Kristeva and the Political

Cecilia Sjoholm

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415213660
• eBook ISBN: 9781134613021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential French thinkers of the twentieth century and is best known for her work in linguistics. Even though her work has been very influential, the political implications of her writings have so far been neglected. Kristeva and the Political is the first book to explore the relation of Kristeva's work to the political and casts new light on her work, connecting her to recent developments in literary theory, political theory, and cultural studies. In particular it shows how Kristeva's account of the unconscious and psychoanalysis generally, widens the notion of the political.Each chapter introduces a fundamental theme in Kristeva's work, highlighting a specific period of development in her thought and drawing on texts from the 1960s through to the 1990s. Themes addressed include Kristeva's theory of discourse, the theory of the subject, the notion of alterity, feminism and marginality and her theory known as the 'politics of meaning'. Kristeva and the Political also shows how Kristeva's notions of the political draw on a rich array of thinkers and writers, from Freud, Melanie Klein and Lacan, to Proust and Marguerite Duras.

1

A REVOLUTION BETWEEN PLEASURE AND SACRIFICE

Materialism and Marxism

The often told story of Kristeva’s arrival in Paris as a boursier de l ’état français from Bulgaria is associated with precocious brilliance and intellectual stardom: she becomes the favourite of Roland Barthes, gets involved with the Tel Quel circle and Philippe Sellers, introduces Bakhtin and the concept of intertextuality.¹ Named L Étrangère by Roland Barthes she becomes a main influence in Tel Quel, publishes a Maoist manifesto, goes on a scandalous journey to China, becomes a professor, a psychoanalyst, a writer, etc. In her writings from the 1960s, Kristeva emerges as a radical with a very defined goal: she wants to theorise the revolutionary potential of literary discourse. In other words, the primary aim is not to formulate a theory of literature, but a new form of materialist critique. The work on literature is motivated by a desire to fill in a blank in Marxist theory, not the understanding of literature. This project goes hand in hand with a consistent emphasis on the radical value of aesthetic work. Removing the political from the central stage of decision-making onto the margins of avant-garde practices, literary discourse is made a weapon for political change. The writings from the 1960s give evidence of an aesthetic militancy that later books to some extent have served to cover. But there is an obvious continuity between the youthful, militant Kristeva, and the mature psychoanalyst. The early political engagement would not have been so interesting had it not been for the fact that much of her work on psychoanalysis and literature could be seen as an elaboration of the political. Set at the crossroads between psychoanalysis and materialist cultural criticism, Kristeva challenges the traditional emancipatory politics of the left. Rather than be prone to reflective and critical discourses, her political subject is rooted in a body of drives and desires, taking pleasure not only in the challenge to repressive institutions but also in corporeal affectivity itself. The replacement of critical analysis for affectivity, regression and pleasure seems to belie the idea that the work is done in the name of ‘the political’. The theory has been accused of being stuck at an impossible crossroads between an affirmation of the pleasures of a singular subject and a critical assessment of the totalising forces of modernity. But although a definition of the political as avant-gardism, subjectivity and intimacy may be debatable, her writings not only make it impossible to dismiss these spheres as apolitical, but they also clearly demonstrate the way in which the subjective discourses of art and psychoanalysis are tied in with modern political thought. Proceeding in three moves, this chapter will begin to uncover the intellectual engagements that have led Kristeva to replace the analysis of capitalism and class struggle with an affirmation of the workings of the unconscious. It is necessary here to tell the story of Paris in the early 1960s and Kristeva’s place in that context. Second, I will discuss the definition of pleasure as being based on the Freudian notion of polymorphous sexuality. Third, I will argue that Kristeva’s affirmation of pleasure is conceived as a logic of pleasure and sacrifice. This means that enjoyment is the ultimate motivator of the formations of subjectivity, and that sacrifice, or the giving up of enjoyment, is only the momentary giving up of a pleasure that is to be retrieved in a new form.

Kristeva’s notion of the political emerged at a scene were art, philosophy, politics and ways of living just in general were subject to experimentation. Politics, philosophy, film and literature were rejuvenating themselves, and the intellectual scene was becoming increasingly radical. In his extensive history of the journal Tel Quel Philippe Forest has shown that its politicisation took off in the summer of 1966, when Philippe Sollers became chief editor. A political committee of the review was formed in 1967, and a first article announcing the liaison with the Communist Party was published the same year. In the year to come, Tel Quel presented itself as revolutionary and avant-garde. In other words, the group wanted to create a new kind of environment for the political left, where aesthetic practices were considered as revolutionary in themselves. The project at that point was to create a theoretical superstructure for the practices of the avant-garde, similar to the manifestos of early avant-gardisms such as, for instance, Russian and Italian futurists or French surrealists. But the interest of Tel Quel was almost exclusively dedicated to literature and language, leaving out art, photography, film and music, although these art forms were more innovative and experimental in the 1960s than literature. Certain authors, such as Georges Bataille and Céline, were considered to be avant-garde, whereas the original French surrealist movement was left outside, never mind the international scene of other modernists. In such a context, the influence of Julia Kristeva must have been like a breath of fresh air. She knew only of two French avantgarde authors before she came to France (Céline and Blanchot),² but this in turn seems to have propelled her curiosity. Cultivating a particular interest in modernism she inspired a new perspective on authors such as Rimbaud, Bataille and Mallarmé. Moreover, she was familiar with Russian, German and English-speaking literature, and served to introduce authors and theorists from other contexts, opening the door towards a wider notion of avant-gardism than the French one. Although at times she would appear infuriatingly syncretistic, even superficial to some, she was always a daring and inspirational thinker.³

The insistence that the political be defined as a revolution of the subject must be considered within a context where a radical politics was an object of incessant disputes. It would be easy to presume that the 1960s were a time of solidarity, where the radical thought of the avant-garde merged with the quest for social and political change of the political parties. This was, however, not the case. To many of the intellectual left the discourses of deliberation and decision-making were considered hostage to a certain notion of power that was dismissed, and towards the end of the 1960s there was little common ground between the Tel Quel group and the communist party to which they originally had adhered, the PCF. The actual details of the dissensus are, however, not as interesting as the discourse that was cultivated in its wake, and in this Kristeva was not the only contributor. As the autobiographic novel Les Samuraïs implies, the group was not particularly dedicated to activism. Originally conceived as a publication promoting a new kind of aesthetic, Tel Quel gradually came to aspire towards subversion of those areas of life that tended not to be considered as political by the mainstream: art, culture and psychoanalysis. Even more importantly, these areas of life were not thought of as alien to the theoretical apparatus of the intellectual elite. In fact, one must underscore that the real originality of the Tel Quel group lies in its promotion of marginal areas of life such as intellectualism and avant-gardism as the actual motor of the revolution. Increasingly, the aim became to make theory subversive in itself.

In the manifesto of the Tel Quel group from 1968, Théorie d’ ensemble, Marxism and grammatology are pronounced to be the same thing, whereas capitalism and logocentrism are made equivalent with one another. The revolution is made into a question of text, not of political manoeuvres, and the goal of the volume is as advocated in the preface: ‘to articulate a politics logically linked to a non-representative dynamic of writing’.⁴ Such a ‘non-representable dynamic’ consisted in a theorisation of textual processes, irreducible to critique or analysis, which relied on the productive force of the theoretical machinery that was set in motion. One could describe Kristeva’s early work in three stages, although these stages intercept and overlap. The articles appearing before the publication of her seminal thesis Revolution in Poetic Language as well as that book itself could all be described as early work. All of these stages could be described as dynamic but raw attempts to formulate a materialist theory of literature, infusing literature into the concerns of the radical left. All these stages could also be regarded as allied to the idea of a non-representative dynamic of theorisation, underscoring not its analytic but rather productive power. The first stage is the sémanalyse, as presented in the Semeiotiké (1969), where literary texts are brought into a kind of discursive laboratory and examined with ‘scientific’ precision. The second stage comes with the introduction of Maoism and the Tel Quel manifesto published in 1971, declaring the need for a cultural revolution in the intellectual movement of the left. This stage signals a turn towards experience and interiority. The third stage comes with feminism and a more systematic integration of psychoanalysis so that corporeal and affective aspects of the subject are underscored.

Referring to Althusser in Théorie d’ensemble Philippe Sollers establishes that theory is a practice, and that the study of the text in particular is a site of the practice of dialectical materialism.⁵ The field through which such theoretico-political challenges are to be made is, according to Kristeva, semiotics (or the study of science), or, as she calls it in Théorie d’ensemble, semiology. Semiology (named by Saussure) emphasises the privileged place of language and argues that any study of signification would have to be referred to language. What is so specific about Kristeva’s version of semiology (or semiotics, as she calls it in other texts) is the emphasis of theory. Semiology, in fact, is nothing but theory: it constructs its objects, and reflects its own theorisation in that very construction. In this, it poses a threat to the belief in the viability of scientific discourses lacking this form of self-reflection. In relation to traditional discourses of science, semiology is aggressive and subversive, showing that all discourses are ideologically permeated, even discourses pretending to a high level of scientific value such as logic and mathematics.⁶ Signalling a new materialist theory of literature, the sémanalyse is more radical than critical analysis, more concerned with Marxism than literary theory.⁷ The interest in the text is a new, materialist science where one has to

analyse the particularities of the poetic or ‘literary’ text in the general sense and specify the specific rules for the function of meaning in these texts as well as the exact place which the subject will occupy—this could become an essential and pure contribution to the constitution of a Marxist science which Lenin showed us that we need but which is currently lacking, a science of signifying practices.⁸

Literary analysis must focus on the production of meaning, not on meaning as an object. But the history of signifying practices is relatively independent in relation to materialist history, and so one cannot simply translate the history of Marxism into literary terms.⁹ The literary text is never simply a mirror of social life. Its subversive status derives from the fact that it is produced through a relation of negativity to the social fabric. A radical theory of literature must therefore elucidate those mechanisms of negativity, and take the subversive status of the text into account without translating it in terms of the values and norms of a system of exchange in the form of a meaning made object to the text itself. Making meaning into an object, something which may be discovered as a given truth of the text rather than realising the heterogeneity and polyphony of the text, literary historians implicitly resort to metaphysics. Moreover, they tend to rely on the values and assumptions originating in a given class system. A new science of literature must therefore circumvent both of these problems, avoiding the reproduction of a given social system and the objectification of a content. However, the leftist contention that literature could be made into a scholarly discipline of analysis—read formalism—is ridden with problems. The ideology of linguistic scientism implies that literature be reduced to the object of language, a fixation on representation, making the text itself vanish under a formalist construction.¹⁰ Art and literature are transformational signifying practices and therefore irreducible to metaphysical conceptions of meaning. The text itself, and the dialectics implied in the production of the text, must be the only meaningful object of study for a materialist science of literature.

Any notion of meaning is intertwined with a set of values constructed in a given social structure, such as a class system. A new Marxist science of literature would therefore have to start with the notion of literature as a signifying practice, obeying certain rules of production. But these rules of production cannot be identified as entities outside of the text, and so cannot be reduced to sociology. As it is, literature does nothing but support a given class system. The upper classes have made it into an ideological support for their hegemony, whereas the working classes have made it into a substitute for religion. In order to challenge such metaphysical presuppositions, Kristeva, unlike Lucien Goldmann, does not look into the sociological structures of the reception of literature. She goes straight to the question of how literature signifies. This is a question that cannot, however, be reduced to linguistic presumptions. The text neither names nor determines an outside: it can only be described as a Heraclitean mobility with a double orientation—on the one hand it is produced in a specific signifying system, and on the other in a social context. Given that the text is produced between these systems, it overshoots both of them and overcomes a reduction to representation in either terms. The text never has one meaning (un sens), the textual practice ‘decentres the subject of a discourse (of one meaning, of one structure) and is structured like the operation of its pulverisation in one undifferentiated infinity’.¹¹ Rather than considering artistic practices as spaces of alienation, illustration and expression, Marxism must take their productive processes into consideration. ¹² This means that the new materialist science of signifying practices must focus on the text.¹³ The focus on the text is in itself not a particularly original claim, given the context: Sellers, Derrida, Barthes and others all made the text the focus of their study. Kristeva’s own motivation for doing so, however, must be set apart from the rest. Already from the start, the political was focused on the subject being produced through textual processes. The text is the becoming of the subject. In order to understand how such a subject appears, one has to challenge a discourse on literature that has made use of certain metaphysical and ideological presuppositions.

However, the project of attempting to found a theory of literature as a Marxist science, focusing on a textual subject studied through a linguisticsemiotic theoretical apparatus, falls short of its goals. Her texts were accused by fellow Marxists of being too scientistic and too abstract. ¹⁴ An intervention against Sémeiotiké by Mitsou Ronat at the big colloquium on literature and ideology in 1971 is illuminating in this regard. Ronat, critical of Kristeva’s claim to have surpassed the Indo-Eurocentric problems of Chomskyan linguistics, accuses her of scientism. The claim to be subverting the logical and scientific concepts of discourses such as Chomsky’s in reverting to a notion of a textual subject rather than linguistic system, guides her attention towards processes through which signification is produced rather than the given system of its production. But Ronat shows that the argument of Kristeva is circular. Her ambition is to move beyond the science of linguistic signs towards an analysis of how the sign is produced. This happens through a turn from linguistics to semiotics, which distances itself from the scientific discourse of linguist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• THINKING THE POLITICAL
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 A Revolution between Pleasure and Sacrifice
• 2 A Theorist Aesthetics
• 3 Love and the Question of Identity: from recognition to Einfuhlung
• 4 Body Politics: Pleasure, abjection, contamination
• 5 Revolutions of Our Time: Revolt as return
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index