Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Culture

Subjectivity in Crisis

Sylvie Gambaudo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754655619
• eBook ISBN: 9781351923835
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Examining Julia Kristeva's contention that contemporary Western society is witnessing a crisis of subjectivity due to the failure of the paternal function, Gambaudo places Kristeva's thesis within the context of Freudian psychoanalytic thought and shows how Kristeva defends her position against a cultural climate privileging scientific and cognitive answers to aesthetic concerns. Gambaudo argues that while Kristeva's position might be construed as defensive and a reactive clinging on to paternal modes of organisation of subjectivity, it also offers a unique and visionary analysis of subjectivity that rescues the paternal project from its decline. Eschewing a traditional emphasis on Kristeva's feminism, this book's primary interest is located at the intersection between psychoanalysis and culture, specifically analysing the superseding of Oedipus by narcissistic organisation.

Chapter 1
Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Culture: An Overview¹

In 1992, Julia Kristeva painted a somewhat pessimistic picture of contemporary society, saying that, 'the moment of militancy is over and we are living in a therapeutic age in which we must face up to our problems' (Kristeva,1992: 20). In the five years that followed, Kristeva committed herself to offering a psychoanalytic diagnosis of these problems, culminating in the publication of three texts: Les nouvelles maladies de l'âme in 1993, Sens et non-sens de la révolte in 1996 and La révolte intime in 1997. Her analysis is articulated around the two recurring themes of absence and revolt. The failure of the symbolic/paternal function and the return to archaic/maternal processes has brought about a situation of crisis. Human beings are experiencing a splitting of subjectivity, with a growing divide between two opposite poles.

On the one hand, men and women are craving to become more efficient social performers with homogenised personal needs satisfied by manufactured sensations. This mass consumption has engendered schizoid social subjects whose identity crises have found their way into popular culture, in the alluring problematic of the replicant that films like Blade Runner (Scott, 1991) initiated. On the other hand, the singularities of human experience are displaced and transformed into social 'diseases', symptomatic of repression and homogenisation: the collapse of ideologies of revolt, the fragmentation of the family unit, resurgence of fundamentalism and extremism, may be aetiologically linked to the spread of stress related illnesses. In turn, sufferers of these fin de siècle diseases find fast and efficient relief in pills, ready-made images or euphoric discourses of damnation/salvation.

Kristeva presents us with no less than the future of the human race. Throughout her 1990s work, we read that we are now faced with a choice: withdrawal from the human or reassessment and rehabilitation of the possibility for revolt and survival. Before we delve further into Kristevan crisis, we can pause a moment on the trajectory that led the author from her 1960s structuralist research on the limits of signification to her 1990s post-feminist stance on the human subject.

Kristeva's Trajectory

Linguistics, Semanalysis, Intertextuality

As early as 1969, Kristeva begins focusing on 'the history of thought applied to this unknown which constitutes it' (Kristeva, 1981: 323). At the start of her work, she enthusiastically believes that the 20th century, self-assured in the knowledge it has gained in linguistics, is now ready to move beyond mere systemic understanding of the human. She believes we are witnessing 'a complete mutation of the sciences and ideology of this technocratic society' (Kristeva, 1981: 326), a mutation from symbolic tradition to new frameworks. Le langage, cet inconnu describes that century (and Kristeva's) distancing from traditional linguistics and attraction to the psychoanalytic model. Since language cannot be totalised and fully studied, then it must not be studied outside its subject. Instead, Kristeva proposes to construe human communication as a split system of words on the one hand and transverbal articulations on the other. The domain of dreams, of poetry, of the unknown dimension of communication, transverbal articulations are known on the level of words that attempt to order and name this unknown. She says:

The West, reassured by the mastery it achieved over the structures of language can now confront these structures to a constantly evolving and complex reality to find itself faced with all the omission and censorship which enabled it to construct this system: this system was but a refuge: language without a reality, signs, mere signifiers even. Having been sent back to these very concepts, our culture is forced to question again its own philosophical matrix. (Kristeva, 1981: 326-7)

The enthusiasm in 1969 is in sharp contrast with the pessimism of the late 1980s. For in questioning its philosophical matrix, at the turn of the 20th century, Kristeva repeatedly deplores the withdrawal of the subject behind a wall of typified formulas, images, words, etc. Far from leaving the refuge of systemic thinking, the West reinforced that construction even further. We see the separation between words and transverbal articulations and repeated attempts at totalising modes of representations, shutting out the possibility of considering the unknowable dimension of language as both transcendence and origin of the system. In other words, not only can the human be known, but also the human can be controlled through the manipulation of what expresses it. language.

If the framework is refined and the tone changes, her discontent today echoes her 1969 criticism. Against the reductionist bias of traditional linguistics Kristeva proposes, at her debut, to redress the balance. She applies her theoretical views to the aesthetic field of literature and attempts to demonstrate how a reading that does not sacrifice the transverbal dimension of language can enhance our apprehension of text and subject. Whether she calls it 'semiotic analysis' or 'semanalysis' (Kristeva, 1978) or 'semiotic practice' (Kristeva, 1974a: 188), her theoretical framework firmly challenges traditional literary criticism. It is also a 'method' or 'signifying practice' to approach text that entails two things: first, to show the functions of the aesthetic discourse; second, to remain aware of such a construction of text and of its limits. It is, in other words, a meeting, or better a 'hybridisation' of two discourses. On the one hand is the traditional structuralist discourse actively seeking the symbolicity of communicative operations. On the other hand, is the transformational process itself, that is the attempt on Kristeva's part to describe the movement of communication, from the body that initiates it to the symbol that stands for it, the 'subject in process':

[A]nalysis should not limit itself simply to identifying texts that participate in the final texts, or to identifying their sources, but should understand that what is being dealt with is a specific dynamics of the subject of the utterance, who consequently, precisely because of this intertextuality, is not an individual in the etymological sense of the term, not an identity. In other words, the discovery of intertextuality at a formal level leads us to an intrapsychic or psychoanalytic finding, if you will, concerning the status of the "creator", the one who produces a text by placing himself or herself at the intersection of this plurality of texts on their very different levels – I repeat, semantic, syntactic, or phonic. (Kristeva, 1985: online)

The concept of intertextuality that Kristeva develops from 1966² takes after Freud's model of language.³ It first positions the production of language, from body to symbol, on an unconscious or psychic level, thus challenging traditional linguistics. Second it adds to Freud's 'displacement' and 'condensation' a further dimension to the analysis of language and the subject, that of process. Her interest rests not only with the finished product, the condensation and/or displacement of psychic activity, but also with the very passage from one sign system to another.⁴ In this passage, text is the result of a complicated process Kristeva positions on two axes: horizontally, words are shared in 'real time' by both speaker and addressee; vertically each unit of the text is the result of the speaker's belonging to a given environment that is both anterior and synchronic to him/her. Intertextuality is this crossroad where text takes its place amidst a mosaic of other texts. Kristeva's intertextuality exceeds then the traditional Freudian view of language as the product of 'castration'. In her logic, language (in its wider sense of text) is not solely the manifest content of a wider picture of the subject, the biggest part of which has been repressed and hidden from view. She makes of Freud's model a more permeable structure where she seeks to show the process of symbolisation and repression. This does not mean that her work marks the end of repression and the beginning of a theory where the subject can fully be known. On the contrary, her discursive practice insists on the repression of corporeality as 'it' is transformed. What is repressed is contained in this "it". Not only do transformational processes repress corporeal elements but maybe more importantly for an understanding of Kristevan logic, repression is the repression of the very process of repression. The repression of process is for her one of the markers of Western society. Western society 'represses the process that occurs within the body and the subject [...]. [Because] this mode of capitalist production has organised language into idiolects, it has made of them closed untransmittable units' (Kristeva, 1974a: 11). Against the repression of the subject and its body and to redress the balance, Kristeva proposes to ground the subject and its production into a materiality she finds in language.

What we call signifiance is precisely this unlimited creation that is never closed, this constant work of drives towards, in and through language, towards, in and through exchange and its protagonists: the subject and its institutions. This heterogenuous process [...] is a structuring and destructuring practice, touching on social and subjective limits, and – under those conditions only – it is jouissance and revolution. (Kristeva, 1974a: 15)

Several themes are introduced here. In retrospect these form the foundation of Kristeva's later work. First, Kristeva makes clear that she does not separate the subject from its institutions. Rather, institutions, that is any production, social, cultural, the individual's objects, should be treated like a language: neither can be considered in separation from their subject. Both the subject and its objects are enmeshed into a constant exchange where the one is projected onto the other and the other is symptomatic of the one. Hence the structuring, destructuring, empowerment and limitations of the one is also all that in the other.⁵

Second, in her insistence to expose the powers and limits of a semiotic practice, we recognise a theme that will remain present throughout Kristeva's oeuvre: a dedication to describing how her theoretical framework empowers the speaker but also limits the capacity for construction. Those limits are indeed set out by Kristeva from 1969 and more strongly with her adoption of Freudian psychoanalysis as a frame of reference. In short, phallicism structures and empowers, the feminine destroys and limits. The adoption of such a framework will warrant her the status of misogynist amongst a certain group of feminist critics, as we will see below. In spite of repeated criticism, Kristeva remains firm in her conviction that femininity is a negativity. To talk about femininity is to speak from outside the psychoanalytic frame. From semanalysis to psychoanalysis, the Kristevan framework considers no other dimension of human subjectivity than phallic. Hence terms such as 'the transverbal', 'the semiotic'. 'the feminine', etc. should only be apprehended from without traditional psychoanalysis or, at best, as the expression of a 'notsomething'. This brings us to the second aspect and 'phase' of Kristeva's trajectory, that of her uneasy relationship with feminism.

Feminism, Psychoanalysis

Kristeva is famous in Anglo-American circles for her views on sexual identity and her work on women's position in social organisation. Along with Cixous and Irigaray, Toril Moi sees her as one of the three authoritative figures of French feminism the 'new holy Trinity of French feminist theory' (Oliver, 1993: 163) as she put it. Moi's tongue-in-cheek comment is a fair assessment of a certain Anglo-American bias regarding Trench feminism', evidenced in their selection of these three writers over and above a multiplicity of other feminist work in France. At the same time, defining Kristeva as one of the three pillars of French feminism tends to fence Kristeva's work within the 'French feminist philosopher' (Moi, 1985: 11) category that has given Kristeva's work exposure beyond French intellectual circles but has also limited the understanding of the scope of her work.

Kristeva's theoretical position on identity goes well beyond gender identity, or rather, she proposes a framework that can be applied to sexual difference as well as to other fields. She clarified her position in 1996 by stating:

I believe that much of what has been written in the United States about my conception has been inaccurate. People have either defined and glorified the "semiotic" as if it were a female essence or else claimed that I do not grant enough autonomy to this "essence", this "difference". I hear in such reductive statements traces of the old-age debate between the "universalists" and the "differentialists". I have the impression that American feminists cling to differential ism and fan the flame of a war between the sexes that is no doubt quite real. My goal is to inscribe difference at the heart of the universal and to contribute to what is much more difficult than war: the possibility, with a little bit of luck, that men and women, two human species with sometimes conflicting desires, will find a way to understand each other. (Gubennan, 1996: 269)

The key to understanding, and possibly misunderstanding, Kristeva's feminism lies in her own use of the term 'sexual difference'. Where most view sexual difference as that which differentiates man from woman (biological and environmental), Kristeva's 'sexual difference' refers to a very specific process, a Freudian one, namely that of the individual's sexual development. Sexual difference does lead to an understanding of gender difference, but more widely, it leads to a logic of differentiation. The only claim to a feminist practice that Kristeva makes in 'Women's Time' (1990b) is to refuse to define the essences of 'man' or 'woman'. Such definitions are fruitless as both terms belong to metaphysical categories. Instead, the gender debate, along with any debate founded on a binary logic (race, class, etc.) must be brought back to a re-assessment of what created it in the first place. This corresponds to 'an interiorisation of the founding separation of the sociosymbolic contract' (Belsey and Moore, 1990: 215). Through an analysis 'of the potentialities of victim/executioner which characterise each identity, each subject, each sex' (Belsey and Moore, 1990: 216), Kristeva is urging her readers against the fabrication of scapegoats -this patriarchal society- and victims -women, foreigners, etc. Her views go beyond a mere attack on liberal/radical feminists (or 'universalists' and 'differentialists' as she calls them) perpetuating 'unconsciously the very oppositions they are trying to undo' (Guberman, 1996: 107). Throughout her work, and more particularly in the last ten years,⁶ questions of sexism are also the questions of racism class conflict, etc. These questions, traditionally separated into individual struggles, become symptoms of one common psychical constitution, that of the human subject which, as diverse as they appear, form a kind of blueprint of Western culture. However, if the symptoms of sexual difference she describes pertain to Western culture, the structuring of the individual through sexual difference does not.

With the publication of Des Chinoises, in 1974, Kristeva notices that in spite of cultural differences opposing the capitalist West and communist China, both cultures are faced with the same difficulty regarding subjectivity: 'the search for legitimisation through the paternal function, the impossible relationship of the daughter with the mother, the suicidal call of polymorphous jouissance in front of a crumbling social contract' (Kristeva, 1974b: 224). This leads her to believe in the universality of sexual difference, reminiscent of Freud's belief in the universality of the Oedipal triangulation. The difficulties experienced by individuals are rooted in a crisis in the family structure, itself regulated by sexual difference. Crisis is the crisis of the traditional family triangle, mother, father, individual. Crisis is the effect of the collapse of religious values and the withering away of 'God' as socio-symbolic instance. After the collapse of the symbolic father (God), Man in his biological fragility, is now threatened. This theme of the collapse of the symbolic and threat of biology prevails throughout Kristeva's work and increasingly so at the turn of the century. She will return in a quasi obsessive way to the importance of phallic organisation, the subject's relationship with 'an abstract instance, say symbolic, which is not necessarily a sexual partner, or a psychoanalyst, or a Party, but a social practice: political, aesthetic, scientific' (Kristeva, 1974b: 224). In this, Kristeva makes herself the advocate of Freud (and Lacan) and shows the limit of her own practice. Yet, she also steps away from the definition of woman as biological category based on reproduction and insists that the phallic frame of reference necessitates the re-defining of woman in relation to the symbolic instead of the biological. In 1974, Kristeva predicts that after the crisis of man's identity will come the crisis of woman's, 'which will be the true revolution of industrialised humanity, freed from the anxiety to procreate and to produce: neither man nor woman, nor uni-sex: a whirl of clashes and laughter' (Kristeva, 1974b: 225). In Des Chinoises, Kristeva is the most outspoken about her hopes and expectations regarding the future not only of individuals and of society but also of gender identity. Her 'mission' is clear:

[...] to build a society whose acting power, is represented by no one: no one can appropriate it if no one is excl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Culture: An Overview
• 2 The Genesis of the Subject: The Paternal Function
• 3 The Failure of the Paternal Function
• 4 Reassignment of the Paternal Function to the Maternal
• 5 The Maternal
• 6 Narcissism
• 7 Narcissus
• 8 Narcissistic Society
• Bibliography
• Index