Kristeva in Focus

From Theory to Film Analysis

Katherine J. Goodnow

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781782385066, 9781845456122
• eBook ISBN: 9781845457945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Linguistics

Dealing with some of the major themes in film narratives, this book draws on the theories of French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. It looks at how narratives have changed over time, and considers the sources of our variable reactions to themes and representations of horror, strangers, and love.

In addition to a selection of contemporary mainstream films, the major films for analysis are New Zealand "New Wave" films such as Alison Maclean's Kitchen Sink and Crush; Vincent Ward's Vigil; and Jane Campion's Sweety, An Angel at My Table, and The Piano.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION TO KRISTEVA

Kristeva, like most postmodernists, does not present herself as offering a grand metatheory:

Considering the complexity of the signifying process, no belief in an all-powerful theory is tenable; there remains the necessity to pay attention to the desire for language, and by this I mean paying attention … to the art and literature of our time, which remains alone, in our world of technological rationality, to impel us not toward the absolute but toward a quest for a little more truth … concerning the meaning of speech, concerning our condition as speaking beings.¹

That lack of a grand theory – or of a single, central proposition from which all else unfolds – makes for difficulties when one attempts to present any simple synthesis of Kristeva’s position. One solution to this difficulty would be to present a chronological account of what she has written. Her work, however, is often recursive rather than linear over time.² Film analysts are likely to find it more rewarding if they begin, not with a chronological account, but with a sense of the kinds of questions she has asked, the kinds of perspectives she has used, and the general concerns that cut across her work.

I shall accordingly open this chapter by noting that Kristeva combines in one person a knowledge of the several disciplines – semiotics, psychoanalysis, political theory, and feminist theory – to which film theorists have often looked for borrowable concepts and methods. She is Professor of Linguistics and Director of the doctoral school ‘Language, Literature, Image’ at the University of Paris. She is a practising psychoanalyst: a career that came after the start of a career in linguistics. She has been, over time, committed to Marxist theory (with reservations based on her having first-hand experience of life in Bulgaria, before coming to Paris in her mid twenties), interested in Maoist theory, disillusioned with political groups, and more oriented towards what individuals – particularly individuals within the avant-garde – can achieve in the destabilization of restrictive social orders or in the preservation of an effective order that is under threat (she is concerned, for instance, with the rise of racial prejudice in contemporary France). Finally, she has long been regarded as one of the leading ‘French feminists’, although her own self-identification is not as a ‘feminist’ and the reactions of many feminists to her proposals about the position of women have been far from universally positive.³

I shall introduce Kristeva by beginning with two concepts – two grand concerns – that cut across much of her work. These are far from being the only concepts she presents or the only ones of interest to film theorists. At this point, however, presenting a précis of each of Kristeva’s main ideas would result in a chapter that would be weak on interconnections and so skeletal, so poorly anchored in examples, as to be uninteresting, even if comprehensible. These two large concepts will open the analysis, with others added as the chapters unroll and specific questions arise. That route is a little closer to Kristeva’s own style (although still far from it). In many ways, Kristeva often writes as if she expected understanding to emerge in the way it does with the reading of a poem. It is the accumulation of images, of references, that yields at the end the sense of now knowing what is intended. My approach is not poetic in any standard form, but it will be cumulative rather than attempting to touch on all points at the start.

Which concepts, then, to choose as a starting point? Of the two selected, the first has to do with the nature of order and its destabilization. The second has to do with what Kristeva refers to as ‘the text of society and history’. The two, it will emerge, are closely inter-related, in the sense that the challenge to any existing order (social order or literary canon) lies often in drawing upon past texts in a way that is novel, that refuses to accept the customary ways, and that displays a ‘defiant productivity’.⁴

A first general concept: Order and disturbances of order

The heading Moi chooses for her chapter on Kristeva, in a book on Sexual/Textual Politics, is ‘Marginality and Subversion’.⁵ Kristeva has indeed a long-standing interest in the ways by which any established order is challenged, undermined, or changed, in the necessity for disturbance, and in the risks and promises, the gains and losses, that breaks in an established order bring with them.

This concern is a thread that links Kristeva’s early work – Revolution in Poetic Language, for example, to later work such as Strangers to Ourselves and Intimate Revolt. It is a thread that also cuts across the several kinds of representations or texts that Kristeva analyses: from novels to the several versions of the French constitution during the Revolution and works of art by Giotto or Holbein. It is as well part of Kristeva’s image of her own position, her own suspicion of established theory. Asked at one point, for instance, about her connection to a Marxist ‘line of thought’, her response was: ‘I never intended to follow a correct Marxist line, and I hope I am not correctly following any other line whatsoever’.⁶ Léon Roudiez, the translator of several of Kristeva’s books, describes Kristeva in similar terms:

She is nearly always, if ever so slightly, off-centred in relation to all established doctrines …. Her discourse is not the orthodox discourse of any of them; the vocabulary is theirs but the syntax is her own.⁷

Conscious of her own position as a foreigner in France, a woman in a world dominated by men, a speaker who stands outside language in order to study it, Kristeva must indeed have been pleased with Barthes’s description of her:

Julia Kristeva changes the place of things. She always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by …. [S]he subverts authority, the authority of monologic science.⁸

From Kristeva’s several expressions of concern with order and its destabilization, I shall draw out several propositions. I do so with an awareness that this way of proceeding violates Kristeva’s own style, and runs the risk of losing the richness of her thought – of ‘domesticating the alien’.⁹ At the same time, as I noted in the preface, I wish to make Kristeva’s argument accessible to those who may have no other knowledge of what she has written. I shall accept the risk, with the promise that the later chapters will undo any appearance of reductive or simplistic thought on Kristeva’s part.

The reader will recognize that these propositions place Kristeva within a line of thought that includes Althusser, Barthes, Derrida, and Lacan, and it is certainly not part of my argument to present Kristeva as being without precedent. What distinguishes her, however, and makes her ideas particularly attractive for film analysis, is the combined set, and in particular, the later propositions within the set.

Order takes a variety of forms

Some of these forms have to do with the nature of texts or representations. The expected forms of written texts or works of art, for instance, specify what can be named or pictured, and how this should be done. Change then may be in either of these aspects. In Kristeva’s view, for instance, ‘Western painting’ departed from ‘Catholic theology’ first by its ‘themes (at the time of the Renaissance) and later, [by] its norm-representation (with the advent of Impressionism and the ensuing movements)’.¹⁰

Other forms of order have to do with the relationships expected to apply between individuals, either as lovers or as residents of one country. ‘Self’ and ‘other’ are expected to be separate, but the degree and the nature of separateness – or, as in the case of marriage, ‘oneness’ – are codified rather than left to chance or to mood.

Another form of order refers to relationships within parts or aspects of the individual. This form of order again involves a distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other’. ‘Not yourself’ or ‘beside myself’, for instance, are phrases indicating that there are some parts of oneself that are expected to occupy only a certain place. Dreams, fantasies, violent feelings, or the state of being ‘in love’, for example, are in contemporary times accepted as part of one’s self, as part of one’s ‘unconscious’ or ‘dream life’ (in earlier times they might well have been exteriorized as the result of witchcraft or possession). They are, however, not typically seen as part of one’s ‘usual self’ and they are expected to be under the control of one’s ‘usual self’.

Finally, ‘order’ refers to the general state of affairs that applies in a society. It is possible, for instance, to describe a society as dominated by the values of a bourgeoisie, with little or no dissenting voice. It is also possible to describe a society as marked by patriarchy. For Kristeva the major distinction is between social orders that allow differing amounts of space for the dissenting voice: the voice that she sees as part of a ‘semiotic’ rather than the ‘symbolic’ register or form of experience. The social order that is dominated by the symbolic is, in essence, one marked by the valorization of rationality, technology, evaluative judgments, strict logic, naming, and the delineation of opposites (man/woman; rationality/emotionality; prose/poetry, etc.). In contrast, a social order with some space for the semiotic is one with a place for rhythm, ‘pulses’ and colour, a feeling for the ‘unnameable’ and for the flow of opposites into one another, and a desire for ‘jouissance’ rather than for control, clarity, and the observance of rules.

That societies differ in the extent to which they allow a dissenting voice is a proposal that passes without challenge. The extension to identifying this voice as semiotic, however, is a different point: one that has raised some degree of concern. Among some critics, there is a degree of concern with the way Kristeva moves from terms originally developed to describe the nature of language to a use of the same terms to describe a social order. Nancy Fraser, for instance, objects to ‘a quasi-structuralist conflation’ of ‘a register of language – symbolic/semiotic – with a social order’.¹¹ For the moment, however, I shall let the analogy stand.

The several forms of order are related to one another

Two such links stand out in Kristeva’s work. In the first link, the way in which parts of oneself are interrelated (the internal ‘self’ and the ‘other’) is regarded as parallel to, and giving rise to, the way in which we regard strangers. (Hence the title Strangers to Ourselves, for a book that begins with concern about the rise of xenophobia in contemporary France.) The same kind of link is also part of the argument that in order to love others we must be able to love ourselves (but also to go beyond self-love), and that we find unsettling or ‘uncanny’ encounters with the ‘alien double’. This link will be recognized as having a classic psychoanalytic base.¹² The second link is between the social order and the literary order. This linking actually has several parts to it, each attracting varying degrees of comment, and it will be worth separating them from the start. The first part – the notion that there are links of various kinds between forms of social order and the forms that texts or representations take – receives the widest support. It is a pervasive proposal in the field of humanities: one that may be found in work ranging from historical analyses of art to analyses of horror films.¹³ I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Introduction to Kristeva
• Chapter 2. Horror – Basic concepts: The abject and its varieties
• Chapter 3. Horror – Specifying the circumstances
• Chapter 4. Strangers – Basic concepts: Strangers without and within
• Chapter 5. Strangers – Expansions: The stranger’s story
• Chapter 6. Love – Basic concepts
• Chapter 7. Love – Expansions: Old and new discourses
• Chapter 8. The text of society and history
• Chapter 9. Women and social change
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index