New Forms of Revolt

Essays on Kristeva's Intimate Politics

Sarah K. Hansen, Rebecca Tuvel, Sarah K. Hansen, Rebecca Tuvel

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781438465203, 9781438465210
• eBook ISBN: 9781438465227
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Over the last twenty years, French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and novelist Julia Kristeva has explored how global crises threaten people's ability to revolt. In a context of widespread war, deepening poverty, environmental catastrophes, and rising fundamentalisms, she argues that a revival of inner psychic experience is necessary and empowering. "Intimate revolt" has become a central concept in Kristeva's critical repertoire, framing and permeating her understanding of power, meaning, and identity. New Forms of Revolt brings together ten essays on this aspect of Kristeva's work, addressing contemporary social and political issues like immigration and cross-cultural encounters, colonial and postcolonial imaginations, racism and artistic representation, healthcare and social justice, the spectacle of global capitalism, and new media.

Part I

Kristeva

Revolt and Political Action

1

New Forms of Revolt

Julia Kristeva

I would like to summarize the lecture of New Forms of Revolt without repeating it, by briefly touching on my understanding of humanism.

I am referring to an event that happened in Europe (and nowhere else) and that cut ties with religious tradition, leading to Nietzsche’s “God is dead”—an unprecedented event whose way was paved by the Greco-Judeo-Christian tradition. But “God is dead” also means that some use religion as a political tool if not a political weapon, as in the case of religious fundamentalism. Hannah Arendt already established that those who use God for political aims are also nihilistic, if not more so than the self-declared nihilists. We cannot respond to the crisis of the global world without continuously refounding this other ethical space, which detached itself from the religious continent and which is precisely secularization or humanism. Humanism was built in Europe—it began in the Renaissance and was developed during the eighteenth century by Erasmus, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, Goethe, and many other rebels, continuing on until Freud and his successors, who have inspired my thought.

I understand humanism in the Nietzschean sense of a “transvaluation of values” (Umwertung aller werte) that puts “a big question mark on matters of weighty seriousness.” Such work is endless, exorbitant, and long term. We are undergoing not only an economic, political, and social crisis, but also an existential one in which we are confronted with a major unknown: What is a man? What is a woman? What is humanity?

The interminable response to this question associates, I believe, today’s crisis with the crisis of Homo sapiens. Concretely speaking, it is a question of human identity in general, and subsequently of the crisis of our multiple identities: sexual, ethnic, racial, national, religious, familial, and so on. This crisis calls on the human sciences, which developed following the disintegration of the theological continent more than two centuries ago, but the response depends equally on our ability (or inability) to create new languages: new literature, new painting, new dance, new music.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) in his Divine Comedy (cantica I, 69) looked for a language capable of “exceeding the human”: “trasumanare” was the term he used, a neologism representative of what is called his “new style.” Today my conviction is that the human sciences could be a radical means to this trasumanare that humanity needs—that is, if we refuse to wallow in this endemic, inevitable crisis that the growth of technology and virtual finance has imposed on men and women; and if, on the contrary, we want to sense the seeds germinating while awaiting the much desired renaissance to come.

On the invitation of Pope Benedict XVI to a recent interreligious meeting for peace in Assisi in October 2011, as a humanist at the head of a delegation of non-believers (and this for the first time in the long history of religions), I developed ten principles of humanism, which I will not develop here, but which you can consult on my Web site.

Allow me, though, to mention just the first principle of humanism according to my understanding, because it echoes with the theme of Revolt.

The humanism of the twenty-first century is not a theomorphism. Neither “value” nor ulterior “goal,” Man with a capital M does not exist. After the Holocaust and the Gulags, humanism has a duty to remind men and women that we are not the sole legislators, but it is uniquely through the continuing questioning of our personal, historical, and social situation that we can make decisions for society and history.

Revolt is this permanent questioning: revolt, as return/turning back/displacement/change, constitutes the internal logic of a certain culture whose acuity seems rather threatened these days, and which I would like to revive in my paper. But let us return to the meaning of this revolt, which seems to me to indicate what is most alive and promising about our culture.

Generally, when the media use the word “revolt,” what we understand is the nihilistic suspension of questioning in favor of so-called new values, which, precisely as they are values, have neglected to operate a return onto themselves and have thereby essentially betrayed the meaning of the revolt that I am trying to make you appreciate here. The nihilist is not a man in revolt. The pseudo-rebellious nihilist is, in fact, a man reconciled with the stability of new values. This stability, which is illusory, is in fact deadly and totalitarian. I cannot stress enough the fact that totalitarianism and its modern version, the automatization of species, are the result of a certain fixation of revolt in what is precisely its betrayal—namely, the suspension of retrospective return, which amounts to a suspension of thought.

I am therefore seeking experiences in which this work of revolt, which opens psychical life to infinite re-creation, continues and reoccurs, even at the price of errors and dead ends. Indeed, we should not delude ourselves: it is not enough to revive the permanence of revolt, which technology may have inhibited, in order to secure happiness or some sort of serene stability of being. Revolt exposes the speaking being to an unbearable conflictuality, and our century has assumed the daunting privilege of manifesting the necessary enjoyment (jouissance) and morbid dead ends associated with this conflictuality. But this functions in an altogether different way from the nihilist, who is focused on the celebration of his unmitigated rejection of the “old” or on the unflinching positivity inspired by the “new” path of trasumanare.

I briefly touch on how new political actors are incarnating and realizing this refoundation of humanism that the globalized world direly needs. I take as examples two of these experiences that cruelly lack a means of expression in today’s codes of humanism: adolescents in want of ideals and maternal passion at the crossroads of biology and meaning.

Adolescence: A Syndrome of Ideality

As opposed to the child, who, according to Freud, is a polymorphic pervert—the child who wants to know where babies come from and whom Freud compares to a “laboratory researcher”—the adolescent is a believer. The adolescent is not a “researcher” in a laboratory; he is a believer. The adolescent is a mystic of the object of love. Adam & Eve, Dante & Beatrice, Romeo & Juliet: we are all adolescents. We are all adolescents when we are in love.

But the belief that there exists an ideal object (be it a partner, a profession, or a creation) is accompanied by the absolute belief that the parental couple must be surpassed and even abolished so that the adolescent subject can escape into an idealized, paradisiacal variant of absolute satisfaction.

When this fantasy fails to direct the adolescent toward a process of sublimation (school, profession, vocation), the failure of the paradise syndrome inevitably leads to depressivity, which takes the banal form of common boredom—“If I don’t have Everything, I get bored”—and opens the way to delinquent conduct. But this conduct is merely the flip side of the malady of ideality, because the need for ideality persists beneath this delinquency and supports aggressive behavior; it in no way signals the abolition or ongoing destruction of ideality.

Civilizations commonly referred to as primitive have long used initiation rites to assert symbolic authority (divine for the invisible world, political for this world here) and to justify the acting out of what we would qualify today as perverse by condoning initiatory sexual practices. In our Western culture, notably in medieval Christianity, mortification rituals and excessive fasting channeled the anorectic and sadomasochistic behaviors of adolescents and, in so doing, alternatively downplayed or glorified them.

In yet another way—this time secular—what seems to me to be an imaginary elaboration of the adolescent’s crisis is the birth of the European novel during the Renaissance, shaped around the adolescent character.

Those are some solutions from the past, but today the question for psychoanalysis and education is: are we able to innovate when confronted with adolescent crises?

Only the analyst’s and the teacher’s capacities to recognize and name the idealizing course of adolescent drives will allow them to provide a credible and effective transference and thus enable a metabolization of the need to believe through the pleasure that comes with thinking, questioning, and analyzing rather than through nihilist acting out. This way, analysts and teachers will be able to accompany the adolescent’s rebellions, doubts, and malaises while conserving this universal component, this need to believe, which structures the adolescent.

Motherhood Today

Secular civilization is the only civilization lacking a discourse on motherhood. We believe we understand what a Jewish or a Christian mother is—but what about a modern mother? What is she in this space between the lover, the working woman, and the activist for women’s liberation and artificial reproduction, or, on the contrary, returning to the protective values of traditional family?

Contemporary psychoanalysis offers to shed some light on maternal passion. I recently proposed the existence of a maternal eroticism I call reliance at an international conference on psychoanalysis (JAPA—Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association). This word, in French, carries echoes of the word “lien,” to link or to connect, and confiance, trust or confidence, as well as an alternative to religion (religion-reliance). Between biology and sense, attachment and expulsion, love and hate, and violent influence and generous transmission, maternal reliance is a surprising and necessary version of ethics we might call a herethic.

Maternal passion can be understood as a cleft between the mother’s hold on her child and sublimation. This division makes the risk of madness ever present, and yet this very risk offers a perpetual opportunity for culture. Religious myths spun their webs around this divide. In the Bible, the woman is a “hole” (such is the meaning of the word “woman,” nekayva in Hebrew) and a queen; the Virgin is similarly a “hole” in the Christian trinity of father/son/holy ghost and a Queen of the Church. Religions address this maternal division through these imaginary constructions—by recognizing the division, they perpetuated it, but they also found a way of balancing it. A kind of working-through of maternal madness came of this, one that made possible the existence of a humanity endowed with a complex psychic functioning, capable of having an inner life and of being creative in the outer world.

Let me conclude. The adolescent and the mother are two eternal actors in human existence that reveal themselves to be decisive actors in this trasumanare, in this passing through the human that concerns us at the beginning of this third millennium; and by incarnating their dramatic experiences, our interdisciplinary research could perhaps accompany modern existential crises with the necessary delicacy lacking in contemporary ethics and politics. The refoundation of humanism necessitates the contribution of our multifaceted field, the humanities. Thank you for having given me the occasion to remind you of this.

2

Spectacle and Revolt

On the Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Social Theory in Julia Kristeva’s Work

Surti Singh

Since the publication of Kristeva’s The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt and Intimate Revolt, renewed forms of revolt have spread across the globe. The rebellious atmosphere of the twenty-first century occasions a reconsideration of Kristeva’s thesis that the loss of revolt is a central problem for contemporary politics. Given recent events, how should we understand Kristeva’s claim that the spectacular nature of contemporary society damages the culture of revolt (2002, 5)? This claim reflects a profound shift in Kristeva’s thinking from her earlier works on revolt and revolution (Beardsworth 2005; Brandt 2005; Margaroni 2007). Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, for example, was inspired by the distinctly political meaning of revolt originating with the French Revolution, which implied a transgression against the law and prohibitive political structures, “a protest against already established norms, values and powers” (2002, 3). In contrast, Kristeva’s later work questions this meaning of revolt given the changed social and political climate of the late twentieth century. For Kristeva, one of the most striking features of contemporary society is the absence of any definitive power against which we might revolt, and the effects that this absence has on the individual. In this context, Sara Beardsworth notes that Kristeva’s return to the concept of revolt in her later works, while renewing the themes that she developed in the 1970s, is profoundly influenced by her psychoanalytic excursions into the problems of subject formation undertaken in works such as Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, and Black Sun written during the 1980s (2004, 37). Kristeva asks not only how we might think about revolt today when power is much more diffuse and difficult to identify, but, more importantly, how we might think about the loss of the desire for revolt forty years after the rebellious atmosphere of the 1960s that inspired the student-worker revolution of May 1968.

While Kristeva ultimately addresses the loss of the desire for revolt within a psychoanalytic register, it is notable that she turns to social theory to explain the conditions for this loss. Explicitly referencing the 1967 text of Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Kristeva argues that the image-saturated environment of the spectacle invades the psychic space of the individual resulting in a lack of imagination and fantasy. The subject’s passivity in face of these commercial, standardized images creates an incapacity for revolt. Kristeva’s invocation of the society of the spectacle moves her work beyond traditional psychoanalytic concerns by linking them with social and political issues. Kristeva’s debt to The Society of the Spectacle is noted in the literature, but the wider implications of Kristeva’s reliance on Debord’s social theory, specifically as a framework for her own psychoanalytic theory of revolt, is little discussed. Part of this neglect is a result of Kristeva’s own references to Debord, which, while numerous, are never linked to an explicit engagement with The Society of the Spectacle itself. Maria Margaroni’s review article (2007), for example, positively explores the viability of a psychoanalytic social theory that emerges in recent work on and by Kristeva. Yet in another essay Margaroni notes, “Kristeva’s obsessive and (perhaps, uncritical) use of Debord’s term has done little to improve her reputation …” (2009, 110). Indeed, Kristeva’s shorthand references to Debord potentially pose problems for the legitimacy of her claims, but they also create the possibility of developing this connection further, particularly in light of the prominent role that the spectacle continues to play in the political realm. Fifteen years after writing Intimate Revolt and The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, and in light of current events, Kristeva asks in her lecture “New Forms of Revolt,” “Could ‘revolt,’ called ‘riot’ on the web, be—at this digital age—in the process of shaking up humankind of its dream of hyperconnectedness? Or could it be just a trick played on us by the culture of the spectacle to last longer?” (2014). Kristeva’s turn to Debord is both provocative and timely, for it points to the spectacle’s ambivalent character—it creates both the obstacles to revolt but also the resources by which revolt may occur. We can see this double-edged quality of the spectacle in the prominent role that social media, for example, have played in contemporary uprisings. The spectacle contains the means to facilitate revolt and at the same time, by way of these means, perpetuates its own existence and produces new obstacles to revolt.

Because Kristeva accepts Debord’s thesis wholesale and often references his theory of the spectacle as an explanatory principle for the nature of society without explicitly engaging with it, her analysis of subject formation does not include a questioning of psychoanalysis itself as a discourse produced within and by the society of the spectacle. According to Debord, the logic of the spectacle structures every aspect of our reality; discourse cannot magically stand outside the spectacle. How, then, can we accept both Kristeva’s reliance on traditional psychoanalytic categories to explain contemporary subjectivity and her belief that we live in a society of the spectacle, in Debord’s sense of the term? While there may appear to be a disjuncture between psychoanalysis and social theory in Kristeva’s work, I contend that D...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Kristeva: Revolt and Political Action
• Part II Imagining New Intimacies: Anti-Racist, Aesthetic, and Clinical Revolts
• Part III Language and Narrative in Kristeva
• Contributors
• Index
• Backcover