The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt

The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis

Julia Kristeva, Jeanine Herman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780231518437
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicoanalisi

Linguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist, Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential and prolific thinkers of our time. Her writings have broken new ground in the study of the self, the mind, and the ways in which we communicate through language. Her work is unique in that it skillfully brings together psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, literature, linguistics, and philosophy.

In her latest book on the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, Kristeva focuses on an intriguing new dilemma. Freud and psychoanalysis taught us that rebellion is what guarantees our independence and our creative abilities. But in our contemporary "entertainment" culture, is rebellion still a viable option? Is it still possible to build and embrace a counterculture? For whom—and against what—and under what forms?

Kristeva illustrates the advances and impasses of rebel culture through the experiences of three twentieth-century writers: the existentialist John Paul Sartre, the surrealist Louis Aragon, and the theorist Roland Barthes. For Kristeva the rebellions championed by these figures—especially the political and seemingly dogmatic political commitments of Aragon and Sartre—strike the post-Cold War reader with a mixture of fascination and rejection. These theorists, according to Kristeva, are involved in a revolution against accepted notions of identity—of one's relation to others. Kristeva places their accomplishments in the context of other revolutionary movements in art, literature, and politics. The book also offers an illuminating discussion of Freud's groundbreaking work on rebellion, focusing on the symbolic function of patricide in his Totem and Taboo and discussing his often neglected vision of language, and underscoring its complex connection to the revolutionary drive.

1

What Revolt Today?

The title of this book is meant to evoke the current political state and the lack of revolt that characterizes it. I promise not to elude this aspect of the problem, but I will approach things from a bit of a distance: from the roots of memory, which is nothing other than language and the unconscious. There are two facets to the reflections presented here: the first concerns psychoanalysis, its history, and its present state; the second takes into consideration different literary texts.

I will explain first what I mean by “revolt” and why the problematic of the sense and non-sense of revolt is inscribed in a psychoanalytical perspective. A number of major texts of our time can be approached from this angle, and I have selected the works of three well-known authors, each linked, though differently, to rebellion in the twentieth century: namely, Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes.

Some psychoanalytical questions will allow us a more profound approach to these three authors. To begin quite naturally—some might say provocatively—I think it would be useful to look into the etymology of the word “revolt,” a word that is widely used, if not banal, but that holds a few surprises. As a linguist by training, I sought out what linguists had to say about it.¹ Two semantic shifts mark the evolution of the word: the first implies the notion of movement, the second, that of space and time.

Movement

The Latin verb volvere, which is at the origin of “revolt,” was initially far removed from politics. It produced derivatives with meanings—semes—such as “curve,” “entourage,” “turn,” “return.” In Old French, it can mean “to envelop,” “curvature,” “vault,” and even “omelet,” “to roll,” and “to roll oneself in”; the extensions go as far as “to loaf about” (galvauder), “to repair,” and “vaudeville” (vaudevire, “refrain”). If this surprises you, so much the better: surprise is never extraneous to revolt. Under Italian influence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, volutus, voluta—in French volute, an architectural term—as well as volta and voltare suggest the idea of circular movement and, by extension, temporal return. Volta also means “time”—as in “one time” or “once”—hence, “turning back.” Another direct derivative from Latin belongs in this lineage, the adjective volubilis, “that which turns with ease,” as in volubilitas linguae; the French equivalent is volubile (voluble). And volumen, sheets of paper scrolled around a stick, with the spatial meaning of “wrapping” or “covering,” results in “volume,” which comes to mean “book” in the thirteenth century. (In a second usage the word acquired the more abstract meaning of “mass” and “thickness.”) That the book has kinship with revolt might not be self-evident at first, but I will try to remedy this obfuscation.

The linguist Alain Rey stresses the cohesion of these diverse etymological evolutions, which start with a matrix and driving idea: “to twist, roll, wrap” (going back to the Sanskrit varutram, the Greek elutron, eiluma) and “covering,” an object that serves as a wrapping. The idea of twisting or enveloping, a topological and technical concept, is dominant; it can even be found in the name of the Swedish car company, Volvo, “I roll.” The old Indo-European forms *wel and *welu evoke a voluntary, artisanal act, resulting in the denomination of technical objects that protect and envelop. Today we are barely aware of the intrinsic links between “revolution” and “helix,” “to rebel” (se révolter), and “to wallow” (se vautrer). But while I encourage readers to use etymology as a deciphering tool, do not rely solely on the appearance (or image) of a word and its meaning. Go further, go elsewhere, interpret. Interpretation, as I understand it, is itself a revolt.

“Evolution,” in its first attested appearance in 1536, inherits the semes I have just mentioned but concerns only the movement of troops being deployed and redeployed. More interesting as far as the modern meaning of the word is that “to revolt” and “revolt,” which come from Italian words that maintained the Latin meanings of “to return” and “to exchange,” imply a diversion at the outset that will soon be assimilated to a rejection of authority. In sixteenth-century French, “to revolt” is a pure Italianism and signifies “to turn,” “to avert” (to revolt the face elsewhere), or “to roll up” (thus hair was revolted). In 1501 the sense of a reversal of allegiance—siding with the enemy or religious abjuration—is attested, close to the Italianism “volte-face” (about-face). Thus in Calvin (“If a city or a country revolted from its prince . . .”) or in Théodore de Bèze (“Those who revolt from Jesus Christ . . .”) the idea of abjuration is linked to that of cycle and return, sometimes indicating only a change of party. In the psychological sense, the word contains an idea of violence and excess in relation to a norm and corresponds to émouvoir (to move), hence émeute (riot) for “revolt.”

In the sixteenth century, the word does not involve the notion of force but strictly indicates opposition: to leave (a party), to abjure (a belief), to turn away (from a dependency). Until the eighteenth century, the word “revolt” is not used for war, as is the series “rebel,” “rebellion,” but is used in the political and psychological domain: “It’s always been allowed by right of war to fire revolt between one’s enemies,” Laodice says to Arsinoë, in Corneille’s Nicomedes.² There is also reference to “feelings in revolt.”³

The historical and political sense of the word prevails until the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth: in The Age of Louis XIV, Voltaire uses “revolt” to mean civil war, unrest, cabal, insurrection, war, and revolution when speaking of Mazarin’s time.⁴ The relationship between “revolt” and “revolution” is not yet clearly established, revolution maintaining its celestial origins until 1700.

Time and Space

Turning to the semantic line of time and space, the Latin verb revolvere engenders intellectual meanings: “to consult” or “reread” (Horace) and “to tell” (Virgil). “Revolution” appears later, entering the French language in scholarly astronomical and chronological vocabularies. In the Middle Ages, the word “revolution” is used to mark the end of a period of time that has “evolved”; it signifies completion, an occurrence, or a completed duration (the seven days of the week). In the fourteenth century, the notion of space is added: mirrors, interlocking objects, the projection of images.⁵ The revolution of human affairs is a stopping point in a preexisting curve. Gradually, the term comes to signify change, mutation. In 1550, and for a century afterward, it is applied to another semantic field, that of politics: thus the revolution of time leads to the revolution of State.⁶ In the second half of the seventeenth century, in the context of the Fronde and the period that followed, from Gondi to Retz and Bossuet, the word’s political sense of conflict or social upheaval is confirmed.⁷ In the eighteenth century, “revolution” becomes more specific and widespread, with parallels frequently drawn between planetary and political mutations.⁸

That’s all I have to say about the evolution of the term “revolt,” but I hope I have given you an idea of the richness of its polyvalence; I wanted to wrest it, etymologically, from the overly narrow political sense it has taken in our time. From these various etymological uses, I would like you to remember what I will call the “plasticity” of the term throughout its history, as well as its dependence on historical context. I have made passing reference to its links with astronomy but also with Protestantism, the Fronde, and the Revolution to show how rooted this plasticity is in scientific and political history. This preoccupation will guide the following reflections.

In the series of rather disparate semes I proposed, a number of them ought to be thought of in relation to this book’s title, which emphasizes the impact, as much as the impasses, of revolt (“the sense and non-sense”): the non-sense suggested by words such as galvaudage (sullying, idling about) and vaudeville but also the uncertainties and randomness implicit in “reversal,” “abjuration,” “change,” “detour,” which repeat and transform, as well as the semes “curve,” “quarrel,” and “book”; “cycle,” “stalling,” and “upheaval”; and finally, “recovery,” “unfolding,” and the somewhat bland “reassessment.” Also worth noting are the classic, though very different, uses of this notion by clans, tradesmen, and diverse social groups (artisans, astronomers, meteorologists), as well as its uses in psychology and politics.

In short, revolt twists and turns—indeed, veers off—depending on history. It is up to us to complete it. But why now? Why, given the plasticity I have briefly described, grapple with revolt now? What do I mean to convey in the present context, if it is true that historical context must be taken into account in order to renew the sense of the word? In response, allow me to make a point to which I will not return but which I would like to place on the implicit horizon of this book. This political observation supports a reflection I have expressed and pursued on various occasions that concerns the moment we are traversing and, to my mind, particularly justifies the necessity of reexamining the notion of revolt.

A Normalizing and Pervertible Order

The postindustrial and post-Communist democracies we live in, with their affairs and scandals, share characteristics that humanity has never confronted. Two of these accompany the society of the image, or of the spectacle, and justify the attempt to rethink the notion of revolt even while they seem to exclude the possibility of it: the status of power and that of the individual.

The Power Vacuum

As watchers and readers of the media, we all know what the power vacuum means: the absence of plans, disorder, all the things we speak of and that political parties show the effects of, that we as citizens show the effects of. Yet in spite of this anarchy (who governs? who is going where?), signs of a new world order do exist, and if examined closely this order appears to be both normalizing and falsifiable, normalizing but falsifiable. This is what grounds my inquiry into the possibility of revolt.

Consider the status of the legal system, of law: we no longer speak of culpability but of public menace; we no longer speak of fault (in an automobile accident, for example) but of damages. Instead of responsibility, there is liability; the idea of responsibility-without-fault is becoming acceptable; the right to punish is fading before administrative repression; the theatricality of the trial is disappearing in favor of the proliferation of delaying techniques. Crime cannot be found at the same time as prohibition; as a result, people are increasingly excited when they think they have unearthed a guilty party, a scapegoat. Look at the scandals judges, politicians, journalists, businesspeople are involved in. Crime has become theatrically media-friendly. I do not contest the benefits of this situation for democracy: perhaps we have in fact arrived at a so-called liberal society in which there is no surveillance and no punishment except in these theatrically mediatized cases that become a sort of catharsis of the citizen’s nonexistent guilt. Though we are not punished, we are, in effect, normalized: in place of the prohibition or power that cannot be found, disciplinary and administrative punishments multiply, repressing or, rather, normalizing everyone.⁹

This regulation—invisible power, nonpunitive legislation, delaying tactics, on the one hand, and media theatricalization, the fear of getting caught up, of being theatricalized in turn, on the other—supposes and engenders the breaches and transgressions that accompany business, speculation, and Mafia activity. The causes for this are multiple, but on the legal level, it is possible to describe what allows for them in terms of normalization, on the one hand, and perversification, on the other. There are no longer laws but measures. (What progress! How reassuring for democracy!) Measures are susceptible to appeals and delays, to interpretations and falsifications. This means that, in the end, the new world order normalizes and corrupts; it is at once normalizing and pervertible. Examples of this abound in all countries. Note, for example, the importance of stock market speculation on industrial production; bookkeeping leads to the accumulation of capital, on the right as on the left, and to the falsification of true wealth, which even recently was still measured in terms of production and industrial capacities. This example may clarify my idea of the new world order as a normalizing and falsifiable order. It is neither totalitarianism nor fascism (as is said in Italy particularly), though we have a tendency to resuscitate these terms in order to continue thinking according to old schemas. Still, the current normalizing and falsifiable order is formidable in another way: indirect and redirectable repression. Faced with these impasses, shouldn’t we try to determine how a new regulation of power and transgression has come to replace the totalitarianisms of yesteryear and stop letting old terms like “fascism” and “totalitarianism” distract us?

The Patrimonial Individual

Because literature reveals the singularity of experience, it is worth looking at what is becoming of the individual, the singular subject, in this new normalizing and pervertible economic order. Consider the status of the individual in the face of biological technologies. The human being tends to disappear as a person with rights, since he/she is negotiated as possessing organs that are convertible into cash. We are exiting the era of the subject and entering that of the patrimonial individual: “I” am not a subject, as psychoanalysis continues to assert, attempting the rescue—indeed, the salvation—of subjectivity; “I” am not a transcendental subject either, as classical philosophy would have it. Instead, “I” am, quite simply, the owner of my genetic or organo-physiological patrimony; “I” possess my organs, and that only in the best-case scenario, for there are countries where organs are stolen in order to be sold. The whole question is whether my patrimony should be remunerated or free: whether “I” can enrich myself or, as an altruist, forgo payment in the name of humanity or whether “I,” as a victim, am dispossessed of it. Some provisions set forth by the European Economic Community concerning the dynamics of the sale of bodies have even found that, thanks to biotechnological advances, the patrimonial individual may favor European economic development. Happily, speculations such as these incite resistance and are challenged by many jurists. Nevertheless, the primacy of the market economy over the body is certainly something to worry about, perhaps even to get dramatic about, to protest before things are firmly established, before it is definitely too late. Again, I am not discussing the democratic advantages that this new world order may entail; they are no doubt considerable. Still, I would underscore that an essential aspect of the European culture of revolt and art is in peril, that the very notion of culture as revolt and of art as revolt is in peril, submerged as we are in the culture of entertainment, the culture of performance, the culture of the show.

The Culture of Revolt

The European tradition, where this phenomenon is most manifest, has an experience of culture that is at once inherent in the social fact and active as its critical conscience. Europeans are cultured in the sense that culture is their critical conscience; it suffices to think of Cartesian doubt, the freethinking of the Enlightenment, Hegelian negativity, Marx’s thought, Freud’s unconscious, not to mention Zola’s J’accuse and formal revolts such as Bauhaus and surrealism, Artaud and Stockhausen, Picasso, Pollock, and Francis Bacon. The great moments of twentieth-century art and culture are moments of formal and metaphysical revolt. Stalinism no doubt marked the strangling of the culture of revolt, its deviation into terror and bureaucracy. Can one recapture the spirit itself and extricate new forms from it beyond the two impasses where we are caught today: the failure of rebellious ideologies, on the one hand, and the surge of consumer culture, on the other? The very possibility of culture depends on our response.

Just under the surface of this question is another we could legitimately ask: what is the necessity of this culture of revolt? Why relentlessly attempt to resuscitate forms of cultures whose antecedents lie in Cartesian doubt and Hegelian negativity, the Freudian unconscious and the avant-garde? Aren’t they simply lost forever? Why should we want to find modern responses to these past experiences? After the death of ideologies, shouldn’t we just be content with entertainment culture, show culture, and complacent commentary?

We shouldn’t! I will try to demonstrate why through a discussion of Freud, for in listening to human experience, psychoanalysis ultimately communicates this: happiness exists only at the price of a revolt. None of us has pleasure without confronting an obstacle, prohibition, authority, or law that allows us to realize ourselves as autonomous and free. The revolt revealed to accompany the private experience of happiness is an integral part of the pleasure principle. Furthermore, on the social level, the normalizing order is far from perfect and fails to support the excluded: jobless youth, the poor in the projects, the homeless, the unemployed, and foreigners, among many others. When the excluded have no culture of revolt and must content themselves with regressive ideologies, with shows and entertainments that far from satisfy the demand of pleasure, they become rioters.

The question I would like to examine—from the somewhat narrow though not socially irrelevant perspectives of private life, psychological life, art, and literature—is the necessity of a culture of revolt in a society that is alive and developing, not stagnating. In fact, if such a culture did not exist, life would become a life of death, that is, a life of physical and moral violence, barbarity. This is a matter of the survival of our civilizations and their freest and most enlightened components. There is an urgent need to develop the culture of revolt starting with our aesthetic heritage and to find new variants of it. Heidegger thought only religion could save us; faced with the religious and political impasses of our time, an experience of revolt may be the only thing that can save us from the automation of humanity that is threatening us. This revolt is under way, but it has not yet found its voice, any more than it has found the harmony likely to give it the dignity of Beauty. And it might not.

That’s where we are, and I see no other role for literary criticism and theory than to illuminate the experiences of formal and philosophical revolt that might keep our inner lives alive, this psychological space we call a soul and that is no doubt the hidden side, the invisible and indispensable source of what is Beautiful. Starting here, I will try to integrate the notion of the culture of revolt in the realms of art and literature, understood as experiences, and to raise the stakes. This means going beyond the notion of text—the elaboration of which I have contributed to, along with so many others—which has become a form of dogma in the best universities in France, as well as in the United States and other, more exotic places. In its stead, I will try to introduce the notion of experience, which includes the pleasure principle as well as the rebirth of meaning for the other, which can only be understood in view of the experience of revolt.

My ...