordial [cap-itale] vision, and her essential and libidinal impact is so strong that it toodeserves to be fundamentally repressed.

The evidence of masculine phallic power hides another type of power, whichis not identical to the first: it is the dependence on the maternal protospace,which is prior to the representation. At the end of his life, Freud ultimately ad-vances that the feminine constitutes, for the two sexes, the more principle formof repression.24 The castration fantasy that women are assumed to harbor and thecastration fantasy feared by men manifest themselves as constructions of de-ferred action (Nachträglich) [après coup] of the depressive position that these fan-tasies allow to form and of which they make use. In the same way, the Imagerecasts and elaborates, in the visible and in following its historical development,events inscribed and hidden in the past.25 Thus, during the genital and symbolicmaturation of the speaking subject, the castration fantasy reclaims the cata-strophic impotence of childhood and gives it a new meaning, affixing it to thevisible male organ. In opposition to the fear of death, the terror of castration is,however, eroticizable, playable [ jouable]. It is not the obstinate survival of athreatened body, says the castration fantasy, it is only a question of phallic power:that which is lacking in woman and which can be taken from man, if he is pun-ished by a father or an all-powerful mother. Nevertheless, in the face of the terrifying risk of castration, the subject, from this moment on, has at his disposalthe possibilities present in his eroticism and his language that he did not have

36 Julia Kristeva

during the period of his infantile impotence. Seduction and representation cometo defend against the fear of death and mourning, and catastrophic melancholycan be combated by the pleasures of sadomasochistic perversity.

Beginning with the initial manipulations of the skull, sexual excitement re-cuperates the horror, and masturbatory pleasure transforms the horrible relicinto a fetish. But it is truly graphic and pictoral representation, through themultiplication of motifs of decollation and their masterful treatments, that ren-der perfectly explicit two anxieties underlying the movement of the visible: theancient anxiety of losing the mother that endures until impotence and deathwith its corollary of the all-powerful mother, and man’s castration anxiety withits corollary of the castrated woman. The excessive splendors of pictoral decol-lations betray this unconscious double logic that drives us to delimit the visibleitself, insofar as it is a sublime defense against these two anxieties.

Starting with the era that will be that of humanism, the representation ofdecollation eroticizes itself because it draws entirely from ancient sources, fromthem or against them. The works pulsate with sexual pleasure rather than wilt-ing in the face of the consecration of death. Sacrificial terror and seduction co-habitate in the work, the latter permitting desecration by insinuating castration;a blasphemous perversity establishes itself there, the artist and the viewer tak-ing turns playing the parts of the wound and the knife. A “genre”/“gender”26

emerges and constitutes itself, one that the fatal [capitale] wound absorbs in anabundance of depths and colors—by embellishing it to the point of banality.Yet within this same thematic, graphic works—by the intrinsic sobriety of theirtechnique and, without a doubt, by virtue of the ascetic character of draftsmenthemselves—introduce an economy that is denser, quasi iconic, generally stim-ulating, but also at times complacent. We are far from the sacred taboos of pasteras. Just as it is interesting to cut, it is also flagrant, entertaining. . . . And sincepolitical life is full of massacres of all types, it is necessary to unite the histori-cal or contemporary subjects with this manner of seeing settled horror, increas-ingly conformist, pretentious, theatrical, mummified.

In 1809, Vivant Denon, general director of the Napoleonic museums, or-ders Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson (b Montargis, 1767/d Paris, 1824)to produce a work to glorify the crushing defeat of the revolt of Cairo. The artistfound nothing better suited to immortalize the national army’s heroism than todangle, on the sullen Egyptians’ swords, the heads . . . of the brave French sol-diers, disguised as Italian Christs for the moment of their decapitation (Studyfor the Revolt of Cairo, c. 1810, Musée de l’Avallonnais, Avallon).

Henri Regnault’s (b Paris, 1843/d Buzenval, 1871) Standing Moor, Arms Raised(c. 1870, Musée du Louvre, Paris) represents the insolence of the executioner whowill reappear in Execution Without Trial under the Moorish Kings of Granada (1870,Musée d’Orsay, Paris): the drawing represents this feature more incisively than itwould come to be, gesticulating, in the painting. The word game betrays the sameinsolence: the standing Moor [le Maure debout], the upright death [mort debout], of

Decollations 37

the end/extremity [de-bout], two ends/extremities [deux bouts]. . . . Mallarmé shouldhave broken a melancholic and complicit smile in light of the drawing of his friendthe painter, who, like him, should have been able to write that “the destruction washis [sic: my] Beatrice.”27 Did not Regnault confide in him in the following letter:“I don’t know if it is due to the in-depth study of art, this language so rich and in-finite, but I have an aversion to the everyday language of ordinary people [. . .] I am, I believe, in a period of great impotence. You have without a doubt gonethrough this as well.”28 Shortly after this, he was hit by an enemy bullet, January19, 1871. Mallarmé seems to think that death alone, be it even of a dear friend,brings us closer to that exaltation which makes possible the eternal Work: “I am nottruly sad to think that Henri [Regnault] sacrificed himself for France, and the pos-sibility that it would be no longer. His death was purer. There would come to bemore Eternity than History in this unique tragedy.”29 Artists’ depression finds itself confirmed by an epoch of war and violent social conflicts, but does it revealthe end of this apocalyptic era or, on the contrary, does it reinforce it? Did not Regnault go so far as to write that “decoration is the true goal of painting?”Decollation—the decoration of an irreparable crisis?

In reality, decollation has difficulty in detaching that which is attached[decoller], so the spectacle comes to satiate instead. All of the ancient gods are,moreover, completely unknown to you. Their implausible adventures are over yourhead. You have enough to consider in your own dreams and nightmares, manyabout yourself, about the present. Fine! I suppose that, for Solario, Allori, Dürer,Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and the others, their severed heads were already noth-ing more than “inscriptions” and “images” [ figures]. And that the artists projectedtheir moral sentiments onto them, that they carved into them their own slashes,cuts, castrations, and wounds of all forms to acquire, in the in-between of figura-tion, a little bit of meaning, some distance, an appearance, some sort of liberty. Yousee, a drawing of a severed head is detached from its myth and model. Where isthe blood? Not a scarlet trace, not the slightest flow, not even a spurt. The lines,curved or angular, smooth or rough, create a shadow, isolating [libèrent] a void: youcan envision the tormented suffering here, assuaged there. But the carnage is ac-tually absorbed in the blackness of the sketch [du trait], which examines [traite]violence economically, an economic economy, by which I mean iconic. Withoutexaggerating or being cruel, you are at a distance, protected from cannibals, ter-rorists. Frankly, if there is an image, it is projected and projects. This Saint Johnthe Baptist, is he of the time of Herod, of the Renaissance or of your dream fromyesterday? Moreover, is Saint John, or Solario himself, as he would like to seehimself on his deathbed, serene, almost happy, in this vision?30 This vision of hisworks? Of those that he did not make? Of the Baptist himself? Of that which thePrecursor proclaims? Of that which not even one proclamation can ever pro-claim—the indeterminable duration, the timeless? Of the wounds from which hesuffered, that he inflicted on himself, and that he seized on one last time in thedrawing of Saint John the Baptist’s severed head?

38 Julia Kristeva

You too are happy, thank God, you have never been wounded, no one hasever cut off your head. Clearly. You are like me: a human being that speaks,more or less without an end or audience, who understands sorrow, who is rarelyin agreement, fearing the worst, moving forward, recoiling, groping. When youfall asleep, at times with difficulty, you barricade yourself in complete blackness.Dreamless, the old Freud cannot help us. In flashes, your small mistakes, thegrave traumas of that day return to you as though in a movie trailer, in blood redor in black and white. You take revenge on your employer, your parents, yourpartner, your children; you cut them in any way you can, you are afraid of them,you laugh at them, you cannot go on any longer. No? No, you are a woman, afemale stranger, a male stranger, you are ill, handicapped, insane. No, a star, anexceptional being, or perhaps the opposite: a mortal being, just like everyoneelse? No one sees you as you are, we benefit from your difference to settle ac-counts, your own or those of others; we permit ourselves with you that whichwe never permitted with others, male or female, but you let it be, otherwise itis too complicated: perhaps it is nothing but a deferred part [partie remise], youare going to take your revenge, invert the situation, immersing yourself, for ex-ample, in a detective thriller, in dreams, in speaking with your psychoanalyst, instrolling through this exposition.31

It is prohibited to kill, says the God of the Bible, but this moral law does notbecome possible except on the condition of the recognition that the cut [la coupure]is structurally necessary: some prefer to say that it32 is the work of God. It is clearlyGod who, at the beginning, did nothing besides separate: Bereshit33: “In the begin-ning, God created the heaven and the earth.”34 The separation of sky and earth, of man and woman, of body and soul, unconscious/preconscious/conscious. . . . At once formed, interiorized, the cut can be called a prohibition, that which is imposed to be transgressed: no one wants it, the body revolts against the spirit andthe spirit against the body, man against woman or woman against man, et cetera.I contemplate it, this sacred slash [entaille], I am afraid of it or I playfully enjoy it,I submit myself to its terror or I defy it. But if I decide to ignore it, it will overtakeme, from within or without; my organs will begin to bleed; I am sick; my actionsare toward death;35 I feel persecuted.36

I know that you no longer read, but you watch television and the savagemassacres committed by the ayatollahs and other Pol Pots, the barbarians inRwanda or Algeria. It is not absent here, especially today. At home, it is theissue of survival, of anachronisms, of the return of the repressed, of flares all toogood for the suburbs [les banlieues] that are classified as explosive, and thepathology of the police blotter and accident reports.37

You see things for what they are: the fear of death is not necessarily a fear ofmurder. I follow you, even there. When I imagine a betrayal, such as the disloyaltyof a confidante, a lover’s infidelity, a child’s illness, that I experience as though theywere acts of mortal violence, as if each time my head has been cut off, this is notthe nothingness that accompanies me more or less in the long run. No, I cry out

Decollations 39

against the evil that is inflicted on me by another. Death defeats me, it nullifies me.Violence, itself, is a possession: the hold that an active pleasure has on a victimizedobject, it depends on my passive pleasure. If I refuse to be a victim, I begin by re-vealing the destruction of which I am the object, and I take the liberty to say it. Youhave made the choice to be minimalist, to say as little as possible about it? One dayyou will return inevitably to the most severe pain. You will choose paroxysms, youwill select images of those with their throats slit who are your predecessors, you willrepresent as victims those who have sensed your intentions. You reverse the roles,you will be a victim no longer, you will accuse, you will hope to wound and, whynot, to kill when it is your turn to do so.

Could sadomasochism be the secret of the unconscious? Freud is not farfrom this very conclusion when he assigns a logic of drives [une logique pulsion-nelle] to the unconscious and when he describes these drives as reversible: active/passive, Eros/Thanatos. And then Proust! I have not spoken of the Baronde Charlus who loved to be whipped in the brothel. One need only look closelyat one of the descriptions of the so-called charming Proustian women to seewhat is ultimately there in those dead heads, the heads of Medusa. Miss Sac-ripant holding a large, round hat on her knee, a surprising simulacrum, doublingher own recently coiffed head that she could thus hold in her hand, like a sev-ered head, what an idea! And Albertine, whose hair is a living beast hollowedout by valleys, hemmed in by heart-shaped curls, bristling gorgonian locks, thoseof “moonlit trees, lank and pale,” and who, prefiguring her approaching deathin her sleep, is displayed in her bed as a decapitated corpse: “It was as though [. . .] the head alone was emerging from the tomb [. . .]. This head had been sur-prised by sleep almost upside down, the hair disheveled.”38 Even Proust, like somany others, was an expert in sadomasochism.

I care for my musée imaginaire, and I invite you to look upward to contemplatethe looped projections. They juxtapose the mosaics in San Marco in Venice thatdepict the beheading of Saint John the Baptist (anonymous, Beheading of SaintJohn the Evangelist, cir. 12th cen., Basilica di San Marco, Venice) and two greatartists: the irascible Caravaggio (Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, b Milan orCaravaggio, 1571/d Porto Ercola, 1610) and the tenacious Artemisia Gentileschi.The nomadic painter, lover of severed heads, denied himself neither Judith nor Saint John nor Isaac. I prefer the macabre humor of his David and Goliath(1609–1610, Galleria Borghese, Rome). Robust, sculpted, the young David withhis golden skin gives the sideways glance of a young Adonis, whereas the unstable“head” [le chef branlant]39 of the sinister giant, entrusted to the future king’s dis-tracted hands, displays in all its simplicity the characteristics of the artist himself:a criminal face borrowed for the moment from the accessory storehouse of thecommedia dell’arte. The king does not look at the severed head, no one looks at asevered head, not even the amateur art viewers, the voyeurs like you and me. Doyou believe that there would be something there to see? David makes you see thatthere is not. Decollation, which is frequently represented, signs on the margin of

40 Julia Kristeva

the terminus of the visible. It is the end of the show, ladies and gentlemen, moveon! There is nothing left to see! Or rather there is nothing except that which is tobe seen, better, to be heard. Now open your ears, if they are not too sensitive. Thedepths of horror that cannot be seen; that are to be heard, perhaps. Return thepalettes, and to good hearing, good-bye! Unless this sadomasochistic intimacy, re-lentlessly profane and Caravagesque, may be the last modern temple? One thatendures in the fetish sex shops, the raves and other locales, on which to meditateafter an eyeful.

Artemisia, the most famous woman painter whose masterpiece is a decolla-tion ( Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1611–12, Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodi-monte, Naples), is not far from thinking this! There was not a single feminist ofthe “Belle Epoque” of the seventies who did not scrutinize the details of the car-nage before applauding Artemisia’s talents and Judith’s feat. The story begins witha scandal that was, it appears, the rape of Artemisia by a painter in her father’s at-elier: one named Tassi who, denounced too late by the victim’s father, was impris-oned until the lovers reconciled, quite mysteriously, just as the trial was picking upsteam. The problematic affair40 of which it was a part: master and disciple, fatherand daughter, violator and violated, who violates who? Artemisia, was she a whore,a victim/a plaything [jouet] or a genius? All of these at the same time? Does it mat-ter? What matters is that she painted like no other woman that came before or afterher, and that she painted not just anything: she painted a violated man beautifullyand, even better, beheaded by her own hand. Brilliant, Artemisia! Let’s look at thescene: two women pounce on the sleeping figure of the Assyrian general. The ser-vant with her bored expression and a fierce Judith, floating in her brocade dress. Arich, crimson velvet envelops the man’s splayed thighs, in contrast to the disor-dered snarl of their six arms that, next to the head, perpetrate an interminable vi-olation indeed. With all her weight, the servant immobilizes the victim, while aviolent movement carries Judith to the right-hand margin of the painting: withher right hand, the sovereign plunges a sword into the offered throat, with her lefthand she renders the male head [la tête male] powerless on the bed. Not a trace ofhorror on the murderess’ face. Only her body’s rigid reserve, moving away fromthe spurting stream of blood, reveals some disgust. Her face, on the other hand, re-flects the concentration of a mathematician, biologist, or surgeon who, in the act,already savors her victory. That of absolute knowledge? Of the people of Israel?Of woman over man? Artemisia’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1630s,Royal Collection, Windsor) depicts a full-bodied woman who turns her face awayfrom the viewer and discreetly shows herself in three-quarter view: she imposeson the focal point of our gaze only a robust right arm, its hand forcefully armedwith a paintbrush. More powerful than Judith’s arm as it holds the knife, this pro-todwarf ’s short and muscular arm reveals the complete absence of narcissism, aspirit completely transformed into work. Artemisia’s head is in her hand, she isnothing more than the source of her arm, she moves toward the painting that wedo not see, the painting is itself a decollation.41

Decollations 41

Did you believe that you knew these images? Salome and John the Baptist?This Caravaggio? This Artemisia? Did you imagine that they formed our an-cestors’ cinemascope, a phantasmagoria that marks, the weightiness of typo-graphic impressions? Look at them again, at the economy of drawing that youlearned to read while observing the graphic works collected here. The specta-cle erases itself, bringing back pain’s gash, the stroke [le trait].42

Notes[Trans.] The word “décollation,” which means to remove a person’s head and de-rives from the Latin “decollatio,” is related to the French verb “décoller” (1368)and the noun “décollement” (1635). While décollation refers specifically to the re-moval of the head, décollement, or the action of detaching, refers to the sepa-ration of an organ from those anatomical regions to which it is normallyattached. (See “Décollation,” Le Petit Robert: Dictionnaire Alphabétique andAnalogique de La Langue Française [Paris: Société Du Nouveau Littré, 1971]).This term is also related to “décolleté,” which refers to clothing that is low-cutand to the area from (although often including) the base of the neck to (butnot including) the breasts, and “décollage,” which refers both to an airplane’stakeoff and to the simple act of unsticking. The ambiguity of the double mean-ing of décollation as “beheading” and “detachment” is clearly useful for Kristeva’sclaim that decapitation is at once both an act of vengenance for the oppressed,particularly women, and a placeholder for castration.

This essay comprises one chapter of an exhibition catalog entitled Visions cap-itales authored by Kristeva as a companion to an exhibition that she curated atthe Musée du Louvre. The exhibition was part of the Carte Blanche series, inwhich the Department of Prints and Drawings invites numerous famous intel-lectuals, writers, and filmmakers to curate exhibitions that sought to bring con-temporary philosophical and literary perspectives to bear on older forms ofartistic expression. This series involves inviting guests to curate exhibitions forwhich they have “carte blanche” with regard to the theme, works chosen, and soon. The exhibition took place in the Hall Napoléon, April 27–July 27, 1998.

1. [Trans.] “Jean-Baptiste, préfigurateur par excellence, prête sa figure à lafiguration de l’invisible par excellence: le passage.” In the original, you can seethat Kristeva intends a play on words between “préfigurateur,” “figure,” and “fig-uration,” all of which contain the root “figure,” which can be translated as“image,” “face,” “bust,” “visage,” and “illustration,” among others.

2. Cf. P.-H Stahl, Histoire de la decapitation (Paris: PUF, 1986).3. [Trans.] Given the nature of this publication, the images included in

the original publication of this chapter in Visions capitales are not included in thistranslation. To compensate for this omission, I have included the relevant art

42 Julia Kristeva

historical information for the images included in the chapter as well as other relevant information on the work (e.g., date, artists’ biographical information,etc.) not included in the original. All parenthetical art historical informationshould be considered to be my addition.

4. Cf. [The chapter in Visions capitales entitled] “Le visage et l’expériencedes limites,” p. 147 (the looped video #2 [included in the exhibition]) and LaLune est belle [in Max Ernst, The Hundred-Headless Woman, trans. DorotheaTanning (New York: Braziller, 1981)].

5. Cf. I Samuel XVI, XVII, etc.; II Samuel V, VI, VII, etc.6. I Samuel XVI, 50–52 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with

Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Mur-phy, new rev. std. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]).

7. [Trans.] “La femme de tête” can also signify an intellectual woman orsexually promiscuous woman.

8. Judith I, 1 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, new rev.std. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]).

9. [Trans.] Judith VIII, 7 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Mur-phy, new rev. std. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]).

10. [Trans.] In the French translation cited by Kristeva, Judith asks god togive her the words of a seductress or seductive words: “Donne-moi un langageséducteur.”

11. Judith IX, 12–13 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, new rev.std. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]).

12. Judith XIII, 2 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, new rev.std. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]).

13. Judith XIII, 6–10 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, new rev.std. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]).

14. Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863) writes “Judith” in 1839. The play wouldbe subsequently parodied by Nestroy [ Johann Nestroy, 1801–1862] under thetitle of “Judith and Holofernes.”

15. Sigmund Freud, “ The Taboo of Virginity (Contributions to the Psy-chology of Love III [1918 (1917)],” 208, trans. Angela Richards, in The StandardEdition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XI (1910): FiveLectures on Psychoanalysis, Leonardo da Vinci, and Other Works, ed. James Stracheyin collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson(London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957); 191-208.

16. [Trans.] Kristeva uses a question mark here to highlight that this par-ticular work has only recently been attributed to Cavallino (cf. Jan Simane’s

Decollations 43

exposition catalog Neapolitanische Barockzeichnungen in der graphischen Sammlungdes Hessischen Landesmuseums Darmstadt [Darmstadt: Hessisches Museum, 1994])and was originally attributed to Massimo Stanzione (b ?Orta di Atella, ?1585/d?Naples, ?1656).

17. According to certain specialists, this would have been Correggio’s, aswell as Italian painting’s, first nighttime painting where one can see Mantegna’sstrong influence.

18. Judges XVI, 18–21 (The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible withApocrypha, ed. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller[New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]).

19. Judges XVI, 30 (The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible withApocrypha, ed. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller[New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]).

20. [Trans.] In French, this work is entitled Delilah’s Triumph.21. II Kings IX, 22 (The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible with

Apocrypha, ed. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller[New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]).

22. II Kings IX, 30–35 (The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible withApocrypha ed. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller[New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]).

23. [Trans.] Kristeva cites an image that depicts a skull considered to berepresentative of an important group of skulls from the Levantine Neolithic.They are unique insofar as their features were modeled or recreated with plasterprior to burial, a practice uncommon at the time. Although the skulls containedin the collection of the National Museum in Damascus (i.e., the one in the imagethat Kristeva cites) are part of the “Tell Ramad” skulls found in Tell Ramad,Syria, the skulls to which Kristeva refers in her description in the chapter enti-tled “Le crane: culte et art” in Visions capitales are, apparently, part of the groupof skulls found in Jericho. The latter group is uniquely defined by the shells usedin place of the eyes, while the eyes of the skulls from Tell Ramad were modeledwith grayish plaster. An exemplar of the group of skulls that Kristeva describesin this chapter can be found at the British Museum, London (accession numberAF127414) (Denise Schmant-Besserat, “The Modeled Skull,” in ‘Ain Ghazal,Excavation Reports, Vol. I: Symbols at ‘Ain Ghazal ed. Denise Schmant-Besseratand published under the direction of Gary O. Rollefson and Zeidan Kafafi[Berlin: Ex Oriente, Freie Universität, forthcoming]. Middle East Network In-formation Center, University of Texas–Austin. <http://menic.utexas.edu/menic/ghazal/>). Apparently, the National Museum in Damascus does not own any ofthe skulls found in Jericho. To this end, it is clear that although the image in-cluded in the original publication of Visions capitales displays a skull owned by theNational Museum in Damascus whose eyes were modeled with gray plaster,Kristeva intends the reader to consider the group of skulls found in Jericho (i.e., those for which shells were used to recreate the eyes).

44 Julia Kristeva

24. Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” The StandardEdition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXIII (1937–1939), trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud(London: Hogath Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1991 [1964]). It isnecessary to understand by [the term] “feminine” both the woman’s castrationfantasy and its ancient osmosis of maternal container/contents [le contenant mater-nal] to which Freud compares the “Minoan-Mycenaean civilization” previous tothe notoriety of classical Greece. Cf. also Sigmund Freud, “Female Sexuality,” TheStandard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXI(1927–1931), trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud(London: Hogath Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1991 [1961]).

25. Cf. “Figura” [in Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of EuropeanLiterature, trans. unknown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984[1938])] and [the chapter entitled] “Prophétie en acte,” pp. 71-80 [in Visionscapitales].

26. [Trans.] In French, the word “genre” can mean both “genre” in the senseof a group of objects, artistic pieces, and the like, that share a characteristic incommon as well as “gender” in the sense of the gender of a noun.

27. [Trans.] Kristeva cites a statement made by Mallarmé in a letter to Eugène Lefébure in which he writes, “La destruction fut ma Béatrice” (empha-sis added) (see Stéphane Mallarmé: Correspondance (1862–1871), ed. Henri Mendor [Paris: Gallimard, 1959]; 246).

28. Cf. Henri Cazalis, Henri Regnault, Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre, ed. AlphoneLemerre (Paris: J. Claye, 1872), pp. 8–9. [Trans. This quotation is my translation.]

29. Cf. Mallarmé, letter to Cazalis on April 23, 1871 (see Stéphane Mal-larmé: Correspondance (1862–1871), ed. Henri Mendor [Paris: Gallimard, 1959],246). [Trans. This quotation is my translation.]

30. [Trans.] Kristeva is referring here to Andrea Solario’s (b Milan c. 1465/d before 8 Aug 1524) Head of Saint John the Baptist (1507, Musée duLouvre, Paris).

31. [Trans.] Cf. second unnumbered paragraph at beginning of this Notes section.

32. [Trans.] “It” refers to “la coupure” and is thus represented as “elle” or “she.”33. [Trans.] In Hebrew, this term means “in the beginning.” Kristeva

renders the term as “Berechit,” as is common in Francophone writings (see “Bereshit,” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, ed. JohnBowker [Oxford University Press, 2000]. Oxford Reference Online, Oxford University Press.)

34. Genesis I, 1 (The Westminster Study Edition of The Holy Bible, ed. W. L. Jenkins [Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1948]).

35. [Trans.] “[M]es actes sont mis à mort.”36. [Trans.] This is the first point in the essay that Kristeva highlights that

the first-person voice she has adopted is neither a gendered voice nor her own.

Decollations 45

She signals this fact by including both the masculine and the feminine form ofthe adjective “persecuted,” which she writes as follows: “persécuté(e).”

37. [Trans.] Kristeva uses the term “faits divers,” which, according to theDictionnaire de l’Acadamie Française, pertains specifically to the journalistic prac-tice of grouping and describing the day’s incidents, including accidents, crimes,and so on (see “Faits divers,” Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, tome 1, 9th ed[Paris: Éditions Fayard, 1994], <www.academie-française.fr/dictionnaire>). Theonly equivalent term in English is “police blotter,” which, although it does notoften cover accidents, does group the crimes of the day in a similarly patholog-ical way to the faits divers.

38. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. V: The Captive, trans. C. K. ScottMoncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (London: Folio Society, 1992),60, 337. Cf. R. Coudert, Du feminine dans “A la recherche du temps perdu” de MarcelProust, p. 180 and ff., 425 ([published] doctoral dissertation, University of ParisVII-Denis-Diderot, 1997, Lille: Atelier national de reproduction des thèses deLille, 2004).

39. [Trans.] I have inserted quotation marks around “head” to underscoreKristeva’s use of the word “chef ” to describe Goliath’s head, thereby playing onthe figurative use of the term “head” (e.g., the head of state, the head of a com-pany) and the metaphorical sense of the term “director” or “boss” when used todescribe a person’s head as the source of her rational capabilities and thus the“director” of her will.

40. [Trans.] Lest we are tempted to interpret Kristeva’s use of “affair” tosignify only those of the amorous sort, it is important to remember that, inFrench, l ’affaire can also mean “trial, object of a judicial debate” (my transla-tion) (“Affaire,” Le Robert Micro: dictionnaire d’apprentissage de la langue française[Paris: Dictionnaries Le Robert, 1998]).

41. Cf. Mieke Bal, “Headhunting: Judith on the Cutting Edge of Knowl-edge,” in A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna: The FeminineCompanion to the Bible, 7, ed. Athalya Brenner (1995), 253–285.

42. [Trans.] “Le spectacle s’efface, reviennent l’entaille de la douleur, le trait.”

yanulada


PART II

THE VIOLENCE

OF THE SPECTACLE

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yanulada


3

Meaning against Death

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Kelly Oliver

In her latest book, Hate and Forgiveness, Julia Kristeva suggests that what she calls“the drama of Abu Ghraib tragically reveals that our civilization not only fails toproduce [an] integration of the symbolic Law in the deep strata of [the psyche] thatgoverns sexual pleasure, but that maybe, it [also] aggravates the disintegration ofLaw and desire” (2005a, 346). She says that it is not the army or such and such ad-ministration that has failed, but rather it is the integration of the symbolic Law inthe psychic apparatus that has failed. This failure is not the result of a lapse in lawor the weakening of prohibitions; on the contrary, it is a result of the pervasivenessof surveillance and punitive technologies in all aspects of life. The result is hatredwithout forgiveness. Rather than fore-give meaning to make affects intelligibleand thereby livable, symbolic Law is reduced to regulation and management tech-niques that police without giving form to desire. Kristeva claims that the so-calledblack sheep of Abu Ghraib, the few bad apples, are not exceptional but “average in-habitants of the globalized planet of humanoids trained” by reality shows and theInternet (346). This “exploded rush toward disinhibitied satisfaction” operates asthe counterpoint to the Puritan code, that she identifies with a “ferocious repres-sion,” which robotizes the functions of the new world order. This ferocious re-pression is manifest in policing technologies and professional hyperproductivity,both of which emphasize efficiency in an economy of calculable risks and profitsover meaning. On the other side of law become the science of management are evermore violent forms of entertainment: spectacles, scandals, and sexcapades. It is thecleavage between law and desire, between word and affect, between the symbolicand the body, that according to Kristeva can produce teenage torturers who abuseprisoners seemingly in all innocence—as they claim at their trials—“just for fun.”

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Kristeva diagnoses what she calls this new “malady of civilization” as a failure to integrate the symbolic Law into the psychic apparatus (2005, 347; alltranslations from La haine et le pardon are my own). Ten years ago, in New Mal-adies of the Soul, she described these “maladies of the soul” as failures of repre-sentation caused by a split between word and affect (meaning and being) whichis intensified by media culture with its saturation of images (2002, 207, 443–444). The world of symbols has become disconnected from our affective orpsychic lives; the result is an inability to represent (and thereby live) our emo-tional lives outside of the economy of spectacle. Expressions of affect and emotion take the form of violent images or outrageous confessions of sexual ex-ploits. Our psychic lives are overrun with images of sex and violence on televi-sion, at the movies, or on the Internet, while the idealized romance and everydaylives of movie stars become our prosthetic fantasies. Imagination, creativity, andsublimation are what are at stake in the colonization of our fantasy lives withmedia images. Indeed, according to Kristeva, the possibility of creativity, imag-ination, and representation are impeded by the standardized expressions of massmedia. She predicts

if drugs do not take over your life, your wounds are “healed” with im-ages, and before you can speak about your states of the soul, you drownthem in the world of mass media. The image has an extraordinarypower to harness your anxieties and desires, to take on their intensityand to suspend their meaning. It works by itself. As a result, the psy-chic life of modern individuals wavers between somatic symptoms(getting sick and going to the hospital) and the visual depiction of theirdesires (daydreaming in front of the TV). In such a situation, psychiclife is blocked, inhibited, and destroyed. (2002, 207)

Media images become substitute selves, substitute affects, that impede ratherthan facilitate the transfer of bodily drives and affects into signification. Im-ages, seemingly transparent, substitute for questioning and interpreting themeaning of the body and therefore of life. The psyche or soul itself hangs inthe balance.

In her earliest work, Kristeva makes the presentation of the means of pro-duction of meaning and value the primary criteria for what she calls the “revo-lution in poetic language.” The transformative possibilities of revolutionarylanguage, or what in her later work she calls “intimate revolt” depends on mak-ing questioning-interpreting and the process of questioning-interpreting explicit.Ultimately, what must be called into question and constantly reassessed are theunconscious forces that lay behind our actions, particularly our pleasure in vio-lence. Through representation accompanied by critical hermeneutics, we can givemeaning to our violent impulses that may help us avoid acting on them. In Kris-teva’s words, “insofar as jouissance is thought/written/represented, it traverses evil,

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and thereby it is perhaps the most profound manner of avoiding the radical evilthat would be the stopping of representation and questioning” (2002, 443).

When continued questioning is the heart of representation, it is a form oftranslation through which meaning is given to being as the gift that bestows hu-manity. But this constant translation requires time and energy, scare commodi-ties in today’s global economy, where questioning is considered inefficient, apoor use of time; and interpretation is a waste of resources unless it results inprofits recognized by the value hierarchies of global capitalism. As Kristeva says“the conditions of modern lives—with the primacy of technology, image, speed,and so forth, inducing stress and depression—have a tendency to reduce psy-chical space and to abolish the faculty of representation. Psychical curiosityyields before the exigencies of so-called efficiency” (2002, 444). Because it takestime and energy and its profits are not immediately grasped, this type of cu-riosity is not marketable in the new world order. Within this order, meaning be-comes a commodity like any other that is valuable only if it can be marketed,distributed, and sold at a profit. The fungibility of meaning, however, places itwithin an economy of exchange that levels its values for life, which Kristevacalls the “par-don of interpretation,” which cannot be calculated.

For within the economy of exchange, substitution can never move beyondfetishism; there the dynamic and poetic operations of metaphorical substitutionare reduced to products or things. Consumer culture proliferates the empty desirefor products that create their own needs and only ever lead to partial, incomplete,and therefore short-lived satisfactions. The rich are idolized for their wealth andproperty, individuals with things. Individuals themselves become fungible. Andmonetary value stands in for ethical value. But these objects that we crave cannottouch the more profound longing for meaningful lives that comes not through ahunger for consumer goods but rather through a passion for life. Unlike hunger,passion cannot be temporarily satisfied. Unlike the thirst for wealth and things,passion has no object; it is not defined in terms of possession and calculations. Pas-sion gives more energy than it takes, in excess of calculations and exchange value.Passion for life is what we risk losing when we reduce freedom to the free marketand peace to a leveling universalism that subjects the planet to our norms.

Kristeva insists that the new maladies of the soul are not the result of abreakdown or abolition of prohibition but rather the disintegration of prohibi-tion. Following Lacan, she describes the two sides of the Law as prohibition onthe one side and the command to enjoy on the other. With violent prohibitioncomes violent transgression. Kristeva extends (and limits) this Lacanian insightin relation to the culture of the spectacle in which extreme forms of both pro-hibition and promiscuity are marketable. Abu Ghraib is a symptom of what she calls this “new malady of civilization” insofar as violent sadomasochisticabuses are performed and even photographed in all innocence as “just havingfun.” Desire takes a detour through a “manic jouissance that nourishes itself onthe sexual victimization of others” (2005a, 348).

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Regression or “Just Having Fun”It is as if the subject occupies an abyss between law and desire and thereforetakes refuge from violent repression through regression. Rather than integrateprohibitions and inhibit violent drive force, these “subjects” cordon off prohibi-tions and keep them separate from their sexual and emotional lives where theyretreat into polymorphous perversion without guilt. They/we retreat to a pre-subjective and preobjective psychic dynamic that Kristeva associates with ab-jection; they play with and eroticize the in-between, the ambiguous, the lack ofboundaries to protect themselves from falling into abjection. It is not exactly thatthese “innocent” subjects don’t “know the difference between right and wrong,”but that by eroticizing the abject, they “purify” it and thereby purify themselves.Their perverse desire for abjection becomes a defense against contamination;and fear of contamination—phobia—motivates their perversion. So, rather thanintegrate the symbolic Law with its prohibitions and command for pleasure,they live in-between in the space of the cleavage between these two aspects ofthe law. This cleavage or split renders the symbolic Law ineffective in setting upsymbolic substitutes for violent drives. Strong prohibition leads to phobia, whichin turn leads to perversion as a protection against that which is most feared be-cause it is most prohibited. Phobia of others is negotiated by eroticizing whatis seen as their abjection and making them victims of sexual abuse. The disin-tegration of the symbolic Law leaves us with “innocent” parties who, within thepsychic logic of perversion, escape guilt by regressing to a time before guilt, atime before proper subjects who take proper objects, which is to say a time be-fore responsibility. These “innocent” subjects dwell, even wallow, in abjectionwith the pervert’s guiltless glee. They become the cheerleaders of abjection forwhom sadomasochistic violence toward themselves and others becomes the pre-requisite for a good party.

Think of the 2005 Hollywood blockbuster movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith—whichgenerated more off-screen heat in the tabloids than on. There, Brad Pitt andAngelina Jolie play a couple, John and Jane Smith, whose marriage has lost itsspark after only “five or six” years and who rekindle their passion by beating,shooting, and cutting each other. The film begins with the couple in therapy re-luctant to answer questions about their lackluster marriage, especially about theirsex life. In the course of the film we learn that unbeknownst to each other, bothare accomplished assassins working for competing companies. They sleepwalkthrough their marriage and everyday lives together like automatons; while theirviolent killing sprees are executed as manic moments in their otherwise emptylives. The few words they exchange are passionless—until they receive ordersfrom their respective companies to kill each other. Unlike the failed couples ther-apy mockingly shown at the beginning and end of the film, their brutality towardeach other enflames their desires and reinitiates sex and conversation, both ofwhich revolve around violence. Neither loses sleep over their killing sprees; Jane


brags that she has lost feeling in three of her fingers and it seems that, outsideof their violent mania, neither of them feel much of anything, even for each other.They have become killing machines who abuse others as automatically as theybrush their teeth or eat dinner. Their violence is so mechanical that when orderedthey turn it on each other without a second thought. And it is their automaticviolence that apparently saves them from their robotic marriage.

Watching this glorification of sadomasochism and sexual violence, I was re-minded of Abu Ghraib, where sexual torture by young military personnel wasused to enhance their sex lives: for example, one soldier gave another picturesof prisoners forced to simulate sex acts as a birthday present; and pictures of sexbetween soldiers were interspersed with the torture photographs. The idea thatabusing others is a form of sexual arousal seems to move easily between theeveryday fare of sexual violence and the violent sex of Hollywood films and In-ternet porn and the shocking photographs from Abu Ghraib. Why is oneshocking and the other banal? Is it simply that one is real and the other is fan-tasy? Is it because, as Freud says, the uncanny effect of the real is more power-ful than artifice? The relation between reality and fantasy is precisely thedangerous terrain of human habitation, filled as it is with hair-triggered landmines, images both virtual and real.

We might diagnose these “abysmal individuals” as part of an abysmal culturein which regression is a defense against repression. If the “proper” or “socially ac-ceptable” is circumscribed by repression of violent and aggressive impulses, thenregression to an infantile state prior to that repression circumvents the gap be-tween reality and pleasure set up by repression. In this way, the regressed subjectdoes not have to wait for a substitute or delayed satisfaction à la the reality prin-ciple in the face of the pleasure principle. Rather, the regressed subject reverts toan unrestrained pleasure principle within his or her emotional life even whileacknowledging a harsh disciplinary structure in other aspects of life. In this way,reality and pleasure are segregated and compartmentalized; and the more harshthe superego, the easier it is to give way to polymorphous perversity. Individualsand culture can simultaneously foster conservative mores, sexual promiscuity, andsadomasochistic violence. We can engage in the rhetoric of tolerance and globalfreedom while our military uses sex, loud music, and dogs as torture strategies aspart of what is openly called the “occupation of Iraq.”

A theory of regression may be useful in articulating the difference betweenperversion and sublimation, which in turn may help us think through the func-tion and effect of the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib as opposed to otherkinds of photographs or representations, including a film like Mr. & Mrs. Smithor works of art that represent violence. A theory of regression, however—likepsychoanalytic theory in general—must be supplemented with some form ofsociopolitical analysis of the function of the rhetoric of innocence and igno-rance and their valorization within our culture, where we idolize Forrest Gumpand demand that the complexities of life be described in shelf after shelf of

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manuals “for dummies.” We need to delve more deeply into our love of dumband dumber than I can in this context; but for now let’s see what psychoanaly-sis has to tell us about regression.

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud argues that small childrenare without “shame, disgust and morality” and therefore do not repress their“instincts of scopophilia, exhibitionism and cruelty,” which manifest themselvesas “satisfaction in exposing their bodies,” “curiosity to see other people’s geni-tals,” “cruelty towards animals and playmates,” and make children “eager spec-tators of the processes of micturition and defaecation” (1989, 268–269). Whenrepression of these instincts sets in, they must find alternative outlets for theseurges in either sublimation or neurosis, which often manifests as somatic symp-toms. There is an integral link between repression and sublimation that isbreached in the regressive formation of perversion. Prohibitions that are recog-nized in one aspect of life are foreclosed from other aspects, particularly whenit comes to sexual pleasure. As we have seen, Kristeva maintains that prohibi-tions or the symbolic paternal law is not integrated into psychic life; it existsbut can be compartmentalized through the depressive mania of the regressedpervert. On the one side, the prohibition is strong but it is cut off from any af-fective significance; it is empty of any real threat insofar as the subject experi-ences the law as separated from his or her pleasures. The law appears asmechanical regulation, management and surveillance designed to maximize ef-ficiency and control but without touching the humanity of meaningful rela-tions with self or others. The law has become nothing more than the rules ofengagement manipulated to establish control over others rather than social re-lations with them. The military, with its chain of command, disciplinary regi-mens, and discourse of containment, harshly and mechanically administered,fuels the containment of discipline itself against the regressive pleasure of in-fantile perversion. Rather than give meaning to the body by translating semi-otic bodily drive force into language, rather than give form to polymorphousdesires and thereby discharge them into the safety net of the symbolic, whichis a prerequisite for relations with ourselves and others, law as mere rules of en-gagement and containment force the disintegration of bodily pleasure andthereby prevents meaningful relationships.

Hate as a Defense against VulnerabilityIn Hate and Forgiveness, Kristeva raises the question “how to inscribe in the con-ception of the human itself—and, consequently in philosophy and political practice—the constitutive part played by destructivity, vulnerability, disequilibriumwhich are integral to the identity of the human species and the singularity of thespeaking subject?” (2005a, 115). She has dealt with destructivity throughout herwork, especially in Powers of Horror in which she describes the negotiation with theabject as a stage in the process of becoming a subject by excluding that which


threatens the borders of proper identity. Starting with her earliest work, she insistson the role of negativity in psychic life. And, in Revolution in Poetic Language, shecalls negativity the fourth term of the dialectic; negativity is the driving force of psy-chic life. In Intimate Revolt, she maintains that it is questioning that transformsnegativity into something other than merely negation or negation of negation;through endless questioning, negativity is transformed from a destructive or merelydiscriminatory force that separates self and other, inside and outside, and becomesthe positive force of creativity and the nourishing of psychic space (2002, 226).The negativity of drive force becomes the positive force of signification throughrepetition and response from the other; it becomes the sublimation of drive forceinto language. In regression, however, not yet even a discriminatory force, negativityremains a destructive force. Successfully negotiating and renegotiating abjectionsets up the precarious border between self and other; but when the “subject” re-mains stuck at the level of abjection, confusion between self and other can be boththreatening to the extreme of phobia and arousing to the extreme of perversion. Itis the polymorphous perversion of this regressed state that can lead to sexual pleas-ure in violating others. Eroticizing the abject becomes a form of purification thatprotects the abysmal subject from “contamination” from its phobic object/other.

In Powers of Horror it is the uncanny effect of the other who becomes thecatalyst for the return of repressed otherness—the abject—in the self that pro-vokes hatred and loathing, which in turn either can lead to acting out againstothers or to sublimating the experience of uncanny otherness through repre-sentation. In La haine et le pardon, the uncanny effect of the other is specificallyassociated with vulnerability. Kristeva claims that along with liberty, equality,and fraternity, vulnerability is a fourth term that we inherit from Enlighten-ment humanism (2005a, 115). Speaking of the handicapped, and extending heranalysis to racism, classism, and religious persecution, Kristeva once again re-minds us of the narcissistic wound that constitutes humanity as a scar at thesuture of being and meaning. It is our position in-between that makes us vul-nerable, and also free. Precisely that which makes us human and opens up aworld of meaning, makes us vulnerable. For as Kristeva says, psychic life is an“infinite quest for meaning, a bios transversal of zoë, a biography with and forothers” (2005a, 115). The uncanny encounter with another, then, puts us faceto face with our own vulnerability “with and for others.” And, it is the fear anddenial of our own vulnerability that causes us to hate and exploit the vulnera-bility of others. To repeat Kristeva’s question, how can we acknowledge that tobe human is to be vulnerable? In other words, how can we accept our own vul-nerability without violently projecting it onto others whom we oppress and tor-ture or alternatively “civilized” and protected?

For Kristeva these questions point to the need for psychoanalysis, or inter-pretation more generally: We integrate our own violent impulses into our psy-chic lives in productive ways by interpreting them. Kristeva maintains that “inthis postmodern time of clashes of religions, which are times of war without

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end, psychoanalytic interpretation is useful in revealing the multifaceted destinyof hate which makes and unmakes the human species . . . that psychic life needsin order to continue to live” with its own hatred and loathing (2005a, 373). Theidea is that by interpreting our hatred and loathing as a response to our own vul-nerability, we gain the distance necessary to prevent ourselves from acting onthem. We turn our fear and loathing into words so that we can live with themand with others.

But interpretation operates as a counterbalance to real world violence onlywhen it is also sublimatory, which is to say, when it effectively discharges driveenergy into symbols—when it converts being into meaning and affect into rep-resentation. Moreover, this sublimatory interpretation should also be the sourceof a jouissance that takes us beyond the realm of finite sensuous pleasures andputs us in touch with the realm of infinite meaning or what Kristeva might call“psychic rebirth.” This joy in playing with words gives meaning to being as atype of “par-don” for violent drives, now expressed in words rather than in ac-tions. This analytic jouissance sublimates the death drive by replacing the ec-stasy of interpretation for the manic pursuit of satisfaction on the other side ofdepression, where pleasure gives way to joy.

The distinction between pleasure and joy is central to separating perversionfrom sublimation. And walking the line between perversion and sublimationmay allow us to begin to discern degrees of difference between the photographsfrom Abu Ghraib, the Hollywood film Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Goya’s Disasters ofWar series, Picasso’s Guernica, or Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, toname just a few examples. The guiding, perhaps intractable, question is, Howdo we distinguish between sublimatory or creative forms of representation andthose that merely repeat or even perpetuate violence? Kristeva claims that artis-tic production can sublimate the death drive and thereby prevent killing; buthow do we delineate differences between types of artistic production in relationto their sublimatory value. While Kristeva insists on the necessity of artisticcreativity as a protection against death, she condemns media culture or the cul-ture of the spectacle for flattening psychic space by closing down sublimation.Can television and other forms of media sublimate in the same way that highart can? Is Kristeva’s preference for high art and criticism of popular mediamerely elitism? At stake here is the effect and function of representations of violence that saturate media images and fuel the culture of the spectacle.

In Visions capitales, the book that accompanied the Louvre exhibit on sev-ered heads in the history of art curated by Kristeva in 1998, she repeatedly sug-gests that artistic representations of decapitation are sublimatory means ofnegotiating anxieties over castration and death, what following her latest workwe could call “anxieties over vulnerability.” The threat of decapitation has longbeen connected with the threat of castration. And given various philosophies ofthe significance of the face, particularly that of Emmanuel Levinas, it is reason-able to think that in an important sense the face and the head are the most vul-


nerable parts of the human body; or at least insofar as they are associated withlanguage, thought and ethics, as well as kissing and looking, they signal what wetake to be essential characteristics of humanity, including, perhaps especially, vul-nerability in relation to others. In Visions capitales, Kristeva suggests that artistspaint and sculpt severed heads to mitigate anxieties over vulnerability as an al-ternative to projecting and abjecting it onto others. Here and throughout herwork, she argues that representations of violence can prevent real violence; echo-ing Lacan, she maintains that what is effaced in the imaginary and the symbolicrisks returning at the level of the real. Analyzing images of beheadings from theFrench Revolution, she concludes that perhaps the figures of decapitation andsevered heads can be seen as an intimate form of resistance to what she calls the“democracy” of the guillotine. She says “above all, if art is a transfiguration, it haspolitical consequences” (1998, 110; all translations of Visions capitales are my ownin consultation with a translation by Sarah Hansen). This sentiment could notbe more relevant today as we witness gruesome beheadings in videotaped spec-tacles that could be diagnosed as a refusal to examine the role of fantasy in con-structions of reality, where the inability to represent sacrifice leads to real sacrifice,and where reality itself has become a commodity.

What is the difference between Caravaggio’s painting of beheading in Davidand Goliath and recent videotapes of beheadings in Iraq? This question itself maybe shocking because the difference could not be more obvious: one is art whilethe other is making a spectacle of gruesome murder. But given psychoanalysis’insistence on the role of fantasy in perceptions of reality, can the difference besimply that between artifice and reality? If artificial death abolishes the uncannyeffect of real death, does this imply that the more realistic the representation themore uncanny it becomes? What about artists such as August Raffet or Geri-cault, whom Kristeva discusses, and who used real severed heads and accidentvictims as their models (cf. Kristeva 1998)? And what of the artifice involved inthe ritualistic staging and recording of the beheadings in Iraq? What of the stag-ing involved in using green hoods and stacking prisoners in a pyramid for thecamera at Abu Ghraib or standing a hooded prisoner on a box, arms outstretchedattached to wires, reminiscent of crucifixion? Where is the border between arti-fice and reality? Navigating that border is precisely what is threatened by thecontemporary fascination with reality television and live Internet Webcams. Yes,Freud is right that the uncanny effect of the real is more powerful than artifice;but does the need for greater degrees of reality in violence and sexual victimiza-tion of others become perverse when representation becomes a form of actingout? Perhaps degrees of perversion can only be measured in terms of the suffer-ing of its “objects”. Perhaps as reality itself becomes commodified and fetishized,we crave more extreme forms of bodily experience. Think of the prominence ofmasochistic practices popular with cutters who ritualistically cut themselves tofeel something, or kids who play the hanging game to cut off their air supply.They seem to want something “more real.” In addition, surveillance technologies

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produced to serve regulatory and disciplinary power, as Foucault might say, alsoproduce desires for more voyeuristic and exhibitionist sexual practices using cam-eras, video recorders, telephones, and the Internet. And military technologiesdesigned to facilitate surveillance and containment are now used to disseminateimages of “real live bodies in action” that cannot be contained. Reality is no longersomething we live but something we crave.

The “F” WordIn her discussions of freedom and peace in La haine et le pardon, Kristeva sug-gests more allusive “measures” of the balance between perversion and sublima-tion, delineations intended to prevent sadomasochistic violence that leads tosuffering. She argues that global capitalism has appropriated one version of free-dom from the Enlightenment and has mistakenly taken its legacy to be abstractuniversalism; following Kant, this prominent version of freedom is not nega-tively conceived as the absence of constraint but as the possibility of self-beginning that opens the way for the enterprising individual and self-initiatives(2005b, 29). This is the freedom of the free market, which, Kristeva says, “cul-minates in the logic of globalization and of the unrestrained free-market. TheSupreme Cause (God) and the Technical Cause (the Dollar) are its two co-existing variants which guarantee the functioning of our freedom within thislogic of instrumentalism” (30). She acknowledges that this form of freedom is the foundation for human rights, the French notion of Liberty-Equality-Fraternity, and the English Habeas Corpus (31). Yet, this notion of freedom asequation in which every individual is equal to every other leads to somethinglike the free-market exchange of individuals in a calculus that offers only for-mal freedom and empty equality. Freedom becomes defined in terms ofeconomies and markets; and governments liberate through occupation to openup new markets and free new consumers with little regard for cultural differ-ences that might undermine the universalization of this fungible freedom. Tech-nology becomes the great equalizer through which all individuals are reducedto this lowest common denominator; its brokers are paying lip service to re-spect for cultural differences even as they exchange some freedoms for others inthe name of the “F” word: Freedom with a capital F.

It is noteworthy that President George W. Bush introduced the phrase“women of cover”—an analog to women of color—in relation to the freedom toshop. In a speech before the State Department shortly after September 11, 2001,Bush told “stories of Christian and Jewish women alike helping women of cover,Arab-American women, go shop because they were afraid to leave their home”and in a news conference a week later he again invoked the religious unity of Amer-ica epitomized in women getting together to shop: “In many cities when Christianand Jewish women learned that Muslim women, women of cover, were afraid ofgoing out of their homes alone . . . they went shopping with them . . . an act that


shows the world the true nature of America,” suggesting that the true nature ofAmerica is the freedom to shop for women of all faiths (Saffire 2001, 22).

Perhaps it is telling that Bush’s 2004 inaugural address, which repeats therhetoric of women’s freedom, appeared on CNN.com next to a Victoria’s Secretadvertisement with a provocative photo of a bikini-clad model—with pursed lipslooking seductively at the camera—that reads “Create your perfect bikini . . . suityourself, any way you like.” As I argue elsewhere (Oliver 2007), freedom becomeswomen’s freedom, which becomes women’s sexual freedom, which becomes thecommodification of women’s sexuality reduced to the right to choose any bikini.

While Kristeva reminds us that “other civilizations have other visions ofhuman freedom,” she is concerned with a second version of freedom that reemergesfrom the Western tradition as a counterbalance to universalized individualism: “thissecond kind of freedom is very different from the kind of calculating logic thatleads to unbridled consumerism; it is a conception that is evident in theSpeech-Being in the Presencing of the Self to the Other” (2005b, 30). In otherwords, this freedom comes through language, or more accurately meaning, from theOther now negotiated by a singular self. This singularity is at odds with individu-alism insofar as it cannot be reduced to a common denominator in the name ofequality. Indeed, neither meaning nor singularity can be fixed within an economyof calculation; they are fluid processes that engender the products and individualsof the free market as leftovers whose cause-and-effect logic effaces the veryprocesses through which they arise. Both meaning and singularity are imbued withunconscious dynamics that may be manipulated by the market but that always ex-ceed it. This second kind of freedom is not concerned with maximizing relationsthrough efficient technologies of marketing, management, and surveillance, butrather with meaningful relationships. Freedom as the quest for meaning is an on-going project. Kristeva calls it an “aspiration . . . driven by a real concern for unique-ness and fragility of each and every human life, including those of the poor, thedisabled, the retired, and those who rely on social benefits. It also requires specialattention to sexual and ethnic differences, to men and women considered in theirunique intimacy rather than as simple groups of consumers” (31).

Acknowledging the link between freedom and vulnerability moves us furtherfrom conceiving of freedom as the absence of prohibition to conceiving of freedomas the absence of sacrifice. Freedom is not anything goes but everyone stays, notno-thing is excluded but no one is excluded. In Visions capitales, Kristeva sug-gests that artistic representation expresses a freedom that resides “not in the effacement of prohibitions, but in the renouncement of the chain/gear of sacri-fices (l’engrenage des sacrifices),” which moves us beyond loss to “a joy that loses sac-rificial complacency/indulgence itself (la complaisance sacrificielle elle-même)” (1998,152). Transcending the sacrificial economy requires moving beyond identities basedon the exclusion of others toward inclusion and interaction enabled by question-ing and representing what it means to be an “individual,” an “American,” a“human,” and so on. This reversal of perversion with its fear and loathing of the

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other requires overcoming the economy of abjection through the processes of sublimation. Moving beyond the abjection and exclusion of others that results inphobic and perverse identities and relations, sublimation enabled by representationtranslates violent impulses into creative life force. Sublimated jouissance replacesviolence toward self and others; representations of sacrifice and human vulnerabilityreplace literal sacrifice, which is to say that sacrifice is itself sacrificed to creativityand this sacrifice of sacrifice is definitive of humanity.

“Amorous Disasters”Instead of engaging in rites of sacrifice that return sacrifice to an imaginary orsymbolic realm, fundamentalists act out their violent fantasies in the real world,which, as Kristeva warns, leads the members of one religion to sacrifice themembers of another, along with themselves (cf. 2002, 428). We continue to wit-ness this sacrificial violence taken to the extreme with suicide bombers who sac-rifice themselves to kill others. Kristeva claims that “the triumph of the cultureof death, disguised behind an appeasement (une pacification) promised beyond,reaches its height in the figure of the kamikaze: the shahida” (2005a, 431). Shesuggests that the cleavage between zoë and bios is most violently realized in thedestructive acts of women suicide bombers. She explains that women have beenrelegated to the realm of procreation or being (zoë) and been denied access torepresentation (bios). Yet, insofar as they are “sent off to sacrifice and martyr-dom in imitation of the warlike man and possessor of power,” they are killingin the name of principles that have excluded them; the representatives (neverrepresenting) of life are sent to kill. This is to say that the very culture that reduces them to the bearers of life now makes them the bearers of death.

But as Kristeva describes it, the situation of these women is much morecomplex. It is not just that they come to represent a contradiction between beingand meaning but also they find themselves occupying a no-man’s-land betweenone culture and another, between one set of prohibitions and another, such thatmartyrdom becomes the only way to reach paradise (2005a, 90). Kristeva proposes that these women occupy two incompatible universes of family andschool, which results in a “double personality” or a “psychic cleavage” that ren-ders them politically vulnerable (2005a, 89-90). Relying on Barbara Victor’sportraits of recent shahidas, Kristeva argues that most of them are young womenwho are “brilliant students and who have integrated modern knowledge andmores” (90). But their surrounding environment, especially their families, arehostile to this aspect of their personalities. Condemned by their intimates, and“guilty of their difference,” depression resulting from their exclusion leads to adesperate hope that they can regain standing in their community by martyringthemselves (90). Here Kristeva’s analysis is reminiscent of Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of the paradoxical position of subaltern women, caught between a modern world in terms of which their traditions seemingly render them


passive objects and traditions that seemingly make them agents, but only oftheir own suicide.

Kristeva calls the lives of these women “amorous disasters—pregnancy out-side of marriage, sterility, desire for phallic equality with man” (2005a, 431);they are shunned and shamed by their families for their breach of traditional val-ues, particularly as they center around marriage and children (women’s role asprocreator). Kristeva goes so far as to say that “fundamentalism dedicates thosewomen it wants to rid itself of to idealization and the sacred cult, for theamorous life of these women, with their intolerable and inassimilable novelties,marks the incapacity of the religious word to pacify the ambivalent bonds offree individuals, emancipated of archaic prohibitions but deprived of new jus-tifications for their lives.” Undesirable women are sacrificed to traditional lawas their last attempt at redemption. Their difference can only be forgiventhrough their sacrifice as a form of purification ritual. But this notion of for-giveness is merely the flip side of vengeance; it is a perversion that idolizes sac-rifice and killing. We could say that forgiveness is precisely what these womenlack; that the lack of forgiveness leads to depression and suicide (cf. Oliver2004). Analytic forgiveness comes through interpretation that gives meaning tolife as a gift, par-don. This alternative notion of forgiveness operates outside ofthe economy of vengeance or judgment to offer a “rebirth” within representa-tion outside of sacrifice (which is to say within the sacrifice of sacrifice). For-giveness offers a renegotiation with the law such that meaning supportsindividuality, or more precisely singularity, rather than prohibiting it.

While the enlisted women whose photographs have been associated withwar in Iraq may not be amorous disasters, they are poor women who typicallyjoin the military to avoid the poverty that can lead to various sorts of “amorous dis-asters.” Think of Lynndie England, pregnant by Abu Ghraib “ringleader” CharlesGraner (who later married another soldier indicted for abuse, Megan Ambuhl) atthe time she was charged with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. England’s story couldbe one of amorous disaster. With her baby son in her arms at her trial, she was bitter about Graner’s marriage to Ambuhl. And it was Graner’s testimony that undermined her defense and led to the retrial in which she was convicted. In anarticle entitled “Behind Failed Abu Ghraib Plea, A Tangle of Bonds and Betray-als,” journalist Kate Zernike described the soap opera–like scene: “In a militarycourtroom in Texas last week was a spectacle worthy of ‘As the World Turns’:Pfc. Lynndie R. England, the defendant, holding her 7-month-old baby; the im-prisoned father, Pvt. Charles A. Graner Jr., giving testimony that ruined whatlawyers said was her best shot at Leniency; and waiting outside, another defen-dant from the notorious abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Megan M. Ambuhl,who had recently wed Private Graner—a marriage Private England learned aboutonly days before” (Zernike 2005).

Kristeva’s discussion of amorous disasters is embedded in her delineation oftwo pillars of peace that she finds in Kant’s Perpetual Peace: “first, that of

62 Kelly Oliver

universality—all men are equal and all must be saved. Second is the principle ofprotection of human life, sustained by the love of the life of each (l’amour de la viede chacun)” (2005a, 424). She insists that although we are far from achievingeconomic justice for all, it is the second pillar and not the first that is in the mostdanger today: “Yet whatever the weaknesses, the efforts for realizing social, eco-nomic, and political justice have never in the history of humanity been as con-siderable and widespread. But it is the second pillar of the imaginary of peace thatseems to me today to suffer most gravely: The love of life eludes us; there is nolonger a discourse for it” (2005, 424-425). It is not just economic, racial, and re-ligious inequalities that prevent peace, but also the lack of a discourse of the loveof life, of passion for life. The culture of death fosters war over peace because weare losing the ability to imagine the meaning of life and thereby ways to em-brace it. Life as amorous disaster is a result of women liberated from traditionalroles that reduced the meaning of their lives to procreation, but without beingable to create new justifications for life. Even as women and others gain the neg-ative freedom from prohibitions, how do they gain the positive freedom to cre-ate the meaning of their lives anew? What does their unique biological differencemean outside of a discourse that reduces them to procreation? How can theirsingularity be sublimated into creative forms of representation that give mean-ing to their uniqueness beyond an economy of perversion that relegates differ-ence to the realm of abjection through phobia or eroticization?

How can the cleavage between zoë and bios, between biological life and re-counted life, between being and meaning, be repaired? When diagnosing thedisintegration of the paternal law in relation to emotional life, Kristeva suggeststhat it is a matter of integration. But doesn’t integration imply once again free-dom as calculus, a culture or globe made whole through the integration of itsparts? Perhaps we should conceive of the relationship between different elementsas an interaction instead of integration. Kristeva suggests as much in her discus-sion of rights for the handicapped when she says “I distrust the term ‘integration’of the handicapped: it feels like charity towards those who don’t have the samerights of others. I prefer ‘interaction’ which expresses politics becoming ethics, byextending the political pact up to the frontiers of life” (2005a, 102). In this re-gard, we should be mindful of at least two senses of “integration”: on the onehand, the mathematical process of finding the solution of a differential equationor producing behavior compatible with one’s environment or, on the other hand,opening society or culture to all without erasing their differences.

What is lacking or threatened by modern forms of perverse regression isnot merely the integration of law into psychic life but any interaction betweenpleasure and jouissance. Bodily pleasures at the level of being are cut off from joyenabled by the realm of meaning. Jouissance is reduced to pleasures unto deathbecause pleasure is cut adrift from meaning. Rather than inscribe being withmeaning, or give form or structure to bodily affects and drives, symbolic Law isreduced to techniques designed to manage, regulate, and spy to more efficiently


contain. Within this military-industrial consumer culture, we mess around inthe abject space between images and reality to the point of a perverse regressionto infantile pleasures in sadomasochistic violence toward ourselves and others.The only way to imagine sexual fulfillment and satisfaction with life is throughpossession and violence. When, like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, we can only imaginepleasure as brutalized bruised and bleeding bodies, perverse pleasure replacespassion for life.

ReferencesFreud, Sigmund. 1989. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In The Freud

Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: Norton.Kristeva, Julia. 1998. Visions capitales. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux.———. 2002. The Portable Kristeva. Ed. Kelly Oliver. New York: Columbia

University Press.———. 2005a. La haine et le pardon. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard.———. 2005b. “Thinking about Liberty in Dark Times.” The Holberg Prize

Seminar, 2004. Bergen, Norway: Holberg Publications. This lecture, delivered in English, is also the first chapter of La haine et le pardon(2005), in French as “Penser la liberté en temps de déstresse.”

Oliver, Kelly. 2004. The Colonization of Psychic Space: Toward a PsychoanalyticSocial Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2007. Women as Weapons of War. New York: Columbia University Press.Saffire, William. 2001. “Coordinates: The New Location Locution.” The New

York Times Magazine, October 28, p. 22.Zernike, Kate. 2005. “Behind Failed Abu Ghraib Plea, A Tale of Betrayal.” New

York Times, May 10, pp. A1, A14.

yanulada


4

Kristeva’s IntimateRevolt and the Thought Specular:

Encountering the (Mulholland) Drive

��

Frances L. Restuccia

Happiness depends on intimacy. At least that is the premise of Julia Kristeva’snew work on intimate revolt. But intimacy is under a grave threat—that of ex-tinction. The background of this current crisis involves a certain moral and aes-thetic dimension of Western culture, which used to be “an essential componentof European culture . . . fashioned by doubt and critique,” having become, inKristeva’s estimation, seriously attenuated, “marginalized,” rendered “a decora-tive alibi [merely] tolerated by” the society of the spectacle (2002, 4). Posing aninsidious challenge to intimacy and consequently to psychic life itself, enter-tainment, performance, and show culture has taken center stage in the Westand, worse—along with the uniformity produced by the market, the media, andthe Internet—seems currently poised to robotize the entire world via global-ization. “The conditions of modern lives,” Kristeva worries,

with the primacy of technology, image, speed, and so forth, inducingstress and depression—have a tendency to reduce psychical space andto abolish the faculty of representation. Psychical curiosity yields be-fore the exigencies of so-called efficiency; the unquestionable advancesof the neurosciences are then ideologically valorized and advocated asantidotes to psychical maladies. Gradually, these maladies are deniedas such and reduced to their biological substrata, a neurological defi-ciency. (2002, 11)

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66 Frances L. Restuccia

Through prayer, dialogue, art, and analysis, we therefore must seek “thegreat infinitesimal emancipation: restarting ourselves unceasingly” (2002, 223).Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Kristeva’s newest work is its attempt tosquare intimacy with political life.

Kristeva elaborates her notion of intimate revolt in two recent volumes—The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (2000) and Intimate Revolt: The Powers andLimits of Psychoanalysis (2002). The first five chapters of the latter volume lay outKristeva’s emphasis on four constituents of her concept of intimate revolt: inti-macy, time, forgiveness, and image. While she italicizes the role of art (paint-ing, sculpture, music) and in particular literature in this revolt—which she notesis a “synonym of dignity” as well as “our mysticism” (2002, 4)—the fifth chap-ter, “Fantasy and Cinema,” focuses on film. A psychoanalyst, psychoanalytictheorist, professor, and novelist, Kristeva is unnotorious as a film theorist.Nonetheless, that is the genre to which she devotes an entire, quite powerful,and intricately theoretical chapter of Intimate Revolt; film is, after all, a semi-otic art form in which one would expect intimate revolt to thrive.

For one thing intimate revolt entails sensory experience, a primary alter-native, in Kristeva’s mind, to our spectacular and robotizing society. Revolt like-wise necessitates jouissance, which is to Kristeva indispensable for the life of thepsyche and therefore to the “faculty of representation and questioning that spec-ifies the human being” (2002, 7). Texts that incite such a revolt are even said tooffer the extreme experience of psychosis; the reader or viewer must “come upagainst a psychical reality that endangers consciousness,” exposing him or herto the “pulse of being” (9). The reader or viewer experiences an “erasure of sub-ject/object borders, an assault of the drive” (9).

Kristeva’s idea here is founded on the Heideggerian assumption that “Beingitself is wrought by nothingness” (2002, 8). Modern philosophy and psycho-analysis attain a “border region of the speaking being that is psychosis.” To Kris-teva, in a parallel fashion, artistic revolt too achieves “non-sense,” “by unfoldingmeaning to the point of sensations and drives, finding its pulse in a realm thatis no longer symbolic but semiotic.” Primarily visual, cinema has great poten-tial to participate in this process of moving to the psychotic dark mass of humanbeing, of disseminating meaning among sensations and drives, of escorting theviewer/subject into “hazardous regions” in which “unity is annihilated” (10).

Kristeva conceptualizes both art and psychoanalysis, then, as potentially activeagents in an “interrogation into Nothingness and negativity.” Freud, she explains,regarded the symbol and thought themselves as “a sort of negativity,” that is, as “anunbinding proper to the drive,” “the death drive” (2002, 9). Kristeva posits thequestion of under what conditions the death drive transforms into “symbolizingnegativity” (9). Such a transformation occurs when “thought or writing in revolt”finds a representation for a confrontation with “the unity of law, being, and theself ” (10), a jouissance-producing process. Thought, written, or represented jouis-sance “traverses evil”—evil being, to Kristeva, an unsymbolized death drive.

Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular 67

Revolt cuts into banality and thus transpires through a caesura, where timelessness intersects with time. Such an atemporality is necessary given Kris-teva’s sense of the reason behind psychopathological symptoms and structures:the contemporary subject’s inability to integrate the atemporal. Making thiscase from her position as a clinician, Kristeva asks, “Is it not the Zeitlos thatcauses the obsessional to stumble, as he strives fruitlessly to possess the “im-measurable by measuring it?” And isn’t it again the Zeitlos that messes up themelancholic, insofar as he or she suffers from fixation on a past that refuses toenter time? And, finally: “Isn’t it on the Zeitlos that the paranoiac runs aground,vying with an eternity that subjugates him?” (2002, 41). The Freudian conceptof the Zeitlos points to an unconscious time, a time of death, which is tanta-mount to the time of the drive. Kristeva locates in Freud the notion of death asa “temporality heterogeneous to linear time.” She bases her central idea of theimportance of not subtracting “thanatology” from, but incorporating it in, the“logic of the living” (32) on Freud’s opening up of every “human manifestation(act, speech, symptom) beyond consciousness, toward unconscious, prepsychi-cal, somatic, physical continuity” (32). In general, what Kristeva is underlininghere is the value of encountering death in a way that enriches rather than up-sets life’s course, “time’s flight forward” (32). However revolt is accomplished,what is required is access to timelessness or the Zeitlos, the atemporality of thedrive and the death drive, which “characterizes the unconscious” (12). Time-lessness transports us to the boundaries of thought, enabling us to revisit or perhaps visit our “intimate depths,” our places of suffering (12).

In turn, forgiveness, nonjudgmental meaning, is bestowed on such suffering.Forgiveness is not in Kristeva quite what we conventionally construe it to be; itis instead this ascribing of meaning to suffering, which arms us against the in-trusion of the superficial spectacle. Kristeva conceptualizes forgiveness as be-yond compassion, as a nonjudgmental gift, an act that interprets the meaning ofsuffering. Insofar as any film, or work of art for that matter, fills in the meaningof suffering, it would participate in such forgiveness. Ill-being, to Kristeva, resultsfrom a lack of meaning. Forgiving oneself through an analyst or an aesthetic ob-ject, making sense in these ways of “troubling senselessness,” injecting it withmeaning, leads to well-being. Psychoanalytic revolt occurs through the analyst’s“par-don” (“par meaning ‘through’; and don ‘gift’”), which reunites with affect“through the metaphorical and metonymical rifts of discourse” (2002, 26). Thisprocess of making meaning is not one of intellectualizing, fully comprehending,or certainly mastering but of actualizing preverbal meanings, “instinctual im-pulses and affects”—what Kristeva is now famous for calling the semiotic (19).Such actualizations draw out complex and intraverbal experiences, drain out thedark mass of the unconscious, and siphon it into the signifying light of day.

For Kristeva, this is the role of the imaginary. Death is inscribed as an in-stinctual force within life and consciousness in the register of the imaginary.Through the imaginary the psyche is repositioned between time and the timeless;


it finds its proper place at that intersection. Kristeva promotes activities that freezethe psychical process so that it no longer flows, that locate a dead time, and thataccept repressed drives, activities that then insert nonlife into life—which is asimple but fair description of Kristeva’s notion of working-through. Kristeva con-ceives of the imaginary conjoining of the linear and the indestructible as a “stateof grace”—and I would say a sacred act—that brings with it exactly what onemight expect would accompany such a state, jouissance. And she points out, atthe end of a section on working-through, that the status graciae “transits throughthe specular” (2002, 38).

What Kristeva labels the “register of interiority” includes neither nonsen-sorialized perceptions nor thoughts but images (2002, 46). It is the domain ofimages wherein we find the intimacy that will guarantee psychic life. It is there-fore especially in fantasy that intimacy is represented. Kristeva’s imaginary “ap-pears in all its logic—and risk—when introduced through fantasy,” which, sinceit contains, albeit distortedly, the reality of desire, testifies to psychical reality.Kristeva treats all fantasies as reflective of unconscious fantasy and regards lit-erature and art as “the favored places for the formulation of fantasies” (66). Sheassumes that the very formulating of fantasies as well as commenting on themproduces jouissance, which can preclude the horror of their enactment.

Kristeva anticipates that her reader will respond to her focus on fantasy byremarking on the “veritable paradise of fantasy” that we inhabit “today thanks toimages in the media.” But to Kristeva “nothing is less certain” than the notionthat our culture produces beneficial fantasies, stimulates us to formulate them,and as a result turns us into creators of the imaginary (2002, 67). Our society ofthe spectacle allows neither analysis of fantasy nor even their formation. Indeed,we are inundated with images; but they fail to liberate us. Their stereotypicalquality shuts down our ability to imagine our own imagery, to generate our own“imaginary scenarios” (67). Such a reining-in, and even obliteration of, the phan-tasmatic faculty help produce instead our contemporary maladies of the soul.Regardless of the abundance of images surrounding us, we have in the place offantasy melancholia, paranoia, perversion, hysteria, obsessional neurosis, phobia.Phantasmatic representation needs to be constructed, in fact, so that these newmaladies of the soul may be engaged through a subsequent analysis of fantasy. Weare phantasmatically impoverished, if not vacuous; and the reduction, if not abo-lition, of such a faculty threatens to wipe out inner depth itself. Which is why art,literature, and cinema are essential—as allies of psychoanalysis—in providingthe spaces in which the phantasmatic faculty can be exercised.

Cinema then can lean in one of two directions. It can preclude or crushfantasy insofar as it is stereotypical. Or since “the visible is the port of registryof drives, their synthesis beneath language, cinema as an apotheosis of the visible [can offer] itself to the plethoric deployment of fantasies” (2002, 69).Film has been contaminated by unimaginary images; as an art form, it has beendiverted from its psychically rich potential. But Kristeva singles out what she


calls “an other cinema” that serves as a kind of “condensed and meditative modeof writing” (69).

Standing in for fantasy, this “thought specular,” as Kristeva also calls it—“whenit is great art,” as exemplified by Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Godard, Bresson, Pasolini—pierces us in the place of the drives (2002, 69). We are saturated with cin-ematic images that shut down fantasy even as ironically it is the visible that ac-cedes “to a primary and fragile synthesis of drives, to a more supple, less controlled,riskier representability of instinctual dramas, the games of Eros and Thanatos”(69). Not at all “images-information,” the cinema of Godard consists of “signalscaptured, cut up, and arranged in such a way that the phantasmatic thought of thewriter-director can be made out and invites you first to locate your own fantasiesand then to hollow them out” (74). It is the voyeur, after all, as Kristeva mentions,who “makes a symptom of his first articulation of drives,” taking pleasure in the“sadomasochism of an autoerotic, incestuous osmosis with an object from whichhe is not really detached” (69), just as film in the form of the thought specular ab-sorbs the material of the drive. Supporting her idea of the psychoanalytic power ofcinema, Kristeva writes that it is the gaze that can provoke an “initial specular syn-thesis at the borders of the sadomasochistic drive” (70).

At the crossroads between consciousness and the unconscious, film thatexplores the specular triggers fantasy. It has the capacity to graft fantasy onto theaudience, in a way similar to Kristeva’s grafting of fantasy onto her patient Di-dier by requesting that he read novels. The fantasy must be constructed, andthis is the potential function of the cinematic thought specular. The sexual drivehas to coagulate as fantasy for it to be analyzed; and this is where art comes in,militating against Kristeva’s banality of evil, an unrepresented drive or impov-erished fantasy.

The specular is, to Kristeva, the most advanced medium for the inscrip-tion of the drive, although what we actually perceive on the screen falls short ofbeing what fascinates us, for the drive is manifested at the intersection of ob-jects on the screen and the fantasy formation that emerges as we experience thefilm. The thought specular seizes us where the specular bears the trace of thenonrepresented drive. Such a bearing occurs through the lekton, an expressiblethat transforms a flat image into a symptom. Tones, rhythms, colors, figures,various semiotic elements, are associated with the raw image, effecting a primaryseizure of drives. Certain films are able to grab, so to speak, the drive of theviewer within the filmic material and to formulate it phantasmatically within thespecular arrangement of the film, thus annexing the drive to representation.

But cinema goes further than revealing our fantasies, our psychical lives; itthinks the specular, in a manner that is of course itself specular. That is, it em-ploys the visible at the same time as it provides protection from it. Whereas thesociety of the spectacle produces evil, as it leaves the drive naked, that is, un-represented, unaccessed, and uncompensated for, the thought specular show-cases “the sadomasochistic repressed of the society of the spectacle” (2002, 79)


but avoids redoubling the evil by finally distancing us. Kristeva appreciates cam-era movement, as in Godard, that holds the spectator—while immersed in fan-tasy—“at a distance from fascination” (80). In this way sadomasochism can beprovisionally at home in cinema until it is demystified. Kristeva calls for a de-banalization of evil, a deauthorizing of perversion, a demystification—a gap, awedge driven through fetishism, that is, intimacy in revolt. She does not regardour time as one of great art; but it is nevertheless capable of producing aestheticantidotes to the society of the spectacle.

Such an antidote, like analytical discourse, would put the self into ques-tion, which for Kristeva is tantamount to castration, “the realization of a lack,an uncertainty, and the endless refraction that constitutes psychical splitting.” Itis the “eternal return” of these psychic phenomena that “places us in the time-lessness of the unconscious” (2002, 236–237) and thereby eventually enablesthe restructuring of the subject in a rebirth, “psychical suppleness,” remobilizeddrives, “new creativities” (237). Kristeva’s intimate revolt is anathema tofetishism insofar as it entails thanatology, the embracing of Nothingness. Kris-teva poses the rhetorical question of “how many Didiers exist in suffering with-out even considering the possibility of the verbal representation of the malaisein which they lock themselves and those close to them?” (128). To Kristeva,“[t]his is when the freedom and negativity proper to psychological representa-tion may become mired in fetish.” The problem may be generalized: again, sheasks, “Is this the end of a civilization of questioning and freedom?” (129), im-plying that to question and consequently to attain freedom (on both the indi-vidual and social levels) is to embrace negativity so as not to be buried in thequagmire of fetishism.

Given that the thought specular engages an interiority Kristeva wishes torehabilitate that depends on accessing one’s preverbal psychic history and is in-tricately, intimately tied to one’s singularity, it is difficult to exemplify its spe-cific operations. But I want to examine a film—David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive(2001)—that demonstrates Kristeva’s idea of the thought specular insofar as itdeploys the specular to challenge fetishism. Being about fantasy’s paralyzingtakeover of the psyche, Mulholland Drive would also seem to have the capacityto enable a viewer to free (or work toward freeing) himself or herself from theillusion of a fantasy that puts one in a stranglehold—by presenting the Noth-ing that has the power to unloosen the fixation.

In Intimate Revolt, Kristeva distinguishes between “noble,” “indispensable”fantasy that serves desire and the ignoble “spectacular imaginary” that currently“assaults us” (2002, 180). Sometimes the trouble appears to be that the spectac-ular imaginary keeps us “mired in fantasy.” It offers an opaque reality without“arranging the escape hatch of clarity.” Kristeva prefers representations of fantasythat are self-conscious to those that are stereotypically protective, numbing.Self-conscious fantasy—to which Kristeva ascribes a “thetic value—stabilizes thesubject” and can serve as a “source of survival and rebirth,” bringing to life the


“metabolized-negativized drive in indefinite, infinite psychical life” (180).1 DavidLynch’s Mulholland Drive (pun now intended) is such a self-conscious repre-sentation of fantasy, one that foregrounds Kristeva’s thesis of the value of (an en-livening death) fantasy in slicing through (a debilitating love) fantasy. MulhollandDrive demonstrates how fantasy itself can offer an “escape hatch.”

Fantasy, then, can bring one to the negativity that desire is based on, or itcan plug lack, thus serving as a fetish. An articulation of Kristeva’s thought spec-ular, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive puts on display and in turn contests suchfetishism. Ultimately rendering a universal abyss at the heart of things, Mul-holland Drive is an antifetishism film that gives its spectators the opportunityto encounter a certain inarticulable absence, compatible with Freud’s Zeitlos, towhich site they are brought through a story about the potential effectiveness offantasy in traversing fantasy.

More specifically: Mulholland Drive unveils the gap between a supposedobject of desire and the objet a, or cause of desire, that renders that object allur-ing; the film in this way seems cognizant of the Nothing on which love isfounded. Lynch demonstrates Lacan’s conception of “the only conceivable ideaof the object, that of the object as cause of desire, of that which is lacking,” a lackthat is situated in the Real. “[A]nd the little we know about the real,” Lacanelaborates in The Four Fundamental Concepts, “shows its antinomy to all verisimil-itude” (1973/1981, ix). Lynch, I am suggesting, is faithful to this Real antinomy.

At the same time, as a metafilm, a film preoccupied with matters of filmand the film industry, Mulholland Drive reveals the illusory nature of film itself.Hence an analogy takes shape, one Godard already insinuated in Contempt—between cinema and love—perhaps intimating the reason cinema is enthralledwith this subject. In revealing the void on which love and film are predicated,Mulholland Drive doubly attempts to explode the fetishistic ideas of theverisimilitude of film as well as the fantasy of the fulfillment or satisfaction oflove. Lynch’s film offers a full disclosure about cinema (that it is not full!), punc-turing the fetishism of film in the Metzian sense; it does so via a complex nar-rative about a love affair, offering the revelation that absence founds them both.2

Mulholland Drive’s exposure of love’s underlying aporia hinges on the film’stwo-part structure. Roughly the first two-thirds of Mulholland Drive can beconsidered Diane’s fantasy of a successful relationship with Camilla, and thelast one-third as the preceding actual story of a failed sexual relation that ex-plains the rationale of the fantasy.3 Diane’s desire is not only dissatisfied in theway that all desire is dissatisfied—since to desire is by definition to seek/lack sat-isfaction—but Diane’s already intense desire was abruptly terminated at its apex.She has been left in a traumatized state, fixated fetishistically on a lost object oflove, to which her psyche insists on clinging. Lynch is impressively astute atcapturing a lover’s urge to kill a beloved who tortures her with desire that getsexpressed simultaneously along with an edict against it. In the last one-third ofthe film, Diane has an hallucinatory memory of herself in an erotic pose with


Camilla, as Camilla expresses to her, “You drive me wild,” yet immediately follows that incitement to Diane’s desire with her decision that they “shouldnot do this anymore.” Devastated, Diane feels compelled to expunge Camillafrom the face of the earth; she hires a hit man to do so. Diane knows she mustexpel Camilla: she reiterates this murderous impulse in her fantasy (producedafter the hit man has done the job) in Betty’s Hollywood audition as well as inher practice audition, which she enacts with Rita(the figure Camilla becomesin Diane’s fantasy). In both, Betty asserts to her partner, “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill usboth,” reiterating insistently that the love object must be removed.

Diane’s fantasy on the whole, however, offers a less literal and more psy-choanalytic approach to canceling the love object, given that it works to extin-guish Diane’s cathexis of Camilla, which requires that the fantasy engage theReal or the Nothing of Diane’s desire. In focusing on a fantasy that Diane needsto experience to rid herself of her fetishistic fixation, Mulholland Drive is aboutwhat Kristeva’s thought specular is meant to do: project a fantasy that enablesone to overcome a malady of the soul. Insofar as the film operates this way forthe viewer, it may function as the thought specular in the service of intimate re-volt at the same time as it is about the very process of the thought specular.

Mulholland Drive is comprised of three ontological levels: fantasy and re-ality, as I have said, and the Nothing/Real. Something horrific suffuses thisfilm. The Nothing/Real is represented as monstrous: through the monstrousfigure behind Winkie’s café; through the creepy, ominous Louise who arrives atBetty’s aunt’s door and proclaims forebodingly that someone is in trouble;through the corpse that Betty and Rita traumatically encounter in Diane’s apart-ment; and perhaps through the ghastly tiny elderly couple. Diane’s fantasy in-cludes a young, terrified man who visits Winkie’s with someone who could bein the position of his therapist since the young man explains to him that theyare there because he has had two dreams that took place at this coffee shop.The young man at Winkie’s, whom I will call the analysand for the sake of iden-tification, was frightened in his dreams as was his therapist, frightening theyoung man even more. Why? Because there is a man in back who is “doing it.”The analysand can perceive him through the wall; that is, in his dream he canobserve his (the Gorgon’s?) face. The therapist suggests that the analysand hasbeen drawn to Winkie’s to discover if the man “doing it” is actually out there.They take a peek. The monster emerges, terrifying the analysand, it seems, toliteral death—a preview of the film’s situating itself in the place of the gaze andof its fuller illustration of Kristeva’s notion that horror is “the quintessentialspecular” (2002, 77). Film that rises to the level of the “fascinating thought spec-ular” seizes us through fear, at the place of the gaze. “This is its magic” (73).

Betty and Rita later sit in what appears to be the same Winkie’s for coffee,establishing a skewed parallel between Betty and the analysand and Rita and themonster. In yet a third Winkie’s scene, we have Diane meeting with the hit man,ordering the extinction of her object of desire, so that the following chain of


associations forms on the side of the monster: the monster, Rita, and then deathor an extinguished Camilla. If we accept that the monster is in the register of theNothing/Real, this chain enables us to observe Diane’s fantasy as an encounterwith the Nothing/Real of Diane’s desire as that monster is identified with Rita,the fantasy’s stand-in for Camilla, as a way of sucking Rita/Camilla into theVoid. The corpse that Betty and Rita discover in Diane’s apartment is taken bythe two young women in the first place to be Rita, or at least someone mistakenby the murderer as Rita. (The body is laid out on the bed in a way reminiscentof how Rita lay on the aunt’s bed in an early scene, on her side with her legsstacked up.) Upon giving us a close-up of the dead person, the camera reveals amonstrous face, so that again Rita is linked to the monster. Rita is the monsterin that she (as the stand-in for Camilla) has captured Betty’s/Diane’s desire; butrefusing to fulfill it in real life, Camilla as a result fixes Diane in an utterly mis-erable position. Diane needs to rectify this situation; as Coco (Betty’s busybodylandlady and neighbor) admonishes in the fantasy, “If there is trouble, get rid ofit!” Camilla is Diane’s “trouble,” and in real life (in the film) she gets rid of it lit-erally. Her fantasy, however, offers another, albeit belated but more psychoana-lytic, efficacious suggestion about how to detach from a love object.

Prior to such an extrication, Betty and Rita (in the fantasy) begin to merge.When they attempt by phone to reach Diane Selwyn, Betty comments that it isstrange calling yourself; but at this moment it is not clear who is calling Dianeor “herself ” because it is not clear which one of them is “Diane.” Rita eventuallydons the white wig, causing her to resemble Betty physically. And the fantasy ingeneral is about their merging in love, so that we grasp that the idea of love hereis of a subject locating her missing piece (no wonder Rita is puzzled over who sheis). “I’m in love with you,” Betty repeats to Rita emphatically and erotically. Thebed scene of their making love is what we might call a Lacanian Love encounter,where the subject in love (Betty/Diane) momentarily coalesces with her belovedor experiences the illusion of the temporary cessation of the sexual relation notbeing written (on the penultimate page of Encore, Lacan explains that “something[may be] encountered . . . which momentarily gives the illusion that the sexualrelationship stops not being written—an illusion that something is not only ar-ticulated but inscribed, . . . by which, for a while—a time during which things aresuspended—what would constitute the sexual relationship finds its trace and itsmirage–like path in the being who speaks” [1975/1998, 145]). “Is love—as psy-choanalysis claims with an audacity that is all the more incredible as all of its ex-perience runs counter to that very notion, and as it demonstrates the contrary—islove about making one (faire un)? Is Eros a tension toward the One?” (5), Lacanasks, simultaneously positing Oneness as the lover’s goal and casting a cynicalpsychoanalytic eye on its possibility.

Given that this attempted union occurs in the fantasy segment of the film,Mulholland Drive seems to know that the missing piece can never actually beannexed. Being a constitutive lack of the subject, such a piece, upon being


embraced, would threaten subjectivity, induce psychosis. Upon being psychi-cally clung to in this way, fetishized—that is, taken to plug the lack in the subject—such a piece would jam up the subject. “[D]esire merely leads us toaim at the gap” (Lacan 1998, 5). The subject lacks, but it lacks Nothing. Mul-holland Drive likewise seems keenly aware that those subjects who believe theycome close to consummating their desire, upon being cut off in the midst, wouldwish to “kill” what they take to be the missing piece with which they nearly co-alesced, for it would be agony to have that “missing piece” of oneself walk away,with/as a potential portion of oneself. Instead, especially in such cases of unre-quited love, the missing piece, or missing emptiness—since the objet a or causeof one’s desire is only a structural absence, the residue of one’s splitting off fromthe original Other—needs to be pried loose in the lover’s psyche from the con-tingent object that only appears to house the objet a. That one’s cause of desireactually inheres in one’s ostensible object of desire is a psychic illusion. It is thisillusion, not the object, that must be destroyed, especially when the object flees,leaving in its wake an all-consuming psychic residue. This is psychoanalyticlogic as well as, I am suggesting, the logic of the film.4

Mulholland Drive demonstrates that Diane needs to relinquish her psychicgrip on Camilla, that Camilla is merely a contingent object. At Club Silencio,Rita and Betty attentively observe all sorts of paradigmatic fissures. One wouldassume that here, at the Club, there would be a band, but “No hay banda.” Thereis music, but it is recorded. The emcee proclaims the theme: “It is an illusion.”The singer belting out Roy Orbison’s “Crying” herself wails over a lost love,helping us link the splitting that the scene effects—between what appears to betrue and the reality (“No hay banda”)—with a certain psychic/emotional de-tachment that Diane needs to undergo. The singer collapses onto the stage, buther singing eerily prevails.

The voice, one of the four forms of the objet a in Lacan’s Four Fundamen-tal Concepts, persists without embodiment. Lynch peels the voice from the singerin a way that could be read as a kind of surgical procedure on the drive as it in-heres in the voice, carving it away from a particular body/subject. The collapsedsinger reveals that the voice, or objet a, the cause of Diane’s desire, is locatedsomeplace else besides the body of the singer, or the body of Camilla—thatDiane loves Camilla for “something more.” And at this moment, the fantasythat she is that excess is crumbling, as McGowan explains: “The structure offantasy breaks down when the subject confronts the total emptiness of the objetpetit a, which is what occurs as Rebekah Del Rio’s song continues after she hasfainted. . . . Betty looks down in her purse and sees a blue box, which representsthe point of exit from the fantasy world” (2004, 83). The camera dramaticallyzooms in on that box—dark blueness pervades the screen. Herein lies the cri-sis moment of the film, the pivotal point at which unconscious confrontationwith the drive, the death drive, timelessness (the Zeitlos)—psychosis—enablesan exit, away from (Diane’s) fetishizing a love object (Camilla).


The operations of Kristeva’s thought specular are at this stage foregroundedas part of the diegesis, which presents the breakdown of a fantasy insofar as itis predicated on an object mistaken for object a. Betty shakes as she observes allthe stage effects that indicate illusion, especially the singer as she physicallywithdraws from her song, because Betty/Diane senses—and is experiencing—the Nothingness of the cause of her desire. But perhaps the horror that Betty’sbrittle shaking indicates is not due entirely to a confrontation with the in-eluctable lostness of the lost object, but also to the fact that it is, practicallyspeaking, too late for Diane. She has failed to heed Kristeva’s warning aboutthe necessity of engaging a liberating fantasy to avoid the actual enactment ofa destructive fantasy. That is: Diane’s fantasy, produced after the hit man has en-acted the murder commissioned by Diane (we know that this is the time se-quence for one thing because Rita shows up in the fantasy with a pile of moneythat Diane presumably paid to the hit man to have Camilla killed), unveils toher the logic of love as fantasy (that it pursues an objet a, a cause of desire, amissing piece, rather than a particular person). Having exposed love as illusion,Diane’s fantasy points belatedly to the possibility of puncturing a fantasy thatmakes one miserable, that gets stuck at the level of the necessarily false object—by encountering and loosening the drive that set it in motion.

Lynch redoubles this theme of the illusion of love by planting it within andintertwining it with the context of Hollywood, fulfilling Kristeva’s desideratumthat the thought specular be self-aware—as a way of distancing the spectatorfrom the film itself as fantasy. Rita (Camilla’s avatar in Diane’s fantasy) whim-sically names herself after Rita Hayworth depicted on a poster for Gilda. All theflamboyant camera shots that deliberately lead the way to horror—creepilydown the hall to Rita in the shower, down the steps to the monster behindWinkie’s, and perhaps most suspensefully to the monstrous corpse in bed—scream out that we are watching a psycho-horror movie. Reflecting the illusorycondition of love, where one “pretends” to be the object cause of the lover’s de-sire, giving in a sense what one lacks (one of Lacan’s dominant definitions oflove), Betty (Davis?) in the fantasy sequence cleverly remarks to Rita that, inchecking out with the police if an accident indeed happened on MulhollandDrive, they can pretend they are someone else, just as in the movies. Withinthe context of Diane’s fantasy, or dream, about a sexual relation with Camilla (inthe guise of Rita), Betty designates Hollywood and specifically her aunt’s LosAngeles apartment, as a “dreamplace,” referring to her dream of making herdebut in Hollywood. Again in imitation of Contempt, the last word of Mulhol-land Drive ironically is “Silencio,” which points not simply to the absence atthe core of the love fantasy the film encloses but also, à la Christian Metz, tothe absence on which the film/film is founded. Just as Camilla (not Rita!) is theillusion of Diane’s love, Mulholland Drive, while signifying “unaccustomed per-ceptual wealth,” is (to quote Metz on film in general) “stamped with unrealityto an unusual degree, and from the very outset.” Like all cinema, Mulholland


Drive, as Mulholland Drive itself discloses, “drums up all perception, but toswitch it immediately over into its own absence, which is nonetheless the onlysignifier present” (1982, 45). Such a defetishizing exposure of the film enhancesMulholland Drive’s status as thought specular, insofar as it precludes any pretenseof its subject matter actually being there, thus removing the spectator from itsfascination. It is, in other words, insofar as Mulholland Drive reflects on its sta-tus as a Metzian imaginary signifier that it can serve as Kristeva’s imaginaryregister, where death is inscribed within consciousness.

By exposing the chasm at the heart of love and film, Lynch’s film doublyundermines fetishism: the phantasmatic form that plugs the lack of love withan object as well as the fetishism of filmic verisimilitude. Mulholland Drive dragsthe fetishism of love as well as of film itself—insofar as it projects itself as present—down to its vacuous base, to a blue box, unmistakably an “escapehatch,” signifying Nothing. Targeting a primary generator of the glittery imagesof the society of the spectacle, Hollywood itself, Lynch’s film grants the spec-tator psychic life, intimacy, through an especially sensuous cinematographicalencounter with images of interiority that collapse in the end in a way that cat-alyzes a new start. Facing the skewed relation of the object of desire and the ob-ject a, an abyss, Freud’s Zeitlos, the Real, at the level of the unconscious, withinthis savvy and sophisticated example of Kristeva’s thought specular, the specta-tor is prompted to exit through the blue box, that is, to extricate himself or her-self from psychic fixations, or at least to work through them, to enter eventuallyinto a new psychic space. Mulholland Drive as the thought specular has the po-tential, I am suggesting, to imbricate itself with the spectator’s own sufferingand, through such attachment (a way of pulling the spectator’s trauma intosemiotic representation), to offer forgiveness, that is, the transformation of thespectator’s pain into meaning.

By transfiguring the spectator’s own psychic trouble into fantasy, images,signification, through a journey to the end of the night, Mulholland Drive doesits part in arming the spectator against the contemporary robotization process.By bringing the spectator into relation with his or her unconscious, by luring thespectator into the abyss, into “hazardous regions” wherein “unity is annihilated”(Kristeva 2002, 10), which in the case of this particular film is shown to foundlove and film, Mulholland Drive restores psychic depth, or at least takes a step to-ward its restoration. While this may seem like a private matter, films that fitKristeva’s category of the thought specular possess the potential to inject death,the unconscious, the unseen into consciousness and turn back the tide of the de-humanization of society—even to militate against biopower. After all, as Foucaultelaborates in Society Must Be Defended, with the predominance of the power ofsocial regularization, death is gradually disqualified. Death has become, Foucaultreminds us, “something to be hidden away” (2003, 247). Foucault’s spooky as-sertion that “Power no longer recognizes death” (248) provides a further ration-ale behind Kristeva’s perspective that contemporary society needs to reintegrate


thanatology into the logic of the living—to stave off the new episteme she appears to be diagnosing in which the psychically complex subject has vanishedand robots rule.

Notes1. As Maria Margaroni explains, in Julia Kristeva: Live Theory, the thetic

phase refers to a break that paves the way for signification; it is “both a rupture(the emergent subject’s separation from the semiotic chora) and a link, the sub-ject’s identification with the signifier that is necessary for the taking up of posi-tons in the signifying realm” (2004, 14–15).

2. Such a dual theme perhaps should come as no surprise from the direc-tor of a previous film with a fetish as its title: Blue Velvet.

3. Todd McGowan puts it this way: “The second part of Mulholland Driveis structured around the incessant dissatisfaction of desire as Diane (NaomiWatts)—and the spectator—are denied any experience of Camilla (Laura ElenaHarring), Diane’s love object. By contrast, in the first part Diane, appearing asBetty, can enjoy the object” (2004, 67).

4. I invoke my understanding of Lacan’s idea of love because MulhollandDrive appears to subscribe to it; I do not mean to imply that Kristeva’s (distinct)conception of love is reflected in the film. Mulholland Drive, in other words, ful-fills Kristeva’s notion of the thought specular through its presentation of afetishistic fantasy of love that its representation of Lacan’s conception of love asillusion has the capacity to puncture. For Lacan and Kristeva’s different theoriesof the subject, see Maria Margaroni, who observes a more drastic split betweenthe Lacanian subject and his or her lack than in Kristeva’s subject’s split condi-tion, produced by the internal eruption of “semiotic motility” (2004, 26). How-ever, see also Joan Copjec’s Imagine There’s No Woman (2002) for an idea of theLacanian subject as well as of Lacanian love that approaches if not overlaps withMargaroni’s sense of Kristeva.

ReferencesCopjec, Joan. 2002. Imagine There’s No Woman. Boston, MA: MIT Press.Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de

France, 1975–76. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador.Heidegger, Martin. 1929. “What is Metaphysics?” Trans. David Farrell Krell.

http://www.msu.org/e&r/content.e&r/texts/heidegger/heidegger_wm2.html.

Kristeva, Julia. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman.New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 2002. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans.Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.


Lacan, Jacques. 1973/1981. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis.Ed. Jacques Alain-Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton.

———. 1975/1998. Encore: 1972–1973: On Feminine Sexuality/The Limits ofLove and Knowledge. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink. NewYork: Norton.

Margaroni, Maria, and John Lechte. 2004. Julia Kristeva: Live Theory. London: Continuum.

McGowan, Todd. 2004. “Lost on Mulholland Drive: Navigating David Lynch’sPanegyric to Hollywood.” Cinema Journal 43 (2): 67–89.

Metz, Christian. 1982. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.Trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and AlfredGuzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mulholland Drive. 2001. Dir. David Lynch. Universal Studios.

5

Julia Kristeva and theTrajectory of the Image

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John Lechte

Given Julia Kristeva’s interest in the visual and plastic arts, as well as in the imaginary, it is perhaps surprising that very little has been said or written abouther theoretical stance here.1 When it comes to the image as such the silence iseven more deafening.2 A partial explanation for this might be that her writing onpainting and cinema often appears to be incidental to other theoretical and crit-ical tasks. This cannot be said, however, of the treatment of the cinema imageand, through her analysis of Sartre’s phenomenology, of the mental image. In anycase, I suggest that by paying close attention to Kristeva’s approach to the imageone begins to see another level open up in her work, one that, despite her termi-nology, is less in keeping with orthodox psychoanalysis and more in keeping withthe cinematic turn inaugurated by Gilles Deleuze (1986; 1989). Indeed, it is in-structive to begin with a short detour comparing aspects of the thought of thetwo thinkers on the image, before moving on to consider Kristeva’s theory of thecinema image, the mental image as proposed by Sartre3—all against the back-drop of the image in Guy Debord’s theory of the “society of the spectacle” (1994).The latter turns the image into a thing with serious consequences, the analyst argues, for the very viability of psychic space.

Society and the Cinema Image in Kristeva and DeleuzeThe two thinkers—Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze—in their work on cinemacan, I suggest, be equated. However, it is true that Kristeva, coming from a

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particular psychoanalytic orientation, does seem to go with a subject-object dualism. Her terminology, as we shall see, of the “specular,” “fantasm,” and, fi-nally, “seduction” would place her squarely on the side of subjectivity as reflectedon the screen, if not beyond the screen. There is no denying the difference be-tween a Bergsonian approach to the image (highlighted by Deleuze) and Kris-teva’s notions, such as the “semiotic” as a rhythmical space (time emerges here).On the other hand, her use, like Deleuze, of the Stoic concept of “lekton” (the“saying,” the “expressing,” or description that gives itself as such) brings hercloser to Deleuze, who described the difference between description and its object in Italian neorealist cinema as being indiscernible. Moreover, a certaintype of cinema (cf. Hitchcock and Godard), for Kristeva, is essentially linked tothinking, as it is also for Deleuze. Horror movies become a way of thinking thespecular—which would be a thinking of an aspect of the material semiotic.

For Kristeva, then, thought is linked to affect through the image. Her ap-proach is thus very different, and much more innovative, than the applicationto film of a highly analytical and intellectualist Lacanian framework, as is foundin Žižek (1991) or Rocchio (1999).

Writing on cinema and the image has recently become part of a concernwith the image in history and thought, a concern driven by Kristeva’s return to Debord’s critique of the “society of the spectacle,” a society wedded to the reality of appearances and to appearance as reality, and where one is literallydrowning in media images made into things (la choisification) (from television andelsewhere) (Kristeva 1995, 7–10; 1996a, 15–24, 114–115; 1997, 118, 125–127,233–236, 256–258). The spectacle stifles revolt, not only ideologically, so thatimage-clichés and image-stereotypes dominate, but psychically, too, because,being standardized, the bevy of images inhibits imaginary formations, such asfantasy and the self as difference.

Kristeva’s commitment to critique might be thought to place her at oddswith Deleuze. The case changes substantially, though, when mediation, ratherthan media, is made the focus of attention. For mediation, following the in-sights of Bergson, is on the side of perception, objectification and, subsequently,on the side of a “photographic” view of reality, a view that privileges space overtime and memory. To put it bluntly: a mediatized society (a society of media-tion) would suppress the insights made possible by cinema as the vehicle of timeand movement. It would suppress an experience of time and memory, and thusof a certain subjectivity. In the beginning, we are told, there was a Big Bang. Butin the very beginning, the photographic view says, there was stillness: timeless-ness, without movement. The stillness of the photographic image becomes ametaphor for the very beginning.

To the extent that Kristeva understands the image qua image as a form ofunreality (or irreality) in the manner of Sartre, and as the basis of fantasy pro-duction she is at odds with Deleuze. For Deleuze rejects any rigid dualism offantasy and reality in favor of the view that fantasy and subjectivity flow over

Julia Kristeva and the Trajectory of the Image 81

into reality—or at least into the actual (this is Deleuze’s surrealism). Instead,there is a reality of subjectivity as there is, after Bergson, a reality of conscious-ness, in the sense that consciousness is something (Deleuze 1986, 60–61).

But Deleuze primarily points an accusing finger at the image-cliché, not atthe image as such. Kristeva makes the same distinction. For the images we areflooded with by the media are stereotypical, standardized. These are not theimages of fantasy (imbued with unreality—virtual images) but ones that havebecome thinglike (simulacra) and which inhibit the receiver’s capacity to fan-tasize, to associate and to engage in interpretation. People with their heads cutoff no longer signify violence. This is what Didier, Kristeva’s analysand, demon-strates in his incapacity to see, or to feel, the “obvious” force of what he has donein his art (Kristeva 1995, 10–11, 19–20). More generally, the “society of thespectacle” damages the subject’s psychic space, a symptom of which is the emas-culation of interiority, and hence of the capacity to have a vibrant fantasy life.Externality rules, an externality of uniformity and standardization. We nowleave the spectacle in abeyance and, in what follows, examine Kristeva’s specificapproach to the cinema image.

Seduction and the Specular“The image I see has nothing to do with the specular which fascinates me”—such is the point of departure in both Kristeva’s most recent writing on the cin-ema in 1997 (118–149) and in her piece, first published in 1975, entitled“Ellipse sur la frayeur et la séduction spéculaire” (“Ellipsis on Fright and theSeduction of the Specular”) (collected in 1977, 373–382). What seduces is nei-ther the meaning of the image nor its symbolism as revealed by semiology, butits materiality: its noises (the older sense of “frayeur” means the noise that givesa fright), its “pulsations, somatic waves, colour waves (ondes), rhythms, tones”(373). I am, then, dragged into the image, willy-nilly, without knowing it; noquestion of being coaxed, tempted, or consciously seduced. Rather, I can actu-ally live out the aggression and anxieties that constitute the underbelly of thespecular, while seduction would be underpinned by the drives. In any case, evenif we stuck with Lacan’s mirror stage, we should recall that there it was a ques-tion of an imago (something that has effects in the subject) more than narcis-sism. With “imago” we come closer to the Kristevan semiotic. In this sense, Iam in the semiotic—I “inhabit” it (cf. Merleau-Ponty)—more than the semi-otic is in me. The Platonic khora, as we know, generates the semiotic, which be-comes a rhythmical space, a space we inhabit as humans. This is a musicalizedand thus timeful space.4

The specular is also a sign that exceeds the borders of the signified. It is,moreover, a visual sign “which calls to the fantasm because it carries an excessof visual traces, traces irrelevant to the identification of objects because they arechronologically, and logically, anterior to the famous ‘mirror stage’” (Kristeva

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1977, 374). Parenthetically, it is notable that, for Deleuze, mirrors are a key example of the virtual image, which is interior to the time-image. Here, mirrorsevoke the oscillation between the virtual and the actual but do not evoke theimaginary because it is not possible to be external to images. More of this later.

For Kristeva, the sign that evokes the fantasm appears in its own right. Itis not a purveyor of information about the object. Such signs emerge in theshower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho where behind the curtain the shadow ap-pears and then the hand with the dagger raised in silhouette. The signified ofthis image is fear. Fear—affect—is thus this excess of signification, a significa-tion that ceases to be one in any formal sense. For I am in the picture in theshower scene. The cinema image ceases to be a medium and becomes an im-mediate experience—a transsubstantial experience perhaps if we were to takeour cue from Kristeva’s reading of Proust (1996b).

Again, the signs of the semiotic give over to “lektonic traces”. Lekton refersto that dimension of the sign as an “expressible,” or a “sayable,” which is morethan what is represented or symbolized, the dimension that exceeds significa-tion. Eisenstein’s films are illuminated by this notion, which draws attention tothe process of signification before it shows what is indicated. And so the or-ganization of space, the placement of objects, the “calculated intervention ofeach reply” could all be added to the rhythm of images, a rhythm intensified byEisenstein’s version of montage.5 The lektonic dimension leads to an experienceof images in the process of signification. The signified is secondary to this. Thelektonic dimension of khora is the rhythm of the space. Analytically, rhythm isthe subjective dimension of objective space. Kristeva’s point, though, is thatspace cannot emerge as such outside its rhythmical or subjective aspect. Wecannot “know” real (as opposed to abstract) space except as an experience. Time,by implication, is also an experience of time. Time is subjective. It is tied to in-voluntary memory (not memory as habit). On this, Kristeva, Deleuze, and Berg-son all concur.

Kristeva, in her 1975 essay, also makes the point that cinema is the specu-lar thought (le spéculaire pensé)—a thinking of the specular so that the specularand thought become intertwined. It is not just a question here of what an imagerepresents. The specular is the semiotic (displacements, condensations, tones,rhythms, vibrating colors, figures of all sorts) as excess in relation to the signi-fied; images that become an “expressing” in their own right, as provided for bythe stoic lekton.

Closely linked to the specular and thought is the horror movie à la Hitch-cock, where “[r]epresented horror is the specular par excellence” (Kristeva 1977,377). This means that horror is in the image as sign (a horror image), and in thesubject’s relation to it (because it is a question of a fantasmatic domain) and notin what is signified. There is a spatial dimension of the object equivalent to per-ception, while the subject is essentially in time. Time would be the semiotic it-self, provided we understand time monumentally, and not chronologically.6


To this point, Kristeva seems to give equal weight to both the cinema imageand to subjectivity. At the level of the specular, the cinema image—in the genreof the horror films in particular—would have an immediacy that makes theconcept of representation a very rough instrument. In her later work of 1997,the emphasis changes. The fantasm begins to take on a life of its own. And psy-choanalysis would render the fantasm conscious, integrating it into an inter-pretative story, a story generated by associations. Through interpretation (whichmeans through working with fantasy), the symptom can be dissolved. Althoughthe earlier insight regarding lektonic traces is woven into the later work, we alsohave another psychoanalytic angle on the fantasm and its importance for thesubject’s psychic life. So, does Kristeva’s approach actually deepen our insightinto the cinema image as such? A certain progress in producing insights into thenature of the cinema image was made in the earlier work; but now this imageis allowed to slip away into the labyrinth of details on the fantasm as a fact ofsubjectivity. In the chapter, “Fantasme et cinema” in La révolte intime (1997), lit-tle is learned about cinema that was not learned from the 1975 article. And thisis because the author is bound up in the debate about the “society of the spec-tacle” and its effects on individual psyches. Cinema here seems to be part of theproblem, not part of the solution. Nevertheless, Kristeva also says in this piecethat “the specular transforms the drive into desire, and aggressivity into seduc-tion” (1997, 134). The specular now becomes a displaced form of the uncon-scious foundation of the psychic apparatus. Cinema thus reveals somethingabout the current nature of the psyche. The specular thought is about an excessof subjectivity rather than about the basis of an insight into cinema and film-making. The cinema is distant, not immediate, in the life of the subject.

Even so, this is only part of the story. For the lekton is still there, as is thesemiotic in Eisenstein and Godard. The potential is there, in effect, for ex-panding our understanding/experience of cinema; it is now a matter of work-ing through this. But what, in relation to cinema, is the society of the spectacleall about? A look at Debord’s theory in more detail will allow us to begin tounderstand the force of Kristeva’s position concerning the image.

The Spectacle as the Sign of an Ontological Shift?The image is fundamental in Guy Debord’s theory of the society of the spec-tacle where the spectacle is defined as a “social relation among people, mediatedby images” (Debord 1994, para. 4). As with Rousseau, the festival for Debordwould overcome the opacity normally encountered in every representation as aform of mediation. Festival reveals the truth that representation, as a virtual re-ality, keeps in the dark. With the critique of the spectacle, however, the issue isno longer about truth as the real being hidden by representation; it is about rep-resentation as the virtual image not just taking the place of the real, but be-coming real itself (becoming a thing). If Rousseau’s question is epistemological,

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in the sense that the subject is presented with a distorted version of the object,in the more recent case, the claim is that there is no longer any object other thanforms of representation: we therefore could be dealing with an ontological shiftthat signals the end of the dominance of the Platonic age based in appearanceand reality, reality and image.

So the image is central. The spectacle is a “Weltanchauung which has be-come actual, materially translated” (Debord 1994, para. 5). Debord speaks incertain passages as though mediation evokes something immediate. But thetone changes, and we find that the spectacle “is not a supplement to the realworld, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real so-ciety” (para. 6). Society itself is unreal. Or rather, this is a society in which thedifference between real and unreal is no longer relevant. Therefore, “One can-not abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division isitself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived re-ality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle . . . reality risesup within the spectacle and the spectacle is real” (para. 8). And in a key passage,Debord affirms that “[c]onsidered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmationof appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life as mere ap-pearance” (para. 10). There is nothing hidden in the social form that is the spec-tacle: “that which appears is good, and that which is good appears” (para. 12).The spectacle is also inextricably tied to the commodity as fetishistic (one com-modity refers only to another and so on, ad infinitum) and as pure appearance.For this reason, Debord says that the commodity is the spectacle par excellence.

When Kristeva comes to read Sartre in light of the society of the specta-cle, the uniqueness of her position begins to show through. Indeed, two con-ceptions of reality are now at stake: one that is virtual and as such is not real (thepsychic image that gives rise to fantasy), and another that has come to be realdespite being virtual (media images). The best way to bring out this distinctionis to look at aspects of Sartre’s text, L’Imaginaire (1940/1986) and at Kristeva’sresponse to it in La révolte intime (1997, 303-334).

The Sartrian Image as a Critique of the Spectacular ImageSartre is more interested in what an image is itself and less in how images playthemselves out in social reality. Thus, the image, Sartre declares at an early stagein L’Imaginaire, is not another reality; it is not a simulacrum; it is not an objectin its own right, but is a nothingness (néant). To assume that the image is a sim-ulacrum is to commit the error of the “illusion of immanence” (illusion d’imma-nence) (1986, 17). This is the key point, the point that Kristeva finds the mostintriguing and important in L’Imaginaire, and she is, in La révolte intime, willingto endorse Sartre’s position even though the philosopher is skeptical of any the-ory of the unconscious. For Kristeva, the image as nothingness confirms her view


that the image cannot be a thing, even though technologies of the image turn itinto one by refusing its unreality (1997, 319–320). Sartre argues, then, that theremay be an image of reality (of the thing, object, individual, etc.), but there is noreality of the image. Again, Kristeva agrees because, similarly, there is no realityof fantasy. To make fantasy into a reality is to make it a thing, just as the societyof the spectacle makes media images things and denies an original. And so, theimage is not a different version of the object, neither should an image be confusedwith a perception. In a perception of the Parthenon one will be able to distinguishthe number of columns and will probably be interested in making this distinc-tion. In an image of the Parthenon, on the other hand, the number of columnsis quite irrelevant; for in this case the “columnness” of columns is the importantand interesting thing as far as the image qua image is concerned.7

The imaging consciousness, then, is not a perception. The latter is analogical,being formed from sense data deriving from objects in external reality. It is thus thebasis of a thetic consciousness, or a consciousness founded on the subject-object re-lation. An image, by contrast, is a “nonthetic” consciousness, a consciousness with-out an object. Once again, this accords with Kristeva’s view of a genuinelyfantasmatic object. With regard to an image, careful distinctions need to be madewhen dealing with various forms of representation. A photograph thus has twoaspects as far as its image is concerned. One aspect is the photograph as physicalobject; the other is the photograph as image. With a painting, things are similar:there is a clear distinction between the physical object of a perception and an image.The perception of the physical object that has been assigned the task of repre-senting it is quite different from the imaging consciousness. And this implies thatthe image qua image—or imaging consciousness—is indifferent to the physicalform of representation. The image, then, transcends its incarnation. This means,too, that an image has a specific relation to presence, such that when, as Sartre putsit in the very opening lines of L’Imaginaire, an image of a friend is produced in themind, it is the friend who is the object of consciousness, not the image. An imageis not, then, some kind of container within which a content (presence of a friend)is housed. On the contrary, the image qua image, is the presence of the friend inconsciousness. Or, rather, the image is the consciousness as such of the friend, orof what is imaged. Whether this image appears immediately in the mind as a mem-ory, or in a representation makes no difference to the imaging consciousness. Theimaged is always an object of an imaging consciousness, not a representation; for,to repeat, the imaged is consciousness of what is imaged. By way of illustration,Sartre refers to the portrait of Charles VIII:

It is him that we see, not the painting, and yet we present him as notbeing there: we have reached him by the “image,” “by the intermedi-ary” of the painting. We now see that the relation that consciousnesspresents in the imaging attitude, between the portrait and the originalis literally magical. (1986, 53)

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Charles VIII is “there” through the image, even though to be “there” entailsnot being there in person. Even though Charles VIII is not there in person, theimaging consciousness brings him there—into presence. Through the image,one is able to say at one and the same time, “Charles VIII is both down therein the past and here” (1986, 53). Presence as image is the nonpresence as real-ity, as object. In the imaging consciousness, the portrait as a series of brushstrokes does not exist; there is instead only the image as the presence of theking. In perception, only the portrait exists as physical object in the world, andthe king is absent. Sartre’s thesis aims to show how important it is that percep-tion and image not be confused.

To think the image of a painting is not to think it as a painted image. In apainting of Pierre, says Sartre, Pierre is not thought as the image of the paint-ing; the painting is not an image of Pierre. Pierre appears as absent. Through asimilar logic an image as an imitation is not an analogon of what is imitated; theimitation, in other words, is not a separate, objective entity. Thus, the imitationof Maurice Chevalier does not produce a separate image in the mind that maythen be compared with the imitated singer. Rather, the imitation is made bysigns given by the imitator and these signs evoke Maurice Chevalier himself. Inshort, the imitator is Maurice Chevalier. As such, imitation evokes, accordingto Sartre, the possessed of primitive dances rituals (1986, 64).

Such is further support for Kristeva’s approach to the extent that for her,too, an image is not itself a thing, but a way in which psychic space is articulated.There is no psychic space, on the one hand, and images, on the other.

Thus a visual sign in general is an evocation. As such, Sartre’s argument im-plies, it brings what is envisaged into presence. An evocation qua evocation isthus entirely transparent. The sign of a man brings the man into presence as animage. It matters little whether this sign is conventionalized or whether it isiconic; the effect is the same; namely, to put consciousness in touch with whatis evoked independently of the evocation. In short, evocation is a way of beingin imagination; such a capacity is necessary in order that arts such as theaterand fiction can work successfully as theater and as fiction; for it has to be pos-sible to engage in make-believe (and to extricate oneself from it), and this, Kris-teva implies, is what is becoming more difficult in the society of the spectacle.

Truly imaginary reading, then, is not first a reading of the words, thena transporting of the reader into an imaginary world. Reading fiction in theSartrian mode is not to be made aware of style, or of sentence formation. Onthe contrary, to read fiction is to be transported (metaphorized?) into anotherworld; it is to be in another world. A knowledge of the fictive world does notderive either from the meaning of words, or from what words signify. Noamount of effort is likely to make a world arise out of “office,” “third floor,”“building,” “suburb” (1986, 129). A very different effect ensues, however, whenone reads in Sartre’s example that “he hastily descended the three floors of thebuilding” (129–130). Here, words cease to be signifiers and become the


intended thing itself. In this formulation, the words evoke a world and are effaced in the evocation.

In Sartre’s version of the phenomenological concept of intentionality, theobject of affect is in consciousness. Thus joy is the joy of something, just as hateis the hatred of something. But this, Sartre says, is also the consciousness ofsomething. In other words, affectivity is affective consciousness—not in the re-flexive or “intellectualist” sense of consciousness in which a metalanguage wouldbe opened up, but in the sense that consciousness is the access to the affect, oremotion, as affect. Or again, consciousness is the affective investment in an ob-ject such that the union of consciousness and a lived relation to the object areone and the same thing. In sum: “Consciousness is always transparent to itself;it must therefore be at one and the same time entirely knowledge and entirelyaffectivity” (1986, 143.). For the Sartrian, there is no affectivity in itself anymore than there is consciousness in itself or an image in itself. Language, too,has no existence in itself outside a meaning immediately evoked. There is no re-ality of affectivity, consciousness, or words. Instead, there is intentionality: con-sciousness of something. Might there not be word-images, however? Sartreresponds quite definitely by saying that words are not images; for when a wordbecomes an image it ceases to be a sign (word) (166).

Although Kristeva leaves to one side the issue of evocation in her readingof Sartre, it is clear that an evocation (or more strongly, an incantation) fits inwith the Kristevan theory of psychic space as constituted by the fantasy of aninternal life. The question is, How does one control the limits of fantasy so thatthey do not topple over into hallucination? The idea that, as iconic, the contentof the image is present is an illusion. When does the image pass itself off assomething real and actual when it is not? When I see Walter Benjamin throughAdami’s line drawing evoking his glasses (Adami 1973, 4–5)—when Benjaminis present as image—it is less that Benjamin exists and more that his presencedoes not depend on the technical virtuosity of the representation. In effect, therepresentation disappears into the image. This is what is at stake—not Ben-jamin’s real or unreal existence. Benjamin’s existence would be an issue were thequestion a technical one of realism and representation, in which case, the draw-ing could be compared with the known, or existing object of the representa-tion. Here, there is a reality of the representation where existence is at stake.With the image, on the other hand, there is no such duality, as we have seen.Rather, the image is presence (of the thing or entity).

Ironically, perhaps, an image is the inkblot or, more profoundly, the imageis present in a Turner painting much more than in Holbein. Modern paintingà la Rothko is, in this sense, a profound study of the image. For it is only withRothko that we see that indistinctness does not entail a perception of the can-vas, or of the paint as such. An image, then, is not an imitation of perception.A superrealist painting does not put us in touch with the object; it is not trans-parent, however clear and focused it might be. For like all realism, it is an

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imitation of perception and calls on the spectator to marvel at the virtuosity oftechnique. The image, by contrast, is born of the subtlest evocation; often by anevocation that is barely one.

The image is thus very much on the side of the ephemeral and no doubtof the idealist side of things. But ideal, too, is ephemeral like the image and isdestined to disappear with the spectacle. Thus, Kristeva says that under thedomination of the spectacle “the consciousness of the object as an ideality dis-appears” (1997, 315). Ideality and the image mean, in the example given bySartre (1986, 133), that the words “a beautiful woman” evoke the image ofbeauty, an image that is not reducible to a real body as object. Words evoke thebody, which becomes the canvas through which the image of beauty appears. Oragain, form and volume—shape, density, and size—is simply the medium ofthe body itself, a body that does not exist in perception but only in image. Thispresence of the body in image, Sartre calls the imagination:

The act of imagination . . . is a magical act. It is an incantation destinedto make appear the object one is thinking about, the thing one desires,such that one can take possession of it. There is in this act alwayssomething imperious and child-like. (1986, 239; emphasis added)

A similar sentiment can be found in Barthes speaking on photography—Barthes, as we know, having dedicated Camera Lucida to Sartre. What Sartreand Barthes call the magical function of the imaginary is not the same as theimage as a virtual reality that Kristeva fears (cf. Kristeva 1997, 234)—the imageas thing, as simulacrum—but evokes the essentially double character of theimaginary in the sense of “both-and”: both self and other, one and the many,being and nonbeing, word and meaning, death and life, and so on.

As an incantation, the image in the imaginary function defies the existen-tial level of perception. The latter always implies the division of subject and ob-ject, whereas no such division is implied at the level of the imaginary. Incantation,in short, is the transcendence of the subject-object relation. The image-object isa nonreal object (an “objet irréel ” [Sartre 1986, 249, and passim]).

Immediacy and the ImageAn important issue that remains to be discussed is whether the image is irrevoca-bly tied to representation. I suggest that the underlying logic of Kristeva’s work isto break with such a notion. Like language in the Freudian tradition, the image hasalways had effects before being the external vehicle of an internal, or otherwise in-visible, reality. Kristeva herself confirms as much in Tales of Love when she saysthat “the subject is not simply an inside facing the referential outside” (1987, 274).But in any case, we only have to recall again that the famous Lacanian mirror image


is an imago for the child, having an impact on emotional development, before it is a mimetic object, or a representation. The imago contributes to the instantiationof the subject. The subject, we recall from the opening pages of Tales of Love, is an open system, which means that it is open to change and modification in lightof new experiences, particularly the experience of love. Before that, of course, Kristeva had spoken of the subject-in-process (on trial), and of the subject as a “work-in-progress,” so that the emphasis is on the subject as always being in for-mation, not already formed, or posited, as (a certain version of ) phenomenologyhad implied. It is this process of continuous formation that makes the subject a singularity.

If the overall logic of Kristeva’s oeuvre is to give precedence to immediateeffects—effects that instantiate—this is because the immediacy of process andof acts, as is said in Tales of Love (1987, 274), takes precedence over static rep-resentations. Immediacy is also linked to the image as fantasm, so that the imageis differently articulated in Kristeva’s work relative to that of most others, withthe possible exception of Deleuze. We need to look at the place of immediacyin more detail.

First, the immediate for Kristeva is brought out in her work on love asmetaphor and transference, where it refers to primary identification, whereas themediate is linked to the symbolic order. Desire is metonymic (displacement),while love is metaphoric. Metaphor enables a “crystallization of fantasy” (1987,30). Now, we have just seen that fantasy will be the key element in the analysisof the image, so that metaphor (= immediacy), fantasy, and image come to forma series of key terms.

Second, a poetics of the semiotic as immediacy would be very differentfrom a poetics based on a model in the symbolic, precisely because the sym-bolic is the sphere of mediation. Such an aesthetics will be constitutive ratherthan constituted, inventive rather than given, based in the “synthetic” punctum(the immediate sting of a detail) of the image, rather than in the narrativestudium of analysis (Barthes).

Even when Kristeva interpreted color in Giotto in her early work, it was al-ways a matter of the immediacy of the drives evoked by color as the “void of fig-uration” (1984, 231). Color decenters the ego, since it is not a matter ofrepresentation produced analytically, nor is it a matter of the precedence over theimage of narrative, as produced by the symbolic (1984a, 215).

Third, although an image cannot be reduced to color, it is clear that part ofthe immediacy of the drive dimension of color spills over into an appreciationof the power of the noncliché image. An image, strictly speaking, is irreducibleto the narrative system, even if it also supports this system in cinema. Once thedrive dimension is brought to bear on the image, the latter ceases to be astraightforward object of thought; for it is also a condition of the possibility ofthought. The mistake has been to move too readily into analyzing images asthough they were based in representation. Perhaps Kristeva’s approach to the

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image through the idea of the society of the spectacle also implies that the imageis a representation that evokes a narrative, but this is not in keeping with theoriginality of Kristeva’s contribution to the theme once the semiotic (drives) isbrought into the frame.

Virtual and the Actual of the ImageFor his part, Deleuze defines the crystal image (recall Kristeva’s “crystallization”)as one in which the actual and virtual images intersect; this is what Kristevawould call “the imaginary.” The movement-image (for example, in Westerns andaction films) is an actual image, in which time is virtual (it does not appear assuch). This means that time is indirectly present in the movement-image. Thevirtual element would constitute the imaginary dimension, if Deleuze believedin it; but he does not. The crystal image brings together the actual and the vir-tual in one image: “The imaginary is the crystal-image. It’s the key factor inmodern cinema” (Deleuze 1995, 67). Now, a virtual image is not an object, muchless a signifier; indeed, it is a nothingness—the very definition Sartre, and soKristeva, give to the image as purely imaginary. As virtual, time cannot appearin an actual image (a movement-image), much less be reduced to time as a pres-ent moment. However, a crystal image provides for time to become actual, andfor actual images to become virtual. Such is the challenge for the imaginary; forthe nothingness of the image as fantasy nevertheless has an actuality, whichmeans that it can be conceived of, if not perceived. An actual image in a mirrorentails a virtual image of the one whose reflection it is. Or if the latter is also ac-tual, then the virtual image is the image of the two actual images. But this vir-tual image itself could become actual, and so on, ad infinitum.

Time, here, refers to the nonlinear, nonchronological time of Bergsonianduration, where the series of “nows” gives way to something outside represen-tation, outside consciousness. For Deleuze, true durational time is cinemato-graphic, whereas the time—or more precisely, the space—of fixed, frozenmoments is photographic. Subjectivity and virtuality are enveloped in cine-matographic time, while objectivity and perception are related, but external, totime as spatialization, as the “frozen” moment. This is the version of time thatis missed in the image cliché (Kristeva’s “standardized” image, turned into athing); for attention is directed exclusively at what the image represents, whichis to say, at the level at which it is an object for perception. Both Kristeva andDeleuze head in the same direction here, although, it is true, Kristeva main-tains a psychoanalytic stance that Deleuze rejects. Nevertheless, as I have sug-gested elsewhere (see Lechte 2003), the kind of psychoanalytic frameworkKristeva works with is ultimately heterodox in its emphasis on the subject as asubject-in-process, a work-in-progress, an open system, a singularity. In each ofthese characterizations of the subject, is it not clear that time is durational,therefore virtual, but open to becoming actual before returning to virtuality?


This is Deleuze’s cinematic time writ large. Analytical time (the series of “nows”or present moments) gives way to the synthetic time of the cinema. What isthe significance of the term, “synthetic” here? Before concluding, let me offer abrief outline of the synthetic in relation to Kristeva’s idea of subjectivity.

The Synthetic and the PoeticBy “synthetic” is to be understood, creative and instantiating processes, as opposed to “analytical,” which attempts to establish the nature of things as al-ready given. Synthetic also evokes complexity theory in which the emphasis ison emergent processes.

Katherine Hayles, who, as one of the first to map the research developmentsin Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life, has used certain insights from thisarea to interpret literary texts, and points out that complexity is founded on“emergence,” or a capacity to evolve, and this is a synthetic process (1999, 243).By comparison, Artificial Intelligence aims to replicate and thus imitate humanintelligence once and for all. It takes a firmly analytical approach (238–239).

With regard to the cinema image, a synthetic perspective ignores the usualanalytical strictures concerning the certainty of plot development, chronology,and characterization. It is as though interest were in the contingency and chanceevents of the real, much like some surrealist works.

Deleuze’s philosophy of the cinema image emphasizes a synthetic approach,and is, despite appearances, close to Kristeva on this theme. Deleuze opposes aphenomenological approach to the cinema image, one based in natural percep-tion where “movement is still related to poses” (1986, 57), or is related to shots,as with photographs that “freeze” the moment. For the philosopher, movementin cinema is not an illusion, it is real.

From a synthetic perspective, subjectivity is defined as the self-formative ac-tivity of a subject composed of both vital drives and symbolic capacities. If ele-ments of personality exist from the very beginning of life, these are subject totransformation in life, particularly in experiences related to love and art. Sub-jectivity is not reducible to perception because perception is spatial and freezesthings in “poses.” Perception is spatial and analytical.8 Subjectivity is rather syn-thetic, in time, in movement and duration, in flux, “in process,” to evoke Kris-teva. In sum, subjectivity is synthetic.

Time as experienced in subjectivity, especially memory, is duration as out-lined by Bergson (1993, 212–213). For its part, memory constitutes time, notthe reverse. Time is not the minutes that pass in perception, but the durationthat is produced by events themselves, and within which subjects are caught up.

As cinema is the art form uniquely based in time, cinema images produceevents, memory, and subjectivity. The cinema image articulates time and be-comes the form of time’s incarnation as memory, just as photography is the articulation of space and perception.

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Semiotic as SynthesisKristeva’s theory of the semiotic (1984b, 13–106) can be thus understood as asynthetic and creative process based in affect. It brings her work in touch withDeleuze’s. To understand the cinema image in-depth is to see it as a dynamicforce in the formation of subjectivity. The semiotic, as we have seen, is adrive-based notion, composed of energy charges. This is very close to whatDeleuze calls the image to the extent that the semiotic, as a nonconceptual, syn-thetic feature, is not a representation. Kristeva describes the semiotic as havingits basis in the Greek khora, which is, she says: “a nonexpressive totality formedby the drives and their stases.” It is constituted by “movements and theirephemeral stases” (1984b, 25). It is not a position or positioning of any kind. Therelevance of the semiotic is difficult to grasp if one presupposes that the cinemaimage takes place in mediated reality reliant on perception, while the semiotickhora might be assumed to be based in a real body. However, it is precisely thefluidity of the passage between khora and image that is proposed. The khora isthe energy flow simultaneously present in both body and image. The body isconstituted in its exposure to images: that is, it is formed in and through images.

In Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat White (1998), much of the impact of the filmwould be lost if attention was directed solely to the narrative—such as it is. In-stead, expressions on lined faces, the gold teeth, the flamboyant clothing, theelaborately decorated vehicles, the sounds of gravelly voices, and so forth, makethe film what it is and contribute to the constitution, semiotically, of the sub-jectivity of the protagonists and spectators. The semiotic thus instantiates thecharacters; they are not already there, as symbolic cutouts. This is precisely theeffect of synthetic processes.

ConclusionOut of the discussion in this chapter, the key point that is reiterated is that sub-jectivity as related to the image is neither essentially photographic nor symbolic,but derives from the dynamic processes of time and the semiotic drives. Andthese are most clearly evident in cinema. Perception, based in space and the eter-nal pose of photography, connects with the symbolic order, which is analytical,while the semiotic, giving rise to the rhythms of time, connects with cinema.

But even Sartre in his deliberations of the image is careful to separate per-ception from subjectivity as such, while perception is linked to objectivity. Inshort, for Sartre, the image is essentially subjective, even if it also has to paradein phenomenological guise as consciousness.

If Kristeva’s approach to the image is via the notion of the fantasm as ar-ticulated by psychoanalysis, it is also true that her approach, in keeping withSartre’s, preserves the virtual character of the image as a nothingness, Kristeva’sfear being that this virtuality will be turned into a simulacrum in the media


barrage of the society of the spectacle. Although Deleuze is uninterested in theimaginary as a producer of images, the distinction between virtual and actual issustained, and the virtual image retains its status of virtuality, even if it becomesdifficult to distinguish between virtual and actual in the crystal image.

Finally, once time and its image ceases to be reduced to perception, to thephotographic and to the symbolic as essentially analytical—that is, once timeceases to be spatialized—it must be grasped through the dynamic framework ofsynthetic processes characteristic of an “open system,” the subject-in-process, thesubject-as-a-work-in-progress, and as a singularity—that is, through time-basedprocesses. This insight, common to both the work of Kristeva and Deleuze, canthen serve as the basis for creative and original research on time in the future.

Notes1. This does not mean of course that the term “image” is not evoked in writ-

ings about Kristeva. Just the opposite: compare “images of melancholy,” the “imageof the female body,” images of gender, and so forth. It rather means that the the-oretical impetus related to Kristeva’s approach to the image is rarely addressed.

2. See, however, Lechte (1990a, 1990b, 1995) for examples using Kris-teva’s theoretical frame in studies of the image.

3. Speaking of the “mental image,” it is notable that Mark Hansen, in hiscritique of Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema, argues that the “time-image,” forwhich Deleuze has become best known, is limited because it is situated withina “purely mental space,” which is in fact that of the brain as receptacle of the cin-ema inscription (cf. “the brain is the screen”) (2004, 593). He then argues thatrecent developments of cognitive science have refuted such a passive view ofthe mental image/brain. Without being able to develop this point in this chap-ter, it is worthwhile keeping it in mind as we discuss the relations between Kris-teva, Sartre, and Deleuze on the (mental) image.

4. Even though it does not exactly accord with the traditional way of in-terpreting khora, it must now be envisaged that it has to do with time even morethan space; for to spatialize it implies linking it to both perception and the sym-bolic, whereas Kristeva’s trajectory, as we know, is to give it a definite semioticflavor that is at the antipodes of the symbolic. Moreover, we note that for Lacan,perception is linked to the symbolic through the lack of castration representedby objet petit a—that is, perception in itself is never entirely satisfying, so thesubject is induced to go beyond it. Interestingly, Lacan makes this point moststrongly in his analysis of seeing and the look in relation to the painted imagein particular and to images in general (1964, 65–109).

5. Here, we should recall that a key aspect of Jean Mitry’s discussion (1999)of Eisenstein’s work (as well as that of other filmmakers) is in terms of “rhythmand montage.” The “rhythm” of a film, for Mitry, approximates the underlyingtemporal ordering of the film’s articulation, especially in relation to the way

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action is presented. Mitry, without knowing it, thus alludes to the Kristevannotion of the “semiotic khora.”

6. Nietzsche and, after him, Kristeva define monumental time as the timeof the eternal recurrence of the fundamental rhythms of nature and society (in-cluding the biorhythms of the human species) (see Kristeva 1986).

7. For a commentary on this, see Casey (1981, 139–168). For Casey, itseems problematic to attempt to separate perception from imaginary withoutfalling for the illusion of immanence.

8. This point may need revision in light of recent developments in cogni-tive science, but still has significant purchase (see Hansen 2004, 593 n. 10).

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———. 1997. La révolte intime: Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse II. Paris:Fayard.

Lacan, J. 1964. Quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychoanalyse. Paris: Seuil.Lechte, J. 1990a. “Art, Love and Melancholy in the Work of Julia Kristeva.” In

Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva. Ed. JohnFletcher and Andrew Benjamin. London: Routledge, 24-41.

———. 1990b. “Kristeva and Holbein, Artist of Melancholy.” British Journal ofAesthetics 30 (4): 342–350.

———. 1995. “Translating Abstraction.” Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts3:25–35.

———. 2003. “Love, Life, Complexity and the ‘Flesh’ in Kristeva’s Writing Ex-perience.” In The Kristeva Critical Reader. Ed. J. Lechte and M. Zour-nazi. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 185-201.

Mitry, J. 1999. “Cinematic Rhythm.” The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema.Trans. Christopher King. London: Indiana University Press, 104-109.

Rocchio, R. F. 1999. Cinema of Anxiety: A Psychoanalysis of Italian Neorealism.Austin: University of Texas Press.

Sartre, J.-P. 1940/1986. L’Imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard.Žižek, S. 1991. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular

Culture. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.

yanulada


6

The Darkroom of the Soul

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Robyn Ferrell

There are few other contemporary theorists who allow an understanding of meaning in both its aspects, of sign and subjectivity. Julia Kristeva’s psycho-analytic semiotics can bring out what is at stake in certain aesthetic questions, and provide a vehicle for linking these with political questions that may animatetheir production.

In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva writes, “Modern man is losing hissoul, but he does not know it, for the psychic apparatus is what registers repre-sentations and their meaningful values for the subject. Unfortunately, that dark-room needs repair” (1995, 8).

I want to explore this “darkroom of the soul” in the context of the ubiqui-tous images of press photography. I want to do so to bring out the sophisticationof Kristeva’s semiotics for understanding the deep structure of our time—an eracolonized by the image, and cultivating a subjectivity formed to fit.

IBarthes saw in the temporality of photography a new “space-time cat-egory ‘spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority,’ the photographbeing an illogical conjunction of the here-now and there-then.” Pho-tography shows us a prior reality, and even if it does give us an impres-sion of ideality, it is never experienced as purely illusory: it is a documentof a “reality from which we are sheltered.” (Kristeva 1989, 315)

Photography can be distinguished then from cinema, Kristeva notes, because of“their different ways of grasping reality”; cinema “is not presented as an evocation

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of a past reality, but as a fiction the subject is in the process of living.” The possi-bility of cinema as a visible language implicitly emerges from her discussion, sincethe conjunction of images allows for the analogy with syntax and narrative inwritten texts. “The isolated image (or photograph) is an utterance; when arrangedwith others, it produces a narration” (1989, 316).

This suggests that photography too can be visible language, since it can bethought of as an utterance. The analysis of the photograph as embodying twomoments, the here-now with the there-then, is already constituted by this im-possibility, in the direction of fiction. Yet, its putative relation to reality somehowseems to cut short its development into a discourse. It is as if our susceptibilityfor the realism of the photograph entails that it be interpreted reductively.

The privilege of the press photograph is, as Barthes has argued, to suggesta reality unmediated by representation. Naturally, this is a feint, for however re-alistic it appears, the photograph remains an image. “What is the content ofthe photographic message? What does the photograph transmit? By definition,the scene itself, the literal reality” (1981, 196).

In order to move from the reality to its photograph it is in no way nec-essary to divide up this reality into units and to constitute these unitsas signs. . . . Certainly the image is not the reality but at least it is itsperfect analogon and it is exactly this analogical perfection which, tocommon sense, defines the photograph. (1981, 196)

In particular, the press photograph professes to be “a mechanical analogueof reality.” In other “analogical” reproductions—drawing, painting, cinema, theater—the style comes as a supplementary message in these genres, Barthes argues. Whereas:

In front of a photograph, the feel of “denotation” or, if one prefers, ofanalogical plenitude, is so great that the description of a photographis literally impossible: . . . to describe is thus not simply to be impre-cise or incomplete, it is to change structures, to signify something dif-ferent from what is shown. (1981, 197–198)

This leads to the formulation of the paradox of photography, which is a“structural and ethical paradox”: “[w]hen one wants to be ‘neutral,’ ‘objective,’one strives to copy reality meticulously, as though the analogical were a factorof resistance against the investment of values (such at least is the definition ofaesthetic ‘realism’)” (1981, 199).

Barthes goes on to consider the ways in which these appearances are deceptive; the press photograph does connote which we can infer from ourknowledge that it has been “chosen composed constructed and treated accord-ing to professional, aesthetic, or ideological norms,” likewise it is read,

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“connected more or less consciously by the public that consumes it to a traditional stock of signs” (1981, 198).

A potent example is the press picture taken of “the moment of death,” thefirst execution of a woman on death row, and published in a newspaper of thetime (reprinted in Kobré and Brill 2004). While the commentary freely admits tothe artifice, even the cunning, of its capture—the camera on the leg and so on isdetailed in the caption—this is the more to mobilize its uncanny realism, the truthof its depiction. The photojournalist steals the real from under the noses of thosewho censor it. Ironically, the methods of its production are more clearly seen inthis photograph than in many others because the blurring, produced by its methodof photographing, alerts us to the possibility of “trick” photography. Barthes’s “eth-ical paradox” is foreshadowed in many aspects of this photo: the illegality of it, thesensationalism of the death, and the attendant anxiety about capital punishment.

It is as well to remember that the connotation of the photograph is“neither ‘natural’ nor ‘artificial’ but historical, or, if it be preferred, ‘cultural.’ Its signs are gestures, attitudes, expressions, colors, or effects,endowed with certain meanings by virtue of the practice of a certainsociety: the link between signifier and signified remains, if not unmo-tivated, at least entirely historical. (1981, 206)

This allows Barthes to rejoin his general conviction that “[s]ignification isthe dialectical movement which resolves the contradiction between cultural andnatural man” (1981, 206). He writes:

This purely “denotative” status of the photograph, the perfection andplenitude of its analogy, in short its “objectivity,” has every chance ofbeing mythical. (1981, 198; emphasis added)

By mythical he means carrying the structure of signification that makes mean-ing possible at all. The faith in the reality of the photograph is a cultural under-pinning, supporting the intelligibility of contemporary first-world sign-systems.

IIIf the photograph is mythical in this structuralist sense, photojournalism wouldnevertheless be regarded in common sense as the antithesis of the sacred. But thisis surely the point. The conviction that reality is not a question of faith but ofempirically tested knowledge is, ironically, the article of faith.

Kristeva’s explicit interpretations of the sacred draw it into this genericquestion for realism. The sacred, as announced by Kristeva in her beautiful epis-tolary exchange with Catherine Clément, The Feminine and the Sacred, is vari-ously “life bearing meaning” (2001, 14); “the mystery of the emergence of

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meaning (and its celebration)” (13); “the impossible and nevertheless sustainedconnection between life and meaning” (14), which Kristeva—reading Arendt atthe time, she admits—distinguishes from the technocratic “life without ques-tions,” the totalitarianism that seeks destruction of life, and the zoos that wouldleave life in the realm of the naturally instrumental.

The sacred thereby occupies an intense place in Kristeva’s scheme for un-derstanding the production of meaning. The sacred is not the semiotic, nor thechoric, but the possibility of retrojecting these out of the necessary acts of mean-ing in which we live our embodiment, including our soul. She reminds us of theLacanian parable of how meaning is produced from out of life, that is, out of thedrives of the body, “the sacred as a sacrifice,” “the one that inscribes language inthe body, meaning in life” by means of a “cut,” a prohibition on a desire, “[a] pro-hibition on murder and incest, it is experienced by the soma as an act of vio-lence” (2001, 15).

To read the press photograph according to this function of the sacred wouldbe to read it as revealing and even celebrating the event of life bearing mean-ing. I can think of no better illustration paradoxically than the dark evocationsof photojournalism from worlds at war.

Such a line of thought might clarify the inherent religiosity felt to be in-vested in the famous image of the twin towers burning on September 11, 2001.With its iconography of crucifixion, and the surrounding rhetoric of the axis ofevil and the sanctity of American life, a reality sprung out of the image of apoc-alyptic change: “the world will never be the same.”

In more ways than many, this “media event” raises knowingness of the pro-duction of the real through images; for example, many have remarked on howthis photo (and the video of the same events) are “like a disaster movie,” and onefeels assured, given the accident of its spectacular capture, that armed with fore-knowledge, the terrorists arranged their own footage in case this photo oppor-tunity was somehow missed.

The myth of the separation of reality and image is paradoxically so strongthat most viewers have no trouble identifying the press photograph as a depic-tion of what happened. We do so without awareness of its metaphysical origin,and invariably without skepticism as to its reference. It is as it purports to be.But aliveness to this mythical meaning structuring our view might come fromconsidering the myths of others.

For example, in the iconography of the Central Desert painting of indige-nous Australian artists, the sacred meanings of the world are both displayedand encrypted. Eric Michaels, a passionate advocate for the Aboriginal artistsof the Central Desert, has written, “These paintings make the claim that thelandscape does speak and that it speaks directly to the initiated, and explains notonly its own occurrence, but the order of the world” (1987, 143).

Despite the time he has spent in the desert with the painters, Michaels ad-mits he has trouble accepting the claim of the paintings “in reality.” The press


photograph might prove his way into it, since it makes precisely the same claim;that reality speaks directly to the initiated in the photographic images, explain-ing its own occurrence and the order of the world. For example, in the photo-graphs of 9/11, we see not only the burning skyscrapers, which we accept asfactual and not simulated, as they would be in a movie sequence, and we also seea sequence of images that codes the event as cataclysmic, in the manner of thatgenre. We see sacrilege, we see historical forces at work, in the transmission ofpixels to a screen or dots to a page.

Such is the action also accorded to the icon in Byzantine art, which bringsthe devotee into direct communication with the sacred. This is dismissed todayas superstition. Like other examples of instrumental thought, the belief in thereference of the photograph betrays its own religiosity, not only as a record ofthe real, but also as a fundamentalism that believes it is the only possible one.

IIIThe psyche is an apparatus, Kristeva tells us, one that registers representationsand their meaningful values for the subject. The psychic apparatus is akin to adarkroom, as a process by which sensory data can be produced as meaningfulsigns. Kristeva follows Freud here in depicting the psyche as a mechanism to beunderstood, asking, How does it work?

Freud, in the essay on the “mystic writing pad” (1925), wrestled with themodel of such an apparatus; what mechanism could both receive fresh registra-tions while still maintaining a record of previous impressions? He found a sim-ple illustration in the case of the child’s toy, the Wunderblock that records animpression on the waxed paper cover and also on the wax tablet beneath.

But Kristeva’s analogy has the benefit of technological advance; the psychecan now be thought of as a darkroom, that seclusion in which the photographerdevelops and processes the film on which has already been recorded, by the ac-tion of the camera, an impression of light. Just as the photographer influencesthe resulting image by varying a multitude of elements in the process (the aper-ture, the film speed, the developer, the enlarger), so the psyche produces mean-ing in images by subjecting it to the structures of desire.

The analogy works even more strictly with the advent of digital photogra-phy: the camera is now an apparatus that can include the darkroom, as the psy-che embodies the registration and interpretation of images. And the light isnow recorded using not the analog techniques of film but the digital binaries ofthe pixel. Since meaning, too, can be understood on that binary model (in thestructuralist tradition, at least), the process of photography is today an evenmore perfect analogy for the psychical, producing its “meaningful values” bycontrasting a mark merely with what it is not.

The common factor, in both Freud’s example of the Wunderblock and Kris-teva’s of the darkroom, is to conceive of the psyche as a space of representations,

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and to infer from the sense impression a mind that is populated with images. Indeed, it also may be to infer from the habit of projection a thoroughly pro-duced image complete with aesthetic and ethical value.

The photograph is a good analog for the thought or other mental repre-sentation, because it includes in its instance a presentation of reality along withevidence of its production, for those who care to investigate it. In effect, it is theassumed access to reality—through the senses—that makes these representa-tions believable.

And in both cases, the psyche and the camera, the problem of interpretation(or the subjective) is disguised by this realist tendency, that is, the credibility ofour own feelings and thoughts along with the credibility of the scene in the pho-tograph. We are convinced of the truth of some things (facts) just as we believethe photograph records the reality of those things it depicts. This faith we havein some images—faith we are obliged to have, in order to join the “lifeworld”—belies the production of “meaningful values” that upholds their veracity.

The image is deceptive, in this sense, through and through. If we stop there,content with the image as representing the real, then we accept this laminate ofdesire as fact. In effect, we prefer our “internal reality” over the outer world, aworking definition of psychosis. Yet this presupposes that desire and reality canbe prised apart.

Neither Kristeva nor Lacan, who in this she follows, allow that it can. Theego, through whose lens all thought is refracted, is located “beside itself,” in the“field of the Other.” For Freud, all thought was representation; this was its func-tion in effect, to represent the force of the impulse/drive, experienced in thebody as affect, in the forum of the mind where it might become subject to thepossibility of satisfaction. In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, for example, he de-scribes an instinct as the demand made on the mind for work by the body as aresult of its connection with it (see in Ferrell 1996, chap. 2). The drive engen-ders an affective connection in the production of a representation.

Photography could be viewed like other genres that claim verisimilitude—the biography or the autobiography. But it is also a peculiarly virulent kind ofnarrative-myth; one that represents desire as always already accomplished. Inthis respect it is like the dream, profiting from the choric satisfaction of the hal-lucination. Engaging Freud’s semiotics of the dream-text, whose “primaryprocess” thinking allowed for a genre unlike conscious rational speech but fullof meaning and motivation, Kristeva refers us to the interpretation of dreamsin both Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) and in Language: The Unknown(1989) as a pivotal analysis bringing formal language into the drama of thespeaking subject.

The trick of the photograph—for example, of Barthes’s here-now in the wakeof his mother’s death holding the there-then of her living in her photograph (see1981, 65–66)—is that it “always carries its referent with itself ” (5), even thoughthis is an impossibility. It can thereby deny contradiction without being psychotic.


IVRealism is a genre, since it is a species of representation. And like all genres, itdescribes a desire. The separation of the reality from its image is a peculiarly Eu-ropean metaphysical commitment, one that more precisely separates the subjectfrom its objects in the image.

Technological thinking begins in metaphysics, as a style of thought inwhich the subject is opposed to its object, and ends with the generalizing of thesubject’s purposes to the means/ends thinking of instrumental rationality. In-deed, the image is arguably a potent psychic technology for thinking the worldin terms of its technological potential, that is, as means to ends. By this I mean,it is the image that can direct representation toward desire, express in the ob-ject a desire accomplished, in the most crude Freudian terms of wish fulfillment.Kristeva writes, “The rapture of the hallucination originates in the absence ofboundaries between pleasure and reality, between truth and falsehood.”

But at the same time, and perhaps because of this, in European philosophythe image is spared the rigor of the concept. The image is spared for the affectwithout which we cannot think, even though it is sacrificed to thought at a cer-tain point in the logic of instrumental rationality. The image retains the colorof this sacrifice, and remains the receptacle of it, of all that I am drawn to andconnected with, despite my putative separation from my objects.

This explains perhaps why images, and aesthetic appreciation in general, areso sacred to the European, and why today they emerge as the obvious intellectu-ally respectable way to spirituality—the modern bourgeois urban subject desiresto “know something about art,” going to galleries, collecting, and so forth. Theepiphany of Western abstraction would be the imageless image—the Rothkopainting, for example—that asserts only a logic of sensation.

Kristeva writes in several places of the mystery of life and meaning that isjoined in the sacred, but “new maladies of the soul” emerge in her diagnosis ofthe modern scene:

The body conquers the invisible territory of the soul. . . . You are over-whelmed with images, They carry you away, they replace you, you aredreaming. (1995, 8)

Pleasure and reality principles become permanently collapsed. This changein the psychical order could be momentous enough to be a new form of sub-jectivity, where the question shifts from “To be or not to be?” to “To take a pillor to talk?” Kristeva discerns the body, or at least a particular secularism in neu-roscience and biology, to have called into question the function of the psychic apparatus: Why have a soul?

This ambivalence about a certain primacy of the body is important, because it highlights that the psychoanalytic drive was never mere body, but

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always a concept designed to activate the relationship between body and mind.The drive is the body’s representative, to be found in, but not confined to, psy-chical representation.

If drugs do not take over your life, your wounds are “healed” with im-ages, and before you can speak about your states of the soul, you drownthem in the world of mass media. (1995, 8)

This dysphoric representation of the image seems to contrast with the role Ihave outlined above for the image as a site of the sacred, but this is complicatedby what Kristeva understands by the production of meaning.

The image is not confined to the semiotic, nor to the chora, of Kristeva’stheorizing. For, as she says, any utterance that signifies is a product of both semi-otic and symbolic modalities (1984, 24), a process that is, she tells us, necessar-ily dialectical. And the image is no less a sign than the written word, in theterms of the science of semiotics. Thus the photograph might suggest a signi-fying practice that could go beyond “narrative,” “metalanguage,” or “contem-plation” to become a “text” (99). Kristeva already grants this status to the “visiblelanguage” of painting, quoting Meyer Shapiro.

But what of those places where Kristeva appears to dismiss the photographas a mere ideological salve? “Before you can speak about your states of the soul,you drown them in the world of mass media,” she writes. Does she miss thepotency of the photography image as text in favor of the literary prejudice to-ward articulate conscious thought? In a case study of an artist suffering from thisnew kind of “narcissistic disorder” she observes in New Maladies of the Soul, thepatient finds a cure in the articulation of analysis, a relief that his expressions incollage have not brought him (1995, 25). What does the former have that thelatter lacks?

Perhaps the answer is, it has the “thetic.” Subject-formation comes about, as she describes in Revolution in Poetic Language, in the double bind of the sub-ject distinguished and separated from its objects in the “thetic,” a structural re-flexivity which at the same time displaces into the symbolic the material of itsdesires (1984, 43). This is to suggest that the analytic cure seeks a differentiationby the subject of its position as subject, from the drives and the objects deriving it.

VThe representations of photojournalism are generically ubiquitous and forceful.This genre is often marked by trauma and violence. Photojournalists use theirimages to arrest the attention of a knowing viewer bombarded with a constantstream of images all soliciting affects of some sort. But the distinction betweenthe representation and its historical event can slip from a reliable grasp, as atroc-ity and the tendentiousness of its image become more firmly glued together.


War correspondents have traded on the trauma of the battle to achieve theireffect of bringing events from elsewhere to the attention of the reading/viewingpublic. Sometimes this enterprise is undertaken explicitly to bring to recognitionthe injustice being done in a part of the world we don’t witness. Kevin Carter’sphotograph of the child and the vulture from Sudan is a case in point. In the pho-tograph, a small child squats exhausted and starving in the dust in the foregroundof the picture while a vulture watches and waits behind. (This picture can beviewed at www.pdngallery.com/20years/photojournalism/03_kevin_carter.html.)It contains an importantly ambivalent relation to horror and trauma, since it de-picts nothing in the present, except the menace of the near future. It is what webring from our own knowledge of the world—what will happen next—that sick-ens us in this terrifying image. It won Carter the 1994 Pulitzer Prize.

This photograph operates to cultivate the loss of something previously un-missed: the Sudanese other, in the aftermath of European colonialism in Africa.This is an event that exceeds representation for the Western subject, who nev-ertheless must come to mourn it if there is to be justice.

The strength of its success in creating an affect for a representation of anevent might be measured in the prestige of the Pulitzer, but also in Carter’s ownanguished suicide following the award of the prize. It is clear this photograph be-came potentially a type of experience for viewers. This photograph makes graphicthe place of affects, and thereby of the body, in the production of “information.”

Among the accolades came criticism for the culture of the photojournalist,for whom representation became more of an imperative than reality: “The manadjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as wellbe a predator, another vulture on the scene,” as the St Petersburg (FL) Times putit. The ethical dilemma arises from an essential connotative property of thephotograph that is strangely obscured—the photographer, the body at the scene.The claim to reference and thereby, to reality, is underwritten by a body ofhuman capacities and sensibilities.

However, that body is not quite on the scene, and certainly not in the sameway as the little child is on the scene. The photographer’s equivocation, per-haps his judgment, that he could do more for the situation by photographing itthan by saving the child, is unforgivable not only because of its seeming lack ofhumanity, but for what it questions about photographic verisimilitude.

By invoking the photographer, the image puts into question its own “brutereality.” This causes a disturbance in the epistemological frame that establishesthe authority of the photograph. That frame grounds the superstition behind the press photograph as an objective record. Now the access to the real is too di-rect for comfort. For there to have been revealed a photographer, with ethicalchoices beyond recording, makes all viewers of the scene complicit in the trav-esty it represents.

The belief in the reality of the scene, that it “really happened,” underminesbelief in its photographic objectivity. And this happens at the same time as the

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sacred function of the press photograph demonstrates its objectivity as a “natural”consequence of its reality. This is a genuinely iconoclastic moment.

VIDo we have, then, in this analysis of the darkroom of the soul a more sophisti-cated version of the so-called primitive anxiety that the photograph will captureyour soul? Is the photograph, with its verisimilitude and its ubiquity taken to-gether, capable of producing a new subjectivity threatened with fragility in dis-cerning the difference between images? The juxtaposition of elements in mydiscussion—the sacred, the image, the photograph, the psychical apparatus—has endeavored to sketch how Kristeva’s “metapsychology” of the production ofmeaning opens up a discussion of contemporary subjectivity.

This allows me to ask, finally, of Carter’s photograph: What soul-body does the image of the little Sudanese child pay testament to? If her life endedthere, then what in this new psychic order was its value, and what was owed toher and all the millions of others who are obscured as just so many bodies onthe global scene?

We need to chart the ethical dimension of this world that collapses theimage and the body into self-evident realities. As Kristeva intimates, we need toknow this for our own “self ”-preservation, as much as for the good of our souls.

ReferencesBarthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang.Ferrell, Robyn. 1996. Passion in Theory. New York: Routledge.Freud, Sigmund. 1925. “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad.” The Standard

Edition. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 19:227–232.Kobré, Ken, and Betsy Brill. 2004. Photojournalism: The Professionals’ Approach,

5th ed. Ed. Betsy Brill. Boston, MA: Focal Press.Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.

New York: Columbia University Press.———. 1989. Language: The Unknown. Trans. Anne M. Menke. New York:

Columbia University Press.———. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York:

Columbia University Press.Kristeva, Julia, and Catherine Clément. 2001. The Feminine and the Sacred.

Trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press.Michaels, Eric. 1987. “Afterword” in Warlukurlungu Artists Association,

Kuruwarri: Yuendumu Doors. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aborigi-nal Studies.

7

Julia Kristeva’s Chiasmatic Journeys:From Byzantium to the Phantom of Europe and the End of the World

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Maria Margaroni

Fatal AttractionsIn her latest detective novel (Meurtre à Byzance 2004) Julia Kristeva opens thefigure of a chiasmus at the heart of which a series of encounters take place that,as the novel develops, assume the nature of a fatality.1 Very early on in the novel,Sebastian Chrest-Jones (a contemporary historian of migration who falls in lovewith the Byzantine princess Anne Comnène) explains the theory of nonsepa-rability, as expounded by a colleague of his, a quantum physicist. “It wasenough,” he tells us, “for two objects to cross paths once to remain inseparablefor eternity. For ever. Even when in all appearances they seemed absolutely sep-arated in time or space” (2004, 41). According to Sebastian, this theory thatpostulates the possibility of a chiasmatic crossing of paths across temporal orspatial distance can provide “the key” to a life in excess of life (une sur-vie) andto an “absolute time” that is outside and yet a supplement to ours (41).

Meurtre à Byzance attempts to lend substance to this other dimension oftime in the context of which otherwise distant or separate entities are experi-enced simultaneously: “en meme temps” (2004, 57). As the narrator explains, inthis temporal simultaneity there are no more boundaries (57). As a result, theeleventh and the twenty-first centuries converge whereas a number of inventedand real spaces (that is, Kristeva’s fictional Santa-Barbara, Byzantium, theUnited States, Europe, Constantinople, Paris and Puy-en-Valais in France, and

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Boyana and Plovdiv in Bulgaria) find themselves subjected to a law of attrac-tions that promises to keep their fates entangled “for eternity.” This “law of at-tractions,” as I have called it, is no other than allegory, Kristeva’s favorite fictionalmode, characterized (as Walter Benjamin argues in The Origin of German TragicDrama) by a melancholic attitude towards history and the past.2 As Benjaminemphasizes, allegorical melancholia does not point to “the emotional conditionof the poet or his public” but constitutes, instead, a concrete historical responseto the remoteness and irreversibility of the past, the decay of human life, the ru-ination (or ruin-strewn movement) of history itself (1977, 139). According toBenjamin, “an appreciation of the transience of things . . . is one of the strongestimpulses of allegory” (223). Behind this appreciation, however, lies a concernwith “rescuing” the transient; in other words, a desire to redeem what is dead ordying in and for the present.3 Hence, what Benjamin traces at the heart of theallegorical work—namely, the “tiger’s leap into the past” that suspends the his-torical continuum—brings the past in a chiasmatic dialogue with the presentand reinscribes both into larger hermeneutic syntagmas (1968, 261).

In this chapter, I want to follow Kristeva in her precarious leap into Byzan-tium. This leap, it needs to be noted, is not a return to or a quest for the real, his-torical topos of Byzantium. For Kristeva, as for Benjamin, the past exists in itsinscriptions in the present, that is, in its material ruins (the historical and reli-gious sites that carry the memory of Byzantium or the Crusades) and its textualremainders. “My Byzantium is within its books—an imaginary chronicle,”Stephanie Delacour, the female protagonist of the novel, confesses. She goes onto ask, “[H]as it ever existed otherwise?” (2004, 149). What is, then, at stake inKristeva’s leap is not the recovery of any historical truth about Byzantium but ourhermeneutic relation to its (material or textual) ruins. It is no wonder, in this light,that Stephanie (a detective-cum-journalist) is the primary figure in the novel ofthe Benjaminian melancholic allegorist who, as Benjamin insists, is a “tireless in-vestigator and thinker,” one who is committed equally to the fragile world of crea-tures and to the attainment of knowledge (1977, 152). In fact, it is this doublecommitment that brings together Benjamin’s notion of allegory and Kristeva’sdetective fiction for, like the former, the latter focuses on the suffering and decayof the organic—bare life or flesh. As in allegory4 so in detective fiction the humanbody acquires significance only as corpse and murder (which features prominentlyin the title of Kristeva’s novel) becomes emblematic for what Benjamin calls “thePassion” (understood as suffering and anxiety) “of [the creaturely] world” (166).What is more, both Benjaminian allegory and detective fiction (as Kristeva prac-tices it) have a redemptive function for they aim at capturing “a moment of crea-turely hope in the contemplation of hopelessness” (Gilloch 2002, 85). Thisredemptive hope relates as much to what in Benjamin gives allegory its distinctcritical value as to what in Kristeva accounts for the optimism of the detectivegenre, namely, their shared belief in questioning, hermeneutic analysis, contem-plation, or to put it differently “the inner life of the mind” (Gilloch 2002, 79).5

Julia Kristeva’s Chiasmatic Journeys 109

As I propose to demonstrate in what follows, Kristeva’s textual journey toByzantium needs to be understood in the context of this redemptive desire thaterupts as the theorist’s unique historical response to the passion of our post-9/11world. Her investment in Byzantium as the privileged site of this desire andpole of a series of fatal attractions is particularly significant, for both as a his-torical and a conceptual space, Byzantium is currently moving to the forefrontof political debate—not only because it has traditionally functioned as the re-pressed other of old Occidental Europe but, more importantly, because it is in-creasingly being invoked as an alternative to the U.S. global imperium and apotential “heading” for a new multicultural Europe. In his 1992 discussion of thepossible futures of a United Europe, philosopher Jacques Derrida raises the fol-lowing questions:

From what state of exhaustion must these young old-Europeans whowe are set out again, re-embark? Must they re-begin? Or must theydepart from Europe, separate themselves from an old Europe? Or elsedepart again, set out toward a Europe that does not yet exist? Or elsere-embark in order to return to a Europe of origins that would thenneed to be restored, rediscovered, or re-constituted during a great cel-ebration of “re-union”? (1992, 7–8)

In Meurtre à Byzance Byzantium functions both as a restored “Europe oforigins” and as the imaginary topos of a Europe that does not yet exist. Thus,what begins as a melancholic homecoming (in Sebastian’s quest for his forgot-ten roots in Bulgaria and a subjective as well as communal legacy) ends up re-leasing the unheimlich within the home, namely, temporal and spatial distance,foreignness, exile, psychic alienation. This is, of course, consistent with the di-alectical nature of allegory that, as we have seen, seeks hope in the irreversibleprocess of decay and returns to the past only to remind us of the irrevocabilityof all origin. Caught in the chiasmus traced by these inverse gestures, how arewe to understand the heading of today’s Europe, as Kristeva envisions it? Andhow can we escape the discourse of crisis that has historically dominated ourdebates around Europe?

The Crisis of Europe and the End of the WorldIn Wim Wenders’s 1991 film Until the End of the World (also unfolding in an al-legorical en même temps) an old exhausted Europe is coming to acknowledge itsfinitude and the spreading dis-ease at the heart of its heart, namely, Paris. At thebeginning of the film the two Paris-based protagonists, Claire Tourneur and herpartner Gene Fitzpatrick, are found unable to overcome their own personal emo-tional blocks and the deadlocks of their relationship. It is only when, in one of heraimless journeys, Claire accidentally crosses Sam Farber’s path (an American

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hunted by the U.S. government for stealing a high-tech camera invented by hisfather) that a series of fatal attractions is initiated and all the three characters’ lives(along with those of the people they meet on the way) change—for eternity.

The question Wenders ventures to raise from the site of an ailing Europe(a Europe bombarded by a global network of images and threatened by aU.S.-directed imminent catastrophe) relates to the possibility of conceptualiz-ing a community—a universal community, no doubt, though one invested inwhat Gene reclaims as a distinctly European legacy, that is, what he calls “themagic, healing power of words,” which, at the end of the film, he uses to cureClaire of “the disease of images.” It is primarily the sharing of words that keepsthe different characters in the film inseparable—scattered though they arearound the globe.

In The Other Heading, his essay on Europe, Derrida draws on EdmundHusserl, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Valéry, among others, to demonstrate thatthe crisis of Europe has consistently been interpreted as “the crisis of spirit”(1992, 32). It is not surprising, therefore, that every time a spiritual/cultural cri-sis is diagnosed (as in Wenders’s film) the question of Europe and of its exem-plarity as a conceptual and political space is raised. It is in this light that weneed to understand Kristeva’s own growing preoccupation with a European cul-ture of revolt, characterized by a commitment to critique and a faith in themedium of the word. Since 1991 when Le vieil homme et les loups, her first de-tective novel, was published, the globe-scape Kristeva is painting and against thebackdrop of which she sets her fictional as well as psychoanalytic and academicpursuits is, admittedly, bleak. She uses Guy Debord’s term “Society of the Spec-tacle” as a convenient shorthand for the Western globe-aspiring village whereexchange is the only value remaining, where intimacy is stifled, murder becomesthe supreme event, authority is confounded with totalitarianism, and commu-nity gets reduced to interactivity. In her detective fiction this society of post-modern barbarians is translated into the allegorical topos of (aptly named)Santa-Barbara, a fictional country standing for a United States that is divorcedfrom its own internal tensions and typified in the conceptual abstraction of ahuge screen, behind which, as Stephanie notes in Meurtre à Byzance, there isnothing but crime (2004, 135).

Kristeva’s obsessive and (perhaps, uncritical) use of Debord’s term6 has donelittle to improve her reputation—especially in view of the emergence of “VisualCulture” as the new “fashionable” academic field of studies. Yet, if Kristeva, likeWenders, warns us against the disease of images, this is only to raise questionsthat one would expect to find at the heart of the new discipline. Thus, if, as thetheorists of the field argue, our only access to global capitalism is through theflatness of its images, then how should we redefine (and, indeed, reinvent) the act of seeing? And when does the seeing restore to the flatness of the imagethe historicity and complexity that are indispensable for both an aesthetics anda politics of the visual? According to Kristeva, it is precisely such questions that


the “society of the spectacle” prevents us from asking for, as she demonstratesin her reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Imaginaire in her Intimate Revolt, what thespectacle denies is the nihilating power of images, that is, their critical functionwith regard to reality. It is “not a matter of demonizing the universe of images,”she writes.

But it is a matter of assessing the deviations when commercial controlof this omnipresent imaginary-spectacle and its attendant diminishingor weakening of verbal culture end up erasing the annihilating vectorin favor of illusion: I get drunk on the images; I no longer perceive itas a fatally liberating, annihilating image; I cling instead to its so-calledreality; I believe in it. More than imaginary: the imaginary is realized.Or, rather: if everything is imaginary, the imaginary is dead, along withmy margin of freedom. (2002b, 128)

—the freedom, precisely, to lie, invent and remain incredulous in the face of anunsatisfactory or oppressive reality.

These are, in fact, the symptoms of the disease of images as Gene, the sto-ryteller, witnesses them in Until the End of the World. When Sam’s father inventsa device that can record and project on a screen a person’s dreams, all the char-acters get addicted to their own internal fantasies and, as Gene puts it, get “lostin the labyrinth of [their] own soul.” It is this uncritical immersion into fantasythat constitutes for Kristeva the “common denominator” of what she calls the“new maladies of the soul” (1995, 9). According to her, the postmodern “con-sumer of the society of the spectacle . . . has run out of imagination” (10). “In-undated with images” (2002b, 67), she or he has lost the ability to symbolize hisor her “unbearable traumas” and fantasies (1995, 9); in other words, she or hehas lost belief in the communal art that is also paradoxically the most intimate,namely, storytelling. In her discussion of Didier, a patient who she considersthe “symbolic emblem of contemporary man” (1995, 10), Kristeva writes: “Hedisposed of . . . stories as if they were lifeless objects or sterilized waste products”(11). The dilemma, then, we are currently facing is “how to remain in idolatry”(as she puts it) despite our suspicion toward the mediatized golden calf andwhile preserving our faith in the divine thunder of the word, which, Kristevanotes, explodes “imageless” (2002b, 78). As I will suggest, if Kristeva attempts“a tiger’s leap into the past,” this is because she finds in the textual topos ofByzantium a culture that is centred on images but that refuses to take seeing asnatural: “But the eyes, ah, the eyes, here is the key to Byzantium!” Stephanie re-minds us in Meurtre à Byzance.7 “So many battles around the visible and the in-visible, the desirability or non desirability of producing images” (2004, 204).What is more, Byzantium introduces another economy of seeing where theimage is also a written sign (a graphein) and where, as a result, seeing does notstifle critique but opens up a hermeneutic space for the production of what she

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calls “a logos of the soul” (1995, 26). Finally, because it brings together the vis-ible and the tangible, this new economy of seeing renders possible a communitythat aspires to universality but whose pulse, as we will see, no longer beats at theheart of the heart of Europe.

The Clash of CivilizationsTheorists of allegory have repeatedly pointed to the centrality in allegorical nar-ratives of a confrontation between “warring principles, semantic oppositionspersonified” (McHale 1989, 142). In this light, Kristeva’s preference for the al-legorical mode may throw into relief a Manichean pattern in her thinking thatonly recently has begun to take serious political dimensions. In her 1997 addressto a majority of U.S. scholars in New York, Kristeva did not hesitate to expressher concern about the “raging polemic,” as she put it, between two distinct mod-els of civilization, a polemic that, according to her, was made clearer after thefall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (2002a, 261). As she explains, what is at stake inthis polemic is the necessity and/or possibility of an intersection between “twoconceptions of freedom that Western democracies have had the privilege ofconstructing” (262). On the one hand, there is the Kantian understanding offreedom as the freedom to take action (i.e., “to self-begin”) “within a logicalpre-established order.”8 This is, then, freedom defined as adaptation for it de-notes “the ability to adapt to a cause that is always exterior to the self ” and thatis now, as she emphasizes, “less and less a moral cause and more and more aneconomic one” (262). Kristeva sees this distinct type of freedom, which (as MaxWeber has shown) is promoted within the tradition of Protestantism, as theconceptual basis not only of Western liberalism but also of the logic behind thephenomenon of globalization we are currently witnessing. It is for this reasonthat she comes to argue that “American civilization is best suited” to it (262).

On the other hand, there is what we can call the “Continental” version offreedom, one that has its origins in Heidegger’s rereading of Kant, the Greekphilosophical tradition and the legacy of the French Revolution. In contrast to thefreedom-as-adaptation model, this conceptualization of freedom favors “being,and especially singular being, versus economic or scientific necessity” (2002a, 264).It draws on the strengths of Catholicism as much as European socialism and is“animated by a concern for human life in its most fragile singularity [. . .] as well as a concern regarding sexual and ethnic differences in their specific inti-macy and not only in their role as consumers” (264). What is more, it is the prod-uct of a distinctly European articulation of philosophy (as the “permanentputting-into-question” [264]) and is paradigmatically realized in the psychoana-lytic experience of transference/countertransference that privileges the “revelationof the self in the presence of the other through the given word” (2002d, 236).

It is because this other freedom is currently endangered, “carried away” as weare “on this earth, by the maelstrom of thought-as-calculation and consumerism”


(2002a, 264), that Kristeva identifies herself with her journalist-heroine, assumingthe task of serving as Europe’s special envoy in the United States to advocate theneed to espouse an attitude of Europhilia: “[I]f Europe did not exist,” she tells heraudience in the U.S. address, “we would have to invent it. It is in the interest of ourplural freedom, and it is also in the interest of America” (2002a, 268). One canhardly miss in these words the repetition of a gesture that, as Derrida has demon-strated, has historically produced a Europe that is no other than “the idea of Europe,” a Platonic eidos, a phantom conjured by a dreaming Europe in its sleep(Naas 1992, xix). This is a gesture that posits Europe as “the good example, [. . .] theTelos of all historicity,” “the universal heading for all the nations or peoples of theworld” (xxvi). “Can we preserve it [the legacy of Europe] for all mankind?” Kris-teva asks, not hesitating to assume the complicity of her interlocutors in what sheadmits is “more an aspiration than an established project” (2002a, 264).

The problem with the logic of exemplarity,9 of course, is that once you startdividing the universal (once you start subtracting from “it” what is more “itself ”than itself ) you can never end. Thus, the moment Europe is taken out of theuniversal (exempted from it as its prime example) a series of fatal attractions(and subtractions) follow, for Europe is in its turn divided and finds its uniquerealization in France, while France itself rests the head of its heading in Parisand Paris finds its heart beating in the Louvre and Notre Dame. In The OtherHeading, Derrida exposes the working of this logic from the early twentiethcentury to the present, reminding us that a renewed politics for today’s Europecannot but begin in the question(ing) of the example. For Kristeva, however,there is no doubt that France belongs to the avant-garde of a world communitythat, she notes, may not always be sufficiently appreciative or grateful:

They built Notre Dame, the Louvre, conquered Europe and a largepart of the globe, and then went back home, because they prefer apleasure that goes hand in hand with reality. But because they also pre-fer pleasure to reality, they continue to think of themselves as mastersof the world or at least as a great power. And the world, irritated, con-descending, fascinated, seems ready to follow them. To follow us.(2002c, 247–248)

In this light, it is no wonder that, as a novelist, Kristeva comes to privilegeallegory, for it is only in what Benjamin calls the “petrified, primordial landscape”of an allegorical narrative that Paris can appear so luminous (1977, 166). And itis only in such context that a dark antagonist to it can be posited, one serving asa projection screen where an ongoing history of colonial practices and imperial-ist aspirations (both “too French,” very European) is masked behind the perfor-mative repudiation of the United States as the principle of all Evil. In Welcometo the Desert of the Real!, Slavoj Žižek is quick to remind us what is at stake. “Per-haps,” he suggests, the “refusal of ‘Americanization’ in France, shared by many

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Leftists and Rightist nationalists, is . . . ultimately the refusal to accept the factthat France itself is losing its hegemonic role in Europe” (2002, 121). In Meurtreà Byzance, Kristeva’s protagonist admits that “Byzantium has not lasted, Franceherself is on the verge of eclipse. This is how it goes. What remains for us is toleave traces” (2004, 147). And it is, indeed, such traces (melancholic ruins of anall-too-present past) that haunt Kristeva’s allegories. Despite her repeated ac-knowledgment of a deep affinity with Santa-Barbara, Stephanie Delacour al-ways finds refuge in these ruins, which she places at the heart of what she callsthe “logical landscape” of Paris (2002c, 247).10 Though a foreigner (as she neverceases to remind us) and a traveler by nature, Stephanie knows where home is andshe consistently goes back to it—at the end of every novel when the enigma ofthe crime is at last solved and order (temporarily) restored. In “The Love of An-other Language” Kristeva confesses that she, like her heroine, “love[s] returningto France. [. . .] Every millimeter of landscape seems reflective; being here is im-mediately logical. The delicate young elm trees, the well-pruned gardens, the fil-tered marshes exist alongside people who ‘are’ because they ‘think’” (2002c, 247).

It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that it was a French politician(namely, François Mitterand) who, in an attempt to make sense of the new head-ing of Europe, talked of a homecoming (Derrida 1992, 8). Interestingly, inMeurtre à Byzance, crisis breaks out when a humiliated Chinese immigrant de-cides to “set the house on fire,” targeting, through a series of murders, thedwelling of the state itself. The threat of an imminent fire at the heart(h) per-vades the novel and reaches a climax when Stephanie (safely back in Paris)dreams that the Louvre itself is burning due to a terrorist attack. Needless to say,the novel ends with the reassurance that “the Louvre will never collapse” for, asInspector Rilsky reminds us, “detective fiction is an optimistic genre” (2004, 380).Unless one brings back in play the allegorical law of attractions. “The Louvre willnever collapse,” Stephanie tells us, “inasmuch as we are in Byzantium” (380).

Can you already feel the palpitations of the heart?

A Europe Not at Home with ItselfByzantium erupts as a utopian topos of atemporal serenity in the very battle-ground where Kristeva’s opposing principles (i.e., Santa-Barbara and Paris, thenew empire of the spectacle and the old Europe of glorious ruins) meet andclash. It serves as a site of attraction for all the main characters in Meurtre àByzance (including the Chinese serial killer) who, at the end of the novel, findthemselves crossing paths at the Puy-en-Valais Cathedral, the historical basis ofthe first Crusade. Byzantium complicates Kristeva’s allegorical confrontationbetween the old and the new, Europe and the United States, word and image,for it introduces the memory of an origin beyond the old, exposes the existenceof a Europe other than luminous Paris, and, as I’ve already mentioned, hints atan economy of seeing that is not opposed to an economy of reading.


Until recently, the status of Byzantium in European historiography was dubious. Any reference to it was either hasty or dismissive: a thousand years of po-litical existence and cultural production treated as an unfortunate interval betweenthe glory that was Greece (a glory shared by its successor, Rome) and a Europeof the Renaissance. Especially since the Enlightenment, Byzantium became syn-onymous with decadence; it became the sign for a period of intellectual sterility,obscurantism, excessive attention to artifice, and a bureaucratic system of admin-istration. More importantly, it was (subtly but consistently) orientalized and was,as a consequence, associated with physical and spiritual laziness, exoticism, un-controllable passion.11 According to Marie-France Auzepy, “even though the Eu-ropeans know what separates the Byzantine empire from the Ottoman empirewhich conquered it, they have the tendency nevertheless, because the two em-pires have occupied the same geographical location, to dissolve them both into thesame ‘oriental’ space” (2003, 7). Needless to say, such an attitude is less the prod-uct of historiographic blindness than political expediency, for it enabled the West-ern Europeans to complete the operation they initiated in 1204 with the conquestof Constantinople by the Crusaders, eliminating all traces of a legitimate Orien-tal Christian Empire. As Panayiotis Agapitos suggests, it “helped Western Euro-peans to place the origins of the European states in the Latin Middle Ages, . . .and also to claim the heritage of ancient Greek civilization through Rome and theRenaissance, even if the immediate knowledge of Greek language and culturecame to the West through the Byzantines” (1993, 238).

Byzantium, then, has functioned as the repressed, denied Other (in dis-tinction to the “infidel” Muslim as the obvious enemy, the acknowledged Other)of a Europe heading obstinately toward the West. This is why in Meurtre àByzance it is invoked as a lost origin,12 one, however, that once retrieved doesnot promise the self truth or completion but opens a hole at its very heart. Kris-teva’s concern with leading our hands back to this hole and helping us feel itneeds to be appreciated not only in the context of current political develop-ments (i.e., the Balkan Wars, the expansion of the European Union to parts of Eastern Europe, the accession of a divided Cyprus, the open question ofTurkey) but also in light of Derrida’s injunction to imagine a Europe that wouldno longer be “identical to itself ” (2004, 9).

In “Europe Divided: Politics, Ethics, Religion,” a paper originally presentedin 1998 as an address to the Rencontres Internationales de Genève, Kristeva at-tempts to think the existing tensions within Europe beyond an oppositionalmodel that pits “us” against “them.” The task she sets herself in this paper is thatof reclaiming the Orthodox European tradition and opening the two conceptionsof freedom that (a year earlier in her U.S. address) she saw as antagonistic to athird conception, one put forward by Nicodemus the Hagiorite in Philocalia(a collection of texts on the prayer of the heart). In contrast to the Protestantunderstanding of freedom as adaptation to an external cause and to the Catholicprivileging of freedom as revaluation of the singular, the freedom based on

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Philocalia and cultivated in the context of the Orthodox tradition is inextricablefrom the relinquishment of the self. Whereas in Catholicism community re-mains the object of critique and in contrast to Protestantism, which understandsit as the product of an externally imposed cause, the Orthodox tradition opensthe space for a mystical union, a passionate fusion in silence with what defies theintellect and escapes the gaze. According to Kristeva, this view of freedom thatrecognizes “the ‘integral, superindividual, and communal character’ of a person”is epitomized in Byzantine iconography, which cannot be approached througha Western theory of mimesis (2000, 152). As she emphasizes, an icon is neithera spectacle nor a representation. It is, instead, an inscription, “a sensible trace” ofwhat cannot be experienced directly and can only be deciphered (154). “Everyimage is declarative and indicative of something hidden,” writes the iconophileSt. John the Damascene, “. . . inasmuch as a man has no direct knowledge of theinvisible (his soul being covered by a body), or of the future or of things that aresevered and distant from him in space, being as he is circumscribed by place andtime, the image has been invented for the sake of guiding knowledge and man-ifesting publicly that which is concealed” (quoted by Mango 1986, 171). This iswhy he insisted that “whoever refuses the image, refuses incarnation” (quoted byKristeva 1998b, 60), for the Byzantine icon needs to be understood as the econ-omy of a passage, the process of a transcorporation between the visible and the in-visible. What is more, the icon does not appeal to the “gaze alone but engagesour entire affectivity” (Kristeva 2000, 154). On his visit to Boyana in Meurtre àByzance, Sebastian is seduced by “another way of seeing,” which leads his eyes tothe interior and the beyond (2004, 270). “[F]or these people in Boyana,” hethinks, the image was a “skhesis,” a relation of intimacy, an “affective tonality”shared by the model and his image, the Father and the Son, the Form and theformless, the corporeal and the incorporeal (270). It is no wonder, in this light,that Kristeva traces in the distinct economy of the icon the possibility of recov-ering the logic of a community that the spectacle-inundated West appears tohave lost. This is a community that is brought about by the rethinking of free-dom as “an autocommencement . . . with the other” (159; emphasis added) andthat is based on a sensory, ineffable communion; an active relation of “tenderness(katanyxis) that does not judge but welcomes” (148).13

It is this iconomy (as I prefer to call it) that contaminates Sebastian, theSanta-Barbarian, and sets him in pursuit of an alternative beginning. AsStephanie realizes, his quest for another world-outside-this-world was in real-ity a quest for a reconciliation between East and West. Despite the hatred in theworld around him (2004, 162), Sebastian succeeds in realizing his dream byimagining a Crusade of love rather than conquest, a fatal crossing of paths be-tween Anne Comnène, the “belated Greek of Orthodox Empire” (191), andEbrard de Pagan, his assumed ancestor and Latin barbarian. Though their pas-sion was never spoken (for theirs was a communion experienced in silence), Se-bastian dies convinced that the fleeting moment of their embrace lasts forever.


Facing the murals of Boyana, Sebastian thinks of the “desirable, the impossibleEurope,” which “does not imagine how much she is integrated in an imaginarybroken open by abstruse, gracious, paths to fecundate her, perversely, withouther knowing it, even less acknowledging it” (272).

Meurtre à Byzance is Kristeva’s contribution to this imaginary, setting outto reclaim the lost origin of a Europe that still needs to be fecundated—evenagainst its will. “My Byzantium,” Stephanie confesses, “is a question of time, thevery question that time poses itself when it refuses to choose between twospaces, two dogmas, two crises, two identities, two continents, two religions,two sexes, two stratagems. Byzantium leaves the question—as well as time—open” (2004, 149). Byzantium, then, is invoked as Europe’s “future anterior”(149). It becomes the signifier of a history that has shaped Europe (that con-tinues to shape it) and simultaneously (en meme temps) a future heading, a prom-ise and pledge for it.14 This is where the allegorist’s melancholic contemplationof corpses and ruins becomes animated by a redemptive hope for the openingof “a ‘third path’ between Ben Laden and Sharon, Al-Qaida and George Bush”(279). Though this hope is consistently betrayed in the current formation of aUnited Europe’s actual identity and politics, it has nevertheless informed thecreation of what Etienne Balibar calls a “phantom” Europe, which is “still inneed of blood for nourishment,” and “which we do not know whether to exor-cise or to bring to life” (89). For a lot of our most vibrant thinkers today (suchas the late Edward Said, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, and Balibar himself ) thevision of a phantom Europe posited as the “vanishing mediator”15 between theworld of wealth and the world of poverty (or between military force and moraljustice) remains both a challenge and a commitment that the emerging actualEurope will be called to make. This is how Žižek articulates this commitment:“The true opposition today,” he writes,

is not the one between the First World and the Third World, but theone between the whole of the First and Third World (the Americanglobal empire and its colonies) and the remaining Second World (Europe). [. . .] It is easy for the American multiculturalist global Em-pire to integrate premodern local traditions—the foreign body whichit effectively cannot assimilate is the European modernity. Jihad andMcWorld are the two sides of the same coin, Jihad is already McJihad.(2002, 146)

This is why, he insists, “[t]he Left should unashamedly appropriate the sloganof a unified Europe as a counterweight to Americanized globalism” (2002, 145).

In Kristeva’s allegorical narrative, where Europe and Byzantium share thesame “contagious existence” (2004, 149), this is, interestingly, the realization with which Anne Comnène confronts Ebrard at that fleeting moment of theirfatal encounter. “War has become sacred for you,” she tells him, “as it is the

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djihad for the muslims. What is then the difference between your barons who invade our lands, menace our capital under the pretext of liberating Jerusalem . . .and these Antichrists?” (209). If Anne, this female intellectual, “mourner and mil-itant, singular and universal, inconsolable and proud, incommensurable” (147), isthe soul of both Sebastian’s and Kristeva’s Byzantium, this is because she hints atthe existence of a Church “which opposed the holy war of the Church” (220), thusproposing a “third path” between two equally dangerous fundamentalisms (270).But, asks Stephanie, “would one be capable, [. . .] here, now, a million years later,”of reenacting “Anne’s gesture” that contaminates Ebrard, leads him to abandon theCrusades and changes his life forever (141)?16

This is, in fact, the true “tiger’s leap” that Kristeva proposes for us in Meurtreà Byzance. At the end of the novel Stephanie, the traveler from the luminousheart and Rilsky, the enlightened (Santa-)Barbarian, get ready to continue Sebastian’s Crusade of love by reinscribing their time within the fleeting mo-ment of Anne and Ebrard’s embrace. “They doubt, but they do not imagine our silence,” Stephanie tells Rilsky (2004, 380).17

Conclusion: The Humiliated Have No Eyes . . .In Meurtre à Byzance, Kristeva invites us to see through “Anne’s eyes turnedupon our own world” (2004, 192). What we see through these “new eyes” (192)is the vision of “a desirable, an impossible Europe” (272). Yet, as we learn toembrace this vision (as one embraces an icon), we may risk blinding ourselvesto the Europe of the humiliated who, Stephanie reminds us,18 “have no gaze”(204). Indeed, in the novel, it seems that the Byzantines’ eyes that can reachthe invisible have their chiasmatic counterpart in a blind(ed) gaze. This is, need-less to say, the gaze of Wuxian, the Chinese immigrant purificator who, likeSebastian, is in flight from the contemporary world but whose line of flight ispresented as the symmetrical inverse of the historian’s flee to Byzantium. In herdetective-cum-allegorist’s attempt to offer a hermeneutic analysis of the caseunder investigation, Stephanie throws into relief the opposition between thetwo characters: Whereas Wuxian is the “new Man” who lacks interiority (356),Sebastian (lost, as he is, in a timeless time) is all interiority. While Sebastian isthe man of memory who, in rewriting the story of Anne and the Crusades, isready to begin anew, Wuxian is the nihilist who seeks to reduce both past andpresent to an overpowering surge of nausea (235).19 Whereas Sebastian opensthe space of home to the memory of lost ancestors (367), Wuxian (as his namesuggests in Chinese, 248) sets the house on fire. While Sebastian, in his searchof an idealized father, abjects the material body of the mother, Wuxian revoltsagainst the State and paternal law in a desperate attempt to retrieve his twin fe-male side.20 Finally, whereas the eyes of the Byzantine visionary are turned to-ward an invisible light, Wuxian’s gaze consumes itself behind what is no longerlight but purifying fire.


It might be tempting (following Stephanie’s account) to understand Sebastian’s return to and revision of our Byzantine past as the antidote to Wux-ian’s self-destructive blindness. This is what Stephanie openly suggests whenshe comes to distill the two characters’ fatal crossing of paths at thePuy-en-Valais cathedral in the moment of Sebastian’s crying. Talking to thepsychoanalyst Estelle Pankow, she emphasizes that crying marks the thresholdto a subject’s rebirth: “Tears,” she says, “are already life” (2004, 371). Yet, if weagree with Stephanie, we risk losing sight of another blinded gaze, one that isno longer the symmetrical inverse of Sebastian’s inward-turned eyes but theirvery possibility. This is the gaze of Fa Chang, Wuxian’s twin sister and Sebast-ian’s lover, who he murders and blinds, frightened that her pregnancy will putan end to his utopian quest. As Stephanie herself understands, Sebastian’s Anne,“the ideal woman, pure spirit” (2004, 370), can only be brought back to life at the expense of the maternal corporeality of Fa, just as “the celestial jewel” thatSebastian looks for in his chasing of butterflies can only be arrested when “theanimal” is killed—which he enjoys doing by “crushing under his fingers” the “unique human organ of these migrants:” namely, their head marked by “exophtalmic eyes” (44).

Is the passion of the animal, then, the remainder of the process of transcor-poration from the visible to the invisible epitomized in the icon? Is this theblind spot of Sebastian’s dream of Byzantium that contaminates Stephanie’sand (through her) our own existence? In what I consider a powerful moment inthe novel, critical of this dream, Marie (a Bulgarian peasant and Anne’s de-spised grandmother) remembers her Bulgarian compatriots, the soldiers ofSamuel, who Emperor Basil II blinded in 1014 to mark their defeat and hu-miliation. Their (and Marie’s) vacant stare serves as a counterpart to Anne’spenetrating eyes, which, as Marie tells us, can “devour you” (2004, 204). Howdoes this vacant stare inform the vision that Anne’s eyes share with us? And isthe passion behind this stare the blood that is missing to bring to life Kristeva’sphantom Europe—as new as it is impossible?

But this is where Kristeva the allegorist (melancholic in the face of a suf-fering that cannot be redeemed) meets Kristeva the ironist who, as Stephaniereminds us, is not a scoffer but an atheist who has a sense of limits (2004, 358,373). It is this atheism that saves Stephanie from uncritically losing herself intoSebastian’s “palace of memory” (361) and that keeps Rilsky (despite his deepsense of an affinity between them) on the opposite pole to Wuxian, the purifi-cator, who calls himself l ’Infini. It is also this atheism, in my view, that rendersboth Kristeva’s Byzantium and her Europe “impossible.” Their impossibility,however, should not be understood as the mark of their ideality, but as the in-evitable and necessary product of the concrete historical limits within whichthese textual/conceptual topoi are invoked. As we have seen, some of these lim-its concern our act of seeing and serve to remind us that, if an integrated Eu-rope remains impossible, this is because of our own blindness to the humiliated

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within its heavily policed borders. As I have also suggested in the course of myanalysis, more limits are posited by Kristeva’s avowed allegiance to her adoptedmother country. Indeed, in Meurtre à Byzance, the series of attractions that movethe allegorical plot and shape an alternative fate for Europe risk being subsumedunder what remains the privileged union in the novel, namely, that betweenStephanie, the porous but incurable lover of Paris, and Rilsky, the estranged in-habitant of Santa-Barbara. What is more, despite Stephanie’s insistence that“[t]oday Byzantium is of no place” (because, as we have seen, it is a future an-terior: it already has and, simultaneously, not yet taken place), there are times inher narrative when the imaginary topos of Byzantium merges with that of con-temporary France: “She was the West turned Oriental, the most advanced of thecountries of the East, the most sophisticated of the countries of the West, likeFrance today.” And she goes on to ask, “Too Frenchies, these Byzantines? TooByzantine, these Frenchies?” (147).

Perhaps it is time to return to Stephanie’s reassuring words at the end of thenovel: “The Louvre will never collapse inasmuch as we are in Byzantium” (2004,380). The problem is that, both as a geographical and a textual space, Byzan-tium is the powerful attractor of interpretations and links that neither Stephanienor Kristeva are prepared to take account of. One of these links, that opens onlyto be left loose, can be found in chapter 3, part 2 of the novel. The title of thechapter is “Is Communism a Descendant of Byzantium?” (101). Though thequestion is not pursued beyond a fleeting reference to Dostoyevski and the re-lation between orthodoxy and nihilism, the very opening of the question is sig-nificant because it draws attention to those spaces within the narrative where thelaw of attractions slackens and fails to work; where the thought of a contagiousrelation between distant or separate entities unfolds only to be pushed back andwhere the figure of the chiasmus remains incomplete, denied of the crossing atits heart. Indeed, it is worth asking why in her desire to reclaim the other Eu-rope (the Europe of the East), Kristeva remains reticent about this Europe’sdistinct ideological legacy and our postwar experience of division into enemyblocs, the product of which, as Balibar is right to remind us, is precisely ourcontemporary imaginary of a United Europe (90).21 It is also worth asking whythe project of European integration in her work is reinterpreted as the task of“federat[ing] the diverse currents of Christianity that, for the most part, sharespirituality in Europe” (2000, 159)—an interpretation, admittedly, that risks re-viving the term “Christendom,” which was the official name for the geograph-ical and political space that became known as “Europe” only after William ofOrange.22 Hence, the urgency of the warning issued by byzantinologist AverilCameron: “The defence of the history of Byzantium as a part of the history ofEurope is a just cause,” he argues, “at least inasmuch as it does not obscure theequally important connection between Byzantium and the Orient, includingwhat we now call the Middle East” (2003, 237). Yet, if (as Cameron suggests)“Byzantium” is a signifier that calls to mind sites as different as Athens, Rome,


Constantinople, Boyana, and (a now divided) Jerusalem, the question of Europe(a Europe that reclaims the heritage of Byzantium) cannot be limited to thenecessity and/or possibility of healing the schism among the Protestant,Catholic, and Orthodox traditions, but needs to open in the direction of thenew community’s relations to what, as Derrida puts it, “is not, never was andnever will be Europe” (1992, 77). Such a future heading for Europe will un-doubtedly complicate the homecoming Mitterand envisioned, for as the currentpresident of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, has recently admitted in hisaddress to the Turkish prime minister, “we are all, the children of Byzantium.”23

NotesI am grateful to my byzantinologist colleagues Panayiotis Agapitos and StavroulaConstantinou for their invaluable help and feedback. All translations from theoriginal are mine.

1. Kristeva consciously writes within the genre of detective fiction, bothproblematizing and investing in its conventions. For her, the detective’s inves-tigation resembles the work of the psychoanalyst because it “keeps the possibilityof questioning alive” and comforts the subject, assuring him or her that one “canknow” (2002b, 4). “Can you know where evil originates from?” Stephanie Dela-cour, the female protagonist, asks at the end of Meurtre à Byzance. To whichInspector Rilsky answers, “Detective fiction is an optimistic genre” (2004, 380).

2. See Benjamin (1977, 159–233).3. See also Craig Owens’s discussion of Benjaminian allegory (1984,

203–217).4. Benjamin writes, “For this much is self-evident: the allegorization of

the physis can only be carried through in all its vigour in respect of the corpse.And the characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, thatthey can enter into the homeland of allegory” (1977, 217).

5. See note 1 above.6. Kristeva never discusses Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle in any de-

tail. She is content to use the term in its now popular usage; that is, as the preva-lence of standardized images which numb the critical faculties of passiveconsumers.

7. Stephanie is narrating Sebastian’s Novel of Anne Comnène.8. I am drawing on Kristeva’s discussion of the two models of freedom in

her essay on “Psychoanalysis and Freedom,” published in Intimate Revolt(2002d, 236).

9. The word “example” comes from the Latin verb eximere; that is, to sub-tract, to take out. See Hoad 1990, 159.

10. She uses the same designation at the end of her 1998 novel Possessions(1998a, 211).

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11. See Agapitos (1993) and Auzepy (2003).12. Sebastian goes back to the first Crusade and the writings of Anne Com-

nène in an attempt to retrace his paternal origins back to a French Crusader, Ebrardde Pagan, who settled in Philippopolis (now known as Plovdid in Bulgaria). In thecourse of his quest, however, Sebastian projects on Anne’s image of Byzantium hisown utopic vision of Europe. In his fictional account of Anne’s life, his aim is toreimagine the Crusades as the historical inception of our contemporary project ofEuropean Unification. This is the question that animates his homeward journeyto Bulgaria: “No one talks about Philippopolis in Santa-Barbara, New York, Lon-don or Paris; this part of Europe has been shoved into the blind spot of History.Why?” (2004, 263). When she reads his Novel of Anne Comnène Stephanie admitsthat she is contaminated by his “Byzantine dream” (283).

13. As the references to sensory experience and an “affective tonality” sug-gest, the community made possible by the icon and within the context of theOrthodox tradition is one privileging the pre-Oedipal dual relationship and thesemiotic modality of language (2000, 143, 149).

14. In Sebastian’s terms, Byzantium is both the memory of Europe (“thepresent of [its] past”) and the anticipation of Europe (“the present of [its] future”) (2004, 368).

15. See Balibar’s essay “Europe: Vanishing Mediator?” (2004, 203–235).16. Sebastian and (through his writings) Stephanie see Ebrard as the ad-

vocate of a Voltairean pacificism: “leave your arms aside and cultivate your gar-den” (2004, 280). While in Boyana Sebastian wonders: “Yet, isn’t Ebrard’s styletoo elitist, [. . .] too European, Byzantine even, to work? Do we need to resign,then, to the omnipresence and omnipotence of Santa-Barbara?” (280).

17. According to Rilsky, the silence of love is “nothing but music, the sym-metrical inverse of the silence of crime” (2004, 97).

18. Stephanie here is giving the point of view of Marie, Anne’s Bulgariangrandmother.

19. Vomiting is the dominant symptom of Wuxian’s psychic malady.20. Sebastian resents his mother, Tracy Jones (a common barmaid), for

giving birth to a bastard. In this light, his murder of Fa Chang (who also pre-sumed she could engender a son without the father’s permission) can be seen asa matricide (2004, 370). By contrast, Wuxian, in his desperate love for his twinsister Fa, seeks to restore the balance between his yin and his yang (355).

21. What I find interesting in this context is that in the name of Orthodoxfaith Kristeva is in reality reclaiming the concept of a community based on en-thusiasm and an affective, passionate investment—precisely, as she acknowl-edges, what characterises communism (despite its preferred scientific profile) asa revolutionary, ideological movement (2000, 134–235).

22. See Balibar (2004, 6–7).23. Discussed in Hurriyet 17-11-2004. Commenting on this statement,

historian IIber Ortayli said, “I am afraid that the good-intentioned words


of Chirac are not true. Because the French and Northern Europe has [sic] noconnection with Byzantium. They are, rather, from the ones that plundered thiscity in 1204. Naming the East Rome Empire as the Byzantium, is the job ofGermany of the 16th Century. Therefore, the Byzantium name is invented.” Seehttp://www.hurriyetim.com.tr/haber/0,,sid~381@tarih~2004-11-19@nvid~497285,00.asp (accessed May 31, 2005).

ReferencesAgapitos, Panayiotis. 1993. “Byzantine Literature and Greek Philologists in the

Nineteenth Century.” Classica et Mediaevalia: Revue Danoise de Philologieet D’ Histoire. Vol. 43. Ed. Ole Thomsen. Copenhague: Librairie MuseumTusculanum, 231–260.

Auzepy, Marie-France. 2003. “La Fascination de l’Empire.” Byzance en Europe.Ed. Marie-France Auzepy. Saint-Denis, France: Presses Universitairesde Vincennes, 7–16.

Balibar, Etienne. 2004. We, The People of Europe: Reflections on TransnationalCitizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress.

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations.Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books,253–264.

———. 1977. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. Lon-don: NLB.

Cameron, Averil. 2003. “Byzance dans le debat sur l’orientalisme.” Byzance enEurope. Ed. Marie-France Auzepy. Saint-Denis, France: PressesUniversitaires de Vincennes, 235–250.

Derrida, Jacques. 1992. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans.Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-versity Press.

Gilloch, Graeme. 2002. Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Cambridge:Polity Press.

Hoad, T. F., ed. 1990. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. London:Guild.

Kristeva, Julia. 1994. The Old Man and the Wolves. Trans. Barbara Bray. NewYork: Columbia University Press. Originally published in 1991 as Le vieil homme et les loups.

———. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1998a. Possessions. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press.

———. 1998b. Visions capitales. Paris: Editions de la Réunion des MuséesNationaux.

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———. 2000. “Europe Divided: Politics, Ethics, Religion.” Crisis of the Subject.New York: Other Press, 112–162.

———. 2002a. “Europhilia-Europhobia.” Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Lim-its of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press, 255–268.

———. 2002b. “Intimate Revolt.” Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits ofPsychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1–219.

———. 2002c. “The Love of Another Language.” Intimate Revolt: The Powersand Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press, 240–254.

———. 2002d. “Psychoanalysis and Freedom.” Intimate Revolt: The Powers andLimits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 225–239.

———. 2004. Meurtre à Byzance. Paris: Fayard.Mango, Cyril. 1986. The Art of Byzantine Empire 1431–1453. Toronto, Ontario:

Toronto University Press.McHale, Brian. 1989. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge.Naas, Michael B. 1992. “Introduction: For Example.” The Other Heading:

Reflections on Today’s Europe by Jacques Derrida. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, vii–lix.

Owens, Craig. 1984. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmod-ernism.” Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 203–235.

Until the End of the World. 1991. Dir. Wim Wenders. Metrodome DistributionLtd.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11and Related Dates. London: Verso.

PART III

INTIMACY AND

THE LOSS OF POLITICS

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yanulada


8

Love’s Lost Labors:Subjectivity, Art, and Politics

��

Sara Beardsworth

This chapter argues that the essence of Western art in Kristeva is a process ofsubjectivity, a life of the psyche that is, for her, “still the essential value of our civ-ilization” (2006, 39). Art and literature are the work of sublimation that upholdsthe life of the psyche by renewing subjectivity and meaning. The idea of art as sub-limation is a vital approach to the question of what political meanings art mayhave in her project. I argue here that attention to Julia Kristeva’s idea of artisticsublimation reveals at its heart a productive, though not untroubled, negativitythat functions in Hegelian fashion to form and reform the possibilities for humanseparateness and connections with others. Above all, in Kristeva’s hands Hegeliannegation has become the dynamic of loss that is revealed and unfolded from theFreudian perspective on subjectivity. That is, Kristeva digs deeply into theFreudian subject to find what is needed for there to be historical being in her ownsense of the formation, deformation, and reformation of a meaningful life in con-nection with others. A complex and nuanced dynamic of loss is central to theprocess. Artistic sublimation is the form of renewal of this process that belongs toa shareable or public domain, whereas the practice of psychoanalysis is the formreserved to an intimate space. We will be particularly concerned here with theartistic form, specifically its appearance in Kristeva’s thought as a response to theproblem of a cultural failure of loss in which subjective process comes to grief.

I claim, first, that artistic sublimation in Kristeva is the creation of formsthat recovers and gives meaning to loss. This recovery requires a confrontationwith the threat of destructive drive that is central to the dynamic of loss, and ismet only by love as the sole support of the subject in the farthest reaches of the

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128 Sara Beardsworth

trials of loss. Artistic sublimation is therefore, above all, a process that givesform to love and loss and, thereby, gives meaning and value to symbolic life inconnection with others. This is why one can call the life of the psyche an es-sential value of a civilization. Nonetheless, it is easier to grasp the thought thatart and literature bring amatory experience into symbols, giving it symbolic lifefor all and thereby opening up possibilities for human separateness and con-nectedness, than it is to grasp the profound and paradoxical dynamic of loss.1

It is therefore my particular claim that where artistic sublimation gives formand meaning to love, understood as the paradigm of human connectedness, weneed also to see the underlying dynamic of loss: love’s lost labors.

The thought that the life of the psyche remains the essential value of ourcivilization is not, of course, written on some blank slate but is, rather, developedfrom Kristeva’s diagnosis of a condition in which historical being is blocked inlate modern societies, a blockage manifested as a crisis of meaning and values.The subjective process that is the essence of art gains its significance only inand through being a remedy for this blockage. While Kristeva’s diagnosis of thecrisis of meaning and values pertains to modernity, the blockage of subjectiveprocess has deep roots in Western culture. The idea of artistic sublimationmeans that, in her view, art and literature have the capacity to work it through.

This chapter adopts two ways of approaching Kristeva’s thought on loss,which themselves provide two different perspectives on and interpretations ofthe thought that there is a blockage of subjective process in Western culture. Thefirst section of this chapter shows, first, how the discovery and concept of theFreudian subject both clarify the nature of the cultural failure and reveals the dy-namic of loss whose movement is the overcoming of the failure. It also presentsthe first of the two perspectives on the cultural blockage. In this first approach,the failure of loss in Western cultures is at its root a failed relation to the ma-ternal feminine that is the lost past of the subject known to psychoanalysis. Thematernal feminine is a lost past that is constitutive of the subject in its sepa-rateness and connections with others. For reasons that will become clear, I callthis cultural failing the loss of “the lost.” Insofar as artistic sublimation recov-ers the dynamic of loss and, thereby, subjective process, it appears in Kristeva’sthought as a remedy for the cultural problem, opening up possibilities for humanseparateness and connectedness. Where this happens, the artwork is often a fig-uring of the maternal feminine that works to reveal, modify, and repair the cul-ture’s failed relation to it. The first section is therefore on Kristeva’s conceptionof the maternal feminine.

The second section takes a different perspective on the cultural blockage di-agnosed by Kristeva. It suggests that grasping the dynamic of loss does not onlyreveal the need for a changed individual and cultural relation to the maternalfeminine as the lost past constitutive of subjectivity. There is also a need for areconsideration of the meaning of the self in loss. I suggest that the renewal ofsubjective process paradoxically requires going over the loss of self. As a result,

Love’s Lost Labors 129

taking a Freudian point of view, this process runs straight into the problem ofthe death drive. The death drive is the most primitive and problematic elementof negativity in Freud, whose functioning not only threatens the collapse of theindividual but also means that violence can move to the center of what subjec-tivity brings to the social fabric. The difficulty confronted in the second sectionis therefore the violence of the drive that is triggered by the process of going overthe loss of self. To stress the point, death drive is a structural element of Kris-teva’s dynamic of loss and cannot just be bypassed when considering the valueof the artwork and the question of its political meaning in her project. Theproblem of the destructive drive must be met. Since the drive is not a substancebut a tendency in Freudian theory, it can only be met by something that canmodify the distinctive tendency to destruction. What has this ability, in Kris-teva, is love. The second section shows how the dynamic of loss takes the sub-ject to the point where destructive drive holds sway. A short concluding sectionthen introduces the dynamic of love and underlines the Kristevan idea of its relation to loss at the heart of artistic sublimation.

“The Lost”Kristeva’s extended treatment of loss and melancholy appears in Black Sun,where she reflects from a psychoanalytic standpoint on a form of depressionthat she calls “a new malady of the soul,” before considering selected works ofart and literature that appear as artistic sublimations of loss and melancholia.2

The thought of narcissistic depression that she forwards in this book unfolds amelancholia with deep and blurred underpinnings that go back to a stage in in-dividual subject formation classically formulated as the illusory omnipotenceand self-love of the immature psyche.3 Psychoanalysis calls it “primary narcis-sism,” following the lead of the Western myth of the bewitched youth who iscaptivated by himself in a mirage. An intriguing statement appears early in Kris-teva’s discussion in reference to Ovid’s Narcissus, to the effect that “depressionis the hidden face of Narcissus” (1989, 5). This occluded aspect is the counterpartto that reflected visage, open to the youth’s gaze, which he mistakes for reality.The hidden face of Narcissus is the underlying reason for narcissism under-stood as the necessary illusion that protects the fragile psyche. With Narcissus,then, we come upon a form of subjectivity rooted in an element that does notshow itself and may even “bear him away into death” (5). With Kristeva, the ideaof the invisible melancholic and death-bearing element of subjectivity pointsto the most archaic precondition of subject formation: primal loss. Narcissanmelancholy is a “fundamental” sadness bound up with an immemorial loss onthe basis of which a subject can come into being. It is the mute sadness be-longing to the archaic loss of the mother’s body. Depression is therefore thehidden face of Narcissus because it calls back to these hidden beginnings ofsubjectivity. In diagnosing narcissistic depression as a new malady of the soul,


Kristeva suggests further that there is something about this malady, and notonly its archaic element, that does not show itself. Even the malady is unknownto itself. On this view, a melancholic culture would not be one undergoing lossesand nostalgically thrown back on lost objects. Rather, melancholy is a funda-mental affliction of Western cultures that is typically unknown to them. Suchan affliction lies in a deep-seated cultural failure in respect of loss as such, so thatthe loss remains a latent loss.

Yet what is it to speak of loss as such? Our first answer to this question isfound in Kristeva’s theory of the archaic mother. This theory reveals that, in hereyes, melancholy as a phenomenon of Western culture is ultimately a failure toattend to and negotiate the maternal feminine: the essential “lost” of all subjects.Neglect of the maternal feminine is even a foundational element of Westerncultures as we know them. These claims and suggestions are illuminated byKristeva’s thought on the significance and role of the early mother in child de-velopment, a role often undetected or passed over in classical psychoanalysis.The archaic mother is a notion distinguished from the mother as object of de-sire in oedipal triangulation. The former is the maternal counterpart in earlyinfantile experience where, in respect of psychic development, mother and childdo not yet form two independent beings. Primary narcissism, the term for thisphase of psychic development, is a structuring of subjectivity that belongs toearly infantile life where a vital corporeal attachment to the mother’s body per-sists and “nondifferentiation” prevails. With Kristeva, primary narcissism is,nonetheless, already an exposure to otherness and so a preliminary form of sep-arateness and connectedness. In terms of subject formation, this early phase ofinfantile life is comprised of a psychical working out of the exposure to other-ness, one that develops in drive-based and affective responses to it. These are theprimordial and essential elements of the formation of a subject. Although thereis as yet no outside other, there is archaic “relationship,” marked by the absenceof symbolic acts in relation to an other and made up, instead, of an exclusivelycorporeal and affective mode of responsiveness: the preverbal semiotic. From theperspective of subject formation then, Kristeva’s semiotic is an undeveloped butcomplex articulation of drives and affects, composing a primordial form of sep-arateness and connectedness before separation is established along with sym-bolic relations or connections with others in language.

Developments in Kristeva’s writings in the 1980s show that archaic rela-tionship is comprised of preverbal modes of love, loss, and abjection that are playedout where less discerning minds have seen either a merely biological exchangebetween mother and child or a terrain so overlain with and, indeed, repressed bylater developments that little light can penetrate.4 It is noteworthy and importantfor the current discussion that the notion of the semiotic is, inter alia, a recoveryand thinking through of what Freud called “the dark continent”: his term for whatremained, to him, the enigma of the feminine. That is, the theory of the archaicmother draws out what Freud left in the shadows of his dark continent.


What concerns us here is the idea of primal loss that forms the core ofKristeva’s thought on archaic relationship. Primal loss is the “essential” loss inthe prehistory of the subject that is necessary for subject formation and is con-stitutive of subjectivity. Loss of the archaic mother occurs as the first impact ofseparateness in early infantile life. The archaic mother is therefore the paradig-matic lost object. A loss so archaic, however—so deeply tied in with conditionsof nondifferentiation—is one that belongs to conditions where no subject-object distinction and so no object can yet have formed. Kristeva’s archaic ma-ternal feminine is, then, properly speaking, simply and wholly “the lost.” Lossas such, on this view, is therefore the primal loss made up of drive elements andthe mute sway of affect as distinct from an experience of deprivation or lack inrespect of objects, whether persons, ideas, or things. The affective hold that pri-mal loss has on the emergent subject—the “fundamental” sadness—maynonetheless be called up in the experience of subsequent losses. Her theory ofsubject formation therefore seems to make the claim that all loss goes back topreobjectal relationship, which is to say, all loss goes back to the mother.

Turning to Kristeva’s notion of narcissistic depression, we find that it rep-resents a melancholic suffering beset by a silent paralysis of meaning that du-plicates, otherwise and on a different level, the drive-based and affectiveattachment to and loss of the early mother prior to the emergence of linguisticcapacities. To capture this thought, Kristeva says that the depressed narcissistdoes not mourn an object but “wanders alone with the unnamed Thing” (1989,13). Distinguishing her subject matter from the griefs whose sources are moreor less evident and locatable, and underlining the symbolic abdication that gov-erns narcissistic depression, she writes:

I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable griefthat at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even lifeitself. . . . Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of col-lapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic—it appears obvious to me,glaring and inescapable. (1989, 3)

Kristeva recovers the term depression from its narrower psychological usagein institutional symptomatology to return it to the broader field of human ex-perience, culture, and reflection that psychoanalysis, from its beginnings, soughtto inhabit and make its field of inquiry. First, “Freudian theory detects every-where the same impossible mourning for the maternal object” (1989, 9). Sec-ond, Kristeva links melancholy to writing: “For those who are racked bymelancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out ofthat very melancholia” (3). Melancholy has taken the form of an activating sor-row in literary creation (Dostoyevsky) and appeared as the affective ground inphilosophical reflection on the nature of Being, where the philosopher meditates


on the meaning and lack of meaning of Being. The melancholia evoked by Aristotle, she says, is the philosopher’s very ethos and an extreme state that “canbe seen as the forerunner of Heidegger’s anguish as the Stimmung of thought”(7–9). Loss and melancholy have, then, played a fundamental role in Westernculture. Despite this, what is crucial is the thought that Western cultures areafflicted by a failure in respect of a fundamental loss that has, therefore, re-mained a latent loss. This thought is the one linked to Kristeva’s inquiry into thearchaic mother, an inquiry taking place against a background of Western re-flection, including psychoanalytic theory, in which the archaic mother is prac-tically indiscernible.

The idea of this cultural failure is clarified by showing the community of twothoughts in Kristeva. The first is the thought that an upsurge of narcissistic de-pression in a culture signals a crisis of meaning and value. The second is the thoughtthat loss of the archaic mother is a process in child development that supports theentrance into symbolic life: “when that intrepid wanderer leaves the crib to meetthe mother in the realm of representations” (1989, 41). The connection betweenthe two runs as follows. On the one hand, the notion of a crisis in late modern so-cieties is, in Kristeva’s hands, the thought that symbolic life has come to be expe-rienced as a merely linguistic universe: a life that is necessarily symbolic (inlanguage) but that unfolds without meaning and value. Moreover, symbolic life isexperienced as a merely linguistic universe if the need to give form and meaningto the nonverbal aspects of subjectivity and relationship—to the semiotic—is neg-lected. For Kristeva, language is “from the start, a translation, but on a level het-erogeneous to the one where affective loss, renunciation, or the break takes place.If I did not agree to lose mother, I could neither imagine nor name her” (41). Thus,on the other hand, the process of transposing the drives and affects that reign overpreverbal relationship into symbolic life is, at the same time, the transformation ofthe archaic mother into a lost past. In other words, giving symbolic form to thedrives and affects just is loss fulfilled. Kristeva calls this “the negation of loss,” whichis equally the entrance into symbolic life. Above all, symbolic life is loss fulfilledonly insofar as drives and affects are transposed into the realm of representations,as a condition for its having meaning and value. To say that the realm of represen-tations is on a level heterogeneous to the one where affective loss takes place doesnot mean that symbols arise through sheer detachment from and cancellation ofcorporeal and affective life. Where they are treated thus, there can be significationin the narrow sense of the transmission of a message but no meaningful life in con-nection with others. Kristeva therefore links the capacity to give form and mean-ing to “the mirage of the primal Thing” with the enrichment of discourse that isembedded in relationship to an other insofar as “discourse is dialogue” (41). Thehinge in the whole interconnectedness of mourning, meaning, and Mitsein is theemergence of the archaic mother as a lost past: “the lost.”

Kristeva therefore has the mother play a vital role in subject formation—incivilization, she says—in more than one sense. The mother appears, first, as the


maternal counterpart in a preverbal experience that paves the way for the entranceinto symbolic life. Second, the archaic mother is equally the focal point of an im-memorial and unnameable (“impossible”) loss that is essential to the constitutionof a subject as both separate and connected. In the latter role she marks the dis-continuity between preverbal and symbolic life insofar as the universe of prever-bal life is left behind. Yet she also marks the possibility of interactions between thesemiotic and the symbolic. The symbolic will fail if it is taken to be or is lived assheer detachment from the affective and corporeal elements of subjectivity thatgovern preverbal life. Although these elements disappear as the form and total-ity of early infantile life, nonverbal dimensions of subjectivity persist and are trig-gered, above all, in situations of exposure to separateness, pain, and otherness.Where these are limit situations—that is, where there is no personal or culturalprecedent for them—the nonverbal dimensions of subjectivity will then eithercome to take on new symbolic form or be deprived of it. Kristeva therefore bothanalyzes unsymbolized drive and detects the renewal of the subject and meaningthat is brought about by bringing drive and affect into the life of signs. On a per-sonal basis, this process appears, notably, where the analysand weaves sensorialmemory—the affect and drive echoes—into a narrative of self and other that letsthe subject appear afresh. More widely, the semiotic takes on symbolic form where,for example, a culture is able to tell new love stories.

Our focus here is on how it is as “the lost” that the mother becomes the veryaxis of the continuity and discontinuity between the semiotic and symbolic. Inother words, “the lost” is the very source for individual and cultural capacitiesfor transformations in subjectivity and meaning: for subjective process. Thethwarting of these capacities shows up in two phenomena manifested in nar-cissistic depression: on the one hand, the denial of the symbolic or a rejectionof symbolic life (“that’s meaningless”); on the other hand, the suffering of itsemptiness (“there’s no meaning”). These complaints are two sides of the samecoin. What unites them is captured in the idea that depression is the hidden faceof Narcissus. That is, in depression there occurs a fading or insufficient emer-gence of “the lost” as the axis of subjective process. Expressed individually, in de-pressive suffering “I” have lost the mother but have failed to lose her. At thelevel of the culture, the crisis of meaning and value rests on the loss of “the lost.”In essence, then, Kristeva has diagnosed cultural melancholy in terms of a fun-damental failure to negotiate a lost past, which amounts to a cultural neglect ofthe maternal feminine.

Although Kristeva’s thought expands on very different terrain than that ofHegel’s philosophy, this diagnosis of depression is consistent with the Hegelianinspiration that the past itself is constituted only through its cancellation andconservation, that the present is constituted only on condition that the past isthereby truly surpassed, and that only on condition of the conservation of thepast—the affirmation of what one has been—may one become something more.In Kristeva this inspiration has become a critique of Western cultures from the


psychoanalytic standpoint. Western cultures are afflicted by the failure to settleone’s debt to the past. Moreover, this failure just is an abandonment of the ne-gotiation of having belonged to the mother. This failure leaves in its wake theabandoned Narcissus, who is, from the viewpoint of subjective process, a figureof corporeal and affective modes of responsiveness deprived of symbolic life.Kristeva therefore shares with others the perception that the sense of a lack ofmeaning or loss of value in modernity signals its tendency to abstractedness. Inher version of this thought, abstractedness just is a tendency to treat symboliclife as independent of or a replacement for semiotic elements in subjectivity.These elements cannot be extinguished by symbols without cost, since they areconstitutive of them. Once it is culturally abandoned, the semiotic falls as a bur-den on the individual and there is an upsurge of narcissistic suffering. As the fig-ure in relation to which psychoanalysis is currently developing its therapeutictechniques, then, Kristeva’s abandoned Narcissus is a figure of modernity.

We have seen thus far that in the final analysis the suffering of the depressednarcissist comes down to a fading or insufficient emergence of “the lost.” Thisproblem cannot of course be an exclusively modern feature of Western culture.The relegation to darkness of the role of the maternal feminine in civilization hasbeen a universal feature of these cultures, which have represented the source ofcivilizing process as a paternal instance, be it as God or law. The thought of nar-cissistic depression as a new malady of the soul nonetheless underlines the heightsof abstractedness reached in modernity. At the same time, it is equally in theseconditions that a ray of light has reached into Freud’s dark continent. The no-tion of the dark continent and the capacity to throw a little light on it have bothappeared where developments working to repress the maternal feminine haveweakened. What has weakened is the triumph of paternal laws and the assump-tion that they have primacy among—or, indeed, are self-sufficient as—the sup-ports for civilization and historical being. Indeed, it is at this juncture thatpsychoanalysis can both point to the paternal prohibition on desire (for themother) as a pivotal moment in subject formation and find that the unsurpassed“oedipalization” of the subject is a psychic phenomenon, leading to neurosis, justwhere the strength and influence of paternal laws has waned owing, ultimately,to the diminished sway in Western cultures of monotheistic religion.5

Seen from this perspective, Kristeva’s idea of the need for a recovery of thematernal feminine has a historical meaning. In her thought, the recovery of “thelost” enables historical being in the aftermath of the reign of paternal laws. Tounderstand the import of subjective process in this way is to find a place whereart and politics converge. Their convergence is revealed where Kristeva respondsto the question of what form or forms the negotiation of the maternal femininemay take. What forms of the return of “the lost” show up today? In asking this,we are seeking the ways in which the nonverbal aspects of separateness from andconnectedness with others—of love and loss—take on a life that gives them ahistory insofar as they find their way into symbolic life. One commentator has


coined a term that serves well here: “the evolution of the semiotic.”6 Kristeva’sown concern with the evolution of the semiotic is particularly attentive to worksof art and literature, viewed as instances of the transposition of the nonverbalinto the symbolic. Many of her analyses of artworks have shown that the vari-ants of the literary and artistic adventure in which love and loss take on formand meaning are also those where an image or intimation of the maternal fem-inine, recovered as a lost past, prevails. Art and literature are the recovery of“the lost” insofar as they work as sublimations of the corporeal and affective as-pects of subjectivity that correspond to a confrontation with limit situations inindividual and cultural life: the unprecedented or surprising forms of exposureto otherness and separateness, which, culturally ignored, have remained unspo-ken, and whose mute traces have remained locked up in the psychic microcosmof the individual.7 In other words, art and literature are the recovery of “thelost” in and through the creation of forms.

I have been suggesting, then, that artistic sublimation is a vital part of thedynamic of loss that represents a kind of Freudian restoration of the labor of thenegative. The infantile achievement of parting from the mother—“since I con-sent to lose her I have not lost her” (the negation)—is carried out in art and lit-erature as the negation of the negation: having found her again in language, Ihave, again, lost her. The negation of the negation is the recovery of “the lost”in “new style, new composition, surprising imagination” (1989, 51). That artis-tic sublimation allows drive and affect to work within symbolic life and so havethe latter take on meaning and value, thereby forming and reforming the life ofnature and culture, is quite consistent with Kristeva’s long-held position thatany concept of history that neglects subjective process is a dead end.8 Her de-veloped project holds out the thought that, if there is to be history, there mustbe the creation of forms including the figuring of the maternal feminine. Thistakes place as symbolic acts that give form and meaning to love and loss.9 Whatis more, this analysis points to the possibility of a recovery and reshaping of de-sire and pleasure: precisely what prohibitive, paternal laws (the fundamentalform of law in Western cultures, from a Freudian viewpoint) made war upon andhad succumb to superegoic morality. Kristeva’s fundamental vision is not, how-ever, one of the reassertion of desire and pleasure alone. What concerns hermore closely is the fate of what was crushed along with them and appears, in herthought, as the source of desire’s own vitality in renewing subjectivity and mean-ing, this source being love and loss. The political meaning of this conception ofart now comes to the fore. If cultural melancholy is the mute signal and suffer-ing of a blockage in what structures separateness and connections with others,the movement of overcoming this blockage, in artistic sublimation, renews ourpossibilities for separateness and connectedness.

The modern—forlorn—Narcissus can now be seen as a figure of deforma-tion in two senses. First, he or she signals the general cultural neglect of ele-ments necessary for subject formation, which we have seen to be a neglect, in


toto, of the maternal feminine as our lost past. Second, the modern Narcissusappears in the aftermath of the reign of paternal laws that have repressed the sig-nificance of the maternal feminine. Psychoanalytic theory therefore suggeststhat the weakening hold of the latter has left the neglected Narcissus in an ex-posed condition. It equally sheds light on the risks this represents for the socialfabric, when long-neglected corporeal and affective dimensions of subjectivity,which have been left to restricted and repetitive paths of phantasmatic forma-tion, break through.10 One understands from Kristeva’s writings on narcissismthat paternal laws always functioned in part to keep Narcissus in line. Yet herown thought on Narcissus shows him or her to be not the essential problem ofsubjectivity but perilous only as a figure of neglect. The remedy for this neglect,it seems, now requires the individual and cultural negotiation of the maternalfeminine that is our lost past. The remedy is clearly not, for Kristeva, a recov-ery of some maternal feminine “itself,” since the archaic mother is a lost past thatwas never present. She can be indistinctly present, for example, and hazardouslyso, as the unnamed Thing of melancholy attachment. In view of this, it is therecovery of “the lost” that is needed.11 Such an undertaking might itself openup possibilities for political experience that would not get saturated by the re-active reassertion of paternal laws in response to the exposure of the perilouslyneglected Narcissus.

In sum, Kristeva’s treatment of the maternal feminine as our lost past hasproved to be a rich and fairly supple ground for thinking through the relationof subjectivity, art, and politics in her project. Mention has also been made ofthe significance of love in her thought, although its nature and role has not beendrawn out. Before doing so, a question must be raised about Kristeva’s way ofconnecting culture and history to loss. Does all loss go back to the mother? Ourarticulation thus far of negativity and transformation in Kristeva’s thought im-plies that it does. It therefore implies that negotiation of the maternal feminineof individual prehistory is central to culture’s task, as such, and is one that canbe carried out—beyond the psychoanalytic clinic—by art and literature. Thepolitical significance of art would therefore be found in Kristeva’s reminder thatsocial and symbolic life requires the imagination and artworks and cannot flour-ish if it marginalizes or nullifies them.

Loss of SelfBroadening the investigation into Kristeva’s thought on negativity will furtherilluminate this significance of the artwork in her thought. It is possible to takea different route through the Kristevan thought of the hidden face of Narcis-sus, bringing out a different answer to the question, “What is loss as such?” Wewill find that Kristeva’s thought on primal loss is not exclusively a matter of theimmemorial loss of the archaic mother, so that the issue of cultural melancholywill not come down entirely to the problem of a failed relation to the maternal


feminine as our lost past. Cultural melancholy can be thought of as rooted notonly in a loss of “the lost” but also in a loss of loss. Another of Kristeva’s state-ments on narcissistic depression provides the way into this new perspective:

My depression points to my not knowing how to lose—I have per-haps been unable to find a valid compensation for loss? It follows thatany loss entails the loss of my being—and of Being itself. The de-pressed person is a radical, sullen atheist. (1989, 5)

The passage expresses a problem in the capacity for loss itself, what I amcalling “a loss of loss.” My suggestion is that the recovery of loss, on this ground,must mean the recovery of the loss of self. Once, again, following Kristeva, it isthe Freudian perspective that allows us to think through such a claim. The pas-sage just cited actually moves beyond Freud’s essay on the subject—“Mourningand Melancholia”—since, in line with her focus on the primal loss that under-lies successive losses, Kristeva is concerned with the idea of the loss, not of anobject (person, idea, or thing) but of Being and “my” being. If this thought is re-lated to the paradigmatic loss that Kristeva employs to illuminate narcissistic de-pression, the loss of Being itself would find its paradigmatic form in the loss ofthe archaic mother. The issue in question is how the experience of a loss ofself—my being—is possible or could be thought to have a paradigmatic shapein primary narcissism, where Kristeva’s “essential” loss is a condition for a sub-ject to come into being. Her focus on the dark continent provides us with a dif-ferent angle than Freud’s on this issue but we will allow his reflections onmourning and melancholia to guide us (Freud 1917).

Freud puzzled over a phenomenon that is not uncommonly manifestedwhen a person suffers in relation to an object-loss, that is, a loss whose objectis readily determinable: something or someone in one’s life. What is displayedin melancholy is the subject’s being caught in a perplexing affective grip, as dis-tinct from the process of mourning in which the suffering of loss is brought tocompletion and the person shows herself free to make new attachments. Freudsurmised that mourning is a cumulative process of detachment of the ego fromthe lost object. In the case of melancholia, no such process occurs. He concludedthat, with the melancholic, although the external object had to be given up, theobject has been preserved within through a process of identification. Given thisidentification, the ego becomes a substitute-object. The problem of melancho-lia is that the ego is absorbed with the object of loss rather than attending to theself that has lost. It would seem that the focus of attention would need to changeif the melancholic were to be able to begin to mourn.

We will now see what transpires if, turning to primal loss, we ourselves shiftthe focus of attention from the lost object to the self that has lost. This would ap-pear to be an anachronistic undertaking, given that the subject-object distinctionis one that cannot yet have formed in early infantile experience where corporeal


attachments and psychic nondifferentiation prevail. We know, however, thatKristeva views primary narcissism as a realm in which exposure to and a strug-gle with otherness and separateness does occur. Primal loss would be the outsetof this exposure. It cannot therefore occur in the way that the loss of this or thatobject does but must affect the entirety of the infantile condition. That is, pri-mal loss impacts the “whole.” This is, indeed, the thought expressed in the ideathat narcissistic depression suffers the loss of Being itself and “my” being. In con-clusion, what corresponds on the subjective side to the loss of the archaicmother—to “the lost”—is the loss of self at the very point of the possible emer-gence of a self. The primal sense of self is the sense of a threat, an utter depriva-tion of what cannot yet fully be distinguished as other: the mother. For thatreason, primal loss is a threat of loss of “my” being. It is the impact of loss/empti-ness, says Kristeva. There is of course no subject or subjectivity in any strongsense here. We have simply shown that, from the perspective of child develop-ment, “my” being is, first, the shadow of despair cast on the fragile self, says Kris-teva, by the loss of the essential other (1989, 5).

The attention given to the self of loss rather than the lost object has led usto stress the thought that a self emerges out of an all-absorbing affective blow—narcissistic despair—at the very beginnings of separation and exposure to oth-erness. I do not mean to cut this moment off, however, from the process thataccrues to it in Kristeva’s account owing to the development of “parting” sad-ness. This is a notion adopted from Klein, which, in Kristeva, signals the in-fantile consent to lose the mother and meet her again in the realm ofrepresentations. Kristeva means to claim that mourning—the recovery of loss—can only occur through a return to the latent sadness, going to the hidden faceof Narcissus to make it feelable as a condition for the symbolic achievement ofmaking loss livable by finding a signifier for it. Artistic sublimation, that is, restson emotional trials that are more obviously the terrain of psychoanalytic expe-rience. This does not make them merely private and individual, however. We re-call that cultural melancholy is remedied by the recovery of loss that appears ina translation that takes place on a level heterogeneous to the one where the af-fective renunciation takes place. Nonetheless, affective loss must occur. It is aconstitutive element in the recovery of loss that renews subjective process. Whatis more, it now appears that the remedy for cultural melancholy includes themoment, at the furthest possible point of the descent into the latent loss, ofgoing over the loss of self. There are few words for such an undergoing, yet itturns up at the farthest reaches of subjective transformation. It is also the pointof greatest danger, for Kristeva’s thought of the affective impact that primal lossconstitutes in infantile life—the thought of the despair that shadow partingsadness—indicates her view that this is the point in the process of loss wheredeath drive lurks most forcefully. Following her theory of the early life of thedrives, the death drive makes its first and least modified appearance in the im-pact of primal loss. Thus, if the dynamic of loss—the negativity that drives sub-


jective process—encompasses the moment of going over the loss of self, therewill be a triggering of the death drive.

A brief review of Freud’s later theory of the drive is therefore in order.12 Onthe Freudian view, the death drive is a fundamental drive, the counterpart to erosand opposed to it as a detachment drive and a destructive tendency rather thanan attachment drive or a tendency to bind. Eros is the life drive. The two com-ponents of the drive, life and death, are, says Freud, usually found in combina-tion where they are directed outward. That is, in relation to others there is amixture in subjectivity of aggressiveness and desire. Considered on its own, ag-gressiveness still maintains a contact with the world and others. However, if thetwo components of the drive are defused, as is the case with the collapse of de-sire in the depressive narcissist’s loss of interest in life, the death drive is not directed outward but, instead, plays itself out within the tendency to self-destruction. The detachment tendency may fulfill itself in the depressive’splunge into suicide.

We have therefore reached the point of encountering the specifically psy-choanalytic thought on negativity that turns up in Freud’s later theory of thedrives. It might be said that the Freudian grasp on the destructive wave of thedrive presents the moments of collapse in Hegel’s “labor of the negative” withinhistorical being even more clearly than Hegel’s own drama of determinate nega-tion could.13 Having seen the historical role of negativity as it appears fromKristeva’s psychoanalytic standpoint, it has to be admitted that the triggering ofthe death drive looks like an ineliminable if undesirable feature turning up at theheart of the remedy for cultural melancholy itself. In other words, mourningand melancholia are not straightforwardly distinct in Kristeva, either dynami-cally or conceptually. There is no question of bypassing the destructive elementshould it turn up, and we have set conditions for the renewal of subjectiveprocess—through going over the loss of self—that portend its appearance. It isa question, then, of considering how going over the loss of self could be bear-able, given that the self is, precisely, put out of play as the bearer of the processand may founder in the drive. Kristeva does speak of the affect of parting sad-ness as the preliminary cohesion of a fragile self, yet it is also attachment to sad-ness that may doom the subject. If the remedy for cultural melancholy requiresthat the self go over the loss of self, there must be other resources for the trial.We will now, in conclusion, see how love can turn up as the bearer in the far-thest reaches of loss, where loss of self returns.

LoveIn unfolding her conception of love Kristeva returns once again to the regionwhere the emergent ego suffers the impact of loss/emptiness. She draws outfurther the psychoanalytic reconstruction of early infantile life, presenting a par-adigmatic case of love that protects emptiness and presents “a solidarity between


emptiness and narcissism” (1987, 24). The paradigm of love appears, therefore,in the region where the destructive drive is first activated. The reminder, how-ever, that love in psychoanalysis is, first, narcissism—self-love—would seem tosuggest that the self protects itself against the drive by means of the self-enclo-sure of narcissistic relationship detected by Freud.14 Yet this does not fulfill themeaning of Narcissus in Kristeva. She insists on an “already ternary structura-tion” that turns up in the mother-child dyad (23). Primary narcissism, the realmof archaic attachments, contains the appearance of a loving other that is equallythe emergence of loving affect in the budding subject. Kristeva’s loving affect canonly be referred to separate sources—lover and beloved—from the third-personviewpoint, not from the perspective of early psychic development. The love inquestion is “the mother’s gift” since it is dependent on the maternal capacitynot to engulf the child but to draw into the dual relationship an intimation ofher being also elsewhere (34). The appearance of this elsewhere within dual re-lationship would simply be “a sound on the fringe of my being, which transfersme to the place of the Other, astray, beyond meaning, out of sight” (37). Thatis, loving affect in archaic relationship is a transference toward an other that isneither the corporeal environ of the mother’s body nor any determinate thirdparty, but rather the drawing power of an elsewhere without determinate place.Kristeva calls it the metaphorical object, which bends the drive away from thethreatened downfall (30–31). Transference love, she says, this “bright and frag-ile idealization,” acts as a consolation for loss (5). Although he could not com-prehend it, Freud glimpsed these dynamics when he turned from reflection onmonotheism to behold “the sun-drenched face of the young Persian god.”15

We can see a double indeterminacy in the Kristevan conception of trans-ference love: both indeterminacy as regards any position of the source of loveand indeterminacy of the object. This is crucial for her presentation of the spon-taneity and mystery of love: that love, itself, is source. It is, first, source of the sub-ject, not only constituting the nucleus of the ego in subject formation and makingof the subject something intrinsically beyond itself but also allowing for the re-turn of borders dissolved. In this way, love can be the bearer of the trial of goingover the loss of self. Second, it is source of the object insofar as the bearing of thesubject beyond itself underlies all objects of desire. Third, it is the source of imag-inary formations and of loving metaphor. The amatory experience in Kristeva is,then, not just the path of desiring attachments but their very fount. Her lovingdynamic is taken up in the twists and turns of a Western literary adventure thatshe follows from Don Juan and the troubadours to Baudelaire and Stendhal.Having portrayed these major Western figures of loving discourse in terms ofthe creation of forms that gives life and renewed meaning to transference love,she finally avers that, behind them “[t]here lies nevertheless an enigmatic area ofdarkness. The unknown. Like a metaphor” (1987, 340). These concluding wordsto her Baudelaire chapter allude neither to repression (Freud’s dark continent)nor to mortality. They carry a reminder of love’s lost labors. The loss of self


becomes a momentary eclipse into which the ray of light enters, guiding toward another. And finally, the amatory experience, in all its exaggeration and bedaz-zlement, breaks forth within the reign of the symbol: “Juliet is the Sun.”

Notes1. Thus, where Kristeva names her theoretical undertaking semiology, she

distinctly shows the equal weight of love and loss as the most fundamental el-ements constituting symbolic life. “Semiology, concerned as it is with the zerodegree of symbolism, is unavoidably led to ponder over not only the amatorystate but its corollary as well, melancholia; at the same time it observes that ifthere is no writing other than the amorous, there is no imagination that is not,overtly or secretly, melancholy” (1989, 6).

2. See Kristeva (1989). See also her New Maladies of the Soul (1995).3. See Freud (1914).4. Black Sun, the work on loss, is the third of the three books of the 1980s

that detail Kristeva’s thought on primary narcissism. The first, on abjection, isPowers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), and the second, on love, is Talesof Love (1987).

5. See Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1912–1913) for the distinction betweenthe social and psychic manifestations of paternal law. See his Moses andMonotheism (1939) for an extended reflection that brings Freud’s thought on theoedipal structure of subjectivity into relation with the history of monotheisticreligion.

6. See Smith (1998).7. For a developed argument that this process is a response to modern

nihilism, see Beardsworth (2004).8. This is a central thesis of Revolution in Poetic Language (1984).9. The thought that the historical takes place as symbolic figuring ap-

pears most powerfully in her writings of the 1980s. The idea of the need ofartistic figuring of the feminine is most emphatic in Kristeva’s revolt books ofthe 1980s: The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (2000) and Intimate Revolt (2002).

10. Kristeva’s writings do of course also show how these aspects of subjec-tivity and relationship have been encountered and accommodated in Westernreligion and premodern art, albeit in a context in which the “paternal” symbolicwas the rule of social life.

11. The objection might be raised against Kristeva that this way of recover-ing the feminine is complicit with the vanquishing of the feminine by restrictingit to what is lost and what is past. However, in the face of this criticism, it can besaid that Kristeva makes the recovery of this form of the feminine, as “the lost,” acondition for destinies for maternity and the feminine, other than traditional ones,without either conflating the two (woman equals mother) or insisting on their sev-erance (the feminine must be distinguished from motherhood).


12. See Freud (1920).13. See Hegel (1977).14. See Freud (1914).15. Freud (1912–1913, 153), cited in Kristeva (1987, 45).

ReferencesBeardsworth, Sara. 2004. Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity. New York:

State University of New York Press.Freud, Sigmund. 1912–1913. Totem and Taboo. The Standard Edition of the Com-

plete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13. Trans. James Strachey. London:Hogarth Press.

———. 1914. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” The Standard Edition of theComplete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14. Trans. James Strachey. Lon-don: Hogarth Press.

———. 1917. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Com-plete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14. Trans. James Strachey. London:Hogarth Press.

———. 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the CompleteWorks of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hog-arth Press.

———. 1939. Moses and Monotheism. The Standard Edition of the Complete Worksof Sigmund Freud, vol. 23. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford, UK:Clarendon Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S.Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York:Columbia University Press.

———. 1987. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia Uni-versity Press.

———. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman, New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman. NewYork: Columbia University Press.

———. 2002. Intimate Revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

———. 2006. “L’expérience littéraire est-elle encore possible?” Interview. L’Infini 53.

Smith, Anne-Marie. 1998. Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable. London:Pluto Press.

9

Symptomatic Reading:Kristeva on Duras

��

Lisa Walsh

La vue exacte, c’est la vue terroriste du monde.

—Marguerite Duras

In her 2003 preface to the first Chinese edition of Powers of Horror, Julia Kristevaintroduces her 1980 study of abjection in Western culture by identifying its con-temporary relevance to twenty-first century Eastern thought. Referencing China’spostcommunist political and economic power struggles with the West, she pro-poses that if “we” are to survive this (if dialectically foreseeable) East/West colli-sion, intellectual and cultural exchange are indispensable. Texts must be translated,their meanings understood, if we are to establish a dialogue with, rather than sim-ply annihilate, the historically Other “half ” of humanity. As a long time studentof Chinese semiotics and a native Bulgarian,1 Kristeva explains, her work finds itsroots in an Eastern notion of the sacred, therefore offering her Chinese reader afamiliar structure from within which she2 might approach an otherwise utterlystrange and incomprehensible Western (non)sense of religion, and in particular,its inevitable relationship to terrorism (2005, 466). Powers of Horror, she explainsto her Eastern reader, both poses and answers a most urgent question in our trou-bled post–9/11 times: “Is literature terrorism’s accomplice or its antidote?” (468).In its Western practice at least, she responds, literature has much in common withterrorism: notably, “its roots in a national language and its structural participationin horror” (468). Real literature, however, she qualifies, transcends these petty na-tionalisms (we will return shortly to the question of structural “horror”) “throughthe incommensurable author’s infiltration of the communal idiom: maximum

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singularisation, style is a dis-identification of both Person and Nation” (469). Fur-thermore, she continues, “Reading and teaching literature, unveiling its poly-phonic logic in the face of what must be called religious monologism, is a politicaltherapy” (469). In the modern Western tradition, she informs her Chinese readerthat “real literature” does indeed function as an “antidote” to the monotheistic ter-ror of fundamentalist Islam and Christianity. This antidote, however, like anygood pharmakon, may be poisonous and must be handled with care.

The Eastern reader should therefore be on her guard with respect to liter-ature’s power to destroy what it heals. The artistic psyche productive of litera-ture’s “polyphonic logic,” she explains, maintains a necessarily intimate, andtherefore dangerous, relation to the Real, or the unmediated jouissance of thebodily drives before and beyond symbolic meaning. Without a certain commit-ment to sanity on the writer’s part, literature, she warns, lapses into “aestheticact;” it revels in its “structural participation in horror” and becomes more ac-complice than antidote to “acts” of terrorism. One must be careful, then, to avoidthe crazy writer. Thoroughly absorbed in her own crises (as are most feminine,postmodern subjects for Kristeva), rather than sublimate the bodily experienceof the drives through some sort of textual logic, the aesthetic actor denies abjec-tion through “violence, destruction of the other (autrui) and self-destruction,through caricature and insult, through provocation of the reader, through vio-lations of the public and the means of expression itself, and ultimately throughdestruction of the work and of the Self in suicide” (2005, 470). This sort of aes-thetic acting out refuses to assimilate the horror it materializes and thus findsitself aiding and abetting the terrorist cause. Antidotally, on the other hand, lit-erary “judgment” elaborates a complex language and thought system, a “poly-phonic logic” that might contextualize symbolically the banality andspectacularity of horror and perversion confronting us on a daily basis, therebyhelping the reader maintain her shaky symbolic bearings. Literature as judg-ment rather than act, she tells her Chinese reader, represents one of the onlyknown treatments for postcommunist, Western decadence.

Before concluding her preface with a wish that Powers of Horror might as-sist Eastern readers in avoiding falling victim to the “collapse of the shelter ofthought” currently undermining our psychic stability in the West, she reiter-ates this crucial distinction between literary art (judgment) and “political ter-rorism” (act). Literature involves questioning, engaging, thinking: consciousmediation of the drives: “Literature [. . .] is in its own way terror, but because itis situated in representation and language, it is a terror that allows us better tothink about the intimate causes of terror itself. Minimal but deep, it is not theleast of antidotes against the terrorism that assails us from both within andwithout” (2005, 470). Aside from her own novels, unfortunately, Kristeva seemsunable to recommend any “postmodern” texts to the potentially wounded reader.Indeed, contemporary fiction figures for her as a purely ego-driven aestheticwherein feminine writers (as exemplified by contemporary French women writ-

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ers such as Catherine Millot) wallow in the shallow squalor of their “new maladies of the soul,” their “fatigue in the feminine.” Kristeva’s contempt forthe senselessness of women’s writing is nothing new. Indeed, as a “post-War,”French woman writer with a distinctly political project, she has always main-tained an adversarial relationship to her “peers.”3 Contempt, however, makesway for terror in her violent denunciations of the literary acts of MargeuriteDuras (a frankly surprising response to an astoundingly rich body of workuniquely engaged—like Kristeva’s work—with the interstices of the unconsciousand the social). Her symptomatic readings of Duras not only reveal a certain au-thorial “anxiety of influence,” but also produce a melancholic, textual resistancethat ultimately gives life to both the therapeutic ideal of literary judgment and the singular destruction of the literary act that functions as its necessary, ifundesirable, support. Duras as literary actor terrorizes the Kristevan text, pro-voking a symptomatic response not readily amenable to the “political therapy”of symbolic judgment.

Kristeva first analyzes Marguerite Duras and her literary project, or “‘Duras,’”in the conclusive chapter of Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy (1989), elabo-rating an oddly depressive closure to a study seeking to advance a theory of thetherapeutic beauty of the melancholic text. While her other “analysands,” Holbein,Nerval, and especially Dostoyevsky, create sublime modernist works of art froma melancholic position that definitionally precludes symbolic expression, “Duras”represents a feminine, postmodern refusal to transcend melancholic nothingness.As a writer, for Kristeva, this is her job, and as a citizen, this is her duty. Ratherthan do the sublimatory work required to make sense, quite literally, of the over-whelming suffering induced by a disturbingly “radical atheism,” Duras, Kristevaproposes, remains willfully mired in the silence of a melancholic imaginary. Car-ing nothing for beauty or catharsis, the social or the political—or anything else buther own passion for that matter, Duras seeks only to “contaminate” readers withthe affective horrors of her chaotic and grief-stricken inner world; she wants usto feel her pain. And this, for Kristeva, even twenty years later as we will see, rep-resents a historically and politically distressing literary anomaly that must be revealed, judged, and ultimately denounced.

In the theoretical introduction to Black Sun, Kristeva presents us with aworking clinical definition of melancholy: “I shall call melancholia the institu-tional symptomology of inhibition and asymbolia that becomes established nowand then or chronically in a person, alternating more often than not with theso-called manic phase of exaltation” (1987, 18; 1999, 9). Grounding her inter-pretation in the works of Freud, Klein, and Green, Kristeva’s focus on silence askey diagnostic moment posits asymbolia qua symptom as pathological causeand effect: the analysand cannot “make sense” because she is melancholic, andshe is melancholic because she cannot make sense. As in her other works, Kris-teva’s preoccupation here is with “borderline” states, those uniquely human, psy-chic structures wherein the inherent contradictions and confusions of a

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difficultly social animal find both experience and expression: love, abjection,foreignness, genius, literature, and melancholy, all allow the analyst to investi-gate these ever-shifting, and for Kristeva psychically and politically constitutive,boundaries or borderlands (états limites) between nature and culture, affect andreason, real and symbolic (in Lacanian terms).4 Without this constant repeti-tion of a foundational instability and negativity in the subject’s psychic negoti-ation of her embodiment, and its consequent affirmation and alienation in andthrough the symbolic, homo sapiens would cease to exist; like the melancholic,he would stop making sense. Signification, then, makes possible our survival ofthese inevitable, uncomfortable moments in and of these borderlands by en-dowing them with meaning. Language allows for the expression of these en-counters with the real by lending them the stability of signs, thereby bringingthe animal body, safely domesticated, into the social domain. The Law, she in-sists, must supersede radical freedom via the completion of the revolutionaryturn, the inauguration of the next thetic phase.5 Better by far to have stayedwhere we were than to have gone too far in the direction of the “semiotic” con-fusion and meaninglessness of the real. The revolution must make sense. Andthis is precisely Kristeva’s problem with Duras. “She” refuses to make the theticbreak that might make political sense and/or aesthetic beauty of her desperateinhabitation of the melancholic borderlands. She is “sick” and “contagious” and,unlike Dostoyevsky, utterly incapable of forgiveness, sublimation, transcen-dence—inconsolable, incurable, and, most of all, scary.

In this opening section of Black Sun, Kristeva establishes the relationshipbetween literary creation and the semiotic-symbolic movement of language.Literature ideally completes the signifying revolution, touching on the affec-tive depths of the speaking subject and then transcribing this experience intosigns and symbols both constitutive of and, especially in “poetry,” constituted bythese semiotic borderlands. This sublimatory movement is curative, then, ofboth the psyche and the social—even, and perhaps especially, in the case ofmelancholy where language had become impossible. She writes, “Literary cre-ation is that adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to the affect—to sadness as imprint of separation and beginning of the symbol’s sway; to joyas imprint [marque] of the triumph that settles me in the universe of artificeand symbol, which I try to harmonize in the best possible way with my experi-ence of reality” (1987, 32–33; 1989, 22). In other words, literature reenacts thematerial rupture of the thetic moment, allowing the reader, settled in the uni-verse of “artifice and symbol,” to experience the jouissance (painful and/or joy-ous) of moving a bit too far in the semiotic direction of the real. She continues,“The ‘semiotic’ and ‘symbolic’ become the communicable imprints of an affec-tive reality, perceptible to the reader (I like this book because it conveys [com-munique] sadness, anguish, or joy) and yet dominated, set aside, vanquished ”(1987, 33; 1989, 22; emphasis added). In other words, “I” like (j’aime) this bookbecause “I” am reminded that as a rational, speaking subject—like the writer—


“I” can make sense of, and therefore conquer and control, the emotions “I” amable to understand from a safe, mediated distance. “I” hate that book because thewriter has failed to translate her jouissance into the signs and symbols that wouldallow me to maintain my stable position in the social; “I” feel her pain. Durasmakes “me” sick. The authorial “I,” of course, stands in here for the universal“reader.” Kristeva’s singular reader, however—especially a narcissistic or melan-cholic one—might justifiably respond, “But what about ‘me’?” “What if ‘I’ like,even love, my sadness and joy free of mediation, domination, and subordina-tion?” For Kristeva, this Durassian reader (in both senses of the possessive), aswe will see, a loving and a hating reader, cannot be a political reader. Her expe-rience is radically cut off from its social and historical contexts.

For Kristeva, of course, asymbolia equals asocial equals apolitical. The au-thentic, meaningful literary text, on the other hand, maintains the ascendancyof the Husserlian transcendental ego; it transposes the silence and “agitations”of its creative inception:

the work of art that insures the rebirth of its author and its reader orviewer is one that succeeds in integrating the artificial language it putsforward (new style, new composition, surprising imagination) and theunnamed agitations [émois] of an omnipotent self that ordinary socialand linguistic usage always leave somewhat orphaned or plunged intomourning. Hence such a fiction, if it isn’t an antidepressant, is at leasta survival, a resurrection. (1987, 62; 1989, 51; emphasis added)

The curative work of art, again, brings into the artificiality of language andcommunication those forgotten (by the individual subject) and ignored (by thecollective social) preoedipal traces, émois, thereby allowing the omnipotent or-phan to mourn her lost maternal object by attaching signs and symbols to hertraces, and then to be born again, rise from the dead6—via the transcendenceof the thetic break.

How does the melancholic, defined by her asymbolia and failure to mourn,manage to create a work of art if she is caught in a death embrace with her lostobject, the maternal Thing? Sublimation, in a word. Unfortunately though,some artists sublimate and others do not.7 In the case of Black Sun, the other de-pressive artists produce magnificent beauty from the depths of their suffering—to cure themselves and others—whereas Duras only reproduces and spreads herown suffering. Duras, Kristeva argues, does not sublimate because she refusesto abandon the melancholic position, to stop loving-hating the maternal Thing,to complete the revolution and make the thetic break, enter into the social, com-municate. Describing melancholics, Kristeva writes that “…everything has goneby [révolu], they seem to say, but I am faithful to those bygone days [ce révolu],I am nailed down to them, no revolution is possible, there is no future…” (1987,71; 1989, 60; ellipses in original ).8 And Kristeva’s revolution waits for no one.

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Before delving more deeply into the specificities of Kristeva’s readings ofDuras, as well as a few of my own, I would like briefly to revisit Kristeva’s the-orization of melancholic subjectivity as borderlands, as object of philosophicalfascination. The dialectical movement across and within her texts (both fictionand nonfiction) from (1) an identifiable contact with the real—again, poetry,love, abjection—and a passionate attachment to its destabilizing effects on thesymbolic and the social, which effects follow from the “semiotic” imbalance thattips the subject over into the borderlands, almost beyond the reach of the sym-bolic and the logos to (2) a violent negation of that which lies beyond these bor-derlands (the real), what remains inaccessible to the artificiality of signs andsymbols, foreign to humanity and the social contract, rabidly insane, dangerous,and finally to (3) an even more passionate embrace of the symbolic reinstate-ment of the thetic phase that incorporates the wildness and beauty of the un-bridled drives, as both affected by and affective of the “omnipotent self ” andhis sociosymbolic universe, and brings them back into the “triumphant” safetyand repose of “artifice and symbols.”9 The melancholic on this model remainsstuck in the asymbolic, imaginary space-time of the second stage, until, that is,psychoanalysis or sublimation provokes anew the thetic break.

Duras, like Kristeva, uses the darkroom, la chambre noire, to metaphorizean experience of radical psychic interiority, the space-time of this “orchestra-tion” of loss.10 And while Duras may not create photo-graphy in her dark-room—she most definitely does not write with light—she does producegraphos, pages and pages over some fifty years, which would seem to indicatemany thetic moments. In a recent work on Duras and politics, DominiqueDenes identifies the importance of the notion of the darkroom in under-standing the relationship between writing and politics in and for “Duras”(text/woman):

Her [Duras’s] problematic of writing has caused her to adopt a singu-lar posture and position, best synthesized by the original concept of“the darkroom” [“la chambre noire”]. This concept is polysemic: notably,a room for writing or reading, the darkroom would seem to be theclosed, impermeable place par excellence, “a sort of dwelling place [lo-gement] in oneself, a shadow, where everything goes, where the inte-grality of lived experience amasses, piles up,” oriented toward theinterior darkness of being and creation, if the darkroom weren’t also forDuras a place of interface and osmosis from which the solitary writerobserves and returns to others and the world. (2005, 8–9)11

Within the solitary silence of the darkroom, via the writing process that al-ways already assumes a reading other, Duras claims to write from within thecryptic darkness of melancholic asymbolia, to make sense, to speak to others, toattain to a relationship with the outside. Whereas Kristeva argues that rebirth,


resurrection, the transcendent thetic break—contact with the world beyond thenarcissism of the tomb—is necessary to literary production, Duras insists thatwhile she writes from a space of darkness, she remains fully aware, if terrified,of the light and life outside.

In the interview just cited, a postface and response to the screenplay ofDuras’s 1977 film Le Camion, Duras explains her understanding of the chambre noire as writing and reading room. Discussing the writing/reading of thefilm, Duras explains the reasoning behind its contrived setting, a nondescriptroom where the two characters, writer and reader, discuss the film quite liter-ally in process; this chambre noire spatially re-presents, she explains, inmise-en-abyme, the “identical” (identique), unreachable space of writing; it visu-ally replicates for the spectator the relationship between reader and writer (and text!). On screen, the reader (actor Gérard Dépardieu) materially occupiesthe chambre noire; he sits alongside the writer in the darkness—with the text.Duras theorizes:

The film was made in a closed room, that is, curtains drawn, electriclights on, in the dark that is. I wouldn’t have ever thought . . . or atleast, only now is this reflection coming to me . . . I wouldn’t have everthought it possible to read in the light of day. I don’t know, perhaps onealways reads in the dark; the place where one speaks, I call this thedarkroom [la chambre noire]. I say: reading room or darkroom. It seemsto me that there would be a dispersion of the reach of language in adaytime place [un lieu de jour]. Reading comes out of darkness, out ofthe night. Even if one reads in broad daylight, outside, night is createdaround the book. (1977, 103; ellipses in original)12

Yet while she may not have previously reflected on the universal reach ofthe film’s visual metaphor, she did indeed “say” (though within the context ofthis film, she did write it first) “reading room.” The preceding screenplay con-firms that the dark room as cinematic setting functions as both image andmetaphor of the intensity and obscurity of this quite literal “reading room”:

A dark enclosed place. The curtains are drawn. The lights are on. Carpet.Mirrors. It’s a place of rest. Through the white curtains, the light of day. Around table in the center of the place. Two people are there, seated at thistable: Gérard Dépardieu and Marguerite Duras. On the table, manuscripts.The story (histoire) of the film is thus read. They will read this story. Theexterior of the place will only be seen once night has fallen. Throughout thefilm the décor will change, but inside the same place. It will be objects: ta-bles, lamps, that change places. But the light will remain identical. The wayof reading as well, pages in hand. This place can be called: CHAMBRENOIRE, or reading room. (1977, 10–11)

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According to the screenplay, the two characters now read aloud the textdescribing what will be (and is being) projected onto the screen (and has al-ready been inscribed on paper). Duras, “playing” the writer, speaks the vast ma-jority of the words while her reader punctuates the writing-reading withquestions and, less frequently, comments. Crucially here though, although read-ing takes place within the chambre noire, the solitary space of writer-reader, anoutside preexists the reading room, both on blank page and on screen. What sortof outside? An industrial zone, the ugly injustice of the postcolonial, Frenchbanlieue: “Lateral travelling shot. Construction sites. Empty lots. Shanty towns”(1977, 10). She envisioned, she says, those volatile—currently riotous—bad-lands inhabited by immigrants, on the margins of the social.

Some sixteen years later, just before her death, Duras returned for the lasttime to the notion of the chambre noire as space of writing and reading, distinctbut not dissociable. In a 1993 essay on her writerly vocation, “Écrire,” Durasdescribes the desperate solitude of the chambre noire, the radical atheism that forher make writing possible, even necessary. “Writing,” for Duras, “is hell”:

Finding oneself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost completesolitude and discovering that only writing will save you. To be with nosubject for a book, no idea for a book, is to find oneself, rediscover one-self, face to face with [devant] a book. An immense emptiness. Aneventual book. Face to face with nothingness. Face to face as a naked,living writing, as terrible, terrible to overcome. (1993 20)13

There is always, however, despite this solitude, the eventual reader whomthe writer precedes at the bottom of this hole, a reader who shadows thiswriter-book face-off. She may not recognize it at the time (a truncated time asKristeva argues), but deep down she knows it: otherwise it’s not a real book, or“literature” in Kristevan terms (Duras 1993, 23). Writing for Duras, and con-sequently reading (both authors agree that the two are structurally inseparable),is to confront the void left by the absence of belief—religious, aesthetic, philo-sophical, political—to be open to the meaningless suffering taking place outside,to speak, and at times even to scream, from this inescapably silent space-timeof writing-reading. Duras does, however, I would argue, believe in writing, butat the same time, unlike Kristeva, knows and accepts that she will never graspthe meaning of this “unknown”:

You can’t write without bodily strength. You have to be stronger thanyourself to approach writing, you have to be stronger than what youwrite. It’s a funny thing, yes. It’s not only writing, what’s written, it’salso the screams of animals in the night, everyone’s screams, yours andmine, dogs’ screams. It’s the hopeless, massive vulgarity of society. Suf-fering is also Christ and Moses and the pharaohs and all of the Jews,


and all of the Jewish children, and it’s also the most violent kind ofhappiness. Still, I believe that (Toujours, je crois ça). (Duras 1993, 24;emphasis added)

Duras believes this suffering, these animal screams, and it is from and to thistimeless space that she inscribes them, and that the reader is inscribed by them.Can such a hopeless and painful project bear political weight? Get by withoutoffering any redemption or consolation? Kristeva thinks not.

In the final chapter of Black Sun, “The Malady of Grief (La maladie de ladouleur14): Duras,” Kristeva contends that Duras’s irrational devotion to suffer-ing (la douleur) produces an eerie depressive silence that figures as not only crazy,but also politically irresponsible, if not suspect. In brief, Duras has made thepolitical far too personal, which, contrary to the inverse feminist call to action—“the personal is political!”—produces a decidedly asocial textual effect.15 Inbroad terms, Kristeva reads Duras’s morbid love affair with the beyond of thereal as not only politically useless, but also psychically dangerous, arguing:“Duras’s books should not be put into the hands of sensitive readers” (1987,235; 1989 227). Michel de Certeau concurs, warning, “‘Don’t lose sight of thefact that there is always a risk of losing oneself, not being able to get out, re-maining there, fixed, just as one remains mute in the face of a fascinating en-counter’” (emphasis added).16 Similarly, in a first interview with Duras in 1974,Xavière Gauthier explains her own reading experience to the author: “I knowthat, when I read your books, it puts me in a very . . . , very heavy [ fort] state,and I’m uneasy and it’s very difficult to speak or do anything after reading them.I don’t know if it’s fear, but it’s truly a dangerous state to enter into” (Duras andGauthier 1974, 14).17 Duras responds, “All the same, there are still people whoread them [ca], so that’s what should be paid attention to. I pass into anotherdomain, there. Because, when I started not to be able to avoid those books,18 Ithought there wouldn’t be any readers. You see the danger, it’s immense, asy-lum-like. And then, the books found readers . . . and men” (17). How, Gau-thier—positioning herself in this text as a “feminist”—asks, do these “men”respond? According to Duras, “The word “ill” comes back in every letter. [. . .]I’m ill from reading you” (17). And indeed, an impressive array of her contem-porary readers and “men”—Lacan, Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze—confirm a senseof bodily anguish in the face of this writing, an irrational fear that perhaps thereading room has no exit.

Kristeva, however, a generation younger and not a man, turns a far harsherdiagnostic gaze on the Durassian text.19 Black Sun’s final chapter contrasts Rev-olution in Poetic Language’s celebration of modernity’s “music in Letters” with thenihilistic illogic and silence of Duras’s “postmodern” melancholic text. So,whereas a Mallarmé poem might instigate a decidedly progressive, historicalshift in the social structures of material production and reproduction, the dis-eased Durassian text only silences her reader in a static, if not regressive, wave

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of suffering, a meaningless “disease of death,” or maladie de la mort. Thispost-Holocaust text, Kristeva adds, refuses to perform its aesthetic work of emo-tional purification, willfully fails to participate in the “policed” affairs of theState.20 Duras’s artistic irresponsibility lies in her inability to provide her con-temporary reader some much-needed emotional release: “Lacking recovery orGod, having neither value nor beauty other than illness itself seized at the placeof rupture, never has art had so little cathartic potential” (Kristeva 1987, 235;1989, 228). If, following Lacan’s reading of Aristotelian catharsis, as an aes-thetically mediated release of damaging emotions (at both the individual andcollective levels), and in particular fear and pity,21 then perhaps Kristeva hassomething here, at least in terms of beauty. Perhaps Durassian art does positionthe reader at an uncannily ugly psychic breaking point. It is, however, preciselywhen Duras not only fails to relieve, but even violently provokes, the reader’s fearand pity that her texts, to my mind, become most “valuable,” most singularlylikely to inhabit an aggressively political—and ethical—function.

For Kristeva, however, Duras’s uncannily solitary descents into madness,not to mention alcoholism, cannot mean anything. The depth and intensity ofauthorial anguish are indeed potentially terrifying, but this distinguishes themas neither cathartic nor otherwise socially significant. Just dangerous. And to allthe wrong people. Suffering, on Kristeva’s reading—and suffering is the melan-cholic’s life blood—skirts the political and ethically positions history as inter-nalized lost cause: “In the view of an ethic and an aesthetic concerned withsuffering, the mocked private domain gains a solemn dignity that depreciatesthe public domain while allocating to history the imposing responsibility forhaving triggered the malady of death” (1987, 243; 1989, 235). History is loosedfrom its symbolic bearings: “Duras’s melancholy is . . . like an explosion in his-tory. Private suffering absorbs political horror into the subject’s psychic micro-cosm” (1987, 242; 1989, 234). The personal, again, has improperly subsumed thepolitical. Duras, refusing the cathartic possibilities of purification, insists in-stead on a reproductive falling back into the seductive jouissance of the silencesand screams of the real.

Anne Juranville, also an analyst and professor of literature, disagrees withKristeva’s clinical diagnosis, arguing that Duras is too depressed to be melan-cholic, but does agree that the melancholic “subject,” and in particular the fem-inine one, maintains an immediate, traumatic relation to the real qua maternalThing. This nostalgic denial of individuation, as for Kristeva, positions themelancholic beyond the pale of symbolic intervention, unable to access in anyway the historical reality of the social: “Stupefied, horrified, [the melancholic]fixes himself in an inhuman zone beyond death where, lacking the least sym-bolic recourse, he is condemned to remain eternally and passively concentratedon this gaping wound that he himself is” (1993, 54). Juranville unlike Kristeva,however, implies that although the melancholic may indeed be incurable—as exemplified by Virginia Woolf, her melancholic heroine—she does have her


moments of lucidity. Juranville, moreover, theorizes an ethical, if not quite social, expression of melancholic knowledge, arguing that through “the melan-cholic experience of the ontological void, a traversing of the mirror that shat-ters the certainties of the ordinary world and betrays it as a simulacrum, [themelancholic] is able to open the space of ethics as an act of unveiling being(alèthéia) in its primordial tear” (116). Juranville, like Kristeva, denies the melan-cholic access to historical time. For Lacan, however (and this is the former’stheoretical bent), this tragic “act” (as opposed to state), though it does indeedentail a certain rupture in chronological, historical time, does not wrench thesubject from her historical bearings. The drives, or the “semiotic” on Kristeva’stheorization, are always already historical, even historicizing. Lacan explains,“‘[R]ememorization, historicization, is coextensive with the functioning of thedrives in what we call the human psyche. This is also where destruction is reg-istered, enters into the register of experience.’”22 And here, I think, lie not onlythe ethical but also the political possibilities (tentative emphasis here on a greatdeal of risk and luck—tuchè) of the melancholic’s pathological (logic of pathos)retreat from reality. Despite Kristeva’s attempts at extolling “the virtues of amelancholic position,” these possibilities are obscured by Kristeva’s politics ofwriting and reading (Restuccia 2005, 201).

In 1998, some ten years after Black Sun, Kristeva published a second essay onDuras (two years after Duras’s death). The essay’s title, “Une Étrangère” (a [fe-male] “foreigner,” “stranger,” “outsider”) establishes an immediate intratextual andintertextual identification of “Kristeva” and “Duras.” Explaining the title to thereader, Kristeva explains that she and Duras share a certain state of exile as writ-ers born outside the French nation and language who write in French; Duras grewup in Vietnam speaking French at home and Vietnamese outside the home, Kris-teva in Bulgaria, speaking Bulgarian in the home and French at school she ex-plains (see Kristeva 2005, 502–503). Both women moved to France at the age ofmajority and became “French” writers, writers, however, whose most primitive,formative experiences took place in other languages as well, languages belongingto cultures where an intensity of suffering finds expression, where translation istherefore impossible. Both women are profoundly foreign, outsiders who writein France, who write in French: “[A]t the heart of the same language [French],they speak another language. Translating the sensible time of a foreign country—childhood, passion, other people, other voices—into a host idiom comes back toa transubstantiation of the suffering of exile, translation, and writing as commondestiny (en un même destin)” (503).23 In an even more personal vein, she contin-ues, “[W]e were savage accomplices because we were burned by a suffering thatdoesn’t square with French rhetoric. . . . Melancholy isn’t French” (502). In the next“portrait,” this one of Roland Barthes, author of La Chambre claire (1980), Kris-teva explains the formative impact of Barthes’s 1970 essay, “L’Étrangère,” on herintellectual project in diagnosing her early work as displaying a “fertile ‘strange-ness,’” a strangeness she recognized and learned to cultivate rather than repress

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(522; original date of publication 2002). Barthes’s writing, she explains, allowedher to identify herself as a foreigner and also as an accepted member of the Frenchintelligentsia: “He opened . . . the jealously guarded signs of the French Templeof Letters” (511). Kristeva recognizes herself in “The Stranger.” And in Duras shereconizes “A Stranger,” of like kind.

Kristeva’s 1998 essay begins, nonetheless, on a note of decidedly negativeidentification, if not sheer antagonism. The introductory passage is fascinating:

Can one really like (aimer)—what’s called liking (aimer)—Duras? I’m intoxicated by her [it] ( j’en suis soûlée), but since I prefer the sufferingof clarity to the illness of alcohol, I turn to her novels with the symbi-otic, precautionary ripping apart that my most catastrophic patientsprovoke in me. . . . She didn’t hate it that I termed “witchcraft” hercomplicity with maternal hatred, with the anguish that replaces desirein depressed women, with that “nothingness” that scintillates betweentwo women, that ties them ombilically to each other and floods thebasement (inonde le sous-sol ) of endogenous feminine homosexuality.While Duras’s groupies (les groupies de Duras) chastised me for not rec-ognizing her artistic virtuosity [in Black Sun], she saw my diagnosis asmore of an homage. Of course she didn’t care if her art was capable ofcatharsis since she only wanted to contaminate the reader [groupie?]with her passion to death (sa passion à mort), her passion for death.(501–502; ellipsis in original)

“Can one really like Duras?” Kristeva responds that she (qua I ) does not likeher darkness, her alcoholism, her catastrophes, or her illness because she, as ana-lyst and reader, prefers clarity and caution. She reads “Duras” as a seductive andfatal analysand from whom she must violently “rip” herself, and then, after a briefelliptic pause, she turns to Duras’s response. Duras, she explains, did not get de-fensive about the Black Sun essay; she did not hate being associated with witch-craft, hatred, angst, depression, homosexuality; she read “the diagnosis” asappreciation not insult. And indeed, a brief encounter with Duras’s work, her bi-ographies, and her critics quickly confirms that her values and concerns do differsubstantially from Kristeva’s, as do her aesthetics and politics. Setting aside fornow the obvious problems with Kristeva’s theory of female homosexuality here asasocial and abyssal, her labeling of Duras’s readers as “groupies” is telling not onlybecause it implies a certain cheapening of the literary value of her novels (whichas we will see are not, any longer, for Kristeva, literature), but again firmly instan-tiates the reading experience imposed by “Duras” as unmediated by the symbolic:the groupie seeks sexual contact with her idol, not enlightenment—though oddlyenough, these groupies are apparently concerned with “artistic virtuosity.”

Duras, she argues, could not care less whether her novels were art. Norwhether they had any social value at all. Her only intention, and it is unclear here


as to whether this is a conscious or unconscious intention (it cannot be desiresince Duras is incapable), is to make other people ill with her suffering. “Duras”at this point no longer represents the woman and her oeuvre, and indeed theyare incredibly difficult for critics, and even La Duras herself, to differentiate.24

As reader of Kristeva, her respondent and analysand, Duras’s words are nowexplicit and knowable. We, readers of Kristeva (and presumably of Duras), doknow that Duras would certainly not have minded being accused of writingbooks full of suffering and darkness. We also know that she would not haveminded that her novels were not interpreted as cathartic in either cause or ef-fect. But, in the end, we know that Duras cared deeply about the value of herwriting, and of all writing. What she lacked, for Kristeva, was and is anotherkind of belief, the belief that the writing could and would transform suffering,bring the melancholic out of her solitude, her violent relationship with loss, intothe clarity of rational thought. Duras, however, claims that writing is not writing if it is not done alone in the dark, in a state of radical disbelief, “whereeverything is thrown into doubt” (1993, 21).25 At the end of a writing careerspanning the latter half of the twentieth century, an “ugly time for literature”Kristeva exclaims (2005, 508), Duras concludes that all she can ever know aboutwhy or how she writes is this absolute doubt out of which it flows. Duras writes:

And this doubt grows around you. This doubt is alone, it is the doubtof solitude. It is born of it, of solitude. At least the word can be named.I think a lot of people couldn’t bear what I’m saying here; they wouldrun away. Perhaps that’s why everyone isn’t a writer. Yes. That’s it.That’s the difference. That’s the truth. Nothing else. Doubt is writ-ing. Thus, it is also the writer. And with the writer, everyone writes.We’ve always known that. (1993, 22)

Kristeva not only runs away; she rips herself away from this truth, this rad-ical atheism “we’ve always known” to be both possible and potentially fatal, mur-derous or suicidal. Duras’s reader, Kristeva would agree, does indeed write “with”her in this unmediated, “symbiotic” relationship with the text, in the chambrenoire. But this, on her reading, is the last thing we need in an age determinedby religious terror and hatred. What we do need is forgiveness: the forgivenessof psychoanalytic listening whereby the analyst “gives-for” (par-donne) theanalysand the symbolic attachments—words and images—necessary to becomereborn in a socially meaningful way and the forgiveness of literature whereby“[w]riting causes affect to slip into effect: ‘actus purus’ Saint Thomas would say.It conveys affects and does not repress them, it suggests for them a sublimatoryoutcome, it transposes them for another in a threefold, imaginary, and symbolicbond. Because it is forgiveness, writing is transformation, transposition, trans-lation” (1989, 217, 226). The literary act, just and loving, collects sadness andpurifies it, renders it sublime, divine, beautiful. Dostoyevsky, for Kristeva,

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following Aquinas’s dictates regarding justice and human forgiveness, gives hisreader the Christian gift of forgiveness. An orthodox Christian like Kristeva, heexperiences the intense suffering of the melancholic and then selflessly tran-scends his own lack, his own wounds; he believes.26

Kristeva prefaces her conclusive answer to the question of whether “Duras”is literature with a final assertion as to the historical function of literature in these troubled times of wars, crisis, television, and “therapy:” “literature is becoming the rival, Ô how superior often, of the clinic” (2005, 508). And inthis most recent collection, consistently situating the speaking subject in a post–9/11 nightmare of perversity and insanity, both analysis and literary mean-ing-making are more crucial than ever if we are to heal the alarmingly increasingnumbers of the walking wounded, and even, I would argue, the walking dead.In the book’s central essay, “Hatred and Forgiveness: Or from Abjection to Para-noia,” the author posits a talking cure for the terrorist’s political ills, for the “newmaladies of the soul.” She concludes the essay:

In these post-modern times of clashes of religions, times of endlesswars, it is not useless to remember that psychoanalytic interpretation,by revealing the many-sided destiny of hatred that makes and unmakes the human race, puts itself forward as the ultimate lucidityof this for-giveness (ce par-don) that psychic life needs to continue simply to live, without in the process completely ceasing to hate.(2005, 373)

Again, Kristeva asserts the superior value of psychoanalysis as a historicallynecessary moment in the unfolding of humanity’s understanding of itself.Analysis and literature allow us momentarily to have it both ways: the clarity of reason and the confusion of madness. We can have our hate and understandit too.

Returning one last time to Duras, “A Stranger,” Kristeva concludes (onceand for all?) that no, contrary to her earlier interpretation in Black Sun, “Duras”is not literature: One cannot really like Duras. She describes the “vocation” ofthe Durassian text:

to expose madness in the light of reason. Neither to understand it nordissimulate it. Simply to render in its nudity her “enormous pain,”without complaint, “as if singing about it.” “I went mad in a state ofpure reason.”27 The novel as a madness in a state of pure reason? No,a stranger to literature, this apocalypse is certainly not made to be liked.It is only there to interrupt sleep, the time that remains. (2005, 508)

What, then, is the socially and psychically responsible novel on Kristeva’sreading? And why, I wonder, is Duras’s rational representation of madness not


a novel? Kristeva’s answer here is pure negation: “NO.” This cannot be literature,especially at this historical moment when we need literature to rescue us, thewalking wounded, the walking dead, from the senselessness of our suffering.The last thing we need is more sleepless nights.

Duras, unlike Kristeva, does not write detective stories. She does writeabout “true crime” at its most intimate and immediate, reenacts our fascinationwith the transcendent familiarity of the fait divers, especially the crime of pas-sion. In both journalistic pieces (of which two collected volumes have been pub-lished, aptly titled Outside to indicate an explicit engagement with the political)and novels, most exceptionally Moderato cantabile, she explores the criminalityand desperation of domestic familiarity and symbolic meaninglessness. We readthe event within the timeless context of its banality and repetition: “Jealous wifeshoots philandering husband.” No cunning serial killer with a metaphysicalscore to settle, just the everyday violence of love and hatred that, when it en-counters the real and its jouissance, would pull us into the melancholic abyss,and ultimately a Godless death, were it not for our sheer good luck. Our goodluck in still being alive, not killing or being killed. There is, in other words, nocure for a certain Durassian violence—either murderous or suicidal. This doesnot, however, mean that she does not recognize and express political suffering.To the contrary, she not only sets many of her novels in highly politicized sitesof colonial and postcolonial conflict, she also put her body on the line and hernovels on hold to engage with many of the twentieth century’s struggles forfreedom and justice. Her actions, if at times rather extreme, often bordered onthe heroic. Why, then, does Kristeva call this woman/text(s) apolitical? Hernovels socially useless? A distinct conservatism, it would seem, prevails in Kris-teva’s dialectical model of signification, a conservatism grounded in a fear thatforecloses a certain textual intimacy and immediacy. Her rejection, abjection,of Duras, like her abjection of the maternal body in Powers of Horror (1980), re-veals an underlying, albeit well hidden, aversion to a truly radical revolutionthat failed to live up to its name.

Duras’s texts may not be for everyone, though their popularity would seemto attest to a substantial and discerning, and yes often oddly attached, reader-ship. Though I would agree that Duras does subject her reader to an unbear-able experience of unmitigated suffering and loss, I would also argue that theradical solitude of this chambre noire might become a singular, and as such po-litical and ethical, haven for an increasingly victimizing and vicitmized popu-lation. An aesthetics and politics grounded in and expressive of the silences andscreams of the intimacy and immediacy of psychic suffering allows for the sub-ject, both writer and reader, to make an intersubjective connection through lan-guage whose meaning requires no other meaning than this moment ofconnection itself, as solitary repetition of those moments of love and hate thatdraw the melancholic out of her sorrow, even into mania, for at least the timenecessary to write a novel—or to read a novel. This solitary communion

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reaffirms a call to a revolution that would not consist to a return to the same, because the same is too painful for too many people, both rationally and irra-tionally. The unthinkable suffering that accompanies globalized capitalism sim-ply does not and cannot, and hopefully never will, make sense.

Notes1. Kristeva neglects to mention her Maoist affiliation’s potential impact

on her relationship to the Eastern reader.2. The feminine pronoun here is most definitely mine. Kristeva’s reader

is a “universally” masculine reader, and she does conceive sexual difference inChina as fundamentally at odds with Western elaborations of gender. See Kristeva (1974a).

3. While Kristeva’s work has incited much debate within the feministcommunity, in part because of her predilection for modernist, male writers, shedid publish three major works on “feminine genius”: Colette, Hannah Arendt,and Melanie Klein.

4. Significantly though, of course, Lacan denies the existence of the borderline.

5. In her 1974 Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva develops a dialec-tical model of signification whereby the subject moves from a position of “sym-bolic” meaning to its “semiotic” negation via the drives to a sublation as “thetic”moment wherein the subject reaffirms the symbolic position. This “circular”structure constitutes the quite literal “revolution.”

6. The Christian overtones here again emphasize Kristeva’s insistent at-tachment to the salutary function of belief. As a true melancholic on Kristeva’sdefinition, Duras believes in nothing; she is a radical atheist, and this makesher crazy and dangerous.

7. Fortunately, these others have recourse to the other curative option:analysis.

8. The function of time in this process is well worthy of considerationhere. The melancholic cannot share sociohistorical temporality, and this, ofcourse, has some interesting political consequences.

9. Sara Beardsworth provides an impressive analysis of the Kristevan di-alectic in “From Revolution to Revolt Culture” (2005).

10. Duras’s fiction has been uniquely celebrated and investigated by theFrench psychoanalytic community (and to a lesser extent the feminist commu-nity). From Lacan’s famous “Homage to Marguerite Duras” to a slew of booksand articles on her life and works (not to mention several television and docu-mentary film interviews) to a recent issue of the Israeli Lacanian journal dedi-cated to one of her novels, Le ravissement de Lol. V. Stein (Almanac 2005), theanalytic community (aside from Kristeva!) regard Duras’s texts as containingan invaluable if unspeakable knowledge of the unconscious, a knowledge of


which Duras herself is necessarily unaware. Lacan (2000) writes: “MargueriteDuras seems to know, without me, what I teach.”

11. All translations from this text are mine.12. All translations from this text are mine.13. All translations from this text are mine.14. La Douleur is the title of Duras’s 1984 novel that takes the form of a

journal written by the narrator-author while waiting for her husband to returnfrom the Nazi concentration camps. The “journal” chronicles the narrator’s suf-fering through absence and imagination and then the further suffering uponthe husband’s unbearable, uncanny return. This suffering is born of the narra-tor’s love for her husband and equally, if disturbingly, her irrational hatred of allGermans and Charles de Gaulle. This is a novel about the political stakes ofhuman suffering, of love and hatred, of jouissance and the real.

15. Curious in light of Duras’s notorious claim in her first television in-terview (1988) that individual engagements with both Nazi and Stalinist ide-ologies should be read as easily understandable, if highly desperate, attempts tofind political solutions to personal problems. Apostrophes, 1988.

16. Cited in Udris (1988, 4).17. All translations from this text are mine.18. She is referring here to those novels written after and including her

most celebrated work, The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1966), an unfortunate trans-lation of the French title, Le ravissement de Lol. V. Stein (1964). Her previousnovels maintain a certain attachment to the Realist tradition of Balzac and be-come increasingly less concerned with telling stories (individual, familial, so-cial, political) and more concerned with expressing what she knows of her “innerexperience” (in the sense of Bataille).

19. At this point, Kristeva has assessed critically the politics of literary pro-duction in several earlier works, most influentially within the context of the dis-ruptive subjectivation of poeticized desire in Révolution du langage poétique(1974), the exclusionary dynamics of material abjection in Pouvoirs de l’horreur(1980), and the incorporative transference of narcissistic love in Histoires d’amour(1983). Kelly Oliver argues that Kristeva’s works “can be read as an oscillationbetween an emphasis on separation and rejection on the one hand and an em-phasis on identification and incorporation” (2004, 54).

20. Juliet Flower MacCannell argues that “for Kristeva art is over in themodern world—art, that is, as it used to function in the exemplary case, theAristotelian mediation of reason and unreason, the cathartic” (1994, 89).

21. Lacan emphasizes that our knowledge of Aristotle’s thoughts oncatharsis is seriously obscured by the loss of what appears to be his most majorwork on the subject (1986, esp. 285–289).

22. Cited in Hassoun (1997, 16–17).23. She does not, however, remark on the significant political difference

between these two situations.

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24. Michel David (2005) terms this conflation of life and art Duras’s“œuvre-vie” (work-life).

25. Everything but her child, Duras specifies.26. Kristeva has always maintained an explicit dialogue with Christianity,

and in particular its East-West schism. In her most recent novel, Murder inByzantium (2004), orthodox Christianity becomes a metaphor for the currentwars of religion. Indeed, she insists on the meaning of this metaphor in inter-views about the novel.

27. Here Kristeva cites Duras’s L’Amant (1984).

ReferencesAlmanac of Psychoanalysis III: The Logical Time of Ravishment. 2005. Israeli

Group of the European School of Psychoanalysis. Rehovot, Israel: Weiz-mann Institute of Science.

Beardsworth, Sara. 2005. “From Revolution to Revolt Culture.” Revolt, Affect,Collectivity. Ed. Tina Chanter and Ewa Płnowska Ziarek. Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press.

David, Michel. 2005. Le ravissement de Marguerite Duras. Paris: L’Harmattan.Denes, Dominique. 2005. Marguerite Duras: Ecriture et politque. Paris: L’Har-

mattan.Duras, Marguerite. 1964. Le ravissement de Lol. V. Stein. Paris: Gallimard.———. 1966. The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Trans. Richard Seaver. New York:

Pantheon.———. 1977. Le camion, suivi de Entretien avec Michelle Porte. Paris: Editions

de Minuit.———. 1984. L’amant. Paris: Editions de Minuit.———. 1993. Écrire. Gallimard.Duras, Margeurite, and Xavière Gauthier. 1974. Les Parleuses. Paris: Éditions

de Minuit.Hassoun, Jacques. 1997. La cruauté mélancolique. Paris: Flammarion.Juranville, Anne. 1993. La femme et la mélancolie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France.Kristeva, Julia. 1974a. Des Chinoises. Paris: Des Femmes.———. 1974b. Révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Seuil.———. 1980. Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Seuil.———. 1983. Histoires d’amour. Paris: Donoël.———. 1987. Soleil noir: depression et mélancolie. Paris: Seuil.———. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.

New York: Columbia University Press.———. 1993. Les Nouvelles Maladies de l’âme. Paris: Fayard.———. 1999. Le Génie feminine, tome premier: Hannah Arendt. Paris: Fayard.———. 2000. Le Génie feminine, tome II: Melanie Klein. Paris: Fayard.


———. 2002. Le Génie feminine, tome III: Colette. Paris: Fayard.———. 2004. Meurtre à Byzance. Paris: Fayard.———. 2005. La haine et le pardon: Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse III. Paris:

Fayard.Lacan, Jacques. 1986. Le séminaire, livre vii, L’éthique de la psychanalyse. Paris:

Seuil.———. 2000. Autres écrits. Paris: Seuil.MacCannell, Juliette Flower. 1994. The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Sub-

ject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Oliver, Kelly. 2004. “The Crisis of Meaning.” The Kristeva Critical Reader. Ed.

John Lechte and Mary Zournazi. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh Uni-versity Press.

Restuccia, Frances L. 2005. “Black and Blue: Kielowski’s Melancholia” Revolt,Affect, Collectivity. Ed. Tina Chanter and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Udris, Raynelle. 1988. Welcome Unreason: A Study of “Madness” in the Novels ofMarguerite Duras. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

yanulada


10

What Is Intimacy?

��

S. K. Keltner

The term “intimacy” or “the intimate” (l ’intimité) as singular psychic life is firstpresented as the object of a book-length thought with the publication of JuliaKristeva’s second book on the concept of revolt, Intimate Revolt (1997, 2002b).It has remained noticeably present since. Her biographical trilogy, Female Ge-nius: Life, Madness, Words—Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette (1999, 2001a;2000a, 2001c; 2002a, 2004), her fictional detective novels, her broad-reach po-litical writings appearing in, for instance, the popular France Culture over thepast several years, and most recently her newest collection of essays, La haine etle pardon (2005), all make use of the term. Though the term comes to more em-phatically and directly mark what has remained Kristeva’s chosen object-domain, her choice of this term in particular is not new to this period of herwriting. The term first appears at least as early as her first major work of the1980s, Powers of Horror (1980, 1982), and gains significance throughout the1980s and into the early 1990s. In Powers of Horror Kristeva articulates abjec-tion in terms of an intimate/public distinction in which abjection marks thethreshold of intimate suffering and public horror. In Tales of Love (1983, 1987b)intimacy signals Stendhal’s integration of love into politics. In Black Sun (1987a,1989) Kristeva returns to the intimate/public distinction articulated in Powersof Horror to further analyze the constitution of modern intimacy through thework of Marguerite Duras. In Strangers to Ourselves (1988, 1991), the “intimate”describes the culmination of the classical logic of the nation-state in nine-teenth-century German nationalism, the “quest” of Romanticism, and Freud’srecasting of otherness within. Throughout the 1980s Kristeva describes certainwritings as “intimist,” but her use of the term exceeds its meaning in the history

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of art—as, for example, when she refers to Freudian psychoanalysis as “intimist”(1988, 268; 1991, 181). In Time and Sense (1994, 1996b)—many of the insightsof which are integrated into Kristeva’s books on revolt—Proust and Freud rep-resent an experience of rehabilitated intimacy. Nevertheless, if it is clear thatthe term’s presence is long-standing, Kristeva’s choice of it and its meaning isnot so transparent.

The term significantly recalls the political phenomenology of HannahArendt, whose name and whose political concepts also punctuate Kristeva’s textsat least as far back as the 1980s and grows in significance, like the intimate,throughout Kristeva’s oeuvre, ultimately culminating in the biography, HannahArendt. Kristeva confirms Arendt’s long-standing influence on her own work inthe conclusion to the biographical trilogy entitled “Is There a Feminine Ge-nius?” (2002a, 2004), but she marks one of her essential differences from Arendtprecisely in terms of intimacy. Among Arendt’s “limitations” lies a “lack of at-tention to psychic life and intimacy, which she considers to be hybrid relics ofsubjectivism and the loss of transcendence” (1999, 261; 2001a, 162). Neverthe-less, she often recalls Arendt’s political phenomenology throughout her elabo-ration of the concept of intimacy. For example, in Black Sun, Arendt’s name andArendt’s methodological concepts accompany Kristeva’s analysis of intimacy asit is articulated in the work of Marguerite Duras, and which she has recentlycalled, in La haine et le pardon, “ravaged intimacy” (2005, 502); Kristeva’s workon the intimate of revolt, as well as her biography on Arendt—which airs an un-derstanding of intimacy that would have appeared foreign, if not maddening, toArendt herself—defends the intimate, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis andthe artwork, on the other, against Arendtian dismissals; and, just after 9/11 inNovember 2001, in an article published as part of her ongoing column in FranceCulture, “Intimité voilée, intimité violée,” Kristeva mimics Arendt’s now-famousformulation of authority from “What Is Authority?” by articulating the signif-icance of intimacy in the modern world not according to what it is, but ac-cording to what it was (Arendt 1961/1993, 91; Kristeva 2001b/2003, 51).Kristeva, thus, often points toward Arendt’s work as the context in which herarticulation of the modern constitution of intimacy unfolds. Arendt’s geneticphenomenological account is thereby significant for its illumination of howKristeva’s thinking of intimacy, as well as her use of psychoanalysis and aes-thetics to illuminate it, is to be related to political thinking more generally.

Intimacy and the Event of NatalityFor Arendt, the intimate is a modern Western phenomenon. It signals the his-torical transformation of subjective interiority, once “sheltered and protected bythe private realm” (1958/1998, 69), into a “mass phenomenon of loneliness” (59)constituted by the “rebellion,” “withdrawal,” or “flight” from the social, also amodern phenomenon, into the innermost regions of subjectivity. Arendt dates

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the discovery of intimacy to the period of Rousseau—the “first articulate explorer and to an extent even theorist of intimacy” (39)—and, following him,to Romanticism. With the rise of the social, which abolishes the distinction be-tween the private and the public, intimacy becomes the only site into whichone can withdraw. Intimacy, like the private before it, is marked by a necessaryhiddenness, but, she argues, it is an unreliable substitute (70). One of the es-sential differences between the private and the intimate lies in the latter’s in-ability to be located in the world. Arendt emphasizes intimacy as “an innermostregion” without a place: “The intimacy of the heart, unlike the private household,has no objective tangible place in the world, nor can the society against whichit protests and asserts itself be localized with the same certainty as the publicspace” (39). The intimate and the social are, for Arendt, “subjective modes of ex-istence,” and the “uncertain” and “shadowy kind of existence” that is the intimateremains ultimately incommunicable: pain, for example, “cannot assume an ap-pearance at all,” and love “is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is dis-played in public” (51). Any light that illuminates the intimate in language isborrowed from the public and can never adequately mirror the intimate, whichremains hidden. Being riveted to the intimacy of the hidden or to the chatterof social conformism is the effect of the modern loss of the private/public dis-tinction that enabled politics in Arendt’s sense; that is, as a life of action char-acterized by individuation within the plurality of public life.

Kristeva follows Arendt’s characterization of the intimate as a strange re-gion that lacks a proper spatiotemporal, that is, worldly, place that language failsto expose. Though she often refers to intimacy as a space, such “space” cannotbe understood with reference to ordinary spatial extension. As remedy to theproblem of spatially representing intimacy, Kristeva refers the intimate to time.However, just as the intimate as “space” cannot be understood according to sim-ple extension, neither can the intimate as “time” be understood according to oureveryday concept of time; and yet, neither can it be reduced to the philosophiesof time articulated by Bergson or Heidegger, which is not to say that it is un-related to their thought. Kristeva elaborates the temporality of intimacy withreference to Freud’s Zeitlos—the timeless or, more literally, lost time—andProust’s “sensible time”: a “time of death” (1997, 49; 2002b, 31) or a “time out-side time” (40; 25) that “approaches the somatic” (49; 31) and “where being it-self . . . is heard” (80; 50). The temporality of intimacy, as elaborated by Kristeva,integrates the Freudian insight with Bergsonian duration and Heideggereantemporality (46–50; 29–31). Freudian and Proustian sensible-(non)time marksa break with temporality otherwise conceived. Nonetheless, Kristeva draws on“three great thinkers of [the twentieth] century” (47; 29) to fully account forthe intimate. For Kristeva, intimacy would be an interruptive heterogeneityvis-à-vis the unity of the three temporal ecstaces elaborated, albeit differently,by both Bergson and Heidegger. The positive dynamic of intimacy, which shecalls “intimate revolt,” can be understood, in phenomenological language, as

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interrogation and expression. The first movement of the intimate as revolt is areturn to that affective moment of heterogeneity that inscribes an affective dis-position in the subject. Revolt as return is essential because it takes us back tothe necessary moment of affectivity and through an active interrogation holdson, experiences, and undergoes it. Here Kristeva establishes an affective mo-ment in subject constitution in modernity as a necessary part of revolt. Thismovement interrogates what is called “trauma” in psychoanalytic language, asthe return to the subject’s fundamental, corporeal passivity as both rupture andcondition. It is a heterogeneity that cannot temporalize. The second movementof the intimate as revolt is linguistic expression—what would correspond to“word” and “deed” in Arendtian language. The interrogation and experience ofaffective suffering is accomplished in words. Hence, “the talking cure,” “thenovel,” and even “philosophy” become intimate events. Intimate revolt is thedynamic of subjective return to nonintegratable heterogeneity that is articu-lated or given signs. In other words, intimacy is a dispositional index of subjec-tivity characterized by a double movement: “this space to the inside [au-dedans]where men take shelter in referring to the beyond [au-delà]” (2001/2003, 51).Because heterogeneity is ultimately nontranslatable, its narration is ceaseless,infinite. “Intimate revolt” is, thereby, a “double infinity” that opens a ceaselessquestioning that sustains psychic life.

Kristeva’s choice of the term, in recalling Arendt, situates her concept of in-timacy in relation to what she calls Arendt’s “revolutionary temporality”: theevent of natality as rupture and new beginning. Kristeva’s adoption of theArendtian description of a strange, nontemporal, nonspatial “region” of modernexistence, however, develops that line of thinking in a radically different direc-tion. Indeed, Kristeva locates a dynamic of the event of natality in the positivemovement of intimacy. Kristevan intimacy thus fundamentally alters the mean-ing of the intimate and its relationship to what was the political event of natal-ity for Arendt. In her third book on revolt, The Future of Revolt (1998a, 2002b),included in the English translation of Intimate Revolt, Kristeva links her privi-leged examples of intimate revolt to the event: “From prayer to dialogue,through art and analysis, the capital event is always the great infinitesimal eman-cipation: to be restarted unceasingly” (11; 223). Kristeva follows the Arendtiansearch for “new beginnings” but locates what for Arendt was a political event notin “the public,” but in the intimate. Kristevan events are precisely “intimateevents.” Both share an insistence on the event as constitutive, but their place-ment of that event differs. Further, though Kristeva adopts a set of temporalstructures from Arendt to analyze what she has called the failure of “the polit-ical function” (1990, 45; 1993, 68), Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and aesthetic re-sources point beyond the fundamental spontaneity of Arendt’s Aristotelianismand toward a primordial passivity governed by the dominance of otherness insubject constitution. Nevertheless, in articulating intimacy in relation toArendt’s political phenomenology, Kristeva thereby situates her thought of the


temporality of intimacy within Arendt’s temporal structure of an instant that isa breach of time both traditionally and philosophically conceived.

Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and aesthetic position allows her to defend a dif-ferent historical course of intimacy than the one offered by Arendt. She iden-tifies the “first articulate explorer” (Arendt 1958/1998, 39) of modern intimacynot in the writings of Rousseau but in the experience and work of another fig-ure: the Viennese Dr. Freud, who came on the heels of Romanticism. Kristeva’sinterrogation of intimacy tracks a history of intimacy in the West that is con-cerned most expressly with the border between interiority and its beyond, whichis the problematic inherited by Freud (1998b, 10). In Intimate Revolt she iden-tifies two major “revolutions in intimacy”: the first takes place with Augustine’sintroduction of the will into intimacy; the second takes place with Freud’s in-troduction of heterogeneity (1997, 80; 2002b, 50–51). What is intimate or in-most, for psychoanalysis, is simultaneously what is most strange; that is,psychoanalysis returns subjectivity to a nonorigin of otherness in which the selfis, at bottom, beyond itself. The loss of intimacy positively conceived as singu-lar psychic life corresponds to the formation of modern intimacy, a mode of existence in which the positive dynamic of intimacy is lost.

Freud’s Involution of IntimacyWhat Kristeva calls Freud’s “revolution in the intimate” in Intimate Revolt is namedin Strangers to Ourselves the “involution of the strange” (1988, 268; 1991, 191),which reverses the nationalist formation of intimacy in German culture. InStrangers to Ourselves Kristeva outlines the conditions of the emergence and sig-nificance of Freudian psychoanalysis as directly related to the problematic of racial-ized nationalism and Freud’s identity as a Jew. The historical and political contextof the Freudian revolution/involution is defined by the culmination of the post-theological, modern secular logic of the nation-state in nineteenth-century Ger-man nationalism. Kristeva describes this logic as “[a] logic that, amenable toimprovement (democracies) or degeneration (totalitarianism), acknowledges itsbeing based on certain exclusions and, consequently, surrounds itself with otherstructures—moral and religious, whose absolutist aspirations it nonetheless tem-pers—in order precisely to confront what it has set aside, in this case the problemof foreigners and its more egalitarian settling” (143; 98). “Intimacy” marks the dif-ference between the emergence of nineteenth-century German nationalism and theemergence of Freudian psychoanalysis as “a journey into the strangeness of theother and of oneself ” (269; 182). German nationalism (be it grounded in blood,culture, or language) foregrounds the intimate as an interiority of what is most fa-miliar as the organizing principle of modern social and political reality. The inti-mate here marks the problems of race and nation in an expanding, globalizingworld. German Romanticism’s interrogation of this very intimacy is intrigued by what is most strange in language, culture, and tradition. The Romanticists’s

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“intimate quest” of the strange is “the fertilizing soil” out of which the Freudian unconscious “sprang forth” (267; 180–181).

Kristeva’s analysis of the emergence of intimacy as nationalism and itsFreudian reversal follows closely Antoine Berman’s history of the concept oftranslation in German Romanticism in The Experience of the Foreign: Cultureand Translation in Romantic Germany (1984, 1992). Berman traces the conceptof German Bildung as the process of formation of a cultural ethos that is a di-rect response to the translation trends that form French culture. Berman tracesa twofold principle of Bildung: fidelity and expansion. Because French cultureis established, the question of its formation as culture is somewhat settled. Ger-man culture, because it is in the process of being formed, offers a conception oftranslation that depends not simply on fidelity to one’s own past models (whichit shares with the concept of French culture), but a fidelity that must also ne-gotiate the expansion of itself (61–62; 35–36). The concept of culture as Bil-dung posits the foreign as the milieu and mediation of “one’s own” or theintimate. The foreign is that which one must pass through in the formation ofone’s own. Berman opposes “the foreign” as mediation and incorporation to “thestrange” as that which radically disturbs and does not mediate, but unravels.The latter he refers to Freud’s description of the uncanny as “l ’inquiétanteétrangeté” (disturbing/worrisome strangeness) as a model of the relation be-tween one’s own and the foreign/strange that breaks with the notion of the for-eign as mediation (247; 155). The suggestion is that both German and Frenchconcepts of “culture” depend on a notion of translation that is ultimately devoted to one’s own at the expense of the foreign.

Kristeva redescribes Berman’s thesis in the context of an analysis of the sig-nificance of the relation between Freudian intimacy and the political implica-tions of the German negotiation of the intimate/foreign border. She insists thatthe formation of German culture as Bildung suggests a balance between one’sown and the foreign, but the cosmopolitan ideal is perverted insofar as it cul-minated in the expression of German superiority that justified “the demand fora German cultural hegemony”: “Such a nationalist perversion of the cosmopoli-tan idea, vitiated and dominated by a national ‘superiority’ that one has takencare to valorize beforehand is, as is well known, at the basis of Nazi ideology”(1988, 266–267; 1991, 180). If Kristeva insists on the importance of Romanti-cism for conditioning the Freudian discovery, she also insists that Freud’s lo-calization of the strange as l ’inquiétante étrangeté is equally conditioned by hisJudaism in the context of nationalism as intimacy.

On the heels of Romanticism, Freud’s revolution in intimacy emerges as anabsolute contrary to the classical logic of the foreign in French and German cul-ture: for Freud, what is most intimate is simultaneously what is most foreign.Again, Kristeva calls the turning of intimacy as the nationalistic into the strangean “involution.” It shares with German Romanticism an interrogation of thestrange in the intimate, but whereas the strange is relegated to a moment of the


intimate in German culture, it becomes the persistent breakup of such intimacyin Freud. The “strange” as what lies beyond my intimacy in nationalism marks amovement of involution of the strange into the very basis of the intimate, mak-ing the strange the intimate ground of the familiar: “The involution of thestrange in the psyche loses its pathological aspect and integrates within the as-sumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolicand becomes an integral part of the same. Henceforth the foreigner is neither arace nor a nation. The foreigner is neither glorified as a secret Volksgeist nor ban-ished as disruptive of rationalist urbanity. Uncanny, foreignness is within us: weare our own foreigners, we are divided” (1988, 268; 1991, 181). The Freudianinvolution, the opposite of evolution, as in nationalism’s Social Darwinism, specif-ically turns inward what is excluded by a nationalistic cultural logic that articu-lates the intimate according to the nation and its foreigners. Freud’s involutionof the strange is the strange of National Socialism itself and encompasses thestrange as strange—unlike the “strangers” of nationalism, which are strange vianarcissistic projection or abjection. The otherness of psychoanalytic discoursebecomes then an otherness governed neither by a law of contradiction nor by alaw of dialectical negativity, but rather by a “perturbed logic” of ever-present oth-erness as the breakup of the self and its security. The Freudian involution dis-covers in itself the source of the intimate/strange distinction that governs theGerman valuation of Bildung and, as such, discovers the intimate as what is mostforeign. Kristeva thus grounds the originary formative experience of modern in-timacy, as articulated by Freud, in the problematic of racialized nationalism.

For Kristeva, Freud’s “intimist rehabilitation of the strange” (1988, 268; 1991,181) recalls principally Freud’s Judaism, but not only “the Judaic exploration of astrange God or of a stranger who will reveal God” (268; 181). It also recalls his“personal history”: “a Jew wandering from Galicia to Vienna and London, withstopovers in Paris, Rome, and New York (to mention only a few of the key stagesof his encounters with political and cultural foreignness)” (268–269; 181). Thus,at the basis of the Freudian preoccupation with the strange as the intimate, andthe logic that governs it, is a life lived as a marginalized migrancy conditioned byand conditioning nationalist and/or racialized intimacy. The implication is that“involution,” as what marks the Freudian course, is also the interiorization of a so-cial demand that cannot be accomplished; that is, the interiorization of a moraldemand of intimacy that cannot be accomplished by a Jew, which makes of Freuda wanderer. The Freudian revolution emerges as an involution of a Western so-cial and political reality. Psychoanalysis thus is witness to the experience of a socially and historically nonintegratable self.

“Ravaged Intimacy” and the Event of DeathKristeva’s insight into the sociohistorical and political significance of Freudian in-timacy is indebted to her prior analyses of abjection and loss in the 1980s, which

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further fills out the reality of modern intimacy. Again, in Powers of Horror Kristevaarticulates abjection according to a distinction between intimate suffering [ladouleur] and public horror. Abjection is the shape that the border between the in-timate and the public takes; or rather, abjection is the fate of intimacy in the his-torical context of an unavoidable interiorization of public horror (1980, 165; 1982,140). In Black Sun Kristeva returns to this distinction in the context of Arendt’s po-litical phenomenology, primarily the distinction between private and public and theemergence of intimacy in late modernity. To be precise, her thesis of abjection isshown to bear the weight of the loss of public space as the space of individuation.Kristeva’s thought of intimacy here provocatively reevaluates the stakes of the pri-mary difference between Arendtian and Heideggerean ontology, read from thevantage point of a psychoanalytic and aesthetic perspective. The work of Mar-guerite Duras is accorded considerable importance to this project. Her reading ofDuras appears as the concluding chapter to Black Sun and is entitled “The Mal-ady of Grief [la douleur].” It appropriates the title of one of Duras’s novellas, withone exception: “grief,” “pain,” “distress,” or “suffering” [la douleur] replaces Duras’s“death”: The Malady of Death. If the substitution marks the object domain of theconcluding chapter as suffering subjectivity, its tie to Duras’s chosen word, “death,”remains essential. Kristeva asks, “Would suffering [la douleur] in love with death bethe supreme individuation?” (1987a, 245; 1989, 237; translation modified).

Though Arendt is mentioned by name only once, the text resonates withher presence. This is clear in the first several lines of the chapter—from howKristeva defines the modern world as the world since 1914, which repeats thepreface to The Human Condition, to the language and method of Arendt’s ge-netic phenomenological constitution of intimacy. However, if Arendt’s thoughtmarks the formal context of Kristeva’s political analysis, the Durasean aestheticconcretizes its real meaning. Kristeva says that Duras’s aesthetic reveals that“the malady of death constitutes our most concealed intimacy” (1987a, 229;1989, 221; translation modified); that the “outburst of death and madness” thatwas the reality of World War II “found its intimate, unavoidable repercussionat the heart of psychic grief [la douleur]” (230; 222); that Duras and Resnais’sfilm Hiroshima mon amour is une histoire rooted in the local, but yet, because of“the Third World’s irruption” and “the realism of family carnage,” is made notonly “plausible,” but “strangely close, intimate” (238; 230); and finally, thatDuras’s literary works are “intimist texts” (241; 234). Kristeva’s most recent work,La haine et le pardon (2005), repeats her description of Duras in a chapter enti-tled “Une étragère,” originally published in a special issue on Duras in NRF in1998. There, Kristeva says that the history of the twentieth century has “passedby” the “pages” of Duras and left “only a ravaged intimacy” (2005, 502). Kris-teva credits Duras with having discovered and elaborated the passion that is themalady of death as a “new malady of the soul.”

Kristeva’s analysis of Duras provides an account of the event of intimacythat is not the event of natality, but its opposite: the event of death. Kristeva’s


sole reference to Arendt’s proper name in “The Malady of Grief [la douleur]”claims that “[p]olitics is not, as for Hannah Arendt, the parade ground wherehuman freedom is deployed and displayed” (1987a, 242; 1989, 235; translationmodified). Here, politics has the sense of an open field specifically constitutedfor the emergence of freedom. Politics in this sense is absent. Kristeva contin-ues: “The modern world, the world of world wars, the Third World, the un-derground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendorof the Greek city state” (242; 235). Arendt and Kristeva are in agreement thatpolitics as the event of natality is absent in the modern world. However, whereArendt sees the impossibility of individuation, Kristeva sees a “paradoxicallyfree individuation” (242; 235). Kristeva maintains the ontological structure ofArendt’s political phenomenology, and yet, the political event as the rupture ofthe new through words and deeds in the public sphere gives way to the politi-cal event as the rupture of death and a subsequent, intimate asymbolia and im-mobility. Duras’s texts reveal that intimacy is dominated by the presence ofdeath; in Freudian language it is distinguished by the emergence of the deathdrive. Kristeva tracks the constitution of intimacy in Duras’s text primarilythrough the most intimate of experiences: that of love; specifically, love’s inte-riorization of death or, recalling Powers of Horror, the intimate’s interiorizationof public horror. Death, in the modern world, is something, Kristeva says fol-lowing Paul Valéry, that “we also know that we inflict on ourselves” (229; 221).Duras’s aesthetic demonstrates the lack of distance or possibility of escape frompublic horror (235; 227) and situates the stakes of politics in love and death. Therelationship between love and death in the work of Duras represents, for Kris-teva, the fate of modern intimacy. Intimacy is constituted by a political event,but not the political event of natality.

“[L]’événement” (the event) appears four times in the final chapter of BlackSun. First, Kriteva calls Hiroshima an event: “Hiroshima itself, and not its reper-cussions, is the sacrilege, the death-bearing event” (1987a, 239; 1989, 231). Sec-ond, the event appears as a description of the modern subject, or rather the strangespace in which the modern subject is situated. Just before her single reference toArendt, Kristeva says: “The event, today, is human madness. Politics is part of it,particularly in its lethal outbursts . . . madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical,and paradoxically free individuation” (242; 235; translation modified). Third, fromthe perspective of human madness, which casts a fundamental, melancholyshadow across the public, “political events, outrageous and monstrous as theymight be—the Nazi invasion, the atomic explosion—are assimilated to the extentof being measured only by the human suffering they cause” (242; 235). Finally,Kristeva links the event to maternality or the feminine: “After the imposition ofthe mother’s hatred in the mad bonzian woman (The Vice-Consul ), themother/daughter destruction in the The Lover compels us to realize that themother’s outburst of fury against the daughter is the “event” that the hateful, lov-ing daughter watches for, experiences, and restores with wonder” (261–262; 255).

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The term “event” here, in opposition to its use in Kristeva’s later work andin the work of Arendt, indicates not an emancipation, but rather an event thatrefuses to pass by. The political as event enters the private as intimate and opensthe psyche to the presence of death in a historically specific way. While the ab-sorption of the political as the event of horror causes “political life” to lose “theautonomy that our consciousness persists in setting aside for it, religiously”(1987a, 242; 1989, 234), the public continues on as is and becomes, Kristeva says,“seriously severed from reality” (243; 234). In those moments that would seemto exclude the political, like erotic passion or desire, one finds an absorption ofthe very politics that one would like to deny. Such a politics of intimacy is to saymore than that the personal is political. Kristeva claims that what we would liketo exclude refuses any form of negation that consciousness would like to ac-complish. In this sense, the private loses its very intimacy, in the Arendtian sense.The real political stake becomes situated in the private, but remains invisible.The Durasean shape of intimacy is the effect of a politics that politics itself can-not reintegrate; hence the “absolute equivalence” that Duras describes in TheWar, and that Kristeva quotes in both Black Sun and again in La haine et le par-don: “Collaborators, the Fernandezes. And myself two years after the war, a mem-ber of the communist party. An absolute, final equivalence. It’s the same thing,the same call for help, the same judgment deficiency, let’s say the same supersti-tion, which consists in believing there is a political solution to a personal prob-lem” (243; 235–236; 2005, 502). Politics is no longer the site of individuation;rather, madness as “suffering [la douleur] in love with death” (245; 237; transla-tion modified) becomes the form of modern, “paradoxically free individuation”(242; 235). No longer God or politics or others, but death alone becomes thesource of an individuation that takes the form of radical severance.

Kristeva’s analysis of Durasean “intimacy” as a staged encounter withArendtian natality implicitly evokes a Heideggerean inspired account of theshape of modern intimacy, albeit reread according to a history, problematic, andFreudian influence that would have appeared unfamiliar to Heidegger himself.Kristeva’s articulation of Duras’s passion for death as a new malady of the soul alsooutlines what she takes to be the significance of the Heideggerean conceptionof finitude. The importance of Heidegger to Kristeva at this juncture is con-firmed by his presence in the opening pages of Black Sun: “My pain is the hid-den side of my philosophy, its mute sister. In the same way, Montaigne’sstatement ‘To philosophize is to learn how to die’ is inconceivable without themelancholy combination of sorrow and hatred—which came to a head in Hei-degger’s care and the disclosure of our ‘being-for-death.’ Without a bent formelancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play” (1987a, 14;1989, 4). Or again: “The melancholia [Aristotle] evokes is not a philosopher’sdisease but his very nature, his ethos. . . . With Aristotle, melancholia, counter-balanced by genius, is coextensive with man’s anxiety in Being. It could be seenas the forerunner of Heidegger’s anxiety as the Stimmung of thought” (17; 7;


translation modified). Even further, the central notion of Black Sun, “the Thing,”is referred back not to Lacan, who also found Heidegger’s analysis of “theThing” provocative, but to Heidegger. Kristeva finds in Heidegger, because ofher Freudianism, the culmination of the presence of the death drive in modernlife. Likewise, Kristeva finds in psychoanalysis, because of her Heideggereanism,a discourse that exceeds subjectivism and gives way to an insight into Being andthe presence of death within it. In Time and Sense, Kristeva says: “Death is nota final destination, but a death drive inherent in Being, its constitutive intermit-tence, its indispensable lifeblood” (1994, 376; 1996b, 313).

The political as an event that is not the event of words and deeds situatesKristeva’s thinking of the modern political problematic within the ontologicaldifference. And yet, Kristeva’s descriptive account of the event of death is moreprecisely an “event” that does not temporalize. Rather, the event, for Kristeva,marks the stalling out of time, a return that, as she describes in Intimate Revolt,“runs aground” on the “Zeitlos” (1997, 65; 2002b, 41). For Kristeva, the newmalady she names “passion for death” is a “moment” in which time itself seemsto disappear: the past does not pass by, “no revolution is possible, there is no fu-ture” (1987a, 71; 1989, 60). The political as an event comes to outline the verytemporality of the intimate, a temporality that Kristeva calls reduplication, whichshe defines as “a jammed repetition” (253; 246). She says that “the no man’s landof aching affects and devalued words . . . is not lacking expression. It has itsown language—it is called reduplication. It creates echoes, doubles, kindred be-ings who display a passion or a destruction [that lacks the effort for] putting intowords [and instead suffers their deprivation]” (252; 246). If death marks themoment of unity or the integration of Dasein for Heidegger, it marks utter frag-mentation for Kristeva, and not in the sense that one is fragmented because ofa fallenness or fleeing. And yet, Kristeva wants to maintain repetition in a Hei-deggerean sense as that which is capable of such integration, albeit integratedwith the insights of Freud. For Kristeva, temporality is the horizon of finitude,but she seeks “individuation” as the integration of fragmentation elsewhere.

Though Kristeva privileges Freudian time—“only in Freud has a breach oftime that does not temporalize been established” (1997, 50; 2002b, 31)—she nev-ertheless chooses the term “reduplication” rather than “repetition” to mark the neg-ativity of the intimate. The space/time of failed repetition is a term that refers mostimmediately to the space/time that precedes the identification that establishesself-relation and relations to others in Lacan’s mirror stage. And yet, it recalls Hei-degger insofar as the account of being-toward-death (as a passion for death) marksthe failure of a repetition that would unfold time (Arendt’s “word and deed”). Redu-plication is an instant that cannot pass into another. She says that “reduplicationlies outside time. It is a reverberation in space, a play of mirrors lacking perspec-tive or duration. A double may hold, for a while, the instability of the same in depth, opening up an unsuspected, unfathomable substance. The double is the unconscious substance of the same, that which threatens it and could

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engulf it. . . . [Reduplication] refers to the outposts of our unstable identities, blurredby a drive that nothing could defer, deny, or signify . . . a privileged universe” (1987a,253; 1989, 246). Kristeva’s reservation of the term “repetition” for the positivemovement of subjectivity “into time,” when she could have used the term to de-scribe the death drive in Freud—since repetition, as the inability to let the pastpass by, is precisely how Freud discovered the death drive—reveals an ambiguityin the relationship between psychoanalysis and ontology for Kristeva. Kristeva’sturn to Heidegger alongside Freud and Lacan for thinking death in modern soci-ety reveals a very specific understanding of the death drive. The death drive is notsimply a universal psychic drive that underwrites all behavior. If this were the case,reference to Arendtian and Heideggerean ontologies would be unnecessary. Deathdrive is not “in” the psyche as a private individual, but rather pervades the perme-able limit of society itself. What we lack are the resources for negotiating it. It is asif the psyche is a pawn in the death drive of Being. The political question is,: Howdoes one rejoin a past that no longer provides possibilities for repetition? How doesone answer the suffering of events without words and deeds? How does one trans-form “reduplication” into “repetition” in modern societies?

Kristeva’s Arendt: Passion for Death, Passion for LifeKristeva’s work does not offer a political theory per se that would equal the re-quirements of political theory proper, as for a figure like Arendt. Indeed, she referspolitics to a possibility of the future—a possibility that might be realized if inti-macy in its positive movement of repetition as revolt is rehabilitated. However, herwork does point toward a thinking of the political significance of marginalizedsubjectivities as essential to any rehabilitation of politics as such. To be precise,Kristeva’s thought diagnoses the weaknesses of modern secular discourses; andyet, she offers us a vision of hope for the future of politics. This vision is best for-mulated toward the end of “Women’s Time” when she claims that marginality isprecisely the site created by politics that offers the possibility of a transformationof politics itself: “In our world, the various marginal groups of sex, age, religion,ethnic origin, and ideology represent a refuge of hope, that is, a secular transcen-dence” (1995, 216). In relation to Arendt, we might say that the failed transcen-dence that results in intimacy for Arendt becomes for Kristeva the very site ofhope for new forms of transcendence, understood in the sense that Arendt her-self articulated this term as a positive, secular form of individuation and relationto others. Though Kristeva’s work in relationship to identity politics generallytakes the form of an unraveling of identity, her thought does not abandon it. Kris-teva especially privileges feminine/feminized subjectivities. Her seminal essays“Women’s Time” and “Stabat Mater,” but also her readings of Duras and most re-cently her trilogy on female genius, suggest that feminine subjectivity occupies aprivileged position with regard to the failure of politics in modern societies.


The case of Kristeva’s reading of Arendt in Hannah Arendt is significant forits reinscription of Kristeva’s understanding of intimacy, as opposed to Arendt’sunderstanding, in the life of Arendt. If Duras’s “intimist texts” reveal a passion fordeath that disintegrates the intimate and the public—“That is her discovery, thatis her supplement, to add to the manuals of the new maladies of the soul” (2005503)—Kristeva locates in the work of Arendt a passion for life in the midst of apassion for death (“denial of life”). The passion that integrates life and thought inArendt’s work—“Gripped from the start by that unique passion in which life andthought are one” (1999, 26; 2001a, 4)—constitutes a singular, exemplary negotia-tion of the malady discovered by Duras. Thus, whereas Kristeva criticized Arendt’spolitical solution in Black Sun, in the biography, Hannah Arendt, Kristeva valorizesArendt’s intimate accomplishment, which she essentially links to her status as awoman and as a Jew. Kristeva’s reading of Arendt emphasizes “life” as the primaryvalue that unifies Arendt’s oeuvre. Not content with philosophy proper as “purethought,” Arendt’s work appears as the concretization, if not the sensorialization,of thought itself. Kristeva refers this “Arendtian trait” to “a particularly female char-acteristic” (26; 4), if not also to her social and political status as a Jew. Drawing outthe distinction between zoë and bios, Kristeva returns Arendt’s concern for “thevalue of human life” to an accomplishment of the positive dynamic of intimacythat is intimately joined to Arendt’s female and Jewish subject position.

Kristeva’s redescription of Arendtian intimacy as an exemplary “singular psy-chic life” under social and political conditions is perhaps best articulated theo-retically in her analysis of what she calls “the extraneousness of the phallus” inThe Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (1996a, 2000b) and again in the conclusion tothe female genius trilogy. Kristeva delineates the difficulties and the good fortuneof the psychic structuration of “feminine” subjectivities in modern societies. Sheinsists that the oedipal formation of the psyche is neither purely physiologicallynor purely sociohistorically necessitated. She insists, rather, that the psychoana-lytic account requires an account of the affect/discourse ambiguity, which Freud’spsychoanalytic account elaborates. Kristeva summarizes her account of the po-sitioning of women in Contre la depression nationale, an interview with PhilippePetit: “[W]oman is foreign to the phallic order that she however integrates,which would be only because she is a speaking being, a being of thought and oflaw. But she conserves a distance with regard to the social order, its rules, its po-litical contracts, etc., which renders her skeptical, potentially atheist, ironic, andin the final analysis pragmatic. I am not really it, says a woman, I remain outsideof it, I do not believe it, but I play the game, and sometimes even better than oth-ers” (1998c, 113). The affective-discursive positioning of marginalized, femininesubjectivity results in a “disequilibrium” that can lead to melancholia or, in defenseagainst melancholia, “efforts ‘to make as if ’” through “seduction, make-up, or onan extremely serious side, abnegation, overwork, etc.” A difficult interval to exist,the question of the equilibrium of this strangeness also leads to nothing less thanthe possibility of a vision of the new.

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The political question of repetition, which is thought according to “inti-mate revolt” in the 1990s, is tied to Kristeva’s privileging of the intimacy ofmarginalized subjectivities throughout her writing and suggests an approach tothe politics of difference that is essential to negotiating Kristeva’s significancefor contemporary social and political thought. Her analysis of modern intimacy,from psychoanalysis to phenomenology and art, is bound to questions of iden-tity politics in the modern world. For Kristeva, the struggle with the difficultyof repetition in modern societies takes place most dramatically at the margins,where reduplication remains less unacknowledged and thereby an attempt at“working through,” in psychoanalytic language, is enacted and accomplished.

Kristeva offers a formal political thought and concrete examples with re-spect to freedom and the social bond that provides a necessary moment in po-litical reflection. Her insistence on “the intimate” and the multiplicity ofinterrogative and narrative ruptures in the continued life of multinational andinternational societies is essential as we rethink the national boundary. Mar-ginalized identities are situated differently at the threshold of semiotic loss andsymbolic failure. The marginalized occupy a different relationship to the polit-ical, which affords insights guaranteed only at the margins of a discourse. ForKristeva the marginalized are in the unique position to offer a different ap-proach to power and meaning. To be precise, in her engagement with identitypolitics, Kristeva finds in modern intimacy the hope of an endless accomplish-ment of intimate revolt that points toward secular forms of transcendence anda possible future for politics in a political context in which, she claims, “we areall in the process of becoming foreigners” (1988, 152; 1991, 104).

ReferencesArendt, Hannah. 1958/1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.———. 1961/1993. Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin Books.Berman, Antoine. 1984. Épreuve de l’étranger. Paris: Gallimard.———. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Roman-

tic Germany. Trans. S. Heyvaert. New York: State University of NewYork Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Seuil.———. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.

New York: Columbia University Press.———. 1983. Histoires d’amour. Paris: Denoël.———. 1987a. Soleil noir, dépression et mélancolie. Paris: Gallimard.———. 1987b. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia

University Press.———. 1988. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard.


———. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1990. “La Nation et le Verbe.” Lettre ouverte à Harlem Désir. Paris: Edi-tions Rivages.

———. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1993. “The Nation and the Word.” Nations without Nationalism. Trans.Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 1994. Le temps sensible: Proust et l ’expérience littéraire. Paris: Gallimard.———. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York:

Columbia University Press.———. 1996a. Sense et non-sens de la révolte: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse

I. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard.———. 1996b. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature. Trans.

Ross Mitchell Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.———. 1997. La révolte intime: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse II. Paris:

Librairie Arthème Fayard.———. 1998a. L’avenir d’une révolte. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.———. 1998b. “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva.” Parallax 4 (3): 5–16.———. 1998c. Contre la depression nationale. Interview with Philippe Petit.

Paris: Les Éditions Textuel.———. 1999. Le Génie feminine, tome I: La vie: Hannah Arendt. Paris: Fayard.———. 2000a. Le Génie feminine, tome II: La folie: Melanie Klein. Paris: Fayard.———. 2000b. Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psycho-

analysis, vol. 1. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

———. 2001a. Hannah Arendt, vol. 1, Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words—Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette. Trans. Ross Guberman. NewYork: Columbia University Press.

———. 2001b/2003. “Intimité voilée, intimité violée.” Chroniques du temps sen-sible, Première édition (28 novembre; mercredi 7 heures 55 [2001–2002]).Paris: Éditions de l’Aube.

———. 2001c. Melanie Klein, vol. 2, Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words—Han-nah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York:Columbia University Press.

———. 2002a. Le Génie feminine, tome III: Les mots: Colette. Paris: Fayard.———. 2002b. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2.

Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.———. 2004. Colette, vol. 3, Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words—Hannah

Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press.

———. 2005. La haine et le pardon: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse III. Paris:Librairie Arthème Fayard.

yanulada


11

Fear of Intimacy?Psychoanalysis and the

Resistance to Commodification

��

Cecilia Sjöholm

The question of public versus private, as it has been cast in Enlightenment philosophy, is inherent also in the discourse of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis mayseem to be dedicated to issues that belong to what could be labeled the private orintimate sphere: sexuality, affectivity, love, desire, and so on. Indeed, Freud him-self discusses the particularly intimate character of psychoanalysis and the specificbond between analyst and analysand arising through such intimacy: psycho-analysis has a particular character of confession, and must be built on completecandor. Certainly the unconscious is situated beyond what is laid open through theconfession. But it must be the task of the analyst to direct the patient toward intimate issues of sexuality. The relation between analyst and analysand, as is wellknown, must be constructed on transference: in analysis, the patient is repeatinglove stories from his own history, “what he is showing is the kernel of his intimatelife history: he is reproducing it tangibly, as though it were actually happening, insteadof remembering it” (SE XX 226). And yet some psychoanalytic schools are suspi-cious of the language of intimacy. As is well known, the duty of psychoanalysis,from a Lacanian point of view, is to resist reification and commodification of theunconscious. Therefore, the theorization of the unconscious must, according toJacques Lacan, resist the urge to fall into the discourse that deals with affects,emotions, and objects of intimacy. This may seem a bit surprising. After all, what kind of space is it that psychoanalysis is occupying? What about the posi-tion of the couch in the bourgeois psychoanalyst’s household? Does that couch not

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construe a space of intimacy? Does it not also call for—for the psychoanalyst and the patient alike—a sharing of intimate secrets? Or is psychoanalysis todayto be considered a practice set beyond that distinction between public and private,social or intimate, that so came to mark the self-conception of modern, urban society in Freudian times, and thereby is not susceptible to the corruption of thesespaces? If the question of intimacy no longer applies in the discussion of psycho-analysis, one may wonder why the couches of the psychoanalyst even today get placed precisely in a bourgeois household, rather than in, say, a working-class council estate or a clinic or some other kind of space. Psychoanalysis stillseems drawn to the restaging of that bourgeois space of intimacy that, in theory,it vividly fears.

Revaluing the place of affects and emotions in psychoanalysis, Julia Kristevahas reclaimed the concept of intimacy. Psychoanalysis, Kristeva has argued, mayaid the resistance to the colonization of psychic space, and protect against the re-lentless exploitation of images and slogans in consumer society. Therefore, theexplorations of the unconscious as practiced by philosophy, psychoanalysis andart, will help protect the singularity of human life. Kristeva’s belief in what she calls“the intimate revolt” of psychoanalysis attempts to encircle the unconscious as aform of intimacy that resists commodification, together with practices such as art,literature, and philosophy. What is it that Kristeva has found in these practices thatappears to be resisting commodification of human emotions? And why does thenotion of an intimate revolt resisting commodification appear so surprising, notonly in an analytical but also a philosophical context? To answer that question, onemust begin by looking at the concept of intimacy and its particular place in phi-losophy. Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt tend to equate intimacy withemotions of love and a certain experience of family bonds. The private, on theother hand, is rather a concept allied to property and ownership in their vocabu-lary. Julia Kristeva, in turn, links intimacy to sensory experience, giving the con-cept a rather particular meaning. One may not look to psychoanalysis to findsupport for this particular meaning. Freud discusses intimacy in psychoanalysisonly on a few occasions. In Lacanian language the word “intimacy” lacks theo-retical weight, since anything referring to a division line between interior and ex-terior is discarded. Instead, the genealogy of Kristeva’s concept of intimacy is tobe found in the Christian experience of meditation, and of love; intimacy is thatwhich allows for an experience of the soul that cannot be reduced to scientistic ex-plorations of the unconscious. It is a concept linked directly to the knowledge oflove, felt and sensed through a sensorial experience of the body. In Kristeva’s ar-gumentation, that sensorial experience is necessary for the protection of humanlife as something vital, singular, and productive, capable of resisting the vastamount of dead images and words that attack us in consumer society. Her suste-nance of that belief is quite unique, however. Looking at philosophy and psycho-analysis, anything connected with the concept of intimacy is usually discarded asunreliable, corruptible, and full of disguises and lures.

Fear of Intimacy 181

Intimacy according to Habermas and the Frankfurt SchoolThe spheres of the intimate and the private are considered prone to corruptionnot only in (Lacanian) psychoanalytic theory, but also in the Enlightenmenttradition of philosophy. In his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant describesthe development of public space through the growth of eighteenth-century pub-lications, to which the citizen can turn and debate issues that are independentof his own occupation; the citizen of public space is born. For Kant the growthof public space is a victory for reason and for the laws of universality. Publicspace is necessary for man’s maturity, since it is only in public space that a manmay enjoy “unlimited freedom to use his own reason and to speak in his ownperson” (1970, 57). Public space, therefore, would help produce a citizen of pol-itics, unfettered by contingent circumstances that would prevent him from de-veloping his capacity of judging. For Kant the growth of public space is a victoryof reason and for the laws of universality. For Hannah Arendt, as another the-oretician of public space, Kant’s idea on universality and his appeal to reason arenot necessarily to be translated as valid for all people at all times. Kant is, rather,indicating a possibility of thinking and judging not on personal grounds, butwithin a political community. In that way, thinking and judging become im-bued not only with concern for the whole in a technocratic sense. Rather, thequestion of universality opens up a possibility of thinking and judging in placeof others, or of the other. The ideal of universalism and its incarnation in pub-lic space makes us capable of looking at things from the point of view of oth-ers. To think is to use judgment with concern for the plurality that marks society.Thought is not a reflection of or over the self, but a dialectics between the selfand political society. In this way, judgment and thought will be dependent onwhat we call public space, which guides our way of looking at the world. Pub-lic space makes possible a form of judgment that takes place in the space of theother. The projected communication toward a space marked by plurality tran-scends the reflection of the self and makes judgment possible. Thereby Arendtis erecting a dichotomy between public and private although she recognizestheir interdependence. But the question is, How are we to find new tools thatmake it possible to reconsider what Arendt is describing: the possibility ofthinking in the place of the other, to find a space of sharing that goes beyond alimited amount of ideas and ideologies, sharing instead at a more primarylevel—in the mind, in judgment, in the sensory experience of the world?

Jürgen Habermas has helped complicate the philosophical conception of theparticular space of intimacy, viewing it as a social and political construction. Ratherthan enforcing the dichotomy between public and private, Habermas is interestedin their intertwinement. In his book The Structural Transformation of the PublicSphere, Habermas takes us through the complex social architecture of the bour-geois household of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in it, he shows us, we


find a dividing line between the salon used for guests and public discourse, andthe part of the house that was used for family, or private matters. This means then,that the discourse of public space was not something that necessarily took placein public space, it could just as well be taking place in the home. In other words,the public sphere is internalized, so to speak, in the private sphere. An intricateintertwinement between public and private, social and intimate, runs through thebourgeois household and beyond (1989, 45–46). The development of public, pri-vate, and intimate, however, is dependent on certain social and economic condi-tions. The bourgeois household was protective of its freedom, and saw itselfdevelop free of external coercion. On the other hand, the freedom of intimatespace was correlative with the authority of the patriarchal laws that governed it.As Habermas notes, Freud discovered the internalization of those laws. They, inturn, were dependent on a certain model for marriage, which made the questionsof love, marriage, and sexuality the obsession of the bourgeois.

The discovery of intimacy was this correlative to the development of a pub-lic domain; the discourse of intimacy tended to develop in a semipublic domain,for instance through widely published novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.Here, the intimate details of the seduction of a young woman, as revealed infictional letters, created frissons for an audience that may well have felt theywere looking into the secrets of her privacy, and spoken to in intimacy. On theother hand, the frissons created by the novel became even greater since her se-duction was exposed in a public domain. Habermas describes the links betweenthe opening of a space of intimacy within the home, and the related structureof a public sphere, which also found a place within the home, as the historicallyspecific development of a bourgeois public space. With the development of abürgerliche Öffentlichkeit, then, not only does a public space develop, but also aspace of the intimate related to emotions, feelings, and sexuality, a sphere thatwas commonly exploited in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. Therelation between public, private, and intimate are intertwined in intricate ways,not least since public discourse develops in the form of cultural critique. (1989,49–51). The public sphere is in fact the expansion of the intimate, as inventedby the novel, discussed and reflected in the public spaces that were constructedaround it: coffeehouses, publications. Public space, in this regard, is the bour-geoisie reflecting on itself. Both are conditioned by social and economic struc-tures. Whereas intimacy is related to family life, privacy is related to propertyand thereby to the market. One would have thought that these spheres wouldbe kept separate, intimate space reflecting a depth in subjectivity that remainsunfettered by market interests. However, this is not the case. The aspect of own-ing goods and the aspect of close relationships were bound up in the same in-dividual, submitted to the same patriarchal structure. The same kind ofintertwinement can be seen in the relation between public and private. WhereasArendt considers public space to be something more than the sum of its parts,Habermas considers it to be the result of the coming together of separate “pri-


vatized” individuals, hiding their interests as property owners under the fictionof being “human beings” fair and square (1989, 56). The public sphere is therebythe result of an economic and social structure, posing as the free space of equals.The aspect of worldliness, and the aspect of sharing that has been forwarded byArendt does not exist in the Habermasian description, For Habermas, rather,public space is a construction submitted to interests that may not be reflectedin the discussion taking place in an open realm.

From the critical perspective of the Frankfurt School, the commodifica-tion of the experience of art has been colonizing both public space and intimatesphere, causing the collapse of the one into the other. Reading Theodor Adorno,one must assume that the frissons of Pamela served to commodify emotions andhelped produce sentimentalization and banalization not only of the private butalso of the public. The bourgeois enjoyment of banality and sentimentalityhelped produce a certain experience that, in the language of the FrankfurtSchool, became part of the culture industry. In the cultural history of Adorno,the same novel that gave rise to the sphere of intimacy became the beginningof a cultural industry in which the experience of art became commodified, trans-forming human experience into a repetition of the same. The streamlining ofcultural products involve sentimentalization (Adorno 1991, 100). Naturalizedconceptions of pain and pleasure, for instance, have, in Adorno’s own critique,become transformed into cultural products. The cultural industry, in fact, livesoff the promise of a pleasure that will never be fulfilled. Adorno’s primary ex-ample is music, which produces a commodified set of emotions; the consumerof music is not so much enjoying the emotions and feelings that music gives riseto as the value he receives from its enjoyment: status, social, and economicstature. Like all goods, music has an exchange value in its various forms and thespecific character of immediacy, which belongs to music, is in fact a commod-ification of the very lack of object specific to the art of music. This pleasure pro-duction of the culture industry has its counterpart in the creation of the worksof fine art where, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, the distinction betweenpain and pleasure has been eradicated. Neither popular culture nor fine arts ful-fill the promise of fullness, but whereas one is true to the suffering whereby thefaith of happiness is upheld, the other is busy providing substitutes. Slavoj Žižek,for his part, has argued that the production of pleasure has long since been over-taken by the unmistakable production of enjoyment, or the collapse of distinc-tions between suffering and pleasure that the hypertrophied submission understrong, symbolic systems has produced both in postcommunist Europe and thecapitalist West. What critical theory has shown, then, is the susceptibility ofcommodification of a certain discourse of emotions, which one may relate to thesphere of intimacy.

Regretting the loss of the public space of the polis as it was defined in ancientGreece, Hannah Arendt has attempted to philosophize the notion of public spacein terms of her own political ontology. Although Arendt recognizes the vital


impact of the private in public life, and although she challenges the Kantian distinction public/private as an absolute, she still disavows the intimate whencompared to the public. In ancient Greece, private life, or the oikos, was governedby necessity—the Penates, or the household gods. Things connected to good, tothe body, to the maintenance of human life were private. For Hannah Arendtherself, the concept of privacy must be heard through its original meaning; it con-stitutes a form of deprivation, since in privacy we are deprived of others. The polis,on the other hand, was the sphere of freedom. However, the condition of thatfreedom depended on the household. With the rise of the social sphere, or theeconomical maintenance of the city, the distinction between public and private be-came blurred. Modern privacy (which Arendt sometime uses in the same vein asintimacy, although the private is otherwise connected to property) is distinct notto the public sphere, but rather to the social sphere “in its most important func-tion, to shelter the intimate” (1998, 38). This development occurred withJean-Jacques Rousseau, whose intimate confessions must be seen as a reactionagainst society’s “perversion of the human heart” such as the “levelling demands”that have come to dominate the social sphere (39). As it were, then, the rise of thesocial has a tendency to eradicate all distinctions between public and private, andlater also of the intimate sphere. Even more importantly, intimacy and publicsphere hold reversible positions in Arendt’s philosophy; the world of men tendsto disappear if one lives intensely through emotions, and what is intimate cannotbe revealed in public because it will lose its reality; “love [. . .] is killed, or ratherextinguished, the moment it is displayed in public” (51). Defining public space asplurality, Hannah Arendt also links it to freedom, and thereby to the political.The access to that aspect of human life that Arendt herself calls “the most digni-fied of all,” namely, the political, depends on the capacity of society to overcomeor transcend the lower spheres of personal needs. It could even be dangerous toinvolve intimacy in politics; the intimate bond of love, for instance, when infusedin politics, could lead to idealization of leaders and thereby aid totalitarianism. Inits worst form modernity is an escape from the public sphere to the intimate, andall those processes of emotion that dominate the space of the intimate. Warningagainst the contamination of the intimate in public life, Arendt argues that toomuch exposure on the intimate in public life would threaten to overtake the di-mension of plurality that marks public space. Making the public realm the mea-sure of judgment, Arendt pits it against privacy, which can never, she argues, reachthe same quality of “reality” which results from the plurality engaged in the pub-lic sphere: “the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence ofinnumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itselfand for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised”(57). In Arendt’s argumentation, the family world of privacy and intimacy is notjust another aspect of reality; in fact, it is less real than public space since it is onlythrough public space that worldly reality “truly and reliably appear[s]” (57). Theintensity of emotions and the depth of experience that may be connected to inti-


macy is, in Arendt’s mind, representative of a form of degeneracy that threatensto overtake the plurality connected to public space: “this intensification will alwayscome to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men”(50). In Arendt’s ontology, only the presence of others makes the world truly ap-pear. Only the public world may represent sharing, a form of differentiation of thesame that makes participation and common experience possible while maintain-ing the singularity connected to the plurality of positions and experiences repre-sented by a variety of people.

Bios politikos and oikosHannah Arendt’s concept of public space has, to a large extent, been influencedby the Greek concept of bios politikos, political life as defined by the communalspaces of the polis. In this view, man is a political animal, defined through hiscapacity to think and act with others. In Aristotle’s Politics, that which is humanis also political, meaning that human beings communicate and share a com-mon world, not only in terms of necessities for survival, but in the quest for thegood life. But philosophy is not the only tradition that is concerned with polit-ical life in various forms. The philosophical idealization of bios politikos neg-lects the consideration of other political spaces. As is well known, Greek tragedymust be considered an alternative path in the representation of political life.Greek tragedy does not equate politics with the open spaces of the bios politikos.Although the scenes of Greek tragedy generally take place outside of a houseor palace, tragic action is a dialectic between private and public. Deeply affect-ing the run of public affairs, that which goes on inside of the house is uncannyand impossible to control. Situated between the spaces of public and private—outside and inside—tragedy calls into question what we know and how we thinkwe know it. Thereby it is embodying another view on political life than theAristotelian tradition. Rather than deliberative discourse, the political life oftragedy is made out of lures, disguises, and appearances. The action of politicalheroes is determined not merely by the regard for the best of the city, but alsothrough desires and drives, forces of the unknown that appear more powerfulthan deliberative action. This quality of tragedy is embodied through the veryscenery of the action. It can also be linked to a question that still, as of today,keeps haunting commentaries on Greek tragedy without having found a satis-factory answer: Given that Athens was a state in which almost no women werepresent in the streets or the open spaces, or in the bios politikos of political lifeat all, how come so many of the political concerns of the city were representedby women on the stage? Why was Greek tragedy so obsessed with the figuresof women, letting them act out the problems of justice, power, government, andrevenge that were haunting the city, when in real life the lives of women werein fact suppressed and invisible, hiding in the sphere of the oikos or the home,cut of from public affairs? One could respond to this issue through a range of


possibilities, one being that women were allowed to represent a wider array ofcomplicated desires and emotions connected to the sphere of the oikos, therebyacting out an intricate link between the public and the intimate sphere of thehouse, which was more difficult to portray for male characters, whose focusought to be more wholeheartedly set on public affairs.1

From this point of view, tragedy points to a complication in the philo-sophical definition of the political as that which is open and deliberative, com-mon to all. There is reason, also, to link this other tradition, that of the tragic,to a suspicion against those aspects of political life that belong to the sphere ofintimacy, a sphere remarked through its lures and disguises. Political philosophyhas imposed a clear demarcation line between that which is open to delibera-tion and communication and the sphere of intimacy, which implicitly imposesa threat to the open spaces of the political. Of course, we know of Hegel’s fa-mous appellation to the potentially subversive ironic laughter of women, placedon the outskirts of the ethical order and without access to the discourse of uni-versality. And, of course, we know of Rousseau’s tireless journeys into the life ofemotion and senses, underscoring the idea that intimate life must be kept sep-arate from public affairs. A philosophical consequence of this separation, as out-lined also by Habermas, has been the subsequent devaluation of those aspectsof the individual that remain in the space of intimacy—emotions, affects, andfeelings, or questions that relate sensibility to singularity. To some extent, boththe tragic and the philosophical tradition are implying that the separation be-tween public and intimate is a gendered issue, and that the devaluation of thesphere of intimacy is inseparable from the devaluation of women as politicaland philosophical beings. However, it is not certain that the ghost of feminin-ity is more fearful than the specters of inconsistency, vulnerability, and indeter-minacy that is marking the life of emotions but also of the philosophicalcategory of the sensible all in all. As tradition has shown, the life of intimacy isuncanny, not because it is run by women, but because it is threatening to allthose aspects of political life that are supposed to define that which is, as Arendthas said, the most dignified aspect of human beings.2

Psychoanalysis and the Resistance to ReificationIn the discussion of psychoanalysis, one is rarely considering the space of the prac-tice, or the space referred to by psychoanalytic theory as such. It may well be thatpsychoanalysis physically, from placing the cure in the home of the analyst, wouldbe embracing and affirming the qualities of intimacy. Looking at the theory ofanalysis, however, this is not the case. Given the earlier discussion herein, which in-dicates the baggage given to intimacy in Western cultural history, it is perhaps notstrange that psychoanalysis rather than embracing the intimacy one would thinkwould belong to it through its practice takes distance and does its best to dissoci-ate itself from the luring shadows of inconsistency, or of the intimate life of emo-


tions and sensations. From this point of view, the oedipal discourse of universality,or the symbolic order in Lacanian language, would be representing that which wassocially and politically viable in psychoanalysis. Through Oedipus, psychoanalysishas aligned itself with ideals of universality and the law. Freud’s notion that pater-nal law is internalized links the intimate questions of the subject to a certain con-ception of the law, through which all issues of the unconscious and of desire mustbe addressed. A consequence may well be a devaluation of those aspects of the sub-ject that remain in the space of intimacy—emotions, affects, feelings, and all thosesensory qualities that are integral to the analysand, and that cannot be observed bythe analyst himself. Freud is not interested in treating emotions or sensory expe-riences or qualities thereof, but the symptoms of the neuroses; all those things thatcan be observed in language or the behavior of the patient. It could well be that thepatient is expected to confess to a life hidden from public view, such as his sexualbehavior, but the emotional or sensory aspects of that life of intimacy is irrelevantfor psychoanalysis. In linking issues of intimacy to a certain conception of the lawrather than affirming the life of emotions and sensorial experience as valid quali-ties in themselves, psychoanalysis casts itself as the immediate heir of Enlighten-ment discourse. Freud’s famous view that the desire of women is enigmatic, andthat women constitute a dark continent, does perhaps not merely express an inca-pacity to understand the nature of women, but could also be a reference of suspi-cion directed to that other space of intimacy, the feminine space of the oikos, whichappears to lie impenetrable beyond the appeal to the law. Certainly psychoanaly-sis must affirm the space of intimacy as the very locus of its work, and it must re-ject all claims that psychoanalytic treatment should necessarily lead to adaptation.But the Freudian view on all those aspects of life that one would otherwise asso-ciate with intimacy—namely, the domain of emotions and feelings—remains oneof suspicion: the love, the emotion, the affect of the patient belong to the domainthat psychoanalysis must study and interpret. They need to be traversed for psy-choanalysis to unravel. The work of the unconscious.

In the work of Jacques Lacan, on the other hand, the rejection of emotionas proper, psychoanalytic material is made quite clear. For Lacan, emotions andexperiences of “good” and “bad” belong to the imaginary and thus to a sphere thatpsychoanalysis must traverse. Psychoanalysis, according to Lacanian theory, hasbeen subjected to a similar fate in the sense that the unconscious has become anobject of banalization through the many misconceptions of Freudian ideas thathave flourished. The famous claim made by Lacan himself, that his project sim-ply consists in the rescue of the Freudian unconscious from banalization, mustbe seen as a fear of commodification of the unconscious, not least through theproduction of art and literature. As it were, the only way to redeem the uncon-scious in Lacanian thought is through a radical return to the Traumarbeit. Those aspects of the psychoanalytic subject that would be linked to emotionsand feelings, and to the idea of a good or bad internalized object in the Kleiniansense, must be traversed in Lacanian analysis. Lacanian analysis disregards


the Kleinian theory of the object for remaining in the imaginary, which is the category that must be traversed for the truth of the subject to be revealed. Ratherthan discussing the object, then, Lacan talks about the Thing in an attempt tomove beyond the Kleinian object, disavowing the theory of object relations.Counting as imaginary are the infantile fantasies described by Klein, but alsothe strong emotions connected to those fantasies. In his seminar on The Ethicsof Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that emotions in general are aspects of the imag-inary. Certainly the theoretical reasons for this are consistent throughout the La-canian project. One may wonder, however, why those aspects of the subject thatare prone to commodification are linked to, precisely, the sphere of intimacy.Could it be that Lacan’s interest in the symbolic and his disavowal of the objectare attempts to disclose the ghosts haunting psychoanalysis as belonging to a space of intimacy? In that case, it would appear that Lacanian analysis is attempting to force us out from those shadows, lures, and disguises that are connected with the space of intimacy in ancient thought and beyond.

Part of the project of resisting commodification is the Lacanian attempt tomove beyond the spatialization of the unconscious as part of an interior. The un-conscious is neither inside nor outside the subject, but rather that which struc-tures its desire as having a cause, rather than a goal. Rather than referring tointimacy, Lacan is using the concept of “extimacy,” a term according to whichthe subject is constituted in and through that which is radically foreign to it; theThing that is foreclosed in the space of the Real. Lacan is attempting to makeof psychoanalysis a practice resisting reification (and thereby commodification,one may argue) through the focus on the symbolic and the real, rather than theimaginary and its objects. Could it be, however, that his disregard of affectation,emotions, and so on would have something to do with an unwillingness to rec-ognize intimate space? Given that psychoanalysis still takes place in the intimatesphere of a bourgeois household, the resistance to intimacy could almost be re-garded as a form of disavowal, perhaps directed against femininity, perhapsagainst the roots of psychoanalysis itself.

The Frankfurt School and the Resistance to CommodificationThe most poignant relation between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Frank-furt School, resides, possibly, in this aspect; both stress the susceptibility of emo-tions and affects to fall prone to commodification or reification. The Lacanianproject of traversal mirrors the suspicion of the Frankfurt School regarding thecommodification of emotions. For the Frankfurt School, emotions are prone tocommodification through the culture industry. As Habermas himself has arguedin the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the candidness that was ex-plored through the eighteenth-century novel became a naturalized part of thecommodification of the public and the intimate sphere alike. As for the question


of the unconscious and of psychoanalysis, Habermas considers psychoanalysis apotentially progressive force, but only if it aligns itself with the precepts govern-ing public space, and the ideals of rationality and clarity that belong to it. Rep-resenting the intellectual left of the 1960s, Habermas has wanted to bringpsychoanalysis into the service of emancipation, since it provides “a rational basisfor the precepts of civilization.” There may well be a tension between political en-gagement and psychoanalysis that corresponds to the division of modern soci-ety into a public sphere of communication and the distortions of the unconscious,but psychoanalysis does also teach us to overcome this tension. Psychoanalysismay become a force of emancipation, and a force strengthening the public sphereof communication, insofar as it “cures” language of distortions. Psychoanalysis isgoverned by a hermeneutic impulse, attempting to reinstall a coherent meaningstructure in cases in which it is lacking, through supplanting explanations. Thephenomena examined by Freud—parapraxes, forgetting, slips of the tongue, mis-readings, bungled actions, chance actions, and so forth—are all examples of be-havior where the subject is deceiving itself in the communication with itself.Neuroses distort the capacity of the subject to reflect on himself in the dimen-sions of language, action, and bodily experience. The very construction of theunconscious, then, builds on distortions of that which withdraws from the sphereof communication. The analyst attempts to interpret the processes of distortion,although a layer of content will perhaps remain that may resist interpretation. Resistance against the psychoanalytic process, according to Habermas is resist-ance against the rules governing public communication. It is the resistance tointerpretation that must be considered pathological. Resistance causes the un-conscious to withdraw from interpretation in that it deviates from the commu-nicative norms that govern the public sphere: “wrong behavior means everydeviation from the model of the language game of communicative action, in whichmotives of action and linguistically expressed intentions coincide” (1989, 226).Psychoanalysis therefore can be used where “the text of our everyday languagegames are interrupted by incomprehensible symbols.” The symbols referred to asincomprehensive by Habermas, offer resistance against interpretation because“they do not obey the grammatical rules of ordinary language, norms of action,and culturally learned patterns of expression.” The practice of psychoanalysis isfocused on coming to terms with the communication disturbance that the sub-ject has with himself. The task of analysis, then, is to encourage self-reflection,but it must be a form of self-reflection that aligns itself with the ideals throughwhich Enlightenment philosophy has interpreted the public sphere.

At another level, Freudian analysis may also teach us to analyze the distor-tions of the public sphere, although this is not directly argued by Habermas.Whereas Marx lacks it, Freud has a reflective knowledge of collective behavior andof the laws placed at the origin of communicative action. One may thus infer thatthrough Freudian analysis we may well learn not only to communicate better withourselves, or between ourselves, but also to traverse the illusions that are produced


by the powers and ideologies that make the public sphere susceptible to com-modification, as argued by Habermas himself in The Structural Transformation ofthe Public Sphere. Habermas’s account of psychoanalysis, of course, is not one thatmany would subscribe to today. But he does bring up questions that are valid inthis context: How does psychoanalysis relate to the function of the public sphere?How does it describe the aspects of the subject and of the unconscious that arewithdrawing from the laws and norms that govern public communication? Is itpossible to disregard the function of the public sphere altogether and simply re-turn to the Lacanian concept of the symbolic, or the Freudian concept of an in-ternalized paternal law? The Frankfurt School has described a tendency towardcommodification of emotions in the production of art and literature. Lacan hasattempted to theorize a tendency within psychoanalysis itself toward a reificationof the unconscious, immobilizing the search for truth in analysis. All of these the-ories fear the inconsistency and vulnerability associated with intimate life, even ifthey theorize practices such as literature, art, and psychoanalysis. One may ofcourse consider the resistance to intimacy as a consequence of the refusal of thenotion of interiority, and therefore as a philosophical position in the theorizationof the subject. In other words: both the Frankfurt School and Lacan refuse theidea of a subject that would have some kind of interior life of emotions and feel-ings that would be corresponding to a site where the “real” self is to be discovered.However, one must ask if this theoretical refusal of interiority has not also broughtwith it an exaggerated suspicion against the idea that the “truth” of the subject alsohas something to do with emotions, sensations, and sensibility.

Kristeva and IntimacyIn contradistinction both to the Marxist tradition and to Lacan, Julia Kristevadoes not consider the life of sensory experience and feelings, or the relation toan internalized object, to be a symptom of alienation or commodification. Indiscussing a particular conception of intimacy, she is attempting to restore thevalue and relevance of certain aspects of psychic life that have been devaluedthrough the refusal of interiority. As I have already noted, Kristeva’s concep-tion of intimacy is quite particular; it is not clear why sensory experience wouldbe referred to as “intimate.” One would describe this as being contrary to theLacanian project, and perhaps not very Freudian either. She takes recourse tothe tradition of Christian meditation, and the exploration of the senses in thework of Augustine or Loyola instead. Kristeva’s intimacy is also a sphere that hasbeen held as a “platonic cave” of lures and disguises in the philosophical dis-cussion, where sensory experience is devalued in relation to truth. What is it,then, in Kristeva’s discourse that allows for intimacy to develop through, but atthe same time become, something other than sensory experience?

To unravel that issue, one must take recourse to the Enlightenment debateand consider the way in which Kristeva’s discourse contrasts with common-


places in the philosophical tradition. The intimate, in Kristeva’s language, is notthe same as issues having to do with privacy, or with family life. Whereas pri-vacy must be associated with a certain space of the home, the frissons that mayovercome us when we open the doors and get a glimpse of the lives and secretsof the other, the intimate for Kristeva is not a place or a space but rather a func-tion of subjectivity that is known or unknown to ourselves, but that always ap-pears to touch the truth of ourselves. The intimate has evolved as a domain inwhich issues of signification may be negotiated beyond the pretenses of uni-versal law, or beyond the restraints of communicative language as described byHabermas. Kristeva describes intimacy as a domain of singularity, or rather evenas the domain of singularity. The intimate is a domain of affects, sensations,moods, and feelings, a domain in which the function of the mind is close to thebody. Intimacy is the capacity of the mind to connect language to forms of sen-sibility. Intimacy, in this version, is not a description of a sphere of interiority,but rather a description of a certain discourse of corporeality. In the Christiantradition of meditation, and the exploration of the senses in the work of Au-gustine or Loyola, the question of the relation between the word and the senseshas been central to meditation and to the individual’s relation to God. In thelanguage of intimacy, the author is baring his soul through the unraveling ofhis senses. He is thus unraveling the singularity of his existence, and thereby thesovereignty of God, through a language in which that existence shows itself assensibility. The experience of the body, and all those aspects of sensibility thatwe may link to feelings, affects, moods, and so forth, becomes proof of a divin-ity that can only show itself through a singular existence, the life of an individ-ual. That experience, however, cannot be fully disclosed through a generalquestion pertaining to the link between mind and body, or the relation betweenperception and sensibility. It can only be disclosed through the discovery of thesingularity of the life that bears witness to those affects and their meaning, tothose feelings and their signification. The language in which I bear witness to the divine aspects of the sensible, then, is not a language of triumph or jubi-lation, but rather a language of intimacy, since I discover divine significationthrough relating affects, moods, and sensations to singular events that only haveto do with my life, my experiences, and my questions.

Psychoanalysis is the theory and practice that, in our time, has proven mostcapable of preserving that singular quality of human life in which truth, signi-fication, and sensation become part of the same experience, without recourse todivine interpellation. The particularity of Freudian intimacy consists in a “re-casting of the soul/mind dichotomy” (Kristeva 2002, 50). To preserve that spe-cific quality of psychic life, where sensations are attached to singular experiencesof signification, rather than general descriptions of corporeality, psychoanalysismust stress the importance of countertransference, on the one hand, and thevery style of the language in practice, on the other: a “poetics,” as Kristeva callsit (51).


Here, we return to a territory well known from Kristeva’s argumentationelsewhere. The concept of intimacy as a domain traversing language, and yetstrictly intertwined with processes of signification, has gone under differentnames: the preoedipal, inner experience, negativity, the semiotic, the abject, coun-tertransference, and so on. Although Kristeva relates the concept of intimacy tothat of revolt, it is perhaps not a question of reaction or revolution, but rather ofprotection of a certain concept of the singularity of human life. A discourse ofintimacy does nothing to revolutionize society, but it may well present us with acertain protection against the colonization of ready-made images that marks thecapitalist society of aggressive new media. The language of intimacy, therefore,offers an access to the truth of the subject. Intimacy is the capacity of the mindto connect language to forms of sensibility. Intimacy, in this version, is not a de-scription of a sphere of interiority, but rather a description of a function of lan-guage through which the relation to the body becomes enhanced. In theChristian tradition, the question of the relation between the word and the senseshas been central to meditation and to the individual’s relation to God. Psycho-analysis incarnates the secular transformation of a long tradition in Christianity,through which the intimate life of the soul has become a question of truth. InThe Intimate Revolt, Kristeva describes psychoanalysis as a practice that, togetherwith art, literature, and philosophy, is concerned with the uncovering of the do-main of intimacy in this sense. It is a way of describing the very core of an in-tellectual engagement that has marked the twentieth century and beyond whichhas attempted to resist the aggression of consumer society. In this she comes upwith another response to the question of the relation between public and private,attempting to situate psychoanalysis beyond Enlightenment discourse. One maywell make universalistic references to the symbolic and the law, while attempt-ing, at the same time, to move beyond the aspects of the private sphere that have,as Habermas, Adorno, and others have argued, become susceptible to commod-ification. Intimacy, in Kristeva’s language, is not susceptible to commodification,but rather a protection against it.

Moreover, Kristeva recasts the question of the object, and that eruption ofthe foreign called extimacy by Lacan. The most important aspect of the subjectis not extimate, but rather a thing of intimacy. Kristeva thereby reverses the La-canian perspective on the tasks of psychoanalysis. Rather than relying on thesymbolic order and its correlative the real, which are concerned with languageon the one hand and symptoms on the other, Kristeva is interested in the verysensory qualities that are produced through the intimate practice of psycho-analysis. The extimate thing of foreclosure can only be known as symptom. Theobject of intimacy, however, is one of experience. Not a product of foreclosurebut of countertransference, the thing of intimacy transpires through sensory experience, emotions, and feelings.

To sum up, then, Kristeva’s notion of the intimate could be considered a re-sponse to the devaluation of intimacy that has been haunting philosophy and


psychoanalysis alike ever since the distinction between private and public wasmade in Enlightenment philosophy. Whereas it does not deny that the phe-nomena that are usually connected with privacy—emotions, frissons, pleasures,and so forth—may well lack in political significance and may well be prone tocommodification, Kristeva’s notion of the intimate is one that remains closelyconnected to such phenomena of the private sphere, although it cannot beequated with them. Perhaps it is fair to say that the intimate is the displaced,politicized version of the private, a version that refuses the closed doors but thatkeeps open the frisson. The intimate object is rather the object that must be con-sidered the condition for the subject’s capacity to experience at all, and the ob-ject that must be the condition that makes thought and language possible. Thestarting point of the subject, then, is not the law, but an object of the senses. Inthis regard, the starting point is not equated with ideals of universality but ratherwith the soft matters that may appear to escape the “hard” qualities demandedby science, but that constitute the qualities of singularity that psychoanalysismust concern itself with: bonding, corporeality, sensory experience, emotions,and affectivity. These phenomena have been cast in the imaginary, considered toosoft or too involved in the sphere of sensibility for Lacanian or critical theory totake them seriously. This aspect of psychoanalysis, one that seems to embracethe notion of a primary, intimate object, may well bring us back to the kind ofcouch that it thought it may well have left with Lacan, and that it felt itself toorational to enter with Habermas, for instance. But if we are really beyond thoseissues of the intimate, then how come we keep returning to their insistence in ourlives? Perhaps philosophy and psychoanalysis have placed too much focus at theother side of the Enlightenment divide between public and private, and perhapsthe old fears of the tragic oikos keep haunting psychoanalysis as much as it keepshaunting public life; the lures and disguises of intimate life.

An important philosophical issue to be raised before ending this discus-sion, however, is whether Kristeva’s conception of intimacy implies a form ofsharing, beyond the sharing that takes place in the public sphere, and whetherit manages to confront the Arendtian critique of intimacy as modernity’s fa-vored form of escape. Human life, for Arendt, is always diverse, singular, andmarked by the possibility of sharing that she herself refers to public space, ratherthan the knowledge of privacy or intimate life. Kristeva points to the necessityof countertransference, and to the poetic qualities of the language of intimacy;a language of affectivity and sensibility. Through intimacy one can perhaps notshare a world, a truth, or a political community. On the other hand, one maywell argue that intimacy is a condition for creating the plurality of singularitiesthat, in Arendt’s ontology, creates the plurality of perspectives. If anything, Kris-teva has managed to show that intimacy conditions singularity, beyond thethreats of commodification that appears to have created a philosophical fear for the term of intimacy. Reconsidering intimacy, we may well begin to recon-sider the public realm as well.


Notes1. This is related to what I have argued in my book The Antigone Complex.

Here I attempt to show that the desire of Antigone is not to be considered asfeminine to its nature, but rather as exemplifying a complex ethical questionthat only a female character was capable of portraying. See Cecilia Sjöholm,The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2004). In her book Playing the Other, Froma Zeitlinargued for an interpretation which puts forward a different aspect: the sphereof the oikos was radically separated from public space, a fact that meant the fem-inine sphere was radically separated from that of free men, participating in pub-lic life. That is why Greek tragedy, Zeitlin (1996) argues, may depict thefeminine as dark and fearsome, and also why Greek tragedy may appear to at-tempt to control those dark forces that may well pose a secret threat to the orderof the city.

2. This is so because it is connected to the sphere of freedom and equalityin the ancient world, as well the possibility of excellence, arête, as separated fromthe sphere of the sheer necessities of human life (Arendt 1998, 27, 31, 49).

ReferencesAdorno, Theodor W. 1991. The Culture Industry. Trans. J. M. Bernstein. Lon-

don: Routledge.Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.Freud, Sigmund. 1926. “The Question of Lay Analysis.” The Standard Edition

of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XX. Trans. James Strachey.London: Hogarth Press. Cited as SE XX.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.Trans. Thomas Burger, with Frederick Lawrence. London: Polity Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 1970. “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?”Kant’s Political Writings. Trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 54–60.

Kristeva, Julia. 2002. Intimate Revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.

Zeitlin, Froma. 1996. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical GreekLiterature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

12

Humanism, the Rights of Man,and the Nation-State

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Emily Zakin

“If God exists . . . everything . . . is permitted.” So Slavoj Žižek pronounces ina recent editorial in the New York Times (March 12, 2006). This Dostoyevskianinversion, in seizing on the political climate of religious extremism, is publishedon behalf of what Žižek calls “Europe’s most precious legacy.” Atheism, or moreparticularly a secular public sphere, is this vital inheritance deemed crucial fornot only the past but the future of Europe, and it demands, in an obvious ref-erence not only to Marx but also to Kant, what Žižek calls “a ruthless, criticalanalysis” of religion as “the wellspring of murderous violence.” While Žižek hassometimes allied himself with various forms of fundamentalism, or appointedhimself the representative or guardian of a (quasi-?)Stalinist or fascist set of po-litical convictions as against liberal openness, multicultural inclusiveness,do-gooder fervor, and especially humanist sincerity, nevertheless in this edito-rial Žižek puts forward a hard-hitting attack against religious conviction and afortification of atheism, atheism with its undeniably Enlightenment heritageand distinctively European tradition. Žižek concludes that only atheism canprovide the public space requisite for a nonpatronizing and nonrelativist respectfor the beliefs of others. In part, Žižek is addressing the crisis confronting Eu-rope, the crisis, we could say, of political correctness, of not trusting oneself.And in part, Žižek is addressing the ramifications of this crisis for world poli-tics, for relations to the “other” as he might scoff. But more profoundly, he isconfronting the question of legitimacy, the legitimacy of Modernity, and in par-ticular the Modern nation-state (and, it seems, affirming that legitimacy).

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If the Modern legitimation crisis is brought about by what is always called“the death of God,” this death derails the relation between the subject and poli-tics, rendering it tenuous and unstable, regardless of the laws that are put in placeto order and maintain that relation. No state of law, no nation-state or republic,can replace the homogeneity promised by the pre-Modern world of status, thecertainty of having a fixed place in the order of the world. The mobility producedby Modernity’s replacement of status with contract generates a disconnect be-tween the newly established citizen and politics,1 a dissatisfying heterogeneity(and ultimately an irresolvable tension between nation/people and state/citizen).No wonder we are now witnessing the resurrection of God in politics.

What I will address in this chapter is not the sometimes circuitous andrambling political commitments of Žižek but rather two convergent and salientpoints he raises clearly and directly in the editorial cited: first, the already notedcrisis of European political structures and in particular the legitimation crisis itimplies, and, second, the way in which this crisis dovetails with the loss of tran-scendent values (not only the death of god, but also that of nature and history)and thus, concomitantly, with the absence of any guarantee, or even hope, ofgrounding law in either eternal ideas or human nature or the progress of spirit( geist). Both Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva directly tackle these issues in anumber of works, including especially Arendt’s On Revolution (1963), TheHuman Condition (1958), Origins of Totalitarianism (1966), and Lectures onKant’s Political Philosophy (1982), and Kristeva’s Nations without Nationalism(1993), Crisis of the European Subject (2000), Strangers to Ourselves (1991), andHannah Arendt (2001). For my purposes here, I will disregard Žižek’s contemptfor Arendt and her theory of totalitarianism that he takes to be fully allied withreactionary politics. But what we can take from Žižek is a crucial insight thatmight help us pursue the political significance of Arendt and Kristeva’s work:that it is in our worldly relations with others, not in looking into one’s ownheart or soul for inner truth or access to the transcendent, but in actively par-ticipating in the world, that we become political. Given this worldly concern,the pursuit of political legitimacy must take place within the public space of ap-pearance and cannot depend on access to the soul or another world or nature.

As already hinted by Kristeva’s interest in Arendt, I will make this argu-ment, incongruously enough considering Arendt’s disrespect for psychoanaly-sis, by appealing to the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious, contendingthat the missing god of Modernity is akin to the missing (or divided, non-self-identical) self, both of which represent the insecurity and limits within whichwe have to live with ourselves and others. Bringing psychoanalytic theory to-gether with Arendt is less surprising than might perhaps appear since Arendt iscertainly not a rationalist who believes in egoic self-mastery and self-authorship.Arendt makes clear that the human “agent is not an author or producer” of heror himself (1958, 184) and that the story of our lives and of history is not some-thing that is “made at all” (186). Her work, and in particular the last chapter of

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Origins of Totalitarianism, “Ideology and Terror,” as well as chapter 24 of the “Action” section of The Human Condition, makes room, as Kristeva notes, for a“political psychology” (2001, 137) in which the self embraces a “daimonic” ele-ment (173). Kristeva’s reading of Arendt attempts to explore the “chasms of thehuman psyche” to which Arendt’s work is not always attentive, not only to re-veal how “the death drive . . . gives life to the speaking being” (xvi) but also tomore fully theorize the destruction of that psychic space (137). Such a readingdoes not contest Arendt’s insistent distinction between worldliness and our innerdisposition but renders it more complex, making it clear that the psychoanalyticunconscious is at odds with, rather than allied with, a theological view of thesoul, since it can only promise that human life will be permanently unsettled.2

While Kristeva acknowledges “the limitations of Arendt’s diatribe againstsociety” (2001, 162), she nonetheless admires Arendt for distinguishing betweenthe social (which Kristeva, like Arendt, allies with need or, in psychoanalyticvocabulary, the imaginary) and the politically “dangerous freedom of bonds withother people” (161) (which Kristeva allies with desire or the symbolic, not dis-similar to Arendt’s idea of political speech). Kristeva appreciates Arendt in par-ticular for recognizing the correspondence between a value system that deems“life to be the ultimate good” (xv) and one that finds human life “superfluous”(7) since both are ultimately “nihilist” (40). Whether the life process is raised tothe highest good as in “the vitalist restlessness of the consumer culture,” or heldonly in contempt as in totalitarianism, in either case what is missing is a senseof human possibility beyond predictable, automated, or conventional confinesand expectations.

By providing a psychoanalytic vocabulary, Kristeva provides new insightnot only into the social threat to intimacy, but also into who we are as politicalactors and citizens. Psychoanalysis helps us see what is left when the egoic pred-icates of whatness, the armor of our identity and objective qualities, are nottaken as wholly determinative of who we are, and when we abandon the ideathat we can fabricate ourselves and our political communities. Because the fan-tasies of self-authorship and self-ownership (both liberal fantasies) are funda-mentally egoic,3 they do not afford us the precarious hazards of freedom butlock us in what Lacan has called “the knot of imaginary servitude” (2006, 80).But the “who,” as we will see, is not “entrenched in the fixation of vision” (Kris-teva 2001, 173); it is rather excessive, reducible to neither biological nor socialmetabolisms (174). This excess reminds us of the “nonsubjective foundation forpolitics” (219). Just as we are not our own individual authors, we are also notcommunal authors of the polis. The polis is not premised on some human ideal,essence, or telos, and it emerges from acting not fabricating. Rather than see-ing the polis as an artifice of the human, we should say rather that the humanemerges from the artifice of politics.

Political Modernity can be characterized by the tension between, on theone hand, an abstract and substanceless commitment to universality, realized

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practically in legal neutrality as the basis of civil order, and, on the other hand,a material attachment to blood or soil manifested not only in our social loyal-ties and identifications, but also in the formulation of the definition of the legalcitizen (with reference to parentage or land of birth). This tension is what bothdefines and imperils the unstable amalgamation that is the Modern nation-state.Kristeva offers an analysis of the nation-state’s odd and unavoidable hybridity,and in so doing makes a crucial distinction between the dangerous, but inex-orable, spirit of the national, on the one hand, and the juridical, and thereforepotentially empty, promise of the state as guarantor of rights, on the other. In contradistinction to the liberal tradition, however, Kristeva does not advancea commitment to the state as purified and rational, claiming that such an idea is vacant and without affective force. Nation and state always contaminateeach other.

Kristeva considers what she takes to be the two dominant models of the nation-state and the relation each has to a specific notion of the foreign andthen attempts to reconsider both in light of a third model. The two primaryforms or models of the nation-state, each with its own foreigner, are, accordingto Kristeva, the organic and the contractual. The first, “organic,” “feudal,” and“spiritualistic” (1991, 176) concept is founded on blood and soil, on physicalkinship and linguistic identity (and is based on inheritance). In this model, so-cial harmony and homogeneity are the central traits; the foreign is representedby different cultures, blood, soil, language, religion, and so forth. We could saythat this is a “nation” understanding of the nation-state.

Second, there is the “contractual” concept (1991, 175) premised on the rightto freedom (based on civic, rational, and universal ideals and capacities). In thismodel, a certain kind of heterogeneity is presumed, since neutrality before thelaw presupposes, even as it negates or obscures, individual difference; here, theforeign is figured as the particular, the irrational, that which resists subsumptionby the universal. We could say that this is a “state” understanding of the nation-state. Kristeva claims that this latter, contractual concept is affectivelyempty, unmoored, “hollow” (178) and thus that it easily collapses into the former in a search for affective bonds.

So, on the one hand, the state needs the nation (the bonds of affective iden-tity) that nonetheless threatens it. On the other hand, the spirit of liberal con-tractualism produces its own foreigner in the form of the irrational, and thisreemergence of an alien outside of reason also presages a return to a nationalconcept from within the state’s own rationalism (“we” are rational, defenders offreedom, saviors of democracy, and so on; “they” are precivilized demonic hordeswho hate our freedom). The implication of this analysis is that Enlightenmentrationalist cosmopolitanism cannot sustain itself, but this is not quite Kristeva’sconclusion. The second model both tolerates and represses difference (the dif-ference manifest in the particularity/singularity/corporeality that disappears before the law). Nation, we could say, is repressed, even as it returns.


Kristeva proceeds to offer a third understanding of the foreign, the one developed by Freud (1991, 181), in the hope that this might provide a thirdmodel of the nation-state (or perhaps better, a more self-reflexive version of thecontractual and cosmopolitan state). This foreign is neither “banished as dis-ruptive of rationalist urbanity” nor “glorified as a secret volksgeist” (181). In-stead, Kristeva writes, “we are our own foreigners, we are divided.” This formof foreignness is thus more primordial than the other two, even their very source.It is my own “perturbed logic” as a “bundle of drive and language” that is thesource of my “discontent in living with the other.” It is here that we can find adifferent, or more self-reflexive, understanding of the nation-state, one that can-not disown either its affective bonds or its affective volatility and divisiveness(the inability to live with others), one that does not run from, but grapples with,the return of the repressed.

In discussing this revised view of the nation-state, Kristeva invokes anethics of respect that she claims to find in a kind of Freudian cosmopolitanismthat begins with an “ethics of respect for the irreconcilable” (1991, 182), of thedrives with language, the life of the body with the rule of law, kinship relationswith abstract citizenship, and natality, carnality, mortality, and maternity withreason and universality. Kristeva concludes Strangers to Ourselves with theprospect that “the ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics,” a “cosmopoli-tanism” (192). We could say, in other words, that the return of the repressedsuggests an alliance between Freud and Kant linking Freud’s respect for the un-conscious with Kant’s call for cosmopolitanism as both “separation and union”(173), preserving difference “at the very heart of the universal republic” (172),an alliance that might transform the identity of the nation-state through thesecular and profane, rather than sacred and profound, promise not only of theplural coexistence of states, but also of this plurality within.

But it is with regard to the peaceful coexistence of nation-states, and neu-trality within nation-states, that both Arendt and Kristeva identify a crisis. AsArendt puts it, “human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found onlyin a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time mustcomprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly lim-ited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities” (1966, ix). ForArendt then, “the great problem in politics . . . is how to find a form of govern-ment which puts the law above man” (1963, 183). This might sound regressiveto those of us unfamiliar with the Foucauldian critique of “the repressive hy-pothesis” and who therefore equate freedom with liberation, emancipation, andtransgression, the breaking or overcoming of law, or anarchy. While I will takeonly a limited foray here, Foucault makes clear (in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 [1978]) that the dream of liberation is itself allied with the juridical dis-couse it contests. Foucault mocks the sexual or political hope that links together“enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures” (7) and that promises a newage of freedom in the future if only we would revolt today. He argues instead

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that the claim that we are repressed or oppressed is itself an evasion of newforms of nonsovereign power, and therefore is complicit with those forms. Sov-ereignty, in both its juridical and monarchical versions, is, for Foucault, on thedecline. It is replaced with what he calls “disciplinary power and biopower,”power that operates not primarily through law but through social formationsembedded in our identities and practices (and productive of them), power of,over, and through our corporeal lives. It should be noted, of course, that Fou-cault does not believe that the revival of sovereignty is the solution to disciplineand biopolitics—he calls instead for “a new form of right” that is “liberated fromthe principle of sovereignty” (Foucault 1980, 108). Nonetheless Arendt’s refor-mulation of the traditional problem of legitimacy resonates with Foucault’sanalysis and with his concerns about the administration or management of life.

Yet we must look more closely at the internal transformation of sovereigntyfrom its monarchical to its democratic form to understand the problem. TheModern legitimation crisis has been analyzed by Claude Lefort who articulatesspecifically this transformation in the form and meaning of political sovereignty.Lefort proposes in his essay “The Logic of Totalitarianism” that to understandthe distinctive political logic of Modernity we must first discern “the meaningof a mutation which lies at the origin of modern democracy: the establishmentof a power of limited right” (1986a, 279). He writes in the essay “The Ques-tion of Democracy,” that in monarchy “power was embodied in the person of the prince” who “condensed within his body” the principle of order (1998, 17). The prince’s power, and his body, thus “pointed toward an unconditional,other-worldly pole,” acting as “guarantor” of “the kingdom itself represented asa body, as a substantial unity” (17). But Lefort directs us toward the democraticdemise of this substantive form of power and the rise of “the symbolic charac-ter of power” (1986a, 279) in which “the locus of power becomes an empty place”(1998, 17). This claim has two aspects: first, that “the legitimacy of power isbased on the people” but, second, that “the image of popular sovereignty islinked to the image of an empty place.” In other words, Modern democracyarises with and creates the paradox that democracy lies in the distinction orcontradiction: “power emanates from the people . . . but is the power of nobody”(1986a, 279) because there is no such thing as “the people” or the demos.4 Thepeople does not exist.

This means that Modern democratic power is substanceless, dematerial-ized, or as Lefort claims “purely symbolic” (1998, 17). For Lefort, democracy isnot a substantive or organic unity, but an empty symbolic place, the place leftby the body of the king. Although power itself is not empty or impotent, theplace of power is empty (or again, to use Kristeva’s term, “hollow”), residing inthe lack of a popular will to assume the place that had been occupied by theking’s will. The singular place of power that had been occupied by the sovereignis vacated, replaced by law (i.e., the symbolic form of power) and this rule of lawworks by keeping the content or substance of power empty, by thus being “uni-


versal” (all citizens are equal before the law) and disembodied. Sovereignty isthen situated as a void; it is symbolic rather than substantive. Even if a vestigeor residue remains in the sublation of king into law, the latter has lost its tran-scendent ground. The supposed subject of politics, the people, is thereforemerely a placeholder. Universal suffrage for citizens within a particular na-tion-state means that we are no longer recognized by the law as distinctively em-bodied with a particular political status; for instance, peasant or aristocrat, manor woman, rural or urban, and so forth. The system of status and privilege givesway to a system of universal rights.

This revolution in citizenship is not unproblematic. As power becomes dis-incorporated, Lefort writes, “democratic society is instituted as a society withouta body” (1998, 18), leading to “the emergence of a purely social society” (18; em-phasis added) while at the same time dissolving social bonds in favor of statis-tics such that “number replaces substance” (19). This is the moment that Foucaultdiagnoses as the movement from juridical sovereignty to biopower. The paradoxhere is that the dissolution of social status actually dissolves politics in favor ofsociety, opening the reign of “the good of all,” in which democratic politics takesas its mission the flourishing of life, and thereby smuggles the body back in.Power, in the sanctimonious propensity of democracy to sustain a belief in itsown integrity, harmony, and moral supremacy, becomes identified with society,“is declared to be social power” (284) and thus “ceases to designate an emptyplace” (285). The logic of democracy thus reverses itself as democratic sover-eignty becomes difficult to distinguish from biopower and the management oradministration of populations. The moment of the juridical nation-state is thusephemeral, passing fleetingly between pre-Modern forms of government andpostpolitical forms of managing the life of peoples and societies. Why is this so?

Arendt points to the “vicious circle” of legislation, namely, that “those whoget together to constitute a new government are themselves unconstitutional”(1963, 183–184). Before the law, there is no law. From whence does the legiti-macy of “the fundamental law” arise (184)? Kristeva is right when she answersin the affirmative the question whether for Arendt “the search for political re-newal, that is, for a secularized humanity, is tantamount to what was onceknown as transcendence” (2001, 165), but she perhaps misunderstands her ownclaim. For Arendt does not wish to replace the transcendence of gods or historywith “the people” or some such secular concept. She is seeking instead to cometo terms with Modernity’s legitimation crisis, the impossibility of replacing theloss of transcendence, and with the danger that that impossibility will, by pro-voking atavistic but potent and compelling attachments, yet simultaneously iso-lating us from a common world, produce either a monochromatic social life andidentity or an impossible ideal of wholeness that will result in totalitarianism.From a psychoanalytic perspective, we can consider these the “once-promisingfantasies” that emerge from “the breaking up of national, political, and religiousbonds” and “that prove to be deadly strains of fanaticism” (136). This form of

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homelessness, this loss of ground (both in the literal sense of refugees forced intostatelessness and in the slightly more metaphorical sense of the death of tran-scendence) provides a crucial key to considering how the uncanniness of ourown drives and their phantasmatic and often self-destructive quest for satisfac-tion is bound to the fear of groundlessness and the desire for a secure place inthe world, for a home.5 But given our psychic and political need for safe haven,what bonds are possible or necessary to both legitimate and sustain the Mod-ern nation-state?

Let me approach this question and its alliance with the question of secular-ism obliquely at first, through Arendt’s criticism of Roussseau. Arendt takesRousseau to task for both his notion of the general will and his notion of natu-ral compassion. As Arendt characterizes Rousseau, he understands that “to putthe law above man and thus to establish the validity of man-made laws, il faudraitdes dieux, ‘one actually would need gods’” (1963, 184). But Rousseau resolves thisconundrum with the notion of the general will. The will of the people is singu-lar, lacking plurality, turning many into one. Arendt writes that “the shift fromthe republic to the people meant that the enduring unity of the future politicalbody was guaranteed not in the worldly institutions which this people had incommon, but in the will of the people themselves” (76), producing the idea of“the nation as a body driven by one will” (76), that is, an organic unity. Hence,according to Arendt, the French Revolution merely replaces the body of the kingwith the body of the people as one: “the men of the French Revolution put thepeople into the seat of the king” (156) and thereby deified the people (183). Thepeople, in other words, remains a theocratic idea, emerging not as an emptyplaceholder, but as a site of fullness, harmony, and singularity, a site of transcen-dence. The will of the people, “the general will” of Rousseau or Robespierre is stillthe divine Will, transubstantiated, this will[-]made flesh.

Moreover, the result of this concept of will is that “an enemy existed withinthe breast of each citizen, namely, in his particular will and interest” (1963, 78;emphasis added)—the particularity of our wills becomes the common enemyand this Arendt takes as the origin of “terror” (79), the idea that “the commonenemy resides in everybody’s hearts” (79). Rousseau is thus complicit with Robes-pierre’s “terror of virtue” (79) where we must be permanently “suspicious” of “our innermost motives” lest we be “hypocrites” (97). Such a view turns the selfinto a natural enemy and makes of compassion the birth of terror and terror thefruit of compassion. Arendt thus claims that “the passion of compassion hashaunted and driven the best men” (71). The general will, while defiantly not thesum total of private wills, nonetheless returns us to an introverted contemplationof the state of our personal souls, removing us from the community of appear-ances into the pathology of expiation and interiority. Ironically, the general willnecessitates the absence of others and immersion in the self if only to immolateit. We are no longer concerned with the world, but have become otherworldlyin our focus on inner life and dispositions. It should be clear, therefore, that


Arendt is not seeking to idolize secularized humanity as a transcendent value, butis, in fact, attacking this tendency within humanist political philosophies (andMarx could be included as an example here as well).

Arendt’s sustained critique of Rousseau and the French Revolution can becompared both to her more favorable outlook on the American Revolution andto her very different assessment of the violence involved in the founding of lawlaid out in the introduction to On Revolution. This introduction concludes bystating that “in the beginning was a crime” (1963, 20)6 and that “whateverbrotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, what-ever political organization men may have achieved has its origin in crime” (20).Arendt’s point here is twofold: first, that “a political realm does not automati-cally come into being wherever men live together” (19), that is, that the politi-cal is not something natural or innate but requires an event; and second, that thisprepolitical event preliminary to the advent of a polis will always be violent,creating order out of chaos (nomos out of anomos). The question of legitimacyis thus the question of beginning, of origin, and that question cannot be evadedwith reference to inner nature, especially to any evocation of a benign inner na-ture. Arendt is opposed to the idea of a natural or even artificial demos, premisedon a notion of the unity of a people, that would provide the seamless ground forits own law, instead noting that law arises out of that which it cannot contain,a prepolitical violence, and that citizenship does not presuppose natural equal-ity but is the artifice of an isonomic form of government, where each is equallyruler and ruled. This view is adamantly secular in its disregard of the soul.

The tradition of political philosophy proposes to answer the question, Howmight we live in peace with one another? If we turn to Hobbes, peace is a prob-lem because of our selfish nature, but this is also the solution to that problemsince we find within ourselves natural laws (corresponding to rational self-interest in self-preservation) that lead us to seek peace. If we turn to Rousseau,we have a different problem because, though we are at peace in nature, we aresolitary and do not live together. If, for Hobbes, in the state of nature we livetogether but are at war, for Rousseau we live in peace but do so in isolation. ForHobbes, the creation of artificial institutions gives us the means by which wemight transform our natures, becoming capable of new powers, especially thosethat depend on cooperation. As we have already seen, Arendt is contemptuousof Rousseau’s understanding of compassion and of his dissolution of the publicrealm into the inner workings of the soul. The Hobbesian idea of a new worldorder, created artificially through institutions might be somewhat more palat-able, but he continues to hold not only a view of human nature that is mecha-nistic and determinist, leaving no room for natality and new beginnings (1958,300), but also a conceptual hold on absolute rule rooted “in the image of divinepower” (1966, 171).

Regardless of who one takes as a starting point, this tradition of politicalphilosophy has always hinged on a theory of human nature (this is true with

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Locke and Hume as well). Each begins with a presuppostion about the natureof man; for example, innocent or acquisitive, solitary or competitive, love of selfor love of glory. Such a conception, any conception of human nature in thisvein, supposes that politics can be built on a given “what” rather than be creativeof a “who.” It is here, crucially, that Arendt departs from the political traditionin refusing to posit a theory of human nature. She instead discusses the humancondition (worldliness, plurality, temporality) and the human capacity for na-tality that allows us a second birth in which we might disclose and become aunique “who” “in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is—his qualities, gifts,talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide” (1958, 179). This“who,” as Kristeva reminds us, “arrives in the midst of life’s conditions . . . as anexcess [that] is achieved through a constant attack on biological life, against themetabolism with nature” (2001, 174).

In reading Arendt, Kristeva is interested in the revolutionary political pos-sibilities of this “revelation of a ‘who’” (2001, 230) that can never be reduced toan egoic or predicated “what” where the latter is allied with, as Kristeva puts it,“social appearance and biological attributes” (172).7 While the weakest parts ofKristeva’s text on Arendt delve into cheap psychobiography (e.g., interpretingArendt’s political and philosophical commitments on the basis of her relationwith her mother), and while Kristeva is for the most part more suggestive thanargumentative about the benefit to Arendt’s political philosophy of a concept ofthe unconscious, it is nonetheless clear that this unconscious has nothing to dowith the innermost recesses of the soul, discussed earlier, but rather with thesymbolic space of the psyche that simultaneously enables, refracts, and solidi-fies but also disables, obscures, and dissolves the symbolic space of politics. Kris-teva thus provides a critical supplement to Arendt’s account of the “who” ofpolitics, of the relation between citizen and self, citizen and polis, and citizenand foreigner. And this has nothing to do with the political tolerating its for-eigners, which assumes that the polis is a unity, a one or totality, but rather withthe polis itself as divided and yet defined, porous yet bounded.

In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt writes strikingly of theact of judgment as an enlargement of the mind that involves taking the other intooneself. Yet she is quite specific that this act is not one of empathy and that em-pathy would in fact be a hindrance to the disinterest required, merely substitut-ing or multiplying interest, rather than dissolving it (1982, 43). The enlargementof the mind is not driven by affect, but is a disinterested act of the imagination.Arendt thus posits a relation of the other within that is a necessary basis for po-litical life and yet that is nonetheless solitary without being firmly bounded orlimited. This otherness within is related to the solitude of thinking that Arendtdescribes as being two-in-one and in both cases we might posit this otherness asa unique form of productive or creative disidentification and a move away fromegoic boundaries. Writing in support of Arendt’s account of judgment, Kristevahopes it provides an alternative to the rationalism and quest for knowledge of


contemporary political theory (a barb she aims at Habermas in particular), andeven more she suggests that it shares a kinship with “a theory of the uncon-scious,” a claim she recognizes as “radical” (2001, 230).

Kristeva insists adamantly that Arendt’s accounts of thinking and judgingreveal “the fundamental estrangement of the thinker” (2001, 192). Kristeva, inother words, interprets Arendt’s idea of the solitary thinker who is always a“two-in-one,” as commensurate with (though not equivalent to) the “originalsplit” (194) or “original duality” exposed by the unconscious (193), a split thatshe considers both “endogenous” and “endemic” to the psyche (194). Kristevaalso approvingly cites Arendt’s disdain for “the futility of the fashionable searchfor identity” (193; Arendt 1981, 187).

This returns us to the idea of the symbolic from a different perspective, interms of a “split in the thinking ego” as Kristeva puts it (2001, 194). For Kris-teva, the symbolic acts as a triangulation of both social and egoic relationships,each of which is fundamentally dyadic. The promise of the symbolic is to moveus away from the imaginary security and trap of identity, compensating for thisloss with a kind of psychic freedom or movement that can only be sustainedwithin language and law. By rendering both psychic and social identity less rigid,less likely to stay stopped in place, the symbolic provides the mediation of move-ment or the movement of mediation that keeps us capable of new beginnings.

We can now juxtapose Arendt’s reading of Rousseau with her reading ofthe American founding fathers. According to Arendt, the American revolution-aries, although they may have maintained rhetorical allegiance to the idea of di-vine authority, nonetheless acted as if “laying down the law was pre-political,prior to the existence of the polis, the city-state, just as building the walls aroundthe city was prior to the coming into existence of the city itself ” (1963, 186).Rather than conflating law with power, with the people as the source of both, theAmericans thus located the source of law in something worldly and stable, likethe walls of a city, a written document (157). The authority of positive laws thusderives not directly from the people but from a more fundamental law, the con-stitution. This is why Arendt reminds us that the law (nomos) is, etymologically,related to wall (nemein) (1958, 63); it establishes and distributes the boundariesbetween households, and between the public and private realms, preserving thepublic space of appearances, and making possible a city or political community(64). The law does not shield us from one another (as in liberalism where the aimis to keep politics out of private individual life, a life that is assumed to be directedby its author and defined by its predicates), but establishes an expanse that we canenter together like the walls of a room that give us a public space.

Arendt both favors constitutional law as the source of authority and rec-ognizes the import of positive laws, in their changeability. Positive laws are nec-essary to mediate between the permanence of legitimating authority and theimpermanence and temporal uncertainty of human life, of the “ever changingactions of men” (1966, 463). But, Arendt argues, having followed the route of

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Rousseau and the French Revolution, Modernity has become mass society inwhich humans are “imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experi-ence, which does not cease to be singular if the same experience is multipliedinnumerable times . . . [but] permitted to present itself in only one perspective”(1958, 58). We seek “goodness” rather than “excellence” (73–78) and in this weseek something that cannot appear and is fundamentally worldless.

This distinction between goodness and excellence becomes especially crit-ical when considered in light of the last chapter of Origins of Totalitarianismand its critique of the totalitarian dissolution of positive law into fantasies oftranscendence, the realization of heaven on earth. Totalitarian movement,Arendt writes, benefits from the idea of disagreements “beyond the power ofreason.” By exploding “the very alternative . . . between lawful and lawless gov-ernment, between arbitrary and legitimate power” (1966, 461), totalitarianismmanages to be arbitrary but not lawless since “far from being ‘lawless,’ it goes tothe sources of authority from which positive laws received their ultimate legit-imation” (461), that is, nature, history, God, promising “the rule of justice onearth” (462). Its “defiance of positive laws” rests on a claim to “a higher form oflegitimacy,” namely, “the laws of Nature or of History” (462). Arendt considersthis recourse to authority “monstrous” since it dissolves the “discrepancy be-tween legality and justice” (462), and sacrifices “everybody’s vital immediate in-terests” (461) in favor of a higher notion of their good in which the humanspecies is transformed into “the embodiment of law” (462) with which they arefully, totally, identified. Arendt here clearly gestures toward the limits of democ-racy and the asymptotic movement of law toward justice. Instead of a nomos orpositive law that, like four walls, provides a stable frame for the movements andtransformations of human beings, “terror is the realization of the law of move-ment . . . [that] seeks to ‘stabilize’ men” (463) by having the law itself be con-stantly in flux and unstable. Terror thus renders men immobile and isolated(incapable of both action and of sharing a common world) because it destabi-lizes the source of authority.

Arendt thus identifies in the totalitarian process not a new form of gov-ernment or a seizure of power, but an antipolitics, “a movement that is con-stantly kept in motion: namely the permanent domination of each singleindividual in each and every sphere of life” where the aim is “to set and keep [thepeople] in motion” (1966, 326). While the constancy or continuity of law en-courages the possibility of human spontaneity and action, the “monstrous” ab-solutization of Law fully realized—“totalitarian lawfulness pretends to havefound a way to establish the rule of justice on earth” (462)—by keeping law per-manently on the move erodes the human ability to act. Instead, human beingsare either/both rendered immobile, fixed, rigidified, or are themselves put intothe permanent motion of “behavior.” In any case, the movement here is anti-thetical to action and serves not to disclose agents but to atomize and isolate individuals in a state of perpetual motion.


It is in this context that Arendt discusses isolation as “the psychologicalbasis for total domination” (1966, 323). Once rendered homeless (literally state-less or figuratively uprooted—suffering the loss of traditional values and sta-tus), a human being, according to Arendt, can derive “his sense of having a placein the world only from his belonging to a movement” (324), from finding someform of attachment to its arbitrariness and becoming part of it. Given the needfor some affective social bond, ideology provides the only cement available. Ide-ology then replaces the everyday, common, mundane world with unwaveringloyalty and holds the individual to itself even while being devoured. Even as itslogic of identification promises security, it can nonetheless only be a practice ofself-effacement. As “the logic of an idea” (469), ideology defies both commonsense and the world of experience and is closed to persuasion. Its workings aredeductive, not deliberative, and it thus carries the violent force of necessity thatnothing can elude. Once the ideological premise (History or Nature) is set inmotion, everything follows inevitably from it. The logic of ideology is thus alsothe logic of reattachment or, as Kristeva puts it, it is “a paranoid delusion thatseeks to compensate for social atomization” (2001, 136). By providing some-thing to cling to in the face of a lost common world, it thus also, paradoxically,binds many into one, eradicating plurality. In making this conceptual connec-tion between ideology and isolation, Arendt astutely points to the threat posedby a world released from law and citizenship.

How then can we think politically human instability and its relation to law?As we have seen, unlike the social contract theorists, Kristeva, and psychoana-lytic theory generally, gives us an entirely different way of conceptualizing“human nature,” one that presupposes neither innocence nor avarice, nor anyother substantive binary. Instead, Kristeva offers a conception of the drives andtheir relation to language, a notion of the unconscious and of the symbolic thatsupplements Arendt’s analysis as well as Lefort’s. By allowing us to recognizesymbolic (and violent) processes within both psychical and political formations,we can characterize both the subject and the polis as neither self-identical, norhomogenous, nor at one with itself. Neither subject nor polis seeks, or merelyseeks, its own good and each is equally foreign to itself and horrified by its for-eigners. The political experience of strangeness, especially as it is knotted to thepsychical strangeness we experience within ourselves, sheds light on the im-possible task of civilization: living peacefully with others and doing so (withinthe confines of nation-states) without repressing the violence that is “the ulti-mate condition of our being with others” (1991, 192).

Kristeva herself is stymied by the question, “[T]he rights of man or therights of the citizen?” (97). In reflecting on “the distinction that sets the citizenapart from the man,” she claims the result to be the “deadlock” of the Modernnation-state (97). Citizenship, by definition, always implies limited rather thanuniversal citizenship and thus within its essence is contained the difficulty of the foreigner, the one who is a man but not a citizen. As Kristeva incisively

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wonders, does this not mean that “he who is not a citizen is not fully a man?”(98). Kristeva points out that there is a slippage between man and citizen in theDeclaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, one that obliquely acknowledges thepolitical reality of nation-states and the impossibility of “natural egalitarianism”even while purporting to assert it (148–149). Equality is thus, from the outsetof its Modern theoretical and political origins, a fundamentally political attrib-ute: “the free and equal man is, de facto, the citizen” (149).

Kristeva finds this political state of affairs “regrettable” and notes its “draw-backs” (1991, 150); in allying herself with Arendt (150), however, she seems tomiss precisely Arendt’s neo-Burkean point, that in fact the “rights of man” arehelpless when faced with those “who are not citizens of a sovereign state” (150).Arendt writes that “no paradox of contemporary politics is filled with morepoignant irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning ideal-ists who stubbornly insist on regarding as ‘inalienable’ those human rights, whichare enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, andthe situation of the rightless themselves” (1966, 279). Arendt, in other words,seems to understand quite well, the pessimistic truth (which Kristeva tries toevade) that one does not “belong to mankind” when “one is not a citizen” (1991,150). Indeed “the loss of a polity itself expels [the human] from humanity” (1966,297). The phenomenon of statelessness makes manifest the fragility of civiliza-tion, and our own dependence on artificial human institutions.

Arendt believes that the loss of citizenship (the “right to have rights” [1966,296]) corresponds to a loss of humanity; it is not, according to Arendt, thathuman beings have natural rights, but that the artifice of rights is necessary torender us human, that is, citizens. As Arendt herself witnessed, “the concep-tion of human rights, based on the assumed existence of a human being as such,broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it werefor the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other quali-ties and specific relationships—except that they were still human. The worldfound nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human” (299). Arendtmocks the pious rhetoric of those who cling to human rights as bearing “an un-canny similarity in language and composition to that of societies for the pre-vention of cruelty to animals” (292).

While Kristeva allies the “barbarity” of National Socialism with the “verycore of the nation-state system” (1991, 151), Arendt allies it instead with its break-down and transience. Kristeva retains the “rights of man” as an immanent princi-ple “of universal dignity” (152) that has symbolic and ethical value beyond politicaland historical dynamics of strife and barbarity.8 At the same time, and in my viewtrying to have it both ways at once, she wants to wrest human dignity from “theeuphoria of classic humanists” to see it “laden with the alienations, dramas, anddead ends of our condition as speaking beings” (154). In this idea of a “cos-mopolitanism interior to the nation-states” (154), Kristeva appears to prevaricateon Arendt’s more honest insight that we can never be world citizens and that the


plurality of nation-states is the best that we can hope for. Citizenship, and notcompassion, is a better guarantee, or at least promise, of dignity and respect.

If we have lost an appeal to transcendent authority, to absolute justificationof the laws within which we live, then we live without guarantee or stablebedrock. If instead we erect the “good of all” in the place of this transcendentauthority, we are in danger of loving too much our social status (no matter whatit is), of escaping from politics by taking refuge in the social (and in identity) andof retheologizing our own human status in the name of humanism. This socialworld of “whats” rather than “whos,” of predicated identities already positioned,renders self-disclosure, and hence politics, if not impossible or obsolete, then atserious risk. In place of god, we now have humanism as our transcendent valueand hence the all-pervasive rise of the management and fostering of life. Herewe have the perverse convergence of theocracy, global capitalism, and institu-tional depoliticization, all promising justice on earth through the eradicationof the distinction between public and private realms and the digestion of a com-mon world by the administrative care of need. Romanticized cosmopolitanismor appeal to a universal demos is not an antidote to either liberalism or theoc-racy but a variant of them. The alternative is the agonal equality of excellencepremised on a plurality of perspectives and honest about the tension betweenequality and freedom. The “pessimism” that acknowledges that “each ‘who’ isdriven by its inherent impossibility of being” must, according to Kristeva, ac-company any hope for fostering political bonds and tolerating their fragility(2001, 239). Working through the political, like working through the psyche,would then be an interminable and nonutopian process, permanently grapplingwith the insoluble trauma of loss. If the demos is neither the premise nor thepromise of politics, the ways in which democracy broaches its own limits mightreveal its immanent and insistent dangers. This involves accepting the tragicview that neither happiness nor “life is the highest good” (Arendt 1963, 64).And that may not be such a bad thing.

Notes

I first formulated many of the ideas presented here at an NEH Summer Semi-nar on Hannah Arendt in the summer of 2005, led by Russell Berman and JuliaHell. I thank them as well as my fellow participants in the seminar, especiallyStephen Schulman and Edward Dickinson, for their thoughtful comments.

1. For a discussion of the distinction between status and contract and thetransformation of one to the other, see Pateman (1988).

2. Kristeva writes that “in direct contrast to the reconciliation of man in hisisolation in the face of God . . . psychoanalytic anamnesis reveals that perma-nent conflict is a precursor of psychic life” (citing Arendt 1958, 37). This

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tension also corresponds to that between immortality and eternity that Arendtdiscusses in The Human Condition (1958, 17–21).

3. Liberalism assumes a substantive and self-identical subject endowedwith a free will; in spite of its friction with democracy, it is because of this sharedidea of the subject that we can still talk about liberal democracy.

4. The idea of a homogenous people sharing a general will (as in Rousseau)is, as we shall see, a significant target of Arendt’s philosophical and political ire.

5. The link between Modern statelessness or homelessness and Freud’sidea of the uncanny (unheimlich) is something I will pursue further in a longerwork of which this is a chapter.

6. We might find this claim uncannily similar to Freud’s analysis in Totemand Taboo (1913).

7. Here we can clearly distinguish between social appearance and politi-cal appearance: only the latter is linked to the “plurality of the world” (Kristeva2001, 172), while the former is constituted through an isolating conformity.

8. Lefort (1986b) makes a similar point in defense of human rights and their political status, though more carefully elaborated and rigorously de-veloped. In contrast, Giorgio Agamben (1998), Alain Badiou (2001), andMichael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) all raise compelling argumentsagainst human rights.

ReferencesAgamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.———. 1963. On Revolution. New York: Viking.———. 1966. Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt.———. 1981. The Life of the Mind. Orlando, FL: Harcourt.———. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics. New York: Verso.Foucault, Michel. 1978. History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York:

Vintage.———. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews, 1972–1977. Ed. Colin

Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books.Freud, Sigmund. 1913. Totem and Taboo. The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13. Trans. James Strachey.London: Hogarth Press.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York:Columbia University Press.


———. 1993. Nations without Nationalism. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York:Columbia University Press.

———. 2000. Crisis of the European Subject. Trans. Susan Fairfield. New York:Other Press.

———. 2001. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press.

Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Ecrits. Ed. and trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton.Lefort, Claude. 1986a. “The Logic of Totalitarianism.” The Political Forms of

Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.———. 1986b. “Politics and Human Rights.” The Political Forms of Modern

Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.———. 1998. “The Question of Democracy.” Democracy and Political Theory.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-

sity Press.

yanulada


13

Kristeva’s Uncanny Revolution:Imagining the Meaning of Politics

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Jeff Edmonds

How can we make our thinking more political? What would political revoltlook like today? Where would it take place? What, particularly, would it over-come? And what sort of society would we hope to achieve by means of this re-volt? In short, what is the meaning of politics?

That these questions fascinate us today is a certainty. The question of thepolitical has dominated intellectual discourse in recent years. What is the mean-ing of this political turn in intellectual thought? One way to begin an answer tothis question is to turn to a thinker who has openly resisted this move to politi-cal thinking. Julia Kristeva’s work never shies away from the most fundamental po-litical problems of the day—her work has contributed much to feminist theory,to cosmopolitan political theory, and to political questions about immigration,excluded communities, and terrorism. Yet, in spite of the apparent political rele-vance of Kristeva’s work, her own relationship to the political is uneasy at best. In-deed, despite this discomfort with the idea of being a political thinker—perhapsbecause of this discomfort—Kristeva constantly finds herself having to explainand address the political element of her work. Perhaps her ambivalence toward thepolitical is best expressed in the following excerpt from an interview with RosalindCoward. Here she responds to the statement by Coward that “some of your [Kris-teva’s] more recent statements about politics have been bewildering” (2002, 341).Kristeva replies that

I suppose we have a new religion which is not only sex—which maybe important but also very pleasant and not dangerous—we have a

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religion which is politics. We think that everything is political. Whenwe say political we say something which cannot be analyzed, it’s thefinal act. This is political . . . stop. It’s tremendously important thisfinal enigma, which is politics. (2002, 343)

While this reply is a response to Coward, it certainly is not intended to re-lieve her sense of bewilderment. In fact, Kristeva’s response here places bewil-derment at the heart of the political, suggesting that politics today is, in fact,“something which cannot be analyzed . . . this final enigma” (2002, 343). More-over, Kristeva suggests here that it is precisely because politics is enigmatic thatit is tremendously important.

On the other hand, however, Kristeva is frustrated by the way in whichreaders want to receive her work politically from the outset, as if its entire valuecould be captured by its political dimension. It is in this moment that the po-litical takes the form of fundamentalism, as that which cannot be analyzed. Shesees the repetition of the political in the vacuous form of political correctnessand the constant question of how her work is related to the political as sort ofmeaningless and passionless fetishization of politics. Kristeva fears that this de-sire to see everything through the lens of politics will lead to a mystical or spir-itual crisis. In the same interview, Kristeva states that what is needed is

more of a questioning about the discourse that can take the place ofthis religious discourse which is cracking now. And I don’t think po-litical discourse can take its place. . . . If we stay with only a politicalexplanation of human phenomena we will be overwhelmed by theso-called mystical crisis, or spiritual crisis—that happens, it’s a reality.Every bourgeois family has a son or daughter who has a mystical cri-sis—it’s understandable because of this very simple schematic expla-nation of such phenomenon as love or desire simply by politics. (2002,343–344)

Indeed, our very familiarity or heimlichkeit with the political—our tendencyto gauge the adequacy of a work in terms of “the political” as if we knew fromthe beginning what shape or substance the political takes—threatens to coverover the uncanniness or unheimlichkeit of the political.1 Kristeva’s refusal to an-swer directly the question of whether her work is “political” is no rejection ofpolitics. It is a rejection of the simplistic and fetishistic repetition of the polit-ical as a criterion for thinking.

The thought here is that the almost neurotic repetition of the call to poli-tics heard in the intellectual world today is a symptom of a deeper problem.The ubiquity of the political question and the lack of subtlety with respect tothe political is a sign of its inability to represent human experience fully. Thevery repetition of the political question represents the failure of the political

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discourse to give meaning to human problems. If this is true, then, perhaps thedomain of politics has moved beyond politics. Kristeva puts it like this:

So my problem is: how, through psychoanalysis or something else likeart, through such discourses can we try to develop a more complicatedelaboration, discourse, sublimation of these critical points of thehuman experience, which cannot be reduced to a political causality.(2002, 344)

In short, Kristeva gives us an analytic approach to politics. She is interested inasking why the question of the political is so familiar to us rather than with ad-dressing the political directly. While this analytic approach to the political is cer-tainly not immediately recognizable to a traditional political thinker, her writingsare also not a naive rejection of the question of the political. I hope to indicate, infact, quite the opposite. Kristeva’s analysis of the political does certainly call thepolitical into question, but this questioning of the political is in no way an aban-donment of it; on the contrary, it is an attempt to reinvigorate political discourse—to give it meaning by bringing it into relation to experience and imagination.

I would like to suggest, in short, that Kristeva’s complicated relationship tothe political shows the way toward a more vibrant conception of politics. By work-ing through the problematic of Kristeva’s relationship to the political, I hope tobe able to articulate a way of engaging her work that requires neither the rejec-tion of her work as apolitical, nor an immediate embrace of her as a politicalthinker. Indeed, it is her ability to occupy an ethical space on the margin of pol-itics—neither absolutely political nor apolitical—that allows her to more effec-tively criticize the sorts of fundamentalism that threaten the very connectionbetween politics and intellectual life today. Kristeva’s analytic ethic provides a formof unity better suited to democratic community than the forms of solidarity of-fered by traditional political theory. Hers is a community found through the workof imagination, interpretation, and analysis, rather than in allegiance to an ideal.

From Fundamentalism to the Uncanny: An Analytic Ethic in Strangers to OurselvesKristeva’s analytic ethic is elaborated through a criticism of fundamentalism.Of course, political fundamentalism is not the only sort of fundamentalism thatthreatens the possibility of a more adequate political language. Fundamental-ism is perhaps the most recurrent problem within today’s political horizon. Fromthe Christian right to Islamic suicide bombers, the fundamentalist drives polit-ical discourse (or the lack thereof ) today.2 Though Kristeva was writing beforethe events of 9/11, her analysis of fundamentalism resonates even more clearlytoday. In Strangers to Ourselves, she describes fundamentalism as “purely

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symbolic,” a sort of emptied ritual.3 The bonds of the fanatical religious com-munity are “cemented by pure, hard fantasies” (1991, 24). She writes, “Funda-mentalists are more fundamental when they have lost all material ties, inventingfor themselves a ‘we’ that is purely symbolic; lacking a soil it becomes rooted inritual until it reaches its essence, which is sacrifice” (24).

The argument here is complex. Stripped of “all material ties,” the funda-mentalists are essentially adrift. They are a community of foreigners, but theirforeignness is absolute. Having been excluded from all other communities, theyinvent a “we” that has no basis other than that of exclusion. Kristeva puts it thisway: “As enclave of the other within the other, otherness becomes crystallized aspure ostracism: the foreigner excludes before being excluded, even more than heis being excluded” (1991, 24). The hardness of the cemented fundamentalist bondsthat allow for the tightness of the community also cement the ostracization ofthe foreigner. Their very impenetrability is a sign of their emptiness. Their insideis cement. And yet these bonds are formed on the basis of a previous exclusion.4

This logic of fundamentalism, the emptiness of its ritual, the firmness of itsdogma, and its lack of interpretation leads to its essence, which is death. Onerecognizes a sort of Hegelian thought here. The purity of the fundamentalist’sfantasy can only manifest itself in her willingness to sacrifice everything for herfantasy. That is, the universality of the fantasy is its essential emptiness. Thepurely symbolic becomes rooted in ritual alone and eventually reaches its essenceas emptiness—sacrifice and death. The question thus becomes how to disruptthe absolutism of the fundamentalist that manifests itself in the tight link between ideology and death.5

Kristeva finds resources to address this issue in Freud’s short work, “TheUncanny.” In this work, Kristeva writes, Freud shows that “in the very word,heimlich, the familiar and the intimate are reversed into their opposites, broughttogether with the contrary meaning of ‘uncanny strangeness’ harbored in un-heimlich” (1991, 182). In other words, the meaning of the familiar is constitutedby a sort of strangeness, and vice versa. “Consequently therefore,” writes Kristeva,“that which is strangely uncanny would be that which was (the past tense is im-portant) familiar and, under certain conditions (which ones?), emerges” (183).

Indeed, the political question of how to engage the absolutist fundamen-talist may be asked in the following fashion: Under what conditions might one’smost familiar belief appear strange? Or under which conditions does the un-canny emerge? And what should our reaction be to this emergence? Freud writesthat “whatever reminds us of this inner repetition-compulsion is perceived as un-canny” (1919/1953, 391). What would remind us of this, of the vacuous eter-nal recurrence of the repetition-compulsion? How might the fundamentalist beable to see the uncanny emptiness of her most meaningful rituals?

It is in response to this question that Kristeva develops her ethics of analy-sis. For Freud, Kristeva explains, it is the confrontation with death that pro-duces the feeling of the uncanny. Kristeva writes that “the fear of death dictates


an ambivalent attitude: we imagine ourselves surviving (religions promise immortality), but death just the same remains the survivor’s enemy, and it ac-companies him in his new existence. Apparitions and ghosts represent that am-biguity and fill with uncanny strangeness our confrontations with the image ofdeath” (1991, 185). Precisely, here, at the heart of the emptiness of fundamen-talism, then, Kristeva locates a sort of uncanny possibility. Indeed, the simulta-neous contradiction between and proximity of the suicide bomber and herdream of immortality produces a sense of the uncanny. The fantasy of the sui-cide bomber, that through her death she might overcome her death, can lead tothe horrific realization of the uncanny.

It is at this moment that Kristeva locates a sort of ethical choice. The ap-pearance of the uncanny, whether in the approach of a strange foreigner or inthe coincidence of death and immortality in the form of the suicide bomber,leads to two possibilities of confrontation. The first possibility is to meet the un-canny with analysis: with curiosity and imagination. The second possibility is torefuse the uncanny: with fear and abjection.6 Kristeva puts it this way:

On the one hand, the sense of strangeness is a mainspring to identifi-cation with the other, by working out its depersonalizing impact bymeans of astonishment. . . . And yet the uncanny strangeness can alsobe evacuated: “No, that doesn’t bother me; I laugh or take action—I goaway, I shut my eyes, I strike, I command . . .” Such an elimination ofthe strange could lead to an elimination of the psyche, leaving, at thecost of mental impoverishment, the way open to acting out, includingparanoia and murder. (1991, 190)

It is in this choice that Kristeva identifies her ethic of psychoanalysis. If the costof the universal is always exclusion of the foreigner and if the heimlichkeit can onlybe constructed on the basis of unheimlichkeit, then there is a sense in which the oneis always present in the other. It is only by abjecting the foreign completely thatone could arrive at the sort of empty ideology, the elimination of psychic space,that would lead to terror activities. In a swift dialectical move, Kristeva locatesthe terror of the terrorist fundamentalist within. But what the fundamentalist ismost terrified of, what she must exclude completely is the unheimlichkeit of herdeed. It is only on the basis of the exclusion of the uncanny that the certainty ofconviction can pave the way for the actualization of the death drive.

What is needed instead is deferral, displacement, sublimation. This wouldonly come if the uncanny were recognized as an imaginative possibility, as an“astonishment” or wonder that calls for analysis. This is what Kristeva meanswhen she writes:

To discover our disturbing otherness, for that indeed is what bursts into confront that “demon,” that threat, that apprehension generated by

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the projective apparition of the other at the heart of what we persist inmaintaining as a proper, solid, “us.” By recognizing our uncannystrangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the out-side. . . . The ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics: it would involvea cosmopolitanism of a new sort that . . . might work for a mankindwhose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious—desiring, destructive, fearful, empty, impossible. (1991, 192)

The ethical duty that would provide for “a mankind whose solidarity is foundedon the consciousness of his unconscious” elaborated here would be a constantanalysis of the forms of rejection that must take place for the “us” to be formed.This analysis would be desirous in that it would call for a curiosity toward whathad been rejected, destructive in that it could not possibly fully articulate theloss of those rejected, fearful in that it would have to confront the reasons whyit had rejected the others, empty in that it would be a mere sublimation or rep-resentation of the loss, and impossible in that for all of the above reasons, the lostor repressed other would surely return.

We could say that the solidarity that Kristeva offers here is political, but theanalytic ethic is not the solidarity of traditional political theory. Because theunity of this solidarity is founded on an ethic of analysis, on a working out orworking through of forms of social unity and exclusion, the unity it provides isnot theoretical, but one of practice. It is a kind of politics in-process/on trial. Sheoffers no a priori theory of politics, but a practice of political analysis. For thisreason, it is “far removed from a call to brotherhood, about which one has al-ready ironically pointed out its debt to paternal and divine authority—‘In orderto have brothers there must be a father’” (1991, 192). Through her idea of animaginary politics, Kristeva attempts to give us a picture of politics beyondbrotherhood—and also beyond paternalism, authority, and political theory astraditionally construed. Kristeva’s notion of solidarity is not organized arounda controlling ideal, but around an analytic practice. It is not grounded in a mean-ing, but in the constructions and reconstructions of the political imaginary.

This point is most evident in Kristeva’s style. Her work cannot be judged ac-cording to its theoretical completeness, for she is not interested in giving a finaland comprehensive theory of politics. The politics of her work is found in its ef-fects on our own conception of how a political theory should work. Her writingsoperate on the boundary of the political as a sort of play that entices us beyondthe political, that shows us a new space into which politics might move and be-come something else. In short, instead of asking the imagination to answer to thedemands of politics, she asks politics to yield to imagination. Instead of imagi-nation and philosophy serving politics, Kristeva calls for a politics that is imag-inative. She works to identify the concept of the political itself with animaginative analytics. On the one hand, this identification breaks down the ideathat we could possibly understand what sort of writing was or was not political


from the outset. But on the other hand, this identification of the imaginary with the political provides the possibility of giving new life to both imaginationand politics.

Appetite after the Feast: Toward a Postprandial PoliticsKristeva’s notion of the political as “beyond brotherhood” raises some importantquestions. If politics has been transformed from a more traditional state-centered understanding to a more imaginative, psychic realm, then it seems rea-sonable to ask how one could identify the form of authority in this new politi-cal landscape. If the domain of politics is imaginary, then are the forms ofauthority operative here as well? The question is crucial. If Kristeva’s treatmentof the political is not to be read as a flight from authority into a romantic imag-inary space, it must be read as an engagement with forms of oppression, alien-ation, and suffering in a new realm. What is the relation between this newpolitical realm and the traditional way of understanding political authority?

In other words, we might ask: Is imaginary revolt possible? Against whomwould we revolt? And who are we? To put the question in psychoanalytic terms,if solidarity is not brotherhood, which is to say if “we” are not held together bythe memory of the death of the father, then how really might this solidarity beprovided? In other words, if solidarity always comes through revolt or the over-coming of some authority, then where or what or who is the authority againstwhich this new cosmopolitan politics could be constituted?

It is clear that politics without a discourse of authority is almost unimaginableand most likely irresponsible, but perhaps a healthy answer to this question can befound somewhere between abandonment and fixation. If the difficulty of con-ceiving a kind of solidarity or cosmopolitanism beyond brotherhood rises becauseof our insistence on conceiving this unity in terms of an absolute authority, thenperhaps in working through an analysis, together, of the sources of this conceptionsomething like this solidarity might appear. We can find solidarity in the engage-ment with this problematic.

I take Kristeva to be beginning this task most explicitly in The Sense andNon-sense of Revolt (2000) when she identifies the traditional form of this prob-lematic in the Freudian fable of the founding of the social link with the mur-der of the father in Totem and Taboo (1913). As she already indicated in her callfor solidarity beyond brotherhood, Kristeva suggests here as well that we are atthe limits of the logic of this fable. To understand what a politics beyond broth-erhood might mean, we must look a little more closely at the Totem and Taboomyth, which Kristeva summarizes nicely:

One day, the sons plotted a conspiracy and revolted (there we are!)against the father: they killed him and ate him. After this totemic meal,

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they identified with him, and after this primary ceremony of human-ity, which saw the concomitance of revolt and feast (remember thisconcomitance!), they replaced the dead father with the image of the fa-ther, with the totem symbol of power, the figure of the ancestor. Fromthen on, guilt and repentance cemented the bond, the social pact,among the sons, among the brothers; they felt guilty and banded to-gether as a result of this guilt, and “the dead father became strongerthan the living one had been.” (2000, 12)

In essence, the myth tells the story of the founding of religious conscious-ness. The primitive strength of the father is transformed into a transcendentalpower—“a sense of wrongdoing” (2000, 12). The social link, so the myth goes,was primarily a religious link, worked out through the ritualization of an ideal-ized image of the father. So long as this totem reminds the sons that they killedtheir father, the social bond is maintained through the feeling of guilt and theremembrance of the death of the father through the totemic rite.

At the limits of this logic, however, the bond between the brothers becomesa mere association, and the rituals that memorialized the father become mean-ingless and empty. The ritual of remembrance degenerates into riot on the onehand and empty, fetishistic fundamentalism on the other. At this moment thebasis of the social bond transforms from one based on a common memory toone based on exclusion and sacrifice. We have returned to the moment of fun-damentalism and of the repetition of the political—the clinging to empty ritu-als that require empty sacrifices. Kristeva asks:

Why does one sacrifice? Why does one enter into a religious pact andembrace fundamentalism, of whatever sort? Because Freud tells us, thebenefits we extract from the social contract threaten to disappear “as aresult of the changing conditions of life”: unemployment, exclusion,lack of money, failure in work, dissatisfactions of every kind. From thenon, assimilation into the social link disintegrates; the profit “I” findingmy integration in the socius collapses. What does this profit consist of ?It is nothing other than the “appropriation of paternal attributes.” Inother words, “I” felt flattered to be promoted to the level of someonewho could, if not be the father, at least acquire his qualities, identifywith his power; “I” was not excluded (2000, 14; emphasis added)

Kristeva mentions exclusion here in reference to her analysis of fundamental-ism in Strangers to Ourselves. The logic is precisely the same—because of theloss of material ties, the “profit” of integration into the social collapses. Whatwas once a society governed by the memory of a single authority literally dis-integrates into and through the logic of exclusion. The authority is no longer lo-cated transcendentally and shared equally. Instead, power operates horizontally


between the brothers at the level of normalization: “‘I’ feel excluded; ‘I’ can nolonger locate power, which has become normalizing and falsifiable” (2000, 14).

At this moment, the social bond is based on what both Freud and Kristevacall “filial rebelliousness” (2000, 14). The brothers, having lost the memory ofthe dead father who once united them, turn against each other. This leads to amultiplication of acts of defiance: “Thus we see the development of new at-tempts at rebellion, different from the primary revolt that was the murder of thefather, in the form of religious worship and its pageantry, which today we con-sider aesthetic or artistic. A sacrificial situation is reproduced through which animaginary power (which is not immediately political but has this latent voca-tion) is established and activated” (14). After the death of the father, after theidentification with him, occurs the “concomitance of revolt and feast,” whichKristeva earlier asked us to remember. This is our moment, the passing of thememory of the father into empty, normalizing, and pervertible ritual, into a fan-tastic, tumultuous rebellion. The revolution of the sons turned them into a bandof brothers, but at the limits of this logic, the band disintegrates into a mob—the culture of the spectacle.

Here we are. The memory of the father’s death has been finally killed andwe are all, on the one hand, constantly and frantically, gorging ourselves in thefeast, consuming so quickly that we forget why. The inundation and repetitionof images, spectacle, and hollow ritual has crowded out another possibility: thatof actively and creatively representing this loss together in a politically mean-ingful way. The father has been dispersed, digested, completely consumed. Rev-olution used to be killing the authority of the father and providing for thepossibility of this feast. Now all we have is feasting; the feast characterizes ourmoment: “Perhaps this is where we are: neither guilty nor responsible but con-sequently incapable of revolt” (2000, 15).

What to do now? We cannot bring the father back to life. We understandall too well that he was, in fact, an invention of our imagination, an imaginaryfather. The totem is (was) a hollow ritual. Yet, in a strange way this hollownessand emptiness provides for the possibility of a return of a more democratic solidarity—a solidarity founded not on the basis of paternal authority but on anactive working through of the loss of that authority. The loss of a unified sourceof authority in the form of a religious or secular discourse (God or State as pa-ternal function) uncovers a concealed possibility. At the very moment when thefather’s memory has been lost, the possibility of bringing him back imagina-tively, aesthetically, and artistically has been opened. This imaginary return givesmeaning to revolution today as an analytic, imaginative revolt. The father can-not be brought back to life, but through imagination we can sublimate this loss,this death, instead of actualizing it.

Kristeva’s revolt thus calls for a giving of meaning to the loss of ground orauthority that is involved in the culture of the image and of the spectacle. Itwould be the attempt to keep “filial rebellion” from mob mentality. It will require

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negotiation, discourse, and engagement without the possibility of an end. Instead of a conspiracy against the father, political revolution would be the con-stant and never finished sublimation of the conflict between brothers withoutthe possibility of the return of some final authority. It would require an analy-sis of the social in terms of a familiar memory that has been lost at some pointbut again returns,7 never fully present, unconscious, indeed unheimlich—“a mankind whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its uncon-sciousness” (1991, 192).

Kristeva presents us the challenge of articulating this solidarity through ananalytic ethic. This is the revolutionary and political task she sets out. The spaceof the political is again an imaginary domain: aesthetic, subjective, linguistic,symbolic—in short psychic. Its dangers and forms of authority are operative onthis domain as well. Kristeva puts it this way:

A sacrificial situation is reproduced through which an imaginary power(which is not immediately political but has this latent vocation) is es-tablished and activated. Each participant hopes to satisfy the need toconfront an authority in his/her imagination; it becomes possible notonly to protest indefinitely (the rite is repeated) but also to renew therite, in a way, with the dazzling expenditures that accompany religiouscelebrations: dances, trances, and other festivities inseparable from thescene of the sacrifice. (2000, 14)

The choice is between politics as a repetitive, empty protest (which costs noth-ing) against an imaginary authority or as a sort of jouissance—a celebration withexpenditures, festivities, guests. The difference is subtle, but essential. The ques-tion boils down to who will control our imagination. Will we remain stuckprotesting indefinitely against the same empty image of the father, “pounding ourfists for a while, then changing the channel or falling asleep?”8 Or will we takethe absence of the father as an opportunity to celebrate, to invite others in, toimagine possibilities for encounters with others from different families? Will wefixate on the heimlich, clinging uncannily to a lost family resemblance, or will weinvite the foreigner in on the off chance that he, too, is uncannily familiar?

In short, Kristeva draws the authority of the father (and politics thought interms of this authority) into question in a revolutionary way. She presents thepolitical response to this question as leading to two possibilities. On the onehand the response to this loss of authority could be abjection—a forgetting, adenial of the father’s death, a repression of his memory. If the psychologicalanalogy holds, this repression would cause a return of the father in some hor-rifying way—it would bring his image back as real,9 as an uncanny return ofauthority in the form of an image that would fill psychic space with its spec-tacular emptiness. Fundamentalism and terrorism are manifestations of thistoday. On the other hand, the response could involve an active reimagining and


deferral of this loss, an attempt to bring an imaginary father back through aninfinite process of imagination, analysis, and interpretation. Kristeva puts theoptions this way:

[I]t is no longer a matter of conforming to the universal . . . or assert-ing one’s difference (ethnic, religious, sexual) as untouchable, sacred;still less of fighting one of these tendencies with the other or simplyand skillfully combining them. It is a matter of pushing the need for theuniversal and the singular to the limit in each individual, making thissimultaneous movement the source of both thought and language. . . .The borders of philosophy and literature break down in favor of a processof meaning and the speaking being, meanings emitted and values received. (2000, 19)

This very process would require the analytic ethic elaborated in Strangers toOurselves. It figures the ethical as curious, endless engagement as opposed toexclusion and rejection. It figures politics as imaginative revolution of mean-ing. The process calls for subjecting our own meanings to the values of others,“meanings emitted, values received” instead of giving in to a repetitive rebel-lion. Perhaps politics as paternalism is dead, and democracy is on the rise, butKristeva shows us that the passing of paternalism is just the beginning of aprocess of working through that death. Her imaginary politics raises the ques-tion of how to deal with the lack of an identifiable authority.

Kristeva thus draws the authority of politics into question in a revolutionaryway, but her revolution is not meant to consume the father by means of indiffer-ent and vacuous ritual, image, and text. It is instead the postprandial articulationof a revolutionary process; a process that is not only an end, a consuming or con-summating feast, but the birth of an appetite, a drive, a beginning—which involves not only loss but the birth of a memory of that loss.

Conclusion?Let’s return to the questions that opened this chapter. What is the meaning ofpolitics today? And are Kristeva’s writings political?

A third question now comes into view: What would it mean to answerthese questions in theory? And thus what would it mean to assume that onecould decide theoretically what the shape or form of the political is and whichworks met the criterion of “being political?” Following Kristeva’s analytic ethicdemands interrogating the community that is guided by political questions.

Indeed, if we follow the uncanny logic elaborated on in this chapter, therepetition or fetishization of the political as a question emerges as a symptomof the rejection of the political from the rest of the passions that guide and sus-tain our lives. Faced with the death of political consciousness, we academics

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have been trying to conjure it through the repetition of images of political rebellion or a desperate sort of seeking for its lost essence. This intellectual whosees everything in terms of its implications for political theory threatens to un-dermine the ethic of analysis and the practical solidarity this ethic provides. Itis to sacrifice the fragile but sustainable bond built through a process of analy-sis to the absolute and empty bonds of political theory.

Kristeva’s description of the fundamentalist bears repeating in today’s po-litical context: “Fundamentalists are more fundamental when they have lost allmaterial ties, inventing for themselves a ‘we’ that is purely symbolic; lacking asoil it becomes rooted in ritual until it reaches its essence, which is sacrifice”(1991, 24). If those of us today who are concerned with the threat of funda-mentalism to politics respond with a fundamentalist allegiance to the political,we sacrifice attention to material realities that might not be captured by tradi-tional political discourse. This sort of fundamentalist politics is built more onthe separation between political theory and the rest of life, the lack of materialties between the political “we” of academia and the apolitical “them” that liesoutside our politicized theory. What are the consequences of our desire to be po-litically relevant for the communities in which we live? What sorts of lines doesthe discourse of politics draw between people? And how can these lines be re-configured? These are the questions that Kristeva’s analytic ethic places beforeus. They are political questions, to be sure, but to address them we must exam-ine how the meaning of politics functions in community. How have the prac-tices of political theory already decided who is to engage in political reflectionand how that political reflection is to take place?

For Kristeva, the meaning of politics remains enigmatic. But the enigmaticnature of politics is a call to imaginative analytics. Kristeva’s work attempts toshow a sort of narrow path that we might tread with regard to finding a mean-ingful place for politics within the larger context of life. Her response to theenigma of politics is neither an abandonment of politics nor the repetition of aquestion concerning its essence. Instead she takes a calculated distance from“the political,” pausing for a moment to reflect on the reasons, forces, and desires behind our political consciousness.

This distance provides space for reflection, for sublimation, for return, for rev-olution. One could thus say that for Kristeva the space of the political is psychic—or that psychic space is the condition of possibility of politics. But to understandthe political as a process, as the birth of an appetite instead of the return of anempty repetition, a continuous interpretation of what it means for politics to beguided by imagination must continue. At the very least it means that we must beable to imagine possibilities for judging the effects of discourse beyond the sim-plistic question of whether and how the discourse is politically relevant.

We must understand Kristeva’s call for an imaginary politics as a demand tolook toward what has been overlooked in our fascination for finding political im-plications. In this sense it is in the very imaginative articulation of politics as imag-


inary that an imaginary politics would appear, and it is in this uncanny articulationof a politics beyond the political that Kristeva’s work finds its political implica-tions. Instead of a collectivity centered around an image of authority, she points to-ward a democracy to come: one that is always in process, its unity founded on animaginative process of analysis of that unity. This unity must always be provisional.As soon as this imaginative process of articulation is finished, Kristeva’s uncannyunity between politics and imagination will be evacuated, leaving an emptiness,words on a page, a mere image of imaginary politics.

For these reasons, Kristeva’s work gives us no answers; it gives us questionsthat demand analysis. Her work calls for an imaginative confrontation with herown uncanny, shifting, and difficult text. Indeed, if her remarks concerning thepolitical are bewildering, it is because they call for interpretation. Her interpre-tation of the political disperses its meaning. What is the nature of the political?The question repeats itself, continuously. It calls for interpretation, for an imag-inary revolution.

Notes1. I will return to the relation between the familiar and uncanny, which is

extremely important in Kristeva’s work. She acknowledges that her use of thefamiliar and uncanny derives from Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” in whichhe writes, “What interests us most . . . is to find that among its different shadesof meaning the word heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite,unheimlich. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich…In general we arereminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous but belongs to two sets ofideas, which without being contradictory are yet very different: on the one hand,it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which isconcealed and kept out of sight” (1919/1953, 375).

2. The recent violence in Europe and the Middle East over the politicalcartoons depicting Mohammed dramatizes in an extreme way both the failureof the political discourse and the emptiness of the fundamentalist reaction tothat failure. These events have made it increasingly clear that we lack the lan-guage to address the political and religious differences that threaten the possi-bility of a more democratic or cosmopolitan global community. The death ofpolitical discourse dramatized by these events calls ever more urgently for analy-sis, for a more imaginative sort of politics.

3. I will return to this notion of the empty ritual in my analysis of revolu-tion in a different light in the second section of this chapter.

4. The question of who is responsible for what one might call a “primary”exclusion seems wrong to ask here. Kristeva is not interested in locating who orwhat is to blame for the exclusion of certain groups and for their counterexclu-sion. Indeed, the attempt to finalize and/or demonize some group as carryingthe sole responsibility for starting the process of exclusion would be absurd on

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her account. As she makes clear, rejection is always necessary—it is more a ques-tion of the manner in which the exclusion would occur.

5. Another question arises at this point, which is that insofar as we haveidentified the absolute fundamentalist as the “terrorist,” perhaps we have al-ready succumbed to the logic of exclusion that Kristeva is elaborating. Again,however, it is not merely a question of identification, but of how we deal withthat identification—with violence and rejection or with analysis?

6. These two possibilities are dramatized in E. T. A. Hoffman’s “TheSandman.” The protagonist, Nathaniel is antagonized by uncanny visions, andthough in the end they drive him to suicide, they also drive him to correspon-dence and curiosity and eventually love. Interestingly, he falls in love with Clara,who analyzes his uncanny fantasies as products of his imagination. It is onlywhen he takes these fantasies to be real that he cannot love Clara and commitssuicide. Hoffman dramatizes these options as follows. First, the uncanny as asource of curiosity and imagination: “[N]ever could I accustom myself to the un-canny ghost: the image of the cruel sandman never grew paler within me. Whatit could be that he had to do with my father began to engage my imaginationmore and more. An invincible timidity prevented me from asking my fatherabout it; but to investigate the mystery myself, to see the fabled sandman my-self—this desire grew more and more intense as the years passed. The sandmanhad started me on the road to the strange and adventurous that so easily find ahome in the heart of a child” (1988, 89). But when Nathaniel’s imagination be-comes confused with reality, the sandman becomes an object of horror and ab-jection: “When now I saw this Coppelius, my soul was filled with fear, and withhorror that it was he of all people who had turned out to be the sandman; thesandman was now no longer that bogeyman of the nursery tale who took chil-dren’s eyes as food to his owl’s nest in the moon: no! he was now a repellentspectral monster bringing misery, distress and earthly and eternal ruinationwherever he went” (90).

7. The brothers, having forgotten the father at this point, are no longerbrothers, but perhaps they have the unconscious memory of having been a fam-ily. Perhaps, upon the appearance of the other, there is an uncanny recognition.What was once familiar (heimlich) has been transformed into the uncanny (un-heimlich). “Thus heimlich,” writes Freud, “is a word the meaning of which de-velops toward an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite,unheimlich” (1919/1953, 377).

8. This idea was suggested by Kelly Oliver. This chapter arose from a grad-uate seminar in the spring of 2005 and owes much of its development to Kelly’shelp both inside and outside the seminar.

9. It is helpful at this point to remember the two choices for representingthis uncanny return as depicted in Hoffman’s “The Sandman.” The first in-volves love, analysis, and imagination. The second, which conflates image withreality, involves rejection, horror, and death.


ReferencesFreud, Sigmund. 1913. Totem and Taboo. The Standard Edition of the Complete

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13. Trans. James Strachey.London: Hogarth Press.

———. 1919/1953. “The Uncanny.” Collected Papers. Trans. Joan Riviere. Lon-don: Hogarth Press.

Hoffman, E. T. A. 1988. “The Sandman.” Tales of Hoffman. Trans. R. J. Holling-dale. London: Penguin Books.

Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York:Columbia University Press.

_____. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman. NewYork: Columbia University Press.

_____. 2002. “Julia Kristeva in Conversation with Rosalind Coward.” ThePortable Kristeva. Ed. Kelly Oliver. New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press.

yanulada


14

Religion and the “Rights of Man”in Julia Kristeva’s Work

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Idit Alphandary

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,(How Could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)Terrific threshold of the ’sprophet’s pledge,Prayer of pariah, and the ’slover’s cry,—

—Hart Crane, To Brooklyn Bridge

Julia Kristeva’s writings on religion, I would like to suggest, redefine the relationof language and desire. According to Kristeva the institution of a productive re-lation between desire and language enhances the rights of man. A useful con-nection of language and desire might enable human beings to experience being,not just safely participate in doing, or successfully circumvent difficulties thatcrop up in daily living. In Kristeva’s writing, the most important human right isthe right to unite with the sacred, in the religious phrase, or to have a sensationof being, in the language of psychoanalysis. Kristeva, I would like to show, bothdetects and creates a correlation between the religious mind and the psychoan-alytical mind on profound levels of thinking and meaning production. Kristevaforeshadows the linguistic proficiency that engenders dominant narrative-patterns, and shows that the acquisition of language and the oedipal phase arefundamental to all narrative systems around which our minds revolve. The Chris-tian narrative, which is grounded on the three advents: of conception, death, andresurrection, and the psychoanalytical narrative—comprising three cardinalphases: unity with the mother, subjection to the taboo against incest, and the

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institution of a flow of information between the conscious and the unconsciousmind—are narratives very similar to one another and thus they contain overlap-ping ideas. Kristeva initiates a scholarly and humanistic study that crystallizesideas that are common to religion and psychoanalysis, as these ideas enhance ourability to have meaningful experiences.

The Son and Murderous DesireIn Kristeva’s book In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (1987), sherelates the structure of the unconscious with the very structure of monotheism.She interprets the Christian Credo and shows that religion points to the narcis-sistic wound that man suffers as he begins to talk and develop his subjectivity:

We believe in one God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth,and of all things visible and invisible: And in one Lord Jesus Christ, theonly begotten Son of God, begotten of his father before all worlds, Godof God, Light of Light, very God of Very God, begotten not made,being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made;who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and wasincarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man,and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. (1987, 37)

In the Credo, Kristeva argues, Christ is the symbol of human living thatthe believer could identify with. Christ is both a “Son” and a “son,” or a youngboy. It is possible to identify with Him because this “son,” with a small s, is atthe same time inherent in God, identical to light, and is “very God of VeryGod.” The son of God does and does not coincide with the father; the father’sexistence implies a paternal function in the life of the son, Jesus Christ, and ofall human beings.

In analysis, too, the son realizes that he is not identical to the father; the dis-course of the monarch or the father is metaphorical and might exist in the sonthrough the acquisition of language. The son abandons a jubilant unity withthe mother, when he learns to speak. In the aftermath of the loss of the mother’sbody, melancholia inhabits the son’s psyche, and language, which expresses thisdepression, enables him to communicate his desire to the others. Yet, death isinherent in this transition. From the crucifixion of Christ, the analyst learnsthat murderous desires toward the father lurk in the very structure of monothe-ism. In psychoanalysis, too, analysands suffer from an almighty father or fromthe lack of a powerful father. The analyst interprets Christ’s passion as guilt thatis visited upon the Son who is put to death. According to religion, then, the sacred is inherent in crucifixion.

Kristeva shows that sublimation of the death drive, and language acquisi-tion, are connected to one another. In An Ethics of Dissensus, Ewa Płnowska

Religion and The “Rights of Man” in Julia Kristeva’s Work 231

Ziarek suggests that Kristeva’s analysis of language acquisition is to do mainlywith an ethical role assigned to sublimation, “the deflection of the aggressivityof the death drive for the destruction of the narcissistic unity of the ego and forthe restructuring of language” (2001, 133). Ziarek is not at ease with Kristeva’snarrow characterization of sublimation, and I subscribe to the discomfort. Here,love is excluded from the structure of sublimation. But Kristeva, too, is unhappywith her own interpretation as it presupposes that interaction with the other isgrounded on sacrifice. Thus Kristeva examines the possibility that a nonsacri-ficial sacred exists too.

The Mother and the SonKristeva continues, “Seen in psychoanalytic terms, the rights of man comprise notthe right to calculate what life is but to understand the unconscious, to understand iteven to the gates of death” (1987, 62). Kristeva institutes a new theoretical view-point of the relation of the Mother and the Son. In the definition of human rightsin the last section, the Power that resides in the symbolic order of signification isundermined by the obligation to understand the “death” that presides in the semi-otic order of affective significance. This means that human beings do not have amoral right to restrict meaningful living and uniquely deploy symbolic “calculation,”thus dissociating sublimation from love and concern for the other. The expressionthe “Rights of Man” has a double valence: it means that human beings have a rightto tend to those aspects of the personality that emerge from trauma, but at thesame time this expression announces that human beings are answerable to newmoral discriminations. Kristeva examines the mother’s posture in discourse anddeduces that man is subject to a moral imperative to explore memory traces in theunconscious mind. Understanding the unconscious might teach the man of faith,the analysand, and the reader to assign significance to the affects pain, sorrow, andloss, and this understanding will give meaning to ideas such as love and concernfor the other; ideas on which human existence is founded.

In “Stabat Mater,” Kristeva represents the mother’s posture in discourse.She shows that the mother’s love begins to develop when she encounters death.“The calm of another life, the life of that other who wends his way while I re-main henceforth like a framework. Still life. There is him, however, his ownflesh, which was mine yesterday. Death, then, how could I yield to it?”(1976/1987, 243). The mother’s subjectivity is characterized by the emergenceof the capacity for concern for the other.1 In this case, Kristeva singles out therelation of love to death: love necessitates complete openness to the other; it isconsubstantial with an experience of personal annihilation, or with perfect open-ness, an acceptance of death. The Virgin’s love appears at the instance of herown death as the Madonna is transformed in the process of Dormition or As-sumption.2 In both of these cases the mother encounters death uniquely as it isinherent in love; death is embedded in giving life.

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In The Feminine and the Sacred, in her reply letter to Catherine Clément,Kristeva detects a striking parallelism between the religious mind and the psy-choanalytic mind. She shows that “from the Nativity to the Pieta, and includ-ing the Mater Dolorosa and the Regina Caeli, the Virgin is . . . exclusively thedevoted mother. The ‘good mother’ as Melanie Klein would say, who gives her-self body and soul to her son, to the extent that, without her, the dear son wouldhave no body, since that god is a man precisely, only by the grace of his journeythrough the body of Mary ‘full of grace’” (2001, 76). We are told that no humanbeing could survive without maternal love and care. Kristeva connects the reli-gious myth with the narrative of psychoanalysis and states, “In short, Mary re-habilitates that primal bedrock of our identities, which modern analysts call‘mother-baby excitation,’ and which Winnicott identifies with the serenity of‘being’” (76). The continuity of love and death, inherent in motherhood, is agift that precedes other drive-related phallic definitions of rights of man, suchas freedom, equality, knowledge, and justice.

In Cecilia Sjöholm’s recent book Kristeva and the Political, she examinesthe secularizing gesture that presides in Kristeva’s study of religion and psy-choanalysis: “Psychoanalysis repeats the Christian form of meaning production.Psychoanalysis could even, at least to some extent, be said to have taken theplace of religion. After theology, psychoanalysis studies how language producesmeaning, through the notions of transference and countertransference. Ratherthan being a science, or a question of truth, psychoanalysis is faith. Its object isalso a question of the imaginary” (2005, 82). I take issue with this argument asit seems to turn matters upside-down. As I indicated, psychoanalysis studiesthe human mind and examines religious devotion precisely in the respect thatboth scripture and analysis introduce difference to language.

Kristeva, I suggest, does not hold that religion is a meaningful language inand of itself. Rather, I think that she elucidates the power that the religious nar-rative has over the believer, or the archaic mind, in order precisely to show thata different, scientific or humanistic narrative holds the same explanatory powerand it, too, ushers in meaningful living. The psychoanalytical model of trans-ference and countertransference—conterminous with recognition and love ofthe other—becomes the preferred model of communication, because meaning-ful living emerges from these intersubjective relationships. Contemporary psy-choanalysts—particularly the American psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell—go astep further to show that indeed intersubjective interactions enhance acts ofconsciousness construction.3

The Semiotic and the SymbolicYet, Kristeva’s description of the mother has to explain the breakdown that sep-arates the semiotic from the symbolic orders of language. Because the cuts andbreaking inherent in giving birth and child rearing do not imprint death in the


mother’s unconscious they introduce difference to language. Kristeva relates the semiotic both with the unconscious and the imagination. The mother re-sides in the prelinguistic phase and beyond the parentheses of language, andthus we call the son’s language the “mother tongue.” Motherhood means thatthe mother experiences the body and the transmission of speech as continuouswith each other.

In an early article, “The Abject Maternal: Kristeva’s Theoretical Consis-tency,” Mary Caputi writes, “That mode of expression which most articulatesjouissance, which is the most ‘maternal,’ is poetic language. In its self-consciousabjuration of symbolic logic, poetic language carries out the project of sem-analyse, lending credence to the claim that a connection between language andrevolution indeed exists” (1993, 32). Revolution is a central concept in this dis-cussion, as according to Hannah Arendt (1963), it is directly related to free-dom.4 Yet I think that Caputi short-circuits the fact that the use of the idea ofrevolution obligates one to endorse the utopian Kantian description of the au-tonomy of the will, which emerges from one’s subjection to the ethical imper-ative. But it is precisely this utopia that Kristeva’s oeuvre challenges. Thus, Iview the role that jouissance and poetry have in language differently. Affect andliterature do not merely furnish the revolutionary mind with the tools neededto refute symbolic categories, such as the taboo, and the law. More important,jouissance and poetry do to language what the relation love-death does to thehuman being. In both cases tenderness or the sublime creates a union betweenthe human subject and being.5

The aforementiond claim also explains why the mother resides in abjection.In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva shows that the mother hasdifficulty with the symbolic realm and with acknowledging and being ac-knowledged by the father or the husband. In this situation, the third or the fa-ther enters into the picture and helps the son—activates his drive energy in theson—and orientates him toward doing. The father initiates a struggle againstthis thing that was the mother and is now the abject. The son internalizes thisstruggle, “Repelling, rejecting; repelling itself, rejecting itself. Ab-jecting” (1982,13). Thus, the mother’s significance is to do with a primeval object of impossi-bility—she is the excluded or the one that is outside of meaning; the abject. Sheis the “Atopia,” a kind of nowhere to which the son’s being continuously refers.Precisely because the mother remains outside the symbolic order of language ab-jection presides in literature and psychoanalysis; two discourses that givemetaphor to abjection, or alter meaning through the excess of sublimation.

Literature and PsychoanalysisKristeva likes to interpret Antonin Artaud’s relation to Christ’s corpse. The corpse provokes horror and in writing Artaud attains resurrection. Kristeva writes:

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The death that “I” am provokes horror, there is a choking sensationthat does not separate inside from outside but draws them the one intothe other, indefinitely. Artaud is the inescapable witness of that tor-ture—of that truth. . . . At the level of downfall in subject and object,the abject is the equivalent of death. And writing, which allows one torecover, is equal to a resurrection. (1982, 25–26)

For Kristeva’s Artaud, Christ and the author are similar to one another.Christ, too, is abjected, rejected, excluded, because his language recalls the death,sin, or loss in which our lives are immersed. According to Kristeva the historyof religion—not uniquely of Christianity—is conterminous with the history ofpurifying the object. It culminates with art, the most cathartic occupation, “onthe far and near side of religion” (1982, 17).

Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double clearly relates maternal language withinstituting a new cultural ideal:

Here is what is really going to happen. It is simply a matter of substi-tuting for the spoken language a different language of nature, whose ex-pressive possibilities will be equal to verbal language, but whose sourcewill be tapped at a point still deeper, more remote from thought. . . .

Gesture is its material and its wits; . . . [this language] springs fromthe necessity of speech more than from speech already formed. Butfinding an impasse in speech, it returns spontaneously to gesture. Inpassing, it touches upon some of the physical laws of human expres-sion. It is immersed in necessity. (1958, 110)

Artaud implies that speech emerges from trauma. Traces or physical sen-sations inscribed in the semiotic and the abjected memory of maternal caremake speech necessary. For Artaud theater is the art that should bring the semi-otic back into the symbolic realm, thus enhancing meaning, turning meaninginto a personal experience. The theater is heartrending precisely because at thenavel of this cultural experience abjection presides.

In Kristeva’s famous phrase, the language of psychoanalysis is grounded on“a gaping wound.” She relates that Lacan views the importance of psychoanaly-sis in the saintliness of the analyst who embodies the linkage and is imbued withuniquely one mood: blackness. The analysand’s wound has to be kept open, as init she or he resides. The analyst’s “poetic” speech is an antidote to the sadness thatpervades the analysand’s speech; it shows that this sadness is the way in which onegains knowledge of the abject. The language of the analyst exhibits identificationbut moves away from it through the use of interpretation. Thus the analytic speechbecomes incarnate, in the true sense of this word. Psychoanalysis is “Cathartic,”as it enables the analyst and the analysand to experience not just purification, but,“rebirth with and against abjection” (Kristeva 1982, 31).6 In “Forgiveness and


Community,” Kelly Oliver relates the meaning that emerges in the transferenceto forgiveness, “As the unconscious makes its way into signification through thesemiotic dimension, the possibility of forgiveness emerges from meaningful re-sponse. The meaninglessness of life, more specifically the meaninglessness oftrauma, is thereby forgiven by becoming meaningful” (2004, 9). According to myline of thinking, forgiveness is one of the rights of man.7 These rights belong toa political discourse and, thus, suddenly politics has to contend with difference andrelate the rights of man to love.

Notes1. In Winnicott’s seminal article, “The Development of the Capacity for

Concern,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, he writes,“Concern refers to the fact that the individual cares, or minds, and both feels andaccepts responsibility. At the genital level in the statement of the theory of devel-opment, concern could be said to be at the basis of the family, where both parentsin intercourse—beyond their pleasure—take responsibility for the result” (1990,73). This citation is relevant to Kristeva’s text as it locates concern beyond the plea-sure principle. Yet, in “Stabat Mater,” it seems to me that Kristeva goes a step fur-ther when she directly relates giving birth to “still life,” or to the cessation of theexistence that preceded the delivery of an infant into the world. Her concern forthe other directly emerges from the syncope that pervades maternal existence.

2. Kristeva studies the Madonna’s Assumption—the process in which theMadonna rises up to the heavens body and soul—because she believes that itendows the body, too, with continuity. As the Mother of God does not die sheneed not rise from the dead, and thus her body is not subject to suffering anddecay. This fate, which is more radiant than the Son’s, renders the woman’s bodyboth seductive—after death Mary becomes Queen of Heaven and the Church—and, at the same time, disembodied, spiritual, or desexualized—the sexuality ofthe maternal body is censored, and it contains neither the life instincts nor thedeath drive. Always intact, the Madonna’s body accomplishes the totality of thewoman and thus Mary protects the child and the artist against an oedipal anxi-ety. The seductiveness of the Virgin, characterized by Kristeva as seduction with-held and experienced as incorporeal, appears on canvases devoted to this topic.Mary McCarthy began to interest the later Kristeva, who was writing HannahArendt, the first volume in Kristeva’s trilogy on female genius. Thus, it is inter-esting to note that in her masterpiece on the grandeur of Venice, Mary Mc-Carthy relates Titian’s Assumption to the Jesuit ideology that aspires to bring thebeliever closer to the dogma of the Church. “The Frari ‘Assumption,’ moreover,though owned by the Franciscans, is quite in the Jesuit taste. Ruskin detested it,rightly, I think; with its gaudy reds and blues, it seems to be the first sample, ofthat religious propaganda art which the Jesuits used to ‘sell’ the faith to themasses” (1963, 138).

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3. Stephen Mitchell’s work is devoted to articulating a new role for thepsychoanalyst, one in which the analyst imparts knowledge to the analysandand yet neither loses his authority nor obstructs the flow of materials that re-side in the analysand’s unconscious mind. In Influence and Autonomy in Psycho-analysis, Mitchell claims, “In a complex interpersonal situation, one can presentto another in many different ways what is or was in one’s mind.” He continues,“In an important sense, consciousness comes into being through acts of con-struction either by others or, through self-reflection, by oneself ” (1977, 218).

4. In her comparative study of revolutions, Hannah Arendt compares theFrench revolution to the American revolution in regard to how they view therelation of revolution to freedom. “Crucial, then, to any understanding of rev-olutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and the experience of anew beginning should coincide.” Arendt continues, “And since the current no-tion of the Free World is that freedom, and neither justice nor greatness, is thehighest criterion for judging the constitutions of political bodies, it is not onlyour understanding of revolution but our conception of freedom, clearly revolu-tionary in origin, on which may hinge the extent to which we are prepared toaccept or reject this coincidence” (1963, 29).

5. Emmanuel Levinas attributes pure alterity to the feminine. In this sense,Levinas views the feminine as an integer in the relationship that exceeds the en-counter between two people. The feminine belongs to the sublime as womancannot be reduced to knowledge and thus she remains contrariety—or thatwhich is not reduced to sameness by a correlation with its other that emergeswithin the relationship—woman is the signifier of contrariety within the rela-tionship. Contrariety is a term that inhabits the absolutely other; it is equal tothe feminine. Levinas uses the example of tenderness to show that woman’scontrariety remains intact within the relationship with the other. The feminineenhances desire even while woman pacifies the claims of desire. In Le Temps etl’autre (Time and the Other), Levinas writes,

La caresse est un mode d’être du sujet, où le sujet dans le contact d’unautre va au-delà de ce contact. Le contact en tant que sensation faitpartie du monde de la lumière. Mais ce qui est caressé n’est pas touchéà proprement parler. Ce n’est pas le velouté ou la tiédeur de cette don-née dans le contact que cherche la caresse. Cette recherche de la caresseen constitue l’essence par le fait que la caresse ne sait pas ce qu’ellecherche. Ce “ne pas savoir,” ce désordonné fondamental en est l’essen-tiel. Elle est comme un jeu avec quelque chose qui se dérobe, et un jeuabsolument sans projet ni plan, non pas avec ce qui peut devenir nôtreet nous, mais avec quelque chose d’autre, toujours autre, toujours in-accessible, toujours à venir. La caresse est l’attente de cet avenir pur,sans contenu. Elle est faite de cet accroissement de faim, de promessestoujours plus riches, ouvrant des perspectives nouvelles sur l’insaisiss-


able. Elle s’alimente de faims innombrables. Cette intentionalité de lavolupté, intentionalité unique de l’avenir lui-même, et non pas attented’une fait futur, a toujours été méconnue par l’analyse philosophique.

The caress is a mode of being of the subject, where the subject in con-tact with an other goes beyond this contact. The contact as a sensationis a part of the world of light. But what is caressed is not touched prop-erly speaking. It is not the smoothness or the warmth given within thecontact that the caress searches. The research of the caress constitutesthe essence of the contact by the fact that the caress does not knowwhat it searches. This “not to know,” this fundamental disorderlinessis the caress’s essence. It is like a game with something that takes it-self away, and a game absolutely without a project or a plan, includingnot with what can become ours or we, but with some other thing, al-ways other, always inaccessible, always yet to come. The caress is theexpectation of this pure future, without content. It is made of this in-crease of hunger, of always richer promises, opening new perspectiveson the elusive. It nourishes numberless hungers. This intentionality ofthe voluptuous, unique intentionality of the future itself, and not ex-pectation of a future fact, has always been unrecognized by the philo-sophical analysis. (1983, 82–83; translation mine)

Levinas’s portrayal of the caress, and by extension the feminine, is reified. Lev-inas, I suggest, aims to define the feminine or the caress as an action and an af-fect that enhances consciousness even while it evades the hold thatconsciousness has on the advent of the encounter with the other. Yet Kristeva,who, I have every reason to believe, accepts the content of Levinas’s argument,offers a complex, profound analysis of the relation of the emergence of concep-tual thinking to the development of the body or of the relation of tendernesswith Power. Kristeva shows that the mother inherits to humanity a capacity tomeet the other when she discloses her own experience, “which defers eroticisminto tenderness and makes an ‘object’ an ‘other me’” (2001, 57). Uniquely theshared experience of motherhood, I would like to suggest, could transform thebody to significance or to a semiotic system, and thus relate desire to languageand institute the free play of desire and desire’s sublimation. Kristeva writes,

Now I can set forth my idea: through these two prototypes of filth (ex-crement and menses), what is fundamentally warded off is maternalPower. Why? Just think of the maternal authority that oversees thetraining of the sphincters, through archaic frustrations and prohibi-tions, and forms a first cartography of identity out of our autoeroticbaby bodies, well before our identity cards, a cartography composedof zones, orifices, points and lines between “proper” and “improper,” to

238 Idit Alphandary

be precise, possible and impossible. A primal cartography of the bodyI call “semiotic,” which is the precondition for language even thoughit depends on language, and which suffers and takes pleasure in another logic, complementary to the logic of linguistic signs imposed andconsolidated by paternal laws. (2001, 95)

6. The epigraph of this article is particularly relevant to Kristeva’s view of therelation of religion or the sacred to abjection. Hart Crane conveys the feeling thatBrooklyn Bridge is more magnificent than a monumental cathedral is and pos-sesses discrete sanctity, as does an altar, precisely because the bridge is forged bythe furies that reside in the hearts of the prophet, the pariah, and the lover. Inplate 11 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake asserts, “All deitiesreside in the human breast” (1988, 38). But Hart Crane courageously examinesthe wilderness and abjection—“the gaping wound,” in the language of Kristeva—in which human living is immersed and from which the myth of God emerges.The poet shows that “mere toil” endows man’s impure existence with objects thatare the fruit of a thriving imagination that “lend[s] a myth to God” (1986, 43).

7. In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Jacques Derrida articulates two dif-ferent aspects of forgiveness. The first, directly related to the law, was establishedin the Nuremberg Tribunal, when the conviction of those who perpetrated crimesagainst humanity stood as a symbol for humanity that desired its own condemna-tion, because it needed to forgive itself and continue living while believing in thePower of laws even in the face of historical catastrophe. Derrida adds that the Truthand Reconciliation Committee in South Africa was established when the UnitedNations decided to define Apartheid as a crime against humanity. The secondform of forgiveness does not bring about totality. Derrida writes, “In order to ap-proach now the very concept of forgiveness, logic and common sense agree foronce with the paradox: it is necessary, it seems to me, to begin from the fact that,yes, there is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? Theonly thing that calls for forgiveness?” (2001, 32). According to my understanding,Derrida articulates the role that forgiveness plays in introducing difference to theconstruction of history and memory. And yet, I think that uniquely after we havefurther analyzed the various aspects of love—inherent in maternal concern for theother and in transference in the psychoanalytical encounter, as indicated by Kristeva—we may be able to articulate the empirical bases that enhance globalpolitics to contend with difference and redefine the status of persons who offerforgiveness within states of affairs whose very existence emerges from unforgiv-able deeds.

ReferencesArendt, Hannah. 1963. On Revolution. New York, London: Penguin Books.Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline

Richards. New York: Grove Press.


Blake, William. 1988. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. DavidV. Erdman. New York: Doubleday.

Caputi, Mary. 1993. “The Abject Maternal: Kristeva’s Theoretical Consistency.”Women and Language 16 (2): 32–36.

Crane, Hart. 1986. Complete Poems of Hart Crane. New York: Liveright.Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Doo-

ley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge.Kristeva, Julia. 1976/1987. “Stabat Mater.” Tales of Love. Trans. Leon Roudiez.

New York: Columbia University Press.———. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez.

New York: Columbia University Press.———1987. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. Trans. Arthur

Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press.Kristeva, Julia, and Catherine Clément. 2001. The Feminine and the Sacred.

Trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press.Levinas, Emmanuel. 1983. Le temps et l ’autre. Paris: Presses Universitaires

de France.McCarthy, Mary. 1963. Venice Observed. San Diego, CA: Harcourt.Mitchell, A. Stephen. 1977. Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis. London:

Atlantic Press.Oliver, Kelly. 2004. “Forgiveness and Community.” Southern Journal of Philoso-

phy 42 (Suppl.): 1–15.Sjöholm, Cecilia. 2005. Kristeva and the Political. London: Routledge.Winnicott, W. D. 1990. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Envi-

ronment. London: Karnak.Ziarek, Ewa Płnowska. 2001. An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism,

and the Politics of Radical Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-sity Press.

yanulada


Contributors

��

Idit Alphandary is adjunct faculty of Poetics and Comparative Literature andWomen and Gender Studies at Tel Aviv University. She submitted her doctoraldissertation at Yale University (2001). She is currently completing the manu-script of her first book The Subject of Autonomy and Fellowship in Guy de Mau-passant and D. W. Winnicott.

Caroline Arruda is a graduate student in the Philosophy Department at StateUniversity of New York–Stony Brook and is currently writing her dissertation,entitled The Practice of Recognition: Hegel, Social Reproduction, and the EpistemicFoundations of Social Theory.

Sara Beardsworth is associate professor in the Philosophy Department atSouthern Illinois University. She is author of Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis andModernity (2004). Her research is in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Euro-pean philosophy, and she has published articles on psychoanalysis, feminism,and critical theory.

Jeff Edmonds is a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. He received hisbachelor’s degree in philosophy from Williams College in 1999 and worked asa high school teacher in Asuncion, Paraguay, and Bell Buckle, Tennessee, beforedeciding to pursue his Ph.D. in 2004. His areas of interest are political philos-ophy, philosophy of education, and philosophy of language.

Robyn Ferrell is presently attached to the University of Western Sydney’s Writ-ing and Society Research Group. She is the author of Copula: Sexual Technolo-gies Reproductive Powers (2006), Genres of Philosophy (2002), and Passion in Theory(1996). She is currently working on a book: Untitled: Art Culture Gender Law.

S. K. Keltner is assistant professor of Philosophy at Kennesaw State University.Her research interests fall within social and political philosophy, broadly construed

241

242 Contributors

to include continental thought, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and discourses con-cerning social difference. She has published essays on de Beauvoir, Levinas, Kris-teva, Irigaray, and Heidegger. She has a book forthcoming entitled Julia Kristeva:Thresholds.

John Lechte is professor of Sociology at Macquarie University in Sydney witha special interest in Continental theory. He has published, with Mary Zour-nazi, The Kristeva Critical Reader (2003), and with Maria Margaroni, Julia Kirsteva: Live Theory (2004). In 1990 he published his influential bookJulia Kristeva.

Maria Margaroni is assistant professor in Literary and Cultural Theory at theUniversity of Cyprus. She is coauthor, with John Lechte, of Julia Kristeva: LiveTheory (2004) and coeditor, with Effie Yiannopoulou, of Metaphoricity and thePolitics of Mobility (2006) and a special issue of the European Journal of EnglishStudies on “Intimate Transfers” (2005).

Kelly Oliver is W. Alton Jones Chair and professor of Philosophy at Vander-bilt University. She is the author of fifteen books and more than fifty articles,including The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Oppres-sion (2004); Noir Anxiety: Race, Sex, and Maternity in Film Noir (2002); Wit-nessing: Beyond Recognition (2001); Subjectivity without Subjects: From AbjectFathers to Desiring Mothers (1998); Family Values: Subjects Between Nature andCulture (1997); Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to “the Feminine”(1995); and Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind (1993).

Frances Restuccia is a professor in the English Department at Boston College,where she teaches contemporary literary and cultural theory as well as mod-ernism and film/film theory. In 1989, she published James Joyce and the Law ofthe Father and, in 2000, Melancholics in Love: Representing Women’s Depressionand Domestic Abuse. Restuccia has also published numerous articles in journalssuch as Raritan, Contemporary Literature, Novel, Genre, Genders, American Imago,JPCS (Journal for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society), Gender and Psychoanaly-sis, Clinical Studies, Religion and the Arts, literature and psychology, and LacanianInk. She is cochair of the “Psychoanalytic Practices” seminar at Harvard’s Hu-manities Center and editor of the Contemporary Theory series at Other Press.Her most recent book, Amorous Acts: Lacanian Ethics in Modernism, Film, andQueer Theory, appeared in 2006.

Cecilia Sjöholm is associate professor in Comparative Literature and has a Ph.D.in philosophy. She teaches at Södertörn University College, Stockholm, Swe-den, where she is currently director of the Program of Aesthetics. Her work in-cludes articles and books on literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy in English

Contributors 243

and Swedish. Her latest works are the titles Kristeva and the Political (2005) andThe Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire (2004).

Lisa Walsh is a lecturer in French Studies and Critical Theory at the Univer-sity of Nottingham and member of the editorial board of Culture, Theory, andCritique. Her articles on psychoanalysis and feminism appear in Hypatia anddifferences, and she is author of Subjects of Love and Desire (2009).

Emily Zakin is associate professor of philosophy at Miami University of Ohio.She is the coeditor of Derrida and Feminism and Greek Tragedy, Sexual Differ-ence and the Formation of the Polis, and of numerous essays in Continental phi-losophy, political philosophy, and psychoanalysis. She is currently completing abook manuscript tentatively entitled Fantasies of Origin: The Birth of the Polisand the Limits of Democracy.

yanulada


Index

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Abjection (the abject), 52, 54, 55, 63,144, 222, 233, 234; of Duras, 157;eroticization of, 52, 55, 62; of theforeign, 217; and intimate suffering,163, 170; overcoming, 60; and thesacred, 238n6. See also under sacred

Abu Ghraib, 49, 51, 53, 57, 61Adami, V., 87adaptation, 24, 26, 112, 115, 187. See also

freedomAdorno, Theodor, 183, 192affectivity (affect), 2, 3, 67, 87, 122n13,

130–140, 186–188, 198–199; andthe icon, 116; and image/ represen-tation, 50, 56, 80, 102–105, 132;and literature, 146, 155, 233; and re-volt, 166; and word/discourse, 2, 49,50, 173, 175

Agapitos, Panayiotis, 115allegory, 108, 109, 112, 113, 121n4Allori, Cristofano, 33, 37; Judith and

Holofernes, 33amorous disaster, 60–62anguish, 132, 151, 152, 154Antigone, 194n1anxiety, 6, 7, 34, 36, 106, 235n2; in Being,

172; about capital punishment, 99; of influence, 145. See also undercastration

Arendt, Hannah (Arendtian), 25, 164–167, 170–175, 181–186, 193,196–209, 233, 236n4; The HumanCondition, 170, 196, 197, 210n2;

and the intimate, 164, 165, 170,172, 174, 175, 180, 193; Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 196,204; Origins of Totalitarianism, 196,197, 206; political phenomenology,12, 13, 164, 166, 170, 171; On Revolution, 196, 203; “What is Authority?” 164

Argus, 30Aristotle, 132, 159n21, 172; Politics, 185Artaud, Antonin, 233, 234; The Theater

and Its Double, 234artistic sublimation, 11,127–129, 135,

138asymbolia, 145, 147, 148, 171atheism, 119, 145, 150, 155, 195. See also

religionAugustine, Saint, 26, 167, 190authority, 4, 21, 22, 164, 209, 218–225;

maternal; 237n5; source of, 205,206, 221

Auzepy, Marie-France, 115

Balibar, Etienne, 117, 120banality of evil, 22, 69, 70Barthes, Roland, 20, 88, 89, 97–99,

102, 153, 154; Camera Lucida, 88;L’étrangère, 153

Bataille, Georges, 3, 151, 159n18Beardsworth, Sara, 2, 3, 158n9Benjamin, Walter, 87, 108, 113, 121n4;

The Origin of German Tragic Drama,108

245

246 Index

Bergson, Henri (Bergsonian), 80, 90, 91, 165

Berman, Antoine, 168betrayal, 38Bildung, 168, 169bio politikos, 185birth, 32, 235n1; re-birth, 56, 61, 70, 119,

147, 148, 204, 234Black Sun (Kristeva), 129, 145–147, 151,

154, 164, 170–173Blake, William, 238n6Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang, 21, 22Boleyn, Anne (queen), 35borderland(s), 146, 148brotherhood, 203, 218, 219Bush, George W., 58, 59, 117

Cambiaso, Luca, 30; Mercury BeheadingArgus, 30

Cameron, Averil, 120Caputi, Mary, 233Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 39,

41, 57caress, 237n5Carter, Kevin, 105, 106castration, 7, 29, 32–37, 41, 70, 93n4;

anxiety, 32, 36, 56; fantasy, 35,44n24. See also under mother

catharsis (cathartic), 152, 154, 155,159n20, 159n21, 234

Cavallino, Bernardino, 33, 42n16; Judith’sServant, 33

chambre noire, la, 148–150, 155, 157Chirac, Jacques, 121, 123cinema, 66, 69–71, 79–83, 89–92, 93n3,

97, 98; as allies of psychoanalysis,68. See also film

citizenship, 201, 203, 207–209Clément, Catherine: The Feminine and

the Sacred, 99, 232Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle, 26commodity (commodification), 183, 188,

190, 192, 193; of emotions, 180,183, 188, 190; as fetishistic, 84;meaning as, 51; of reality, 57; of theunconscious, 179, 180, 187; ofwomen’s sexuality, 59

contrariety, 236n5corporeality, 191, 193, 198corpse, 39, 108, 117, 121n4, 233.

See also deathCorreggio, 33, 43n17; Judith and her

Servant, 33Coward, Rosalind, 213, 214Crane, Hart, 229, 238n6crystallization, 89, 90cultural failure, 127, 128, 130, 132

David, Michel, 160n24death, 29, 36–39, 56, 57, 169–175, 216,

217, 230–234; -bearing, 129, 171;and consciousness, 76; culture of, 60,62; father’s, 219–223; fear of, 35, 36,38, 216; of God, 196; malady of,152, 170; sensationalism of, 99; andtime, 67. See also corpse; and underdrive; event; passion

Debord, Guy, 7, 79, 80, 83, 84, 110,121n6. See also society of the spectacle

decapitation, 29, 30, 32–36, 41, 56, 57de Certeau, Michel, 151decollation: definition of, 41deferred action, 35defloration, 32Deleuze, Gilles, 79–82, 89–93, 93n3, 151del Garbo, Raffaellino, 33; Judith, 33democracy of the guillotine, 57Denes, Dominique, 148Denis-Diderot, 22Denon, Vivant, 36depression, 56, 60, 61; artists’, 37;

narcissistic, 129, 131–134, 137, 138.See also melancholia

de Roucy-Trioson, Anne-Louis Girodet,36; Study for the Revolt of Cairo, 36

Derrida, Jacques, 109, 113–115, 121,238n7; On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 238n7; The Other Heading, 110, 113

desire: cause of, 71, 74, 75; object(s) of,71, 72, 74, 76, 130, 140. See alsounder law

detachment, 41, 74, 137, 139

Index 247

Didier, 69, 70, 81, 111distortion, 189Doré, Gustave, 34; Jehu’s Companions

Finding the Remains of Jezebel, 34Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 120, 131, 145, 146,

155, 195doubt(s), 65, 155dream(s), 102, 103drive(s): death, 7, 22, 56, 66, 67, 74, 129,

138, 139, 171, 173, 174, 197, 217,230, 231 (see also under negativity);life, 139; sexual, 22, 69; violent, 52,56. See also instinct

Duras, Margeurite, 143–160, 163, 164,170–175; Le Camion, 149; LaDouleur, 159n14; The Ravishing of LolStein, 159n18. See also under abjection

ec-static other, 22ego, 89, 102, 137, 139, 140, 144, 147,

205, 231. See also superegoEisenstein, Sergei, 69, 82, 83England, Lynndie, 61. See also Abu GhraibEnlightenment (Aufklärung), 21, 55, 58,

115, 179, 181, 187–193, 195, 198equality, 58, 59, 61, 194n2, 203, 208, 209Ernst, Max, 30, 42n4Eros, 39, 69, 73, 139. See also drive;

instinct; ThanatosEurope: crisis of, 109, 110, 196;

Europhilia, 113event, the, 171, 173; of death, 169, 170,

173 (see also death); of natality, 164,166, 170, 171 (see also birth)

evocation, 86–88, 97exclusion, 59, 60, 216–218, 220, 223,

225n4, 226n5extimacy, 188, 192. See also intimacy;

Lacan

fantasm, 80–83, 89, 92fantasy (fantasies), 60, 68–76, 77n4, 81, 89,

90, 111, 188; of the certainties of salvation, 25; colonization of, 50; fundamentalist’s, 216, 217; masculine,32; production, 80. See also realism;and under castration; mother; reality

father, 31, 35, 218–223, 226n6, 226n7,230, 233. See also under death

female homosexuality, 154feminine, the, 35, 44n24, 130, 141n9,

141n11, 145, 171, 194n1, 236n5Feminine and the Sacred (Kristeva), 14, 99,

232feminine unconscious, 32femininity, 31, 186, 188festival, 83, 222fetishism (fetishistic), 36, 51, 70, 71, 76,

84; anti–, 71filial rebellion, 221film, 68. See also cinema; and under horrorfilth, 237n5fixation(s), 67, 72, 76, 219fore-give, 49. See also forgivenessforeign, the (foreignness), 109, 168, 169,

192, 198, 199, 216, 217foreigner, the, 1, 4, 153, 154, 167, 169,

176, 198, 199, 204, 207, 216, 217,222

for-giveness (par-don), 51, 56, 61, 67,156; gives-for, 155

forgiveness, 49, 61, 67, 76, 146, 155, 156,235, 238n7

Foucault, Michel, 58, 199–201; The His-tory of Sexuality, vol. 1, 199; andpower, 58, 76, 200, 201; Society MustBe Defended, 76

Frankfurt School, 181, 183, 188, 190freedom, 23–25, 62, 70, 111–116, 184,

194n2, 198, 199; and autocom-mencement, 23, 58, 116; conceptionof, 6, 112, 115, 236n4; emergenceof, 171; of intimate space, 182; and revolution, 233, 236n4; to shop, 58, 59

Freud, Sigmund: “the dark continent,”130, 134, 137, 140, 187; Instinctsand Their Vicissitudes, 102; “Mourn-ing and Melancholia,” 137; “MysticWriting Pad,” 101; Three Essays onthe Theory of Sexuality, 54; Totem and Taboo, 141n5, 210n6, 219; The Uncanny, 216, 225n1, 226n7 (see also under uncanny)

248 Index

Fundamentalism (fundamentalists), 60,61, 144, 195, 214–217, 220, 222,224, 225n2, 226n5. See also terror-ism; and under fantasy

Gauthier, Xavière, 151Gentileschi, Artemisia, 32, 39, 40; Judith

Beheading Holofernes, 32, 40; Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 40

German nationalism, 163, 167globalization (globalism), 24, 51, 58, 65,

110, 112, 117, 158Godard, Jean-Luc, 69, 70, 80, 83; Con-

tempt, 71, 75Graner, Charles, 61. See also Abu GhraibGreek tragedy, 185, 186, 194n1grief, 26, 131, 151, 170, 171. See also

mourningguilt, 29, 52, 220, 221, 230

Habermas, Jürgen, 21, 180–183, 186,188–193, 205; Structural Transfor-mation of the Public Sphere, 188, 190

Haine et le Pardon, La (Kristeva), 3, 7, 49,54, 55, 58, 156, 164, 170, 172

Hannah Arendt (Kristeva), 164, 175Hansen, Mark, 93n3hatred (hate), 49, 54–56, 87, 154, 156,

172. See also forgive; forgivenessHayles, Katherine, 91head, 45n39; severed, 37, 39, 57. See also

skullHebbel, Friedrich, 31, 42n14Heemskerck, Martin van, 30; David and

Goliath, 30Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

(Hegelian), 127, 133, 139, 186, 216.See also negativity; spirit

Heidegger, Marin (Heideggerean), 21,24, 66, 112, 132, 165, 172–174; con-cept of finitude, 172; Dasein, 173.See also temporality; time

heterogeneity, 3, 165–167, 196, 198Hitchcock, Alfred, 69, 80, 82; Psycho, 82Hobbes, Thomas, 203Hoffman, E. T. A.: “The Sandman,”

226n6, 226n9. See also uncanny

Holberg, Ludvig, 23–26; Holberg Prize,5, 19–21, 26

horror, 7, 36, 72, 75, 82, 105, 143–145,170, 172, 226n6, 234; film/movie,75, 80, 82, 83

humanism, 21–23, 36, 55, 195, 209human nature, 203, 204, 207human rights, 58, 208, 210n8, 229, 231Hume, David, 204Husserl, Edmund, 110, 147

identity politics, 176ideology, 207illusion, 75, 84, 87, 94n7, 111, 129, 189image(s): mental, 79, 93n3; as nothing-

ness, 84, 90, 92; qua image, 80, 85;saturation of, 50, 68

imaginary, the, 90, 111, 219, 232; doublecharacter of, 88; and jouissance, 68;for Lacan, 187, 188, 193; role of, 67

imaginary: of peace, 62; politics, 218,223–225; scenarios, 68; spectacular,70

imagination, 50, 86, 88, 136, 141, 217–225, 226n6, 233

imago, 81, 89. See also Lacanimitation, 86–88immortality, 210n2, 217. See also deathimpotence: childhood/infantile, 35, 36incantation, 87, 88instincts (instinctual), 54, 67, 69, 102,

235n2. See also driveintegration, 62interiority, 5, 70, 76, 81, 118, 148, 164,

167, 190–192; register of, 68interpretation, 51, 61, 81, 83, 102, 189,

234; lack of, 216; need for, 55, 56, 156In the Beginning was Love (Kristeva), 230intimacy (the intimate): concept of, 164,

166, 180, 192; and private, 164, 165,172, 180–182, 193; and public, 163,165, 166, 170, 171, 175, 182–186,188, 193; ravaged, 164, 169, 170

intimate revolt, 1, 50, 65–77, 164–166,176, 180

Intimate Revolt (Kristeva), 55, 66, 70,111, 163, 166, 167, 173, 192

Index 249

intimist, 163, 164, 169, 170, 175involution, 167–169isolation, 207, 209n2“Is There a Feminine Genius?” (Kristeva),

164

Jameson, Fredric, 183John the Baptist, 29, 30, 32, 37, 39, 41John the Damascene, Saint, 116jouissance, 50, 51, 56, 60, 62, 66, 144, 146,

147, 152, 157, 222, 233. See alsounder the imaginary

Juranville, Anne, 152, 153

Kant, Immanuel, 23, 58, 112, 181, 184,195, 199, 233; The Critique of Prac-tical Reason, 23; The Critique of PureReason, 23; Perpetual Peace, 61;“What is Enlightenment?” 181

khora, 81, 82, 92, 93n4Klein, Melanie (Kleinian), 1, 138, 145,

187, 188, 232Kusturica, Emir: Black Cat White, 92

Lacan, Jacques (Lacanian), 51, 100, 153,158n4, 159n10, 159n21, 179–181,187–190, 192, 197, 234; conceptionof lack, 71, 93n4; Encore, 73; TheEthics of Psychoanalysis, 188; TheFour Fundamental Concepts, 71, 74;“Homage to Marguerite Duras,”158n10; on love, 73–75, 77n4; mir-ror stage/image, 81, 88, 173 (see alsomirror). See also imago; objet a; andunder the imaginary

language: acquisition, 230, 231; and de-sire, 229; of intimacy, 179, 191–193;maternal, 25, 234; meta-, 87, 104;poetic, 233; as translation, 132; visi-ble, 98, 104. See also semiotic

law: “dead letter” of, 4; and desire, 3, 49,52; paternal/symbolic, 49, 50, 52,54, 62, 118, 134–136, 141n5, 187,190, 238; positive, 205, 206

Lefort, Claude, 200, 201, 207, 210n8;The Logic of Totalitarianism, 200;The Question of Democracy, 200

lekton (lektonic), 69, 80, 82, 83Levinas, Emmanuel, 56, 236n5; and the

face, 56literature, 143–146, 150, 154–157; and

art, 127–129, 135, 136, 187, 190;authentic/ real, 143, 144, 147; andpsychoanalysis, 5, 6, 21–23, 68, 233;and revolt, 66

Locke, John, 204loss: dynamic of, 127–129, 135, 138;

failure of, 127, 128; latent, 130, 132,138; “the lost,” 128, 129, 131–138,141n11; primal, 129, 131, 136–138;of self, 128, 129, 136–140

love: as metaphor, 89, 140; self-, 129,140. See also narcissism

Lynch, David: Mulholland Drive, 70–77

MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 159n20malady (maladies): of civilization, 3, 50,

51; of death, (see under death); of thesoul, 50, 51, 68, 72, 103, 111, 129,134, 145, 156, 170, 172, 175

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 37, 44n27, 151Margaroni, Maria, 77n1, 77n4marginality, 174marginalized, the, 176Marie-Antoinette (queen), 35martyrdom, 60. See also suicide bombersMarx, Karl, 189, 190, 195, 203maternity (maternal), 141n11, 199; femi-

nine, 11, 128, 130–136; protospace,35; Thing, 147, 152. See also underauthority; language

McCarthy, Mary, 235n2McGowan, Todd, 74, 77n3meaning(s): and being, 50, 51, 55, 56, 60,

62; crisis of, 128, 132, 133; produc-tion of, 7, 9, 12, 50, 100, 104, 106,229, 232

mediation, 80, 83, 84, 89, 205; of thedrives, 144; the foreign as, 168

Medusa (medusan), 31, 35, 39melancholia (melancholy, melancholic),

12, 34, 36, 129–132, 136, 137,141n1, 146–148, 152, 153, 158n8,172, 175, 230; allegorical, 108, 114,

250 Index

melancholia (continued), 117, 119; cultural,11, 133, 135–139; definition of, 145,158n6. See also under writing

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 81metaphysics, 29, 103Metz, Christian, 75, 76Michaels, Eric, 100Michelangelo, Buonarroti, 37Millot, Catherine, 145mirror, 82, 90. See also under LacanMiserablism, 30Mitchell, Stephen, 232; Influence and

Autonomy in Psychoanalysis, 236n3Mitry, Jean, 93n5Mitterand, François, 114, 121modernity, 117, 134, 166, 170, 184, 193,

195–197, 200, 201, 206monotheism, 14, 140, 230. See also reli-

gionMontaigne, Michel de, 172mother: all-powerful, 6, 31, 35, 36;

archaic, 130–133, 136–138; and castration, 7, 31, 32; fantasy of, 31.See also maternity; motherhood

motherhood, 32, 141n11, 232, 233,237n5

mourning, 29, 131, 132, 137–139, 147Mr. & Mrs. Smith (movie), 52, 53, 56, 63Murder in Byzantium (Kristeva), 10, 26,

107–121, 160n26

narcissism (narcissistic), 40, 81, 129, 130,136, 140, 149; primary, 129, 130,137, 138, 140, 141n4; wound, 8, 14,55, 230. See also love

negativity, 11, 66, 70, 71, 127, 136, 138;and the death drive, 129, 139; asfourth term of the dialectic, 55; ofthe intimate, 173. See also underquestioning

Nestroy, Johann, 42n14neuroses, 187, 189New Maladies of the Soul (Kristeva), 9, 50,

97, 104Nicodemus the Hagiorite, 115Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21, 94n6nihilism, 11, 21, 120

nondifferentiation, 130, 131, 138non-sense, 66normative consciousness, 21nothing (nothingness), 38, 70, 74–76,

150, 154; and Being, 66; refusal totranscend, 145; and Sartre, 9, 84, 90, 92

Nothing/Real, 72, 73

object, 22; love, 72–74, 77n3; metaphori-cal, 140

objet a, 71, 74, 75, 93n4Oedipal, 141n5, 175, 187, 229, 235n2;

pre-, 122n13, 147, 192; triangula-tion, 130

oedipalization, 134oikos, 184–187, 193, 194n1Oliver, Kelly, 159n19, 226n8, 235omnipotent self, 147, 148

passage, 10, 29, 41n1, 116passion, the, (as suffering), 108passion: for death, 154, 172–175; for life,

8, 51, 62, 63, 174, 175passivity, 32, 166paternal complex, 32peace, 58, 61, 62, 203perception, 92perversion, 52–62, 70, 184; infantile, 54Petit, Philippe, 175phallic: equality, 61; order, 175; power,

32, 35phallus, 175phobia, 52, 55, 62. See also neurosesphotograph (photographic), 51, 53, 56,

61, 80, 85, 88, 90–93, 97–106; press,9, 97, 98, 100–101, 105, 106

poetics, a, 89, 191political revolt, 1, 4, 5, 213polyphonic logic, 144Powers of Horror (Kristeva), 54, 55, 143,

144, 157, 163, 170, 171, 233preverbal, 67, 70, 130, 132, 133primacy of the body, 103principle: pleasure, 53, 103, 235n1;

reality, 53, 103procreation, 60, 62

Index 251

prohibition, 7, 49, 51, 52, 54, 59–62, 134,237; and cut, 38, 100

Protestantism, 24, 112, 116. See alsoreligion

Proust, Marcel, 1, 26, 39, 82, 164, 165psyche, the, 50, 66, 67, 83, 101, 102, 174,

205; colonization/takeover of, 7, 8,13, 70, 180; elimination of, 217; formation of, 175; the life of, 66,127, 128

psychic (psychical): identity, 26; space, 5, 7, 9, 51, 55, 56, 65, 76, 79, 81, 86,87, 180, 197, 217, 222, 224. See alsosingular psychic life; and underreality

psychoanalysis: as emancipation, 189;ethics of, 199, 216–218, 222–224;and narrative, 229, 232; need for, 55;practice of, 127, 189, 192

psychosis, 66, 74, 102public: vs. private, 2, 165, 170, 179–182,

184, 185, 192, 193, 205, 209purification, 7, 52, 55, 61, 152, 234

questioning, 24, 50, 51, 59, 66, 70, 113,121n1; and psychic life, 166; trans-forms negativity, 55

Raffet, August, 57Ratzinger, Joseph, 21realism, 9, 87, 98, 99, 103. See also fan-

tasy; realityreality: conceptions of, 9, 84; of conscious-

ness, 81; construction/ production of,9, 57; and fantasy, 53, 57, 72, 80, 85;and image, 103; mechanical analogueof, 98; psychical, 66, 68. See also underprinciple reduplication, 173, 174, 176

Regnault, Henri, 36, 37; Execution With-out Trial under the Moorish Kings ofGranada, 36; Standing Moor, ArmsRaised, 36

regression, 8, 52–55, 62, 63religion(s), 6, 134, 143, 195, 213, 214,

229–238; collision/clashes of, 20, 55,60, 156, 160n26. See also atheism;monotheism; Protestantism

Rembrandt (van Rijn), 32, 34, 37; The Blinding of Samson, 34

repetition, 55, 173, 174, 176, 183, 216repressed, the, 8, 35, 49, 52–54, 140, 222;

return of, 30, 38, 55, 199Resnais, Alain: Hiroshima mon amour, 170responsibility, 8, 52, 235n1; ir-, 152resurrection, 13, 29, 147, 149, 229, 233,

234revolution, 4, 25, 146, 147, 158n5, 233,

236n4; American, 203, 205, 236n4;French, 25, 57, 112, 202, 203, 206,236n4; in poetic language, 50

Revolution in Poetic Language (Kristeva),55, 104, 151, 158n5

Richardson, Samuel: Pamela, 182, 183Rimbaud, Arthur, 3, 21ritual, 61, 216, 220–224Roland, Philippe-Laurent, 34; Samson, 34Romanticism, 163, 165, 167, 168Rothko, Mark, 87, 103Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 83, 165, 167,

184, 186, 202, 203, 206; and thegeneral will, 202, 210n4

sacred, the, 6, 9, 30, 99–101, 103, 104,106; and abjection, 238n6; and crucifixion, 230; Eastern notion of,143; and human right, 229

sacrifice(s), 6, 57, 59–61, 100, 216, 220,222, 224, 231; eroticization of, 34

sacrificial terror, 36Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9, 22, 79, 80, 84–88,

92; concept of intentionality, 87;L’Imaginaire, 84, 85, 111. See alsounder nothing

seeing, 93n4, 110–112, 114, 116, 119;all-, 30

self-authorship, 196, 197semiology, 9, 81, 141n1. See also semioticsemiotic, the, 67, 80–83, 89, 92, 130,

132–135, 146, 238n5; and symbolic,2, 3, 11, 12, 104, 133, 232, 233

sentimentalization, 183September 11 (9/11), 3, 58, 100, 101,

109, 143, 156, 164, 215. See alsoterrorism

252 Index

Sergel, Johan Tobias, 34; Samson andDelilah, 34

sexual thing, the, 22–24Shapiro, Meyer, 104sharing (partager), 6, 23, 25, 27n5, 181,

183, 185, 193; unsharable, 23, 25signification, 13, 55, 82, 191, 192, 231,

235; dialectical model of, 157,158n5; and media images, 50; andour survival, 146; and thetic phase,77n1; two modalities of, 2, 3

silence, 116, 145, 147, 148, 152, 157singular psychic life, 4, 5, 10, 12, 13, 163,

167, 175Sjöholm, Cecilia: Kristeva and the Politi-

cal, 232skull, 35, 36, 43n23society of the spectacle, 5, 7–10, 65,

8–70, 76, 79–86, 90, 93, 110, 111.See also Debord

Solario, Andrea, 37, 44n30solidarity, 14, 218–222, 224somatic symptom, 50, 54speaking being, 3, 8, 10, 22–24, 175, 197,

208, 223; and psychosis, 66speaking subject, 22, 35, 54, 102, 146,

156Speech-Being, 59spirit ( geist), 196. See also HegelSpivak, Gayatri, 60Spranger, Bartholomeus, 33; Judith and

Holofernes, 33Strangers to Ourselves (Kristeva), 1, 4,

163, 167, 199, 215, 220, 223Stuart, Marie, 35subject: abysmal, 55; formation, 104,

129–135, 140; -in-process, 3, 89, 90,93; -object, 2, 9, 66, 80, 85, 88, 137.See also speaking subject

substitution, 51suffering, 57, 58, 67, 70, 108, 133–135,

150–158, 159n14, 170, 172, 174; in-timate, (see under abjection); melan-cholic, 131; and pleasure, 183

suicide bombers, 8, 60, 215. See also mar-tyrdom

superego, 53, 135

surveillance, 49, 54, 57–59symbolic, the, 2, 3, 49, 54, 89, 93, 133,

148, 190, 205, 232–234symbolic: life, 128, 132–134; order, 89,

92, 187, 192

Tales of Love (Kristeva), 88, 89, 163talking cure, 156, 166temporality (temporal), 67, 97, 165–167,

173; atemporal, 67, 114; of intimacy,165, 167, 173. See also time

terror, 202, 206terrorism, 11, 143, 144, 213, 222. See also

September 11Thanatos (thanatology), 39, 67, 69, 70,

77. See also death; drives; Erosthetic, 70, 104, 146–149, 158n5; con-

sciousness, 85. See also undersignification

Thing, the, 173, 188Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 155, 156time, 19, 67, 80–82, 90–92, 93n4, 94n6,

117, 158n8, 165, 173, 174; absolute,107; before responsibility, 52; futureanterior, 10, 117, 120; -image, 82,93n3; -less, 37, 67, 70, 74, 80, 118,151, 165; unconscious, 67. See alsotemporality; and under death

Time and Sense (Kristeva), 164, 173totalitarianism, 21, 100, 110, 167, 184,

196, 201, 206transference, 25, 89, 112, 140, 159n19,

179, 232, 235, 238; counter-, 25,191–193, 232

transfiguration, 29, 57transgression, 51, 199trauma, 104, 105, 166, 231, 234, 235Traumarbeit, 187

uncanny (unheimlich), 109, 169, 216–218;effect of the real, 53, 57; Freud’s no-tion of, 168, 210n5, 225n1, 226n7;and life of intimacy, 186; otherness,55; of the political, 214; in “TheSandman,” 226n6, 226n9

unconscious, the, 13, 14, 21, 39, 67, 69,70, 158n10, 179, 180, 187–190, 205,

Index 253

207, 222, 230, 231, 233, 235. See also feminine unconscious; and under commodity; time

universality, 13, 20, 62, 186, 187, 197,181

unreality (irreality, unreal), 75, 80, 81, 84,85. See also reality

Valéry, Paul, 110, 171Venus of Willendorf, 35Veronese, Paolo, 33; Judith and

Holofernes, 33Victor, Barbara, 60visibility (the visible), 10, 29, 36, 68, 69;

and the invisible, 111, 116, 119; terminus of, 40

Visions Capitales (Kristeva), 7, 43n23, 56,57, 59

vulnerability (vulnerable), 8, 22, 54–57,59, 60

Weber, Max, 24, 112Wenders, Wim: Until the End of the

World, 109William of Orange, 120Winnicott, W. D., 232, 235n1Woolf, Virginia, 152working-through, 11, 13, 14, 68, 176,

209, 219, 221, 223writing, 148–150; and “an other cinema,”

69; experience(s) of, 6, 25; andmelancholy, 131, 153, 155; in revolt, 66

Zeitlin, Forma: Playing the Other, 194n1Zeitlos, 67, 71, 74, 76, 165, 173. See also

timeZernike, Kate, 61Ziarek, Eva Płnowska, 230–231Žižek, Slavoj, 13, 80, 117, 183, 195, 196;

Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, 113

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