Julia Kristeva (RLE Feminist Theory)

John Lechte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415636179
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136199257
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

A leading literary critic and psychoanalyst, Julia Kristeva is one of the most significant French thinkers writing today. In this up-to-date survey of her work, John Lechte outlines fully and systematically her intellectual development. He traces it from her work on Bakhtin and the logic of poetic language in the 1960s, through her influential theories of the 'symbolic' and the 'semiotic' in the 1970s, to her analyses of horror, love, melancholy and cosmopolitanism in the 1980s. He provides an insight into the intellectual and historical context which gave rise to Kristeva's thought, showing how thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Emile Benviste and Georges Bataille have been important in stimulating her own reflections. He concludes with an overall assessment of Kristeva's work, looking in particular at her importance for feminism and postmodern thought in general.

Essential reading for all those who wish to extend their understanding of this important thinker, this first full-length study of Kristeva's work will be of interest to students of literature, sociology, critical theory, feminist theory, French studies and psychoanalysis.

Part One

Context and influences

1

‘“Too French …”’? Setting the intellectual scene

‘Too French’ means: love affairs, libertinism, witticisms, fickleness, lack of substance and seriousness, fashion, petite Parisian women, economic incompetence, Pigalle, Folies-Bergère, Moulin-Rouge, banks of the Marne, Impressionism, the tradition of the eighteenth century, too frivolous, too much froth and bubble….

Philippe Sollers, Théorie des Exceptions

Frenchness

There are probably few nations, if not few people, in the world – and, certainly in the Western world – for whom ‘French’ does not evoke a specific set of images relating to food, fashion, politics, sexuality, language, rural and intellectual life, etc. – images precisely like those enumerated above by Sollers.¹ How could it be otherwise? For as the historian, Theodore Zeldin clearly recognizes, no ‘nation has tried harder to find and express its identity’² – especially outside France, we could add. Even though, as Zeldin also recognizes, the task of describing a typical French person is well-nigh an impossible one, ‘Frenchness’, because it is a perceived set of images, styles, and behaviours divorced from any particular individual, is much easier to define.

Here, we need only recall the image – even if it is a somewhat faded one – of the intellectual engagé, or, more simply, the very idea of ‘intellectual’. Thus an intellectual is certainly a person who takes a stand, goes against the tide, is provocative, opposes the establishment, and generally has a sense of moral, or political commitment; but in its non-Sartrean version, an intellectual can also be someone who loves art and ideas for their own sake, who may enjoy putting on a show (cf. Lacan), and who does not necessarily need to be paid in order to think.

And so while a difference exists between the image of ‘Frenchness’ and the reality, we need above all to recognize that before being able to appreciate and understand intellectual and artistic endeavour in France, we must, firstly, discount images of ‘Frenchness’ deriving from self-promotion; and, secondly, look critically at the often negative stereotypes deriving from an overreaction to ‘Frenchness’ outside France. In this regard, Philippe Sollers might well have added ‘Parisian intellectual’ to his list of what ‘too French’ means. American or British books and articles on intellectual movements in France – especially since 1945 – rarely fail to refer to the effects on thought of Parisian intellectual life.³ More specifically, in the early years of structuralism in America and elsewhere, being a French intellectual often meant being seen by Anglophones as monstrously difficult to understand;⁴ or, if the figure was Jacques Lacan, simply a monstrosity.⁵

Julia Kristeva's work is written in this milieu which, for some, is ‘too French’. That she is highly sensitive to this milieu, is illustrated by the following remarks:

From the time of my arrival [in Paris], I found, in this milieu, a distrustful and cold hospitality, that was nevertheless effective and dependable. A hospitality which has, moreover, never failed. Whatever the xenophobia, the antifeminism or the antisemitism of some, I maintain that French cultural life as I have come to know it has always been marked by a reserved but generous curiosity, one that is reticent but, everything considered, receptive to the nomad, the outlandish, the implant, and the exogamous of all kinds. The greater tolerance of the English, and the greater American capacity for assimilation no doubt offer more existential opportunity. But they are, finally, because of their lower resistance, less propitious to the production of new thought.⁶

As a foreigner in France for whom being in exile has taken on both an intellectual and personal significance,⁷ Kristeva becomes a perceptive witness of the intellectual environment that I discuss in the following pages of this chapter. Indeed, in what follows, I attempt to provide a pre-text for Kristeva's text, one to which Kristeva has responded from the moment of her arrival in Paris in the mid-1960s to the present day.

Thought and its concerns in France

Beginning in particular in the 1930s with the lectures of Alexander Kojéve,⁸ Hegel, and then Marx will permeate Parisian intellectual life for the next thirty or more years. Whatever version of their thought becomes current in France up until 1968, it is impossible to dissociate it from a political cutting edge. Interest in these thinkers shakes philosophy from its narrowly institutional – that is, academic – slumber perhaps characteristic of the Bergson era. Kristeva's work certainly bears the mark of this influence – especially in texts such as La Révolution du langage poétique.⁹

Sartrean Existentialism, too, is more or less unthinkable outside a framework set by the Hegel-Marx nexus. As Sartre wrote in 1960: ‘the unsurpassable framework of Knowledge is Marxism; and in as much as this Marxism clarifies our individual and collective praxis, it therefore determines us in our existence.’¹⁰

The study of Hegel and Marx focused attention on the foundations of thought and society. Theories of politics, ideology, and subjectivity, which would give French intellectual life its unique stamp immediately before and after the Second World War, begin to come to the fore. At the same time begins the ascendancy of the French Communist Party as the main focus for progressive intellectual and cultural activity: it becomes the prime organizer of colloquia on social and cultural issues, the main harbinger – almost despite itself – of intellectuals and avant-garde writers and artists in the late sixties and early seventies.¹¹ Stalin had been denounced in 1956; the party's bureaucratic apparatus was deemed cumbersome and authoritarian, but the party as patron of intellectual activity, together with Marxist philosophy, would not receive its final coup de grâce until the mid to late seventies with the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, the rise of the so-called ‘new philosophers’ (who called, in part, for a return to the moral ideas of Kant and the Enlightenment), and the emergence of the Solidarity movement in Poland.

Somewhat less visible to a wider public than Hegelianism or Marxism, was phenomenology. Phenomenology comes to provide a more sophisticated backdrop for the development of a theory of subjectivity and language – a theory of which Marxism was bereft. Phenomenology, too, provided the impetus for Sartre's existentialist humanism, although Sartre's ‘innovation’ here was to try to rid his humanism of any trace of transcendence, or any entity prior to consciousness in the world. In fact, in privileging consciousness, Sartre eliminated the difference between subject and object: the ego would become absolute master of itself and of the objective world for it would be continuous with it. The phenomenological strand found in Sartre is therefore somewhat aberrant; nevertheless, it doubtless inspired the move to see Marxism as a humanism, thus bringing the latter under fire from structuralism in the 1960s. According to Michel Foucault,¹² Marxism was, after 1945, always fundamental, but was variously ‘married’ to other parallel systems of thought, or intellectual movements. Of these, phenomenology was, in Foucault's eyes, by far the most important – to the extent that ‘everything which took place in the sixties arose from a dissatisfaction with the phenomenological theory of the subject, and involved different escapades, subterfuges, break-throughs, according to whether we use a negative or a positive term, in the direction of linguistics, psychoanalysis or Nietzsche’.¹³ As we shall see,¹⁴ Julia Kristeva's work is also strongly marked by the influence of phenomenology and its theory of the subject. Rather than rid thought of the distinction between subject and object, Kristeva's Freudian approach leads to an investigation of the preconditions for the constitution of the subject-object division. This kind of focus, let us note, was quite inimical to the Analytic-Empiricist tradition. For it, too, like Marxism, failed to pay close attention to a theory of the subject.

Nietzsche constitutes another underlying reference point in French thought for the generation coming after Sartre. In particular, writers such as Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot – assiduous readers of Nietzsche – influenced those, who, like Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, wanted to ecape the restrictiveness of academic philosophy and Marxism alike. Nietzsche was not only challenging and refreshing as a thinker, and captivating as a prose stylist, but was also seen as a way of gaining a new insight into contemporary culture. If, then, Sartre had somewhat cavalierly dismissed God and the transcendental ego at almost a single stroke, Nietzsche had shown, firstly, that God cannot be abolished so readily, but that, secondly, were He to be, man would also be a casualty, with nihilism taking up the slack. If the writer was Georges Bataille, Nietzsche would even stimulate a renewed interest in the sacred. Thus, in the early 1970s, Kristeva writes that:

Bataille's work seems to me to bear on this precise moment: it is that following the ending of Christianity, with its affirmation posing the subject and knowledge, thus opening up society as well as modern philosophy, Bataille proclaims a new practice. Rather than being ignorant of it, or avoiding it, Bataille's approach takes the conclusion of Christian idealism as its point of departure.¹⁵

Part of Bataille's attraction for Kristeva and others is in showing that the death of God is not the end of the story – either philosophical or historical. In its continuation, this story – especially as it is taken up by the writer – refuses to bypass the horror and death (man's own death) which Christianity masked, and which humanity must now confront alone, if it can confront it at all. In short, Bataille would counter Sartre's humanist naïveté and point toward an understanding of the knife edge upon which the existence of society is poised in the battle between the sacred transgression (cf. sacrifice) and the Law as the basis of the social pact.

Structuralism

The movement publicly designated ‘structuralism’,¹⁶ which emerged in France in the 1960s became, in many respects, the strongest force against philosophical humanism. Most fundamentally, the structuralist endeavour restored the difference between subject and object that Sartre's philosophy in particular had erased. Such is the significance of the emphasis on the study of language as both a relatively autonomous realm, and at the same time constitutive of the conscious subject. For Sartre, it was important to show how language could be transparent, and a perfect representation of the world. Although approached from different directions by a variety of thinkers, the structuralist concern was to show that representation as such was not innocent, but symptomatic of a particular kind of society. The journal Tel Quel (publisher of most of Kristeva's writing), pointed out in its editorials and articles in the late 1960s, and especially in 1968, that representation, knowledge, and consciousness could not be separated from one another in a bourgeois, capitalist society. The point was to avoid being naïve about re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor's foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One Context and influences
• Part Two A reading of Kristeva's œuvre
• Part Three Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index