Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva (Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature)

k e l l y o l i v e r & s.k. k e l t n e r | e d i t o r s

Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva

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Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Kristeva

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Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Kristeva

Edited by Kelly Oliver and S. K. Keltner

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2009 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Kelli W. LeRoux Marketing by Michael Campochiaro

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and politics in the work of Julia Kristeva / edited by Kelly Oliver and S. K. Keltner. p. cm. — (Suny series, insinuations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-2649-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Kristeva, Julia, 1941— Criticism and interpretation. I. Oliver, Kelly, 1975- II. Keltner, S. K. PN75.K75P79 2009 194—dc22 2008036293 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

 Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Politics from ‘a bit of a distance’ S. K. Keltner

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PART I. TWO STATEMENTS BY KRISTEVA 1. A Meditation, a Political Act, an Art of Living Julia Kristeva, translated by S. K. Keltner

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2. Decollations Julia Kristeva, translated by Caroline Arruda

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PART II. THE VIOLENCE OF THE SPECTACLE 3. Meaning against Death Kelly Oliver

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4. Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular: Encountering the (Mulholland) Drive Frances L. Restuccia

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5. Julia Kristeva and the Trajectory of the Image John Lechte

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6. The Darkroom of the Soul Robyn Ferrell

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7. Julia Kristeva’s Chiasmatic Journeys: From Byzantium to the Phantom of Europe and the End of the World Maria Margaroni v

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PART III. INTIMACY AND THE LOSS OF POLITICS 8. Love’s Lost Labors: Subjectivity, Art, and Politics Sara Beardsworth

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9. Symptomatic Reading: Kristeva on Duras Lisa Walsh

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10. What Is Intimacy? S. K. Keltner

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11. Fear of Intimacy? Psychoanalysis and the Resistance to Commodification Cecilia Sjöholm 12. Humanism, the Rights of Man, and the Nation-State Emily Zakin 13. Kristeva’s Uncanny Revolution: Imagining the Meaning of Politics Jeff Edmonds

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14. Religion and the “Rights of Man” in Julia Kristeva’s Work Idit Alphandary

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Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

 “A Meditation, a Political Act, an Art of Living” is a translation of the text of Julia Kristeva’s speech to the University of Paris VII Denis Diderot in May 2005. The symposium was organized to celebrate her reception of the prestigious Holberg Prize in the fall of 2004. A revised version has been published as the first chapter of her most recent collection of essays, La haine et le pardon (Paris: Fayard, 2005). “Decollations” is a translation of a chapter from Kristeva’s Visions capitales (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1998), the catalog of a museum exhibit that Kristeva organized in the spring and summer of 1998 as part of the Carte Blanche program initiated by the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Louvre. The editors wish to express their gratitude to Julia Kristeva for contributing the text of her speech and for allowing it, along with the selection from Visions capitales, to be translated for this volume.

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Introduction Politics from “a bit of a distance”

 S. K. Keltner

Julia Kristeva’s relationship to modern and contemporary social and political discourses is complex, ambiguous territory. Though she has claimed that the “problem of the twentieth century was and remains the rehabilitation of the political” (1990, 45; 1993, 68) and that our world is a “necessarily political” one (1987, 242; 1989, 235), exactly how her works are to be related to social and political thought is difficult to clarify. The difficulty is tied to both her chosen object domain, as that of singularity or what she tends to call, more and more, the intimate, and her interdisciplinary approach, which includes the entire human and social sciences, but which privileges psychoanalysis and aesthetics. Aside from her broad-reach cultural and political essays that have appeared in such publications as the popular France Culture, Kristeva’s major, book-length works are not easily classified as social or political texts, and even bracket more familiar political approaches. Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) and the revolt books of the 1990s, for example, reinforce her commitment to psychoanalytic and aesthetic discourses. In the latter, she expressly avoids an analysis of “political revolt” in order to concentrate her efforts on what she calls “intimate revolt.” The works of the 1980s, including her interrogation of “the foreigner” in Strangers to Ourselves (1988), are concerned with the fate of individual, psychic life in modern societies. Her biographical trilogy on female genius neither explicitly elaborates a recognizably feminist thought nor does her choice or treatment of Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette viscerally strike a feminist sensibility as immediately sensible. Furthermore, her turn to detective fiction and her privileging of the work of Proust over the past two decades pursues venues that avoid direct confrontation with the sociopolitical problematics of modern societies. Kristeva’s chosen object as the singular 1

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or intimate and her chosen approach through psychoanalysis and aesthetics seems to limit the relevance of her work to social and political thought. Nevertheless, both Kristeva and her readers persistently remind us to think through the problematic of the relation between her object and approach, on the one hand, and more traditional and familiar social and political discourses and themes, on the other. This volume does not suggest that there is a one-to-one correlation, such that Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and aesthetic approach to intimacy might be translated into social and political thought. It is questionable as to whether such a translation is not only possible, but desirable. Our concern is, rather, how might we clarify that tension, and what is the value of doing so? All of the chapters presented here, including Kristeva’s own chapters, interrogate this essentially ambiguous gap between a psychoanalytic and aesthetic approach to intimacy and social and political thought. As the chapters in this volume show, to raise the question of the relationship between the intimate and the public requires attention to the sense in which Kristeva’s concern for the intimate is not a concern for the private individual in opposition to what is more properly “social” or “political”. Rather, Kristeva’s concern with the intimate is a concern for a border or threshold that is at once the border of affectivity and discourse, the social bond, and historical being. In a lecture addressed to Columbia University and subsequently published as “‘Nous Deux’ or a (Hi)story of Intertextuality” in the Romanian Review (2002), Kristeva claims that the concepts and themes addressed in her work share the “common point” of a “frontier,” “border,” or, she says, “even better, ‘threshold.’” This “threshold” indicates the object domain of Kristeva’s interrogations into the processes governing subjectivity and language and introduces an equivocation into traditional, metaphysical distinctions, including mind/body, affect/word, nature/culture, subject/object, individual/society, private/public, and present/ past. Moreover, “threshold” represents not only a spatial and temporal meaning, as in the space of a passageway or a transitional interval, but also a “social melting spot,” “a political openness,” and a “mental plasticity.” For Kristeva, this fragile threshold is both permanently and historically in crisis. Sara Beardsworth has aptly called the modern shape of this border “the tendential severance of the semiotic and the symbolic” (2004, 12). Kristeva’s articulation of the semiotic and symbolic is most rigorously presented under those terms in the early work, Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), and her subsequent work may be seen as the attempt to bring further precision to this primary problematic. The semiotic and the symbolic are two modalities of signification that are never experienced as separate, but are theoretically separable as two tendencies within signification. The “symbolic” roughly refers to the domain of symbolic representation, which includes law, grammar, logic, structure, and form. The “semiotic” roughly refers to the affective, corporeal elements of language that contribute to meaning, but do not intend or signify in the way that symbols do: one may think of the rhythms and tones of poetry or music, or the

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affective dimension of language that is part of but remains heterogeneous to the symbol. The semiotic is thereby “outside” of the symbolic as the excessive demand of affective, corporeal existence to accomplish expression, though this demand is qualified by its being conditioned by sociohistorical structures of meaning. Kristeva describes this threshold as “heterogeneity vis-à-vis language” (1998b, 9). The relation between the semiotic and the symbolic makes signification possible, even when one is emphasized at the expense of the other, as in “purely” formalistic enterprises of thinking like math or logic or in “purely” expressive music. Kristeva’s distinction entails both a theory of language and a correlative theory of the subject qua speaking being as “in process” or “on trial” (le sujet-en-procès). The subject is not substantive, but a movement, an event, or an affective relating that takes place at a certain linguistic, affective threshold that is at once also social and historical. The “subject-in-process” is the relating of semiotic and symbolic that avoids both traditional logic, which would oppose them, and dialectical logic, which would absorb one into the other. It is, instead, a fragile border that conditions the speaking being. Drawing on Bataille’s concept of inner experience, Kristeva has described this border as “always a contradiction between the presence of the subject and its loss, between thought and its expenditure, between linkage (logos) and its separation” (1973/1995, 248). Beardsworth’s naming of the modern shape of this border “a tendential severance” locates the modern problematic of social and symbolic discourses in the historical loss of those resources that enable the giving of form and meaning to the semiotic. Such a diagnosis does not implicate Kristeva’s thought in a conservative call for the recovery of traditional forms of meaning and their social organizations. Rather, we confront the need to negotiate this modern crisis of representation, which puts at risk psychic life itself. As she says in “A Meditation, a Political Act, an Art of Living,” quoting Rimbaud, “it is necessary to be absolutely modern!” Kristeva finds psychoanalysis and aesthetics to be privileged sites that reveal and work through this crisis, and thereby provide models for thinking through the social and political problematic more generally. Kristeva herself has called attention to the tension between her object and approach, on the one hand, and social and political discourses, on the other, and has insisted on its importance for modern societies. Just after 9/11, in a broad-reach essay entitled “Intimité voilée, intimate violée,” Kristeva claims that the social and political scene of modern societies has the effect of “making appear as minor” both her object and the discourses she chooses to interrogate (2001/2003, 50). And yet, she insists, those concerns would be beneficial to legal and political judgment. In “Le Désir de Loi” in La haine et le pardon (2005), Kristeva analyzes the failure of the integration of law and desire that besets modern civilizations from a psychoanalytic perspective. She diagnoses the “new malady of civilization” as the loss of what she calls “the symbolic value of law”: “I imagine that this value of Law in psychoanalysis leaves jurists perplexed. It seems to me, however, that beyond the microcosm of psychoanalysis, it is not

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without interest to the social field itself ”—that is, she continues, “if we do not want Law to remain a ‘dead letter.’” The “dead letter” of law, she claims, is “deeply rooted in the life of the City, the experience of [the analysand], and in the much sought after speech of ‘just authority’” (2005, 344). Psychoanalysis draws our attention to a problematic of law and politics that remains unaccounted for in contemporary social and political discourses. Kristeva’s thought, we may conclude, is political in the sense that she diagnoses the failure of political discourses in modern societies and seeks those moments in which the crises afflicting modern subjectivity are revealed and worked through. In The Future of Revolt she claims that the interrogation of those moments is essential to the future of politics (1998c, 11; 2002, 223). The question of politics, and its failures, in Kristeva’s work requires that we remain attentive to the manner in which her chosen discourses (psychoanalysis and aesthetics) and her chosen object domain (singular psychic life) foster a distance that is essentially critical. In the opening of her first book on the culture—or lack thereof—of revolt, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, Kristeva claims that the political remains the horizon of the work, but that she will “approach things from a bit of a distance” (1996, 5; 2000, 1). Indeed, Kristeva’s approach to the concept of revolt as a concept that is not inherently political insists on a perspective that casts the question of political revolt as seemingly peripheral to her task. Such a position on “revolution” was established as early as her 1974 Revolution in Poetic Language in which she argued that revolution no longer takes place in the sociopolitical domain, but rather in modern poetic language. However, this distance must be clarified as strategic. For example, in Strangers to Ourselves, a book on the stakes of otherness in growing multinational and international societies, Kristeva defends her interrogation of “arts and letters” as constituting a necessary distance from the commonplace, for the sake of the question of politics, in this case that of the Western nation-state’s negotiation of otherness. People will object . . . there is no point in pouring over the archives of thought and art in order to find the answers to a problem that is, when all is said and done, very practical, one might say even commonplace. And yet, do we have any other recourse against the commonplace and its brutality except to take our distance by plunging into it—but in our minds—confronting it—but indirectly? Facing the problem of the foreigner, the discourses, difficulties, or even the deadlocks of our predecessors do not only make up a history; they constitute a cultural distance that is to be preserved and developed, a distance on the basis of which one might temper and modify the simplistic attitudes of rejection or indifference, as well as the arbitrary or utilitarian decisions that today regulate relationships between strangers. (1988, 151–152; 1991, 104; translation altered; emphasis mine)

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Kristeva’s approach establishes a reflective and creative distance for the sake of ensuring that we not lose sight of the need to rehabilitate psychic space in modern societies, and she insists that the interrogation and promotion of singular psychic life functions as a guarantee against cultural and political homogenization. Kristeva’s concept of revolt culture, for instance, tracks a form of revolt that is not, properly speaking, political revolt, but which she thinks is essential to the formation of a critical disposition, which also marks a distance from and against the political and cultural homogenization of the society of the spectacle. For Kristeva, to foster reflective and creative distance from the spectacle opens the possibility of the emergence of new cultural and political horizons. The present collection seeks to provide a sustained interrogation of this complicated problematic from a variety of perspectives and across the various contexts and moments that constitute Kristeva’s present oeuvre.

Two Statements by Kristeva Part 1 of this collection includes two never before translated pieces by Kristeva. The first, “A Meditation, a Political Act, an Art of Living” (2005) is the text of a speech delivered to the University of Paris VII Denis Diderot in May 2005. The symposium celebrated her reception of the prestigious Holberg Prize in the fall of 2004, which was established by the Norwegian government as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the human and social sciences. This essay contains Kristeva’s most recent, public reflections on the contemporary social and political import of psychoanalysis and the modern artwork. Kristeva addresses first the recognition of psychoanalysis, which distinguishes it in the human and social sciences, and, second, the significance of her own personal history and identity—a “European citizen” of “French nationality, Bulgarian origin, and American adoption”—in becoming the first laureate of the prize. A revised version of the piece has recently appeared as the opening chapter of her most recent collection of essays, La haine et le pardon. The context of Kristeva’s reflections here is an overarching concern for the contemporary collapse of what she calls “places of thinking.” Kristeva argues that psychoanalysis and literature are “two experiences of language” that constitute journeys of return to oneself; that is, they initiate a self-interrogation constitutive of “interiority” and relations to others. The experiences of psychoanalysis and literature are politically salient because they point toward new articulations of freedom, on the one hand, and new forms of sociopolitical binding for late modern societies, on the other. Kristeva characterizes the criticism of psychoanalysis and art as the inability to ground the “unifying link” that motivates fundamental sociopolitical binding. In defense of psychoanalysis and the artwork, she says: “Their respective contributions to the complication of the humanism of Knowledge is not understood, in its pre- and transpolitical significance, as capable of founding this ‘unifying link,’ which lacks a political, secular rationality. Such is nevertheless

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the hypothesis . . . that I would like to defend.” Kristeva contextualizes these experiences of language within the failures of two authorities—modern secular humanism and religion—and marks their recasting of the social bond with the term “partager.”Partager has its closest English equivalent in “to share,” but in its double sense: in the sense of having a connection, but also in the sense of dividing, as in “sharing out.” The essay argues that literature and psychoanalysis constitute “an ethical and philosophical horizon of a revision of the subject itself ” and the concept of freedom that accompanies it. Kristeva outlines two distinct models of freedom: one that is traditionally suited to American capitalism and another that is “reinforced and clarified by the radical experiences de partage de l’impartageable” and is conditioned by the experiences of writing and psychoanalysis. In this context, Kristeva addresses some of the most pressing social and political issues of our time: the relationship between religion and politics, capitalism, fundamentalism, media, technology, the loss of language to articulate modern experience, university politics, obligation, law, right, sex and sexuality, nature and culture, and biology and the social. Finally, Kristeva’s own personal history and identity is significant for its crossing of national, cultural, and political borders and marks the distinction of a cosmopolitan citizen and an intellectual who affords insight into the sociopolitical problematic that she diagnoses. The second piece by Kristeva, “Decollations,” is the translation of a chapter from Visions capitales (1998a)—the catalog of a museum exhibit that Kristeva organized in the spring and summer of 1998 as part of the Carte Blanche program initiated by the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Louvre. In the preface to the catalog Kristeva asks whether we are “inevitably slaves of the image” and suggests that there is another possibility of our relation to the image: that of confronting an experience of the sacred. For Kristeva the image is perhaps the last link we have with the sacred: “with the terror that provokes death and sacrifice, with the serenity that follows from the pact of identification between sacrificed and sacrificing, and with the joy of representation indissociable from sacrifice, the only possible crossing” (1998a, 11). Privileged within this aim to uncover what Kristeva takes to be one of the last remaining experiences of the sacred is the act of beheading or decollation. The exhibit includes an array of historical images of beheadings and confronts the difficult task of examining violence by and against women, including reactions against sexist oppression. The exhibit, and this chapter in particular, is significant for Kristeva scholarship in that it renders concrete her prior analyses of the position of women in relation to death and violence, not only as the victims of violence, but also as the bearers of violence and death in the cultural imaginary (cf. Powers of Horror, Black Sun, and Strangers to Ourselves). Kristeva insists that the image, particularly the image of decollation, allows us to confront the libidinal impact of the mother, both the loss of her and her threat to us. The artistic image of decollation negotiates two types of anxiety: first, the anxiety over the loss of the mother and its corollary fear of the mother as all-powerful; second,

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the anxiety, for men, of the threat of castration and its corollary fear of the castrated mother. The image accommodates unconscious anxiety by sublimating the death drive. Kristeva’s return to the act of decollation addresses the historical development of our relationship to violence, which culminates in an image culture that has become “complacent” in its “manner of seeing settled horror, increasingly conformist, pretentious, theatrical, mummified.” The image may function to settle horror, but it also carries within it the possibility of its experience and transformation.

The Image and the Violence of the Spectacle In posing the question of her exhibit, Visions capitales, in terms of the significance of the image as an experience that opposes enslavement to it by negotiating the destructive element of the drive, Kristeva offers a counterpossibility for the image in a society dominated by, what she calls following Guy Debord, the society of the spectacle. The chapters in part 2 examine Kristeva’s analyses of the crisis of representation and the subsequent collapse of psychic space by the spectacle’s colonization of the psyche. Further, each offers an account of the image that challenges the violence of image culture and draws primarily from her three books that carry the subtitle “The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis”—The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, Intimate Revolt, and, more recently, La haine et le pardon. The significance of those analyses is examined in relation to the image in film, photography, the media, and Kristeva’s own fictional writings. Kelly Oliver’s chapter, “Meaning against Death,” outlines the social and political stakes of the violence of the spectacle. She draws on Kristeva’s insistence on the “dead letter” of Law from La haine et le pardon and her insistence in Visions capitales that the image can sublimate the death drive to examine the violent fate of the crisis of representation that Kristeva’s work tracks. Oliver claims that what is at stake here is the question of meaning itself, particularly the meaning of acts of violence that saturate image culture and fuel the society of the spectacle. Kristeva claims in La haine et le pardon that the “failure of the integration of Law in desire” finds tragic expression today in the sexually exploitative drama of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. She insists that the “the young people of Fort Ashby” are not exceptions, but rather “the banal subjects of the banal planetary village” (2005, 346). Oliver follows through on Kristeva’s psychoanalytic account that the new malady of our civilization lies in the disintegration of prohibition and enjoyment. The failure is not reducible to a weakening of prohibition, but rather what Oliver calls “the colonization of the psyche” by the economy of the spectacle and the heightened forms of technological policing, which put at risk the possibilities of the intimate production of meaning. The result of the disintegration is “hatred without forgiveness.” That is, the result is the free reign of violent impulses and indulgences or the purification of abjection due to the lack of our capacity to fore-give meaning to desire. According to Oliver, “It is as if the

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subject occupies an abyss between law and desire and therefore takes refuge from violent repression through regression.” Such is the reason why the prison guards of Abu Ghraib defend themselves “in all innocence” as “just having fun.” Oliver claims that they occupy a time prior to responsibility, which she explores through a theory of perverse regression to an infantile enjoyment of sadomasochistic pleasure without guilt. Kristeva herself claims in the conclusion to her “Le Désir de Loi,” “The desire of the other is diverted by a manic jouissance that is fed by the sexual victimization of others.” There is, she continues, an “urgent necessity to remedy the psychosis that today separates the desire for Law from the desire for the other” (2005, 348). Thus, the disintegration of law and desire in the new malady of civilization has as its consequence the disintegration of social and ethical bonds, giving rise to hatred as the form the subject/other border takes. Oliver links her analysis of perverse regression to vulnerability as the narcissistic wound that constitutes the speaking being. The lack of forgiveness that besets our anxieties over vulnerability is essentially linked to the absence of discourses that emphasize a passion for life. In this context Oliver examines the images of violence in art, cinema, and media and delineates the images of female suicide bombers and images of women as bearers of sexualized violence, like those of Lynndie England, as “amorous disasters.” Frances Restuccia is also concerned to emphasize the absence of forgiveness as an act that bestows meaning to suffering in the context of image culture. “Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular: Encountering the (Mulholland) Drive” chronicles Kristeva’s account of intimate revolt—constituted by intimacy, time, forgiveness, and revolt—to contextualize the import of Kristeva’s account of fantasy and the cinematic image. Acknowledging that Kristeva is not known as a film theorist, Restuccia explicates the significance of Kristeva’s work on the cinematic image for film analysis as well as the significance of the filmic image for Kristeva’s search for a rehabilitated revolt culture in which affectivity is interrogated and expressed by the imaginary, and which subsequently challenges the emptiness of the society of the spectacle in which psychic life is in danger of being lost. The “thought specular” represents a cinema that challenges the specular robotization of subjectivity. This “other cinema” fulfills Kristeva’s fourfold requirement of intimate revolt: intimacy, time, forgiveness, and image. Cinema is capable of thinking the specular by distancing us from it. Restuccia examines David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive as exemplary of Kristeva’s thought specular. Restuccia says that insofar as Lynch’s film represents “fantasy’s paralyzing takeover of the psyche,” it also enables the spectator to free herself or himself from fantasy to establish a critical distance and, thereby, both self-relation and relation to the spectacle. Through a play on the psychoanalytic notion of “drive” in Mulholland Drive, Restuccia offers a psychoanalytic account of the film that privileges Lynch’s film as an accomplishment of that “other cinema” Kristeva praises: a filmic image and an image of film that reinscribes subjectivity’s intimate depths within the specular image.

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John Lechte also engages Kristeva’s relationship to film theory. “Julia Kristeva and the Trajectory of the Image” examines her account of the cinematic image, her treatment of Sartre’s “mental image,” and their relationship to the role of Debord’s “society of the spectacle” in Kristeva’s work. Lechte provocatively situates her thought in relationship to Deleuze’s cinematic work on the image to explicate the significance of Kristeva’s analysis of the image as a “dynamic force in the formation of subjectivity.” He claims that Kristeva’s approach to the image opens a level of thinking that is not reducible to a traditional psychoanalytic account and puts her thought in relation to Deleuze’s inauguration of a “cinematic turn” in contemporary analyses of the image. Lechte examines Kristeva’s relationship to Sartre’s “mental image” to demonstrate what is unique in Kristeva’s thought on the image: that it historically tracks an ontological shift in our conception of the relationship between the image and reality. He claims that two conceptions of reality are at stake: “one that is virtual and as such is not real (the psychic image that gives rise to fantasy), and another that has come to be real despite being virtual (media images).” Further, because Kristeva follows Sartre’s linking of the image to nothingness, it challenges the thingliness of the image as diagnosed by Debord and instead emphasizes an articulation of psychic space that is irreducible to the traditional subject/object dualism of other psychoanalytic accounts. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic semiology instead demonstrates the synthetic process of subjectivity formed in and through images. The image as the dynamic framework of a synthetic process ultimately draws Kristeva’s work in close proximity to Deleuze’s own account of the image in his film books. Robyn Ferrell’s “The Darkroom of the Soul” also emphasizes the importance of the image for Kristeva’s account of modern subjectivity and the media construction of reality. She takes as her starting point Kristeva’s claim in New Maladies of the Soul that “[m]odern man is losing his soul, but he does not know it, for the psychic apparatus is what registers representations and their meaningful values for the subject. Unfortunately, that darkroom needs repair” (1995, 8). Ferrell explores Kristeva’s description of “the darkroom of the soul” in the context of press photography to gauge the significance of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic semiotics for articulating contemporary psychic life as shaped by the dominance of the image. Ferrell claims that photography, though it is distinguished from the cinematic image in its representation of reality, can be understood as a visible language grounded in the photograph as utterance. The relation to reality that is assumed in our way of seeing the press photograph reduces the photograph to a repetition of reality. However, press photography harbors a paradox in which the striving for neutral realism is undermined. Following Barthes, Ferrell describes the photographic image as mythical; that is, the photograph carries out a signification that makes meaning possible. With the press photograph, faith in the reality of the image underwrites the vision of the image. Ferrell links the mythic photographic image to Kristeva’s account of the sacred and the production of meaning. The darkroom, Ferrell argues, is a succinct analog of the

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psychoanalytic account of subjectivity insofar as the photographic process—and even more so in the inclusion of the darkroom in digital cameras—presents reality and the production of that reality. Though the image is deceptive in that it is underwritten by belief in its faithfulness to reality, the image of the darkroom makes visible the production of a meaningful narrative. Like the preceding authors, Maria Margaroni’s concern is with the sociohistorical status of the image in modern societies. She provocatively traces the failures and possibilities of the image through Kristeva’s relationship to Byzantium in both her literary and her theoretical texts. “Julia Kristeva’s Chiasmatic Journeys: From Byzantium to the Phantom of Europe and the End of the World” chronicles the allegorical mode of Kristeva’s form of detective narration, in general, and the iconomy of the image in Kristeva’s latest detective novel, Murder in Byzantium, in particular. Margaroni follows what she calls “Kristeva’s precarious leap into Byzantium” as an historical and conceptual space for addressing political concerns over the nation and its future, image culture, the fate of psychic life, and the possibilities of conceptualizing freedom. Kristeva finds in the iconomy of Byzantium, Margaroni argues, a culture of images, but one that restores to the image a critical economy of “seeing” against the ever-growing “ society of the spectacle.” Utilizing an allegorical mode of writing, Kristeva’s novel brings to the fore the opposition of two competing principles of freedom that are complicated by the figure of Byzantium. Byzantine iconography marks an economy of the image that is irreducible to the spectacle and instead leaves its mark as a trace or inscription of what remains hidden. As such, it denotes, Margaroni argues, a passage from the invisible to the visible that inscribes heterogeneity in the symbol. Byzantium, the figure of a lost, archaic origin and other of Europe, allows Kristeva to think the history and, simultaneously, a “future anterior” of Europe. Margaroni situates Kristeva’s “phantom Europe” within the broader imaginary of both discourses on Byzantium and those on that of a future Europe. In so doing, she outlines the benefits and the limits of Kristeva’s, as well as others’, topos of Byzantium as “a desirable, impossible Europe.”

Intimacy and the Loss of Politics Part 3 approaches the difficult question of what it means to bring Kristeva’s approach to intimate, singular psychic life through psychoanalysis and aesthetics into dialogue with social and political philosophy. Each of the chapters in this section delineates Kristeva’s political thought according to her relation to the loss of politics in the modern world. Sara Beardsworth’s “Love’s Lost Labors: Subjectivity, Art, and Politics” traces the destructive element of the drive in contemporary societies back to a loss of symbolic resources that could adequately negotiate the vulnerability of the speaking being as the fragile border between affect and symbol. Beardsworth distinguishes between what she elaborated in her Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis

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and Modernity as “the loss of loss” and what she calls here “the loss of the lost.” Beardsworth argues that Kristeva’s thought of artistic sublimation turns Hegelian negativity into a dynamic of loss that is revealed in and through the Freudian account of subjectivity and that to clarify what politics might mean for Kristeva, she must thematize the sublimatory dynamic of the artwork. Beardsworth distinguishes between the psychoanalytic and aesthetic positions that Kristeva adopts along the lines of her distinction between the intimate and the public. Whereas psychoanalysis interrogates what is intimate, art makes itself public. While the two cannot be rigidly distinguished, Kristeva’s “politics” nevertheless requires that we take into account the aesthetic dimension, particularly its negativity, as exemplary. Beardsworth argues that the deepest moment of Kristeva’s thought is that of loss. The “loss of loss” articulates the condition of the modern subject in conditions of modern nihilism; that is, Beardsworth says, in conditions where historical being is “blocked.” It marks our inability to confront and work through loss, which is the effect of the failure of politics in the secular aftermath of religious authority. The loss of loss signals the failure of negativity to provide form and meaning to the affectivity of semiotic/ symbolic collapse. The dynamic of loss is not simply one element of subjective process, but, according to Beardsworth, “present’s love’s lost labors,” where love marks the positive dynamic of subjectivity missing in modern societies. For Kristeva, Beadsworth argues, Freudian psychoanalysis brings this vision into view. Within this problematic Beardsworth analyzes the significance of the figure of the maternal feminine in Western cultures as what has been lost. This she calls “the loss of the lost,” and it is in the artwork that the maternal feminine often functions to negotiate Western culture’s relationship to loss. Lisa Walsh’s “Symptomatic Reading: Kristeva on Duras” also returns to Kristeva’s diagnosis of modern culture as melancholic and her privileging of the artwork as capable of working through loss. Walsh focuses explicitly on Kristeva’s readings of Duras in Black Sun and in La haine et le pardon, and she confronts the controversial status of Kristeva’s reading of Duras—namely, that Duras’s work cannot be considered to be literature as such. Kristeva’s claim that Duras’s work is not literature raises questions regarding what literature is for Kristeva and, in relation to our concerns in this volume, its relation to current social and political realities. Walsh questions Kristeva’s claim that Duras’s work cannot be considered literature as such and situates Kristeva’s reading of Duras within Duras scholarship. She defends Duras against Kristeva’s claim while at the same time she seeks to delineate the function of literature for Kristeva in modern societies. Both readings take place around the question of the value and work of artistic sublimation within what Walsh calls, following Duras, la chambre noir of literature’s object domain. Walsh situates her return to Duras against Kristeva within Kristeva’s 2003 preface to the Chinese edition of Powers of Horror. In it Kristeva describes how literature can be both a form of terrorism and its antidote. Walsh emphasizes this distinction between what Walsh

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calls “authentic” literature, a form of political therapy, and literature that participates in violence and destruction. Whereas Kristeva continuously privileges avant-garde literature as an exemplary accomplishment within the cultural failure of semiotic/symbolic disintegration, Duras’s work represents a noncathartic melancholia that, Kristeva warns, is potentially dangerous to her readers. Walsh argues, on the contrary, that Duras’s work as the exploration of la chambre noir “might become a singular, and as such political and ethical, haven for an increasingly victimizing and victimized population” which would allow for an intersubjective connection as an essential production of meaning itself. S. K. Keltner’s “What Is Intimacy?” also recalls Kristeva’s readings of Duras as representative of a modern failure. She situates Kristeva’s reading of Duras in relationship to Freudian psychoanalysis, Arendtian political phenomenology, and Heideggerean ontology to track the genealogy of Kristeva’s analysis of the modern constitution of intimacy, in which Duras plays a central role. Keltner argues that Kristeva’s emphasis on the term “intimacy” from the mid-1990s to the present should be contextualized within her analyses of intimacy in the 1980s in Powers of Horror, Black Sun, and Strangers to Ourselves. The survey of the concept of intimacy in Kristeva’s oeuvre reveals a significant relationship to both Arendtian and identity politics, which Kristeva is generally seen to warn against, as well as opens a reading of the significance of the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis as conditioned by a nationalist conception of intimacy. Cecelia Sjöholm’s chapter, “Fear of Intimacy? Psychoanalysis and the Resistance to Commodification,” argues that the significance of Kristeva’s reclaiming of the concept of intimacy—the object of the psychoanalytic, aesthetic, and philosophical practices—is to be sought in a resistance to commodification. Kristeva links intimacy to sensorial experience as a necessary moment of singular psychic life that protects against the commodification of the psyche in consumer culture. However, as Sjöholm shows, Kristeva’s trajectory is unique: “Looking at philosophy and psychoanalysis, anything connected with the concept of intimacy is usually discarded as unreliable, corruptible, and full of disguises and lures.” Sjöholm analyzes Kristeva’s insistence on intimacy in relationship to the more popular psychoanalytic and philosophical warning against the concept in the work of Lacan, Kant, Habermas, Adorno, and Arendt. Sjöholm returns intimacy to the Enlightenment, critical theory, and Arendtian concern for public space and political community. She demonstrates that the intimate as a space of emotions, feelings, and sexuality—as constituted by the bourgeois novel—is not a subjective depth that transcends social and political space, but is rather a cultural product constructed in the historical development of bourgeois public space. Critical theory demonstrates that intimacy as emotion, feeling, or desire is susceptible to commodification and, even further, as Arendt has shown, threatens public life itself. Though psychoanalytic practice would seem to affirm intimacy insofar as it physically occupies intimate, private spaces in practice, analytic theory distances itself from intimacy. Sjöholm argues that the emphasis on Oedi-

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pus aligns psychoanalytic theory with universality and law. Any concern for intimacy as the domain of emotion, feeling, and desire is subordinate to law; and psychoanalysis, like critical theory and Arendtian political phenomenology, insists that a resistance to the discourses of intimacy is simultaneously a resistance to the commodification of the unconscious. Sjöholm demonstrates that for Kristeva intimacy reconfigures the soul/body dichotomy and is the “domain” in which sensations are linked to signification. Rather than being that which is susceptible to commodification, intimacy is precisely that which protects against the colonization of singular psychic life. Kristeva’s reclaiming of intimacy is to be seen, Sjöholm argues, as a response to philosophic and psychoanalytic devaluations of intimacy and is an act that resists the very universalization and law that those discourses have banked on. For Kristeva, public or political community may very well depend on it. Emily Zakin’s “Humanism, the Rights of Man, and the Nation-State” examines the relationship between Arendt and Kristeva. She links Arendt and Kristeva’s political thought to the question of the political’s modern legitimation crisis and argues that for Kristeva the political is that which must be interminably “worked through.” Zakin situates her reading of Kristeva and politics in the context of Slavoj Žižek’s recent inversion of Dostoyevsky’s famous claim about the death of God in The Brothers Karamazov. In the New York Times (March 12, 2006), Žižek claims: “If God exists . . . everything . . . is permitted.” Žižek here marks what Zakin calls “the legitimation crisis” of modernity’s replacement of religious authority with secular authority and its fateful realization in the resurrection of God in politics necessitated by the crisis. Zakin addresses two points that Žižek raises as the context for her reflections on Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva: first, the crisis of European political structures and, second, the loss of all transcendent values and any ultimate ground of law. For Zakin, Žižek can aid in evaluating the significance of Arendt and Kristeva’s work insofar as he insists that our political being is constituted in our relations to others in the world and that the public space of appearance may allow us to rethink the question of political legitimacy. Zakin does not pursue these issues in Žižek’s own thought, but takes his insights into the crisis of legitimacy, as well as those of Foucault and Lefort, as the clue to negotiating Arendt and Kristeva’s significance. She concludes that Kristeva’s psychoanalytic supplements Arendtian political phenomenology. Jeff Edmond’s chapter, “Kristeva’s Uncanny Revolution: Imagining the Meaning of Politics,” examines Kristeva’s relationship to the political as an uneasy one and links the question of politics in Kristeva to an interminable “working through.” In spite of her various and multiple contributions to social and political problems, Kristeva’s more direct claims about the political express ambivalence. Edmonds explains the significance of Kristeva’s claim that politics is ultimately enigmatic as evidence for its importance. He argues that Kristeva’s refusal to directly answer questions concerning the political as such is not a

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rejection of politics, but “of the simplistic and fetishistic repetition of the political as a criterion for thinking.” The persistence of the question of politics reveals a deeper problem: its inability to represent and give meaning to human experience. Edmonds argues that Kristeva’s distance from the political is precisely an attempt to reinvigorate political discourse by insisting on the necessity of linking it to experience and imagination. He argues that Kristeva’s work is neither apolitical nor directly political, but occupies a marginal position that allows for a critique of contemporary political fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is characterized as a purely symbolic bond that is not governed by concrete, material ties, but rather by fantasy and a logic of exclusion that cements the social-symbolic bond. Kristeva’s “political” work seeks to disrupt fundamentalisms and reopen the question of political solidarity on new terrain. Edmonds argues that Kristeva provides a notion of solidarity based not on the mediation of the father, but on what he calls “an active working through of the loss of that authority.” This working through of the loss of the ground of authority becomes the political task that the imaginary must bear. Edmonds concludes that Kristeva’s ambivalent relationship to the political is strategic insofar as the refusal to answer the question “What is the political?” calls on the imaginary for ceaseless interpretation. Idit Alphandary’s chapter, “Religion and the ‘Rights of Man’ in Julia Kristeva’s Work,” concludes the volume by examining the correlation between religious and psychoanalytic subjectivity in Kristeva’s work through attention to the relationship between language and desire. Drawing on the seminal texts of the 1980s and Kristeva’s epistolary exchange with Catherine Clément in The Feminine and the Sacred, Alphandary analyzes the conditions of “meaningful experiences” in our narrative capacities. She takes as her point of departure Kristeva’s claim in In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (1985/1987a) that the structure of the unconscious and the structure of monotheism can be related according to a primary narcissistic wound around which symbolic capacities are acquired, specifically in relation to Kristeva’s rehabilitation of the maternal function in psychoanalysis. Alphandary provocatively situates this comparison in relation to the “Rights of Man” and argues that Kristeva’s analysis of the “power” of “religious narrative” illuminates the significance of the role and need for narrative in secular life.

References Beardsworth, Sara. 2004. Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity. New York: State University of New York Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1973/1995. “Bataille, Experience and Practice.” On Bataille: Critical Essays. Ed. and trans. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1974. La révolution du langage poétique: l’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle. Lautréamont et Mallarmé. Paris: Seuil.

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———. 1980. Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1985. Au commencement était l’amour: psychanalyse et foi. Paris: Hachette. ———. 1987a. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1987b. Soleil noir, dépression et mélancolie. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1988. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard. ———. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1990. “La Nation et le Verbe.” Lettre ouverte à Harlem Désir. Paris: Editions Rivages. ———. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1993. “The Nation and the Word.” Nations without Nationalism. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. Sense et non-sens de la révolte: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse I. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard. ———. 1997. La révolte intime: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse II. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard. ———. 1998a. Visions capitales. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux. ———. 1998b. “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva.” Parallax, 4 (3): 5–16. ———. 1998c. L’avenir d’une révolte. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. ———. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. “‘Nous Deux’ or a (Hi)story of Intertextuality.” Romanic Review ( January–March). ———. 2001/2003. “Intimité voilée, intimité violée.” Chroniques du temps sensible, Première édition (28 novembre; mercredi 7 heures 55 [2001–2002]). Paris: Éditions de l’Aube. ———. 2005. La haine et le pardon: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse III. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard.

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PART I TWO STATEMENTS BY KRISTEVA



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1 A Meditation, a Political Act, an Art of Living

 Julia Kristeva Translated by S. K. Keltner

It is with emotion that I first address myself to each of those who have honored me with their contribution.1 Of course, I will not comment on what I heard as so many offerings of intelligence and complicity, offerings which will not fail to nourish my research in the future. Neither will I respond to the implicit or explicit questions that each contribution posed. Well beyond the narcissistic pleasure I felt in listening to you, I have been overwhelmed and amused by this woman with multiple faces that your praise knew how to surprise and take hold of in the “atypical” person that I am—it is at least what one says to me in order to be nice to me. In truth, I had not even suspected the existence of this woman under the atypical and cumbersome gravity from which, it seems to me, I will never undo myself, whatever may be the voyages that transport me in the multitude of spaces, cities, disciplines, and languages. Is it an immoderate ambition, or a specifically feminine relationship to time—which would retain especially profusion and blossoming—that makes me receive your interventions as so many openings and not conclusions? Openings of questions and of projects that you have given me the honor to read in my writings and my actions, which testify to your ingenuity as intellectuals, and trace for me new courses of research and of debate. I will hold myself to two of these courses, which are: After this day, what sense to give the creation by the Norwegian Government of the prestigious Holberg Prize which comes to fill, magnificently, 19

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in fact the forgetting of the human and social sciences in the Nobel prize list? To what chance of my personal history do I owe the good fortune and honor, no less surprising, of being the first laureate, me, the European citizen, of French nationality, of Bulgarian origin and of American adoption? I. The response to the first question—which bears on the distinction, by the Holberg Prize, of the human and social sciences, with an explicit mention of psychoanalysis—implies to my sense a preliminary interrogation: what power [pouvoir] do the human sciences have today? Contrary to what they would like to make us believe, the collision of religions is in fact only a superficial phenomenon. The problem of the beginning of the third millennium is not the war of religions, but the weakness and the emptiness that henceforth separates those who want to know that God is unconscious, and those who prefer to not know it, in order better to enjoy the spectacle announcing that He exists. The globalized media supports, with all of its imaginary and financial economy, this second preference: to want to know nothing in order better to enjoy the virtual. In other words: to enjoy seeing promises, and to be content with promises of goods, guaranteed by the Promise of a superior Good. This situation, because of the globalization of the denial that is consubstantial to it, is without precedent in the history of humanity. Saturated by enterprises of seductions and deceptions, our cathodic civilization is revealed to be favorable to the belief. And it is why it has favored the melting pot of religions. Catholicism—to my eyes the most aesthetic of all religions—in its genius, has perfectly understood this new phase of History. Consequently, and successfully, which we know, it comes to propose its candidacy to a magistère well deserved over all other beliefs.2 The recent theological and political triumph of the Vatican is only the beginning of this process destined to get worse. I recall you to the preliminary question: what can the human sciences do, which, to go against the current of this wave, insist on wanting to know? Must they be suffocated between the dust of asbestos and the fossil rules of the nineteenth century which solidified the borders between the disciplines? Must they perish in the confused battles of a chase for university careers where they are confined to the management of specialized and bloodless discourse? Must they be lost in the meanderings of so powerful techniques that they have no chance of appealing to the dormant souls of a generation without language and without writing, who must be content with promises alone of improbable and underpaid “posts”? This perspective, which I caricature with difficulty, leads the most hurried to abandon us in order to hurry into the doors of the “Star Academy,” neo-candidates for neo-roles in a media neo-universality. While the others, the dullest, are made the studious archivists of an antimodern nostalgia, who in passing go so far as to include Roland Barthes himself in their mortal, inevitably mortal, ennui.

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To both I say: wake up, light up, reread Rimbaud: “It is necessary to be absolutely modern!” But how is this possible? And Where is this possible? At the University? That is a new one! Nietzsche and Heidegger have warned us: modern man suffers “the absence of a sensible and suprasensible world with the power to obligate.” This annihilation of divine authority, and with it of all other authority, state or political, does not lead necessarily to nihilism. But how to know it today without being lulled to sleep by a strictly rationalist humanism or a romantic spirituality? I claim that the alternative to rising religiosity, as to its inverse, which is narrow-minded nihilism, already and precisely comes from these places of thinking that we test, not to occupy, but to make life. Which we? We who are in this room, in the light of the Holberg Prize, with our accomplices from work in the Hexagon3 and abroad, we for whom the stowing in the vast continent of that which one calls, to be quick, “the human and social sciences,” is essentially due to our implication in literature and psychoanalysis. I have named here two experiences of language that damage the metaphysical pair reason versus faith, around which scholasticism was formerly constituted, and which was recently updated by the dialogue between a postmodern philosopher and a cardinal on the way to becoming pope. After having noted that rationalist humanism had failed in the totalitarianism of the twentieth century, and having announced that it would fail in the economic and biological automation that threatens the human species in the twenty-first century, the two interlocutors agreed to announce that our modern democracies are completely lost [déboussolées] by dint of being deprived of a “superior” reliable authority, alone capable of regulating the wild course of freedom. This convergence of the philosopher and the theologian implies that the return to faith is essential as the sole and unique recourse, suitable to impose a moral stability facing the risks of freedom. In other words, since constitutional democracies have need of “normative presuppositions” in order to found “rational right,” and the secular State does not have at its disposal a “unifying bond” (Böckenförde), it would be essential to constitute a “conservative consciousness” that is nourished by faith (Habermas), or that may be a “correlation between reason and faith” (Ratzinger). In counterpoint to this hypothesis, one may think that we are confronted right now, in advanced democracies in particular, by prepolitical or transpolitical experiences that make obsolete all appeal to “normative consciousness” and to the reason/revelation pair, since they are heading for a radical reform of humanism stemming from the Aufklärung4 without recourse to the irrational. It is precisely at this sensitive point of modernity that the literary experience—with the theoretical thought from which it is inseparable—and the Freudian discovery of the unconscious is situated. Their respective contributions to the complication of the humanism of Knowledge is not understood, in its pre- and transpolitical significance, as capable of founding this “unifying bond,” which lacks a secular, political

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rationality. Such is nevertheless the hypothesis—an alternative to the concert of Böckenförde/Habermas/Ratzinger—that I would like to defend. Those who are exposed to the literary and psychoanalytic experience, or are simply attentive to their stakes—as we who are here—know that the opposition reason/faith or norm/freedom is more tenable if the speaking being that I am is no longer thought as dependent on a suprasensible world and even less on a sensible world “with the power to obligate.” They also know that this I that speaks is unveiled to itself insofar as it is constructed in a vulnerable bond with a strange object, or an ec-static other, an ab-jet: the sexual thing (others will say: the object of sexual drive of which “the carrier wave” is the death drive). This vulnerable bond to the sexual thing and in it—on which the social or sacred bond is propped up—is no different from the heterogeneous bond—biology and sense—on which our languages and our discourses depend, which as it turns out modifies, and which, conversely, modifies the sexual bond itself. In this apprehension of the human adventure opened by literature and psychoanalysis, literature and art do not constitute an aesthetic decor, no more than philosophy or psychoanalysis claim to provide salvation. But each of these experiences, in their differences, is offered as the laboratory of new forms of humanism. To understand and accompany the speaking subject in its bond to the sexual thing gives us a chance to face up to the new barbarities of automation, free of recourse to the safeguards of infantilizing conservatism, and of the shortsighted idealism of banalizing and mortifying rationalism. Nevertheless, if the adventure that I sketch, to the listening of literature and the human sciences of the twentieth century, suggests a revision and even a radical reform of humanism, the consequences would only be, to paraphrase a word of Sartre, “cruel and long-term.” Cruel, because they unveil to us a humanity endowed with an extravagant, amoral freedom, which respects only the singularity of the vulnerable beings that we are, in the crossroads of biology and sense, and whose exceptional realizations—those of “great” writers, artists, philosophers, et cetera—call us continuously to mobilize our own genius, which is no different than the ability, it might be any, to be surpassed in thinking. There is no other means to escape the “banality of evil,” which threatens the bond—amorous, familial, religious, or political—than to oppose it with the capacity of the speaking being, bound by the sexual thing to its biological destiny, to put in question all identity proper— sexual, national, economic, cultural, et cetera—in other words, to widen the powers of thought. Only in this ethical and philosophical horizon of a revision of the conception of the subject itself, of the human, can these experiences that impassion us at the University, well named Denis-Diderot, [sic] be concretized: I speak for example of the creation of the Institute of Contemporary Thought, which seeks to carry out a revision of the disciplines in the confluence of biology-law-psychoanalysis-semiology-literary theory. That is to say that no authority, “obligation,” or instance would know how

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for the long term to aggravate this putting in question that we know henceforth to be inherent in the desire of men and women, just as in their thought, itself understood as sublimation of their desire in creativity. If such is the case, we measure, with literature and psychoanalysis, and their constitutive crises that mark the culture of the twentieth century, the risks of thought and of life that bring on the human adventure. But it is also with literature and psychoanalysis that our understanding is opened, with amoralism and what lies beyond it, so that the risk of the anthropological bond (sexual and linguistic) equally comprises limits and regulations in the sharing [partage]5 between singularities. I employ here the word sharing [partage] in the strong sense of “to share” [partager]: to take part in particularity beyond the separation that imposes our destiny on us, to participate without forgetting that each is “its own part” [chaucun est “à part”],6 in order to recognize “its” unsharable part [“sa” part impartageable], irreducible even to the irreparable, and inassimilable in any saving community. The writer and analyst make this sharing of the unsharable [partage de impartageable] in a bond always recommencing the everyday experience; it leads them to a radical strangeness made of solitude and solicitude. I am not satisfied by any preexisting doxa, but am created indefinitely, infinitely, in the succession of radical reformulations and in the adjustment of the meeting of desires. You understand, that which I designate as a humanism attentive to the speaking being in its indivisible bond to the sexual thing leads us to an experience of risky freedom that it returns us to affirm. It is a question of freedom as sharable [partageable] singularity. If it suddenly appears, in counterpoint, in the conjunction between the religiosity and the nihilism of the planetary era, this model of freedom no less finds its sources in an ancient tradition. I even claim that it is not only essential to European culture, but that it constitutes today the specific contribution, susceptible to opening the spectacular impasses of a globalization in search of faith. In order to situate it better in the history of thought, let us return briefly to this foundation of modern rationalism that are The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and The Critique of Practical Reason (1789). We are in the century of Ludvig Holberg. Kant defines freedom not negatively as an “absence of constraint,” but positively as a possibility of “autocommencement.” Identifiying freedom in this way with the initiative of Selbst, of Self or of Me [Moi], the philosopher opens the way to an apology of enterprising7 subjectivity, if you permit me this personal reading of his “cosmological” thought. Simultaneously, however, Kant does not fail to subordinate the freedom of enterprising Reason, whether it is pure or practical, to a Cause. Divine or moral cause controls in the last instance free initiative, and from this makes entrepreneurial freedom participate in the same logic of cause and effect, but remains protected, untouchable, inaccessible to the desire of thinking. I would extrapolate by saying that in a society more and more dominated by technique, freedom thus conceived progressively becomes a capacity to adapt

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to a “cause” always exterior to the “self,” to the “speak-being” [parlêtre]8 and to its “sexual thing.” Nonetheless, and little by little this productivist causality becomes less and less moral, and more and more economic, to the point that it reaches its proper saturation, it brings the necessity of a support through its symmetrical guarantee that is the moral and/or spiritual causality. In this order of thought, which favors Protestantism (I make allusion to the bonds between capitalism and Protestantism brought to the fore by Max Weber), freedom appears as a freedom to adapt itself to the logic of causes and effects: to the logic of production, of science, and of economy, itself supported by the interdicts of moral reason. The logic of globalization and that of liberalism are the outcome of this freedom, in which you are free . . . enclosing you in the process of causes-effects in search of goods, and/or of the supreme Good. The supreme cause (God) and the technical cause (Dollar) end up appearing, under the spotlight of a technical globalization eager for belief, as the two variants, in solidarity and copresent, that sustain the functioning of our freedoms within this logic, which one could call the instrumentalization of the speaking being. I do not deny the magnitude or the benefits of this freedom of adaptation, which culminates in calculative-thinking and in science. I think that it is a capital moment of the development of humanity acceding to the technique and to the automation of the species. American civilization is better adapted to this freedom. Europe assumes it, because it invented it and practices it, in its own way. I say only that this freedom is not the only one. There is another model of freedom. It appears in the Greek world, at the heart of philosophy, with the pre-Socratics, and is developed by the intermediary of Socratic dialogue. Without being subordinated to a cause, but without ignoring it—transversal therefore to the categories of cause-effect concatenation that are in themselves the premises of scientific and moral reason—this fundamental freedom resides in the being of the speech that is opened up. In desiring, it gives itself, and in presenting itself thus as other to itself and to the other, freedom is freed. This liberation of the being of speech in the encounter between the one and the other was brought to the fore in the discussion Heidegger undertook with the philosophy of Kant (1930 seminar, published under the title The Essence of Human Freedom). It is a question of inscribing freedom in the essence of the speech of man as the immanence of infinite questioning, before and although freedom is thus fixed in the enchainment of causes and effects, and in their mastery that will be no less itself submissive to infinite interrogation. Fear nothing, I will not go further in this very schematic reading of the two models of freedom that I have related back to Kant and Heidegger. What interests me today is to insist on the horizon of emptiness that divides the modern world into “belief ” and “knowledge,” under the connotations of this second model of freedom. It is the writer, working in the identity of the national linguistic code as well as in the fantasies that build a cultural tradition, in order to preserve it and to modulate it, who is the privileged holder of it. Holberg him-

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self did not find a more efficient solution to the barbarities of his time than to make himself the Scandinavian Molière, in order to make fun of the enthusiasms and the language, in the enthusiasm of the maternal language itself. And I do not forget the libertine, his contemporary, defying the proprieties of social causes-effects in order to make appear and to formulate his dissident desire: he has no equivalent in the militant of any “sexual community,” but rather and paradoxically in the desire of life, including sexual, which the most vulnerable and the most excluded people claim as a political right. I think, naturally and therefore, of the transference and countertransference of the analytic experience, where to take part in the unsharable [part à l’impartageable] of the other gives me, at last, a chance to think, which is no different from thinking from the place of the other. The writer, the libertine, the analysand/analyst: some figures that it is very necessary to call revolutionaries (from the Sanskrit +vel, “unveiling” [dévoilement], “reversal” [retournement]), which I understand as the only tenable sense today of this word, the one who inscribes the privileges of the singular person in the bond, in order to reinterrogate conventions. In the last page written before her death, Hannah Arendt dreamed of an optimal political bond, which it seems to her must be the equivalent of the bond instituted by the exchange of aesthetic judgments: taste in lieu and place of the tribunal. This concern for sharable [partageable] singularity in a bond stimulating creativities, knowing how to reconcile laughter and taste, is it not already at the foundation of Knowledge? The Rights of man, and the motto of the French Revolution, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” which radically reinforced the advances of English habeas corpus, before the Terror destroyed the ambitions of it by the erection of a supreme Being by obligations and/or by maliciousness, came to legitimate the tyranny of the masses? We are the inheritors of this second model of freedom, reinforced and clarified by the radical experiences of the sharing of the unsharable [de partage de l’impartageable] which are the experience of writing and, in another way, of the psychoanalytic adventure. Would we be able to deepen them and synthesize them in order, not to fill in, but to interrogate the emptiness that separates “belief ” and “knowledge,” and which dangerously opens [creuse] the crisis of the planetary era? Such is the question that imposes itself on us, by the grace and the gravity of this extraordinary gesture of a government that has revived the memory of Baron Holberg and the European eighteenth century, in order to extract us from the academic routine, and to make us recapture confidence in the risks of thought, facing the fantasies of the certainties of salvation. II. It remains for me to speak to you about what led me to the reflection that I have just submitted to you in conclusion to your homage to my research, without explaining to you in detail my course, or summarizing my books to you—you have generously made it through this day, and I had the chance to risk myself, on the occasion of the colloquium at Bergen, the native city of Holberg,

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which gathered together last December the speakers of five nationalities. I will make three confessions to you, filtered through the remarks of two great French writers, to which I have for a long time devoted my work. These words of Proust, first: “Ideas are the successors of griefs.” I hear these words reverberate, this evening, with my history as an exile and as a woman, but also with the conflict of civilizations that our world traverses today. It is without end that we ask ourselves how it is possible that griefs do not lead to melancholy and to death, but to this strange enigma that is the life of the spirit. It is without end, and it is fortunate. Next, this declaration of Colette: “Being reborn has never been above my forces.” Is it an exorbitant pretension, or a capacity, rather feminine, of eternal return, of blossoming more than of adaptation, of renaissance, of renewal? And if yes, by what condition? Finally, this motto of the heroine in my last novel, Murder in Byzantium, Stéphanie Delacour: “I travel myself.” You may notice that she expresses herself by neologisms, like Julia Kristeva at her beginnings. And since this journalist is a cultivated woman, to say “I travel myself ” is, in fact, her way of summarizing a fundamental axis of our European culture: from Saint Augustine, who recognized only one fatherland, that of traveling, precisely: “In via, in patria,” to Freud, who specified: “There where it was I must become.” In other words, for the heroine who resembles me, the traversal of borders—geographic, between disciplines and constituted discourses—is only possible if the man or the woman who travels succeeds in displacing their own interior borders: “I travel myself.” From this sole condition ideas succeed griefs, and being reborn is never above our forces. You see that the key to my nomadism, to my interrogation of consecrated knowledge, is no different from psychoanalysis understood and practiced as a journey that reconstitutes psychic identity itself. And, I repeat, I am very happy to note that the Holberg Prize has expressly distinguished the Freudian discovery among the human and social sciences. More than two centuries later, I salute therefore Ludvig Holberg who inspired in the Jury the idea of making me the first laureate of the prestigious Prize that carries his name. It is thanks to him that we gather together today. I thank you again for your patience and for your friendship, which I have felt in so strong and close all day long. Please accept all of my profound gratitude.

Notes I would like to thank Yvonne Stricker for her invaluable comments and suggestions on this translation. All of the following notes are mine. —Translator 1. The following text is the speech that Kristeva gave to the University of Paris VII Denis Diderot on May 10, 2005. A symposium was organized to celebrate her reception in the fall of 2004 of the prestigious Holberg Prize.

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2. Le magistère is a third year degree, taken after completing two years at university. It is equivalent to a master’s degree. 3. France. 4. “Enlightenment.” 5. The term “partager” has several senses that imply connecting and several that imply division. It is as if the English “to share” had both of its senses: “to have the same as” as in “I share your view” or “I share your pain” or “to share a meal,” as well as the sense of “to share out” or “to divide up and divvy out; to allot.” The primary senses of the French term are to dismember, divide into pieces; to give someone a part of something; to participate in something at the same time as someone else or to sympathize with; to be in solidarity with; (an old or literary sense) to give someone what they deserve; to be alloted; to divide, to fragment; to be divided (i.e., split in deciding something); to divide a society or people into opposed or even hostile groups (i.e., a society divided on an issue). Some senses are about sharing where two parties participate together in one same thing and some of them are about one thing being divided or shared out, you might say, into two parts. Further, partage has a very strong sense of allotment; it is the legal term for the division of goods that takes place among owners, especially in inheritance. 6. Literally, each is “on his own.” 7. Entreprenant(e) has the connotation of being (sexually) forward and is also etymologically linked to entrepreneuriale (entrepreneurial). 8. The term usually translated “speaking being” in Kristeva’s work is “l’être parlant.”

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2 Decollations

 Julia Kristeva Translated by Caroline Arruda

John the Baptist, prefigurer par excellence, lends his image to the representation of the invisible par excellence: the passage/transition.1 In the future, the representation is ready to accommodate the mythic and biblical memory of decollations. There exists, for better or worse, a history of decapitation in different civilizations that we complete through reconstruction.2 Texts, myths, fantasies detail a thousand and one variants of decapitated heads. The significance of their history and their local color becomes the echo of the tormented vision of the artist, who seizes and revives them, each time in an increasingly modern fashion, in the graphic gash or in the crimson hue of the work. The representational artist relies primarily on those texts that are assumed to be familiar and in which an interpretation is implicitly recommended to the viewer, but which are interpreted in an increasingly liberal fashion, realized in the drawing, in the strong sense of the word “illustrated.” In this back and forth between past and present, text and image, which constitutes the ruse of the Illustration, the representation of our pitiable excesses is liberated from guilt: the represented carnage satiates the more or less repressed or dominated violence of individuals and nations. That having been done, this genre of representations secretly imposes a new metaphysics, which could potentially be an antimetaphysics. It is necessary to scrutinize the sacrificial limits of visibility itself with the tools of illustration, and to revisit the economy of transfiguration—an alchemy where the representation emerges from mourning, from renunciation, from castration, from death. There is a beyond [au-delà] of death, says artistic experience, there exists a resurrection: it is nothing other than the life of the 29

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trace, the elegance of a deed, the grace or brutality of colors, when they dare to display the threshold of the human psyche. There, decapitation is a privileged space. Exultation, shout for joy! Luca Cambiaso (b Moneglia, 1527/d Madrid, 1585, Mercury Beheading Argus, c. 1560s, Musée du Louvre, Paris)3 seizes on a nervous trait, an implacable parsimony, a Mercury preparing to decapitate Argus. He knew without a doubt that Argus or Argos, the prince of Argos, son of Medea, had one hundred eyes and went by the name of “the Argus Panoptes,” the “all-seeing.” Mercury-Hermes, the winged god of voyagers and merchants, lulled him to sleep with the sound of his flute and killed him. Hera, who had been charged with guarding the cow Io, then scattered his eyes over the peacock’s tail. “One hundred eyes or one hundred heads?” Max Ernst will ask much later on, although about a woman.4 The Greco-Roman legend is, in this case, nothing more than Cambiaso’s drawing. The painter transformed himself into the man of one hundred eyes. Is it Argus that you see, supplicating at the bottom of the drawing paper, or Cambiaso himself, who offers himself in sacrifice [supplice] to the Mercury of his fantasies, his friends? In contrast to psychoanalysis, the aesthetic experience revisits and exhausts the logics of the sacred. The young David cutting off the monster Goliath’s head is no longer only a text.5 With regard to the biblical sovereign who, at a young age, delivered aid to king Saul to defeat the Philistines and had a life of complex adventures, the majority of painters withhold the most spectacular scene: “So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and a stone, striking down the Philistine and killing him; there was no sword in David’s hand. Then David ran and stood over the Philistine; he grasped his sword, drew it out of its sheath, and killed him; then he cut off his head with it.”6 The Hebrew text’s polysemy, the meanderings of past and future history, which associate David with the musical arts, a passion for love and political acumen, are, in many artists’ paintings, cinemascopically frozen on the cleansing nature of power. Donning the magnitude of a Greco-Roman sculpture, Martin van Heemskerck’s David (b Heemskerck, 1498/d Haarlem, 1574, David and Goliath, 1555, Musée du Louvre, Paris) has long forgotten his infantile fragility and brandishes his immense, bare sword over the impotent body of a defeated Goliath. This masterful example of Mannerism adeptly transfers signs, memories, ideas from one register to another, from one history to another, from solemnity to eroticism. We are at the antipodes of the compassion aroused by John the Baptist even while considering the Baptist to prefigure God’s peace: Salome does not stop herself from soliciting the interested applause of those who discreetly appreciate the cutting act. The history of the Jewish people came to restore decollation’s power of salvation, in reality and fantasy alike. In the future, the meaning of the mortal scene can be inverted, the killing justified. More than Miserablism: the artist, like the viewer/spectator, is on the side of the victor. The right to behead is recognized: the just cause justifies all excess, a righteous return of the repressed. One will never say by how much the interpretation

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of the biblical text was permitted to exceed the hypocrisy of a certain kind of embellished Christianity and to render accessible a meditation, literary as much as pictoral, on libratory violence. Personal violence, violence of the young, violence of the exiled and the oppressed. A release from the sustained humiliations, the injustices inflicted on them, the daily killings. Next to David is the impetuous Judith beheading Holofernes, which fascinates us the most; Judith rehabilitates the image of a warrior femininity, castrating, merciless. Salome, although responsible for the death of the predecessor to Jesus, is not unable, as we will see, to attract some admiration, particularly during periods of religious crisis. But Judith the liberator, intransigent in her fight against the Assyrian general, assumes all the glory that the unconscious owes to the all-powerful mother. A mother whose medusan head we dread only because we know that she may take our own; that which does not prevent us, in the guise of vengeance, to imagine her without her own. The fantasy of the mother, who is dreaded because she is castrated, inverses itself in the apotheosis of the manhunter [la femme de tete],7 who does more than castrate—who decapitates the most pitiless man: revenge against the tyranny of fathers, against a devouring and mortified femininity. Judith is the positive of Gorgon, her magnificent and triumphant version: “It was the twelfth year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh.”8 Holofernes, general in chief of the Assyrian army, pillages the Jewish towns and villages, taking possession of the water sources and the springs. Revolted by the oppression, Judith, true daughter of Israel, wife of Manasseh, “beautiful and lovely to behold,”9 decides to take action. She says her prayer: “Please, please, God of my father, [. . .] Make my deceitful10 words bring wound and bruise on those who have planned cruel things against your covenant, and against your sacred house, and against Mount Zion, and against the house your children possess.”11 Having infiltrated Holofernes’s camp through trickery on banquet day, “Judith was left alone in the tent, with Holofernes stretched out on his bed, for he was dead drunk.”12 “She went up to the bedpost near Holofernes’s head, and took down his sword that hung there. She came close to his bed, took hold of the hair of his head, and said, ‘Give me strength today, O Lord God of Israel!’ Then she struck his neck twice and with all her might cut off his head. Next she rolled his body off the bed and pulled down the canopy from the posts. Soon afterward she went out and gave Holofernes’s head to her maid, who placed it in her food bag. Then the two of them went out together, as they were accustomed to for prayer.”13 In addition to the Bible implying Judith’s seduction—Does not Holofernes “succumb” first to the charms of this beautiful woman?—it also suggests a savage dimension unchecked by the murder that justified the plea for Israel’s survival. From then on, the warring act obtained a sacred value: opening not an indeterminate beyond, but the political and vital durability of a people. Freud takes up the story of Judith by way of Hebbel’s tragedy “Judith and Holofernes,”14 which gave him the opportunity to approach a writer for whom

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the “paternal complex” could have advocated empathy for women and rendered Judith as a virgin. Not only does defloration, Freud advances, attach woman to man, “it also unleashes an archaic reaction of hostility toward him.” As a result, decapitation, which is a symbolic substitute for castration, appears as an act of vengeance against defloration.15 Although the biblical text makes no mention of Judith’s virginity, it does not fail to sexualize the relationship between Judith and the Assyrian general, moreover rendering the woman the initiator of the seduction. It does not stop until the act of penetration and even defloration are alive in the female neurotic as rape, if not killing, and provoke a desire for vengeance in the feminine unconscious. This indisputable given in clinical analysis should be confirmed by the fact that man experiences an intense fear of castration during the sexual act. The anxiety of losing his organ while penetrating the vagina, aggravated by the rupture of the hymen, is reinforced by possible gestation and the potential birth: would woman not capture the male’s penis to become pregnant “all alone”? If woman can live her life as a violated and avenging virgin, ready to decapitate, man for his part experiences himself, phantasmagorically, as castrated-decapitated by the mother who takes his organ and does not return it except in the form of the child’s head-body. Moreover, when a woman reaches motherhood, the maternal vocation only provisionally appeases his castration anxiety. For those who do not give birth, the production of an oeuvre—and better yet of a visual object [objet à voir]—comes to fulfill this threat. Artemisia Gentileschi (b Rome, 1593/d Naples, 1652/3) marvelously revealed this aspect of the feminine œuvre, which consists in combating the rapist’s phallic power, not to mention the deflowered receiver’s passivity, in the manner of the day . . . through a painting. The most spectacular of these realizations is precisely the painting, not of the scene of the rape that Artemisia herself would come to endure, but inversely that of the decapitation of a man by the legendary Judith ( Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1611–12, Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples). In revenge, no form of paternity shelters man from this anxiety since the child, and particularly the male child, revives the dread of castration and killing. Thus Freud is unjustified in emphasizing the violated woman’s unconscious vengeance, which transforms her into a head-cutter. But it goes without saying that this is man’s fear of venturing into this originary valley and his malaise in the face of the [female] parent’s power, which imposes on the masculine fantasy the image, at once dangerous and thus exciting, of a castrating woman who does not hesitate to sacrifice . . . the essential organ [l’organe capital]. Rembrandt, who knew to decapitate Saint John the Baptist, also dedicated his drawing pencil to Judith (Rembrandt van Rijn, b Leiden, 1606/d Amsterdam, 1669, The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, c. 1628-1635, Musée du Louvre, Paris). For this masterly decollation, he left only a whirl of traces above the headless cadaver that is difficult to recognize. The economy of traces nevertheless reconstructs the resolute postures of the two women: Judith stretching out her left arm as though to draw her victim aside, the old maidservant

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charged with obscuring the trophy. Bartholomeus Spranger (b Antwerp, 1546/d Prague, before Sept. 27, 1611, Judith and Holofernes, ?1606-1607, Musée du Louvre, Paris) adds white highlights with his feverish, brown-inked quill to render visible the trembling of the cut flesh. Cristofano Allori (b Florence, 1577/d Florence, 1621) is interested, above all else, in the grip of this masterful woman: Study for a sleeve and a closed fist holding a lock of hair (c. 1613, Musée du Louvre, Paris) was intended for his painting Judith and Holofernes (we are familiar with many versions: Florence, Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti; Paris, Collection Pourtalès), where Judith is rendered as the painter’s mistress, the beautiful Mazzafirra. Study for the head of Holofernes (c. 1613, Musée du Louvre, Paris), in which we recognize the head of the painter, is also a preparatory sketch for the painting Judith and Holofernes (1613) in the Galleria Palatina in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. To the Naturalist’s Judith the butcher is opposed a victimizing and sacrificial self-portrait: the emasculated painter offers his frustration and his resignation to his impassible executioner. In both studies, the pastel adds an air of grace to the curved drawing style, where the savage feminine, the interrupted/suspended pleasure of the castrated man, and the artist’s vengeance, which renders his sadomasochistic drama visible, are combined. Bernardino Cavallino (?)16 (b Naples, bapt. 25 Aug 1616/d Naples, ?1656, Judith’s Servant, 17th cen., Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt) is one of those rare painters who prefer the maidservant: is this because she collects the head and he likes to feel his/her/their [ses] hands around the cut “member?” Even more popular, Raffaellino del Garbo (b Florence, ?1466/d Florence, 1524, Judith, last quarter 15th cen./first quarter 16th cen., Musée du Louvre, Paris) composes a Botticellian, but nevertheless decisive, Judith: with a juvenile tenderness, she contemplates the head of an elderly Holofernes, vexed because he allowed himself to be brought to a brutal end by such innocence. A small painting attributed to Correggio17 (Allegri, Antonio [called Correggio], b Correggio, ?1489/d Correggio, 1534), Judith and her Servant, around 1510, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg), tightly composed and imposing due to the force of nocturnal gravity, portrays the two women shoving the beheaded chief into a bag by the lugubrious light of a torch that illuminates the maidservant’s monstrous face. In order to believe that when a woman reaches to place her hand on a man’s principle organ, it is necessary to fear witchcraft and other spells. Veronese, by his own lights, sees the servant as black, next to a blond and royal Judith (Veronese, Paolo, b Verona, 1528/d Venice, 1588, Judith and Holofernes, after 1581, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen). At some distance from the primordial [capitale] act, Delilah is satisfied with cutting Samson’s hair to deprive him of the force that his hair possesses and to deliver him to the Philistines. As an attenuated variant of decapitation, this humiliating act secretly retains the dread and pleasure of castration, just as it does for her, the one who anticipated the killing. Delilah appears as a younger and pejorative version of Judith, who precedes her and who finds herself corrected in her.

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A Philistine, an enemy of the Jewish people, she dares to attack the celebrated judge of the Hebrews (the twelfth century B.C.E.) who was the soul of the resistance against the Philistines. “Finally after she had nagged him with her words day after day, and pestered him, he was tired to death. So he told her his whole secret [. . .] ‘If my head were shaved, then my strength would leave me; I would become weak, and be like anyone else’ [. . .] She let him fall asleep on her lap; and she called a man, and had him shave off the seven locks of his head [. . .] So the Philistines seized him and gouged out his eyes. They brought him down to Gaza.”18 The story makes it clear to us that the judge, as he succumbed to the seductress’ charms, lost divine protection. It is, however, nothing but a passing trial, for Yahweh is seized by pity for him. Samson retrieves his hair and his power and succeeds in destroying the edifice that sheltered the Philistine princes, as well as their people, as they gathered together for a ceremony. “Then Samson said, ‘Let me die with the Philistines.’ He strained with all his might; and the house fell.”19 Rembrandt does not detest the triumph of his heretical Delilah, who flees, with scissors in one hand and the locks of the judge’s hair in the other, while Samson is left entangled in an inextricable mêlée of arms and legs (The Blinding of Samson,20 1636, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main). More modern and already expressionist, the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel (b Stockholm 1740/d Stockholm, 1814, Samson and Delilah, 1776, Musée du Louvre, Paris) renders the subject in brown ink and blood-red, suggesting a lascivious embrace more than just the simple brutality of the pernicious Philistine. The Rococo and Mannerist torsos come to anxiety’s aid: no, it is not castration, protests Sergel who, upon his parents’ death, falls into an intense and sudden melancholy and, twenty years later, creates Samson and Delilah during the same period as his famous series Hypochondria. This friend of Füssli was, like many of those who inspired the theme of decollation, a dark prince of melancholy, which he tried to combat by paying homage to revisited ancient art and by tentatively eroticizing his sacrifices. But the feminine avenger is not the only one to seduce artists. Samson also takes on followers, such as Philippe-Laurent Roland (b Pont-à-Marc, 1746/ d Paris, 1816, Samson, 1783, Musée du Louvre, Paris), who sculpts a bust of a red Samson, apparently coming to regain his hair: could we not admire a man who loses, but also regains, his virility in order to better die for his cause! One has difficulty juxtaposing a woman who abandoned herself to decapitation to this series of decapitating women—in chronological order, Delilah, Judith, and Salome. Still, the Bible relates the story of Jezebel who loses her head. The daughter of the king of Tyre, wife of Ahab, mother of Athalie, whom Racine would come to celebrate, this idolatrous queen erected a temple to Baal and favored absolutism in conjunction with the corruption of justice. Gustave Doré (b Strasbourg, 1832/d Paris, 1883) left us one of the few representations of her ( Jehu’s Companions Finding the Remains of Jezebel, 1866, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris). Jehu, receiving God’s mission to destroy the house

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of his master Ahab, is charged with punishing “the many whorehouses and sorceries of [ Joram’s] mother Jezebel.”21 Jezebel, a sorceress and witch as much as the daughter of a king, deserves to be eaten by dogs: “Jezebel heard of it; she painted her eyes, and adored her head, and looked out of the window [. . .] Jehu entered the gate [. . .] Two or three eunuchs looks out at him. He said, ‘Throw her down.’ So they threw her down; some of her blood spattered on the wall and on the horses, which trampled on her [. . .] But when they went to bury her, they found no more than the skull and the feet and palms of her hands.”22 Though rare, this reminder of the feminine skull evokes for us the prehistorical cranial rites, about which at least one hypothesis maintains that they were performed more frequently on female subjects (Skull of Young Woman Covered with Plaster, c. 7000–6000 B.C.E., National Museum, Damascus)23 and the terrifying Medusas. For better or for worse, our ancestors appear to be concerned first and foremost with woman’s head: the Venus of Willendorf or Brassempouy’s young woman are there to bear witness to it. Of course, more than one queen has been decapitated: I recall Anne Boleyn, Marie Stuart, Marie-Antoinette; you can surely think of others. It is always true that, as we approach modern times, men become increasingly interested in decollation. Castration obligates them to be! What could one truly cut off of a woman? one might ask oneself. Unless we accept that the scarcity of female decapitations expresses a fundamental repression, the more difficult it is to admit the following: one aims at the mother’s head [on vise à la tête], she is the primordial [capitale] vision, and her essential and libidinal impact is so strong that it too deserves to be fundamentally repressed. The evidence of masculine phallic power hides another type of power, which is not identical to the first: it is the dependence on the maternal protospace, which is prior to the representation. At the end of his life, Freud ultimately advances that the feminine constitutes, for the two sexes, the more principle form of repression.24 The castration fantasy that women are assumed to harbor and the castration fantasy feared by men manifest themselves as constructions of deferred action (Nachträglich) [après coup] of the depressive position that these fantasies allow to form and of which they make use. In the same way, the Image recasts and elaborates, in the visible and in following its historical development, events inscribed and hidden in the past.25 Thus, during the genital and symbolic maturation of the speaking subject, the castration fantasy reclaims the catastrophic impotence of childhood and gives it a new meaning, affixing it to the visible male organ. In opposition to the fear of death, the terror of castration is, however, eroticizable, playable [ jouable]. It is not the obstinate survival of a threatened body, says the castration fantasy, it is only a question of phallic power: that which is lacking in woman and which can be taken from man, if he is punished by a father or an all-powerful mother. Nevertheless, in the face of the terrifying risk of castration, the subject, from this moment on, has at his disposal the possibilities present in his eroticism and his language that he did not have

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during the period of his infantile impotence. Seduction and representation come to defend against the fear of death and mourning, and catastrophic melancholy can be combated by the pleasures of sadomasochistic perversity. Beginning with the initial manipulations of the skull, sexual excitement recuperates the horror, and masturbatory pleasure transforms the horrible relic into a fetish. But it is truly graphic and pictoral representation, through the multiplication of motifs of decollation and their masterful treatments, that render perfectly explicit two anxieties underlying the movement of the visible: the ancient anxiety of losing the mother that endures until impotence and death with its corollary of the all-powerful mother, and man’s castration anxiety with its corollary of the castrated woman. The excessive splendors of pictoral decollations betray this unconscious double logic that drives us to delimit the visible itself, insofar as it is a sublime defense against these two anxieties. Starting with the era that will be that of humanism, the representation of decollation eroticizes itself because it draws entirely from ancient sources, from them or against them. The works pulsate with sexual pleasure rather than wilting in the face of the consecration of death. Sacrificial terror and seduction cohabitate in the work, the latter permitting desecration by insinuating castration; a blasphemous perversity establishes itself there, the artist and the viewer taking turns playing the parts of the wound and the knife. A “genre”/“gender”26 emerges and constitutes itself, one that the fatal [capitale] wound absorbs in an abundance of depths and colors—by embellishing it to the point of banality. Yet within this same thematic, graphic works—by the intrinsic sobriety of their technique and, without a doubt, by virtue of the ascetic character of draftsmen themselves—introduce an economy that is denser, quasi iconic, generally stimulating, but also at times complacent. We are far from the sacred taboos of past eras. Just as it is interesting to cut, it is also flagrant, entertaining. . . . And since political life is full of massacres of all types, it is necessary to unite the historical or contemporary subjects with this manner of seeing settled horror, increasingly conformist, pretentious, theatrical, mummified. In 1809, Vivant Denon, general director of the Napoleonic museums, orders Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson (b Montargis, 1767/d Paris, 1824) to produce a work to glorify the crushing defeat of the revolt of Cairo. The artist found nothing better suited to immortalize the national army’s heroism than to dangle, on the sullen Egyptians’ swords, the heads . . . of the brave French soldiers, disguised as Italian Christs for the moment of their decapitation (Study for the Revolt of Cairo, c. 1810, Musée de l’Avallonnais, Avallon). Henri Regnault’s (b Paris, 1843/d Buzenval, 1871) Standing Moor, Arms Raised (c. 1870, Musée du Louvre, Paris) represents the insolence of the executioner who will reappear in Execution Without Trial under the Moorish Kings of Granada (1870, Musée d’Orsay, Paris): the drawing represents this feature more incisively than it would come to be, gesticulating, in the painting. The word game betrays the same insolence: the standing Moor [le Maure debout], the upright death [mort debout], of

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the end/extremity [de-bout], two ends/extremities [deux bouts]. . . . Mallarmé should have broken a melancholic and complicit smile in light of the drawing of his friend the painter, who, like him, should have been able to write that “the destruction was his [sic: my] Beatrice.”27 Did not Regnault confide in him in the following letter: “I don’t know if it is due to the in-depth study of art, this language so rich and infinite, but I have an aversion to the everyday language of ordinary people [. . .] I am, I believe, in a period of great impotence. You have without a doubt gone through this as well.”28 Shortly after this, he was hit by an enemy bullet, January 19, 1871. Mallarmé seems to think that death alone, be it even of a dear friend, brings us closer to that exaltation which makes possible the eternal Work: “I am not truly sad to think that Henri [Regnault] sacrificed himself for France, and the possibility that it would be no longer. His death was purer. There would come to be more Eternity than History in this unique tragedy.”29 Artists’ depression finds itself confirmed by an epoch of war and violent social conflicts, but does it reveal the end of this apocalyptic era or, on the contrary, does it reinforce it? Did not Regnault go so far as to write that “decoration is the true goal of painting?” Decollation—the decoration of an irreparable crisis? In reality, decollation has difficulty in detaching that which is attached [decoller], so the spectacle comes to satiate instead. All of the ancient gods are, moreover, completely unknown to you. Their implausible adventures are over your head. You have enough to consider in your own dreams and nightmares, many about yourself, about the present. Fine! I suppose that, for Solario, Allori, Dürer, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, and the others, their severed heads were already nothing more than “inscriptions” and “images” [ figures]. And that the artists projected their moral sentiments onto them, that they carved into them their own slashes, cuts, castrations, and wounds of all forms to acquire, in the in-between of figuration, a little bit of meaning, some distance, an appearance, some sort of liberty. You see, a drawing of a severed head is detached from its myth and model. Where is the blood? Not a scarlet trace, not the slightest flow, not even a spurt. The lines, curved or angular, smooth or rough, create a shadow, isolating [libèrent] a void: you can envision the tormented suffering here, assuaged there. But the carnage is actually absorbed in the blackness of the sketch [du trait], which examines [traite] violence economically, an economic economy, by which I mean iconic. Without exaggerating or being cruel, you are at a distance, protected from cannibals, terrorists. Frankly, if there is an image, it is projected and projects. This Saint John the Baptist, is he of the time of Herod, of the Renaissance or of your dream from yesterday? Moreover, is Saint John, or Solario himself, as he would like to see himself on his deathbed, serene, almost happy, in this vision?30 This vision of his works? Of those that he did not make? Of the Baptist himself? Of that which the Precursor proclaims? Of that which not even one proclamation can ever proclaim—the indeterminable duration, the timeless? Of the wounds from which he suffered, that he inflicted on himself, and that he seized on one last time in the drawing of Saint John the Baptist’s severed head?

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You too are happy, thank God, you have never been wounded, no one has ever cut off your head. Clearly. You are like me: a human being that speaks, more or less without an end or audience, who understands sorrow, who is rarely in agreement, fearing the worst, moving forward, recoiling, groping. When you fall asleep, at times with difficulty, you barricade yourself in complete blackness. Dreamless, the old Freud cannot help us. In flashes, your small mistakes, the grave traumas of that day return to you as though in a movie trailer, in blood red or in black and white. You take revenge on your employer, your parents, your partner, your children; you cut them in any way you can, you are afraid of them, you laugh at them, you cannot go on any longer. No? No, you are a woman, a female stranger, a male stranger, you are ill, handicapped, insane. No, a star, an exceptional being, or perhaps the opposite: a mortal being, just like everyone else? No one sees you as you are, we benefit from your difference to settle accounts, your own or those of others; we permit ourselves with you that which we never permitted with others, male or female, but you let it be, otherwise it is too complicated: perhaps it is nothing but a deferred part [partie remise], you are going to take your revenge, invert the situation, immersing yourself, for example, in a detective thriller, in dreams, in speaking with your psychoanalyst, in strolling through this exposition.31 It is prohibited to kill, says the God of the Bible, but this moral law does not become possible except on the condition of the recognition that the cut [la coupure] is structurally necessary: some prefer to say that it32 is the work of God. It is clearly God who, at the beginning, did nothing besides separate: Bereshit33: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”34 The separation of sky and earth, of man and woman, of body and soul, unconscious/preconscious/conscious. . . . At once formed, interiorized, the cut can be called a prohibition, that which is imposed to be transgressed: no one wants it, the body revolts against the spirit and the spirit against the body, man against woman or woman against man, et cetera. I contemplate it, this sacred slash [entaille], I am afraid of it or I playfully enjoy it, I submit myself to its terror or I defy it. But if I decide to ignore it, it will overtake me, from within or without; my organs will begin to bleed; I am sick; my actions are toward death;35 I feel persecuted.36 I know that you no longer read, but you watch television and the savage massacres committed by the ayatollahs and other Pol Pots, the barbarians in Rwanda or Algeria. It is not absent here, especially today. At home, it is the issue of survival, of anachronisms, of the return of the repressed, of flares all too good for the suburbs [les banlieues] that are classified as explosive, and the pathology of the police blotter and accident reports.37 You see things for what they are: the fear of death is not necessarily a fear of murder. I follow you, even there. When I imagine a betrayal, such as the disloyalty of a confidante, a lover’s infidelity, a child’s illness, that I experience as though they were acts of mortal violence, as if each time my head has been cut off, this is not the nothingness that accompanies me more or less in the long run. No, I cry out

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against the evil that is inflicted on me by another. Death defeats me, it nullifies me. Violence, itself, is a possession: the hold that an active pleasure has on a victimized object, it depends on my passive pleasure. If I refuse to be a victim, I begin by revealing the destruction of which I am the object, and I take the liberty to say it. You have made the choice to be minimalist, to say as little as possible about it? One day you will return inevitably to the most severe pain. You will choose paroxysms, you will select images of those with their throats slit who are your predecessors, you will represent as victims those who have sensed your intentions. You reverse the roles, you will be a victim no longer, you will accuse, you will hope to wound and, why not, to kill when it is your turn to do so. Could sadomasochism be the secret of the unconscious? Freud is not far from this very conclusion when he assigns a logic of drives [une logique pulsionnelle] to the unconscious and when he describes these drives as reversible: active/passive, Eros/Thanatos. And then Proust! I have not spoken of the Baron de Charlus who loved to be whipped in the brothel. One need only look closely at one of the descriptions of the so-called charming Proustian women to see what is ultimately there in those dead heads, the heads of Medusa. Miss Sacripant holding a large, round hat on her knee, a surprising simulacrum, doubling her own recently coiffed head that she could thus hold in her hand, like a severed head, what an idea! And Albertine, whose hair is a living beast hollowed out by valleys, hemmed in by heart-shaped curls, bristling gorgonian locks, those of “moonlit trees, lank and pale,” and who, prefiguring her approaching death in her sleep, is displayed in her bed as a decapitated corpse: “It was as though [. . .] the head alone was emerging from the tomb [. . .]. This head had been surprised by sleep almost upside down, the hair disheveled.”38 Even Proust, like so many others, was an expert in sadomasochism. I care for my musée imaginaire, and I invite you to look upward to contemplate the looped projections. They juxtapose the mosaics in San Marco in Venice that depict the beheading of Saint John the Baptist (anonymous, Beheading of Saint John the Evangelist, cir. 12th cen., Basilica di San Marco, Venice) and two great artists: the irascible Caravaggio (Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, b Milan or Caravaggio, 1571/d Porto Ercola, 1610) and the tenacious Artemisia Gentileschi. The nomadic painter, lover of severed heads, denied himself neither Judith nor Saint John nor Isaac. I prefer the macabre humor of his David and Goliath (1609–1610, Galleria Borghese, Rome). Robust, sculpted, the young David with his golden skin gives the sideways glance of a young Adonis, whereas the unstable “head” [le chef branlant]39 of the sinister giant, entrusted to the future king’s distracted hands, displays in all its simplicity the characteristics of the artist himself: a criminal face borrowed for the moment from the accessory storehouse of the commedia dell’arte. The king does not look at the severed head, no one looks at a severed head, not even the amateur art viewers, the voyeurs like you and me. Do you believe that there would be something there to see? David makes you see that there is not. Decollation, which is frequently represented, signs on the margin of

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the terminus of the visible. It is the end of the show, ladies and gentlemen, move on! There is nothing left to see! Or rather there is nothing except that which is to be seen, better, to be heard. Now open your ears, if they are not too sensitive. The depths of horror that cannot be seen; that are to be heard, perhaps. Return the palettes, and to good hearing, good-bye! Unless this sadomasochistic intimacy, relentlessly profane and Caravagesque, may be the last modern temple? One that endures in the fetish sex shops, the raves and other locales, on which to meditate after an eyeful. Artemisia, the most famous woman painter whose masterpiece is a decollation ( Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1611–12, Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples), is not far from thinking this! There was not a single feminist of the “Belle Epoque” of the seventies who did not scrutinize the details of the carnage before applauding Artemisia’s talents and Judith’s feat. The story begins with a scandal that was, it appears, the rape of Artemisia by a painter in her father’s atelier: one named Tassi who, denounced too late by the victim’s father, was imprisoned until the lovers reconciled, quite mysteriously, just as the trial was picking up steam. The problematic affair40 of which it was a part: master and disciple, father and daughter, violator and violated, who violates who? Artemisia, was she a whore, a victim/a plaything [jouet] or a genius? All of these at the same time? Does it matter? What matters is that she painted like no other woman that came before or after her, and that she painted not just anything: she painted a violated man beautifully and, even better, beheaded by her own hand. Brilliant, Artemisia! Let’s look at the scene: two women pounce on the sleeping figure of the Assyrian general. The servant with her bored expression and a fierce Judith, floating in her brocade dress. A rich, crimson velvet envelops the man’s splayed thighs, in contrast to the disordered snarl of their six arms that, next to the head, perpetrate an interminable violation indeed. With all her weight, the servant immobilizes the victim, while a violent movement carries Judith to the right-hand margin of the painting: with her right hand, the sovereign plunges a sword into the offered throat, with her left hand she renders the male head [la tête male] powerless on the bed. Not a trace of horror on the murderess’ face. Only her body’s rigid reserve, moving away from the spurting stream of blood, reveals some disgust. Her face, on the other hand, reflects the concentration of a mathematician, biologist, or surgeon who, in the act, already savors her victory. That of absolute knowledge? Of the people of Israel? Of woman over man? Artemisia’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1630s, Royal Collection, Windsor) depicts a full-bodied woman who turns her face away from the viewer and discreetly shows herself in three-quarter view: she imposes on the focal point of our gaze only a robust right arm, its hand forcefully armed with a paintbrush. More powerful than Judith’s arm as it holds the knife, this protodwarf ’s short and muscular arm reveals the complete absence of narcissism, a spirit completely transformed into work. Artemisia’s head is in her hand, she is nothing more than the source of her arm, she moves toward the painting that we do not see, the painting is itself a decollation.41

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Did you believe that you knew these images? Salome and John the Baptist? This Caravaggio? This Artemisia? Did you imagine that they formed our ancestors’ cinemascope, a phantasmagoria that marks, the weightiness of typographic impressions? Look at them again, at the economy of drawing that you learned to read while observing the graphic works collected here. The spectacle erases itself, bringing back pain’s gash, the stroke [le trait].42

Notes [Trans.] The word “décollation,” which means to remove a person’s head and derives from the Latin “decollatio,” is related to the French verb “décoller” (1368) and the noun “décollement” (1635). While décollation refers specifically to the removal of the head, décollement, or the action of detaching, refers to the separation of an organ from those anatomical regions to which it is normally attached. (See “Décollation,” Le Petit Robert: Dictionnaire Alphabétique and Analogique de La Langue Française [Paris: Société Du Nouveau Littré, 1971]). This term is also related to “décolleté,” which refers to clothing that is low-cut and to the area from (although often including) the base of the neck to (but not including) the breasts, and “décollage,” which refers both to an airplane’s takeoff and to the simple act of unsticking. The ambiguity of the double meaning of décollation as “beheading” and “detachment” is clearly useful for Kristeva’s claim that decapitation is at once both an act of vengenance for the oppressed, particularly women, and a placeholder for castration. This essay comprises one chapter of an exhibition catalog entitled Visions capitales authored by Kristeva as a companion to an exhibition that she curated at the Musée du Louvre. The exhibition was part of the Carte Blanche series, in which the Department of Prints and Drawings invites numerous famous intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers to curate exhibitions that sought to bring contemporary philosophical and literary perspectives to bear on older forms of artistic expression. This series involves inviting guests to curate exhibitions for which they have “carte blanche” with regard to the theme, works chosen, and so on. The exhibition took place in the Hall Napoléon, April 27–July 27, 1998. 1. [Trans.] “Jean-Baptiste, préfigurateur par excellence, prête sa figure à la figuration de l’invisible par excellence: le passage.” In the original, you can see that Kristeva intends a play on words between “préfigurateur,” “figure,” and “figuration,” all of which contain the root “figure,” which can be translated as “image,” “face,” “bust,” “visage,” and “illustration,” among others. 2. Cf. P.-H Stahl, Histoire de la decapitation (Paris: PUF, 1986). 3. [Trans.] Given the nature of this publication, the images included in the original publication of this chapter in Visions capitales are not included in this translation. To compensate for this omission, I have included the relevant art

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historical information for the images included in the chapter as well as other relevant information on the work (e.g., date, artists’ biographical information, etc.) not included in the original. All parenthetical art historical information should be considered to be my addition. 4. Cf. [The chapter in Visions capitales entitled] “Le visage et l’expérience des limites,” p. 147 (the looped video #2 [included in the exhibition]) and La Lune est belle [in Max Ernst, The Hundred-Headless Woman, trans. Dorothea Tanning (New York: Braziller, 1981)]. 5. Cf. I Samuel XVI, XVII, etc.; II Samuel V, VI, VII, etc. 6. I Samuel XVI, 50–52 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, new rev. std. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]). 7. [Trans.] “La femme de tête” can also signify an intellectual woman or sexually promiscuous woman. 8. Judith I, 1 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocryphal/ Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, new rev. std. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]). 9. [Trans.] Judith VIII, 7 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, new rev. std. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]). 10. [Trans.] In the French translation cited by Kristeva, Judith asks god to give her the words of a seductress or seductive words: “Donne-moi un langage séducteur.” 11. Judith IX, 12–13 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocryphal/ Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, new rev. std. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]). 12. Judith XIII, 2 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocryphal/ Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, new rev. std. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]). 13. Judith XIII, 6–10 (The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocryphal/ Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy, new rev. std. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]). 14. Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863) writes “Judith” in 1839. The play would be subsequently parodied by Nestroy [ Johann Nestroy, 1801–1862] under the title of “Judith and Holofernes.” 15. Sigmund Freud, “ The Taboo of Virginity (Contributions to the Psychology of Love III [1918 (1917)],” 208, trans. Angela Richards, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XI (1910): Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Leonardo da Vinci, and Other Works, ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud and assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1957); 191-208. 16. [Trans.] Kristeva uses a question mark here to highlight that this particular work has only recently been attributed to Cavallino (cf. Jan Simane’s

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exposition catalog Neapolitanische Barockzeichnungen in der graphischen Sammlung des Hessischen Landesmuseums Darmstadt [Darmstadt: Hessisches Museum, 1994]) and was originally attributed to Massimo Stanzione (b ?Orta di Atella, ?1585/d ?Naples, ?1656). 17. According to certain specialists, this would have been Correggio’s, as well as Italian painting’s, first nighttime painting where one can see Mantegna’s strong influence. 18. Judges XVI, 18–21 (The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible with Apocrypha, ed. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]). 19. Judges XVI, 30 (The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible with Apocrypha, ed. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]). 20. [Trans.] In French, this work is entitled Delilah’s Triumph. 21. II Kings IX, 22 (The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible with Apocrypha, ed. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]). 22. II Kings IX, 30–35 (The Oxford Study Bible: Revised English Bible with Apocrypha ed. M. Jack Suggs, Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, and James R. Mueller [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992]). 23. [Trans.] Kristeva cites an image that depicts a skull considered to be representative of an important group of skulls from the Levantine Neolithic. They are unique insofar as their features were modeled or recreated with plaster prior to burial, a practice uncommon at the time. Although the skulls contained in the collection of the National Museum in Damascus (i.e., the one in the image that Kristeva cites) are part of the “Tell Ramad” skulls found in Tell Ramad, Syria, the skulls to which Kristeva refers in her description in the chapter entitled “Le crane: culte et art” in Visions capitales are, apparently, part of the group of skulls found in Jericho. The latter group is uniquely defined by the shells used in place of the eyes, while the eyes of the skulls from Tell Ramad were modeled with grayish plaster. An exemplar of the group of skulls that Kristeva describes in this chapter can be found at the British Museum, London (accession number AF127414) (Denise Schmant-Besserat, “The Modeled Skull,” in ‘Ain Ghazal, Excavation Reports, Vol. I: Symbols at ‘Ain Ghazal ed. Denise Schmant-Besserat and published under the direction of Gary O. Rollefson and Zeidan Kafafi [Berlin: Ex Oriente, Freie Universität, forthcoming]. Middle East Network Information Center, University of Texas–Austin. ). Apparently, the National Museum in Damascus does not own any of the skulls found in Jericho. To this end, it is clear that although the image included in the original publication of Visions capitales displays a skull owned by the National Museum in Damascus whose eyes were modeled with gray plaster, Kristeva intends the reader to consider the group of skulls found in Jericho (i.e., those for which shells were used to recreate the eyes).

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24. Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXIII (1937–1939), trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Hogath Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1991 [1964]). It is necessary to understand by [the term] “feminine” both the woman’s castration fantasy and its ancient osmosis of maternal container/contents [le contenant maternal] to which Freud compares the “Minoan-Mycenaean civilization” previous to the notoriety of classical Greece. Cf. also Sigmund Freud, “Female Sexuality,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXI (1927–1931), trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Hogath Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1991 [1961]). 25. Cf. “Figura” [in Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. unknown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1938])] and [the chapter entitled] “Prophétie en acte,” pp. 71-80 [in Visions capitales]. 26. [Trans.] In French, the word “genre” can mean both “genre” in the sense of a group of objects, artistic pieces, and the like, that share a characteristic in common as well as “gender” in the sense of the gender of a noun. 27. [Trans.] Kristeva cites a statement made by Mallarmé in a letter to Eugène Lefébure in which he writes, “La destruction fut ma Béatrice” (emphasis added) (see Stéphane Mallarmé: Correspondance (1862–1871), ed. Henri Mendor [Paris: Gallimard, 1959]; 246). 28. Cf. Henri Cazalis, Henri Regnault, Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre, ed. Alphone Lemerre (Paris: J. Claye, 1872), pp. 8–9. [Trans. This quotation is my translation.] 29. Cf. Mallarmé, letter to Cazalis on April 23, 1871 (see Stéphane Mallarmé: Correspondance (1862–1871), ed. Henri Mendor [Paris: Gallimard, 1959], 246). [Trans. This quotation is my translation.] 30. [Trans.] Kristeva is referring here to Andrea Solario’s (b Milan c. 1465/d before 8 Aug 1524) Head of Saint John the Baptist (1507, Musée du Louvre, Paris). 31. [Trans.] Cf. second unnumbered paragraph at beginning of this Notes section. 32. [Trans.] “It” refers to “la coupure” and is thus represented as “elle” or “she.” 33. [Trans.] In Hebrew, this term means “in the beginning.” Kristeva renders the term as “Berechit,” as is common in Francophone writings (see “Bereshit,” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, ed. John Bowker [Oxford University Press, 2000]. Oxford Reference Online, Oxford University Press.) 34. Genesis I, 1 (The Westminster Study Edition of The Holy Bible, ed. W. L. Jenkins [Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1948]). 35. [Trans.] “[M]es actes sont mis à mort.” 36. [Trans.] This is the first point in the essay that Kristeva highlights that the first-person voice she has adopted is neither a gendered voice nor her own.

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She signals this fact by including both the masculine and the feminine form of the adjective “persecuted,” which she writes as follows: “persécuté(e).” 37. [Trans.] Kristeva uses the term “faits divers,” which, according to the Dictionnaire de l’Acadamie Française, pertains specifically to the journalistic practice of grouping and describing the day’s incidents, including accidents, crimes, and so on (see “Faits divers,” Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, tome 1, 9th ed [Paris: Éditions Fayard, 1994], <www.academie-française.fr/dictionnaire>). The only equivalent term in English is “police blotter,” which, although it does not often cover accidents, does group the crimes of the day in a similarly pathological way to the faits divers. 38. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. V: The Captive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (London: Folio Society, 1992), 60, 337. Cf. R. Coudert, Du feminine dans “A la recherche du temps perdu” de Marcel Proust, p. 180 and ff., 425 ([published] doctoral dissertation, University of Paris VII-Denis-Diderot, 1997, Lille: Atelier national de reproduction des thèses de Lille, 2004). 39. [Trans.] I have inserted quotation marks around “head” to underscore Kristeva’s use of the word “chef ” to describe Goliath’s head, thereby playing on the figurative use of the term “head” (e.g., the head of state, the head of a company) and the metaphorical sense of the term “director” or “boss” when used to describe a person’s head as the source of her rational capabilities and thus the “director” of her will. 40. [Trans.] Lest we are tempted to interpret Kristeva’s use of “affair” to signify only those of the amorous sort, it is important to remember that, in French, l’affaire can also mean “trial, object of a judicial debate” (my translation) (“Affaire,” Le Robert Micro: dictionnaire d’apprentissage de la langue française [Paris: Dictionnaries Le Robert, 1998]). 41. Cf. Mieke Bal, “Headhunting: Judith on the Cutting Edge of Knowledge,” in A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith and Susanna: The Feminine Companion to the Bible, 7, ed. Athalya Brenner (1995), 253–285. 42. [Trans.] “Le spectacle s’efface, reviennent l’entaille de la douleur, le trait.”

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PART II THE VIOLENCE OF THE SPECTACLE



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3 Meaning against Death

 Kelly Oliver

In her latest book, Hate and Forgiveness, Julia Kristeva suggests that what she calls “the drama of Abu Ghraib tragically reveals that our civilization not only fails to produce [an] integration of the symbolic Law in the deep strata of [the psyche] that governs sexual pleasure, but that maybe, it [also] aggravates the disintegration of Law and desire” (2005a, 346). She says that it is not the army or such and such administration that has failed, but rather it is the integration of the symbolic Law in the psychic apparatus that has failed. This failure is not the result of a lapse in law or the weakening of prohibitions; on the contrary, it is a result of the pervasiveness of surveillance and punitive technologies in all aspects of life. The result is hatred without forgiveness. Rather than fore-give meaning to make affects intelligible and thereby livable, symbolic Law is reduced to regulation and management techniques that police without giving form to desire. Kristeva claims that the so-called black sheep of Abu Ghraib, the few bad apples, are not exceptional but “average inhabitants of the globalized planet of humanoids trained” by reality shows and the Internet (346). This “exploded rush toward disinhibitied satisfaction” operates as the counterpoint to the Puritan code, that she identifies with a “ferocious repression,” which robotizes the functions of the new world order. This ferocious repression is manifest in policing technologies and professional hyperproductivity, both of which emphasize efficiency in an economy of calculable risks and profits over meaning. On the other side of law become the science of management are ever more violent forms of entertainment: spectacles, scandals, and sexcapades. It is the cleavage between law and desire, between word and affect, between the symbolic and the body, that according to Kristeva can produce teenage torturers who abuse prisoners seemingly in all innocence—as they claim at their trials—“just for fun.” 49

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Kristeva diagnoses what she calls this new “malady of civilization” as a failure to integrate the symbolic Law into the psychic apparatus (2005, 347; all translations from La haine et le pardon are my own). Ten years ago, in New Maladies of the Soul, she described these “maladies of the soul” as failures of representation caused by a split between word and affect (meaning and being) which is intensified by media culture with its saturation of images (2002, 207, 443–444). The world of symbols has become disconnected from our affective or psychic lives; the result is an inability to represent (and thereby live) our emotional lives outside of the economy of spectacle. Expressions of affect and emotion take the form of violent images or outrageous confessions of sexual exploits. Our psychic lives are overrun with images of sex and violence on television, at the movies, or on the Internet, while the idealized romance and everyday lives of movie stars become our prosthetic fantasies. Imagination, creativity, and sublimation are what are at stake in the colonization of our fantasy lives with media images. Indeed, according to Kristeva, the possibility of creativity, imagination, and representation are impeded by the standardized expressions of mass media. She predicts if drugs do not take over your life, your wounds are “healed” with images, and before you can speak about your states of the soul, you drown them in the world of mass media. The image has an extraordinary power to harness your anxieties and desires, to take on their intensity and to suspend their meaning. It works by itself. As a result, the psychic life of modern individuals wavers between somatic symptoms (getting sick and going to the hospital) and the visual depiction of their desires (daydreaming in front of the TV). In such a situation, psychic life is blocked, inhibited, and destroyed. (2002, 207) Media images become substitute selves, substitute affects, that impede rather than facilitate the transfer of bodily drives and affects into signification. Images, seemingly transparent, substitute for questioning and interpreting the meaning of the body and therefore of life. The psyche or soul itself hangs in the balance. In her earliest work, Kristeva makes the presentation of the means of production of meaning and value the primary criteria for what she calls the “revolution in poetic language.” The transformative possibilities of revolutionary language, or what in her later work she calls “intimate revolt” depends on making questioning-interpreting and the process of questioning-interpreting explicit. Ultimately, what must be called into question and constantly reassessed are the unconscious forces that lay behind our actions, particularly our pleasure in violence. Through representation accompanied by critical hermeneutics, we can give meaning to our violent impulses that may help us avoid acting on them. In Kristeva’s words, “insofar as jouissance is thought/written/represented, it traverses evil,

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and thereby it is perhaps the most profound manner of avoiding the radical evil that would be the stopping of representation and questioning” (2002, 443). When continued questioning is the heart of representation, it is a form of translation through which meaning is given to being as the gift that bestows humanity. But this constant translation requires time and energy, scare commodities in today’s global economy, where questioning is considered inefficient, a poor use of time; and interpretation is a waste of resources unless it results in profits recognized by the value hierarchies of global capitalism. As Kristeva says “the conditions of modern lives—with the primacy of technology, image, speed, and so forth, inducing stress and depression—have a tendency to reduce psychical space and to abolish the faculty of representation. Psychical curiosity yields before the exigencies of so-called efficiency” (2002, 444). Because it takes time and energy and its profits are not immediately grasped, this type of curiosity is not marketable in the new world order. Within this order, meaning becomes a commodity like any other that is valuable only if it can be marketed, distributed, and sold at a profit. The fungibility of meaning, however, places it within an economy of exchange that levels its values for life, which Kristeva calls the “par-don of interpretation,” which cannot be calculated. For within the economy of exchange, substitution can never move beyond fetishism; there the dynamic and poetic operations of metaphorical substitution are reduced to products or things. Consumer culture proliferates the empty desire for products that create their own needs and only ever lead to partial, incomplete, and therefore short-lived satisfactions. The rich are idolized for their wealth and property, individuals with things. Individuals themselves become fungible. And monetary value stands in for ethical value. But these objects that we crave cannot touch the more profound longing for meaningful lives that comes not through a hunger for consumer goods but rather through a passion for life. Unlike hunger, passion cannot be temporarily satisfied. Unlike the thirst for wealth and things, passion has no object; it is not defined in terms of possession and calculations. Passion gives more energy than it takes, in excess of calculations and exchange value. Passion for life is what we risk losing when we reduce freedom to the free market and peace to a leveling universalism that subjects the planet to our norms. Kristeva insists that the new maladies of the soul are not the result of a breakdown or abolition of prohibition but rather the disintegration of prohibition. Following Lacan, she describes the two sides of the Law as prohibition on the one side and the command to enjoy on the other. With violent prohibition comes violent transgression. Kristeva extends (and limits) this Lacanian insight in relation to the culture of the spectacle in which extreme forms of both prohibition and promiscuity are marketable. Abu Ghraib is a symptom of what she calls this “new malady of civilization” insofar as violent sadomasochistic abuses are performed and even photographed in all innocence as “just having fun.” Desire takes a detour through a “manic jouissance that nourishes itself on the sexual victimization of others” (2005a, 348).

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Regression or “Just Having Fun” It is as if the subject occupies an abyss between law and desire and therefore takes refuge from violent repression through regression. Rather than integrate prohibitions and inhibit violent drive force, these “subjects” cordon off prohibitions and keep them separate from their sexual and emotional lives where they retreat into polymorphous perversion without guilt. They/we retreat to a presubjective and preobjective psychic dynamic that Kristeva associates with abjection; they play with and eroticize the in-between, the ambiguous, the lack of boundaries to protect themselves from falling into abjection. It is not exactly that these “innocent” subjects don’t “know the difference between right and wrong,” but that by eroticizing the abject, they “purify” it and thereby purify themselves. Their perverse desire for abjection becomes a defense against contamination; and fear of contamination—phobia—motivates their perversion. So, rather than integrate the symbolic Law with its prohibitions and command for pleasure, they live in-between in the space of the cleavage between these two aspects of the law. This cleavage or split renders the symbolic Law ineffective in setting up symbolic substitutes for violent drives. Strong prohibition leads to phobia, which in turn leads to perversion as a protection against that which is most feared because it is most prohibited. Phobia of others is negotiated by eroticizing what is seen as their abjection and making them victims of sexual abuse. The disintegration of the symbolic Law leaves us with “innocent” parties who, within the psychic logic of perversion, escape guilt by regressing to a time before guilt, a time before proper subjects who take proper objects, which is to say a time before responsibility. These “innocent” subjects dwell, even wallow, in abjection with the pervert’s guiltless glee. They become the cheerleaders of abjection for whom sadomasochistic violence toward themselves and others becomes the prerequisite for a good party. Think of the 2005 Hollywood blockbuster movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith—which generated more off-screen heat in the tabloids than on. There, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play a couple, John and Jane Smith, whose marriage has lost its spark after only “five or six” years and who rekindle their passion by beating, shooting, and cutting each other. The film begins with the couple in therapy reluctant to answer questions about their lackluster marriage, especially about their sex life. In the course of the film we learn that unbeknownst to each other, both are accomplished assassins working for competing companies. They sleepwalk through their marriage and everyday lives together like automatons; while their violent killing sprees are executed as manic moments in their otherwise empty lives. The few words they exchange are passionless—until they receive orders from their respective companies to kill each other. Unlike the failed couples therapy mockingly shown at the beginning and end of the film, their brutality toward each other enflames their desires and reinitiates sex and conversation, both of which revolve around violence. Neither loses sleep over their killing sprees; Jane

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brags that she has lost feeling in three of her fingers and it seems that, outside of their violent mania, neither of them feel much of anything, even for each other. They have become killing machines who abuse others as automatically as they brush their teeth or eat dinner. Their violence is so mechanical that when ordered they turn it on each other without a second thought. And it is their automatic violence that apparently saves them from their robotic marriage. Watching this glorification of sadomasochism and sexual violence, I was reminded of Abu Ghraib, where sexual torture by young military personnel was used to enhance their sex lives: for example, one soldier gave another pictures of prisoners forced to simulate sex acts as a birthday present; and pictures of sex between soldiers were interspersed with the torture photographs. The idea that abusing others is a form of sexual arousal seems to move easily between the everyday fare of sexual violence and the violent sex of Hollywood films and Internet porn and the shocking photographs from Abu Ghraib. Why is one shocking and the other banal? Is it simply that one is real and the other is fantasy? Is it because, as Freud says, the uncanny effect of the real is more powerful than artifice? The relation between reality and fantasy is precisely the dangerous terrain of human habitation, filled as it is with hair-triggered land mines, images both virtual and real. We might diagnose these “abysmal individuals” as part of an abysmal culture in which regression is a defense against repression. If the “proper” or “socially acceptable” is circumscribed by repression of violent and aggressive impulses, then regression to an infantile state prior to that repression circumvents the gap between reality and pleasure set up by repression. In this way, the regressed subject does not have to wait for a substitute or delayed satisfaction à la the reality principle in the face of the pleasure principle. Rather, the regressed subject reverts to an unrestrained pleasure principle within his or her emotional life even while acknowledging a harsh disciplinary structure in other aspects of life. In this way, reality and pleasure are segregated and compartmentalized; and the more harsh the superego, the easier it is to give way to polymorphous perversity. Individuals and culture can simultaneously foster conservative mores, sexual promiscuity, and sadomasochistic violence. We can engage in the rhetoric of tolerance and global freedom while our military uses sex, loud music, and dogs as torture strategies as part of what is openly called the “occupation of Iraq.” A theory of regression may be useful in articulating the difference between perversion and sublimation, which in turn may help us think through the function and effect of the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib as opposed to other kinds of photographs or representations, including a film like Mr. & Mrs. Smith or works of art that represent violence. A theory of regression, however—like psychoanalytic theory in general—must be supplemented with some form of sociopolitical analysis of the function of the rhetoric of innocence and ignorance and their valorization within our culture, where we idolize Forrest Gump and demand that the complexities of life be described in shelf after shelf of

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manuals “for dummies.” We need to delve more deeply into our love of dumb and dumber than I can in this context; but for now let’s see what psychoanalysis has to tell us about regression. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud argues that small children are without “shame, disgust and morality” and therefore do not repress their “instincts of scopophilia, exhibitionism and cruelty,” which manifest themselves as “satisfaction in exposing their bodies,” “curiosity to see other people’s genitals,” “cruelty towards animals and playmates,” and make children “eager spectators of the processes of micturition and defaecation” (1989, 268–269). When repression of these instincts sets in, they must find alternative outlets for these urges in either sublimation or neurosis, which often manifests as somatic symptoms. There is an integral link between repression and sublimation that is breached in the regressive formation of perversion. Prohibitions that are recognized in one aspect of life are foreclosed from other aspects, particularly when it comes to sexual pleasure. As we have seen, Kristeva maintains that prohibitions or the symbolic paternal law is not integrated into psychic life; it exists but can be compartmentalized through the depressive mania of the regressed pervert. On the one side, the prohibition is strong but it is cut off from any affective significance; it is empty of any real threat insofar as the subject experiences the law as separated from his or her pleasures. The law appears as mechanical regulation, management and surveillance designed to maximize efficiency and control but without touching the humanity of meaningful relations with self or others. The law has become nothing more than the rules of engagement manipulated to establish control over others rather than social relations with them. The military, with its chain of command, disciplinary regimens, and discourse of containment, harshly and mechanically administered, fuels the containment of discipline itself against the regressive pleasure of infantile perversion. Rather than give meaning to the body by translating semiotic bodily drive force into language, rather than give form to polymorphous desires and thereby discharge them into the safety net of the symbolic, which is a prerequisite for relations with ourselves and others, law as mere rules of engagement and containment force the disintegration of bodily pleasure and thereby prevents meaningful relationships.

Hate as a Defense against Vulnerability In Hate and Forgiveness, Kristeva raises the question “how to inscribe in the conception of the human itself—and, consequently in philosophy and political practice—the constitutive part played by destructivity, vulnerability, disequilibrium which are integral to the identity of the human species and the singularity of the speaking subject?” (2005a, 115). She has dealt with destructivity throughout her work, especially in Powers of Horror in which she describes the negotiation with the abject as a stage in the process of becoming a subject by excluding that which

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threatens the borders of proper identity. Starting with her earliest work, she insists on the role of negativity in psychic life. And, in Revolution in Poetic Language, she calls negativity the fourth term of the dialectic; negativity is the driving force of psychic life. In Intimate Revolt, she maintains that it is questioning that transforms negativity into something other than merely negation or negation of negation; through endless questioning, negativity is transformed from a destructive or merely discriminatory force that separates self and other, inside and outside, and becomes the positive force of creativity and the nourishing of psychic space (2002, 226). The negativity of drive force becomes the positive force of signification through repetition and response from the other; it becomes the sublimation of drive force into language. In regression, however, not yet even a discriminatory force, negativity remains a destructive force. Successfully negotiating and renegotiating abjection sets up the precarious border between self and other; but when the “subject” remains stuck at the level of abjection, confusion between self and other can be both threatening to the extreme of phobia and arousing to the extreme of perversion. It is the polymorphous perversion of this regressed state that can lead to sexual pleasure in violating others. Eroticizing the abject becomes a form of purification that protects the abysmal subject from “contamination” from its phobic object/other. In Powers of Horror it is the uncanny effect of the other who becomes the catalyst for the return of repressed otherness—the abject—in the self that provokes hatred and loathing, which in turn either can lead to acting out against others or to sublimating the experience of uncanny otherness through representation. In La haine et le pardon, the uncanny effect of the other is specifically associated with vulnerability. Kristeva claims that along with liberty, equality, and fraternity, vulnerability is a fourth term that we inherit from Enlightenment humanism (2005a, 115). Speaking of the handicapped, and extending her analysis to racism, classism, and religious persecution, Kristeva once again reminds us of the narcissistic wound that constitutes humanity as a scar at the suture of being and meaning. It is our position in-between that makes us vulnerable, and also free. Precisely that which makes us human and opens up a world of meaning, makes us vulnerable. For as Kristeva says, psychic life is an “infinite quest for meaning, a bios transversal of zoë, a biography with and for others” (2005a, 115). The uncanny encounter with another, then, puts us face to face with our own vulnerability “with and for others.” And, it is the fear and denial of our own vulnerability that causes us to hate and exploit the vulnerability of others. To repeat Kristeva’s question, how can we acknowledge that to be human is to be vulnerable? In other words, how can we accept our own vulnerability without violently projecting it onto others whom we oppress and torture or alternatively “civilized” and protected? For Kristeva these questions point to the need for psychoanalysis, or interpretation more generally: We integrate our own violent impulses into our psychic lives in productive ways by interpreting them. Kristeva maintains that “in this postmodern time of clashes of religions, which are times of war without

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end, psychoanalytic interpretation is useful in revealing the multifaceted destiny of hate which makes and unmakes the human species . . . that psychic life needs in order to continue to live” with its own hatred and loathing (2005a, 373). The idea is that by interpreting our hatred and loathing as a response to our own vulnerability, we gain the distance necessary to prevent ourselves from acting on them. We turn our fear and loathing into words so that we can live with them and with others. But interpretation operates as a counterbalance to real world violence only when it is also sublimatory, which is to say, when it effectively discharges drive energy into symbols—when it converts being into meaning and affect into representation. Moreover, this sublimatory interpretation should also be the source of a jouissance that takes us beyond the realm of finite sensuous pleasures and puts us in touch with the realm of infinite meaning or what Kristeva might call “psychic rebirth.” This joy in playing with words gives meaning to being as a type of “par-don” for violent drives, now expressed in words rather than in actions. This analytic jouissance sublimates the death drive by replacing the ecstasy of interpretation for the manic pursuit of satisfaction on the other side of depression, where pleasure gives way to joy. The distinction between pleasure and joy is central to separating perversion from sublimation. And walking the line between perversion and sublimation may allow us to begin to discern degrees of difference between the photographs from Abu Ghraib, the Hollywood film Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Goya’s Disasters of War series, Picasso’s Guernica, or Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, to name just a few examples. The guiding, perhaps intractable, question is, How do we distinguish between sublimatory or creative forms of representation and those that merely repeat or even perpetuate violence? Kristeva claims that artistic production can sublimate the death drive and thereby prevent killing; but how do we delineate differences between types of artistic production in relation to their sublimatory value. While Kristeva insists on the necessity of artistic creativity as a protection against death, she condemns media culture or the culture of the spectacle for flattening psychic space by closing down sublimation. Can television and other forms of media sublimate in the same way that high art can? Is Kristeva’s preference for high art and criticism of popular media merely elitism? At stake here is the effect and function of representations of violence that saturate media images and fuel the culture of the spectacle. In Visions capitales, the book that accompanied the Louvre exhibit on severed heads in the history of art curated by Kristeva in 1998, she repeatedly suggests that artistic representations of decapitation are sublimatory means of negotiating anxieties over castration and death, what following her latest work we could call “anxieties over vulnerability.” The threat of decapitation has long been connected with the threat of castration. And given various philosophies of the significance of the face, particularly that of Emmanuel Levinas, it is reasonable to think that in an important sense the face and the head are the most vul-

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nerable parts of the human body; or at least insofar as they are associated with language, thought and ethics, as well as kissing and looking, they signal what we take to be essential characteristics of humanity, including, perhaps especially, vulnerability in relation to others. In Visions capitales, Kristeva suggests that artists paint and sculpt severed heads to mitigate anxieties over vulnerability as an alternative to projecting and abjecting it onto others. Here and throughout her work, she argues that representations of violence can prevent real violence; echoing Lacan, she maintains that what is effaced in the imaginary and the symbolic risks returning at the level of the real. Analyzing images of beheadings from the French Revolution, she concludes that perhaps the figures of decapitation and severed heads can be seen as an intimate form of resistance to what she calls the “democracy” of the guillotine. She says “above all, if art is a transfiguration, it has political consequences” (1998, 110; all translations of Visions capitales are my own in consultation with a translation by Sarah Hansen). This sentiment could not be more relevant today as we witness gruesome beheadings in videotaped spectacles that could be diagnosed as a refusal to examine the role of fantasy in constructions of reality, where the inability to represent sacrifice leads to real sacrifice, and where reality itself has become a commodity. What is the difference between Caravaggio’s painting of beheading in David and Goliath and recent videotapes of beheadings in Iraq? This question itself may be shocking because the difference could not be more obvious: one is art while the other is making a spectacle of gruesome murder. But given psychoanalysis’ insistence on the role of fantasy in perceptions of reality, can the difference be simply that between artifice and reality? If artificial death abolishes the uncanny effect of real death, does this imply that the more realistic the representation the more uncanny it becomes? What about artists such as August Raffet or Gericault, whom Kristeva discusses, and who used real severed heads and accident victims as their models (cf. Kristeva 1998)? And what of the artifice involved in the ritualistic staging and recording of the beheadings in Iraq? What of the staging involved in using green hoods and stacking prisoners in a pyramid for the camera at Abu Ghraib or standing a hooded prisoner on a box, arms outstretched attached to wires, reminiscent of crucifixion? Where is the border between artifice and reality? Navigating that border is precisely what is threatened by the contemporary fascination with reality television and live Internet Webcams. Yes, Freud is right that the uncanny effect of the real is more powerful than artifice; but does the need for greater degrees of reality in violence and sexual victimization of others become perverse when representation becomes a form of acting out? Perhaps degrees of perversion can only be measured in terms of the suffering of its “objects”. Perhaps as reality itself becomes commodified and fetishized, we crave more extreme forms of bodily experience. Think of the prominence of masochistic practices popular with cutters who ritualistically cut themselves to feel something, or kids who play the hanging game to cut off their air supply. They seem to want something “more real.” In addition, surveillance technologies

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produced to serve regulatory and disciplinary power, as Foucault might say, also produce desires for more voyeuristic and exhibitionist sexual practices using cameras, video recorders, telephones, and the Internet. And military technologies designed to facilitate surveillance and containment are now used to disseminate images of “real live bodies in action” that cannot be contained. Reality is no longer something we live but something we crave.

The “F” Word In her discussions of freedom and peace in La haine et le pardon, Kristeva suggests more allusive “measures” of the balance between perversion and sublimation, delineations intended to prevent sadomasochistic violence that leads to suffering. She argues that global capitalism has appropriated one version of freedom from the Enlightenment and has mistakenly taken its legacy to be abstract universalism; following Kant, this prominent version of freedom is not negatively conceived as the absence of constraint but as the possibility of selfbeginning that opens the way for the enterprising individual and self-initiatives (2005b, 29). This is the freedom of the free market, which, Kristeva says, “culminates in the logic of globalization and of the unrestrained free-market. The Supreme Cause (God) and the Technical Cause (the Dollar) are its two coexisting variants which guarantee the functioning of our freedom within this logic of instrumentalism” (30). She acknowledges that this form of freedom is the foundation for human rights, the French notion of Liberty-EqualityFraternity, and the English Habeas Corpus (31). Yet, this notion of freedom as equation in which every individual is equal to every other leads to something like the free-market exchange of individuals in a calculus that offers only formal freedom and empty equality. Freedom becomes defined in terms of economies and markets; and governments liberate through occupation to open up new markets and free new consumers with little regard for cultural differences that might undermine the universalization of this fungible freedom. Technology becomes the great equalizer through which all individuals are reduced to this lowest common denominator; its brokers are paying lip service to respect for cultural differences even as they exchange some freedoms for others in the name of the “F” word: Freedom with a capital F. It is noteworthy that President George W. Bush introduced the phrase “women of cover”—an analog to women of color—in relation to the freedom to shop. In a speech before the State Department shortly after September 11, 2001, Bush told “stories of Christian and Jewish women alike helping women of cover, Arab-American women, go shop because they were afraid to leave their home” and in a news conference a week later he again invoked the religious unity of America epitomized in women getting together to shop: “In many cities when Christian and Jewish women learned that Muslim women, women of cover, were afraid of going out of their homes alone . . . they went shopping with them . . . an act that

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shows the world the true nature of America,” suggesting that the true nature of America is the freedom to shop for women of all faiths (Saffire 2001, 22). Perhaps it is telling that Bush’s 2004 inaugural address, which repeats the rhetoric of women’s freedom, appeared on CNN.com next to a Victoria’s Secret advertisement with a provocative photo of a bikini-clad model—with pursed lips looking seductively at the camera—that reads “Create your perfect bikini . . . suit yourself, any way you like.” As I argue elsewhere (Oliver 2007), freedom becomes women’s freedom, which becomes women’s sexual freedom, which becomes the commodification of women’s sexuality reduced to the right to choose any bikini. While Kristeva reminds us that “other civilizations have other visions of human freedom,” she is concerned with a second version of freedom that reemerges from the Western tradition as a counterbalance to universalized individualism: “this second kind of freedom is very different from the kind of calculating logic that leads to unbridled consumerism; it is a conception that is evident in the Speech-Being in the Presencing of the Self to the Other” (2005b, 30). In other words, this freedom comes through language, or more accurately meaning, from the Other now negotiated by a singular self. This singularity is at odds with individualism insofar as it cannot be reduced to a common denominator in the name of equality. Indeed, neither meaning nor singularity can be fixed within an economy of calculation; they are fluid processes that engender the products and individuals of the free market as leftovers whose cause-and-effect logic effaces the very processes through which they arise. Both meaning and singularity are imbued with unconscious dynamics that may be manipulated by the market but that always exceed it. This second kind of freedom is not concerned with maximizing relations through efficient technologies of marketing, management, and surveillance, but rather with meaningful relationships. Freedom as the quest for meaning is an ongoing project. Kristeva calls it an “aspiration . . . driven by a real concern for uniqueness and fragility of each and every human life, including those of the poor, the disabled, the retired, and those who rely on social benefits. It also requires special attention to sexual and ethnic differences, to men and women considered in their unique intimacy rather than as simple groups of consumers” (31). Acknowledging the link between freedom and vulnerability moves us further from conceiving of freedom as the absence of prohibition to conceiving of freedom as the absence of sacrifice. Freedom is not anything goes but everyone stays, not no-thing is excluded but no one is excluded. In Visions capitales, Kristeva suggests that artistic representation expresses a freedom that resides “not in the effacement of prohibitions, but in the renouncement of the chain/gear of sacrifices (l’engrenage des sacrifices),” which moves us beyond loss to “a joy that loses sacrificial complacency/indulgence itself (la complaisance sacrificielle elle-même)” (1998, 152). Transcending the sacrificial economy requires moving beyond identities based on the exclusion of others toward inclusion and interaction enabled by questioning and representing what it means to be an “individual,” an “American,” a “human,” and so on. This reversal of perversion with its fear and loathing of the

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other requires overcoming the economy of abjection through the processes of sublimation. Moving beyond the abjection and exclusion of others that results in phobic and perverse identities and relations, sublimation enabled by representation translates violent impulses into creative life force. Sublimated jouissance replaces violence toward self and others; representations of sacrifice and human vulnerability replace literal sacrifice, which is to say that sacrifice is itself sacrificed to creativity and this sacrifice of sacrifice is definitive of humanity.

“Amorous Disasters” Instead of engaging in rites of sacrifice that return sacrifice to an imaginary or symbolic realm, fundamentalists act out their violent fantasies in the real world, which, as Kristeva warns, leads the members of one religion to sacrifice the members of another, along with themselves (cf. 2002, 428). We continue to witness this sacrificial violence taken to the extreme with suicide bombers who sacrifice themselves to kill others. Kristeva claims that “the triumph of the culture of death, disguised behind an appeasement (une pacification) promised beyond, reaches its height in the figure of the kamikaze: the shahida” (2005a, 431). She suggests that the cleavage between zoë and bios is most violently realized in the destructive acts of women suicide bombers. She explains that women have been relegated to the realm of procreation or being (zoë) and been denied access to representation (bios). Yet, insofar as they are “sent off to sacrifice and martyrdom in imitation of the warlike man and possessor of power,” they are killing in the name of principles that have excluded them; the representatives (never representing) of life are sent to kill. This is to say that the very culture that reduces them to the bearers of life now makes them the bearers of death. But as Kristeva describes it, the situation of these women is much more complex. It is not just that they come to represent a contradiction between being and meaning but also they find themselves occupying a no-man’s-land between one culture and another, between one set of prohibitions and another, such that martyrdom becomes the only way to reach paradise (2005a, 90). Kristeva proposes that these women occupy two incompatible universes of family and school, which results in a “double personality” or a “psychic cleavage” that renders them politically vulnerable (2005a, 89-90). Relying on Barbara Victor’s portraits of recent shahidas, Kristeva argues that most of them are young women who are “brilliant students and who have integrated modern knowledge and mores” (90). But their surrounding environment, especially their families, are hostile to this aspect of their personalities. Condemned by their intimates, and “guilty of their difference,” depression resulting from their exclusion leads to a desperate hope that they can regain standing in their community by martyring themselves (90). Here Kristeva’s analysis is reminiscent of Gayatri Spivak’s discussion of the paradoxical position of subaltern women, caught between a modern world in terms of which their traditions seemingly render them

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passive objects and traditions that seemingly make them agents, but only of their own suicide. Kristeva calls the lives of these women “amorous disasters—pregnancy outside of marriage, sterility, desire for phallic equality with man” (2005a, 431); they are shunned and shamed by their families for their breach of traditional values, particularly as they center around marriage and children (women’s role as procreator). Kristeva goes so far as to say that “fundamentalism dedicates those women it wants to rid itself of to idealization and the sacred cult, for the amorous life of these women, with their intolerable and inassimilable novelties, marks the incapacity of the religious word to pacify the ambivalent bonds of free individuals, emancipated of archaic prohibitions but deprived of new justifications for their lives.” Undesirable women are sacrificed to traditional law as their last attempt at redemption. Their difference can only be forgiven through their sacrifice as a form of purification ritual. But this notion of forgiveness is merely the flip side of vengeance; it is a perversion that idolizes sacrifice and killing. We could say that forgiveness is precisely what these women lack; that the lack of forgiveness leads to depression and suicide (cf. Oliver 2004). Analytic forgiveness comes through interpretation that gives meaning to life as a gift, par-don. This alternative notion of forgiveness operates outside of the economy of vengeance or judgment to offer a “rebirth” within representation outside of sacrifice (which is to say within the sacrifice of sacrifice). Forgiveness offers a renegotiation with the law such that meaning supports individuality, or more precisely singularity, rather than prohibiting it. While the enlisted women whose photographs have been associated with war in Iraq may not be amorous disasters, they are poor women who typically join the military to avoid the poverty that can lead to various sorts of “amorous disasters.” Think of Lynndie England, pregnant by Abu Ghraib “ringleader” Charles Graner (who later married another soldier indicted for abuse, Megan Ambuhl) at the time she was charged with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. England’s story could be one of amorous disaster. With her baby son in her arms at her trial, she was bitter about Graner’s marriage to Ambuhl. And it was Graner’s testimony that undermined her defense and led to the retrial in which she was convicted. In an article entitled “Behind Failed Abu Ghraib Plea, A Tangle of Bonds and Betrayals,” journalist Kate Zernike described the soap opera–like scene: “In a military courtroom in Texas last week was a spectacle worthy of ‘As the World Turns’: Pfc. Lynndie R. England, the defendant, holding her 7-month-old baby; the imprisoned father, Pvt. Charles A. Graner Jr., giving testimony that ruined what lawyers said was her best shot at Leniency; and waiting outside, another defendant from the notorious abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Megan M. Ambuhl, who had recently wed Private Graner—a marriage Private England learned about only days before” (Zernike 2005). Kristeva’s discussion of amorous disasters is embedded in her delineation of two pillars of peace that she finds in Kant’s Perpetual Peace: “first, that of

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universality—all men are equal and all must be saved. Second is the principle of protection of human life, sustained by the love of the life of each (l’amour de la vie de chacun)” (2005a, 424). She insists that although we are far from achieving economic justice for all, it is the second pillar and not the first that is in the most danger today: “Yet whatever the weaknesses, the efforts for realizing social, economic, and political justice have never in the history of humanity been as considerable and widespread. But it is the second pillar of the imaginary of peace that seems to me today to suffer most gravely: The love of life eludes us; there is no longer a discourse for it” (2005, 424-425). It is not just economic, racial, and religious inequalities that prevent peace, but also the lack of a discourse of the love of life, of passion for life. The culture of death fosters war over peace because we are losing the ability to imagine the meaning of life and thereby ways to embrace it. Life as amorous disaster is a result of women liberated from traditional roles that reduced the meaning of their lives to procreation, but without being able to create new justifications for life. Even as women and others gain the negative freedom from prohibitions, how do they gain the positive freedom to create the meaning of their lives anew? What does their unique biological difference mean outside of a discourse that reduces them to procreation? How can their singularity be sublimated into creative forms of representation that give meaning to their uniqueness beyond an economy of perversion that relegates difference to the realm of abjection through phobia or eroticization? How can the cleavage between zoë and bios, between biological life and recounted life, between being and meaning, be repaired? When diagnosing the disintegration of the paternal law in relation to emotional life, Kristeva suggests that it is a matter of integration. But doesn’t integration imply once again freedom as calculus, a culture or globe made whole through the integration of its parts? Perhaps we should conceive of the relationship between different elements as an interaction instead of integration. Kristeva suggests as much in her discussion of rights for the handicapped when she says “I distrust the term ‘integration’ of the handicapped: it feels like charity towards those who don’t have the same rights of others. I prefer ‘interaction’ which expresses politics becoming ethics, by extending the political pact up to the frontiers of life” (2005a, 102). In this regard, we should be mindful of at least two senses of “integration”: on the one hand, the mathematical process of finding the solution of a differential equation or producing behavior compatible with one’s environment or, on the other hand, opening society or culture to all without erasing their differences. What is lacking or threatened by modern forms of perverse regression is not merely the integration of law into psychic life but any interaction between pleasure and jouissance. Bodily pleasures at the level of being are cut off from joy enabled by the realm of meaning. Jouissance is reduced to pleasures unto death because pleasure is cut adrift from meaning. Rather than inscribe being with meaning, or give form or structure to bodily affects and drives, symbolic Law is reduced to techniques designed to manage, regulate, and spy to more efficiently

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contain. Within this military-industrial consumer culture, we mess around in the abject space between images and reality to the point of a perverse regression to infantile pleasures in sadomasochistic violence toward ourselves and others. The only way to imagine sexual fulfillment and satisfaction with life is through possession and violence. When, like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, we can only imagine pleasure as brutalized bruised and bleeding bodies, perverse pleasure replaces passion for life.

References Freud, Sigmund. 1989. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: Norton. Kristeva, Julia. 1998. Visions capitales. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux. ———. 2002. The Portable Kristeva. Ed. Kelly Oliver. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2005a. La haine et le pardon. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard. ———. 2005b. “Thinking about Liberty in Dark Times.” The Holberg Prize Seminar, 2004. Bergen, Norway: Holberg Publications. This lecture, delivered in English, is also the first chapter of La haine et le pardon (2005), in French as “Penser la liberté en temps de déstresse.” Oliver, Kelly. 2004. The Colonization of Psychic Space: Toward a Psychoanalytic Social Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2007. Women as Weapons of War. New York: Columbia University Press. Saffire, William. 2001. “Coordinates: The New Location Locution.” The New York Times Magazine, October 28, p. 22. Zernike, Kate. 2005. “Behind Failed Abu Ghraib Plea, A Tale of Betrayal.” New York Times, May 10, pp. A1, A14.

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4 Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt and the Thought Specular: Encountering the (Mulholland) Drive

 Frances L. Restuccia

Happiness depends on intimacy. At least that is the premise of Julia Kristeva’s new work on intimate revolt. But intimacy is under a grave threat—that of extinction. The background of this current crisis involves a certain moral and aesthetic dimension of Western culture, which used to be “an essential component of European culture . . . fashioned by doubt and critique,” having become, in Kristeva’s estimation, seriously attenuated, “marginalized,” rendered “a decorative alibi [merely] tolerated by” the society of the spectacle (2002, 4). Posing an insidious challenge to intimacy and consequently to psychic life itself, entertainment, performance, and show culture has taken center stage in the West and, worse—along with the uniformity produced by the market, the media, and the Internet—seems currently poised to robotize the entire world via globalization. “The conditions of modern lives,” Kristeva worries, with the primacy of technology, image, speed, and so forth, inducing stress and depression—have a tendency to reduce psychical space and to abolish the faculty of representation. Psychical curiosity yields before the exigencies of so-called efficiency; the unquestionable advances of the neurosciences are then ideologically valorized and advocated as antidotes to psychical maladies. Gradually, these maladies are denied as such and reduced to their biological substrata, a neurological deficiency. (2002, 11) 65

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Through prayer, dialogue, art, and analysis, we therefore must seek “the great infinitesimal emancipation: restarting ourselves unceasingly” (2002, 223). Perhaps the most exciting aspect of Kristeva’s newest work is its attempt to square intimacy with political life. Kristeva elaborates her notion of intimate revolt in two recent volumes— The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (2000) and Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (2002). The first five chapters of the latter volume lay out Kristeva’s emphasis on four constituents of her concept of intimate revolt: intimacy, time, forgiveness, and image. While she italicizes the role of art (painting, sculpture, music) and in particular literature in this revolt—which she notes is a “synonym of dignity” as well as “our mysticism” (2002, 4)—the fifth chapter, “Fantasy and Cinema,” focuses on film. A psychoanalyst, psychoanalytic theorist, professor, and novelist, Kristeva is unnotorious as a film theorist. Nonetheless, that is the genre to which she devotes an entire, quite powerful, and intricately theoretical chapter of Intimate Revolt; film is, after all, a semiotic art form in which one would expect intimate revolt to thrive. For one thing intimate revolt entails sensory experience, a primary alternative, in Kristeva’s mind, to our spectacular and robotizing society. Revolt likewise necessitates jouissance, which is to Kristeva indispensable for the life of the psyche and therefore to the “faculty of representation and questioning that specifies the human being” (2002, 7). Texts that incite such a revolt are even said to offer the extreme experience of psychosis; the reader or viewer must “come up against a psychical reality that endangers consciousness,” exposing him or her to the “pulse of being” (9). The reader or viewer experiences an “erasure of subject/object borders, an assault of the drive” (9). Kristeva’s idea here is founded on the Heideggerian assumption that “Being itself is wrought by nothingness” (2002, 8). Modern philosophy and psychoanalysis attain a “border region of the speaking being that is psychosis.” To Kristeva, in a parallel fashion, artistic revolt too achieves “non-sense,” “by unfolding meaning to the point of sensations and drives, finding its pulse in a realm that is no longer symbolic but semiotic.” Primarily visual, cinema has great potential to participate in this process of moving to the psychotic dark mass of human being, of disseminating meaning among sensations and drives, of escorting the viewer/subject into “hazardous regions” in which “unity is annihilated” (10). Kristeva conceptualizes both art and psychoanalysis, then, as potentially active agents in an “interrogation into Nothingness and negativity.” Freud, she explains, regarded the symbol and thought themselves as “a sort of negativity,” that is, as “an unbinding proper to the drive,” “the death drive” (2002, 9). Kristeva posits the question of under what conditions the death drive transforms into “symbolizing negativity” (9). Such a transformation occurs when “thought or writing in revolt” finds a representation for a confrontation with “the unity of law, being, and the self ” (10), a jouissance-producing process. Thought, written, or represented jouissance “traverses evil”—evil being, to Kristeva, an unsymbolized death drive.

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Revolt cuts into banality and thus transpires through a caesura, where timelessness intersects with time. Such an atemporality is necessary given Kristeva’s sense of the reason behind psychopathological symptoms and structures: the contemporary subject’s inability to integrate the atemporal. Making this case from her position as a clinician, Kristeva asks, “Is it not the Zeitlos that causes the obsessional to stumble, as he strives fruitlessly to possess the “immeasurable by measuring it?” And isn’t it again the Zeitlos that messes up the melancholic, insofar as he or she suffers from fixation on a past that refuses to enter time? And, finally: “Isn’t it on the Zeitlos that the paranoiac runs aground, vying with an eternity that subjugates him?” (2002, 41). The Freudian concept of the Zeitlos points to an unconscious time, a time of death, which is tantamount to the time of the drive. Kristeva locates in Freud the notion of death as a “temporality heterogeneous to linear time.” She bases her central idea of the importance of not subtracting “thanatology” from, but incorporating it in, the “logic of the living” (32) on Freud’s opening up of every “human manifestation (act, speech, symptom) beyond consciousness, toward unconscious, prepsychical, somatic, physical continuity” (32). In general, what Kristeva is underlining here is the value of encountering death in a way that enriches rather than upsets life’s course, “time’s flight forward” (32). However revolt is accomplished, what is required is access to timelessness or the Zeitlos, the atemporality of the drive and the death drive, which “characterizes the unconscious” (12). Timelessness transports us to the boundaries of thought, enabling us to revisit or perhaps visit our “intimate depths,” our places of suffering (12). In turn, forgiveness, nonjudgmental meaning, is bestowed on such suffering. Forgiveness is not in Kristeva quite what we conventionally construe it to be; it is instead this ascribing of meaning to suffering, which arms us against the intrusion of the superficial spectacle. Kristeva conceptualizes forgiveness as beyond compassion, as a nonjudgmental gift, an act that interprets the meaning of suffering. Insofar as any film, or work of art for that matter, fills in the meaning of suffering, it would participate in such forgiveness. Ill-being, to Kristeva, results from a lack of meaning. Forgiving oneself through an analyst or an aesthetic object, making sense in these ways of “troubling senselessness,” injecting it with meaning, leads to well-being. Psychoanalytic revolt occurs through the analyst’s “par-don” (“par meaning ‘through’; and don ‘gift’”), which reunites with affect “through the metaphorical and metonymical rifts of discourse” (2002, 26). This process of making meaning is not one of intellectualizing, fully comprehending, or certainly mastering but of actualizing preverbal meanings, “instinctual impulses and affects”—what Kristeva is now famous for calling the semiotic (19). Such actualizations draw out complex and intraverbal experiences, drain out the dark mass of the unconscious, and siphon it into the signifying light of day. For Kristeva, this is the role of the imaginary. Death is inscribed as an instinctual force within life and consciousness in the register of the imaginary. Through the imaginary the psyche is repositioned between time and the timeless;

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it finds its proper place at that intersection. Kristeva promotes activities that freeze the psychical process so that it no longer flows, that locate a dead time, and that accept repressed drives, activities that then insert nonlife into life—which is a simple but fair description of Kristeva’s notion of working-through. Kristeva conceives of the imaginary conjoining of the linear and the indestructible as a “state of grace”—and I would say a sacred act—that brings with it exactly what one might expect would accompany such a state, jouissance. And she points out, at the end of a section on working-through, that the status graciae “transits through the specular” (2002, 38). What Kristeva labels the “register of interiority” includes neither nonsensorialized perceptions nor thoughts but images (2002, 46). It is the domain of images wherein we find the intimacy that will guarantee psychic life. It is therefore especially in fantasy that intimacy is represented. Kristeva’s imaginary “appears in all its logic—and risk—when introduced through fantasy,” which, since it contains, albeit distortedly, the reality of desire, testifies to psychical reality. Kristeva treats all fantasies as reflective of unconscious fantasy and regards literature and art as “the favored places for the formulation of fantasies” (66). She assumes that the very formulating of fantasies as well as commenting on them produces jouissance, which can preclude the horror of their enactment. Kristeva anticipates that her reader will respond to her focus on fantasy by remarking on the “veritable paradise of fantasy” that we inhabit “today thanks to images in the media.” But to Kristeva “nothing is less certain” than the notion that our culture produces beneficial fantasies, stimulates us to formulate them, and as a result turns us into creators of the imaginary (2002, 67). Our society of the spectacle allows neither analysis of fantasy nor even their formation. Indeed, we are inundated with images; but they fail to liberate us. Their stereotypical quality shuts down our ability to imagine our own imagery, to generate our own “imaginary scenarios” (67). Such a reining-in, and even obliteration of, the phantasmatic faculty help produce instead our contemporary maladies of the soul. Regardless of the abundance of images surrounding us, we have in the place of fantasy melancholia, paranoia, perversion, hysteria, obsessional neurosis, phobia. Phantasmatic representation needs to be constructed, in fact, so that these new maladies of the soul may be engaged through a subsequent analysis of fantasy. We are phantasmatically impoverished, if not vacuous; and the reduction, if not abolition, of such a faculty threatens to wipe out inner depth itself. Which is why art, literature, and cinema are essential—as allies of psychoanalysis—in providing the spaces in which the phantasmatic faculty can be exercised. Cinema then can lean in one of two directions. It can preclude or crush fantasy insofar as it is stereotypical. Or since “the visible is the port of registry of drives, their synthesis beneath language, cinema as an apotheosis of the visible [can offer] itself to the plethoric deployment of fantasies” (2002, 69). Film has been contaminated by unimaginary images; as an art form, it has been diverted from its psychically rich potential. But Kristeva singles out what she

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calls “an other cinema” that serves as a kind of “condensed and meditative mode of writing” (69). Standing in for fantasy, this “thought specular,” as Kristeva also calls it—“when it is great art,” as exemplified by Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Godard, Bresson, Pasolini—pierces us in the place of the drives (2002, 69). We are saturated with cinematic images that shut down fantasy even as ironically it is the visible that accedes “to a primary and fragile synthesis of drives, to a more supple, less controlled, riskier representability of instinctual dramas, the games of Eros and Thanatos” (69). Not at all “images-information,” the cinema of Godard consists of “signals captured, cut up, and arranged in such a way that the phantasmatic thought of the writer-director can be made out and invites you first to locate your own fantasies and then to hollow them out” (74). It is the voyeur, after all, as Kristeva mentions, who “makes a symptom of his first articulation of drives,” taking pleasure in the “sadomasochism of an autoerotic, incestuous osmosis with an object from which he is not really detached” (69), just as film in the form of the thought specular absorbs the material of the drive. Supporting her idea of the psychoanalytic power of cinema, Kristeva writes that it is the gaze that can provoke an “initial specular synthesis at the borders of the sadomasochistic drive” (70). At the crossroads between consciousness and the unconscious, film that explores the specular triggers fantasy. It has the capacity to graft fantasy onto the audience, in a way similar to Kristeva’s grafting of fantasy onto her patient Didier by requesting that he read novels. The fantasy must be constructed, and this is the potential function of the cinematic thought specular. The sexual drive has to coagulate as fantasy for it to be analyzed; and this is where art comes in, militating against Kristeva’s banality of evil, an unrepresented drive or impoverished fantasy. The specular is, to Kristeva, the most advanced medium for the inscription of the drive, although what we actually perceive on the screen falls short of being what fascinates us, for the drive is manifested at the intersection of objects on the screen and the fantasy formation that emerges as we experience the film. The thought specular seizes us where the specular bears the trace of the nonrepresented drive. Such a bearing occurs through the lekton, an expressible that transforms a flat image into a symptom. Tones, rhythms, colors, figures, various semiotic elements, are associated with the raw image, effecting a primary seizure of drives. Certain films are able to grab, so to speak, the drive of the viewer within the filmic material and to formulate it phantasmatically within the specular arrangement of the film, thus annexing the drive to representation. But cinema goes further than revealing our fantasies, our psychical lives; it thinks the specular, in a manner that is of course itself specular. That is, it employs the visible at the same time as it provides protection from it. Whereas the society of the spectacle produces evil, as it leaves the drive naked, that is, unrepresented, unaccessed, and uncompensated for, the thought specular showcases “the sadomasochistic repressed of the society of the spectacle” (2002, 79)

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but avoids redoubling the evil by finally distancing us. Kristeva appreciates camera movement, as in Godard, that holds the spectator—while immersed in fantasy—“at a distance from fascination” (80). In this way sadomasochism can be provisionally at home in cinema until it is demystified. Kristeva calls for a debanalization of evil, a deauthorizing of perversion, a demystification—a gap, a wedge driven through fetishism, that is, intimacy in revolt. She does not regard our time as one of great art; but it is nevertheless capable of producing aesthetic antidotes to the society of the spectacle. Such an antidote, like analytical discourse, would put the self into question, which for Kristeva is tantamount to castration, “the realization of a lack, an uncertainty, and the endless refraction that constitutes psychical splitting.” It is the “eternal return” of these psychic phenomena that “places us in the timelessness of the unconscious” (2002, 236–237) and thereby eventually enables the restructuring of the subject in a rebirth, “psychical suppleness,” remobilized drives, “new creativities” (237). Kristeva’s intimate revolt is anathema to fetishism insofar as it entails thanatology, the embracing of Nothingness. Kristeva poses the rhetorical question of “how many Didiers exist in suffering without even considering the possibility of the verbal representation of the malaise in which they lock themselves and those close to them?” (128). To Kristeva, “[t]his is when the freedom and negativity proper to psychological representation may become mired in fetish.” The problem may be generalized: again, she asks, “Is this the end of a civilization of questioning and freedom?” (129), implying that to question and consequently to attain freedom (on both the individual and social levels) is to embrace negativity so as not to be buried in the quagmire of fetishism. Given that the thought specular engages an interiority Kristeva wishes to rehabilitate that depends on accessing one’s preverbal psychic history and is intricately, intimately tied to one’s singularity, it is difficult to exemplify its specific operations. But I want to examine a film—David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001)—that demonstrates Kristeva’s idea of the thought specular insofar as it deploys the specular to challenge fetishism. Being about fantasy’s paralyzing takeover of the psyche, Mulholland Drive would also seem to have the capacity to enable a viewer to free (or work toward freeing) himself or herself from the illusion of a fantasy that puts one in a stranglehold—by presenting the Nothing that has the power to unloosen the fixation. In Intimate Revolt, Kristeva distinguishes between “noble,” “indispensable” fantasy that serves desire and the ignoble “spectacular imaginary” that currently “assaults us” (2002, 180). Sometimes the trouble appears to be that the spectacular imaginary keeps us “mired in fantasy.” It offers an opaque reality without “arranging the escape hatch of clarity.” Kristeva prefers representations of fantasy that are self-conscious to those that are stereotypically protective, numbing. Self-conscious fantasy—to which Kristeva ascribes a “thetic value—stabilizes the subject” and can serve as a “source of survival and rebirth,” bringing to life the

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“metabolized-negativized drive in indefinite, infinite psychical life” (180).1 David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (pun now intended) is such a self-conscious representation of fantasy, one that foregrounds Kristeva’s thesis of the value of (an enlivening death) fantasy in slicing through (a debilitating love) fantasy. Mulholland Drive demonstrates how fantasy itself can offer an “escape hatch.” Fantasy, then, can bring one to the negativity that desire is based on, or it can plug lack, thus serving as a fetish. An articulation of Kristeva’s thought specular, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive puts on display and in turn contests such fetishism. Ultimately rendering a universal abyss at the heart of things, Mulholland Drive is an antifetishism film that gives its spectators the opportunity to encounter a certain inarticulable absence, compatible with Freud’s Zeitlos, to which site they are brought through a story about the potential effectiveness of fantasy in traversing fantasy. More specifically: Mulholland Drive unveils the gap between a supposed object of desire and the objet a, or cause of desire, that renders that object alluring; the film in this way seems cognizant of the Nothing on which love is founded. Lynch demonstrates Lacan’s conception of “the only conceivable idea of the object, that of the object as cause of desire, of that which is lacking,” a lack that is situated in the Real. “[A]nd the little we know about the real,” Lacan elaborates in The Four Fundamental Concepts, “shows its antinomy to all verisimilitude” (1973/1981, ix). Lynch, I am suggesting, is faithful to this Real antinomy. At the same time, as a metafilm, a film preoccupied with matters of film and the film industry, Mulholland Drive reveals the illusory nature of film itself. Hence an analogy takes shape, one Godard already insinuated in Contempt— between cinema and love—perhaps intimating the reason cinema is enthralled with this subject. In revealing the void on which love and film are predicated, Mulholland Drive doubly attempts to explode the fetishistic ideas of the verisimilitude of film as well as the fantasy of the fulfillment or satisfaction of love. Lynch’s film offers a full disclosure about cinema (that it is not full!), puncturing the fetishism of film in the Metzian sense; it does so via a complex narrative about a love affair, offering the revelation that absence founds them both.2 Mulholland Drive’s exposure of love’s underlying aporia hinges on the film’s two-part structure. Roughly the first two-thirds of Mulholland Drive can be considered Diane’s fantasy of a successful relationship with Camilla, and the last one-third as the preceding actual story of a failed sexual relation that explains the rationale of the fantasy.3 Diane’s desire is not only dissatisfied in the way that all desire is dissatisfied—since to desire is by definition to seek/lack satisfaction—but Diane’s already intense desire was abruptly terminated at its apex. She has been left in a traumatized state, fixated fetishistically on a lost object of love, to which her psyche insists on clinging. Lynch is impressively astute at capturing a lover’s urge to kill a beloved who tortures her with desire that gets expressed simultaneously along with an edict against it. In the last one-third of the film, Diane has an hallucinatory memory of herself in an erotic pose with

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Camilla, as Camilla expresses to her, “You drive me wild,” yet immediately follows that incitement to Diane’s desire with her decision that they “should not do this anymore.” Devastated, Diane feels compelled to expunge Camilla from the face of the earth; she hires a hit man to do so. Diane knows she must expel Camilla: she reiterates this murderous impulse in her fantasy (produced after the hit man has done the job) in Betty’s Hollywood audition as well as in her practice audition, which she enacts with Rita(the figure Camilla becomes in Diane’s fantasy). In both, Betty asserts to her partner, “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill us both,” reiterating insistently that the love object must be removed. Diane’s fantasy on the whole, however, offers a less literal and more psychoanalytic approach to canceling the love object, given that it works to extinguish Diane’s cathexis of Camilla, which requires that the fantasy engage the Real or the Nothing of Diane’s desire. In focusing on a fantasy that Diane needs to experience to rid herself of her fetishistic fixation, Mulholland Drive is about what Kristeva’s thought specular is meant to do: project a fantasy that enables one to overcome a malady of the soul. Insofar as the film operates this way for the viewer, it may function as the thought specular in the service of intimate revolt at the same time as it is about the very process of the thought specular. Mulholland Drive is comprised of three ontological levels: fantasy and reality, as I have said, and the Nothing/Real. Something horrific suffuses this film. The Nothing/Real is represented as monstrous: through the monstrous figure behind Winkie’s café; through the creepy, ominous Louise who arrives at Betty’s aunt’s door and proclaims forebodingly that someone is in trouble; through the corpse that Betty and Rita traumatically encounter in Diane’s apartment; and perhaps through the ghastly tiny elderly couple. Diane’s fantasy includes a young, terrified man who visits Winkie’s with someone who could be in the position of his therapist since the young man explains to him that they are there because he has had two dreams that took place at this coffee shop. The young man at Winkie’s, whom I will call the analysand for the sake of identification, was frightened in his dreams as was his therapist, frightening the young man even more. Why? Because there is a man in back who is “doing it.” The analysand can perceive him through the wall; that is, in his dream he can observe his (the Gorgon’s?) face. The therapist suggests that the analysand has been drawn to Winkie’s to discover if the man “doing it” is actually out there. They take a peek. The monster emerges, terrifying the analysand, it seems, to literal death—a preview of the film’s situating itself in the place of the gaze and of its fuller illustration of Kristeva’s notion that horror is “the quintessential specular” (2002, 77). Film that rises to the level of the “fascinating thought specular” seizes us through fear, at the place of the gaze. “This is its magic” (73). Betty and Rita later sit in what appears to be the same Winkie’s for coffee, establishing a skewed parallel between Betty and the analysand and Rita and the monster. In yet a third Winkie’s scene, we have Diane meeting with the hit man, ordering the extinction of her object of desire, so that the following chain of

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associations forms on the side of the monster: the monster, Rita, and then death or an extinguished Camilla. If we accept that the monster is in the register of the Nothing/Real, this chain enables us to observe Diane’s fantasy as an encounter with the Nothing/Real of Diane’s desire as that monster is identified with Rita, the fantasy’s stand-in for Camilla, as a way of sucking Rita/Camilla into the Void. The corpse that Betty and Rita discover in Diane’s apartment is taken by the two young women in the first place to be Rita, or at least someone mistaken by the murderer as Rita. (The body is laid out on the bed in a way reminiscent of how Rita lay on the aunt’s bed in an early scene, on her side with her legs stacked up.) Upon giving us a close-up of the dead person, the camera reveals a monstrous face, so that again Rita is linked to the monster. Rita is the monster in that she (as the stand-in for Camilla) has captured Betty’s/Diane’s desire; but refusing to fulfill it in real life, Camilla as a result fixes Diane in an utterly miserable position. Diane needs to rectify this situation; as Coco (Betty’s busybody landlady and neighbor) admonishes in the fantasy, “If there is trouble, get rid of it!” Camilla is Diane’s “trouble,” and in real life (in the film) she gets rid of it literally. Her fantasy, however, offers another, albeit belated but more psychoanalytic, efficacious suggestion about how to detach from a love object. Prior to such an extrication, Betty and Rita (in the fantasy) begin to merge. When they attempt by phone to reach Diane Selwyn, Betty comments that it is strange calling yourself; but at this moment it is not clear who is calling Diane or “herself ” because it is not clear which one of them is “Diane.” Rita eventually dons the white wig, causing her to resemble Betty physically. And the fantasy in general is about their merging in love, so that we grasp that the idea of love here is of a subject locating her missing piece (no wonder Rita is puzzled over who she is). “I’m in love with you,” Betty repeats to Rita emphatically and erotically. The bed scene of their making love is what we might call a Lacanian Love encounter, where the subject in love (Betty/Diane) momentarily coalesces with her beloved or experiences the illusion of the temporary cessation of the sexual relation not being written (on the penultimate page of Encore, Lacan explains that “something [may be] encountered . . . which momentarily gives the illusion that the sexual relationship stops not being written—an illusion that something is not only articulated but inscribed, . . . by which, for a while—a time during which things are suspended—what would constitute the sexual relationship finds its trace and its mirage–like path in the being who speaks” [1975/1998, 145]). “Is love—as psychoanalysis claims with an audacity that is all the more incredible as all of its experience runs counter to that very notion, and as it demonstrates the contrary—is love about making one (faire un)? Is Eros a tension toward the One?” (5), Lacan asks, simultaneously positing Oneness as the lover’s goal and casting a cynical psychoanalytic eye on its possibility. Given that this attempted union occurs in the fantasy segment of the film, Mulholland Drive seems to know that the missing piece can never actually be annexed. Being a constitutive lack of the subject, such a piece, upon being

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embraced, would threaten subjectivity, induce psychosis. Upon being psychically clung to in this way, fetishized—that is, taken to plug the lack in the subject—such a piece would jam up the subject. “[D]esire merely leads us to aim at the gap” (Lacan 1998, 5). The subject lacks, but it lacks Nothing. Mulholland Drive likewise seems keenly aware that those subjects who believe they come close to consummating their desire, upon being cut off in the midst, would wish to “kill” what they take to be the missing piece with which they nearly coalesced, for it would be agony to have that “missing piece” of oneself walk away, with/as a potential portion of oneself. Instead, especially in such cases of unrequited love, the missing piece, or missing emptiness—since the objet a or cause of one’s desire is only a structural absence, the residue of one’s splitting off from the original Other—needs to be pried loose in the lover’s psyche from the contingent object that only appears to house the objet a. That one’s cause of desire actually inheres in one’s ostensible object of desire is a psychic illusion. It is this illusion, not the object, that must be destroyed, especially when the object flees, leaving in its wake an all-consuming psychic residue. This is psychoanalytic logic as well as, I am suggesting, the logic of the film.4 Mulholland Drive demonstrates that Diane needs to relinquish her psychic grip on Camilla, that Camilla is merely a contingent object. At Club Silencio, Rita and Betty attentively observe all sorts of paradigmatic fissures. One would assume that here, at the Club, there would be a band, but “No hay banda.” There is music, but it is recorded. The emcee proclaims the theme: “It is an illusion.” The singer belting out Roy Orbison’s “Crying” herself wails over a lost love, helping us link the splitting that the scene effects—between what appears to be true and the reality (“No hay banda”)—with a certain psychic/emotional detachment that Diane needs to undergo. The singer collapses onto the stage, but her singing eerily prevails. The voice, one of the four forms of the objet a in Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts, persists without embodiment. Lynch peels the voice from the singer in a way that could be read as a kind of surgical procedure on the drive as it inheres in the voice, carving it away from a particular body/subject. The collapsed singer reveals that the voice, or objet a, the cause of Diane’s desire, is located someplace else besides the body of the singer, or the body of Camilla—that Diane loves Camilla for “something more.” And at this moment, the fantasy that she is that excess is crumbling, as McGowan explains: “The structure of fantasy breaks down when the subject confronts the total emptiness of the objet petit a, which is what occurs as Rebekah Del Rio’s song continues after she has fainted. . . . Betty looks down in her purse and sees a blue box, which represents the point of exit from the fantasy world” (2004, 83). The camera dramatically zooms in on that box—dark blueness pervades the screen. Herein lies the crisis moment of the film, the pivotal point at which unconscious confrontation with the drive, the death drive, timelessness (the Zeitlos)—psychosis—enables an exit, away from (Diane’s) fetishizing a love object (Camilla).

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The operations of Kristeva’s thought specular are at this stage foregrounded as part of the diegesis, which presents the breakdown of a fantasy insofar as it is predicated on an object mistaken for object a. Betty shakes as she observes all the stage effects that indicate illusion, especially the singer as she physically withdraws from her song, because Betty/Diane senses—and is experiencing— the Nothingness of the cause of her desire. But perhaps the horror that Betty’s brittle shaking indicates is not due entirely to a confrontation with the ineluctable lostness of the lost object, but also to the fact that it is, practically speaking, too late for Diane. She has failed to heed Kristeva’s warning about the necessity of engaging a liberating fantasy to avoid the actual enactment of a destructive fantasy. That is: Diane’s fantasy, produced after the hit man has enacted the murder commissioned by Diane (we know that this is the time sequence for one thing because Rita shows up in the fantasy with a pile of money that Diane presumably paid to the hit man to have Camilla killed), unveils to her the logic of love as fantasy (that it pursues an objet a, a cause of desire, a missing piece, rather than a particular person). Having exposed love as illusion, Diane’s fantasy points belatedly to the possibility of puncturing a fantasy that makes one miserable, that gets stuck at the level of the necessarily false object— by encountering and loosening the drive that set it in motion. Lynch redoubles this theme of the illusion of love by planting it within and intertwining it with the context of Hollywood, fulfilling Kristeva’s desideratum that the thought specular be self-aware—as a way of distancing the spectator from the film itself as fantasy. Rita (Camilla’s avatar in Diane’s fantasy) whimsically names herself after Rita Hayworth depicted on a poster for Gilda. All the flamboyant camera shots that deliberately lead the way to horror—creepily down the hall to Rita in the shower, down the steps to the monster behind Winkie’s, and perhaps most suspensefully to the monstrous corpse in bed— scream out that we are watching a psycho-horror movie. Reflecting the illusory condition of love, where one “pretends” to be the object cause of the lover’s desire, giving in a sense what one lacks (one of Lacan’s dominant definitions of love), Betty (Davis?) in the fantasy sequence cleverly remarks to Rita that, in checking out with the police if an accident indeed happened on Mulholland Drive, they can pretend they are someone else, just as in the movies. Within the context of Diane’s fantasy, or dream, about a sexual relation with Camilla (in the guise of Rita), Betty designates Hollywood and specifically her aunt’s Los Angeles apartment, as a “dreamplace,” referring to her dream of making her debut in Hollywood. Again in imitation of Contempt, the last word of Mulholland Drive ironically is “Silencio,” which points not simply to the absence at the core of the love fantasy the film encloses but also, à la Christian Metz, to the absence on which the film/film is founded. Just as Camilla (not Rita!) is the illusion of Diane’s love, Mulholland Drive, while signifying “unaccustomed perceptual wealth,” is (to quote Metz on film in general) “stamped with unreality to an unusual degree, and from the very outset.” Like all cinema, Mulholland

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Drive, as Mulholland Drive itself discloses, “drums up all perception, but to switch it immediately over into its own absence, which is nonetheless the only signifier present” (1982, 45). Such a defetishizing exposure of the film enhances Mulholland Drive’s status as thought specular, insofar as it precludes any pretense of its subject matter actually being there, thus removing the spectator from its fascination. It is, in other words, insofar as Mulholland Drive reflects on its status as a Metzian imaginary signifier that it can serve as Kristeva’s imaginary register, where death is inscribed within consciousness. By exposing the chasm at the heart of love and film, Lynch’s film doubly undermines fetishism: the phantasmatic form that plugs the lack of love with an object as well as the fetishism of filmic verisimilitude. Mulholland Drive drags the fetishism of love as well as of film itself—insofar as it projects itself as present—down to its vacuous base, to a blue box, unmistakably an “escape hatch,” signifying Nothing. Targeting a primary generator of the glittery images of the society of the spectacle, Hollywood itself, Lynch’s film grants the spectator psychic life, intimacy, through an especially sensuous cinematographical encounter with images of interiority that collapse in the end in a way that catalyzes a new start. Facing the skewed relation of the object of desire and the object a, an abyss, Freud’s Zeitlos, the Real, at the level of the unconscious, within this savvy and sophisticated example of Kristeva’s thought specular, the spectator is prompted to exit through the blue box, that is, to extricate himself or herself from psychic fixations, or at least to work through them, to enter eventually into a new psychic space. Mulholland Drive as the thought specular has the potential, I am suggesting, to imbricate itself with the spectator’s own suffering and, through such attachment (a way of pulling the spectator’s trauma into semiotic representation), to offer forgiveness, that is, the transformation of the spectator’s pain into meaning. By transfiguring the spectator’s own psychic trouble into fantasy, images, signification, through a journey to the end of the night, Mulholland Drive does its part in arming the spectator against the contemporary robotization process. By bringing the spectator into relation with his or her unconscious, by luring the spectator into the abyss, into “hazardous regions” wherein “unity is annihilated” (Kristeva 2002, 10), which in the case of this particular film is shown to found love and film, Mulholland Drive restores psychic depth, or at least takes a step toward its restoration. While this may seem like a private matter, films that fit Kristeva’s category of the thought specular possess the potential to inject death, the unconscious, the unseen into consciousness and turn back the tide of the dehumanization of society—even to militate against biopower. After all, as Foucault elaborates in Society Must Be Defended, with the predominance of the power of social regularization, death is gradually disqualified. Death has become, Foucault reminds us, “something to be hidden away” (2003, 247). Foucault’s spooky assertion that “Power no longer recognizes death” (248) provides a further rationale behind Kristeva’s perspective that contemporary society needs to reintegrate

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thanatology into the logic of the living—to stave off the new episteme she appears to be diagnosing in which the psychically complex subject has vanished and robots rule.

Notes 1. As Maria Margaroni explains, in Julia Kristeva: Live Theory, the thetic phase refers to a break that paves the way for signification; it is “both a rupture (the emergent subject’s separation from the semiotic chora) and a link, the subject’s identification with the signifier that is necessary for the taking up of positons in the signifying realm” (2004, 14–15). 2. Such a dual theme perhaps should come as no surprise from the director of a previous film with a fetish as its title: Blue Velvet. 3. Todd McGowan puts it this way: “The second part of Mulholland Drive is structured around the incessant dissatisfaction of desire as Diane (Naomi Watts)—and the spectator—are denied any experience of Camilla (Laura Elena Harring), Diane’s love object. By contrast, in the first part Diane, appearing as Betty, can enjoy the object” (2004, 67). 4. I invoke my understanding of Lacan’s idea of love because Mulholland Drive appears to subscribe to it; I do not mean to imply that Kristeva’s (distinct) conception of love is reflected in the film. Mulholland Drive, in other words, fulfills Kristeva’s notion of the thought specular through its presentation of a fetishistic fantasy of love that its representation of Lacan’s conception of love as illusion has the capacity to puncture. For Lacan and Kristeva’s different theories of the subject, see Maria Margaroni, who observes a more drastic split between the Lacanian subject and his or her lack than in Kristeva’s subject’s split condition, produced by the internal eruption of “semiotic motility” (2004, 26). However, see also Joan Copjec’s Imagine There’s No Woman (2002) for an idea of the Lacanian subject as well as of Lacanian love that approaches if not overlaps with Margaroni’s sense of Kristeva.

References Copjec, Joan. 2002. Imagine There’s No Woman. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Trans. David Macey. New York: Picador. Heidegger, Martin. 1929. “What is Metaphysics?” Trans. David Farrell Krell. http://www.msu.org/e&r/content.e&r/texts/heidegger/heidegger_wm2. html. Kristeva, Julia. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Lacan, Jacques. 1973/1981. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques Alain-Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton. ———. 1975/1998. Encore: 1972–1973: On Feminine Sexuality/The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton. Margaroni, Maria, and John Lechte. 2004. Julia Kristeva: Live Theory. London: Continuum. McGowan, Todd. 2004. “Lost on Mulholland Drive: Navigating David Lynch’s Panegyric to Hollywood.” Cinema Journal 43 (2): 67–89. Metz, Christian. 1982. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mulholland Drive. 2001. Dir. David Lynch. Universal Studios.

5 Julia Kristeva and the Trajectory of the Image

 John Lechte

Given Julia Kristeva’s interest in the visual and plastic arts, as well as in the imaginary, it is perhaps surprising that very little has been said or written about her theoretical stance here.1 When it comes to the image as such the silence is even more deafening.2 A partial explanation for this might be that her writing on painting and cinema often appears to be incidental to other theoretical and critical tasks. This cannot be said, however, of the treatment of the cinema image and, through her analysis of Sartre’s phenomenology, of the mental image. In any case, I suggest that by paying close attention to Kristeva’s approach to the image one begins to see another level open up in her work, one that, despite her terminology, is less in keeping with orthodox psychoanalysis and more in keeping with the cinematic turn inaugurated by Gilles Deleuze (1986; 1989). Indeed, it is instructive to begin with a short detour comparing aspects of the thought of the two thinkers on the image, before moving on to consider Kristeva’s theory of the cinema image, the mental image as proposed by Sartre3—all against the backdrop of the image in Guy Debord’s theory of the “society of the spectacle” (1994). The latter turns the image into a thing with serious consequences, the analyst argues, for the very viability of psychic space.

Society and the Cinema Image in Kristeva and Deleuze The two thinkers—Julia Kristeva and Gilles Deleuze—in their work on cinema can, I suggest, be equated. However, it is true that Kristeva, coming from a 79

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particular psychoanalytic orientation, does seem to go with a subject-object dualism. Her terminology, as we shall see, of the “specular,” “fantasm,” and, finally, “seduction” would place her squarely on the side of subjectivity as reflected on the screen, if not beyond the screen. There is no denying the difference between a Bergsonian approach to the image (highlighted by Deleuze) and Kristeva’s notions, such as the “semiotic” as a rhythmical space (time emerges here). On the other hand, her use, like Deleuze, of the Stoic concept of “lekton” (the “saying,” the “expressing,” or description that gives itself as such) brings her closer to Deleuze, who described the difference between description and its object in Italian neorealist cinema as being indiscernible. Moreover, a certain type of cinema (cf. Hitchcock and Godard), for Kristeva, is essentially linked to thinking, as it is also for Deleuze. Horror movies become a way of thinking the specular—which would be a thinking of an aspect of the material semiotic. For Kristeva, then, thought is linked to affect through the image. Her approach is thus very different, and much more innovative, than the application to film of a highly analytical and intellectualist Lacanian framework, as is found in Žižek (1991) or Rocchio (1999). Writing on cinema and the image has recently become part of a concern with the image in history and thought, a concern driven by Kristeva’s return to Debord’s critique of the “society of the spectacle,” a society wedded to the reality of appearances and to appearance as reality, and where one is literally drowning in media images made into things (la choisification) (from television and elsewhere) (Kristeva 1995, 7–10; 1996a, 15–24, 114–115; 1997, 118, 125–127, 233–236, 256–258). The spectacle stifles revolt, not only ideologically, so that image-clichés and image-stereotypes dominate, but psychically, too, because, being standardized, the bevy of images inhibits imaginary formations, such as fantasy and the self as difference. Kristeva’s commitment to critique might be thought to place her at odds with Deleuze. The case changes substantially, though, when mediation, rather than media, is made the focus of attention. For mediation, following the insights of Bergson, is on the side of perception, objectification and, subsequently, on the side of a “photographic” view of reality, a view that privileges space over time and memory. To put it bluntly: a mediatized society (a society of mediation) would suppress the insights made possible by cinema as the vehicle of time and movement. It would suppress an experience of time and memory, and thus of a certain subjectivity. In the beginning, we are told, there was a Big Bang. But in the very beginning, the photographic view says, there was stillness: timelessness, without movement. The stillness of the photographic image becomes a metaphor for the very beginning. To the extent that Kristeva understands the image qua image as a form of unreality (or irreality) in the manner of Sartre, and as the basis of fantasy production she is at odds with Deleuze. For Deleuze rejects any rigid dualism of fantasy and reality in favor of the view that fantasy and subjectivity flow over

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into reality—or at least into the actual (this is Deleuze’s surrealism). Instead, there is a reality of subjectivity as there is, after Bergson, a reality of consciousness, in the sense that consciousness is something (Deleuze 1986, 60–61). But Deleuze primarily points an accusing finger at the image-cliché, not at the image as such. Kristeva makes the same distinction. For the images we are flooded with by the media are stereotypical, standardized. These are not the images of fantasy (imbued with unreality—virtual images) but ones that have become thinglike (simulacra) and which inhibit the receiver’s capacity to fantasize, to associate and to engage in interpretation. People with their heads cut off no longer signify violence. This is what Didier, Kristeva’s analysand, demonstrates in his incapacity to see, or to feel, the “obvious” force of what he has done in his art (Kristeva 1995, 10–11, 19–20). More generally, the “society of the spectacle” damages the subject’s psychic space, a symptom of which is the emasculation of interiority, and hence of the capacity to have a vibrant fantasy life. Externality rules, an externality of uniformity and standardization. We now leave the spectacle in abeyance and, in what follows, examine Kristeva’s specific approach to the cinema image.

Seduction and the Specular “The image I see has nothing to do with the specular which fascinates me”— such is the point of departure in both Kristeva’s most recent writing on the cinema in 1997 (118–149) and in her piece, first published in 1975, entitled “Ellipse sur la frayeur et la séduction spéculaire” (“Ellipsis on Fright and the Seduction of the Specular”) (collected in 1977, 373–382). What seduces is neither the meaning of the image nor its symbolism as revealed by semiology, but its materiality: its noises (the older sense of “frayeur” means the noise that gives a fright), its “pulsations, somatic waves, colour waves (ondes), rhythms, tones” (373). I am, then, dragged into the image, willy-nilly, without knowing it; no question of being coaxed, tempted, or consciously seduced. Rather, I can actually live out the aggression and anxieties that constitute the underbelly of the specular, while seduction would be underpinned by the drives. In any case, even if we stuck with Lacan’s mirror stage, we should recall that there it was a question of an imago (something that has effects in the subject) more than narcissism. With “imago” we come closer to the Kristevan semiotic. In this sense, I am in the semiotic—I “inhabit” it (cf. Merleau-Ponty)—more than the semiotic is in me. The Platonic khora, as we know, generates the semiotic, which becomes a rhythmical space, a space we inhabit as humans. This is a musicalized and thus timeful space.4 The specular is also a sign that exceeds the borders of the signified. It is, moreover, a visual sign “which calls to the fantasm because it carries an excess of visual traces, traces irrelevant to the identification of objects because they are chronologically, and logically, anterior to the famous ‘mirror stage’” (Kristeva

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1977, 374). Parenthetically, it is notable that, for Deleuze, mirrors are a key example of the virtual image, which is interior to the time-image. Here, mirrors evoke the oscillation between the virtual and the actual but do not evoke the imaginary because it is not possible to be external to images. More of this later. For Kristeva, the sign that evokes the fantasm appears in its own right. It is not a purveyor of information about the object. Such signs emerge in the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho where behind the curtain the shadow appears and then the hand with the dagger raised in silhouette. The signified of this image is fear. Fear—affect—is thus this excess of signification, a signification that ceases to be one in any formal sense. For I am in the picture in the shower scene. The cinema image ceases to be a medium and becomes an immediate experience—a transsubstantial experience perhaps if we were to take our cue from Kristeva’s reading of Proust (1996b). Again, the signs of the semiotic give over to “lektonic traces”. Lekton refers to that dimension of the sign as an “expressible,” or a “sayable,” which is more than what is represented or symbolized, the dimension that exceeds signification. Eisenstein’s films are illuminated by this notion, which draws attention to the process of signification before it shows what is indicated. And so the organization of space, the placement of objects, the “calculated intervention of each reply” could all be added to the rhythm of images, a rhythm intensified by Eisenstein’s version of montage.5 The lektonic dimension leads to an experience of images in the process of signification. The signified is secondary to this. The lektonic dimension of khora is the rhythm of the space. Analytically, rhythm is the subjective dimension of objective space. Kristeva’s point, though, is that space cannot emerge as such outside its rhythmical or subjective aspect. We cannot “know” real (as opposed to abstract) space except as an experience. Time, by implication, is also an experience of time. Time is subjective. It is tied to involuntary memory (not memory as habit). On this, Kristeva, Deleuze, and Bergson all concur. Kristeva, in her 1975 essay, also makes the point that cinema is the specular thought (le spéculaire pensé)—a thinking of the specular so that the specular and thought become intertwined. It is not just a question here of what an image represents. The specular is the semiotic (displacements, condensations, tones, rhythms, vibrating colors, figures of all sorts) as excess in relation to the signified; images that become an “expressing” in their own right, as provided for by the stoic lekton. Closely linked to the specular and thought is the horror movie à la Hitchcock, where “[r]epresented horror is the specular par excellence” (Kristeva 1977, 377). This means that horror is in the image as sign (a horror image), and in the subject’s relation to it (because it is a question of a fantasmatic domain) and not in what is signified. There is a spatial dimension of the object equivalent to perception, while the subject is essentially in time. Time would be the semiotic itself, provided we understand time monumentally, and not chronologically.6

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To this point, Kristeva seems to give equal weight to both the cinema image and to subjectivity. At the level of the specular, the cinema image—in the genre of the horror films in particular—would have an immediacy that makes the concept of representation a very rough instrument. In her later work of 1997, the emphasis changes. The fantasm begins to take on a life of its own. And psychoanalysis would render the fantasm conscious, integrating it into an interpretative story, a story generated by associations. Through interpretation (which means through working with fantasy), the symptom can be dissolved. Although the earlier insight regarding lektonic traces is woven into the later work, we also have another psychoanalytic angle on the fantasm and its importance for the subject’s psychic life. So, does Kristeva’s approach actually deepen our insight into the cinema image as such? A certain progress in producing insights into the nature of the cinema image was made in the earlier work; but now this image is allowed to slip away into the labyrinth of details on the fantasm as a fact of subjectivity. In the chapter, “Fantasme et cinema” in La révolte intime (1997), little is learned about cinema that was not learned from the 1975 article. And this is because the author is bound up in the debate about the “society of the spectacle” and its effects on individual psyches. Cinema here seems to be part of the problem, not part of the solution. Nevertheless, Kristeva also says in this piece that “the specular transforms the drive into desire, and aggressivity into seduction” (1997, 134). The specular now becomes a displaced form of the unconscious foundation of the psychic apparatus. Cinema thus reveals something about the current nature of the psyche. The specular thought is about an excess of subjectivity rather than about the basis of an insight into cinema and filmmaking. The cinema is distant, not immediate, in the life of the subject. Even so, this is only part of the story. For the lekton is still there, as is the semiotic in Eisenstein and Godard. The potential is there, in effect, for expanding our understanding/experience of cinema; it is now a matter of working through this. But what, in relation to cinema, is the society of the spectacle all about? A look at Debord’s theory in more detail will allow us to begin to understand the force of Kristeva’s position concerning the image.

The Spectacle as the Sign of an Ontological Shift? The image is fundamental in Guy Debord’s theory of the society of the spectacle where the spectacle is defined as a “social relation among people, mediated by images” (Debord 1994, para. 4). As with Rousseau, the festival for Debord would overcome the opacity normally encountered in every representation as a form of mediation. Festival reveals the truth that representation, as a virtual reality, keeps in the dark. With the critique of the spectacle, however, the issue is no longer about truth as the real being hidden by representation; it is about representation as the virtual image not just taking the place of the real, but becoming real itself (becoming a thing). If Rousseau’s question is epistemological,

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in the sense that the subject is presented with a distorted version of the object, in the more recent case, the claim is that there is no longer any object other than forms of representation: we therefore could be dealing with an ontological shift that signals the end of the dominance of the Platonic age based in appearance and reality, reality and image. So the image is central. The spectacle is a “Weltanchauung which has become actual, materially translated” (Debord 1994, para. 5). Debord speaks in certain passages as though mediation evokes something immediate. But the tone changes, and we find that the spectacle “is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society” (para. 6). Society itself is unreal. Or rather, this is a society in which the difference between real and unreal is no longer relevant. Therefore, “One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle to actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle which inverts the real is in fact produced. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle . . . reality rises up within the spectacle and the spectacle is real” (para. 8). And in a key passage, Debord affirms that “[c]onsidered in its own terms, the spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life as mere appearance” (para. 10). There is nothing hidden in the social form that is the spectacle: “that which appears is good, and that which is good appears” (para. 12). The spectacle is also inextricably tied to the commodity as fetishistic (one commodity refers only to another and so on, ad infinitum) and as pure appearance. For this reason, Debord says that the commodity is the spectacle par excellence. When Kristeva comes to read Sartre in light of the society of the spectacle, the uniqueness of her position begins to show through. Indeed, two conceptions of reality are now at stake: one that is virtual and as such is not real (the psychic image that gives rise to fantasy), and another that has come to be real despite being virtual (media images). The best way to bring out this distinction is to look at aspects of Sartre’s text, L’Imaginaire (1940/1986) and at Kristeva’s response to it in La révolte intime (1997, 303-334).

The Sartrian Image as a Critique of the Spectacular Image Sartre is more interested in what an image is itself and less in how images play themselves out in social reality. Thus, the image, Sartre declares at an early stage in L’Imaginaire, is not another reality; it is not a simulacrum; it is not an object in its own right, but is a nothingness (néant). To assume that the image is a simulacrum is to commit the error of the “illusion of immanence” (illusion d’immanence) (1986, 17). This is the key point, the point that Kristeva finds the most intriguing and important in L’Imaginaire, and she is, in La révolte intime, willing to endorse Sartre’s position even though the philosopher is skeptical of any theory of the unconscious. For Kristeva, the image as nothingness confirms her view

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that the image cannot be a thing, even though technologies of the image turn it into one by refusing its unreality (1997, 319–320). Sartre argues, then, that there may be an image of reality (of the thing, object, individual, etc.), but there is no reality of the image. Again, Kristeva agrees because, similarly, there is no reality of fantasy. To make fantasy into a reality is to make it a thing, just as the society of the spectacle makes media images things and denies an original. And so, the image is not a different version of the object, neither should an image be confused with a perception. In a perception of the Parthenon one will be able to distinguish the number of columns and will probably be interested in making this distinction. In an image of the Parthenon, on the other hand, the number of columns is quite irrelevant; for in this case the “columnness” of columns is the important and interesting thing as far as the image qua image is concerned.7 The imaging consciousness, then, is not a perception. The latter is analogical, being formed from sense data deriving from objects in external reality. It is thus the basis of a thetic consciousness, or a consciousness founded on the subject-object relation. An image, by contrast, is a “nonthetic” consciousness, a consciousness without an object. Once again, this accords with Kristeva’s view of a genuinely fantasmatic object. With regard to an image, careful distinctions need to be made when dealing with various forms of representation. A photograph thus has two aspects as far as its image is concerned. One aspect is the photograph as physical object; the other is the photograph as image. With a painting, things are similar: there is a clear distinction between the physical object of a perception and an image. The perception of the physical object that has been assigned the task of representing it is quite different from the imaging consciousness. And this implies that the image qua image—or imaging consciousness—is indifferent to the physical form of representation. The image, then, transcends its incarnation. This means, too, that an image has a specific relation to presence, such that when, as Sartre puts it in the very opening lines of L’Imaginaire, an image of a friend is produced in the mind, it is the friend who is the object of consciousness, not the image. An image is not, then, some kind of container within which a content (presence of a friend) is housed. On the contrary, the image qua image, is the presence of the friend in consciousness. Or, rather, the image is the consciousness as such of the friend, or of what is imaged. Whether this image appears immediately in the mind as a memory, or in a representation makes no difference to the imaging consciousness. The imaged is always an object of an imaging consciousness, not a representation; for, to repeat, the imaged is consciousness of what is imaged. By way of illustration, Sartre refers to the portrait of Charles VIII: It is him that we see, not the painting, and yet we present him as not being there: we have reached him by the “image,” “by the intermediary” of the painting. We now see that the relation that consciousness presents in the imaging attitude, between the portrait and the original is literally magical. (1986, 53)

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Charles VIII is “there” through the image, even though to be “there” entails not being there in person. Even though Charles VIII is not there in person, the imaging consciousness brings him there—into presence. Through the image, one is able to say at one and the same time, “Charles VIII is both down there in the past and here” (1986, 53). Presence as image is the nonpresence as reality, as object. In the imaging consciousness, the portrait as a series of brush strokes does not exist; there is instead only the image as the presence of the king. In perception, only the portrait exists as physical object in the world, and the king is absent. Sartre’s thesis aims to show how important it is that perception and image not be confused. To think the image of a painting is not to think it as a painted image. In a painting of Pierre, says Sartre, Pierre is not thought as the image of the painting; the painting is not an image of Pierre. Pierre appears as absent. Through a similar logic an image as an imitation is not an analogon of what is imitated; the imitation, in other words, is not a separate, objective entity. Thus, the imitation of Maurice Chevalier does not produce a separate image in the mind that may then be compared with the imitated singer. Rather, the imitation is made by signs given by the imitator and these signs evoke Maurice Chevalier himself. In short, the imitator is Maurice Chevalier. As such, imitation evokes, according to Sartre, the possessed of primitive dances rituals (1986, 64). Such is further support for Kristeva’s approach to the extent that for her, too, an image is not itself a thing, but a way in which psychic space is articulated. There is no psychic space, on the one hand, and images, on the other. Thus a visual sign in general is an evocation. As such, Sartre’s argument implies, it brings what is envisaged into presence. An evocation qua evocation is thus entirely transparent. The sign of a man brings the man into presence as an image. It matters little whether this sign is conventionalized or whether it is iconic; the effect is the same; namely, to put consciousness in touch with what is evoked independently of the evocation. In short, evocation is a way of being in imagination; such a capacity is necessary in order that arts such as theater and fiction can work successfully as theater and as fiction; for it has to be possible to engage in make-believe (and to extricate oneself from it), and this, Kristeva implies, is what is becoming more difficult in the society of the spectacle. Truly imaginary reading, then, is not first a reading of the words, then a transporting of the reader into an imaginary world. Reading fiction in the Sartrian mode is not to be made aware of style, or of sentence formation. On the contrary, to read fiction is to be transported (metaphorized?) into another world; it is to be in another world. A knowledge of the fictive world does not derive either from the meaning of words, or from what words signify. No amount of effort is likely to make a world arise out of “office,” “third floor,” “building,” “suburb” (1986, 129). A very different effect ensues, however, when one reads in Sartre’s example that “he hastily descended the three floors of the building” (129–130). Here, words cease to be signifiers and become the

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intended thing itself. In this formulation, the words evoke a world and are effaced in the evocation. In Sartre’s version of the phenomenological concept of intentionality, the object of affect is in consciousness. Thus joy is the joy of something, just as hate is the hatred of something. But this, Sartre says, is also the consciousness of something. In other words, affectivity is affective consciousness—not in the reflexive or “intellectualist” sense of consciousness in which a metalanguage would be opened up, but in the sense that consciousness is the access to the affect, or emotion, as affect. Or again, consciousness is the affective investment in an object such that the union of consciousness and a lived relation to the object are one and the same thing. In sum: “Consciousness is always transparent to itself; it must therefore be at one and the same time entirely knowledge and entirely affectivity” (1986, 143.). For the Sartrian, there is no affectivity in itself any more than there is consciousness in itself or an image in itself. Language, too, has no existence in itself outside a meaning immediately evoked. There is no reality of affectivity, consciousness, or words. Instead, there is intentionality: consciousness of something. Might there not be word-images, however? Sartre responds quite definitely by saying that words are not images; for when a word becomes an image it ceases to be a sign (word) (166). Although Kristeva leaves to one side the issue of evocation in her reading of Sartre, it is clear that an evocation (or more strongly, an incantation) fits in with the Kristevan theory of psychic space as constituted by the fantasy of an internal life. The question is, How does one control the limits of fantasy so that they do not topple over into hallucination? The idea that, as iconic, the content of the image is present is an illusion. When does the image pass itself off as something real and actual when it is not? When I see Walter Benjamin through Adami’s line drawing evoking his glasses (Adami 1973, 4–5)—when Benjamin is present as image—it is less that Benjamin exists and more that his presence does not depend on the technical virtuosity of the representation. In effect, the representation disappears into the image. This is what is at stake—not Benjamin’s real or unreal existence. Benjamin’s existence would be an issue were the question a technical one of realism and representation, in which case, the drawing could be compared with the known, or existing object of the representation. Here, there is a reality of the representation where existence is at stake. With the image, on the other hand, there is no such duality, as we have seen. Rather, the image is presence (of the thing or entity). Ironically, perhaps, an image is the inkblot or, more profoundly, the image is present in a Turner painting much more than in Holbein. Modern painting à la Rothko is, in this sense, a profound study of the image. For it is only with Rothko that we see that indistinctness does not entail a perception of the canvas, or of the paint as such. An image, then, is not an imitation of perception. A superrealist painting does not put us in touch with the object; it is not transparent, however clear and focused it might be. For like all realism, it is an

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imitation of perception and calls on the spectator to marvel at the virtuosity of technique. The image, by contrast, is born of the subtlest evocation; often by an evocation that is barely one. The image is thus very much on the side of the ephemeral and no doubt of the idealist side of things. But ideal, too, is ephemeral like the image and is destined to disappear with the spectacle. Thus, Kristeva says that under the domination of the spectacle “the consciousness of the object as an ideality disappears” (1997, 315). Ideality and the image mean, in the example given by Sartre (1986, 133), that the words “a beautiful woman” evoke the image of beauty, an image that is not reducible to a real body as object. Words evoke the body, which becomes the canvas through which the image of beauty appears. Or again, form and volume—shape, density, and size—is simply the medium of the body itself, a body that does not exist in perception but only in image. This presence of the body in image, Sartre calls the imagination: The act of imagination . . . is a magical act. It is an incantation destined to make appear the object one is thinking about, the thing one desires, such that one can take possession of it. There is in this act always something imperious and child-like. (1986, 239; emphasis added) A similar sentiment can be found in Barthes speaking on photography— Barthes, as we know, having dedicated Camera Lucida to Sartre. What Sartre and Barthes call the magical function of the imaginary is not the same as the image as a virtual reality that Kristeva fears (cf. Kristeva 1997, 234)—the image as thing, as simulacrum—but evokes the essentially double character of the imaginary in the sense of “both-and”: both self and other, one and the many, being and nonbeing, word and meaning, death and life, and so on. As an incantation, the image in the imaginary function defies the existential level of perception. The latter always implies the division of subject and object, whereas no such division is implied at the level of the imaginary. Incantation, in short, is the transcendence of the subject-object relation. The image-object is a nonreal object (an “objet irréel ” [Sartre 1986, 249, and passim]).

Immediacy and the Image An important issue that remains to be discussed is whether the image is irrevocably tied to representation. I suggest that the underlying logic of Kristeva’s work is to break with such a notion. Like language in the Freudian tradition, the image has always had effects before being the external vehicle of an internal, or otherwise invisible, reality. Kristeva herself confirms as much in Tales of Love when she says that “the subject is not simply an inside facing the referential outside” (1987, 274). But in any case, we only have to recall again that the famous Lacanian mirror image

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is an imago for the child, having an impact on emotional development, before it is a mimetic object, or a representation. The imago contributes to the instantiation of the subject. The subject, we recall from the opening pages of Tales of Love, is an open system, which means that it is open to change and modification in light of new experiences, particularly the experience of love. Before that, of course, Kristeva had spoken of the subject-in-process (on trial), and of the subject as a “work-in-progress,” so that the emphasis is on the subject as always being in formation, not already formed, or posited, as (a certain version of ) phenomenology had implied. It is this process of continuous formation that makes the subject a singularity. If the overall logic of Kristeva’s oeuvre is to give precedence to immediate effects—effects that instantiate—this is because the immediacy of process and of acts, as is said in Tales of Love (1987, 274), takes precedence over static representations. Immediacy is also linked to the image as fantasm, so that the image is differently articulated in Kristeva’s work relative to that of most others, with the possible exception of Deleuze. We need to look at the place of immediacy in more detail. First, the immediate for Kristeva is brought out in her work on love as metaphor and transference, where it refers to primary identification, whereas the mediate is linked to the symbolic order. Desire is metonymic (displacement), while love is metaphoric. Metaphor enables a “crystallization of fantasy” (1987, 30). Now, we have just seen that fantasy will be the key element in the analysis of the image, so that metaphor (= immediacy), fantasy, and image come to form a series of key terms. Second, a poetics of the semiotic as immediacy would be very different from a poetics based on a model in the symbolic, precisely because the symbolic is the sphere of mediation. Such an aesthetics will be constitutive rather than constituted, inventive rather than given, based in the “synthetic” punctum (the immediate sting of a detail) of the image, rather than in the narrative studium of analysis (Barthes). Even when Kristeva interpreted color in Giotto in her early work, it was always a matter of the immediacy of the drives evoked by color as the “void of figuration” (1984, 231). Color decenters the ego, since it is not a matter of representation produced analytically, nor is it a matter of the precedence over the image of narrative, as produced by the symbolic (1984a, 215). Third, although an image cannot be reduced to color, it is clear that part of the immediacy of the drive dimension of color spills over into an appreciation of the power of the noncliché image. An image, strictly speaking, is irreducible to the narrative system, even if it also supports this system in cinema. Once the drive dimension is brought to bear on the image, the latter ceases to be a straightforward object of thought; for it is also a condition of the possibility of thought. The mistake has been to move too readily into analyzing images as though they were based in representation. Perhaps Kristeva’s approach to the

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image through the idea of the society of the spectacle also implies that the image is a representation that evokes a narrative, but this is not in keeping with the originality of Kristeva’s contribution to the theme once the semiotic (drives) is brought into the frame.

Virtual and the Actual of the Image For his part, Deleuze defines the crystal image (recall Kristeva’s “crystallization”) as one in which the actual and virtual images intersect; this is what Kristeva would call “the imaginary.” The movement-image (for example, in Westerns and action films) is an actual image, in which time is virtual (it does not appear as such). This means that time is indirectly present in the movement-image. The virtual element would constitute the imaginary dimension, if Deleuze believed in it; but he does not. The crystal image brings together the actual and the virtual in one image: “The imaginary is the crystal-image. It’s the key factor in modern cinema” (Deleuze 1995, 67). Now, a virtual image is not an object, much less a signifier; indeed, it is a nothingness—the very definition Sartre, and so Kristeva, give to the image as purely imaginary. As virtual, time cannot appear in an actual image (a movement-image), much less be reduced to time as a present moment. However, a crystal image provides for time to become actual, and for actual images to become virtual. Such is the challenge for the imaginary; for the nothingness of the image as fantasy nevertheless has an actuality, which means that it can be conceived of, if not perceived. An actual image in a mirror entails a virtual image of the one whose reflection it is. Or if the latter is also actual, then the virtual image is the image of the two actual images. But this virtual image itself could become actual, and so on, ad infinitum. Time, here, refers to the nonlinear, nonchronological time of Bergsonian duration, where the series of “nows” gives way to something outside representation, outside consciousness. For Deleuze, true durational time is cinematographic, whereas the time—or more precisely, the space—of fixed, frozen moments is photographic. Subjectivity and virtuality are enveloped in cinematographic time, while objectivity and perception are related, but external, to time as spatialization, as the “frozen” moment. This is the version of time that is missed in the image cliché (Kristeva’s “standardized” image, turned into a thing); for attention is directed exclusively at what the image represents, which is to say, at the level at which it is an object for perception. Both Kristeva and Deleuze head in the same direction here, although, it is true, Kristeva maintains a psychoanalytic stance that Deleuze rejects. Nevertheless, as I have suggested elsewhere (see Lechte 2003), the kind of psychoanalytic framework Kristeva works with is ultimately heterodox in its emphasis on the subject as a subject-in-process, a work-in-progress, an open system, a singularity. In each of these characterizations of the subject, is it not clear that time is durational, therefore virtual, but open to becoming actual before returning to virtuality?

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This is Deleuze’s cinematic time writ large. Analytical time (the series of “nows” or present moments) gives way to the synthetic time of the cinema. What is the significance of the term, “synthetic” here? Before concluding, let me offer a brief outline of the synthetic in relation to Kristeva’s idea of subjectivity.

The Synthetic and the Poetic By “synthetic” is to be understood, creative and instantiating processes, as opposed to “analytical,” which attempts to establish the nature of things as already given. Synthetic also evokes complexity theory in which the emphasis is on emergent processes. Katherine Hayles, who, as one of the first to map the research developments in Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life, has used certain insights from this area to interpret literary texts, and points out that complexity is founded on “emergence,” or a capacity to evolve, and this is a synthetic process (1999, 243). By comparison, Artificial Intelligence aims to replicate and thus imitate human intelligence once and for all. It takes a firmly analytical approach (238–239). With regard to the cinema image, a synthetic perspective ignores the usual analytical strictures concerning the certainty of plot development, chronology, and characterization. It is as though interest were in the contingency and chance events of the real, much like some surrealist works. Deleuze’s philosophy of the cinema image emphasizes a synthetic approach, and is, despite appearances, close to Kristeva on this theme. Deleuze opposes a phenomenological approach to the cinema image, one based in natural perception where “movement is still related to poses” (1986, 57), or is related to shots, as with photographs that “freeze” the moment. For the philosopher, movement in cinema is not an illusion, it is real. From a synthetic perspective, subjectivity is defined as the self-formative activity of a subject composed of both vital drives and symbolic capacities. If elements of personality exist from the very beginning of life, these are subject to transformation in life, particularly in experiences related to love and art. Subjectivity is not reducible to perception because perception is spatial and freezes things in “poses.” Perception is spatial and analytical.8 Subjectivity is rather synthetic, in time, in movement and duration, in flux, “in process,” to evoke Kristeva. In sum, subjectivity is synthetic. Time as experienced in subjectivity, especially memory, is duration as outlined by Bergson (1993, 212–213). For its part, memory constitutes time, not the reverse. Time is not the minutes that pass in perception, but the duration that is produced by events themselves, and within which subjects are caught up. As cinema is the art form uniquely based in time, cinema images produce events, memory, and subjectivity. The cinema image articulates time and becomes the form of time’s incarnation as memory, just as photography is the articulation of space and perception.

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Semiotic as Synthesis Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic (1984b, 13–106) can be thus understood as a synthetic and creative process based in affect. It brings her work in touch with Deleuze’s. To understand the cinema image in-depth is to see it as a dynamic force in the formation of subjectivity. The semiotic, as we have seen, is a drive-based notion, composed of energy charges. This is very close to what Deleuze calls the image to the extent that the semiotic, as a nonconceptual, synthetic feature, is not a representation. Kristeva describes the semiotic as having its basis in the Greek khora, which is, she says: “a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases.” It is constituted by “movements and their ephemeral stases” (1984b, 25). It is not a position or positioning of any kind. The relevance of the semiotic is difficult to grasp if one presupposes that the cinema image takes place in mediated reality reliant on perception, while the semiotic khora might be assumed to be based in a real body. However, it is precisely the fluidity of the passage between khora and image that is proposed. The khora is the energy flow simultaneously present in both body and image. The body is constituted in its exposure to images: that is, it is formed in and through images. In Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat White (1998), much of the impact of the film would be lost if attention was directed solely to the narrative—such as it is. Instead, expressions on lined faces, the gold teeth, the flamboyant clothing, the elaborately decorated vehicles, the sounds of gravelly voices, and so forth, make the film what it is and contribute to the constitution, semiotically, of the subjectivity of the protagonists and spectators. The semiotic thus instantiates the characters; they are not already there, as symbolic cutouts. This is precisely the effect of synthetic processes.

Conclusion Out of the discussion in this chapter, the key point that is reiterated is that subjectivity as related to the image is neither essentially photographic nor symbolic, but derives from the dynamic processes of time and the semiotic drives. And these are most clearly evident in cinema. Perception, based in space and the eternal pose of photography, connects with the symbolic order, which is analytical, while the semiotic, giving rise to the rhythms of time, connects with cinema. But even Sartre in his deliberations of the image is careful to separate perception from subjectivity as such, while perception is linked to objectivity. In short, for Sartre, the image is essentially subjective, even if it also has to parade in phenomenological guise as consciousness. If Kristeva’s approach to the image is via the notion of the fantasm as articulated by psychoanalysis, it is also true that her approach, in keeping with Sartre’s, preserves the virtual character of the image as a nothingness, Kristeva’s fear being that this virtuality will be turned into a simulacrum in the media

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barrage of the society of the spectacle. Although Deleuze is uninterested in the imaginary as a producer of images, the distinction between virtual and actual is sustained, and the virtual image retains its status of virtuality, even if it becomes difficult to distinguish between virtual and actual in the crystal image. Finally, once time and its image ceases to be reduced to perception, to the photographic and to the symbolic as essentially analytical—that is, once time ceases to be spatialized—it must be grasped through the dynamic framework of synthetic processes characteristic of an “open system,” the subject-in-process, the subject-as-a-work-in-progress, and as a singularity—that is, through time-based processes. This insight, common to both the work of Kristeva and Deleuze, can then serve as the basis for creative and original research on time in the future.

Notes 1. This does not mean of course that the term “image” is not evoked in writings about Kristeva. Just the opposite: compare “images of melancholy,” the “image of the female body,” images of gender, and so forth. It rather means that the theoretical impetus related to Kristeva’s approach to the image is rarely addressed. 2. See, however, Lechte (1990a, 1990b, 1995) for examples using Kristeva’s theoretical frame in studies of the image. 3. Speaking of the “mental image,” it is notable that Mark Hansen, in his critique of Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema, argues that the “time-image,” for which Deleuze has become best known, is limited because it is situated within a “purely mental space,” which is in fact that of the brain as receptacle of the cinema inscription (cf. “the brain is the screen”) (2004, 593). He then argues that recent developments of cognitive science have refuted such a passive view of the mental image/brain. Without being able to develop this point in this chapter, it is worthwhile keeping it in mind as we discuss the relations between Kristeva, Sartre, and Deleuze on the (mental) image. 4. Even though it does not exactly accord with the traditional way of interpreting khora, it must now be envisaged that it has to do with time even more than space; for to spatialize it implies linking it to both perception and the symbolic, whereas Kristeva’s trajectory, as we know, is to give it a definite semiotic flavor that is at the antipodes of the symbolic. Moreover, we note that for Lacan, perception is linked to the symbolic through the lack of castration represented by objet petit a—that is, perception in itself is never entirely satisfying, so the subject is induced to go beyond it. Interestingly, Lacan makes this point most strongly in his analysis of seeing and the look in relation to the painted image in particular and to images in general (1964, 65–109). 5. Here, we should recall that a key aspect of Jean Mitry’s discussion (1999) of Eisenstein’s work (as well as that of other filmmakers) is in terms of “rhythm and montage.” The “rhythm” of a film, for Mitry, approximates the underlying temporal ordering of the film’s articulation, especially in relation to the way

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action is presented. Mitry, without knowing it, thus alludes to the Kristevan notion of the “semiotic khora.” 6. Nietzsche and, after him, Kristeva define monumental time as the time of the eternal recurrence of the fundamental rhythms of nature and society (including the biorhythms of the human species) (see Kristeva 1986). 7. For a commentary on this, see Casey (1981, 139–168). For Casey, it seems problematic to attempt to separate perception from imaginary without falling for the illusion of immanence. 8. This point may need revision in light of recent developments in cognitive science, but still has significant purchase (see Hansen 2004, 593 n. 10).

References Adami, V. 1973. Derrière le miroir. Paris: Adrien Maeght. Bergson, H. 1993. Matière et mémoire: Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit. Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France. Black Cat White. 1998. Dir. Emir Kusturica. USA Films. Casey, Edward S. 1981. “Sartre on Imagination,” in Paul Arthur Schilp, ed., The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. In The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 16, 139-168. LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Debord, G. 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson Smith. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1995. Negotiations, 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. Hansen, Mark. 2004. “The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life.” Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring), 584–626. Hayles, N. K. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1977. “Ellipse sur la frayeur et la séduction spéculaire.” Polylogue. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1984a. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Trans. Thomas S. Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. ———. 1984b. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York : Columbia University Press. ———. 1986. “Women’s Time.” The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 188–193. ———. 1987. Tales of Love. Trans. L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

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———. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996a. Sens et non-sens de la révolte: Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse I, Paris: Fayard. ———. 1996b. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1997. La révolte intime: Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse II. Paris: Fayard. Lacan, J. 1964. Quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychoanalyse. Paris: Seuil. Lechte, J. 1990a. “Art, Love and Melancholy in the Work of Julia Kristeva.” In Abjection, Melancholia and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva. Ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin. London: Routledge, 24-41. ———. 1990b. “Kristeva and Holbein, Artist of Melancholy.” British Journal of Aesthetics 30 (4): 342–350. ———. 1995. “Translating Abstraction.” Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts 3:25–35. ———. 2003. “Love, Life, Complexity and the ‘Flesh’ in Kristeva’s Writing Experience.” In The Kristeva Critical Reader. Ed. J. Lechte and M. Zournazi. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press, 185-201. Mitry, J. 1999. “Cinematic Rhythm.” The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema. Trans. Christopher King. London: Indiana University Press, 104-109. Rocchio, R. F. 1999. Cinema of Anxiety: A Psychoanalysis of Italian Neorealism. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sartre, J.-P. 1940/1986. L’Imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard. Žižek, S. 1991. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.

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6 The Darkroom of the Soul

 Robyn Ferrell

There are few other contemporary theorists who allow an understanding of meaning in both its aspects, of sign and subjectivity. Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic semiotics can bring out what is at stake in certain aesthetic questions, and provide a vehicle for linking these with political questions that may animate their production. In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva writes, “Modern man is losing his soul, but he does not know it, for the psychic apparatus is what registers representations and their meaningful values for the subject. Unfortunately, that darkroom needs repair” (1995, 8). I want to explore this “darkroom of the soul” in the context of the ubiquitous images of press photography. I want to do so to bring out the sophistication of Kristeva’s semiotics for understanding the deep structure of our time—an era colonized by the image, and cultivating a subjectivity formed to fit.

I Barthes saw in the temporality of photography a new “space-time category ‘spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority,’ the photograph being an illogical conjunction of the here-now and there-then.” Photography shows us a prior reality, and even if it does give us an impression of ideality, it is never experienced as purely illusory: it is a document of a “reality from which we are sheltered.” (Kristeva 1989, 315) Photography can be distinguished then from cinema, Kristeva notes, because of “their different ways of grasping reality”; cinema “is not presented as an evocation 97

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of a past reality, but as a fiction the subject is in the process of living.” The possibility of cinema as a visible language implicitly emerges from her discussion, since the conjunction of images allows for the analogy with syntax and narrative in written texts. “The isolated image (or photograph) is an utterance; when arranged with others, it produces a narration” (1989, 316). This suggests that photography too can be visible language, since it can be thought of as an utterance. The analysis of the photograph as embodying two moments, the here-now with the there-then, is already constituted by this impossibility, in the direction of fiction. Yet, its putative relation to reality somehow seems to cut short its development into a discourse. It is as if our susceptibility for the realism of the photograph entails that it be interpreted reductively. The privilege of the press photograph is, as Barthes has argued, to suggest a reality unmediated by representation. Naturally, this is a feint, for however realistic it appears, the photograph remains an image. “What is the content of the photographic message? What does the photograph transmit? By definition, the scene itself, the literal reality” (1981, 196). In order to move from the reality to its photograph it is in no way necessary to divide up this reality into units and to constitute these units as signs. . . . Certainly the image is not the reality but at least it is its perfect analogon and it is exactly this analogical perfection which, to common sense, defines the photograph. (1981, 196) In particular, the press photograph professes to be “a mechanical analogue of reality.” In other “analogical” reproductions—drawing, painting, cinema, theater—the style comes as a supplementary message in these genres, Barthes argues. Whereas: In front of a photograph, the feel of “denotation” or, if one prefers, of analogical plenitude, is so great that the description of a photograph is literally impossible: . . . to describe is thus not simply to be imprecise or incomplete, it is to change structures, to signify something different from what is shown. (1981, 197–198) This leads to the formulation of the paradox of photography, which is a “structural and ethical paradox”: “[w]hen one wants to be ‘neutral,’ ‘objective,’ one strives to copy reality meticulously, as though the analogical were a factor of resistance against the investment of values (such at least is the definition of aesthetic ‘realism’)” (1981, 199). Barthes goes on to consider the ways in which these appearances are deceptive; the press photograph does connote which we can infer from our knowledge that it has been “chosen composed constructed and treated according to professional, aesthetic, or ideological norms,” likewise it is read,

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“connected more or less consciously by the public that consumes it to a traditional stock of signs” (1981, 198). A potent example is the press picture taken of “the moment of death,” the first execution of a woman on death row, and published in a newspaper of the time (reprinted in Kobré and Brill 2004). While the commentary freely admits to the artifice, even the cunning, of its capture—the camera on the leg and so on is detailed in the caption—this is the more to mobilize its uncanny realism, the truth of its depiction. The photojournalist steals the real from under the noses of those who censor it. Ironically, the methods of its production are more clearly seen in this photograph than in many others because the blurring, produced by its method of photographing, alerts us to the possibility of “trick” photography. Barthes’s “ethical paradox” is foreshadowed in many aspects of this photo: the illegality of it, the sensationalism of the death, and the attendant anxiety about capital punishment. It is as well to remember that the connotation of the photograph is “neither ‘natural’ nor ‘artificial’ but historical, or, if it be preferred, ‘cultural.’ Its signs are gestures, attitudes, expressions, colors, or effects, endowed with certain meanings by virtue of the practice of a certain society: the link between signifier and signified remains, if not unmotivated, at least entirely historical. (1981, 206) This allows Barthes to rejoin his general conviction that “[s]ignification is the dialectical movement which resolves the contradiction between cultural and natural man” (1981, 206). He writes: This purely “denotative” status of the photograph, the perfection and plenitude of its analogy, in short its “objectivity,” has every chance of being mythical. (1981, 198; emphasis added) By mythical he means carrying the structure of signification that makes meaning possible at all. The faith in the reality of the photograph is a cultural underpinning, supporting the intelligibility of contemporary first-world sign-systems.

II If the photograph is mythical in this structuralist sense, photojournalism would nevertheless be regarded in common sense as the antithesis of the sacred. But this is surely the point. The conviction that reality is not a question of faith but of empirically tested knowledge is, ironically, the article of faith. Kristeva’s explicit interpretations of the sacred draw it into this generic question for realism. The sacred, as announced by Kristeva in her beautiful epistolary exchange with Catherine Clément, The Feminine and the Sacred, is variously “life bearing meaning” (2001, 14); “the mystery of the emergence of

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meaning (and its celebration)” (13); “the impossible and nevertheless sustained connection between life and meaning” (14), which Kristeva—reading Arendt at the time, she admits—distinguishes from the technocratic “life without questions,” the totalitarianism that seeks destruction of life, and the zoos that would leave life in the realm of the naturally instrumental. The sacred thereby occupies an intense place in Kristeva’s scheme for understanding the production of meaning. The sacred is not the semiotic, nor the choric, but the possibility of retrojecting these out of the necessary acts of meaning in which we live our embodiment, including our soul. She reminds us of the Lacanian parable of how meaning is produced from out of life, that is, out of the drives of the body, “the sacred as a sacrifice,” “the one that inscribes language in the body, meaning in life” by means of a “cut,” a prohibition on a desire, “[a] prohibition on murder and incest, it is experienced by the soma as an act of violence” (2001, 15). To read the press photograph according to this function of the sacred would be to read it as revealing and even celebrating the event of life bearing meaning. I can think of no better illustration paradoxically than the dark evocations of photojournalism from worlds at war. Such a line of thought might clarify the inherent religiosity felt to be invested in the famous image of the twin towers burning on September 11, 2001. With its iconography of crucifixion, and the surrounding rhetoric of the axis of evil and the sanctity of American life, a reality sprung out of the image of apocalyptic change: “the world will never be the same.” In more ways than many, this “media event” raises knowingness of the production of the real through images; for example, many have remarked on how this photo (and the video of the same events) are “like a disaster movie,” and one feels assured, given the accident of its spectacular capture, that armed with foreknowledge, the terrorists arranged their own footage in case this photo opportunity was somehow missed. The myth of the separation of reality and image is paradoxically so strong that most viewers have no trouble identifying the press photograph as a depiction of what happened. We do so without awareness of its metaphysical origin, and invariably without skepticism as to its reference. It is as it purports to be. But aliveness to this mythical meaning structuring our view might come from considering the myths of others. For example, in the iconography of the Central Desert painting of indigenous Australian artists, the sacred meanings of the world are both displayed and encrypted. Eric Michaels, a passionate advocate for the Aboriginal artists of the Central Desert, has written, “These paintings make the claim that the landscape does speak and that it speaks directly to the initiated, and explains not only its own occurrence, but the order of the world” (1987, 143). Despite the time he has spent in the desert with the painters, Michaels admits he has trouble accepting the claim of the paintings “in reality.” The press

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photograph might prove his way into it, since it makes precisely the same claim; that reality speaks directly to the initiated in the photographic images, explaining its own occurrence and the order of the world. For example, in the photographs of 9/11, we see not only the burning skyscrapers, which we accept as factual and not simulated, as they would be in a movie sequence, and we also see a sequence of images that codes the event as cataclysmic, in the manner of that genre. We see sacrilege, we see historical forces at work, in the transmission of pixels to a screen or dots to a page. Such is the action also accorded to the icon in Byzantine art, which brings the devotee into direct communication with the sacred. This is dismissed today as superstition. Like other examples of instrumental thought, the belief in the reference of the photograph betrays its own religiosity, not only as a record of the real, but also as a fundamentalism that believes it is the only possible one.

III The psyche is an apparatus, Kristeva tells us, one that registers representations and their meaningful values for the subject. The psychic apparatus is akin to a darkroom, as a process by which sensory data can be produced as meaningful signs. Kristeva follows Freud here in depicting the psyche as a mechanism to be understood, asking, How does it work? Freud, in the essay on the “mystic writing pad” (1925), wrestled with the model of such an apparatus; what mechanism could both receive fresh registrations while still maintaining a record of previous impressions? He found a simple illustration in the case of the child’s toy, the Wunderblock that records an impression on the waxed paper cover and also on the wax tablet beneath. But Kristeva’s analogy has the benefit of technological advance; the psyche can now be thought of as a darkroom, that seclusion in which the photographer develops and processes the film on which has already been recorded, by the action of the camera, an impression of light. Just as the photographer influences the resulting image by varying a multitude of elements in the process (the aperture, the film speed, the developer, the enlarger), so the psyche produces meaning in images by subjecting it to the structures of desire. The analogy works even more strictly with the advent of digital photography: the camera is now an apparatus that can include the darkroom, as the psyche embodies the registration and interpretation of images. And the light is now recorded using not the analog techniques of film but the digital binaries of the pixel. Since meaning, too, can be understood on that binary model (in the structuralist tradition, at least), the process of photography is today an even more perfect analogy for the psychical, producing its “meaningful values” by contrasting a mark merely with what it is not. The common factor, in both Freud’s example of the Wunderblock and Kristeva’s of the darkroom, is to conceive of the psyche as a space of representations,

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and to infer from the sense impression a mind that is populated with images. Indeed, it also may be to infer from the habit of projection a thoroughly produced image complete with aesthetic and ethical value. The photograph is a good analog for the thought or other mental representation, because it includes in its instance a presentation of reality along with evidence of its production, for those who care to investigate it. In effect, it is the assumed access to reality—through the senses—that makes these representations believable. And in both cases, the psyche and the camera, the problem of interpretation (or the subjective) is disguised by this realist tendency, that is, the credibility of our own feelings and thoughts along with the credibility of the scene in the photograph. We are convinced of the truth of some things (facts) just as we believe the photograph records the reality of those things it depicts. This faith we have in some images—faith we are obliged to have, in order to join the “lifeworld”— belies the production of “meaningful values” that upholds their veracity. The image is deceptive, in this sense, through and through. If we stop there, content with the image as representing the real, then we accept this laminate of desire as fact. In effect, we prefer our “internal reality” over the outer world, a working definition of psychosis. Yet this presupposes that desire and reality can be prised apart. Neither Kristeva nor Lacan, who in this she follows, allow that it can. The ego, through whose lens all thought is refracted, is located “beside itself,” in the “field of the Other.” For Freud, all thought was representation; this was its function in effect, to represent the force of the impulse/drive, experienced in the body as affect, in the forum of the mind where it might become subject to the possibility of satisfaction. In Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, for example, he describes an instinct as the demand made on the mind for work by the body as a result of its connection with it (see in Ferrell 1996, chap. 2). The drive engenders an affective connection in the production of a representation. Photography could be viewed like other genres that claim verisimilitude— the biography or the autobiography. But it is also a peculiarly virulent kind of narrative-myth; one that represents desire as always already accomplished. In this respect it is like the dream, profiting from the choric satisfaction of the hallucination. Engaging Freud’s semiotics of the dream-text, whose “primary process” thinking allowed for a genre unlike conscious rational speech but full of meaning and motivation, Kristeva refers us to the interpretation of dreams in both Revolution in Poetic Language (1984) and in Language: The Unknown (1989) as a pivotal analysis bringing formal language into the drama of the speaking subject. The trick of the photograph—for example, of Barthes’s here-now in the wake of his mother’s death holding the there-then of her living in her photograph (see 1981, 65–66)—is that it “always carries its referent with itself ” (5), even though this is an impossibility. It can thereby deny contradiction without being psychotic.

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IV Realism is a genre, since it is a species of representation. And like all genres, it describes a desire. The separation of the reality from its image is a peculiarly European metaphysical commitment, one that more precisely separates the subject from its objects in the image. Technological thinking begins in metaphysics, as a style of thought in which the subject is opposed to its object, and ends with the generalizing of the subject’s purposes to the means/ends thinking of instrumental rationality. Indeed, the image is arguably a potent psychic technology for thinking the world in terms of its technological potential, that is, as means to ends. By this I mean, it is the image that can direct representation toward desire, express in the object a desire accomplished, in the most crude Freudian terms of wish fulfillment. Kristeva writes, “The rapture of the hallucination originates in the absence of boundaries between pleasure and reality, between truth and falsehood.” But at the same time, and perhaps because of this, in European philosophy the image is spared the rigor of the concept. The image is spared for the affect without which we cannot think, even though it is sacrificed to thought at a certain point in the logic of instrumental rationality. The image retains the color of this sacrifice, and remains the receptacle of it, of all that I am drawn to and connected with, despite my putative separation from my objects. This explains perhaps why images, and aesthetic appreciation in general, are so sacred to the European, and why today they emerge as the obvious intellectually respectable way to spirituality—the modern bourgeois urban subject desires to “know something about art,” going to galleries, collecting, and so forth. The epiphany of Western abstraction would be the imageless image—the Rothko painting, for example—that asserts only a logic of sensation. Kristeva writes in several places of the mystery of life and meaning that is joined in the sacred, but “new maladies of the soul” emerge in her diagnosis of the modern scene: The body conquers the invisible territory of the soul. . . . You are overwhelmed with images, They carry you away, they replace you, you are dreaming. (1995, 8) Pleasure and reality principles become permanently collapsed. This change in the psychical order could be momentous enough to be a new form of subjectivity, where the question shifts from “To be or not to be?” to “To take a pill or to talk?” Kristeva discerns the body, or at least a particular secularism in neuroscience and biology, to have called into question the function of the psychic apparatus: Why have a soul? This ambivalence about a certain primacy of the body is important, because it highlights that the psychoanalytic drive was never mere body, but

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always a concept designed to activate the relationship between body and mind. The drive is the body’s representative, to be found in, but not confined to, psychical representation. If drugs do not take over your life, your wounds are “healed” with images, and before you can speak about your states of the soul, you drown them in the world of mass media. (1995, 8) This dysphoric representation of the image seems to contrast with the role I have outlined above for the image as a site of the sacred, but this is complicated by what Kristeva understands by the production of meaning. The image is not confined to the semiotic, nor to the chora, of Kristeva’s theorizing. For, as she says, any utterance that signifies is a product of both semiotic and symbolic modalities (1984, 24), a process that is, she tells us, necessarily dialectical. And the image is no less a sign than the written word, in the terms of the science of semiotics. Thus the photograph might suggest a signifying practice that could go beyond “narrative,” “metalanguage,” or “contemplation” to become a “text” (99). Kristeva already grants this status to the “visible language” of painting, quoting Meyer Shapiro. But what of those places where Kristeva appears to dismiss the photograph as a mere ideological salve? “Before you can speak about your states of the soul, you drown them in the world of mass media,” she writes. Does she miss the potency of the photography image as text in favor of the literary prejudice toward articulate conscious thought? In a case study of an artist suffering from this new kind of “narcissistic disorder” she observes in New Maladies of the Soul, the patient finds a cure in the articulation of analysis, a relief that his expressions in collage have not brought him (1995, 25). What does the former have that the latter lacks? Perhaps the answer is, it has the “thetic.” Subject-formation comes about, as she describes in Revolution in Poetic Language, in the double bind of the subject distinguished and separated from its objects in the “thetic,” a structural reflexivity which at the same time displaces into the symbolic the material of its desires (1984, 43). This is to suggest that the analytic cure seeks a differentiation by the subject of its position as subject, from the drives and the objects deriving it.

V The representations of photojournalism are generically ubiquitous and forceful. This genre is often marked by trauma and violence. Photojournalists use their images to arrest the attention of a knowing viewer bombarded with a constant stream of images all soliciting affects of some sort. But the distinction between the representation and its historical event can slip from a reliable grasp, as atrocity and the tendentiousness of its image become more firmly glued together.

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War correspondents have traded on the trauma of the battle to achieve their effect of bringing events from elsewhere to the attention of the reading/viewing public. Sometimes this enterprise is undertaken explicitly to bring to recognition the injustice being done in a part of the world we don’t witness. Kevin Carter’s photograph of the child and the vulture from Sudan is a case in point. In the photograph, a small child squats exhausted and starving in the dust in the foreground of the picture while a vulture watches and waits behind. (This picture can be viewed at www.pdngallery.com/20years/photojournalism/03_kevin_carter.html.) It contains an importantly ambivalent relation to horror and trauma, since it depicts nothing in the present, except the menace of the near future. It is what we bring from our own knowledge of the world—what will happen next—that sickens us in this terrifying image. It won Carter the 1994 Pulitzer Prize. This photograph operates to cultivate the loss of something previously unmissed: the Sudanese other, in the aftermath of European colonialism in Africa. This is an event that exceeds representation for the Western subject, who nevertheless must come to mourn it if there is to be justice. The strength of its success in creating an affect for a representation of an event might be measured in the prestige of the Pulitzer, but also in Carter’s own anguished suicide following the award of the prize. It is clear this photograph became potentially a type of experience for viewers. This photograph makes graphic the place of affects, and thereby of the body, in the production of “information.” Among the accolades came criticism for the culture of the photojournalist, for whom representation became more of an imperative than reality: “The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene,” as the St Petersburg (FL) Times put it. The ethical dilemma arises from an essential connotative property of the photograph that is strangely obscured—the photographer, the body at the scene. The claim to reference and thereby, to reality, is underwritten by a body of human capacities and sensibilities. However, that body is not quite on the scene, and certainly not in the same way as the little child is on the scene. The photographer’s equivocation, perhaps his judgment, that he could do more for the situation by photographing it than by saving the child, is unforgivable not only because of its seeming lack of humanity, but for what it questions about photographic verisimilitude. By invoking the photographer, the image puts into question its own “brute reality.” This causes a disturbance in the epistemological frame that establishes the authority of the photograph. That frame grounds the superstition behind the press photograph as an objective record. Now the access to the real is too direct for comfort. For there to have been revealed a photographer, with ethical choices beyond recording, makes all viewers of the scene complicit in the travesty it represents. The belief in the reality of the scene, that it “really happened,” undermines belief in its photographic objectivity. And this happens at the same time as the

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sacred function of the press photograph demonstrates its objectivity as a “natural” consequence of its reality. This is a genuinely iconoclastic moment.

VI Do we have, then, in this analysis of the darkroom of the soul a more sophisticated version of the so-called primitive anxiety that the photograph will capture your soul? Is the photograph, with its verisimilitude and its ubiquity taken together, capable of producing a new subjectivity threatened with fragility in discerning the difference between images? The juxtaposition of elements in my discussion—the sacred, the image, the photograph, the psychical apparatus— has endeavored to sketch how Kristeva’s “metapsychology” of the production of meaning opens up a discussion of contemporary subjectivity. This allows me to ask, finally, of Carter’s photograph: What soul-body does the image of the little Sudanese child pay testament to? If her life ended there, then what in this new psychic order was its value, and what was owed to her and all the millions of others who are obscured as just so many bodies on the global scene? We need to chart the ethical dimension of this world that collapses the image and the body into self-evident realities. As Kristeva intimates, we need to know this for our own “self ”-preservation, as much as for the good of our souls.

References Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang. Ferrell, Robyn. 1996. Passion in Theory. New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund. 1925. “A Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad.” The Standard Edition. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 19:227–232. Kobré, Ken, and Betsy Brill. 2004. Photojournalism: The Professionals’ Approach, 5th ed. Ed. Betsy Brill. Boston, MA: Focal Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1989. Language: The Unknown. Trans. Anne M. Menke. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia, and Catherine Clément. 2001. The Feminine and the Sacred. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press. Michaels, Eric. 1987. “Afterword” in Warlukurlungu Artists Association, Kuruwarri: Yuendumu Doors. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

7 Julia Kristeva’s Chiasmatic Journeys: From Byzantium to the Phantom of Europe and the End of the World

 Maria Margaroni

Fatal Attractions In her latest detective novel (Meurtre à Byzance 2004) Julia Kristeva opens the figure of a chiasmus at the heart of which a series of encounters take place that, as the novel develops, assume the nature of a fatality.1 Very early on in the novel, Sebastian Chrest-Jones (a contemporary historian of migration who falls in love with the Byzantine princess Anne Comnène) explains the theory of nonseparability, as expounded by a colleague of his, a quantum physicist. “It was enough,” he tells us, “for two objects to cross paths once to remain inseparable for eternity. For ever. Even when in all appearances they seemed absolutely separated in time or space” (2004, 41). According to Sebastian, this theory that postulates the possibility of a chiasmatic crossing of paths across temporal or spatial distance can provide “the key” to a life in excess of life (une sur-vie) and to an “absolute time” that is outside and yet a supplement to ours (41). Meurtre à Byzance attempts to lend substance to this other dimension of time in the context of which otherwise distant or separate entities are experienced simultaneously: “en meme temps” (2004, 57). As the narrator explains, in this temporal simultaneity there are no more boundaries (57). As a result, the eleventh and the twenty-first centuries converge whereas a number of invented and real spaces (that is, Kristeva’s fictional Santa-Barbara, Byzantium, the United States, Europe, Constantinople, Paris and Puy-en-Valais in France, and 107

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Boyana and Plovdiv in Bulgaria) find themselves subjected to a law of attractions that promises to keep their fates entangled “for eternity.” This “law of attractions,” as I have called it, is no other than allegory, Kristeva’s favorite fictional mode, characterized (as Walter Benjamin argues in The Origin of German Tragic Drama) by a melancholic attitude towards history and the past.2 As Benjamin emphasizes, allegorical melancholia does not point to “the emotional condition of the poet or his public” but constitutes, instead, a concrete historical response to the remoteness and irreversibility of the past, the decay of human life, the ruination (or ruin-strewn movement) of history itself (1977, 139). According to Benjamin, “an appreciation of the transience of things . . . is one of the strongest impulses of allegory” (223). Behind this appreciation, however, lies a concern with “rescuing” the transient; in other words, a desire to redeem what is dead or dying in and for the present.3 Hence, what Benjamin traces at the heart of the allegorical work—namely, the “tiger’s leap into the past” that suspends the historical continuum—brings the past in a chiasmatic dialogue with the present and reinscribes both into larger hermeneutic syntagmas (1968, 261). In this chapter, I want to follow Kristeva in her precarious leap into Byzantium. This leap, it needs to be noted, is not a return to or a quest for the real, historical topos of Byzantium. For Kristeva, as for Benjamin, the past exists in its inscriptions in the present, that is, in its material ruins (the historical and religious sites that carry the memory of Byzantium or the Crusades) and its textual remainders. “My Byzantium is within its books—an imaginary chronicle,” Stephanie Delacour, the female protagonist of the novel, confesses. She goes on to ask, “[H]as it ever existed otherwise?” (2004, 149). What is, then, at stake in Kristeva’s leap is not the recovery of any historical truth about Byzantium but our hermeneutic relation to its (material or textual) ruins. It is no wonder, in this light, that Stephanie (a detective-cum-journalist) is the primary figure in the novel of the Benjaminian melancholic allegorist who, as Benjamin insists, is a “tireless investigator and thinker,” one who is committed equally to the fragile world of creatures and to the attainment of knowledge (1977, 152). In fact, it is this double commitment that brings together Benjamin’s notion of allegory and Kristeva’s detective fiction for, like the former, the latter focuses on the suffering and decay of the organic—bare life or flesh. As in allegory4 so in detective fiction the human body acquires significance only as corpse and murder (which features prominently in the title of Kristeva’s novel) becomes emblematic for what Benjamin calls “the Passion” (understood as suffering and anxiety) “of [the creaturely] world” (166). What is more, both Benjaminian allegory and detective fiction (as Kristeva practices it) have a redemptive function for they aim at capturing “a moment of creaturely hope in the contemplation of hopelessness” (Gilloch 2002, 85). This redemptive hope relates as much to what in Benjamin gives allegory its distinct critical value as to what in Kristeva accounts for the optimism of the detective genre, namely, their shared belief in questioning, hermeneutic analysis, contemplation, or to put it differently “the inner life of the mind” (Gilloch 2002, 79).5

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As I propose to demonstrate in what follows, Kristeva’s textual journey to Byzantium needs to be understood in the context of this redemptive desire that erupts as the theorist’s unique historical response to the passion of our post-9/11 world. Her investment in Byzantium as the privileged site of this desire and pole of a series of fatal attractions is particularly significant, for both as a historical and a conceptual space, Byzantium is currently moving to the forefront of political debate—not only because it has traditionally functioned as the repressed other of old Occidental Europe but, more importantly, because it is increasingly being invoked as an alternative to the U.S. global imperium and a potential “heading” for a new multicultural Europe. In his 1992 discussion of the possible futures of a United Europe, philosopher Jacques Derrida raises the following questions: From what state of exhaustion must these young old-Europeans who we are set out again, re-embark? Must they re-begin? Or must they depart from Europe, separate themselves from an old Europe? Or else depart again, set out toward a Europe that does not yet exist? Or else re-embark in order to return to a Europe of origins that would then need to be restored, rediscovered, or re-constituted during a great celebration of “re-union”? (1992, 7–8) In Meurtre à Byzance Byzantium functions both as a restored “Europe of origins” and as the imaginary topos of a Europe that does not yet exist. Thus, what begins as a melancholic homecoming (in Sebastian’s quest for his forgotten roots in Bulgaria and a subjective as well as communal legacy) ends up releasing the unheimlich within the home, namely, temporal and spatial distance, foreignness, exile, psychic alienation. This is, of course, consistent with the dialectical nature of allegory that, as we have seen, seeks hope in the irreversible process of decay and returns to the past only to remind us of the irrevocability of all origin. Caught in the chiasmus traced by these inverse gestures, how are we to understand the heading of today’s Europe, as Kristeva envisions it? And how can we escape the discourse of crisis that has historically dominated our debates around Europe?

The Crisis of Europe and the End of the World In Wim Wenders’s 1991 film Until the End of the World (also unfolding in an allegorical en même temps) an old exhausted Europe is coming to acknowledge its finitude and the spreading dis-ease at the heart of its heart, namely, Paris. At the beginning of the film the two Paris-based protagonists, Claire Tourneur and her partner Gene Fitzpatrick, are found unable to overcome their own personal emotional blocks and the deadlocks of their relationship. It is only when, in one of her aimless journeys, Claire accidentally crosses Sam Farber’s path (an American

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hunted by the U.S. government for stealing a high-tech camera invented by his father) that a series of fatal attractions is initiated and all the three characters’ lives (along with those of the people they meet on the way) change—for eternity. The question Wenders ventures to raise from the site of an ailing Europe (a Europe bombarded by a global network of images and threatened by a U.S.-directed imminent catastrophe) relates to the possibility of conceptualizing a community—a universal community, no doubt, though one invested in what Gene reclaims as a distinctly European legacy, that is, what he calls “the magic, healing power of words,” which, at the end of the film, he uses to cure Claire of “the disease of images.” It is primarily the sharing of words that keeps the different characters in the film inseparable—scattered though they are around the globe. In The Other Heading, his essay on Europe, Derrida draws on Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Paul Valéry, among others, to demonstrate that the crisis of Europe has consistently been interpreted as “the crisis of spirit” (1992, 32). It is not surprising, therefore, that every time a spiritual/cultural crisis is diagnosed (as in Wenders’s film) the question of Europe and of its exemplarity as a conceptual and political space is raised. It is in this light that we need to understand Kristeva’s own growing preoccupation with a European culture of revolt, characterized by a commitment to critique and a faith in the medium of the word. Since 1991 when Le vieil homme et les loups, her first detective novel, was published, the globe-scape Kristeva is painting and against the backdrop of which she sets her fictional as well as psychoanalytic and academic pursuits is, admittedly, bleak. She uses Guy Debord’s term “Society of the Spectacle” as a convenient shorthand for the Western globe-aspiring village where exchange is the only value remaining, where intimacy is stifled, murder becomes the supreme event, authority is confounded with totalitarianism, and community gets reduced to interactivity. In her detective fiction this society of postmodern barbarians is translated into the allegorical topos of (aptly named) Santa-Barbara, a fictional country standing for a United States that is divorced from its own internal tensions and typified in the conceptual abstraction of a huge screen, behind which, as Stephanie notes in Meurtre à Byzance, there is nothing but crime (2004, 135). Kristeva’s obsessive and (perhaps, uncritical) use of Debord’s term6 has done little to improve her reputation—especially in view of the emergence of “Visual Culture” as the new “fashionable” academic field of studies. Yet, if Kristeva, like Wenders, warns us against the disease of images, this is only to raise questions that one would expect to find at the heart of the new discipline. Thus, if, as the theorists of the field argue, our only access to global capitalism is through the flatness of its images, then how should we redefine (and, indeed, reinvent) the act of seeing? And when does the seeing restore to the flatness of the image the historicity and complexity that are indispensable for both an aesthetics and a politics of the visual? According to Kristeva, it is precisely such questions that

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the “society of the spectacle” prevents us from asking for, as she demonstrates in her reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Imaginaire in her Intimate Revolt, what the spectacle denies is the nihilating power of images, that is, their critical function with regard to reality. It is “not a matter of demonizing the universe of images,” she writes. But it is a matter of assessing the deviations when commercial control of this omnipresent imaginary-spectacle and its attendant diminishing or weakening of verbal culture end up erasing the annihilating vector in favor of illusion: I get drunk on the images; I no longer perceive it as a fatally liberating, annihilating image; I cling instead to its so-called reality; I believe in it. More than imaginary: the imaginary is realized. Or, rather: if everything is imaginary, the imaginary is dead, along with my margin of freedom. (2002b, 128) —the freedom, precisely, to lie, invent and remain incredulous in the face of an unsatisfactory or oppressive reality. These are, in fact, the symptoms of the disease of images as Gene, the storyteller, witnesses them in Until the End of the World. When Sam’s father invents a device that can record and project on a screen a person’s dreams, all the characters get addicted to their own internal fantasies and, as Gene puts it, get “lost in the labyrinth of [their] own soul.” It is this uncritical immersion into fantasy that constitutes for Kristeva the “common denominator” of what she calls the “new maladies of the soul” (1995, 9). According to her, the postmodern “consumer of the society of the spectacle . . . has run out of imagination” (10). “Inundated with images” (2002b, 67), she or he has lost the ability to symbolize his or her “unbearable traumas” and fantasies (1995, 9); in other words, she or he has lost belief in the communal art that is also paradoxically the most intimate, namely, storytelling. In her discussion of Didier, a patient who she considers the “symbolic emblem of contemporary man” (1995, 10), Kristeva writes: “He disposed of . . . stories as if they were lifeless objects or sterilized waste products” (11). The dilemma, then, we are currently facing is “how to remain in idolatry” (as she puts it) despite our suspicion toward the mediatized golden calf and while preserving our faith in the divine thunder of the word, which, Kristeva notes, explodes “imageless” (2002b, 78). As I will suggest, if Kristeva attempts “a tiger’s leap into the past,” this is because she finds in the textual topos of Byzantium a culture that is centred on images but that refuses to take seeing as natural: “But the eyes, ah, the eyes, here is the key to Byzantium!” Stephanie reminds us in Meurtre à Byzance.7 “So many battles around the visible and the invisible, the desirability or non desirability of producing images” (2004, 204). What is more, Byzantium introduces another economy of seeing where the image is also a written sign (a graphein) and where, as a result, seeing does not stifle critique but opens up a hermeneutic space for the production of what she

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calls “a logos of the soul” (1995, 26). Finally, because it brings together the visible and the tangible, this new economy of seeing renders possible a community that aspires to universality but whose pulse, as we will see, no longer beats at the heart of the heart of Europe.

The Clash of Civilizations Theorists of allegory have repeatedly pointed to the centrality in allegorical narratives of a confrontation between “warring principles, semantic oppositions personified” (McHale 1989, 142). In this light, Kristeva’s preference for the allegorical mode may throw into relief a Manichean pattern in her thinking that only recently has begun to take serious political dimensions. In her 1997 address to a majority of U.S. scholars in New York, Kristeva did not hesitate to express her concern about the “raging polemic,” as she put it, between two distinct models of civilization, a polemic that, according to her, was made clearer after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (2002a, 261). As she explains, what is at stake in this polemic is the necessity and/or possibility of an intersection between “two conceptions of freedom that Western democracies have had the privilege of constructing” (262). On the one hand, there is the Kantian understanding of freedom as the freedom to take action (i.e., “to self-begin”) “within a logical pre-established order.”8 This is, then, freedom defined as adaptation for it denotes “the ability to adapt to a cause that is always exterior to the self ” and that is now, as she emphasizes, “less and less a moral cause and more and more an economic one” (262). Kristeva sees this distinct type of freedom, which (as Max Weber has shown) is promoted within the tradition of Protestantism, as the conceptual basis not only of Western liberalism but also of the logic behind the phenomenon of globalization we are currently witnessing. It is for this reason that she comes to argue that “American civilization is best suited” to it (262). On the other hand, there is what we can call the “Continental” version of freedom, one that has its origins in Heidegger’s rereading of Kant, the Greek philosophical tradition and the legacy of the French Revolution. In contrast to the freedom-as-adaptation model, this conceptualization of freedom favors “being, and especially singular being, versus economic or scientific necessity” (2002a, 264). It draws on the strengths of Catholicism as much as European socialism and is “animated by a concern for human life in its most fragile singularity [. . .] as well as a concern regarding sexual and ethnic differences in their specific intimacy and not only in their role as consumers” (264). What is more, it is the product of a distinctly European articulation of philosophy (as the “permanent putting-into-question” [264]) and is paradigmatically realized in the psychoanalytic experience of transference/countertransference that privileges the “revelation of the self in the presence of the other through the given word” (2002d, 236). It is because this other freedom is currently endangered, “carried away” as we are “on this earth, by the maelstrom of thought-as-calculation and consumerism”

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(2002a, 264), that Kristeva identifies herself with her journalist-heroine, assuming the task of serving as Europe’s special envoy in the United States to advocate the need to espouse an attitude of Europhilia: “[I]f Europe did not exist,” she tells her audience in the U.S. address, “we would have to invent it. It is in the interest of our plural freedom, and it is also in the interest of America” (2002a, 268). One can hardly miss in these words the repetition of a gesture that, as Derrida has demonstrated, has historically produced a Europe that is no other than “the idea of Europe,” a Platonic eidos, a phantom conjured by a dreaming Europe in its sleep (Naas 1992, xix). This is a gesture that posits Europe as “the good example, [. . .] the Telos of all historicity,” “the universal heading for all the nations or peoples of the world” (xxvi). “Can we preserve it [the legacy of Europe] for all mankind?” Kristeva asks, not hesitating to assume the complicity of her interlocutors in what she admits is “more an aspiration than an established project” (2002a, 264). The problem with the logic of exemplarity,9 of course, is that once you start dividing the universal (once you start subtracting from “it” what is more “itself ” than itself ) you can never end. Thus, the moment Europe is taken out of the universal (exempted from it as its prime example) a series of fatal attractions (and subtractions) follow, for Europe is in its turn divided and finds its unique realization in France, while France itself rests the head of its heading in Paris and Paris finds its heart beating in the Louvre and Notre Dame. In The Other Heading, Derrida exposes the working of this logic from the early twentieth century to the present, reminding us that a renewed politics for today’s Europe cannot but begin in the question(ing) of the example. For Kristeva, however, there is no doubt that France belongs to the avant-garde of a world community that, she notes, may not always be sufficiently appreciative or grateful: They built Notre Dame, the Louvre, conquered Europe and a large part of the globe, and then went back home, because they prefer a pleasure that goes hand in hand with reality. But because they also prefer pleasure to reality, they continue to think of themselves as masters of the world or at least as a great power. And the world, irritated, condescending, fascinated, seems ready to follow them. To follow us. (2002c, 247–248) In this light, it is no wonder that, as a novelist, Kristeva comes to privilege allegory, for it is only in what Benjamin calls the “petrified, primordial landscape” of an allegorical narrative that Paris can appear so luminous (1977, 166). And it is only in such context that a dark antagonist to it can be posited, one serving as a projection screen where an ongoing history of colonial practices and imperialist aspirations (both “too French,” very European) is masked behind the performative repudiation of the United States as the principle of all Evil. In Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, Slavoj Žižek is quick to remind us what is at stake. “Perhaps,” he suggests, the “refusal of ‘Americanization’ in France, shared by many

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Leftists and Rightist nationalists, is . . . ultimately the refusal to accept the fact that France itself is losing its hegemonic role in Europe” (2002, 121). In Meurtre à Byzance, Kristeva’s protagonist admits that “Byzantium has not lasted, France herself is on the verge of eclipse. This is how it goes. What remains for us is to leave traces” (2004, 147). And it is, indeed, such traces (melancholic ruins of an all-too-present past) that haunt Kristeva’s allegories. Despite her repeated acknowledgment of a deep affinity with Santa-Barbara, Stephanie Delacour always finds refuge in these ruins, which she places at the heart of what she calls the “logical landscape” of Paris (2002c, 247).10 Though a foreigner (as she never ceases to remind us) and a traveler by nature, Stephanie knows where home is and she consistently goes back to it—at the end of every novel when the enigma of the crime is at last solved and order (temporarily) restored. In “The Love of Another Language” Kristeva confesses that she, like her heroine, “love[s] returning to France. [. . .] Every millimeter of landscape seems reflective; being here is immediately logical. The delicate young elm trees, the well-pruned gardens, the filtered marshes exist alongside people who ‘are’ because they ‘think’” (2002c, 247). It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that it was a French politician (namely, François Mitterand) who, in an attempt to make sense of the new heading of Europe, talked of a homecoming (Derrida 1992, 8). Interestingly, in Meurtre à Byzance, crisis breaks out when a humiliated Chinese immigrant decides to “set the house on fire,” targeting, through a series of murders, the dwelling of the state itself. The threat of an imminent fire at the heart(h) pervades the novel and reaches a climax when Stephanie (safely back in Paris) dreams that the Louvre itself is burning due to a terrorist attack. Needless to say, the novel ends with the reassurance that “the Louvre will never collapse” for, as Inspector Rilsky reminds us, “detective fiction is an optimistic genre” (2004, 380). Unless one brings back in play the allegorical law of attractions. “The Louvre will never collapse,” Stephanie tells us, “inasmuch as we are in Byzantium” (380). Can you already feel the palpitations of the heart?

A Europe Not at Home with Itself Byzantium erupts as a utopian topos of atemporal serenity in the very battleground where Kristeva’s opposing principles (i.e., Santa-Barbara and Paris, the new empire of the spectacle and the old Europe of glorious ruins) meet and clash. It serves as a site of attraction for all the main characters in Meurtre à Byzance (including the Chinese serial killer) who, at the end of the novel, find themselves crossing paths at the Puy-en-Valais Cathedral, the historical basis of the first Crusade. Byzantium complicates Kristeva’s allegorical confrontation between the old and the new, Europe and the United States, word and image, for it introduces the memory of an origin beyond the old, exposes the existence of a Europe other than luminous Paris, and, as I’ve already mentioned, hints at an economy of seeing that is not opposed to an economy of reading.

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Until recently, the status of Byzantium in European historiography was dubious. Any reference to it was either hasty or dismissive: a thousand years of political existence and cultural production treated as an unfortunate interval between the glory that was Greece (a glory shared by its successor, Rome) and a Europe of the Renaissance. Especially since the Enlightenment, Byzantium became synonymous with decadence; it became the sign for a period of intellectual sterility, obscurantism, excessive attention to artifice, and a bureaucratic system of administration. More importantly, it was (subtly but consistently) orientalized and was, as a consequence, associated with physical and spiritual laziness, exoticism, uncontrollable passion.11 According to Marie-France Auzepy, “even though the Europeans know what separates the Byzantine empire from the Ottoman empire which conquered it, they have the tendency nevertheless, because the two empires have occupied the same geographical location, to dissolve them both into the same ‘oriental’ space” (2003, 7). Needless to say, such an attitude is less the product of historiographic blindness than political expediency, for it enabled the Western Europeans to complete the operation they initiated in 1204 with the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders, eliminating all traces of a legitimate Oriental Christian Empire. As Panayiotis Agapitos suggests, it “helped Western Europeans to place the origins of the European states in the Latin Middle Ages, . . . and also to claim the heritage of ancient Greek civilization through Rome and the Renaissance, even if the immediate knowledge of Greek language and culture came to the West through the Byzantines” (1993, 238). Byzantium, then, has functioned as the repressed, denied Other (in distinction to the “infidel” Muslim as the obvious enemy, the acknowledged Other) of a Europe heading obstinately toward the West. This is why in Meurtre à Byzance it is invoked as a lost origin,12 one, however, that once retrieved does not promise the self truth or completion but opens a hole at its very heart. Kristeva’s concern with leading our hands back to this hole and helping us feel it needs to be appreciated not only in the context of current political developments (i.e., the Balkan Wars, the expansion of the European Union to parts of Eastern Europe, the accession of a divided Cyprus, the open question of Turkey) but also in light of Derrida’s injunction to imagine a Europe that would no longer be “identical to itself ” (2004, 9). In “Europe Divided: Politics, Ethics, Religion,” a paper originally presented in 1998 as an address to the Rencontres Internationales de Genève, Kristeva attempts to think the existing tensions within Europe beyond an oppositional model that pits “us” against “them.” The task she sets herself in this paper is that of reclaiming the Orthodox European tradition and opening the two conceptions of freedom that (a year earlier in her U.S. address) she saw as antagonistic to a third conception, one put forward by Nicodemus the Hagiorite in Philocalia (a collection of texts on the prayer of the heart). In contrast to the Protestant understanding of freedom as adaptation to an external cause and to the Catholic privileging of freedom as revaluation of the singular, the freedom based on

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Philocalia and cultivated in the context of the Orthodox tradition is inextricable from the relinquishment of the self. Whereas in Catholicism community remains the object of critique and in contrast to Protestantism, which understands it as the product of an externally imposed cause, the Orthodox tradition opens the space for a mystical union, a passionate fusion in silence with what defies the intellect and escapes the gaze. According to Kristeva, this view of freedom that recognizes “the ‘integral, superindividual, and communal character’ of a person” is epitomized in Byzantine iconography, which cannot be approached through a Western theory of mimesis (2000, 152). As she emphasizes, an icon is neither a spectacle nor a representation. It is, instead, an inscription, “a sensible trace” of what cannot be experienced directly and can only be deciphered (154). “Every image is declarative and indicative of something hidden,” writes the iconophile St. John the Damascene, “. . . inasmuch as a man has no direct knowledge of the invisible (his soul being covered by a body), or of the future or of things that are severed and distant from him in space, being as he is circumscribed by place and time, the image has been invented for the sake of guiding knowledge and manifesting publicly that which is concealed” (quoted by Mango 1986, 171). This is why he insisted that “whoever refuses the image, refuses incarnation” (quoted by Kristeva 1998b, 60), for the Byzantine icon needs to be understood as the economy of a passage, the process of a transcorporation between the visible and the invisible. What is more, the icon does not appeal to the “gaze alone but engages our entire affectivity” (Kristeva 2000, 154). On his visit to Boyana in Meurtre à Byzance, Sebastian is seduced by “another way of seeing,” which leads his eyes to the interior and the beyond (2004, 270). “[F]or these people in Boyana,” he thinks, the image was a “skhesis,” a relation of intimacy, an “affective tonality” shared by the model and his image, the Father and the Son, the Form and the formless, the corporeal and the incorporeal (270). It is no wonder, in this light, that Kristeva traces in the distinct economy of the icon the possibility of recovering the logic of a community that the spectacle-inundated West appears to have lost. This is a community that is brought about by the rethinking of freedom as “an autocommencement . . . with the other” (159; emphasis added) and that is based on a sensory, ineffable communion; an active relation of “tenderness (katanyxis) that does not judge but welcomes” (148).13 It is this iconomy (as I prefer to call it) that contaminates Sebastian, the Santa-Barbarian, and sets him in pursuit of an alternative beginning. As Stephanie realizes, his quest for another world-outside-this-world was in reality a quest for a reconciliation between East and West. Despite the hatred in the world around him (2004, 162), Sebastian succeeds in realizing his dream by imagining a Crusade of love rather than conquest, a fatal crossing of paths between Anne Comnène, the “belated Greek of Orthodox Empire” (191), and Ebrard de Pagan, his assumed ancestor and Latin barbarian. Though their passion was never spoken (for theirs was a communion experienced in silence), Sebastian dies convinced that the fleeting moment of their embrace lasts forever.

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Facing the murals of Boyana, Sebastian thinks of the “desirable, the impossible Europe,” which “does not imagine how much she is integrated in an imaginary broken open by abstruse, gracious, paths to fecundate her, perversely, without her knowing it, even less acknowledging it” (272). Meurtre à Byzance is Kristeva’s contribution to this imaginary, setting out to reclaim the lost origin of a Europe that still needs to be fecundated—even against its will. “My Byzantium,” Stephanie confesses, “is a question of time, the very question that time poses itself when it refuses to choose between two spaces, two dogmas, two crises, two identities, two continents, two religions, two sexes, two stratagems. Byzantium leaves the question—as well as time— open” (2004, 149). Byzantium, then, is invoked as Europe’s “future anterior” (149). It becomes the signifier of a history that has shaped Europe (that continues to shape it) and simultaneously (en meme temps) a future heading, a promise and pledge for it.14 This is where the allegorist’s melancholic contemplation of corpses and ruins becomes animated by a redemptive hope for the opening of “a ‘third path’ between Ben Laden and Sharon, Al-Qaida and George Bush” (279). Though this hope is consistently betrayed in the current formation of a United Europe’s actual identity and politics, it has nevertheless informed the creation of what Etienne Balibar calls a “phantom” Europe, which is “still in need of blood for nourishment,” and “which we do not know whether to exorcise or to bring to life” (89). For a lot of our most vibrant thinkers today (such as the late Edward Said, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, and Balibar himself ) the vision of a phantom Europe posited as the “vanishing mediator”15 between the world of wealth and the world of poverty (or between military force and moral justice) remains both a challenge and a commitment that the emerging actual Europe will be called to make. This is how Žižek articulates this commitment: “The true opposition today,” he writes, is not the one between the First World and the Third World, but the one between the whole of the First and Third World (the American global empire and its colonies) and the remaining Second World (Europe). [. . .] It is easy for the American multiculturalist global Empire to integrate premodern local traditions—the foreign body which it effectively cannot assimilate is the European modernity. Jihad and McWorld are the two sides of the same coin, Jihad is already McJihad. (2002, 146) This is why, he insists, “[t]he Left should unashamedly appropriate the slogan of a unified Europe as a counterweight to Americanized globalism” (2002, 145). In Kristeva’s allegorical narrative, where Europe and Byzantium share the same “contagious existence” (2004, 149), this is, interestingly, the realization with which Anne Comnène confronts Ebrard at that fleeting moment of their fatal encounter. “War has become sacred for you,” she tells him, “as it is the

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djihad for the muslims. What is then the difference between your barons who invade our lands, menace our capital under the pretext of liberating Jerusalem . . . and these Antichrists?” (209). If Anne, this female intellectual, “mourner and militant, singular and universal, inconsolable and proud, incommensurable” (147), is the soul of both Sebastian’s and Kristeva’s Byzantium, this is because she hints at the existence of a Church “which opposed the holy war of the Church” (220), thus proposing a “third path” between two equally dangerous fundamentalisms (270). But, asks Stephanie, “would one be capable, [. . .] here, now, a million years later,” of reenacting “Anne’s gesture” that contaminates Ebrard, leads him to abandon the Crusades and changes his life forever (141)?16 This is, in fact, the true “tiger’s leap” that Kristeva proposes for us in Meurtre à Byzance. At the end of the novel Stephanie, the traveler from the luminous heart and Rilsky, the enlightened (Santa-)Barbarian, get ready to continue Sebastian’s Crusade of love by reinscribing their time within the fleeting moment of Anne and Ebrard’s embrace. “They doubt, but they do not imagine our silence,” Stephanie tells Rilsky (2004, 380).17

Conclusion: The Humiliated Have No Eyes . . . In Meurtre à Byzance, Kristeva invites us to see through “Anne’s eyes turned upon our own world” (2004, 192). What we see through these “new eyes” (192) is the vision of “a desirable, an impossible Europe” (272). Yet, as we learn to embrace this vision (as one embraces an icon), we may risk blinding ourselves to the Europe of the humiliated who, Stephanie reminds us,18 “have no gaze” (204). Indeed, in the novel, it seems that the Byzantines’ eyes that can reach the invisible have their chiasmatic counterpart in a blind(ed) gaze. This is, needless to say, the gaze of Wuxian, the Chinese immigrant purificator who, like Sebastian, is in flight from the contemporary world but whose line of flight is presented as the symmetrical inverse of the historian’s flee to Byzantium. In her detective-cum-allegorist’s attempt to offer a hermeneutic analysis of the case under investigation, Stephanie throws into relief the opposition between the two characters: Whereas Wuxian is the “new Man” who lacks interiority (356), Sebastian (lost, as he is, in a timeless time) is all interiority. While Sebastian is the man of memory who, in rewriting the story of Anne and the Crusades, is ready to begin anew, Wuxian is the nihilist who seeks to reduce both past and present to an overpowering surge of nausea (235).19 Whereas Sebastian opens the space of home to the memory of lost ancestors (367), Wuxian (as his name suggests in Chinese, 248) sets the house on fire. While Sebastian, in his search of an idealized father, abjects the material body of the mother, Wuxian revolts against the State and paternal law in a desperate attempt to retrieve his twin female side.20 Finally, whereas the eyes of the Byzantine visionary are turned toward an invisible light, Wuxian’s gaze consumes itself behind what is no longer light but purifying fire.

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It might be tempting (following Stephanie’s account) to understand Sebastian’s return to and revision of our Byzantine past as the antidote to Wuxian’s self-destructive blindness. This is what Stephanie openly suggests when she comes to distill the two characters’ fatal crossing of paths at the Puy-en-Valais cathedral in the moment of Sebastian’s crying. Talking to the psychoanalyst Estelle Pankow, she emphasizes that crying marks the threshold to a subject’s rebirth: “Tears,” she says, “are already life” (2004, 371). Yet, if we agree with Stephanie, we risk losing sight of another blinded gaze, one that is no longer the symmetrical inverse of Sebastian’s inward-turned eyes but their very possibility. This is the gaze of Fa Chang, Wuxian’s twin sister and Sebastian’s lover, who he murders and blinds, frightened that her pregnancy will put an end to his utopian quest. As Stephanie herself understands, Sebastian’s Anne, “the ideal woman, pure spirit” (2004, 370), can only be brought back to life at the expense of the maternal corporeality of Fa, just as “the celestial jewel” that Sebastian looks for in his chasing of butterflies can only be arrested when “the animal” is killed—which he enjoys doing by “crushing under his fingers” the “unique human organ of these migrants:” namely, their head marked by “exophtalmic eyes” (44). Is the passion of the animal, then, the remainder of the process of transcorporation from the visible to the invisible epitomized in the icon? Is this the blind spot of Sebastian’s dream of Byzantium that contaminates Stephanie’s and (through her) our own existence? In what I consider a powerful moment in the novel, critical of this dream, Marie (a Bulgarian peasant and Anne’s despised grandmother) remembers her Bulgarian compatriots, the soldiers of Samuel, who Emperor Basil II blinded in 1014 to mark their defeat and humiliation. Their (and Marie’s) vacant stare serves as a counterpart to Anne’s penetrating eyes, which, as Marie tells us, can “devour you” (2004, 204). How does this vacant stare inform the vision that Anne’s eyes share with us? And is the passion behind this stare the blood that is missing to bring to life Kristeva’s phantom Europe—as new as it is impossible? But this is where Kristeva the allegorist (melancholic in the face of a suffering that cannot be redeemed) meets Kristeva the ironist who, as Stephanie reminds us, is not a scoffer but an atheist who has a sense of limits (2004, 358, 373). It is this atheism that saves Stephanie from uncritically losing herself into Sebastian’s “palace of memory” (361) and that keeps Rilsky (despite his deep sense of an affinity between them) on the opposite pole to Wuxian, the purificator, who calls himself l’Infini. It is also this atheism, in my view, that renders both Kristeva’s Byzantium and her Europe “impossible.” Their impossibility, however, should not be understood as the mark of their ideality, but as the inevitable and necessary product of the concrete historical limits within which these textual/conceptual topoi are invoked. As we have seen, some of these limits concern our act of seeing and serve to remind us that, if an integrated Europe remains impossible, this is because of our own blindness to the humiliated

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within its heavily policed borders. As I have also suggested in the course of my analysis, more limits are posited by Kristeva’s avowed allegiance to her adopted mother country. Indeed, in Meurtre à Byzance, the series of attractions that move the allegorical plot and shape an alternative fate for Europe risk being subsumed under what remains the privileged union in the novel, namely, that between Stephanie, the porous but incurable lover of Paris, and Rilsky, the estranged inhabitant of Santa-Barbara. What is more, despite Stephanie’s insistence that “[t]oday Byzantium is of no place” (because, as we have seen, it is a future anterior: it already has and, simultaneously, not yet taken place), there are times in her narrative when the imaginary topos of Byzantium merges with that of contemporary France: “She was the West turned Oriental, the most advanced of the countries of the East, the most sophisticated of the countries of the West, like France today.” And she goes on to ask, “Too Frenchies, these Byzantines? Too Byzantine, these Frenchies?” (147). Perhaps it is time to return to Stephanie’s reassuring words at the end of the novel: “The Louvre will never collapse inasmuch as we are in Byzantium” (2004, 380). The problem is that, both as a geographical and a textual space, Byzantium is the powerful attractor of interpretations and links that neither Stephanie nor Kristeva are prepared to take account of. One of these links, that opens only to be left loose, can be found in chapter 3, part 2 of the novel. The title of the chapter is “Is Communism a Descendant of Byzantium?” (101). Though the question is not pursued beyond a fleeting reference to Dostoyevski and the relation between orthodoxy and nihilism, the very opening of the question is significant because it draws attention to those spaces within the narrative where the law of attractions slackens and fails to work; where the thought of a contagious relation between distant or separate entities unfolds only to be pushed back and where the figure of the chiasmus remains incomplete, denied of the crossing at its heart. Indeed, it is worth asking why in her desire to reclaim the other Europe (the Europe of the East), Kristeva remains reticent about this Europe’s distinct ideological legacy and our postwar experience of division into enemy blocs, the product of which, as Balibar is right to remind us, is precisely our contemporary imaginary of a United Europe (90).21 It is also worth asking why the project of European integration in her work is reinterpreted as the task of “federat[ing] the diverse currents of Christianity that, for the most part, share spirituality in Europe” (2000, 159)—an interpretation, admittedly, that risks reviving the term “Christendom,” which was the official name for the geographical and political space that became known as “Europe” only after William of Orange.22 Hence, the urgency of the warning issued by byzantinologist Averil Cameron: “The defence of the history of Byzantium as a part of the history of Europe is a just cause,” he argues, “at least inasmuch as it does not obscure the equally important connection between Byzantium and the Orient, including what we now call the Middle East” (2003, 237). Yet, if (as Cameron suggests) “Byzantium” is a signifier that calls to mind sites as different as Athens, Rome,

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Constantinople, Boyana, and (a now divided) Jerusalem, the question of Europe (a Europe that reclaims the heritage of Byzantium) cannot be limited to the necessity and/or possibility of healing the schism among the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions, but needs to open in the direction of the new community’s relations to what, as Derrida puts it, “is not, never was and never will be Europe” (1992, 77). Such a future heading for Europe will undoubtedly complicate the homecoming Mitterand envisioned, for as the current president of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, has recently admitted in his address to the Turkish prime minister, “we are all, the children of Byzantium.”23

Notes I am grateful to my byzantinologist colleagues Panayiotis Agapitos and Stavroula Constantinou for their invaluable help and feedback. All translations from the original are mine. 1. Kristeva consciously writes within the genre of detective fiction, both problematizing and investing in its conventions. For her, the detective’s investigation resembles the work of the psychoanalyst because it “keeps the possibility of questioning alive” and comforts the subject, assuring him or her that one “can know” (2002b, 4). “Can you know where evil originates from?” Stephanie Delacour, the female protagonist, asks at the end of Meurtre à Byzance. To which Inspector Rilsky answers, “Detective fiction is an optimistic genre” (2004, 380). 2. See Benjamin (1977, 159–233). 3. See also Craig Owens’s discussion of Benjaminian allegory (1984, 203–217). 4. Benjamin writes, “For this much is self-evident: the allegorization of the physis can only be carried through in all its vigour in respect of the corpse. And the characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can enter into the homeland of allegory” (1977, 217). 5. See note 1 above. 6. Kristeva never discusses Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle in any detail. She is content to use the term in its now popular usage; that is, as the prevalence of standardized images which numb the critical faculties of passive consumers. 7. Stephanie is narrating Sebastian’s Novel of Anne Comnène. 8. I am drawing on Kristeva’s discussion of the two models of freedom in her essay on “Psychoanalysis and Freedom,” published in Intimate Revolt (2002d, 236). 9. The word “example” comes from the Latin verb eximere; that is, to subtract, to take out. See Hoad 1990, 159. 10. She uses the same designation at the end of her 1998 novel Possessions (1998a, 211).

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11. See Agapitos (1993) and Auzepy (2003). 12. Sebastian goes back to the first Crusade and the writings of Anne Comnène in an attempt to retrace his paternal origins back to a French Crusader, Ebrard de Pagan, who settled in Philippopolis (now known as Plovdid in Bulgaria). In the course of his quest, however, Sebastian projects on Anne’s image of Byzantium his own utopic vision of Europe. In his fictional account of Anne’s life, his aim is to reimagine the Crusades as the historical inception of our contemporary project of European Unification. This is the question that animates his homeward journey to Bulgaria: “No one talks about Philippopolis in Santa-Barbara, New York, London or Paris; this part of Europe has been shoved into the blind spot of History. Why?” (2004, 263). When she reads his Novel of Anne Comnène Stephanie admits that she is contaminated by his “Byzantine dream” (283). 13. As the references to sensory experience and an “affective tonality” suggest, the community made possible by the icon and within the context of the Orthodox tradition is one privileging the pre-Oedipal dual relationship and the semiotic modality of language (2000, 143, 149). 14. In Sebastian’s terms, Byzantium is both the memory of Europe (“the present of [its] past”) and the anticipation of Europe (“the present of [its] future”) (2004, 368). 15. See Balibar’s essay “Europe: Vanishing Mediator?” (2004, 203–235). 16. Sebastian and (through his writings) Stephanie see Ebrard as the advocate of a Voltairean pacificism: “leave your arms aside and cultivate your garden” (2004, 280). While in Boyana Sebastian wonders: “Yet, isn’t Ebrard’s style too elitist, [. . .] too European, Byzantine even, to work? Do we need to resign, then, to the omnipresence and omnipotence of Santa-Barbara?” (280). 17. According to Rilsky, the silence of love is “nothing but music, the symmetrical inverse of the silence of crime” (2004, 97). 18. Stephanie here is giving the point of view of Marie, Anne’s Bulgarian grandmother. 19. Vomiting is the dominant symptom of Wuxian’s psychic malady. 20. Sebastian resents his mother, Tracy Jones (a common barmaid), for giving birth to a bastard. In this light, his murder of Fa Chang (who also presumed she could engender a son without the father’s permission) can be seen as a matricide (2004, 370). By contrast, Wuxian, in his desperate love for his twin sister Fa, seeks to restore the balance between his yin and his yang (355). 21. What I find interesting in this context is that in the name of Orthodox faith Kristeva is in reality reclaiming the concept of a community based on enthusiasm and an affective, passionate investment—precisely, as she acknowledges, what characterises communism (despite its preferred scientific profile) as a revolutionary, ideological movement (2000, 134–235). 22. See Balibar (2004, 6–7). 23. Discussed in Hurriyet 17-11-2004. Commenting on this statement, historian IIber Ortayli said, “I am afraid that the good-intentioned words

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of Chirac are not true. Because the French and Northern Europe has [sic] no connection with Byzantium. They are, rather, from the ones that plundered this city in 1204. Naming the East Rome Empire as the Byzantium, is the job of Germany of the 16th Century. Therefore, the Byzantium name is invented.” See http://www.hurriyetim.com.tr/haber/0,,sid~381@tarih~2004-11-19@nvid~497 285,00.asp (accessed May 31, 2005).

References Agapitos, Panayiotis. 1993. “Byzantine Literature and Greek Philologists in the Nineteenth Century.” Classica et Mediaevalia: Revue Danoise de Philologie et D’ Histoire. Vol. 43. Ed. Ole Thomsen. Copenhague: Librairie Museum Tusculanum, 231–260. Auzepy, Marie-France. 2003. “La Fascination de l’Empire.” Byzance en Europe. Ed. Marie-France Auzepy. Saint-Denis, France: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 7–16. Balibar, Etienne. 2004. We, The People of Europe: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 253–264. ———. 1977. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: NLB. Cameron, Averil. 2003. “Byzance dans le debat sur l’orientalisme.” Byzance en Europe. Ed. Marie-France Auzepy. Saint-Denis, France: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 235–250. Derrida, Jacques. 1992. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gilloch, Graeme. 2002. Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hoad, T. F., ed. 1990. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. London: Guild. Kristeva, Julia. 1994. The Old Man and the Wolves. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press. Originally published in 1991 as Le vieil homme et les loups. ———. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1998a. Possessions. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1998b. Visions capitales. Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux.

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———. 2000. “Europe Divided: Politics, Ethics, Religion.” Crisis of the Subject. New York: Other Press, 112–162. ———. 2002a. “Europhilia-Europhobia.” Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press, 255–268. ———. 2002b. “Intimate Revolt.” Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1–219. ———. 2002c. “The Love of Another Language.” Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press, 240–254. ———. 2002d. “Psychoanalysis and Freedom.” Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press, 225–239. ———. 2004. Meurtre à Byzance. Paris: Fayard. Mango, Cyril. 1986. The Art of Byzantine Empire 1431–1453. Toronto, Ontario: Toronto University Press. McHale, Brian. 1989. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge. Naas, Michael B. 1992. “Introduction: For Example.” The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe by Jacques Derrida. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, vii–lix. Owens, Craig. 1984. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 203–235. Until the End of the World. 1991. Dir. Wim Wenders. Metrodome Distribution Ltd. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London: Verso.

PART III INTIMACY AND THE LOSS OF POLITICS



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8 Love’s Lost Labors: Subjectivity, Art, and Politics

 Sara Beardsworth

This chapter argues that the essence of Western art in Kristeva is a process of subjectivity, a life of the psyche that is, for her, “still the essential value of our civilization” (2006, 39). Art and literature are the work of sublimation that upholds the life of the psyche by renewing subjectivity and meaning. The idea of art as sublimation is a vital approach to the question of what political meanings art may have in her project. I argue here that attention to Julia Kristeva’s idea of artistic sublimation reveals at its heart a productive, though not untroubled, negativity that functions in Hegelian fashion to form and reform the possibilities for human separateness and connections with others. Above all, in Kristeva’s hands Hegelian negation has become the dynamic of loss that is revealed and unfolded from the Freudian perspective on subjectivity. That is, Kristeva digs deeply into the Freudian subject to find what is needed for there to be historical being in her own sense of the formation, deformation, and reformation of a meaningful life in connection with others. A complex and nuanced dynamic of loss is central to the process. Artistic sublimation is the form of renewal of this process that belongs to a shareable or public domain, whereas the practice of psychoanalysis is the form reserved to an intimate space. We will be particularly concerned here with the artistic form, specifically its appearance in Kristeva’s thought as a response to the problem of a cultural failure of loss in which subjective process comes to grief. I claim, first, that artistic sublimation in Kristeva is the creation of forms that recovers and gives meaning to loss. This recovery requires a confrontation with the threat of destructive drive that is central to the dynamic of loss, and is met only by love as the sole support of the subject in the farthest reaches of the 127

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trials of loss. Artistic sublimation is therefore, above all, a process that gives form to love and loss and, thereby, gives meaning and value to symbolic life in connection with others. This is why one can call the life of the psyche an essential value of a civilization. Nonetheless, it is easier to grasp the thought that art and literature bring amatory experience into symbols, giving it symbolic life for all and thereby opening up possibilities for human separateness and connectedness, than it is to grasp the profound and paradoxical dynamic of loss.1 It is therefore my particular claim that where artistic sublimation gives form and meaning to love, understood as the paradigm of human connectedness, we need also to see the underlying dynamic of loss: love’s lost labors. The thought that the life of the psyche remains the essential value of our civilization is not, of course, written on some blank slate but is, rather, developed from Kristeva’s diagnosis of a condition in which historical being is blocked in late modern societies, a blockage manifested as a crisis of meaning and values. The subjective process that is the essence of art gains its significance only in and through being a remedy for this blockage. While Kristeva’s diagnosis of the crisis of meaning and values pertains to modernity, the blockage of subjective process has deep roots in Western culture. The idea of artistic sublimation means that, in her view, art and literature have the capacity to work it through. This chapter adopts two ways of approaching Kristeva’s thought on loss, which themselves provide two different perspectives on and interpretations of the thought that there is a blockage of subjective process in Western culture. The first section of this chapter shows, first, how the discovery and concept of the Freudian subject both clarify the nature of the cultural failure and reveals the dynamic of loss whose movement is the overcoming of the failure. It also presents the first of the two perspectives on the cultural blockage. In this first approach, the failure of loss in Western cultures is at its root a failed relation to the maternal feminine that is the lost past of the subject known to psychoanalysis. The maternal feminine is a lost past that is constitutive of the subject in its separateness and connections with others. For reasons that will become clear, I call this cultural failing the loss of “the lost.” Insofar as artistic sublimation recovers the dynamic of loss and, thereby, subjective process, it appears in Kristeva’s thought as a remedy for the cultural problem, opening up possibilities for human separateness and connectedness. Where this happens, the artwork is often a figuring of the maternal feminine that works to reveal, modify, and repair the culture’s failed relation to it. The first section is therefore on Kristeva’s conception of the maternal feminine. The second section takes a different perspective on the cultural blockage diagnosed by Kristeva. It suggests that grasping the dynamic of loss does not only reveal the need for a changed individual and cultural relation to the maternal feminine as the lost past constitutive of subjectivity. There is also a need for a reconsideration of the meaning of the self in loss. I suggest that the renewal of subjective process paradoxically requires going over the loss of self. As a result,

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taking a Freudian point of view, this process runs straight into the problem of the death drive. The death drive is the most primitive and problematic element of negativity in Freud, whose functioning not only threatens the collapse of the individual but also means that violence can move to the center of what subjectivity brings to the social fabric. The difficulty confronted in the second section is therefore the violence of the drive that is triggered by the process of going over the loss of self. To stress the point, death drive is a structural element of Kristeva’s dynamic of loss and cannot just be bypassed when considering the value of the artwork and the question of its political meaning in her project. The problem of the destructive drive must be met. Since the drive is not a substance but a tendency in Freudian theory, it can only be met by something that can modify the distinctive tendency to destruction. What has this ability, in Kristeva, is love. The second section shows how the dynamic of loss takes the subject to the point where destructive drive holds sway. A short concluding section then introduces the dynamic of love and underlines the Kristevan idea of its relation to loss at the heart of artistic sublimation.

“The Lost” Kristeva’s extended treatment of loss and melancholy appears in Black Sun, where she reflects from a psychoanalytic standpoint on a form of depression that she calls “a new malady of the soul,” before considering selected works of art and literature that appear as artistic sublimations of loss and melancholia.2 The thought of narcissistic depression that she forwards in this book unfolds a melancholia with deep and blurred underpinnings that go back to a stage in individual subject formation classically formulated as the illusory omnipotence and self-love of the immature psyche.3 Psychoanalysis calls it “primary narcissism,” following the lead of the Western myth of the bewitched youth who is captivated by himself in a mirage. An intriguing statement appears early in Kristeva’s discussion in reference to Ovid’s Narcissus, to the effect that “depression is the hidden face of Narcissus” (1989, 5). This occluded aspect is the counterpart to that reflected visage, open to the youth’s gaze, which he mistakes for reality. The hidden face of Narcissus is the underlying reason for narcissism understood as the necessary illusion that protects the fragile psyche. With Narcissus, then, we come upon a form of subjectivity rooted in an element that does not show itself and may even “bear him away into death” (5). With Kristeva, the idea of the invisible melancholic and death-bearing element of subjectivity points to the most archaic precondition of subject formation: primal loss. Narcissan melancholy is a “fundamental” sadness bound up with an immemorial loss on the basis of which a subject can come into being. It is the mute sadness belonging to the archaic loss of the mother’s body. Depression is therefore the hidden face of Narcissus because it calls back to these hidden beginnings of subjectivity. In diagnosing narcissistic depression as a new malady of the soul,

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Kristeva suggests further that there is something about this malady, and not only its archaic element, that does not show itself. Even the malady is unknown to itself. On this view, a melancholic culture would not be one undergoing losses and nostalgically thrown back on lost objects. Rather, melancholy is a fundamental affliction of Western cultures that is typically unknown to them. Such an affliction lies in a deep-seated cultural failure in respect of loss as such, so that the loss remains a latent loss. Yet what is it to speak of loss as such? Our first answer to this question is found in Kristeva’s theory of the archaic mother. This theory reveals that, in her eyes, melancholy as a phenomenon of Western culture is ultimately a failure to attend to and negotiate the maternal feminine: the essential “lost” of all subjects. Neglect of the maternal feminine is even a foundational element of Western cultures as we know them. These claims and suggestions are illuminated by Kristeva’s thought on the significance and role of the early mother in child development, a role often undetected or passed over in classical psychoanalysis. The archaic mother is a notion distinguished from the mother as object of desire in oedipal triangulation. The former is the maternal counterpart in early infantile experience where, in respect of psychic development, mother and child do not yet form two independent beings. Primary narcissism, the term for this phase of psychic development, is a structuring of subjectivity that belongs to early infantile life where a vital corporeal attachment to the mother’s body persists and “nondifferentiation” prevails. With Kristeva, primary narcissism is, nonetheless, already an exposure to otherness and so a preliminary form of separateness and connectedness. In terms of subject formation, this early phase of infantile life is comprised of a psychical working out of the exposure to otherness, one that develops in drive-based and affective responses to it. These are the primordial and essential elements of the formation of a subject. Although there is as yet no outside other, there is archaic “relationship,” marked by the absence of symbolic acts in relation to an other and made up, instead, of an exclusively corporeal and affective mode of responsiveness: the preverbal semiotic. From the perspective of subject formation then, Kristeva’s semiotic is an undeveloped but complex articulation of drives and affects, composing a primordial form of separateness and connectedness before separation is established along with symbolic relations or connections with others in language. Developments in Kristeva’s writings in the 1980s show that archaic relationship is comprised of preverbal modes of love, loss, and abjection that are played out where less discerning minds have seen either a merely biological exchange between mother and child or a terrain so overlain with and, indeed, repressed by later developments that little light can penetrate.4 It is noteworthy and important for the current discussion that the notion of the semiotic is, inter alia, a recovery and thinking through of what Freud called “the dark continent”: his term for what remained, to him, the enigma of the feminine. That is, the theory of the archaic mother draws out what Freud left in the shadows of his dark continent.

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What concerns us here is the idea of primal loss that forms the core of Kristeva’s thought on archaic relationship. Primal loss is the “essential” loss in the prehistory of the subject that is necessary for subject formation and is constitutive of subjectivity. Loss of the archaic mother occurs as the first impact of separateness in early infantile life. The archaic mother is therefore the paradigmatic lost object. A loss so archaic, however—so deeply tied in with conditions of nondifferentiation—is one that belongs to conditions where no subjectobject distinction and so no object can yet have formed. Kristeva’s archaic maternal feminine is, then, properly speaking, simply and wholly “the lost.” Loss as such, on this view, is therefore the primal loss made up of drive elements and the mute sway of affect as distinct from an experience of deprivation or lack in respect of objects, whether persons, ideas, or things. The affective hold that primal loss has on the emergent subject—the “fundamental” sadness—may nonetheless be called up in the experience of subsequent losses. Her theory of subject formation therefore seems to make the claim that all loss goes back to preobjectal relationship, which is to say, all loss goes back to the mother. Turning to Kristeva’s notion of narcissistic depression, we find that it represents a melancholic suffering beset by a silent paralysis of meaning that duplicates, otherwise and on a different level, the drive-based and affective attachment to and loss of the early mother prior to the emergence of linguistic capacities. To capture this thought, Kristeva says that the depressed narcissist does not mourn an object but “wanders alone with the unnamed Thing” (1989, 13). Distinguishing her subject matter from the griefs whose sources are more or less evident and locatable, and underlining the symbolic abdication that governs narcissistic depression, she writes: I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself. . . . Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic—it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable. (1989, 3) Kristeva recovers the term depression from its narrower psychological usage in institutional symptomatology to return it to the broader field of human experience, culture, and reflection that psychoanalysis, from its beginnings, sought to inhabit and make its field of inquiry. First, “Freudian theory detects everywhere the same impossible mourning for the maternal object” (1989, 9). Second, Kristeva links melancholy to writing: “For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia” (3). Melancholy has taken the form of an activating sorrow in literary creation (Dostoyevsky) and appeared as the affective ground in philosophical reflection on the nature of Being, where the philosopher meditates

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on the meaning and lack of meaning of Being. The melancholia evoked by Aristotle, she says, is the philosopher’s very ethos and an extreme state that “can be seen as the forerunner of Heidegger’s anguish as the Stimmung of thought” (7–9). Loss and melancholy have, then, played a fundamental role in Western culture. Despite this, what is crucial is the thought that Western cultures are afflicted by a failure in respect of a fundamental loss that has, therefore, remained a latent loss. This thought is the one linked to Kristeva’s inquiry into the archaic mother, an inquiry taking place against a background of Western reflection, including psychoanalytic theory, in which the archaic mother is practically indiscernible. The idea of this cultural failure is clarified by showing the community of two thoughts in Kristeva. The first is the thought that an upsurge of narcissistic depression in a culture signals a crisis of meaning and value. The second is the thought that loss of the archaic mother is a process in child development that supports the entrance into symbolic life: “when that intrepid wanderer leaves the crib to meet the mother in the realm of representations” (1989, 41). The connection between the two runs as follows. On the one hand, the notion of a crisis in late modern societies is, in Kristeva’s hands, the thought that symbolic life has come to be experienced as a merely linguistic universe: a life that is necessarily symbolic (in language) but that unfolds without meaning and value. Moreover, symbolic life is experienced as a merely linguistic universe if the need to give form and meaning to the nonverbal aspects of subjectivity and relationship—to the semiotic—is neglected. For Kristeva, language is “from the start, a translation, but on a level heterogeneous to the one where affective loss, renunciation, or the break takes place. If I did not agree to lose mother, I could neither imagine nor name her” (41). Thus, on the other hand, the process of transposing the drives and affects that reign over preverbal relationship into symbolic life is, at the same time, the transformation of the archaic mother into a lost past. In other words, giving symbolic form to the drives and affects just is loss fulfilled. Kristeva calls this “the negation of loss,” which is equally the entrance into symbolic life. Above all, symbolic life is loss fulfilled only insofar as drives and affects are transposed into the realm of representations, as a condition for its having meaning and value. To say that the realm of representations is on a level heterogeneous to the one where affective loss takes place does not mean that symbols arise through sheer detachment from and cancellation of corporeal and affective life. Where they are treated thus, there can be signification in the narrow sense of the transmission of a message but no meaningful life in connection with others. Kristeva therefore links the capacity to give form and meaning to “the mirage of the primal Thing” with the enrichment of discourse that is embedded in relationship to an other insofar as “discourse is dialogue” (41). The hinge in the whole interconnectedness of mourning, meaning, and Mitsein is the emergence of the archaic mother as a lost past: “the lost.” Kristeva therefore has the mother play a vital role in subject formation—in civilization, she says—in more than one sense. The mother appears, first, as the

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maternal counterpart in a preverbal experience that paves the way for the entrance into symbolic life. Second, the archaic mother is equally the focal point of an immemorial and unnameable (“impossible”) loss that is essential to the constitution of a subject as both separate and connected. In the latter role she marks the discontinuity between preverbal and symbolic life insofar as the universe of preverbal life is left behind. Yet she also marks the possibility of interactions between the semiotic and the symbolic. The symbolic will fail if it is taken to be or is lived as sheer detachment from the affective and corporeal elements of subjectivity that govern preverbal life. Although these elements disappear as the form and totality of early infantile life, nonverbal dimensions of subjectivity persist and are triggered, above all, in situations of exposure to separateness, pain, and otherness. Where these are limit situations—that is, where there is no personal or cultural precedent for them—the nonverbal dimensions of subjectivity will then either come to take on new symbolic form or be deprived of it. Kristeva therefore both analyzes unsymbolized drive and detects the renewal of the subject and meaning that is brought about by bringing drive and affect into the life of signs. On a personal basis, this process appears, notably, where the analysand weaves sensorial memory—the affect and drive echoes—into a narrative of self and other that lets the subject appear afresh. More widely, the semiotic takes on symbolic form where, for example, a culture is able to tell new love stories. Our focus here is on how it is as “the lost” that the mother becomes the very axis of the continuity and discontinuity between the semiotic and symbolic. In other words, “the lost” is the very source for individual and cultural capacities for transformations in subjectivity and meaning: for subjective process. The thwarting of these capacities shows up in two phenomena manifested in narcissistic depression: on the one hand, the denial of the symbolic or a rejection of symbolic life (“that’s meaningless”); on the other hand, the suffering of its emptiness (“there’s no meaning”). These complaints are two sides of the same coin. What unites them is captured in the idea that depression is the hidden face of Narcissus. That is, in depression there occurs a fading or insufficient emergence of “the lost” as the axis of subjective process. Expressed individually, in depressive suffering “I” have lost the mother but have failed to lose her. At the level of the culture, the crisis of meaning and value rests on the loss of “the lost.” In essence, then, Kristeva has diagnosed cultural melancholy in terms of a fundamental failure to negotiate a lost past, which amounts to a cultural neglect of the maternal feminine. Although Kristeva’s thought expands on very different terrain than that of Hegel’s philosophy, this diagnosis of depression is consistent with the Hegelian inspiration that the past itself is constituted only through its cancellation and conservation, that the present is constituted only on condition that the past is thereby truly surpassed, and that only on condition of the conservation of the past—the affirmation of what one has been—may one become something more. In Kristeva this inspiration has become a critique of Western cultures from the

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psychoanalytic standpoint. Western cultures are afflicted by the failure to settle one’s debt to the past. Moreover, this failure just is an abandonment of the negotiation of having belonged to the mother. This failure leaves in its wake the abandoned Narcissus, who is, from the viewpoint of subjective process, a figure of corporeal and affective modes of responsiveness deprived of symbolic life. Kristeva therefore shares with others the perception that the sense of a lack of meaning or loss of value in modernity signals its tendency to abstractedness. In her version of this thought, abstractedness just is a tendency to treat symbolic life as independent of or a replacement for semiotic elements in subjectivity. These elements cannot be extinguished by symbols without cost, since they are constitutive of them. Once it is culturally abandoned, the semiotic falls as a burden on the individual and there is an upsurge of narcissistic suffering. As the figure in relation to which psychoanalysis is currently developing its therapeutic techniques, then, Kristeva’s abandoned Narcissus is a figure of modernity. We have seen thus far that in the final analysis the suffering of the depressed narcissist comes down to a fading or insufficient emergence of “the lost.” This problem cannot of course be an exclusively modern feature of Western culture. The relegation to darkness of the role of the maternal feminine in civilization has been a universal feature of these cultures, which have represented the source of civilizing process as a paternal instance, be it as God or law. The thought of narcissistic depression as a new malady of the soul nonetheless underlines the heights of abstractedness reached in modernity. At the same time, it is equally in these conditions that a ray of light has reached into Freud’s dark continent. The notion of the dark continent and the capacity to throw a little light on it have both appeared where developments working to repress the maternal feminine have weakened. What has weakened is the triumph of paternal laws and the assumption that they have primacy among—or, indeed, are self-sufficient as—the supports for civilization and historical being. Indeed, it is at this juncture that psychoanalysis can both point to the paternal prohibition on desire (for the mother) as a pivotal moment in subject formation and find that the unsurpassed “oedipalization” of the subject is a psychic phenomenon, leading to neurosis, just where the strength and influence of paternal laws has waned owing, ultimately, to the diminished sway in Western cultures of monotheistic religion.5 Seen from this perspective, Kristeva’s idea of the need for a recovery of the maternal feminine has a historical meaning. In her thought, the recovery of “the lost” enables historical being in the aftermath of the reign of paternal laws. To understand the import of subjective process in this way is to find a place where art and politics converge. Their convergence is revealed where Kristeva responds to the question of what form or forms the negotiation of the maternal feminine may take. What forms of the return of “the lost” show up today? In asking this, we are seeking the ways in which the nonverbal aspects of separateness from and connectedness with others—of love and loss—take on a life that gives them a history insofar as they find their way into symbolic life. One commentator has

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coined a term that serves well here: “the evolution of the semiotic.”6 Kristeva’s own concern with the evolution of the semiotic is particularly attentive to works of art and literature, viewed as instances of the transposition of the nonverbal into the symbolic. Many of her analyses of artworks have shown that the variants of the literary and artistic adventure in which love and loss take on form and meaning are also those where an image or intimation of the maternal feminine, recovered as a lost past, prevails. Art and literature are the recovery of “the lost” insofar as they work as sublimations of the corporeal and affective aspects of subjectivity that correspond to a confrontation with limit situations in individual and cultural life: the unprecedented or surprising forms of exposure to otherness and separateness, which, culturally ignored, have remained unspoken, and whose mute traces have remained locked up in the psychic microcosm of the individual.7 In other words, art and literature are the recovery of “the lost” in and through the creation of forms. I have been suggesting, then, that artistic sublimation is a vital part of the dynamic of loss that represents a kind of Freudian restoration of the labor of the negative. The infantile achievement of parting from the mother—“since I consent to lose her I have not lost her” (the negation)—is carried out in art and literature as the negation of the negation: having found her again in language, I have, again, lost her. The negation of the negation is the recovery of “the lost” in “new style, new composition, surprising imagination” (1989, 51). That artistic sublimation allows drive and affect to work within symbolic life and so have the latter take on meaning and value, thereby forming and reforming the life of nature and culture, is quite consistent with Kristeva’s long-held position that any concept of history that neglects subjective process is a dead end.8 Her developed project holds out the thought that, if there is to be history, there must be the creation of forms including the figuring of the maternal feminine. This takes place as symbolic acts that give form and meaning to love and loss.9 What is more, this analysis points to the possibility of a recovery and reshaping of desire and pleasure: precisely what prohibitive, paternal laws (the fundamental form of law in Western cultures, from a Freudian viewpoint) made war upon and had succumb to superegoic morality. Kristeva’s fundamental vision is not, however, one of the reassertion of desire and pleasure alone. What concerns her more closely is the fate of what was crushed along with them and appears, in her thought, as the source of desire’s own vitality in renewing subjectivity and meaning, this source being love and loss. The political meaning of this conception of art now comes to the fore. If cultural melancholy is the mute signal and suffering of a blockage in what structures separateness and connections with others, the movement of overcoming this blockage, in artistic sublimation, renews our possibilities for separateness and connectedness. The modern—forlorn—Narcissus can now be seen as a figure of deformation in two senses. First, he or she signals the general cultural neglect of elements necessary for subject formation, which we have seen to be a neglect, in

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toto, of the maternal feminine as our lost past. Second, the modern Narcissus appears in the aftermath of the reign of paternal laws that have repressed the significance of the maternal feminine. Psychoanalytic theory therefore suggests that the weakening hold of the latter has left the neglected Narcissus in an exposed condition. It equally sheds light on the risks this represents for the social fabric, when long-neglected corporeal and affective dimensions of subjectivity, which have been left to restricted and repetitive paths of phantasmatic formation, break through.10 One understands from Kristeva’s writings on narcissism that paternal laws always functioned in part to keep Narcissus in line. Yet her own thought on Narcissus shows him or her to be not the essential problem of subjectivity but perilous only as a figure of neglect. The remedy for this neglect, it seems, now requires the individual and cultural negotiation of the maternal feminine that is our lost past. The remedy is clearly not, for Kristeva, a recovery of some maternal feminine “itself,” since the archaic mother is a lost past that was never present. She can be indistinctly present, for example, and hazardously so, as the unnamed Thing of melancholy attachment. In view of this, it is the recovery of “the lost” that is needed.11 Such an undertaking might itself open up possibilities for political experience that would not get saturated by the reactive reassertion of paternal laws in response to the exposure of the perilously neglected Narcissus. In sum, Kristeva’s treatment of the maternal feminine as our lost past has proved to be a rich and fairly supple ground for thinking through the relation of subjectivity, art, and politics in her project. Mention has also been made of the significance of love in her thought, although its nature and role has not been drawn out. Before doing so, a question must be raised about Kristeva’s way of connecting culture and history to loss. Does all loss go back to the mother? Our articulation thus far of negativity and transformation in Kristeva’s thought implies that it does. It therefore implies that negotiation of the maternal feminine of individual prehistory is central to culture’s task, as such, and is one that can be carried out—beyond the psychoanalytic clinic—by art and literature. The political significance of art would therefore be found in Kristeva’s reminder that social and symbolic life requires the imagination and artworks and cannot flourish if it marginalizes or nullifies them.

Loss of Self Broadening the investigation into Kristeva’s thought on negativity will further illuminate this significance of the artwork in her thought. It is possible to take a different route through the Kristevan thought of the hidden face of Narcissus, bringing out a different answer to the question, “What is loss as such?” We will find that Kristeva’s thought on primal loss is not exclusively a matter of the immemorial loss of the archaic mother, so that the issue of cultural melancholy will not come down entirely to the problem of a failed relation to the maternal

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feminine as our lost past. Cultural melancholy can be thought of as rooted not only in a loss of “the lost” but also in a loss of loss. Another of Kristeva’s statements on narcissistic depression provides the way into this new perspective: My depression points to my not knowing how to lose—I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for loss? It follows that any loss entails the loss of my being—and of Being itself. The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist. (1989, 5) The passage expresses a problem in the capacity for loss itself, what I am calling “a loss of loss.” My suggestion is that the recovery of loss, on this ground, must mean the recovery of the loss of self. Once, again, following Kristeva, it is the Freudian perspective that allows us to think through such a claim. The passage just cited actually moves beyond Freud’s essay on the subject—“Mourning and Melancholia”—since, in line with her focus on the primal loss that underlies successive losses, Kristeva is concerned with the idea of the loss, not of an object (person, idea, or thing) but of Being and “my” being. If this thought is related to the paradigmatic loss that Kristeva employs to illuminate narcissistic depression, the loss of Being itself would find its paradigmatic form in the loss of the archaic mother. The issue in question is how the experience of a loss of self—my being—is possible or could be thought to have a paradigmatic shape in primary narcissism, where Kristeva’s “essential” loss is a condition for a subject to come into being. Her focus on the dark continent provides us with a different angle than Freud’s on this issue but we will allow his reflections on mourning and melancholia to guide us (Freud 1917). Freud puzzled over a phenomenon that is not uncommonly manifested when a person suffers in relation to an object-loss, that is, a loss whose object is readily determinable: something or someone in one’s life. What is displayed in melancholy is the subject’s being caught in a perplexing affective grip, as distinct from the process of mourning in which the suffering of loss is brought to completion and the person shows herself free to make new attachments. Freud surmised that mourning is a cumulative process of detachment of the ego from the lost object. In the case of melancholia, no such process occurs. He concluded that, with the melancholic, although the external object had to be given up, the object has been preserved within through a process of identification. Given this identification, the ego becomes a substitute-object. The problem of melancholia is that the ego is absorbed with the object of loss rather than attending to the self that has lost. It would seem that the focus of attention would need to change if the melancholic were to be able to begin to mourn. We will now see what transpires if, turning to primal loss, we ourselves shift the focus of attention from the lost object to the self that has lost. This would appear to be an anachronistic undertaking, given that the subject-object distinction is one that cannot yet have formed in early infantile experience where corporeal

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attachments and psychic nondifferentiation prevail. We know, however, that Kristeva views primary narcissism as a realm in which exposure to and a struggle with otherness and separateness does occur. Primal loss would be the outset of this exposure. It cannot therefore occur in the way that the loss of this or that object does but must affect the entirety of the infantile condition. That is, primal loss impacts the “whole.” This is, indeed, the thought expressed in the idea that narcissistic depression suffers the loss of Being itself and “my” being. In conclusion, what corresponds on the subjective side to the loss of the archaic mother—to “the lost”—is the loss of self at the very point of the possible emergence of a self. The primal sense of self is the sense of a threat, an utter deprivation of what cannot yet fully be distinguished as other: the mother. For that reason, primal loss is a threat of loss of “my” being. It is the impact of loss/emptiness, says Kristeva. There is of course no subject or subjectivity in any strong sense here. We have simply shown that, from the perspective of child development, “my” being is, first, the shadow of despair cast on the fragile self, says Kristeva, by the loss of the essential other (1989, 5). The attention given to the self of loss rather than the lost object has led us to stress the thought that a self emerges out of an all-absorbing affective blow— narcissistic despair—at the very beginnings of separation and exposure to otherness. I do not mean to cut this moment off, however, from the process that accrues to it in Kristeva’s account owing to the development of “parting” sadness. This is a notion adopted from Klein, which, in Kristeva, signals the infantile consent to lose the mother and meet her again in the realm of representations. Kristeva means to claim that mourning—the recovery of loss— can only occur through a return to the latent sadness, going to the hidden face of Narcissus to make it feelable as a condition for the symbolic achievement of making loss livable by finding a signifier for it. Artistic sublimation, that is, rests on emotional trials that are more obviously the terrain of psychoanalytic experience. This does not make them merely private and individual, however. We recall that cultural melancholy is remedied by the recovery of loss that appears in a translation that takes place on a level heterogeneous to the one where the affective renunciation takes place. Nonetheless, affective loss must occur. It is a constitutive element in the recovery of loss that renews subjective process. What is more, it now appears that the remedy for cultural melancholy includes the moment, at the furthest possible point of the descent into the latent loss, of going over the loss of self. There are few words for such an undergoing, yet it turns up at the farthest reaches of subjective transformation. It is also the point of greatest danger, for Kristeva’s thought of the affective impact that primal loss constitutes in infantile life—the thought of the despair that shadow parting sadness—indicates her view that this is the point in the process of loss where death drive lurks most forcefully. Following her theory of the early life of the drives, the death drive makes its first and least modified appearance in the impact of primal loss. Thus, if the dynamic of loss—the negativity that drives sub-

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jective process—encompasses the moment of going over the loss of self, there will be a triggering of the death drive. A brief review of Freud’s later theory of the drive is therefore in order.12 On the Freudian view, the death drive is a fundamental drive, the counterpart to eros and opposed to it as a detachment drive and a destructive tendency rather than an attachment drive or a tendency to bind. Eros is the life drive. The two components of the drive, life and death, are, says Freud, usually found in combination where they are directed outward. That is, in relation to others there is a mixture in subjectivity of aggressiveness and desire. Considered on its own, aggressiveness still maintains a contact with the world and others. However, if the two components of the drive are defused, as is the case with the collapse of desire in the depressive narcissist’s loss of interest in life, the death drive is not directed outward but, instead, plays itself out within the tendency to self-destruction. The detachment tendency may fulfill itself in the depressive’s plunge into suicide. We have therefore reached the point of encountering the specifically psychoanalytic thought on negativity that turns up in Freud’s later theory of the drives. It might be said that the Freudian grasp on the destructive wave of the drive presents the moments of collapse in Hegel’s “labor of the negative” within historical being even more clearly than Hegel’s own drama of determinate negation could.13 Having seen the historical role of negativity as it appears from Kristeva’s psychoanalytic standpoint, it has to be admitted that the triggering of the death drive looks like an ineliminable if undesirable feature turning up at the heart of the remedy for cultural melancholy itself. In other words, mourning and melancholia are not straightforwardly distinct in Kristeva, either dynamically or conceptually. There is no question of bypassing the destructive element should it turn up, and we have set conditions for the renewal of subjective process—through going over the loss of self—that portend its appearance. It is a question, then, of considering how going over the loss of self could be bearable, given that the self is, precisely, put out of play as the bearer of the process and may founder in the drive. Kristeva does speak of the affect of parting sadness as the preliminary cohesion of a fragile self, yet it is also attachment to sadness that may doom the subject. If the remedy for cultural melancholy requires that the self go over the loss of self, there must be other resources for the trial. We will now, in conclusion, see how love can turn up as the bearer in the farthest reaches of loss, where loss of self returns.

Love In unfolding her conception of love Kristeva returns once again to the region where the emergent ego suffers the impact of loss/emptiness. She draws out further the psychoanalytic reconstruction of early infantile life, presenting a paradigmatic case of love that protects emptiness and presents “a solidarity between

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emptiness and narcissism” (1987, 24). The paradigm of love appears, therefore, in the region where the destructive drive is first activated. The reminder, however, that love in psychoanalysis is, first, narcissism—self-love—would seem to suggest that the self protects itself against the drive by means of the self-enclosure of narcissistic relationship detected by Freud.14 Yet this does not fulfill the meaning of Narcissus in Kristeva. She insists on an “already ternary structuration” that turns up in the mother-child dyad (23). Primary narcissism, the realm of archaic attachments, contains the appearance of a loving other that is equally the emergence of loving affect in the budding subject. Kristeva’s loving affect can only be referred to separate sources—lover and beloved—from the third-person viewpoint, not from the perspective of early psychic development. The love in question is “the mother’s gift” since it is dependent on the maternal capacity not to engulf the child but to draw into the dual relationship an intimation of her being also elsewhere (34). The appearance of this elsewhere within dual relationship would simply be “a sound on the fringe of my being, which transfers me to the place of the Other, astray, beyond meaning, out of sight” (37). That is, loving affect in archaic relationship is a transference toward an other that is neither the corporeal environ of the mother’s body nor any determinate third party, but rather the drawing power of an elsewhere without determinate place. Kristeva calls it the metaphorical object, which bends the drive away from the threatened downfall (30–31). Transference love, she says, this “bright and fragile idealization,” acts as a consolation for loss (5). Although he could not comprehend it, Freud glimpsed these dynamics when he turned from reflection on monotheism to behold “the sun-drenched face of the young Persian god.”15 We can see a double indeterminacy in the Kristevan conception of transference love: both indeterminacy as regards any position of the source of love and indeterminacy of the object. This is crucial for her presentation of the spontaneity and mystery of love: that love, itself, is source. It is, first, source of the subject, not only constituting the nucleus of the ego in subject formation and making of the subject something intrinsically beyond itself but also allowing for the return of borders dissolved. In this way, love can be the bearer of the trial of going over the loss of self. Second, it is source of the object insofar as the bearing of the subject beyond itself underlies all objects of desire. Third, it is the source of imaginary formations and of loving metaphor. The amatory experience in Kristeva is, then, not just the path of desiring attachments but their very fount. Her loving dynamic is taken up in the twists and turns of a Western literary adventure that she follows from Don Juan and the troubadours to Baudelaire and Stendhal. Having portrayed these major Western figures of loving discourse in terms of the creation of forms that gives life and renewed meaning to transference love, she finally avers that, behind them “[t]here lies nevertheless an enigmatic area of darkness. The unknown. Like a metaphor” (1987, 340). These concluding words to her Baudelaire chapter allude neither to repression (Freud’s dark continent) nor to mortality. They carry a reminder of love’s lost labors. The loss of self

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becomes a momentary eclipse into which the ray of light enters, guiding toward another. And finally, the amatory experience, in all its exaggeration and bedazzlement, breaks forth within the reign of the symbol: “Juliet is the Sun.”

Notes 1. Thus, where Kristeva names her theoretical undertaking semiology, she distinctly shows the equal weight of love and loss as the most fundamental elements constituting symbolic life. “Semiology, concerned as it is with the zero degree of symbolism, is unavoidably led to ponder over not only the amatory state but its corollary as well, melancholia; at the same time it observes that if there is no writing other than the amorous, there is no imagination that is not, overtly or secretly, melancholy” (1989, 6). 2. See Kristeva (1989). See also her New Maladies of the Soul (1995). 3. See Freud (1914). 4. Black Sun, the work on loss, is the third of the three books of the 1980s that detail Kristeva’s thought on primary narcissism. The first, on abjection, is Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), and the second, on love, is Tales of Love (1987). 5. See Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1912–1913) for the distinction between the social and psychic manifestations of paternal law. See his Moses and Monotheism (1939) for an extended reflection that brings Freud’s thought on the oedipal structure of subjectivity into relation with the history of monotheistic religion. 6. See Smith (1998). 7. For a developed argument that this process is a response to modern nihilism, see Beardsworth (2004). 8. This is a central thesis of Revolution in Poetic Language (1984). 9. The thought that the historical takes place as symbolic figuring appears most powerfully in her writings of the 1980s. The idea of the need of artistic figuring of the feminine is most emphatic in Kristeva’s revolt books of the 1980s: The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (2000) and Intimate Revolt (2002). 10. Kristeva’s writings do of course also show how these aspects of subjectivity and relationship have been encountered and accommodated in Western religion and premodern art, albeit in a context in which the “paternal” symbolic was the rule of social life. 11. The objection might be raised against Kristeva that this way of recovering the feminine is complicit with the vanquishing of the feminine by restricting it to what is lost and what is past. However, in the face of this criticism, it can be said that Kristeva makes the recovery of this form of the feminine, as “the lost,” a condition for destinies for maternity and the feminine, other than traditional ones, without either conflating the two (woman equals mother) or insisting on their severance (the feminine must be distinguished from motherhood).

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12. 13. 14. 15.

See Freud (1920). See Hegel (1977). See Freud (1914). Freud (1912–1913, 153), cited in Kristeva (1987, 45).

References Beardsworth, Sara. 2004. Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity. New York: State University of New York Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1912–1913. Totem and Taboo. The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1914. “On Narcissism: An Introduction.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1917. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1920. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1939. Moses and Monotheism. The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1987. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman, New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. Intimate Revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2006. “L’expérience littéraire est-elle encore possible?” Interview. L’Infini 53. Smith, Anne-Marie. 1998. Julia Kristeva: Speaking the Unspeakable. London: Pluto Press.

9 Symptomatic Reading: Kristeva on Duras

 Lisa Walsh

La vue exacte, c’est la vue terroriste du monde. —Marguerite Duras

In her 2003 preface to the first Chinese edition of Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva introduces her 1980 study of abjection in Western culture by identifying its contemporary relevance to twenty-first century Eastern thought. Referencing China’s postcommunist political and economic power struggles with the West, she proposes that if “we” are to survive this (if dialectically foreseeable) East/West collision, intellectual and cultural exchange are indispensable. Texts must be translated, their meanings understood, if we are to establish a dialogue with, rather than simply annihilate, the historically Other “half ” of humanity. As a long time student of Chinese semiotics and a native Bulgarian,1 Kristeva explains, her work finds its roots in an Eastern notion of the sacred, therefore offering her Chinese reader a familiar structure from within which she2 might approach an otherwise utterly strange and incomprehensible Western (non)sense of religion, and in particular, its inevitable relationship to terrorism (2005, 466). Powers of Horror, she explains to her Eastern reader, both poses and answers a most urgent question in our troubled post–9/11 times: “Is literature terrorism’s accomplice or its antidote?” (468). In its Western practice at least, she responds, literature has much in common with terrorism: notably, “its roots in a national language and its structural participation in horror” (468). Real literature, however, she qualifies, transcends these petty nationalisms (we will return shortly to the question of structural “horror”) “through the incommensurable author’s infiltration of the communal idiom: maximum 143

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singularisation, style is a dis-identification of both Person and Nation” (469). Furthermore, she continues, “Reading and teaching literature, unveiling its polyphonic logic in the face of what must be called religious monologism, is a political therapy” (469). In the modern Western tradition, she informs her Chinese reader that “real literature” does indeed function as an “antidote” to the monotheistic terror of fundamentalist Islam and Christianity. This antidote, however, like any good pharmakon, may be poisonous and must be handled with care. The Eastern reader should therefore be on her guard with respect to literature’s power to destroy what it heals. The artistic psyche productive of literature’s “polyphonic logic,” she explains, maintains a necessarily intimate, and therefore dangerous, relation to the Real, or the unmediated jouissance of the bodily drives before and beyond symbolic meaning. Without a certain commitment to sanity on the writer’s part, literature, she warns, lapses into “aesthetic act;” it revels in its “structural participation in horror” and becomes more accomplice than antidote to “acts” of terrorism. One must be careful, then, to avoid the crazy writer. Thoroughly absorbed in her own crises (as are most feminine, postmodern subjects for Kristeva), rather than sublimate the bodily experience of the drives through some sort of textual logic, the aesthetic actor denies abjection through “violence, destruction of the other (autrui) and self-destruction, through caricature and insult, through provocation of the reader, through violations of the public and the means of expression itself, and ultimately through destruction of the work and of the Self in suicide” (2005, 470). This sort of aesthetic acting out refuses to assimilate the horror it materializes and thus finds itself aiding and abetting the terrorist cause. Antidotally, on the other hand, literary “judgment” elaborates a complex language and thought system, a “polyphonic logic” that might contextualize symbolically the banality and spectacularity of horror and perversion confronting us on a daily basis, thereby helping the reader maintain her shaky symbolic bearings. Literature as judgment rather than act, she tells her Chinese reader, represents one of the only known treatments for postcommunist, Western decadence. Before concluding her preface with a wish that Powers of Horror might assist Eastern readers in avoiding falling victim to the “collapse of the shelter of thought” currently undermining our psychic stability in the West, she reiterates this crucial distinction between literary art (judgment) and “political terrorism” (act). Literature involves questioning, engaging, thinking: conscious mediation of the drives: “Literature [. . .] is in its own way terror, but because it is situated in representation and language, it is a terror that allows us better to think about the intimate causes of terror itself. Minimal but deep, it is not the least of antidotes against the terrorism that assails us from both within and without” (2005, 470). Aside from her own novels, unfortunately, Kristeva seems unable to recommend any “postmodern” texts to the potentially wounded reader. Indeed, contemporary fiction figures for her as a purely ego-driven aesthetic wherein feminine writers (as exemplified by contemporary French women writ-

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ers such as Catherine Millot) wallow in the shallow squalor of their “new maladies of the soul,” their “fatigue in the feminine.” Kristeva’s contempt for the senselessness of women’s writing is nothing new. Indeed, as a “post-War,” French woman writer with a distinctly political project, she has always maintained an adversarial relationship to her “peers.”3 Contempt, however, makes way for terror in her violent denunciations of the literary acts of Margeurite Duras (a frankly surprising response to an astoundingly rich body of work uniquely engaged—like Kristeva’s work—with the interstices of the unconscious and the social). Her symptomatic readings of Duras not only reveal a certain authorial “anxiety of influence,” but also produce a melancholic, textual resistance that ultimately gives life to both the therapeutic ideal of literary judgment and the singular destruction of the literary act that functions as its necessary, if undesirable, support. Duras as literary actor terrorizes the Kristevan text, provoking a symptomatic response not readily amenable to the “political therapy” of symbolic judgment. Kristeva first analyzes Marguerite Duras and her literary project, or “‘Duras,’” in the conclusive chapter of Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy (1989), elaborating an oddly depressive closure to a study seeking to advance a theory of the therapeutic beauty of the melancholic text. While her other “analysands,” Holbein, Nerval, and especially Dostoyevsky, create sublime modernist works of art from a melancholic position that definitionally precludes symbolic expression, “Duras” represents a feminine, postmodern refusal to transcend melancholic nothingness. As a writer, for Kristeva, this is her job, and as a citizen, this is her duty. Rather than do the sublimatory work required to make sense, quite literally, of the overwhelming suffering induced by a disturbingly “radical atheism,” Duras, Kristeva proposes, remains willfully mired in the silence of a melancholic imaginary. Caring nothing for beauty or catharsis, the social or the political—or anything else but her own passion for that matter, Duras seeks only to “contaminate” readers with the affective horrors of her chaotic and grief-stricken inner world; she wants us to feel her pain. And this, for Kristeva, even twenty years later as we will see, represents a historically and politically distressing literary anomaly that must be revealed, judged, and ultimately denounced. In the theoretical introduction to Black Sun, Kristeva presents us with a working clinical definition of melancholy: “I shall call melancholia the institutional symptomology of inhibition and asymbolia that becomes established now and then or chronically in a person, alternating more often than not with the so-called manic phase of exaltation” (1987, 18; 1999, 9). Grounding her interpretation in the works of Freud, Klein, and Green, Kristeva’s focus on silence as key diagnostic moment posits asymbolia qua symptom as pathological cause and effect: the analysand cannot “make sense” because she is melancholic, and she is melancholic because she cannot make sense. As in her other works, Kristeva’s preoccupation here is with “borderline” states, those uniquely human, psychic structures wherein the inherent contradictions and confusions of a

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difficultly social animal find both experience and expression: love, abjection, foreignness, genius, literature, and melancholy, all allow the analyst to investigate these ever-shifting, and for Kristeva psychically and politically constitutive, boundaries or borderlands (états limites) between nature and culture, affect and reason, real and symbolic (in Lacanian terms).4 Without this constant repetition of a foundational instability and negativity in the subject’s psychic negotiation of her embodiment, and its consequent affirmation and alienation in and through the symbolic, homo sapiens would cease to exist; like the melancholic, he would stop making sense. Signification, then, makes possible our survival of these inevitable, uncomfortable moments in and of these borderlands by endowing them with meaning. Language allows for the expression of these encounters with the real by lending them the stability of signs, thereby bringing the animal body, safely domesticated, into the social domain. The Law, she insists, must supersede radical freedom via the completion of the revolutionary turn, the inauguration of the next thetic phase.5 Better by far to have stayed where we were than to have gone too far in the direction of the “semiotic” confusion and meaninglessness of the real. The revolution must make sense. And this is precisely Kristeva’s problem with Duras. “She” refuses to make the thetic break that might make political sense and/or aesthetic beauty of her desperate inhabitation of the melancholic borderlands. She is “sick” and “contagious” and, unlike Dostoyevsky, utterly incapable of forgiveness, sublimation, transcendence—inconsolable, incurable, and, most of all, scary. In this opening section of Black Sun, Kristeva establishes the relationship between literary creation and the semiotic-symbolic movement of language. Literature ideally completes the signifying revolution, touching on the affective depths of the speaking subject and then transcribing this experience into signs and symbols both constitutive of and, especially in “poetry,” constituted by these semiotic borderlands. This sublimatory movement is curative, then, of both the psyche and the social—even, and perhaps especially, in the case of melancholy where language had become impossible. She writes, “Literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs that bears witness to the affect— to sadness as imprint of separation and beginning of the symbol’s sway; to joy as imprint [marque] of the triumph that settles me in the universe of artifice and symbol, which I try to harmonize in the best possible way with my experience of reality” (1987, 32–33; 1989, 22). In other words, literature reenacts the material rupture of the thetic moment, allowing the reader, settled in the universe of “artifice and symbol,” to experience the jouissance (painful and/or joyous) of moving a bit too far in the semiotic direction of the real. She continues, “The ‘semiotic’ and ‘symbolic’ become the communicable imprints of an affective reality, perceptible to the reader (I like this book because it conveys [communique] sadness, anguish, or joy) and yet dominated, set aside, vanquished ” (1987, 33; 1989, 22; emphasis added). In other words, “I” like (j’aime) this book because “I” am reminded that as a rational, speaking subject—like the writer—

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“I” can make sense of, and therefore conquer and control, the emotions “I” am able to understand from a safe, mediated distance. “I” hate that book because the writer has failed to translate her jouissance into the signs and symbols that would allow me to maintain my stable position in the social; “I” feel her pain. Duras makes “me” sick. The authorial “I,” of course, stands in here for the universal “reader.” Kristeva’s singular reader, however—especially a narcissistic or melancholic one—might justifiably respond, “But what about ‘me’?” “What if ‘I’ like, even love, my sadness and joy free of mediation, domination, and subordination?” For Kristeva, this Durassian reader (in both senses of the possessive), as we will see, a loving and a hating reader, cannot be a political reader. Her experience is radically cut off from its social and historical contexts. For Kristeva, of course, asymbolia equals asocial equals apolitical. The authentic, meaningful literary text, on the other hand, maintains the ascendancy of the Husserlian transcendental ego; it transposes the silence and “agitations” of its creative inception: the work of art that insures the rebirth of its author and its reader or viewer is one that succeeds in integrating the artificial language it puts forward (new style, new composition, surprising imagination) and the unnamed agitations [émois] of an omnipotent self that ordinary social and linguistic usage always leave somewhat orphaned or plunged into mourning. Hence such a fiction, if it isn’t an antidepressant, is at least a survival, a resurrection. (1987, 62; 1989, 51; emphasis added) The curative work of art, again, brings into the artificiality of language and communication those forgotten (by the individual subject) and ignored (by the collective social) preoedipal traces, émois, thereby allowing the omnipotent orphan to mourn her lost maternal object by attaching signs and symbols to her traces, and then to be born again, rise from the dead6—via the transcendence of the thetic break. How does the melancholic, defined by her asymbolia and failure to mourn, manage to create a work of art if she is caught in a death embrace with her lost object, the maternal Thing? Sublimation, in a word. Unfortunately though, some artists sublimate and others do not.7 In the case of Black Sun, the other depressive artists produce magnificent beauty from the depths of their suffering— to cure themselves and others—whereas Duras only reproduces and spreads her own suffering. Duras, Kristeva argues, does not sublimate because she refuses to abandon the melancholic position, to stop loving-hating the maternal Thing, to complete the revolution and make the thetic break, enter into the social, communicate. Describing melancholics, Kristeva writes that “…everything has gone by [révolu], they seem to say, but I am faithful to those bygone days [ce révolu], I am nailed down to them, no revolution is possible, there is no future…” (1987, 71; 1989, 60; ellipses in original ).8 And Kristeva’s revolution waits for no one.

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Before delving more deeply into the specificities of Kristeva’s readings of Duras, as well as a few of my own, I would like briefly to revisit Kristeva’s theorization of melancholic subjectivity as borderlands, as object of philosophical fascination. The dialectical movement across and within her texts (both fiction and nonfiction) from (1) an identifiable contact with the real—again, poetry, love, abjection—and a passionate attachment to its destabilizing effects on the symbolic and the social, which effects follow from the “semiotic” imbalance that tips the subject over into the borderlands, almost beyond the reach of the symbolic and the logos to (2) a violent negation of that which lies beyond these borderlands (the real), what remains inaccessible to the artificiality of signs and symbols, foreign to humanity and the social contract, rabidly insane, dangerous, and finally to (3) an even more passionate embrace of the symbolic reinstatement of the thetic phase that incorporates the wildness and beauty of the unbridled drives, as both affected by and affective of the “omnipotent self ” and his sociosymbolic universe, and brings them back into the “triumphant” safety and repose of “artifice and symbols.”9 The melancholic on this model remains stuck in the asymbolic, imaginary space-time of the second stage, until, that is, psychoanalysis or sublimation provokes anew the thetic break. Duras, like Kristeva, uses the darkroom, la chambre noire, to metaphorize an experience of radical psychic interiority, the space-time of this “orchestration” of loss.10 And while Duras may not create photo-graphy in her darkroom—she most definitely does not write with light—she does produce graphos, pages and pages over some fifty years, which would seem to indicate many thetic moments. In a recent work on Duras and politics, Dominique Denes identifies the importance of the notion of the darkroom in understanding the relationship between writing and politics in and for “Duras” (text/woman): Her [Duras’s] problematic of writing has caused her to adopt a singular posture and position, best synthesized by the original concept of “the darkroom” [“la chambre noire”]. This concept is polysemic: notably, a room for writing or reading, the darkroom would seem to be the closed, impermeable place par excellence, “a sort of dwelling place [logement] in oneself, a shadow, where everything goes, where the integrality of lived experience amasses, piles up,” oriented toward the interior darkness of being and creation, if the darkroom weren’t also for Duras a place of interface and osmosis from which the solitary writer observes and returns to others and the world. (2005, 8–9)11 Within the solitary silence of the darkroom, via the writing process that always already assumes a reading other, Duras claims to write from within the cryptic darkness of melancholic asymbolia, to make sense, to speak to others, to attain to a relationship with the outside. Whereas Kristeva argues that rebirth,

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resurrection, the transcendent thetic break—contact with the world beyond the narcissism of the tomb—is necessary to literary production, Duras insists that while she writes from a space of darkness, she remains fully aware, if terrified, of the light and life outside. In the interview just cited, a postface and response to the screenplay of Duras’s 1977 film Le Camion, Duras explains her understanding of the chambre noire as writing and reading room. Discussing the writing/reading of the film, Duras explains the reasoning behind its contrived setting, a nondescript room where the two characters, writer and reader, discuss the film quite literally in process; this chambre noire spatially re-presents, she explains, in mise-en-abyme, the “identical” (identique), unreachable space of writing; it visually replicates for the spectator the relationship between reader and writer (and text!). On screen, the reader (actor Gérard Dépardieu) materially occupies the chambre noire; he sits alongside the writer in the darkness—with the text. Duras theorizes: The film was made in a closed room, that is, curtains drawn, electric lights on, in the dark that is. I wouldn’t have ever thought . . . or at least, only now is this reflection coming to me . . . I wouldn’t have ever thought it possible to read in the light of day. I don’t know, perhaps one always reads in the dark; the place where one speaks, I call this the darkroom [la chambre noire]. I say: reading room or darkroom. It seems to me that there would be a dispersion of the reach of language in a daytime place [un lieu de jour]. Reading comes out of darkness, out of the night. Even if one reads in broad daylight, outside, night is created around the book. (1977, 103; ellipses in original)12 Yet while she may not have previously reflected on the universal reach of the film’s visual metaphor, she did indeed “say” (though within the context of this film, she did write it first) “reading room.” The preceding screenplay confirms that the dark room as cinematic setting functions as both image and metaphor of the intensity and obscurity of this quite literal “reading room”: A dark enclosed place. The curtains are drawn. The lights are on. Carpet. Mirrors. It’s a place of rest. Through the white curtains, the light of day. A round table in the center of the place. Two people are there, seated at this table: Gérard Dépardieu and Marguerite Duras. On the table, manuscripts. The story (histoire) of the film is thus read. They will read this story. The exterior of the place will only be seen once night has fallen. Throughout the film the décor will change, but inside the same place. It will be objects: tables, lamps, that change places. But the light will remain identical. The way of reading as well, pages in hand. This place can be called: CHAMBRE NOIRE, or reading room. (1977, 10–11)

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According to the screenplay, the two characters now read aloud the text describing what will be (and is being) projected onto the screen (and has already been inscribed on paper). Duras, “playing” the writer, speaks the vast majority of the words while her reader punctuates the writing-reading with questions and, less frequently, comments. Crucially here though, although reading takes place within the chambre noire, the solitary space of writer-reader, an outside preexists the reading room, both on blank page and on screen. What sort of outside? An industrial zone, the ugly injustice of the postcolonial, French banlieue: “Lateral travelling shot. Construction sites. Empty lots. Shanty towns” (1977, 10). She envisioned, she says, those volatile—currently riotous—badlands inhabited by immigrants, on the margins of the social. Some sixteen years later, just before her death, Duras returned for the last time to the notion of the chambre noire as space of writing and reading, distinct but not dissociable. In a 1993 essay on her writerly vocation, “Écrire,” Duras describes the desperate solitude of the chambre noire, the radical atheism that for her make writing possible, even necessary. “Writing,” for Duras, “is hell”: Finding oneself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost complete solitude and discovering that only writing will save you. To be with no subject for a book, no idea for a book, is to find oneself, rediscover oneself, face to face with [devant] a book. An immense emptiness. An eventual book. Face to face with nothingness. Face to face as a naked, living writing, as terrible, terrible to overcome. (1993 20)13 There is always, however, despite this solitude, the eventual reader whom the writer precedes at the bottom of this hole, a reader who shadows this writer-book face-off. She may not recognize it at the time (a truncated time as Kristeva argues), but deep down she knows it: otherwise it’s not a real book, or “literature” in Kristevan terms (Duras 1993, 23). Writing for Duras, and consequently reading (both authors agree that the two are structurally inseparable), is to confront the void left by the absence of belief—religious, aesthetic, philosophical, political—to be open to the meaningless suffering taking place outside, to speak, and at times even to scream, from this inescapably silent space-time of writing-reading. Duras does, however, I would argue, believe in writing, but at the same time, unlike Kristeva, knows and accepts that she will never grasp the meaning of this “unknown”: You can’t write without bodily strength. You have to be stronger than yourself to approach writing, you have to be stronger than what you write. It’s a funny thing, yes. It’s not only writing, what’s written, it’s also the screams of animals in the night, everyone’s screams, yours and mine, dogs’ screams. It’s the hopeless, massive vulgarity of society. Suffering is also Christ and Moses and the pharaohs and all of the Jews,

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and all of the Jewish children, and it’s also the most violent kind of happiness. Still, I believe that (Toujours, je crois ça). (Duras 1993, 24; emphasis added) Duras believes this suffering, these animal screams, and it is from and to this timeless space that she inscribes them, and that the reader is inscribed by them. Can such a hopeless and painful project bear political weight? Get by without offering any redemption or consolation? Kristeva thinks not. In the final chapter of Black Sun, “The Malady of Grief (La maladie de la douleur14): Duras,” Kristeva contends that Duras’s irrational devotion to suffering (la douleur) produces an eerie depressive silence that figures as not only crazy, but also politically irresponsible, if not suspect. In brief, Duras has made the political far too personal, which, contrary to the inverse feminist call to action— “the personal is political!”—produces a decidedly asocial textual effect.15 In broad terms, Kristeva reads Duras’s morbid love affair with the beyond of the real as not only politically useless, but also psychically dangerous, arguing: “Duras’s books should not be put into the hands of sensitive readers” (1987, 235; 1989 227). Michel de Certeau concurs, warning, “‘Don’t lose sight of the fact that there is always a risk of losing oneself, not being able to get out, remaining there, fixed, just as one remains mute in the face of a fascinating encounter’” (emphasis added).16 Similarly, in a first interview with Duras in 1974, Xavière Gauthier explains her own reading experience to the author: “I know that, when I read your books, it puts me in a very . . . , very heavy [ fort] state, and I’m uneasy and it’s very difficult to speak or do anything after reading them. I don’t know if it’s fear, but it’s truly a dangerous state to enter into” (Duras and Gauthier 1974, 14).17 Duras responds, “All the same, there are still people who read them [ca], so that’s what should be paid attention to. I pass into another domain, there. Because, when I started not to be able to avoid those books,18 I thought there wouldn’t be any readers. You see the danger, it’s immense, asylum-like. And then, the books found readers . . . and men” (17). How, Gauthier—positioning herself in this text as a “feminist”—asks, do these “men” respond? According to Duras, “The word “ill” comes back in every letter. [. . .] I’m ill from reading you” (17). And indeed, an impressive array of her contemporary readers and “men”—Lacan, Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze—confirm a sense of bodily anguish in the face of this writing, an irrational fear that perhaps the reading room has no exit. Kristeva, however, a generation younger and not a man, turns a far harsher diagnostic gaze on the Durassian text.19 Black Sun’s final chapter contrasts Revolution in Poetic Language’s celebration of modernity’s “music in Letters” with the nihilistic illogic and silence of Duras’s “postmodern” melancholic text. So, whereas a Mallarmé poem might instigate a decidedly progressive, historical shift in the social structures of material production and reproduction, the diseased Durassian text only silences her reader in a static, if not regressive, wave

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of suffering, a meaningless “disease of death,” or maladie de la mort. This post-Holocaust text, Kristeva adds, refuses to perform its aesthetic work of emotional purification, willfully fails to participate in the “policed” affairs of the State.20 Duras’s artistic irresponsibility lies in her inability to provide her contemporary reader some much-needed emotional release: “Lacking recovery or God, having neither value nor beauty other than illness itself seized at the place of rupture, never has art had so little cathartic potential” (Kristeva 1987, 235; 1989, 228). If, following Lacan’s reading of Aristotelian catharsis, as an aesthetically mediated release of damaging emotions (at both the individual and collective levels), and in particular fear and pity,21 then perhaps Kristeva has something here, at least in terms of beauty. Perhaps Durassian art does position the reader at an uncannily ugly psychic breaking point. It is, however, precisely when Duras not only fails to relieve, but even violently provokes, the reader’s fear and pity that her texts, to my mind, become most “valuable,” most singularly likely to inhabit an aggressively political—and ethical—function. For Kristeva, however, Duras’s uncannily solitary descents into madness, not to mention alcoholism, cannot mean anything. The depth and intensity of authorial anguish are indeed potentially terrifying, but this distinguishes them as neither cathartic nor otherwise socially significant. Just dangerous. And to all the wrong people. Suffering, on Kristeva’s reading—and suffering is the melancholic’s life blood—skirts the political and ethically positions history as internalized lost cause: “In the view of an ethic and an aesthetic concerned with suffering, the mocked private domain gains a solemn dignity that depreciates the public domain while allocating to history the imposing responsibility for having triggered the malady of death” (1987, 243; 1989, 235). History is loosed from its symbolic bearings: “Duras’s melancholy is . . . like an explosion in history. Private suffering absorbs political horror into the subject’s psychic microcosm” (1987, 242; 1989, 234). The personal, again, has improperly subsumed the political. Duras, refusing the cathartic possibilities of purification, insists instead on a reproductive falling back into the seductive jouissance of the silences and screams of the real. Anne Juranville, also an analyst and professor of literature, disagrees with Kristeva’s clinical diagnosis, arguing that Duras is too depressed to be melancholic, but does agree that the melancholic “subject,” and in particular the feminine one, maintains an immediate, traumatic relation to the real qua maternal Thing. This nostalgic denial of individuation, as for Kristeva, positions the melancholic beyond the pale of symbolic intervention, unable to access in any way the historical reality of the social: “Stupefied, horrified, [the melancholic] fixes himself in an inhuman zone beyond death where, lacking the least symbolic recourse, he is condemned to remain eternally and passively concentrated on this gaping wound that he himself is” (1993, 54). Juranville unlike Kristeva, however, implies that although the melancholic may indeed be incurable—as exemplified by Virginia Woolf, her melancholic heroine—she does have her

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moments of lucidity. Juranville, moreover, theorizes an ethical, if not quite social, expression of melancholic knowledge, arguing that through “the melancholic experience of the ontological void, a traversing of the mirror that shatters the certainties of the ordinary world and betrays it as a simulacrum, [the melancholic] is able to open the space of ethics as an act of unveiling being (alèthéia) in its primordial tear” (116). Juranville, like Kristeva, denies the melancholic access to historical time. For Lacan, however (and this is the former’s theoretical bent), this tragic “act” (as opposed to state), though it does indeed entail a certain rupture in chronological, historical time, does not wrench the subject from her historical bearings. The drives, or the “semiotic” on Kristeva’s theorization, are always already historical, even historicizing. Lacan explains, “‘[R]ememorization, historicization, is coextensive with the functioning of the drives in what we call the human psyche. This is also where destruction is registered, enters into the register of experience.’”22 And here, I think, lie not only the ethical but also the political possibilities (tentative emphasis here on a great deal of risk and luck—tuchè) of the melancholic’s pathological (logic of pathos) retreat from reality. Despite Kristeva’s attempts at extolling “the virtues of a melancholic position,” these possibilities are obscured by Kristeva’s politics of writing and reading (Restuccia 2005, 201). In 1998, some ten years after Black Sun, Kristeva published a second essay on Duras (two years after Duras’s death). The essay’s title, “Une Étrangère” (a [female] “foreigner,” “stranger,” “outsider”) establishes an immediate intratextual and intertextual identification of “Kristeva” and “Duras.” Explaining the title to the reader, Kristeva explains that she and Duras share a certain state of exile as writers born outside the French nation and language who write in French; Duras grew up in Vietnam speaking French at home and Vietnamese outside the home, Kristeva in Bulgaria, speaking Bulgarian in the home and French at school she explains (see Kristeva 2005, 502–503). Both women moved to France at the age of majority and became “French” writers, writers, however, whose most primitive, formative experiences took place in other languages as well, languages belonging to cultures where an intensity of suffering finds expression, where translation is therefore impossible. Both women are profoundly foreign, outsiders who write in France, who write in French: “[A]t the heart of the same language [French], they speak another language. Translating the sensible time of a foreign country— childhood, passion, other people, other voices—into a host idiom comes back to a transubstantiation of the suffering of exile, translation, and writing as common destiny (en un même destin)” (503).23 In an even more personal vein, she continues, “[W]e were savage accomplices because we were burned by a suffering that doesn’t square with French rhetoric. . . . Melancholy isn’t French” (502). In the next “portrait,” this one of Roland Barthes, author of La Chambre claire (1980), Kristeva explains the formative impact of Barthes’s 1970 essay, “L’Étrangère,” on her intellectual project in diagnosing her early work as displaying a “fertile ‘strangeness,’” a strangeness she recognized and learned to cultivate rather than repress

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(522; original date of publication 2002). Barthes’s writing, she explains, allowed her to identify herself as a foreigner and also as an accepted member of the French intelligentsia: “He opened . . . the jealously guarded signs of the French Temple of Letters” (511). Kristeva recognizes herself in “The Stranger.” And in Duras she reconizes “A Stranger,” of like kind. Kristeva’s 1998 essay begins, nonetheless, on a note of decidedly negative identification, if not sheer antagonism. The introductory passage is fascinating: Can one really like (aimer)—what’s called liking (aimer)—Duras? I’m intoxicated by her [it] ( j’en suis soûlée), but since I prefer the suffering of clarity to the illness of alcohol, I turn to her novels with the symbiotic, precautionary ripping apart that my most catastrophic patients provoke in me. . . . She didn’t hate it that I termed “witchcraft” her complicity with maternal hatred, with the anguish that replaces desire in depressed women, with that “nothingness” that scintillates between two women, that ties them ombilically to each other and floods the basement (inonde le sous-sol ) of endogenous feminine homosexuality. While Duras’s groupies (les groupies de Duras) chastised me for not recognizing her artistic virtuosity [in Black Sun], she saw my diagnosis as more of an homage. Of course she didn’t care if her art was capable of catharsis since she only wanted to contaminate the reader [groupie?] with her passion to death (sa passion à mort), her passion for death. (501–502; ellipsis in original) “Can one really like Duras?” Kristeva responds that she (qua I ) does not like her darkness, her alcoholism, her catastrophes, or her illness because she, as analyst and reader, prefers clarity and caution. She reads “Duras” as a seductive and fatal analysand from whom she must violently “rip” herself, and then, after a brief elliptic pause, she turns to Duras’s response. Duras, she explains, did not get defensive about the Black Sun essay; she did not hate being associated with witchcraft, hatred, angst, depression, homosexuality; she read “the diagnosis” as appreciation not insult. And indeed, a brief encounter with Duras’s work, her biographies, and her critics quickly confirms that her values and concerns do differ substantially from Kristeva’s, as do her aesthetics and politics. Setting aside for now the obvious problems with Kristeva’s theory of female homosexuality here as asocial and abyssal, her labeling of Duras’s readers as “groupies” is telling not only because it implies a certain cheapening of the literary value of her novels (which as we will see are not, any longer, for Kristeva, literature), but again firmly instantiates the reading experience imposed by “Duras” as unmediated by the symbolic: the groupie seeks sexual contact with her idol, not enlightenment—though oddly enough, these groupies are apparently concerned with “artistic virtuosity.” Duras, she argues, could not care less whether her novels were art. Nor whether they had any social value at all. Her only intention, and it is unclear here

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as to whether this is a conscious or unconscious intention (it cannot be desire since Duras is incapable), is to make other people ill with her suffering. “Duras” at this point no longer represents the woman and her oeuvre, and indeed they are incredibly difficult for critics, and even La Duras herself, to differentiate.24 As reader of Kristeva, her respondent and analysand, Duras’s words are now explicit and knowable. We, readers of Kristeva (and presumably of Duras), do know that Duras would certainly not have minded being accused of writing books full of suffering and darkness. We also know that she would not have minded that her novels were not interpreted as cathartic in either cause or effect. But, in the end, we know that Duras cared deeply about the value of her writing, and of all writing. What she lacked, for Kristeva, was and is another kind of belief, the belief that the writing could and would transform suffering, bring the melancholic out of her solitude, her violent relationship with loss, into the clarity of rational thought. Duras, however, claims that writing is not writing if it is not done alone in the dark, in a state of radical disbelief, “where everything is thrown into doubt” (1993, 21).25 At the end of a writing career spanning the latter half of the twentieth century, an “ugly time for literature” Kristeva exclaims (2005, 508), Duras concludes that all she can ever know about why or how she writes is this absolute doubt out of which it flows. Duras writes: And this doubt grows around you. This doubt is alone, it is the doubt of solitude. It is born of it, of solitude. At least the word can be named. I think a lot of people couldn’t bear what I’m saying here; they would run away. Perhaps that’s why everyone isn’t a writer. Yes. That’s it. That’s the difference. That’s the truth. Nothing else. Doubt is writing. Thus, it is also the writer. And with the writer, everyone writes. We’ve always known that. (1993, 22) Kristeva not only runs away; she rips herself away from this truth, this radical atheism “we’ve always known” to be both possible and potentially fatal, murderous or suicidal. Duras’s reader, Kristeva would agree, does indeed write “with” her in this unmediated, “symbiotic” relationship with the text, in the chambre noire. But this, on her reading, is the last thing we need in an age determined by religious terror and hatred. What we do need is forgiveness: the forgiveness of psychoanalytic listening whereby the analyst “gives-for” (par-donne) the analysand the symbolic attachments—words and images—necessary to become reborn in a socially meaningful way and the forgiveness of literature whereby “[w]riting causes affect to slip into effect: ‘actus purus’ Saint Thomas would say. It conveys affects and does not repress them, it suggests for them a sublimatory outcome, it transposes them for another in a threefold, imaginary, and symbolic bond. Because it is forgiveness, writing is transformation, transposition, translation” (1989, 217, 226). The literary act, just and loving, collects sadness and purifies it, renders it sublime, divine, beautiful. Dostoyevsky, for Kristeva,

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following Aquinas’s dictates regarding justice and human forgiveness, gives his reader the Christian gift of forgiveness. An orthodox Christian like Kristeva, he experiences the intense suffering of the melancholic and then selflessly transcends his own lack, his own wounds; he believes.26 Kristeva prefaces her conclusive answer to the question of whether “Duras” is literature with a final assertion as to the historical function of literature in these troubled times of wars, crisis, television, and “therapy:” “literature is becoming the rival, Ô how superior often, of the clinic” (2005, 508). And in this most recent collection, consistently situating the speaking subject in a post– 9/11 nightmare of perversity and insanity, both analysis and literary meaning-making are more crucial than ever if we are to heal the alarmingly increasing numbers of the walking wounded, and even, I would argue, the walking dead. In the book’s central essay, “Hatred and Forgiveness: Or from Abjection to Paranoia,” the author posits a talking cure for the terrorist’s political ills, for the “new maladies of the soul.” She concludes the essay: In these post-modern times of clashes of religions, times of endless wars, it is not useless to remember that psychoanalytic interpretation, by revealing the many-sided destiny of hatred that makes and unmakes the human race, puts itself forward as the ultimate lucidity of this for-giveness (ce par-don) that psychic life needs to continue simply to live, without in the process completely ceasing to hate. (2005, 373) Again, Kristeva asserts the superior value of psychoanalysis as a historically necessary moment in the unfolding of humanity’s understanding of itself. Analysis and literature allow us momentarily to have it both ways: the clarity of reason and the confusion of madness. We can have our hate and understand it too. Returning one last time to Duras, “A Stranger,” Kristeva concludes (once and for all?) that no, contrary to her earlier interpretation in Black Sun, “Duras” is not literature: One cannot really like Duras. She describes the “vocation” of the Durassian text: to expose madness in the light of reason. Neither to understand it nor dissimulate it. Simply to render in its nudity her “enormous pain,” without complaint, “as if singing about it.” “I went mad in a state of pure reason.”27 The novel as a madness in a state of pure reason? No, a stranger to literature, this apocalypse is certainly not made to be liked. It is only there to interrupt sleep, the time that remains. (2005, 508) What, then, is the socially and psychically responsible novel on Kristeva’s reading? And why, I wonder, is Duras’s rational representation of madness not

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a novel? Kristeva’s answer here is pure negation: “NO.” This cannot be literature, especially at this historical moment when we need literature to rescue us, the walking wounded, the walking dead, from the senselessness of our suffering. The last thing we need is more sleepless nights. Duras, unlike Kristeva, does not write detective stories. She does write about “true crime” at its most intimate and immediate, reenacts our fascination with the transcendent familiarity of the fait divers, especially the crime of passion. In both journalistic pieces (of which two collected volumes have been published, aptly titled Outside to indicate an explicit engagement with the political) and novels, most exceptionally Moderato cantabile, she explores the criminality and desperation of domestic familiarity and symbolic meaninglessness. We read the event within the timeless context of its banality and repetition: “Jealous wife shoots philandering husband.” No cunning serial killer with a metaphysical score to settle, just the everyday violence of love and hatred that, when it encounters the real and its jouissance, would pull us into the melancholic abyss, and ultimately a Godless death, were it not for our sheer good luck. Our good luck in still being alive, not killing or being killed. There is, in other words, no cure for a certain Durassian violence—either murderous or suicidal. This does not, however, mean that she does not recognize and express political suffering. To the contrary, she not only sets many of her novels in highly politicized sites of colonial and postcolonial conflict, she also put her body on the line and her novels on hold to engage with many of the twentieth century’s struggles for freedom and justice. Her actions, if at times rather extreme, often bordered on the heroic. Why, then, does Kristeva call this woman/text(s) apolitical? Her novels socially useless? A distinct conservatism, it would seem, prevails in Kristeva’s dialectical model of signification, a conservatism grounded in a fear that forecloses a certain textual intimacy and immediacy. Her rejection, abjection, of Duras, like her abjection of the maternal body in Powers of Horror (1980), reveals an underlying, albeit well hidden, aversion to a truly radical revolution that failed to live up to its name. Duras’s texts may not be for everyone, though their popularity would seem to attest to a substantial and discerning, and yes often oddly attached, readership. Though I would agree that Duras does subject her reader to an unbearable experience of unmitigated suffering and loss, I would also argue that the radical solitude of this chambre noire might become a singular, and as such political and ethical, haven for an increasingly victimizing and vicitmized population. An aesthetics and politics grounded in and expressive of the silences and screams of the intimacy and immediacy of psychic suffering allows for the subject, both writer and reader, to make an intersubjective connection through language whose meaning requires no other meaning than this moment of connection itself, as solitary repetition of those moments of love and hate that draw the melancholic out of her sorrow, even into mania, for at least the time necessary to write a novel—or to read a novel. This solitary communion

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reaffirms a call to a revolution that would not consist to a return to the same, because the same is too painful for too many people, both rationally and irrationally. The unthinkable suffering that accompanies globalized capitalism simply does not and cannot, and hopefully never will, make sense.

Notes 1. Kristeva neglects to mention her Maoist affiliation’s potential impact on her relationship to the Eastern reader. 2. The feminine pronoun here is most definitely mine. Kristeva’s reader is a “universally” masculine reader, and she does conceive sexual difference in China as fundamentally at odds with Western elaborations of gender. See Kristeva (1974a). 3. While Kristeva’s work has incited much debate within the feminist community, in part because of her predilection for modernist, male writers, she did publish three major works on “feminine genius”: Colette, Hannah Arendt, and Melanie Klein. 4. Significantly though, of course, Lacan denies the existence of the borderline. 5. In her 1974 Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva develops a dialectical model of signification whereby the subject moves from a position of “symbolic” meaning to its “semiotic” negation via the drives to a sublation as “thetic” moment wherein the subject reaffirms the symbolic position. This “circular” structure constitutes the quite literal “revolution.” 6. The Christian overtones here again emphasize Kristeva’s insistent attachment to the salutary function of belief. As a true melancholic on Kristeva’s definition, Duras believes in nothing; she is a radical atheist, and this makes her crazy and dangerous. 7. Fortunately, these others have recourse to the other curative option: analysis. 8. The function of time in this process is well worthy of consideration here. The melancholic cannot share sociohistorical temporality, and this, of course, has some interesting political consequences. 9. Sara Beardsworth provides an impressive analysis of the Kristevan dialectic in “From Revolution to Revolt Culture” (2005). 10. Duras’s fiction has been uniquely celebrated and investigated by the French psychoanalytic community (and to a lesser extent the feminist community). From Lacan’s famous “Homage to Marguerite Duras” to a slew of books and articles on her life and works (not to mention several television and documentary film interviews) to a recent issue of the Israeli Lacanian journal dedicated to one of her novels, Le ravissement de Lol. V. Stein (Almanac 2005), the analytic community (aside from Kristeva!) regard Duras’s texts as containing an invaluable if unspeakable knowledge of the unconscious, a knowledge of

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which Duras herself is necessarily unaware. Lacan (2000) writes: “Marguerite Duras seems to know, without me, what I teach.” 11. All translations from this text are mine. 12. All translations from this text are mine. 13. All translations from this text are mine. 14. La Douleur is the title of Duras’s 1984 novel that takes the form of a journal written by the narrator-author while waiting for her husband to return from the Nazi concentration camps. The “journal” chronicles the narrator’s suffering through absence and imagination and then the further suffering upon the husband’s unbearable, uncanny return. This suffering is born of the narrator’s love for her husband and equally, if disturbingly, her irrational hatred of all Germans and Charles de Gaulle. This is a novel about the political stakes of human suffering, of love and hatred, of jouissance and the real. 15. Curious in light of Duras’s notorious claim in her first television interview (1988) that individual engagements with both Nazi and Stalinist ideologies should be read as easily understandable, if highly desperate, attempts to find political solutions to personal problems. Apostrophes, 1988. 16. Cited in Udris (1988, 4). 17. All translations from this text are mine. 18. She is referring here to those novels written after and including her most celebrated work, The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1966), an unfortunate translation of the French title, Le ravissement de Lol. V. Stein (1964). Her previous novels maintain a certain attachment to the Realist tradition of Balzac and become increasingly less concerned with telling stories (individual, familial, social, political) and more concerned with expressing what she knows of her “inner experience” (in the sense of Bataille). 19. At this point, Kristeva has assessed critically the politics of literary production in several earlier works, most influentially within the context of the disruptive subjectivation of poeticized desire in Révolution du langage poétique (1974), the exclusionary dynamics of material abjection in Pouvoirs de l’horreur (1980), and the incorporative transference of narcissistic love in Histoires d’amour (1983). Kelly Oliver argues that Kristeva’s works “can be read as an oscillation between an emphasis on separation and rejection on the one hand and an emphasis on identification and incorporation” (2004, 54). 20. Juliet Flower MacCannell argues that “for Kristeva art is over in the modern world—art, that is, as it used to function in the exemplary case, the Aristotelian mediation of reason and unreason, the cathartic” (1994, 89). 21. Lacan emphasizes that our knowledge of Aristotle’s thoughts on catharsis is seriously obscured by the loss of what appears to be his most major work on the subject (1986, esp. 285–289). 22. Cited in Hassoun (1997, 16–17). 23. She does not, however, remark on the significant political difference between these two situations.

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24. Michel David (2005) terms this conflation of life and art Duras’s “œuvre-vie” (work-life). 25. Everything but her child, Duras specifies. 26. Kristeva has always maintained an explicit dialogue with Christianity, and in particular its East-West schism. In her most recent novel, Murder in Byzantium (2004), orthodox Christianity becomes a metaphor for the current wars of religion. Indeed, she insists on the meaning of this metaphor in interviews about the novel. 27. Here Kristeva cites Duras’s L’Amant (1984).

References Almanac of Psychoanalysis III: The Logical Time of Ravishment. 2005. Israeli Group of the European School of Psychoanalysis. Rehovot, Israel: Weizmann Institute of Science. Beardsworth, Sara. 2005. “From Revolution to Revolt Culture.” Revolt, Affect, Collectivity. Ed. Tina Chanter and Ewa Płnowska Ziarek. Albany: State University of New York Press. David, Michel. 2005. Le ravissement de Marguerite Duras. Paris: L’Harmattan. Denes, Dominique. 2005. Marguerite Duras: Ecriture et politque. Paris: L’Harmattan. Duras, Marguerite. 1964. Le ravissement de Lol. V. Stein. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1966. The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Trans. Richard Seaver. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1977. Le camion, suivi de Entretien avec Michelle Porte. Paris: Editions de Minuit. ———. 1984. L’amant. Paris: Editions de Minuit. ———. 1993. Écrire. Gallimard. Duras, Margeurite, and Xavière Gauthier. 1974. Les Parleuses. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Hassoun, Jacques. 1997. La cruauté mélancolique. Paris: Flammarion. Juranville, Anne. 1993. La femme et la mélancolie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Kristeva, Julia. 1974a. Des Chinoises. Paris: Des Femmes. ———. 1974b. Révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1980. Pouvoirs de l’horreur: Essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1983. Histoires d’amour. Paris: Donoël. ———. 1987. Soleil noir: depression et mélancolie. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1993. Les Nouvelles Maladies de l’âme. Paris: Fayard. ———. 1999. Le Génie feminine, tome premier: Hannah Arendt. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2000. Le Génie feminine, tome II: Melanie Klein. Paris: Fayard.

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———. 2002. Le Génie feminine, tome III: Colette. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2004. Meurtre à Byzance. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2005. La haine et le pardon: Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse III. Paris: Fayard. Lacan, Jacques. 1986. Le séminaire, livre vii, L’éthique de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2000. Autres écrits. Paris: Seuil. MacCannell, Juliette Flower. 1994. The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Oliver, Kelly. 2004. “The Crisis of Meaning.” The Kristeva Critical Reader. Ed. John Lechte and Mary Zournazi. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Restuccia, Frances L. 2005. “Black and Blue: Kielowski’s Melancholia” Revolt, Affect, Collectivity. Ed. Tina Chanter and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek. Albany: State University of New York Press. Udris, Raynelle. 1988. Welcome Unreason: A Study of “Madness” in the Novels of Marguerite Duras. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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10 What Is Intimacy?

 S. K. Keltner

The term “intimacy” or “the intimate” (l’intimité) as singular psychic life is first presented as the object of a book-length thought with the publication of Julia Kristeva’s second book on the concept of revolt, Intimate Revolt (1997, 2002b). It has remained noticeably present since. Her biographical trilogy, Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words—Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette (1999, 2001a; 2000a, 2001c; 2002a, 2004), her fictional detective novels, her broad-reach political writings appearing in, for instance, the popular France Culture over the past several years, and most recently her newest collection of essays, La haine et le pardon (2005), all make use of the term. Though the term comes to more emphatically and directly mark what has remained Kristeva’s chosen objectdomain, her choice of this term in particular is not new to this period of her writing. The term first appears at least as early as her first major work of the 1980s, Powers of Horror (1980, 1982), and gains significance throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. In Powers of Horror Kristeva articulates abjection in terms of an intimate/public distinction in which abjection marks the threshold of intimate suffering and public horror. In Tales of Love (1983, 1987b) intimacy signals Stendhal’s integration of love into politics. In Black Sun (1987a, 1989) Kristeva returns to the intimate/public distinction articulated in Powers of Horror to further analyze the constitution of modern intimacy through the work of Marguerite Duras. In Strangers to Ourselves (1988, 1991), the “intimate” describes the culmination of the classical logic of the nation-state in nineteenth-century German nationalism, the “quest” of Romanticism, and Freud’s recasting of otherness within. Throughout the 1980s Kristeva describes certain writings as “intimist,” but her use of the term exceeds its meaning in the history 163

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of art—as, for example, when she refers to Freudian psychoanalysis as “intimist” (1988, 268; 1991, 181). In Time and Sense (1994, 1996b)—many of the insights of which are integrated into Kristeva’s books on revolt—Proust and Freud represent an experience of rehabilitated intimacy. Nevertheless, if it is clear that the term’s presence is long-standing, Kristeva’s choice of it and its meaning is not so transparent. The term significantly recalls the political phenomenology of Hannah Arendt, whose name and whose political concepts also punctuate Kristeva’s texts at least as far back as the 1980s and grows in significance, like the intimate, throughout Kristeva’s oeuvre, ultimately culminating in the biography, Hannah Arendt. Kristeva confirms Arendt’s long-standing influence on her own work in the conclusion to the biographical trilogy entitled “Is There a Feminine Genius?” (2002a, 2004), but she marks one of her essential differences from Arendt precisely in terms of intimacy. Among Arendt’s “limitations” lies a “lack of attention to psychic life and intimacy, which she considers to be hybrid relics of subjectivism and the loss of transcendence” (1999, 261; 2001a, 162). Nevertheless, she often recalls Arendt’s political phenomenology throughout her elaboration of the concept of intimacy. For example, in Black Sun, Arendt’s name and Arendt’s methodological concepts accompany Kristeva’s analysis of intimacy as it is articulated in the work of Marguerite Duras, and which she has recently called, in La haine et le pardon, “ravaged intimacy” (2005, 502); Kristeva’s work on the intimate of revolt, as well as her biography on Arendt—which airs an understanding of intimacy that would have appeared foreign, if not maddening, to Arendt herself—defends the intimate, on the one hand, and psychoanalysis and the artwork, on the other, against Arendtian dismissals; and, just after 9/11 in November 2001, in an article published as part of her ongoing column in France Culture, “Intimité voilée, intimité violée,” Kristeva mimics Arendt’s now-famous formulation of authority from “What Is Authority?” by articulating the significance of intimacy in the modern world not according to what it is, but according to what it was (Arendt 1961/1993, 91; Kristeva 2001b/2003, 51). Kristeva, thus, often points toward Arendt’s work as the context in which her articulation of the modern constitution of intimacy unfolds. Arendt’s genetic phenomenological account is thereby significant for its illumination of how Kristeva’s thinking of intimacy, as well as her use of psychoanalysis and aesthetics to illuminate it, is to be related to political thinking more generally.

Intimacy and the Event of Natality For Arendt, the intimate is a modern Western phenomenon. It signals the historical transformation of subjective interiority, once “sheltered and protected by the private realm” (1958/1998, 69), into a “mass phenomenon of loneliness” (59) constituted by the “rebellion,” “withdrawal,” or “flight” from the social, also a modern phenomenon, into the innermost regions of subjectivity. Arendt dates

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the discovery of intimacy to the period of Rousseau—the “first articulate explorer and to an extent even theorist of intimacy” (39)—and, following him, to Romanticism. With the rise of the social, which abolishes the distinction between the private and the public, intimacy becomes the only site into which one can withdraw. Intimacy, like the private before it, is marked by a necessary hiddenness, but, she argues, it is an unreliable substitute (70). One of the essential differences between the private and the intimate lies in the latter’s inability to be located in the world. Arendt emphasizes intimacy as “an innermost region” without a place: “The intimacy of the heart, unlike the private household, has no objective tangible place in the world, nor can the society against which it protests and asserts itself be localized with the same certainty as the public space” (39). The intimate and the social are, for Arendt, “subjective modes of existence,” and the “uncertain” and “shadowy kind of existence” that is the intimate remains ultimately incommunicable: pain, for example, “cannot assume an appearance at all,” and love “is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public” (51). Any light that illuminates the intimate in language is borrowed from the public and can never adequately mirror the intimate, which remains hidden. Being riveted to the intimacy of the hidden or to the chatter of social conformism is the effect of the modern loss of the private/public distinction that enabled politics in Arendt’s sense; that is, as a life of action characterized by individuation within the plurality of public life. Kristeva follows Arendt’s characterization of the intimate as a strange region that lacks a proper spatiotemporal, that is, worldly, place that language fails to expose. Though she often refers to intimacy as a space, such “space” cannot be understood with reference to ordinary spatial extension. As remedy to the problem of spatially representing intimacy, Kristeva refers the intimate to time. However, just as the intimate as “space” cannot be understood according to simple extension, neither can the intimate as “time” be understood according to our everyday concept of time; and yet, neither can it be reduced to the philosophies of time articulated by Bergson or Heidegger, which is not to say that it is unrelated to their thought. Kristeva elaborates the temporality of intimacy with reference to Freud’s Zeitlos—the timeless or, more literally, lost time—and Proust’s “sensible time”: a “time of death” (1997, 49; 2002b, 31) or a “time outside time” (40; 25) that “approaches the somatic” (49; 31) and “where being itself . . . is heard” (80; 50). The temporality of intimacy, as elaborated by Kristeva, integrates the Freudian insight with Bergsonian duration and Heideggerean temporality (46–50; 29–31). Freudian and Proustian sensible-(non)time marks a break with temporality otherwise conceived. Nonetheless, Kristeva draws on “three great thinkers of [the twentieth] century” (47; 29) to fully account for the intimate. For Kristeva, intimacy would be an interruptive heterogeneity vis-à-vis the unity of the three temporal ecstaces elaborated, albeit differently, by both Bergson and Heidegger. The positive dynamic of intimacy, which she calls “intimate revolt,” can be understood, in phenomenological language, as

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interrogation and expression. The first movement of the intimate as revolt is a return to that affective moment of heterogeneity that inscribes an affective disposition in the subject. Revolt as return is essential because it takes us back to the necessary moment of affectivity and through an active interrogation holds on, experiences, and undergoes it. Here Kristeva establishes an affective moment in subject constitution in modernity as a necessary part of revolt. This movement interrogates what is called “trauma” in psychoanalytic language, as the return to the subject’s fundamental, corporeal passivity as both rupture and condition. It is a heterogeneity that cannot temporalize. The second movement of the intimate as revolt is linguistic expression—what would correspond to “word” and “deed” in Arendtian language. The interrogation and experience of affective suffering is accomplished in words. Hence, “the talking cure,” “the novel,” and even “philosophy” become intimate events. Intimate revolt is the dynamic of subjective return to nonintegratable heterogeneity that is articulated or given signs. In other words, intimacy is a dispositional index of subjectivity characterized by a double movement: “this space to the inside [au-dedans] where men take shelter in referring to the beyond [au-delà]” (2001/2003, 51). Because heterogeneity is ultimately nontranslatable, its narration is ceaseless, infinite. “Intimate revolt” is, thereby, a “double infinity” that opens a ceaseless questioning that sustains psychic life. Kristeva’s choice of the term, in recalling Arendt, situates her concept of intimacy in relation to what she calls Arendt’s “revolutionary temporality”: the event of natality as rupture and new beginning. Kristeva’s adoption of the Arendtian description of a strange, nontemporal, nonspatial “region” of modern existence, however, develops that line of thinking in a radically different direction. Indeed, Kristeva locates a dynamic of the event of natality in the positive movement of intimacy. Kristevan intimacy thus fundamentally alters the meaning of the intimate and its relationship to what was the political event of natality for Arendt. In her third book on revolt, The Future of Revolt (1998a, 2002b), included in the English translation of Intimate Revolt, Kristeva links her privileged examples of intimate revolt to the event: “From prayer to dialogue, through art and analysis, the capital event is always the great infinitesimal emancipation: to be restarted unceasingly” (11; 223). Kristeva follows the Arendtian search for “new beginnings” but locates what for Arendt was a political event not in “the public,” but in the intimate. Kristevan events are precisely “intimate events.” Both share an insistence on the event as constitutive, but their placement of that event differs. Further, though Kristeva adopts a set of temporal structures from Arendt to analyze what she has called the failure of “the political function” (1990, 45; 1993, 68), Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and aesthetic resources point beyond the fundamental spontaneity of Arendt’s Aristotelianism and toward a primordial passivity governed by the dominance of otherness in subject constitution. Nevertheless, in articulating intimacy in relation to Arendt’s political phenomenology, Kristeva thereby situates her thought of the

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temporality of intimacy within Arendt’s temporal structure of an instant that is a breach of time both traditionally and philosophically conceived. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and aesthetic position allows her to defend a different historical course of intimacy than the one offered by Arendt. She identifies the “first articulate explorer” (Arendt 1958/1998, 39) of modern intimacy not in the writings of Rousseau but in the experience and work of another figure: the Viennese Dr. Freud, who came on the heels of Romanticism. Kristeva’s interrogation of intimacy tracks a history of intimacy in the West that is concerned most expressly with the border between interiority and its beyond, which is the problematic inherited by Freud (1998b, 10). In Intimate Revolt she identifies two major “revolutions in intimacy”: the first takes place with Augustine’s introduction of the will into intimacy; the second takes place with Freud’s introduction of heterogeneity (1997, 80; 2002b, 50–51). What is intimate or inmost, for psychoanalysis, is simultaneously what is most strange; that is, psychoanalysis returns subjectivity to a nonorigin of otherness in which the self is, at bottom, beyond itself. The loss of intimacy positively conceived as singular psychic life corresponds to the formation of modern intimacy, a mode of existence in which the positive dynamic of intimacy is lost.

Freud’s Involution of Intimacy What Kristeva calls Freud’s “revolution in the intimate” in Intimate Revolt is named in Strangers to Ourselves the “involution of the strange” (1988, 268; 1991, 191), which reverses the nationalist formation of intimacy in German culture. In Strangers to Ourselves Kristeva outlines the conditions of the emergence and significance of Freudian psychoanalysis as directly related to the problematic of racialized nationalism and Freud’s identity as a Jew. The historical and political context of the Freudian revolution/involution is defined by the culmination of the posttheological, modern secular logic of the nation-state in nineteenth-century German nationalism. Kristeva describes this logic as “[a] logic that, amenable to improvement (democracies) or degeneration (totalitarianism), acknowledges its being based on certain exclusions and, consequently, surrounds itself with other structures—moral and religious, whose absolutist aspirations it nonetheless tempers—in order precisely to confront what it has set aside, in this case the problem of foreigners and its more egalitarian settling” (143; 98). “Intimacy” marks the difference between the emergence of nineteenth-century German nationalism and the emergence of Freudian psychoanalysis as “a journey into the strangeness of the other and of oneself ” (269; 182). German nationalism (be it grounded in blood, culture, or language) foregrounds the intimate as an interiority of what is most familiar as the organizing principle of modern social and political reality. The intimate here marks the problems of race and nation in an expanding, globalizing world. German Romanticism’s interrogation of this very intimacy is intrigued by what is most strange in language, culture, and tradition. The Romanticists’s

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“intimate quest” of the strange is “the fertilizing soil” out of which the Freudian unconscious “sprang forth” (267; 180–181). Kristeva’s analysis of the emergence of intimacy as nationalism and its Freudian reversal follows closely Antoine Berman’s history of the concept of translation in German Romanticism in The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany (1984, 1992). Berman traces the concept of German Bildung as the process of formation of a cultural ethos that is a direct response to the translation trends that form French culture. Berman traces a twofold principle of Bildung: fidelity and expansion. Because French culture is established, the question of its formation as culture is somewhat settled. German culture, because it is in the process of being formed, offers a conception of translation that depends not simply on fidelity to one’s own past models (which it shares with the concept of French culture), but a fidelity that must also negotiate the expansion of itself (61–62; 35–36). The concept of culture as Bildung posits the foreign as the milieu and mediation of “one’s own” or the intimate. The foreign is that which one must pass through in the formation of one’s own. Berman opposes “the foreign” as mediation and incorporation to “the strange” as that which radically disturbs and does not mediate, but unravels. The latter he refers to Freud’s description of the uncanny as “l’inquiétante étrangeté” (disturbing/worrisome strangeness) as a model of the relation between one’s own and the foreign/strange that breaks with the notion of the foreign as mediation (247; 155). The suggestion is that both German and French concepts of “culture” depend on a notion of translation that is ultimately devoted to one’s own at the expense of the foreign. Kristeva redescribes Berman’s thesis in the context of an analysis of the significance of the relation between Freudian intimacy and the political implications of the German negotiation of the intimate/foreign border. She insists that the formation of German culture as Bildung suggests a balance between one’s own and the foreign, but the cosmopolitan ideal is perverted insofar as it culminated in the expression of German superiority that justified “the demand for a German cultural hegemony”: “Such a nationalist perversion of the cosmopolitan idea, vitiated and dominated by a national ‘superiority’ that one has taken care to valorize beforehand is, as is well known, at the basis of Nazi ideology” (1988, 266–267; 1991, 180). If Kristeva insists on the importance of Romanticism for conditioning the Freudian discovery, she also insists that Freud’s localization of the strange as l’inquiétante étrangeté is equally conditioned by his Judaism in the context of nationalism as intimacy. On the heels of Romanticism, Freud’s revolution in intimacy emerges as an absolute contrary to the classical logic of the foreign in French and German culture: for Freud, what is most intimate is simultaneously what is most foreign. Again, Kristeva calls the turning of intimacy as the nationalistic into the strange an “involution.” It shares with German Romanticism an interrogation of the strange in the intimate, but whereas the strange is relegated to a moment of the

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intimate in German culture, it becomes the persistent breakup of such intimacy in Freud. The “strange” as what lies beyond my intimacy in nationalism marks a movement of involution of the strange into the very basis of the intimate, making the strange the intimate ground of the familiar: “The involution of the strange in the psyche loses its pathological aspect and integrates within the assumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolic and becomes an integral part of the same. Henceforth the foreigner is neither a race nor a nation. The foreigner is neither glorified as a secret Volksgeist nor banished as disruptive of rationalist urbanity. Uncanny, foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners, we are divided” (1988, 268; 1991, 181). The Freudian involution, the opposite of evolution, as in nationalism’s Social Darwinism, specifically turns inward what is excluded by a nationalistic cultural logic that articulates the intimate according to the nation and its foreigners. Freud’s involution of the strange is the strange of National Socialism itself and encompasses the strange as strange—unlike the “strangers” of nationalism, which are strange via narcissistic projection or abjection. The otherness of psychoanalytic discourse becomes then an otherness governed neither by a law of contradiction nor by a law of dialectical negativity, but rather by a “perturbed logic” of ever-present otherness as the breakup of the self and its security. The Freudian involution discovers in itself the source of the intimate/strange distinction that governs the German valuation of Bildung and, as such, discovers the intimate as what is most foreign. Kristeva thus grounds the originary formative experience of modern intimacy, as articulated by Freud, in the problematic of racialized nationalism. For Kristeva, Freud’s “intimist rehabilitation of the strange” (1988, 268; 1991, 181) recalls principally Freud’s Judaism, but not only “the Judaic exploration of a strange God or of a stranger who will reveal God” (268; 181). It also recalls his “personal history”: “a Jew wandering from Galicia to Vienna and London, with stopovers in Paris, Rome, and New York (to mention only a few of the key stages of his encounters with political and cultural foreignness)” (268–269; 181). Thus, at the basis of the Freudian preoccupation with the strange as the intimate, and the logic that governs it, is a life lived as a marginalized migrancy conditioned by and conditioning nationalist and/or racialized intimacy. The implication is that “involution,” as what marks the Freudian course, is also the interiorization of a social demand that cannot be accomplished; that is, the interiorization of a moral demand of intimacy that cannot be accomplished by a Jew, which makes of Freud a wanderer. The Freudian revolution emerges as an involution of a Western social and political reality. Psychoanalysis thus is witness to the experience of a socially and historically nonintegratable self.

“Ravaged Intimacy” and the Event of Death Kristeva’s insight into the sociohistorical and political significance of Freudian intimacy is indebted to her prior analyses of abjection and loss in the 1980s, which

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further fills out the reality of modern intimacy. Again, in Powers of Horror Kristeva articulates abjection according to a distinction between intimate suffering [la douleur] and public horror. Abjection is the shape that the border between the intimate and the public takes; or rather, abjection is the fate of intimacy in the historical context of an unavoidable interiorization of public horror (1980, 165; 1982, 140). In Black Sun Kristeva returns to this distinction in the context of Arendt’s political phenomenology, primarily the distinction between private and public and the emergence of intimacy in late modernity. To be precise, her thesis of abjection is shown to bear the weight of the loss of public space as the space of individuation. Kristeva’s thought of intimacy here provocatively reevaluates the stakes of the primary difference between Arendtian and Heideggerean ontology, read from the vantage point of a psychoanalytic and aesthetic perspective. The work of Marguerite Duras is accorded considerable importance to this project. Her reading of Duras appears as the concluding chapter to Black Sun and is entitled “The Malady of Grief [la douleur].” It appropriates the title of one of Duras’s novellas, with one exception: “grief,” “pain,” “distress,” or “suffering” [la douleur] replaces Duras’s “death”: The Malady of Death. If the substitution marks the object domain of the concluding chapter as suffering subjectivity, its tie to Duras’s chosen word, “death,” remains essential. Kristeva asks, “Would suffering [la douleur] in love with death be the supreme individuation?” (1987a, 245; 1989, 237; translation modified). Though Arendt is mentioned by name only once, the text resonates with her presence. This is clear in the first several lines of the chapter—from how Kristeva defines the modern world as the world since 1914, which repeats the preface to The Human Condition, to the language and method of Arendt’s genetic phenomenological constitution of intimacy. However, if Arendt’s thought marks the formal context of Kristeva’s political analysis, the Durasean aesthetic concretizes its real meaning. Kristeva says that Duras’s aesthetic reveals that “the malady of death constitutes our most concealed intimacy” (1987a, 229; 1989, 221; translation modified); that the “outburst of death and madness” that was the reality of World War II “found its intimate, unavoidable repercussion at the heart of psychic grief [la douleur]” (230; 222); that Duras and Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour is une histoire rooted in the local, but yet, because of “the Third World’s irruption” and “the realism of family carnage,” is made not only “plausible,” but “strangely close, intimate” (238; 230); and finally, that Duras’s literary works are “intimist texts” (241; 234). Kristeva’s most recent work, La haine et le pardon (2005), repeats her description of Duras in a chapter entitled “Une étragère,” originally published in a special issue on Duras in NRF in 1998. There, Kristeva says that the history of the twentieth century has “passed by” the “pages” of Duras and left “only a ravaged intimacy” (2005, 502). Kristeva credits Duras with having discovered and elaborated the passion that is the malady of death as a “new malady of the soul.” Kristeva’s analysis of Duras provides an account of the event of intimacy that is not the event of natality, but its opposite: the event of death. Kristeva’s

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sole reference to Arendt’s proper name in “The Malady of Grief [la douleur]” claims that “[p]olitics is not, as for Hannah Arendt, the parade ground where human freedom is deployed and displayed” (1987a, 242; 1989, 235; translation modified). Here, politics has the sense of an open field specifically constituted for the emergence of freedom. Politics in this sense is absent. Kristeva continues: “The modern world, the world of world wars, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state” (242; 235). Arendt and Kristeva are in agreement that politics as the event of natality is absent in the modern world. However, where Arendt sees the impossibility of individuation, Kristeva sees a “paradoxically free individuation” (242; 235). Kristeva maintains the ontological structure of Arendt’s political phenomenology, and yet, the political event as the rupture of the new through words and deeds in the public sphere gives way to the political event as the rupture of death and a subsequent, intimate asymbolia and immobility. Duras’s texts reveal that intimacy is dominated by the presence of death; in Freudian language it is distinguished by the emergence of the death drive. Kristeva tracks the constitution of intimacy in Duras’s text primarily through the most intimate of experiences: that of love; specifically, love’s interiorization of death or, recalling Powers of Horror, the intimate’s interiorization of public horror. Death, in the modern world, is something, Kristeva says following Paul Valéry, that “we also know that we inflict on ourselves” (229; 221). Duras’s aesthetic demonstrates the lack of distance or possibility of escape from public horror (235; 227) and situates the stakes of politics in love and death. The relationship between love and death in the work of Duras represents, for Kristeva, the fate of modern intimacy. Intimacy is constituted by a political event, but not the political event of natality. “[L]’événement” (the event) appears four times in the final chapter of Black Sun. First, Kriteva calls Hiroshima an event: “Hiroshima itself, and not its repercussions, is the sacrilege, the death-bearing event” (1987a, 239; 1989, 231). Second, the event appears as a description of the modern subject, or rather the strange space in which the modern subject is situated. Just before her single reference to Arendt, Kristeva says: “The event, today, is human madness. Politics is part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts . . . madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation” (242; 235; translation modified). Third, from the perspective of human madness, which casts a fundamental, melancholy shadow across the public, “political events, outrageous and monstrous as they might be—the Nazi invasion, the atomic explosion—are assimilated to the extent of being measured only by the human suffering they cause” (242; 235). Finally, Kristeva links the event to maternality or the feminine: “After the imposition of the mother’s hatred in the mad bonzian woman (The Vice-Consul ), the mother/daughter destruction in the The Lover compels us to realize that the mother’s outburst of fury against the daughter is the “event” that the hateful, loving daughter watches for, experiences, and restores with wonder” (261–262; 255).

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The term “event” here, in opposition to its use in Kristeva’s later work and in the work of Arendt, indicates not an emancipation, but rather an event that refuses to pass by. The political as event enters the private as intimate and opens the psyche to the presence of death in a historically specific way. While the absorption of the political as the event of horror causes “political life” to lose “the autonomy that our consciousness persists in setting aside for it, religiously” (1987a, 242; 1989, 234), the public continues on as is and becomes, Kristeva says, “seriously severed from reality” (243; 234). In those moments that would seem to exclude the political, like erotic passion or desire, one finds an absorption of the very politics that one would like to deny. Such a politics of intimacy is to say more than that the personal is political. Kristeva claims that what we would like to exclude refuses any form of negation that consciousness would like to accomplish. In this sense, the private loses its very intimacy, in the Arendtian sense. The real political stake becomes situated in the private, but remains invisible. The Durasean shape of intimacy is the effect of a politics that politics itself cannot reintegrate; hence the “absolute equivalence” that Duras describes in The War, and that Kristeva quotes in both Black Sun and again in La haine et le pardon: “Collaborators, the Fernandezes. And myself two years after the war, a member of the communist party. An absolute, final equivalence. It’s the same thing, the same call for help, the same judgment deficiency, let’s say the same superstition, which consists in believing there is a political solution to a personal problem” (243; 235–236; 2005, 502). Politics is no longer the site of individuation; rather, madness as “suffering [la douleur] in love with death” (245; 237; translation modified) becomes the form of modern, “paradoxically free individuation” (242; 235). No longer God or politics or others, but death alone becomes the source of an individuation that takes the form of radical severance. Kristeva’s analysis of Durasean “intimacy” as a staged encounter with Arendtian natality implicitly evokes a Heideggerean inspired account of the shape of modern intimacy, albeit reread according to a history, problematic, and Freudian influence that would have appeared unfamiliar to Heidegger himself. Kristeva’s articulation of Duras’s passion for death as a new malady of the soul also outlines what she takes to be the significance of the Heideggerean conception of finitude. The importance of Heidegger to Kristeva at this juncture is confirmed by his presence in the opening pages of Black Sun: “My pain is the hidden side of my philosophy, its mute sister. In the same way, Montaigne’s statement ‘To philosophize is to learn how to die’ is inconceivable without the melancholy combination of sorrow and hatred—which came to a head in Heidegger’s care and the disclosure of our ‘being-for-death.’ Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play” (1987a, 14; 1989, 4). Or again: “The melancholia [Aristotle] evokes is not a philosopher’s disease but his very nature, his ethos. . . . With Aristotle, melancholia, counterbalanced by genius, is coextensive with man’s anxiety in Being. It could be seen as the forerunner of Heidegger’s anxiety as the Stimmung of thought” (17; 7;

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translation modified). Even further, the central notion of Black Sun, “the Thing,” is referred back not to Lacan, who also found Heidegger’s analysis of “the Thing” provocative, but to Heidegger. Kristeva finds in Heidegger, because of her Freudianism, the culmination of the presence of the death drive in modern life. Likewise, Kristeva finds in psychoanalysis, because of her Heideggereanism, a discourse that exceeds subjectivism and gives way to an insight into Being and the presence of death within it. In Time and Sense, Kristeva says: “Death is not a final destination, but a death drive inherent in Being, its constitutive intermittence, its indispensable lifeblood” (1994, 376; 1996b, 313). The political as an event that is not the event of words and deeds situates Kristeva’s thinking of the modern political problematic within the ontological difference. And yet, Kristeva’s descriptive account of the event of death is more precisely an “event” that does not temporalize. Rather, the event, for Kristeva, marks the stalling out of time, a return that, as she describes in Intimate Revolt, “runs aground” on the “Zeitlos” (1997, 65; 2002b, 41). For Kristeva, the new malady she names “passion for death” is a “moment” in which time itself seems to disappear: the past does not pass by, “no revolution is possible, there is no future” (1987a, 71; 1989, 60). The political as an event comes to outline the very temporality of the intimate, a temporality that Kristeva calls reduplication, which she defines as “a jammed repetition” (253; 246). She says that “the no man’s land of aching affects and devalued words . . . is not lacking expression. It has its own language—it is called reduplication. It creates echoes, doubles, kindred beings who display a passion or a destruction [that lacks the effort for] putting into words [and instead suffers their deprivation]” (252; 246). If death marks the moment of unity or the integration of Dasein for Heidegger, it marks utter fragmentation for Kristeva, and not in the sense that one is fragmented because of a fallenness or fleeing. And yet, Kristeva wants to maintain repetition in a Heideggerean sense as that which is capable of such integration, albeit integrated with the insights of Freud. For Kristeva, temporality is the horizon of finitude, but she seeks “individuation” as the integration of fragmentation elsewhere. Though Kristeva privileges Freudian time—“only in Freud has a breach of time that does not temporalize been established” (1997, 50; 2002b, 31)—she nevertheless chooses the term “reduplication” rather than “repetition” to mark the negativity of the intimate. The space/time of failed repetition is a term that refers most immediately to the space/time that precedes the identification that establishes self-relation and relations to others in Lacan’s mirror stage. And yet, it recalls Heidegger insofar as the account of being-toward-death (as a passion for death) marks the failure of a repetition that would unfold time (Arendt’s “word and deed”). Reduplication is an instant that cannot pass into another. She says that “reduplication lies outside time. It is a reverberation in space, a play of mirrors lacking perspective or duration. A double may hold, for a while, the instability of the same in depth, opening up an unsuspected, unfathomable substance. The double is the unconscious substance of the same, that which threatens it and could

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engulf it. . . . [Reduplication] refers to the outposts of our unstable identities, blurred by a drive that nothing could defer, deny, or signify . . . a privileged universe” (1987a, 253; 1989, 246). Kristeva’s reservation of the term “repetition” for the positive movement of subjectivity “into time,” when she could have used the term to describe the death drive in Freud—since repetition, as the inability to let the past pass by, is precisely how Freud discovered the death drive—reveals an ambiguity in the relationship between psychoanalysis and ontology for Kristeva. Kristeva’s turn to Heidegger alongside Freud and Lacan for thinking death in modern society reveals a very specific understanding of the death drive. The death drive is not simply a universal psychic drive that underwrites all behavior. If this were the case, reference to Arendtian and Heideggerean ontologies would be unnecessary. Death drive is not “in” the psyche as a private individual, but rather pervades the permeable limit of society itself. What we lack are the resources for negotiating it. It is as if the psyche is a pawn in the death drive of Being. The political question is,: How does one rejoin a past that no longer provides possibilities for repetition? How does one answer the suffering of events without words and deeds? How does one transform “reduplication” into “repetition” in modern societies?

Kristeva’s Arendt: Passion for Death, Passion for Life Kristeva’s work does not offer a political theory per se that would equal the requirements of political theory proper, as for a figure like Arendt. Indeed, she refers politics to a possibility of the future—a possibility that might be realized if intimacy in its positive movement of repetition as revolt is rehabilitated. However, her work does point toward a thinking of the political significance of marginalized subjectivities as essential to any rehabilitation of politics as such. To be precise, Kristeva’s thought diagnoses the weaknesses of modern secular discourses; and yet, she offers us a vision of hope for the future of politics. This vision is best formulated toward the end of “Women’s Time” when she claims that marginality is precisely the site created by politics that offers the possibility of a transformation of politics itself: “In our world, the various marginal groups of sex, age, religion, ethnic origin, and ideology represent a refuge of hope, that is, a secular transcendence” (1995, 216). In relation to Arendt, we might say that the failed transcendence that results in intimacy for Arendt becomes for Kristeva the very site of hope for new forms of transcendence, understood in the sense that Arendt herself articulated this term as a positive, secular form of individuation and relation to others. Though Kristeva’s work in relationship to identity politics generally takes the form of an unraveling of identity, her thought does not abandon it. Kristeva especially privileges feminine/feminized subjectivities. Her seminal essays “Women’s Time” and “Stabat Mater,” but also her readings of Duras and most recently her trilogy on female genius, suggest that feminine subjectivity occupies a privileged position with regard to the failure of politics in modern societies.

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The case of Kristeva’s reading of Arendt in Hannah Arendt is significant for its reinscription of Kristeva’s understanding of intimacy, as opposed to Arendt’s understanding, in the life of Arendt. If Duras’s “intimist texts” reveal a passion for death that disintegrates the intimate and the public—“That is her discovery, that is her supplement, to add to the manuals of the new maladies of the soul” (2005 503)—Kristeva locates in the work of Arendt a passion for life in the midst of a passion for death (“denial of life”). The passion that integrates life and thought in Arendt’s work—“Gripped from the start by that unique passion in which life and thought are one” (1999, 26; 2001a, 4)—constitutes a singular, exemplary negotiation of the malady discovered by Duras. Thus, whereas Kristeva criticized Arendt’s political solution in Black Sun, in the biography, Hannah Arendt, Kristeva valorizes Arendt’s intimate accomplishment, which she essentially links to her status as a woman and as a Jew. Kristeva’s reading of Arendt emphasizes “life” as the primary value that unifies Arendt’s oeuvre. Not content with philosophy proper as “pure thought,” Arendt’s work appears as the concretization, if not the sensorialization, of thought itself. Kristeva refers this “Arendtian trait” to “a particularly female characteristic” (26; 4), if not also to her social and political status as a Jew. Drawing out the distinction between zoë and bios, Kristeva returns Arendt’s concern for “the value of human life” to an accomplishment of the positive dynamic of intimacy that is intimately joined to Arendt’s female and Jewish subject position. Kristeva’s redescription of Arendtian intimacy as an exemplary “singular psychic life” under social and political conditions is perhaps best articulated theoretically in her analysis of what she calls “the extraneousness of the phallus” in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (1996a, 2000b) and again in the conclusion to the female genius trilogy. Kristeva delineates the difficulties and the good fortune of the psychic structuration of “feminine” subjectivities in modern societies. She insists that the oedipal formation of the psyche is neither purely physiologically nor purely sociohistorically necessitated. She insists, rather, that the psychoanalytic account requires an account of the affect/discourse ambiguity, which Freud’s psychoanalytic account elaborates. Kristeva summarizes her account of the positioning of women in Contre la depression nationale, an interview with Philippe Petit: “[W]oman is foreign to the phallic order that she however integrates, which would be only because she is a speaking being, a being of thought and of law. But she conserves a distance with regard to the social order, its rules, its political contracts, etc., which renders her skeptical, potentially atheist, ironic, and in the final analysis pragmatic. I am not really it, says a woman, I remain outside of it, I do not believe it, but I play the game, and sometimes even better than others” (1998c, 113). The affective-discursive positioning of marginalized, feminine subjectivity results in a “disequilibrium” that can lead to melancholia or, in defense against melancholia, “efforts ‘to make as if ’” through “seduction, make-up, or on an extremely serious side, abnegation, overwork, etc.” A difficult interval to exist, the question of the equilibrium of this strangeness also leads to nothing less than the possibility of a vision of the new.

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The political question of repetition, which is thought according to “intimate revolt” in the 1990s, is tied to Kristeva’s privileging of the intimacy of marginalized subjectivities throughout her writing and suggests an approach to the politics of difference that is essential to negotiating Kristeva’s significance for contemporary social and political thought. Her analysis of modern intimacy, from psychoanalysis to phenomenology and art, is bound to questions of identity politics in the modern world. For Kristeva, the struggle with the difficulty of repetition in modern societies takes place most dramatically at the margins, where reduplication remains less unacknowledged and thereby an attempt at “working through,” in psychoanalytic language, is enacted and accomplished. Kristeva offers a formal political thought and concrete examples with respect to freedom and the social bond that provides a necessary moment in political reflection. Her insistence on “the intimate” and the multiplicity of interrogative and narrative ruptures in the continued life of multinational and international societies is essential as we rethink the national boundary. Marginalized identities are situated differently at the threshold of semiotic loss and symbolic failure. The marginalized occupy a different relationship to the political, which affords insights guaranteed only at the margins of a discourse. For Kristeva the marginalized are in the unique position to offer a different approach to power and meaning. To be precise, in her engagement with identity politics, Kristeva finds in modern intimacy the hope of an endless accomplishment of intimate revolt that points toward secular forms of transcendence and a possible future for politics in a political context in which, she claims, “we are all in the process of becoming foreigners” (1988, 152; 1991, 104).

References Arendt, Hannah. 1958/1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1961/1993. Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin Books. Berman, Antoine. 1984. Épreuve de l’étranger. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Trans. S. Heyvaert. New York: State University of New York Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1983. Histoires d’amour. Paris: Denoël. ———. 1987a. Soleil noir, dépression et mélancolie. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1987b. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1988. Étrangers à nous-mêmes. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard.

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———. 1989. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1990. “La Nation et le Verbe.” Lettre ouverte à Harlem Désir. Paris: Editions Rivages. ———. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1993. “The Nation and the Word.” Nations without Nationalism. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1994. Le temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1995. New Maladies of the Soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996a. Sense et non-sens de la révolte: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse I. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard. ———. 1996b. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature. Trans. Ross Mitchell Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. ———. 1997. La révolte intime: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse II. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard. ———. 1998a. L’avenir d’une révolte. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. ———. 1998b. “Dialogue with Julia Kristeva.” Parallax 4 (3): 5–16. ———. 1998c. Contre la depression nationale. Interview with Philippe Petit. Paris: Les Éditions Textuel. ———. 1999. Le Génie feminine, tome I: La vie: Hannah Arendt. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2000a. Le Génie feminine, tome II: La folie: Melanie Klein. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2000b. Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2001a. Hannah Arendt, vol. 1, Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words— Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2001b/2003. “Intimité voilée, intimité violée.” Chroniques du temps sensible, Première édition (28 novembre; mercredi 7 heures 55 [2001–2002]). Paris: Éditions de l’Aube. ———. 2001c. Melanie Klein, vol. 2, Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words—Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002a. Le Génie feminine, tome III: Les mots: Colette. Paris: Fayard. ———. 2002b. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2004. Colette, vol. 3, Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words—Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2005. La haine et le pardon: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse III. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard.

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11 Fear of Intimacy? Psychoanalysis and the Resistance to Commodification

 Cecilia Sjöholm

The question of public versus private, as it has been cast in Enlightenment philosophy, is inherent also in the discourse of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis may seem to be dedicated to issues that belong to what could be labeled the private or intimate sphere: sexuality, affectivity, love, desire, and so on. Indeed, Freud himself discusses the particularly intimate character of psychoanalysis and the specific bond between analyst and analysand arising through such intimacy: psychoanalysis has a particular character of confession, and must be built on complete candor. Certainly the unconscious is situated beyond what is laid open through the confession. But it must be the task of the analyst to direct the patient toward intimate issues of sexuality. The relation between analyst and analysand, as is well known, must be constructed on transference: in analysis, the patient is repeating love stories from his own history, “what he is showing is the kernel of his intimate life history: he is reproducing it tangibly, as though it were actually happening, instead of remembering it” (SE XX 226). And yet some psychoanalytic schools are suspicious of the language of intimacy. As is well known, the duty of psychoanalysis, from a Lacanian point of view, is to resist reification and commodification of the unconscious. Therefore, the theorization of the unconscious must, according to Jacques Lacan, resist the urge to fall into the discourse that deals with affects, emotions, and objects of intimacy. This may seem a bit surprising. After all, what kind of space is it that psychoanalysis is occupying? What about the position of the couch in the bourgeois psychoanalyst’s household? Does that couch not 179

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construe a space of intimacy? Does it not also call for—for the psychoanalyst and the patient alike—a sharing of intimate secrets? Or is psychoanalysis today to be considered a practice set beyond that distinction between public and private, social or intimate, that so came to mark the self-conception of modern, urban society in Freudian times, and thereby is not susceptible to the corruption of these spaces? If the question of intimacy no longer applies in the discussion of psychoanalysis, one may wonder why the couches of the psychoanalyst even today get placed precisely in a bourgeois household, rather than in, say, a workingclass council estate or a clinic or some other kind of space. Psychoanalysis still seems drawn to the restaging of that bourgeois space of intimacy that, in theory, it vividly fears. Revaluing the place of affects and emotions in psychoanalysis, Julia Kristeva has reclaimed the concept of intimacy. Psychoanalysis, Kristeva has argued, may aid the resistance to the colonization of psychic space, and protect against the relentless exploitation of images and slogans in consumer society. Therefore, the explorations of the unconscious as practiced by philosophy, psychoanalysis and art, will help protect the singularity of human life. Kristeva’s belief in what she calls “the intimate revolt” of psychoanalysis attempts to encircle the unconscious as a form of intimacy that resists commodification, together with practices such as art, literature, and philosophy. What is it that Kristeva has found in these practices that appears to be resisting commodification of human emotions? And why does the notion of an intimate revolt resisting commodification appear so surprising, not only in an analytical but also a philosophical context? To answer that question, one must begin by looking at the concept of intimacy and its particular place in philosophy. Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt tend to equate intimacy with emotions of love and a certain experience of family bonds. The private, on the other hand, is rather a concept allied to property and ownership in their vocabulary. Julia Kristeva, in turn, links intimacy to sensory experience, giving the concept a rather particular meaning. One may not look to psychoanalysis to find support for this particular meaning. Freud discusses intimacy in psychoanalysis only on a few occasions. In Lacanian language the word “intimacy” lacks theoretical weight, since anything referring to a division line between interior and exterior is discarded. Instead, the genealogy of Kristeva’s concept of intimacy is to be found in the Christian experience of meditation, and of love; intimacy is that which allows for an experience of the soul that cannot be reduced to scientistic explorations of the unconscious. It is a concept linked directly to the knowledge of love, felt and sensed through a sensorial experience of the body. In Kristeva’s argumentation, that sensorial experience is necessary for the protection of human life as something vital, singular, and productive, capable of resisting the vast amount of dead images and words that attack us in consumer society. Her sustenance of that belief is quite unique, however. Looking at philosophy and psychoanalysis, anything connected with the concept of intimacy is usually discarded as unreliable, corruptible, and full of disguises and lures.

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Intimacy according to Habermas and the Frankfurt School The spheres of the intimate and the private are considered prone to corruption not only in (Lacanian) psychoanalytic theory, but also in the Enlightenment tradition of philosophy. In his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant describes the development of public space through the growth of eighteenth-century publications, to which the citizen can turn and debate issues that are independent of his own occupation; the citizen of public space is born. For Kant the growth of public space is a victory for reason and for the laws of universality. Public space is necessary for man’s maturity, since it is only in public space that a man may enjoy “unlimited freedom to use his own reason and to speak in his own person” (1970, 57). Public space, therefore, would help produce a citizen of politics, unfettered by contingent circumstances that would prevent him from developing his capacity of judging. For Kant the growth of public space is a victory of reason and for the laws of universality. For Hannah Arendt, as another theoretician of public space, Kant’s idea on universality and his appeal to reason are not necessarily to be translated as valid for all people at all times. Kant is, rather, indicating a possibility of thinking and judging not on personal grounds, but within a political community. In that way, thinking and judging become imbued not only with concern for the whole in a technocratic sense. Rather, the question of universality opens up a possibility of thinking and judging in place of others, or of the other. The ideal of universalism and its incarnation in public space makes us capable of looking at things from the point of view of others. To think is to use judgment with concern for the plurality that marks society. Thought is not a reflection of or over the self, but a dialectics between the self and political society. In this way, judgment and thought will be dependent on what we call public space, which guides our way of looking at the world. Public space makes possible a form of judgment that takes place in the space of the other. The projected communication toward a space marked by plurality transcends the reflection of the self and makes judgment possible. Thereby Arendt is erecting a dichotomy between public and private although she recognizes their interdependence. But the question is, How are we to find new tools that make it possible to reconsider what Arendt is describing: the possibility of thinking in the place of the other, to find a space of sharing that goes beyond a limited amount of ideas and ideologies, sharing instead at a more primary level—in the mind, in judgment, in the sensory experience of the world? Jürgen Habermas has helped complicate the philosophical conception of the particular space of intimacy, viewing it as a social and political construction. Rather than enforcing the dichotomy between public and private, Habermas is interested in their intertwinement. In his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas takes us through the complex social architecture of the bourgeois household of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in it, he shows us, we

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find a dividing line between the salon used for guests and public discourse, and the part of the house that was used for family, or private matters. This means then, that the discourse of public space was not something that necessarily took place in public space, it could just as well be taking place in the home. In other words, the public sphere is internalized, so to speak, in the private sphere. An intricate intertwinement between public and private, social and intimate, runs through the bourgeois household and beyond (1989, 45–46). The development of public, private, and intimate, however, is dependent on certain social and economic conditions. The bourgeois household was protective of its freedom, and saw itself develop free of external coercion. On the other hand, the freedom of intimate space was correlative with the authority of the patriarchal laws that governed it. As Habermas notes, Freud discovered the internalization of those laws. They, in turn, were dependent on a certain model for marriage, which made the questions of love, marriage, and sexuality the obsession of the bourgeois. The discovery of intimacy was this correlative to the development of a public domain; the discourse of intimacy tended to develop in a semipublic domain, for instance through widely published novels like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Here, the intimate details of the seduction of a young woman, as revealed in fictional letters, created frissons for an audience that may well have felt they were looking into the secrets of her privacy, and spoken to in intimacy. On the other hand, the frissons created by the novel became even greater since her seduction was exposed in a public domain. Habermas describes the links between the opening of a space of intimacy within the home, and the related structure of a public sphere, which also found a place within the home, as the historically specific development of a bourgeois public space. With the development of a bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit, then, not only does a public space develop, but also a space of the intimate related to emotions, feelings, and sexuality, a sphere that was commonly exploited in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. The relation between public, private, and intimate are intertwined in intricate ways, not least since public discourse develops in the form of cultural critique. (1989, 49–51). The public sphere is in fact the expansion of the intimate, as invented by the novel, discussed and reflected in the public spaces that were constructed around it: coffeehouses, publications. Public space, in this regard, is the bourgeoisie reflecting on itself. Both are conditioned by social and economic structures. Whereas intimacy is related to family life, privacy is related to property and thereby to the market. One would have thought that these spheres would be kept separate, intimate space reflecting a depth in subjectivity that remains unfettered by market interests. However, this is not the case. The aspect of owning goods and the aspect of close relationships were bound up in the same individual, submitted to the same patriarchal structure. The same kind of intertwinement can be seen in the relation between public and private. Whereas Arendt considers public space to be something more than the sum of its parts, Habermas considers it to be the result of the coming together of separate “pri-

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vatized” individuals, hiding their interests as property owners under the fiction of being “human beings” fair and square (1989, 56). The public sphere is thereby the result of an economic and social structure, posing as the free space of equals. The aspect of worldliness, and the aspect of sharing that has been forwarded by Arendt does not exist in the Habermasian description, For Habermas, rather, public space is a construction submitted to interests that may not be reflected in the discussion taking place in an open realm. From the critical perspective of the Frankfurt School, the commodification of the experience of art has been colonizing both public space and intimate sphere, causing the collapse of the one into the other. Reading Theodor Adorno, one must assume that the frissons of Pamela served to commodify emotions and helped produce sentimentalization and banalization not only of the private but also of the public. The bourgeois enjoyment of banality and sentimentality helped produce a certain experience that, in the language of the Frankfurt School, became part of the culture industry. In the cultural history of Adorno, the same novel that gave rise to the sphere of intimacy became the beginning of a cultural industry in which the experience of art became commodified, transforming human experience into a repetition of the same. The streamlining of cultural products involve sentimentalization (Adorno 1991, 100). Naturalized conceptions of pain and pleasure, for instance, have, in Adorno’s own critique, become transformed into cultural products. The cultural industry, in fact, lives off the promise of a pleasure that will never be fulfilled. Adorno’s primary example is music, which produces a commodified set of emotions; the consumer of music is not so much enjoying the emotions and feelings that music gives rise to as the value he receives from its enjoyment: status, social, and economic stature. Like all goods, music has an exchange value in its various forms and the specific character of immediacy, which belongs to music, is in fact a commodification of the very lack of object specific to the art of music. This pleasure production of the culture industry has its counterpart in the creation of the works of fine art where, as Fredric Jameson has pointed out, the distinction between pain and pleasure has been eradicated. Neither popular culture nor fine arts fulfill the promise of fullness, but whereas one is true to the suffering whereby the faith of happiness is upheld, the other is busy providing substitutes. Slavoj Žižek, for his part, has argued that the production of pleasure has long since been overtaken by the unmistakable production of enjoyment, or the collapse of distinctions between suffering and pleasure that the hypertrophied submission under strong, symbolic systems has produced both in postcommunist Europe and the capitalist West. What critical theory has shown, then, is the susceptibility of commodification of a certain discourse of emotions, which one may relate to the sphere of intimacy. Regretting the loss of the public space of the polis as it was defined in ancient Greece, Hannah Arendt has attempted to philosophize the notion of public space in terms of her own political ontology. Although Arendt recognizes the vital

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impact of the private in public life, and although she challenges the Kantian distinction public/private as an absolute, she still disavows the intimate when compared to the public. In ancient Greece, private life, or the oikos, was governed by necessity—the Penates, or the household gods. Things connected to good, to the body, to the maintenance of human life were private. For Hannah Arendt herself, the concept of privacy must be heard through its original meaning; it constitutes a form of deprivation, since in privacy we are deprived of others. The polis, on the other hand, was the sphere of freedom. However, the condition of that freedom depended on the household. With the rise of the social sphere, or the economical maintenance of the city, the distinction between public and private became blurred. Modern privacy (which Arendt sometime uses in the same vein as intimacy, although the private is otherwise connected to property) is distinct not to the public sphere, but rather to the social sphere “in its most important function, to shelter the intimate” (1998, 38). This development occurred with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose intimate confessions must be seen as a reaction against society’s “perversion of the human heart” such as the “levelling demands” that have come to dominate the social sphere (39). As it were, then, the rise of the social has a tendency to eradicate all distinctions between public and private, and later also of the intimate sphere. Even more importantly, intimacy and public sphere hold reversible positions in Arendt’s philosophy; the world of men tends to disappear if one lives intensely through emotions, and what is intimate cannot be revealed in public because it will lose its reality; “love [. . .] is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public” (51). Defining public space as plurality, Hannah Arendt also links it to freedom, and thereby to the political. The access to that aspect of human life that Arendt herself calls “the most dignified of all,” namely, the political, depends on the capacity of society to overcome or transcend the lower spheres of personal needs. It could even be dangerous to involve intimacy in politics; the intimate bond of love, for instance, when infused in politics, could lead to idealization of leaders and thereby aid totalitarianism. In its worst form modernity is an escape from the public sphere to the intimate, and all those processes of emotion that dominate the space of the intimate. Warning against the contamination of the intimate in public life, Arendt argues that too much exposure on the intimate in public life would threaten to overtake the dimension of plurality that marks public space. Making the public realm the measure of judgment, Arendt pits it against privacy, which can never, she argues, reach the same quality of “reality” which results from the plurality engaged in the public sphere: “the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised” (57). In Arendt’s argumentation, the family world of privacy and intimacy is not just another aspect of reality; in fact, it is less real than public space since it is only through public space that worldly reality “truly and reliably appear[s]” (57). The intensity of emotions and the depth of experience that may be connected to inti-

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macy is, in Arendt’s mind, representative of a form of degeneracy that threatens to overtake the plurality connected to public space: “this intensification will always come to pass at the expense of the assurance of the reality of the world and men” (50). In Arendt’s ontology, only the presence of others makes the world truly appear. Only the public world may represent sharing, a form of differentiation of the same that makes participation and common experience possible while maintaining the singularity connected to the plurality of positions and experiences represented by a variety of people.

Bios politikos and oikos Hannah Arendt’s concept of public space has, to a large extent, been influenced by the Greek concept of bios politikos, political life as defined by the communal spaces of the polis. In this view, man is a political animal, defined through his capacity to think and act with others. In Aristotle’s Politics, that which is human is also political, meaning that human beings communicate and share a common world, not only in terms of necessities for survival, but in the quest for the good life. But philosophy is not the only tradition that is concerned with political life in various forms. The philosophical idealization of bios politikos neglects the consideration of other political spaces. As is well known, Greek tragedy must be considered an alternative path in the representation of political life. Greek tragedy does not equate politics with the open spaces of the bios politikos. Although the scenes of Greek tragedy generally take place outside of a house or palace, tragic action is a dialectic between private and public. Deeply affecting the run of public affairs, that which goes on inside of the house is uncanny and impossible to control. Situated between the spaces of public and private— outside and inside—tragedy calls into question what we know and how we think we know it. Thereby it is embodying another view on political life than the Aristotelian tradition. Rather than deliberative discourse, the political life of tragedy is made out of lures, disguises, and appearances. The action of political heroes is determined not merely by the regard for the best of the city, but also through desires and drives, forces of the unknown that appear more powerful than deliberative action. This quality of tragedy is embodied through the very scenery of the action. It can also be linked to a question that still, as of today, keeps haunting commentaries on Greek tragedy without having found a satisfactory answer: Given that Athens was a state in which almost no women were present in the streets or the open spaces, or in the bios politikos of political life at all, how come so many of the political concerns of the city were represented by women on the stage? Why was Greek tragedy so obsessed with the figures of women, letting them act out the problems of justice, power, government, and revenge that were haunting the city, when in real life the lives of women were in fact suppressed and invisible, hiding in the sphere of the oikos or the home, cut of from public affairs? One could respond to this issue through a range of

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possibilities, one being that women were allowed to represent a wider array of complicated desires and emotions connected to the sphere of the oikos, thereby acting out an intricate link between the public and the intimate sphere of the house, which was more difficult to portray for male characters, whose focus ought to be more wholeheartedly set on public affairs.1 From this point of view, tragedy points to a complication in the philosophical definition of the political as that which is open and deliberative, common to all. There is reason, also, to link this other tradition, that of the tragic, to a suspicion against those aspects of political life that belong to the sphere of intimacy, a sphere remarked through its lures and disguises. Political philosophy has imposed a clear demarcation line between that which is open to deliberation and communication and the sphere of intimacy, which implicitly imposes a threat to the open spaces of the political. Of course, we know of Hegel’s famous appellation to the potentially subversive ironic laughter of women, placed on the outskirts of the ethical order and without access to the discourse of universality. And, of course, we know of Rousseau’s tireless journeys into the life of emotion and senses, underscoring the idea that intimate life must be kept separate from public affairs. A philosophical consequence of this separation, as outlined also by Habermas, has been the subsequent devaluation of those aspects of the individual that remain in the space of intimacy—emotions, affects, and feelings, or questions that relate sensibility to singularity. To some extent, both the tragic and the philosophical tradition are implying that the separation between public and intimate is a gendered issue, and that the devaluation of the sphere of intimacy is inseparable from the devaluation of women as political and philosophical beings. However, it is not certain that the ghost of femininity is more fearful than the specters of inconsistency, vulnerability, and indeterminacy that is marking the life of emotions but also of the philosophical category of the sensible all in all. As tradition has shown, the life of intimacy is uncanny, not because it is run by women, but because it is threatening to all those aspects of political life that are supposed to define that which is, as Arendt has said, the most dignified aspect of human beings.2

Psychoanalysis and the Resistance to Reification In the discussion of psychoanalysis, one is rarely considering the space of the practice, or the space referred to by psychoanalytic theory as such. It may well be that psychoanalysis physically, from placing the cure in the home of the analyst, would be embracing and affirming the qualities of intimacy. Looking at the theory of analysis, however, this is not the case. Given the earlier discussion herein, which indicates the baggage given to intimacy in Western cultural history, it is perhaps not strange that psychoanalysis rather than embracing the intimacy one would think would belong to it through its practice takes distance and does its best to dissociate itself from the luring shadows of inconsistency, or of the intimate life of emo-

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tions and sensations. From this point of view, the oedipal discourse of universality, or the symbolic order in Lacanian language, would be representing that which was socially and politically viable in psychoanalysis. Through Oedipus, psychoanalysis has aligned itself with ideals of universality and the law. Freud’s notion that paternal law is internalized links the intimate questions of the subject to a certain conception of the law, through which all issues of the unconscious and of desire must be addressed. A consequence may well be a devaluation of those aspects of the subject that remain in the space of intimacy—emotions, affects, feelings, and all those sensory qualities that are integral to the analysand, and that cannot be observed by the analyst himself. Freud is not interested in treating emotions or sensory experiences or qualities thereof, but the symptoms of the neuroses; all those things that can be observed in language or the behavior of the patient. It could well be that the patient is expected to confess to a life hidden from public view, such as his sexual behavior, but the emotional or sensory aspects of that life of intimacy is irrelevant for psychoanalysis. In linking issues of intimacy to a certain conception of the law rather than affirming the life of emotions and sensorial experience as valid qualities in themselves, psychoanalysis casts itself as the immediate heir of Enlightenment discourse. Freud’s famous view that the desire of women is enigmatic, and that women constitute a dark continent, does perhaps not merely express an incapacity to understand the nature of women, but could also be a reference of suspicion directed to that other space of intimacy, the feminine space of the oikos, which appears to lie impenetrable beyond the appeal to the law. Certainly psychoanalysis must affirm the space of intimacy as the very locus of its work, and it must reject all claims that psychoanalytic treatment should necessarily lead to adaptation. But the Freudian view on all those aspects of life that one would otherwise associate with intimacy—namely, the domain of emotions and feelings—remains one of suspicion: the love, the emotion, the affect of the patient belong to the domain that psychoanalysis must study and interpret. They need to be traversed for psychoanalysis to unravel. The work of the unconscious. In the work of Jacques Lacan, on the other hand, the rejection of emotion as proper, psychoanalytic material is made quite clear. For Lacan, emotions and experiences of “good” and “bad” belong to the imaginary and thus to a sphere that psychoanalysis must traverse. Psychoanalysis, according to Lacanian theory, has been subjected to a similar fate in the sense that the unconscious has become an object of banalization through the many misconceptions of Freudian ideas that have flourished. The famous claim made by Lacan himself, that his project simply consists in the rescue of the Freudian unconscious from banalization, must be seen as a fear of commodification of the unconscious, not least through the production of art and literature. As it were, the only way to redeem the unconscious in Lacanian thought is through a radical return to the Traumarbeit. Those aspects of the psychoanalytic subject that would be linked to emotions and feelings, and to the idea of a good or bad internalized object in the Kleinian sense, must be traversed in Lacanian analysis. Lacanian analysis disregards

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the Kleinian theory of the object for remaining in the imaginary, which is the category that must be traversed for the truth of the subject to be revealed. Rather than discussing the object, then, Lacan talks about the Thing in an attempt to move beyond the Kleinian object, disavowing the theory of object relations. Counting as imaginary are the infantile fantasies described by Klein, but also the strong emotions connected to those fantasies. In his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues that emotions in general are aspects of the imaginary. Certainly the theoretical reasons for this are consistent throughout the Lacanian project. One may wonder, however, why those aspects of the subject that are prone to commodification are linked to, precisely, the sphere of intimacy. Could it be that Lacan’s interest in the symbolic and his disavowal of the object are attempts to disclose the ghosts haunting psychoanalysis as belonging to a space of intimacy? In that case, it would appear that Lacanian analysis is attempting to force us out from those shadows, lures, and disguises that are connected with the space of intimacy in ancient thought and beyond. Part of the project of resisting commodification is the Lacanian attempt to move beyond the spatialization of the unconscious as part of an interior. The unconscious is neither inside nor outside the subject, but rather that which structures its desire as having a cause, rather than a goal. Rather than referring to intimacy, Lacan is using the concept of “extimacy,” a term according to which the subject is constituted in and through that which is radically foreign to it; the Thing that is foreclosed in the space of the Real. Lacan is attempting to make of psychoanalysis a practice resisting reification (and thereby commodification, one may argue) through the focus on the symbolic and the real, rather than the imaginary and its objects. Could it be, however, that his disregard of affectation, emotions, and so on would have something to do with an unwillingness to recognize intimate space? Given that psychoanalysis still takes place in the intimate sphere of a bourgeois household, the resistance to intimacy could almost be regarded as a form of disavowal, perhaps directed against femininity, perhaps against the roots of psychoanalysis itself.

The Frankfurt School and the Resistance to Commodification The most poignant relation between Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School, resides, possibly, in this aspect; both stress the susceptibility of emotions and affects to fall prone to commodification or reification. The Lacanian project of traversal mirrors the suspicion of the Frankfurt School regarding the commodification of emotions. For the Frankfurt School, emotions are prone to commodification through the culture industry. As Habermas himself has argued in the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the candidness that was explored through the eighteenth-century novel became a naturalized part of the commodification of the public and the intimate sphere alike. As for the question

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of the unconscious and of psychoanalysis, Habermas considers psychoanalysis a potentially progressive force, but only if it aligns itself with the precepts governing public space, and the ideals of rationality and clarity that belong to it. Representing the intellectual left of the 1960s, Habermas has wanted to bring psychoanalysis into the service of emancipation, since it provides “a rational basis for the precepts of civilization.” There may well be a tension between political engagement and psychoanalysis that corresponds to the division of modern society into a public sphere of communication and the distortions of the unconscious, but psychoanalysis does also teach us to overcome this tension. Psychoanalysis may become a force of emancipation, and a force strengthening the public sphere of communication, insofar as it “cures” language of distortions. Psychoanalysis is governed by a hermeneutic impulse, attempting to reinstall a coherent meaning structure in cases in which it is lacking, through supplanting explanations. The phenomena examined by Freud—parapraxes, forgetting, slips of the tongue, misreadings, bungled actions, chance actions, and so forth—are all examples of behavior where the subject is deceiving itself in the communication with itself. Neuroses distort the capacity of the subject to reflect on himself in the dimensions of language, action, and bodily experience. The very construction of the unconscious, then, builds on distortions of that which withdraws from the sphere of communication. The analyst attempts to interpret the processes of distortion, although a layer of content will perhaps remain that may resist interpretation. Resistance against the psychoanalytic process, according to Habermas is resistance against the rules governing public communication. It is the resistance to interpretation that must be considered pathological. Resistance causes the unconscious to withdraw from interpretation in that it deviates from the communicative norms that govern the public sphere: “wrong behavior means every deviation from the model of the language game of communicative action, in which motives of action and linguistically expressed intentions coincide” (1989, 226). Psychoanalysis therefore can be used where “the text of our everyday language games are interrupted by incomprehensible symbols.” The symbols referred to as incomprehensive by Habermas, offer resistance against interpretation because “they do not obey the grammatical rules of ordinary language, norms of action, and culturally learned patterns of expression.” The practice of psychoanalysis is focused on coming to terms with the communication disturbance that the subject has with himself. The task of analysis, then, is to encourage self-reflection, but it must be a form of self-reflection that aligns itself with the ideals through which Enlightenment philosophy has interpreted the public sphere. At another level, Freudian analysis may also teach us to analyze the distortions of the public sphere, although this is not directly argued by Habermas. Whereas Marx lacks it, Freud has a reflective knowledge of collective behavior and of the laws placed at the origin of communicative action. One may thus infer that through Freudian analysis we may well learn not only to communicate better with ourselves, or between ourselves, but also to traverse the illusions that are produced

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by the powers and ideologies that make the public sphere susceptible to commodification, as argued by Habermas himself in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas’s account of psychoanalysis, of course, is not one that many would subscribe to today. But he does bring up questions that are valid in this context: How does psychoanalysis relate to the function of the public sphere? How does it describe the aspects of the subject and of the unconscious that are withdrawing from the laws and norms that govern public communication? Is it possible to disregard the function of the public sphere altogether and simply return to the Lacanian concept of the symbolic, or the Freudian concept of an internalized paternal law? The Frankfurt School has described a tendency toward commodification of emotions in the production of art and literature. Lacan has attempted to theorize a tendency within psychoanalysis itself toward a reification of the unconscious, immobilizing the search for truth in analysis. All of these theories fear the inconsistency and vulnerability associated with intimate life, even if they theorize practices such as literature, art, and psychoanalysis. One may of course consider the resistance to intimacy as a consequence of the refusal of the notion of interiority, and therefore as a philosophical position in the theorization of the subject. In other words: both the Frankfurt School and Lacan refuse the idea of a subject that would have some kind of interior life of emotions and feelings that would be corresponding to a site where the “real” self is to be discovered. However, one must ask if this theoretical refusal of interiority has not also brought with it an exaggerated suspicion against the idea that the “truth” of the subject also has something to do with emotions, sensations, and sensibility.

Kristeva and Intimacy In contradistinction both to the Marxist tradition and to Lacan, Julia Kristeva does not consider the life of sensory experience and feelings, or the relation to an internalized object, to be a symptom of alienation or commodification. In discussing a particular conception of intimacy, she is attempting to restore the value and relevance of certain aspects of psychic life that have been devalued through the refusal of interiority. As I have already noted, Kristeva’s conception of intimacy is quite particular; it is not clear why sensory experience would be referred to as “intimate.” One would describe this as being contrary to the Lacanian project, and perhaps not very Freudian either. She takes recourse to the tradition of Christian meditation, and the exploration of the senses in the work of Augustine or Loyola instead. Kristeva’s intimacy is also a sphere that has been held as a “platonic cave” of lures and disguises in the philosophical discussion, where sensory experience is devalued in relation to truth. What is it, then, in Kristeva’s discourse that allows for intimacy to develop through, but at the same time become, something other than sensory experience? To unravel that issue, one must take recourse to the Enlightenment debate and consider the way in which Kristeva’s discourse contrasts with common-

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places in the philosophical tradition. The intimate, in Kristeva’s language, is not the same as issues having to do with privacy, or with family life. Whereas privacy must be associated with a certain space of the home, the frissons that may overcome us when we open the doors and get a glimpse of the lives and secrets of the other, the intimate for Kristeva is not a place or a space but rather a function of subjectivity that is known or unknown to ourselves, but that always appears to touch the truth of ourselves. The intimate has evolved as a domain in which issues of signification may be negotiated beyond the pretenses of universal law, or beyond the restraints of communicative language as described by Habermas. Kristeva describes intimacy as a domain of singularity, or rather even as the domain of singularity. The intimate is a domain of affects, sensations, moods, and feelings, a domain in which the function of the mind is close to the body. Intimacy is the capacity of the mind to connect language to forms of sensibility. Intimacy, in this version, is not a description of a sphere of interiority, but rather a description of a certain discourse of corporeality. In the Christian tradition of meditation, and the exploration of the senses in the work of Augustine or Loyola, the question of the relation between the word and the senses has been central to meditation and to the individual’s relation to God. In the language of intimacy, the author is baring his soul through the unraveling of his senses. He is thus unraveling the singularity of his existence, and thereby the sovereignty of God, through a language in which that existence shows itself as sensibility. The experience of the body, and all those aspects of sensibility that we may link to feelings, affects, moods, and so forth, becomes proof of a divinity that can only show itself through a singular existence, the life of an individual. That experience, however, cannot be fully disclosed through a general question pertaining to the link between mind and body, or the relation between perception and sensibility. It can only be disclosed through the discovery of the singularity of the life that bears witness to those affects and their meaning, to those feelings and their signification. The language in which I bear witness to the divine aspects of the sensible, then, is not a language of triumph or jubilation, but rather a language of intimacy, since I discover divine signification through relating affects, moods, and sensations to singular events that only have to do with my life, my experiences, and my questions. Psychoanalysis is the theory and practice that, in our time, has proven most capable of preserving that singular quality of human life in which truth, signification, and sensation become part of the same experience, without recourse to divine interpellation. The particularity of Freudian intimacy consists in a “recasting of the soul/mind dichotomy” (Kristeva 2002, 50). To preserve that specific quality of psychic life, where sensations are attached to singular experiences of signification, rather than general descriptions of corporeality, psychoanalysis must stress the importance of countertransference, on the one hand, and the very style of the language in practice, on the other: a “poetics,” as Kristeva calls it (51).

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Here, we return to a territory well known from Kristeva’s argumentation elsewhere. The concept of intimacy as a domain traversing language, and yet strictly intertwined with processes of signification, has gone under different names: the preoedipal, inner experience, negativity, the semiotic, the abject, countertransference, and so on. Although Kristeva relates the concept of intimacy to that of revolt, it is perhaps not a question of reaction or revolution, but rather of protection of a certain concept of the singularity of human life. A discourse of intimacy does nothing to revolutionize society, but it may well present us with a certain protection against the colonization of ready-made images that marks the capitalist society of aggressive new media. The language of intimacy, therefore, offers an access to the truth of the subject. Intimacy is the capacity of the mind to connect language to forms of sensibility. Intimacy, in this version, is not a description of a sphere of interiority, but rather a description of a function of language through which the relation to the body becomes enhanced. In the Christian tradition, the question of the relation between the word and the senses has been central to meditation and to the individual’s relation to God. Psychoanalysis incarnates the secular transformation of a long tradition in Christianity, through which the intimate life of the soul has become a question of truth. In The Intimate Revolt, Kristeva describes psychoanalysis as a practice that, together with art, literature, and philosophy, is concerned with the uncovering of the domain of intimacy in this sense. It is a way of describing the very core of an intellectual engagement that has marked the twentieth century and beyond which has attempted to resist the aggression of consumer society. In this she comes up with another response to the question of the relation between public and private, attempting to situate psychoanalysis beyond Enlightenment discourse. One may well make universalistic references to the symbolic and the law, while attempting, at the same time, to move beyond the aspects of the private sphere that have, as Habermas, Adorno, and others have argued, become susceptible to commodification. Intimacy, in Kristeva’s language, is not susceptible to commodification, but rather a protection against it. Moreover, Kristeva recasts the question of the object, and that eruption of the foreign called extimacy by Lacan. The most important aspect of the subject is not extimate, but rather a thing of intimacy. Kristeva thereby reverses the Lacanian perspective on the tasks of psychoanalysis. Rather than relying on the symbolic order and its correlative the real, which are concerned with language on the one hand and symptoms on the other, Kristeva is interested in the very sensory qualities that are produced through the intimate practice of psychoanalysis. The extimate thing of foreclosure can only be known as symptom. The object of intimacy, however, is one of experience. Not a product of foreclosure but of countertransference, the thing of intimacy transpires through sensory experience, emotions, and feelings. To sum up, then, Kristeva’s notion of the intimate could be considered a response to the devaluation of intimacy that has been haunting philosophy and

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psychoanalysis alike ever since the distinction between private and public was made in Enlightenment philosophy. Whereas it does not deny that the phenomena that are usually connected with privacy—emotions, frissons, pleasures, and so forth—may well lack in political significance and may well be prone to commodification, Kristeva’s notion of the intimate is one that remains closely connected to such phenomena of the private sphere, although it cannot be equated with them. Perhaps it is fair to say that the intimate is the displaced, politicized version of the private, a version that refuses the closed doors but that keeps open the frisson. The intimate object is rather the object that must be considered the condition for the subject’s capacity to experience at all, and the object that must be the condition that makes thought and language possible. The starting point of the subject, then, is not the law, but an object of the senses. In this regard, the starting point is not equated with ideals of universality but rather with the soft matters that may appear to escape the “hard” qualities demanded by science, but that constitute the qualities of singularity that psychoanalysis must concern itself with: bonding, corporeality, sensory experience, emotions, and affectivity. These phenomena have been cast in the imaginary, considered too soft or too involved in the sphere of sensibility for Lacanian or critical theory to take them seriously. This aspect of psychoanalysis, one that seems to embrace the notion of a primary, intimate object, may well bring us back to the kind of couch that it thought it may well have left with Lacan, and that it felt itself too rational to enter with Habermas, for instance. But if we are really beyond those issues of the intimate, then how come we keep returning to their insistence in our lives? Perhaps philosophy and psychoanalysis have placed too much focus at the other side of the Enlightenment divide between public and private, and perhaps the old fears of the tragic oikos keep haunting psychoanalysis as much as it keeps haunting public life; the lures and disguises of intimate life. An important philosophical issue to be raised before ending this discussion, however, is whether Kristeva’s conception of intimacy implies a form of sharing, beyond the sharing that takes place in the public sphere, and whether it manages to confront the Arendtian critique of intimacy as modernity’s favored form of escape. Human life, for Arendt, is always diverse, singular, and marked by the possibility of sharing that she herself refers to public space, rather than the knowledge of privacy or intimate life. Kristeva points to the necessity of countertransference, and to the poetic qualities of the language of intimacy; a language of affectivity and sensibility. Through intimacy one can perhaps not share a world, a truth, or a political community. On the other hand, one may well argue that intimacy is a condition for creating the plurality of singularities that, in Arendt’s ontology, creates the plurality of perspectives. If anything, Kristeva has managed to show that intimacy conditions singularity, beyond the threats of commodification that appears to have created a philosophical fear for the term of intimacy. Reconsidering intimacy, we may well begin to reconsider the public realm as well.

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Notes 1. This is related to what I have argued in my book The Antigone Complex. Here I attempt to show that the desire of Antigone is not to be considered as feminine to its nature, but rather as exemplifying a complex ethical question that only a female character was capable of portraying. See Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). In her book Playing the Other, Froma Zeitlin argued for an interpretation which puts forward a different aspect: the sphere of the oikos was radically separated from public space, a fact that meant the feminine sphere was radically separated from that of free men, participating in public life. That is why Greek tragedy, Zeitlin (1996) argues, may depict the feminine as dark and fearsome, and also why Greek tragedy may appear to attempt to control those dark forces that may well pose a secret threat to the order of the city. 2. This is so because it is connected to the sphere of freedom and equality in the ancient world, as well the possibility of excellence, arête, as separated from the sphere of the sheer necessities of human life (Arendt 1998, 27, 31, 49).

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. The Culture Industry. Trans. J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge. Arendt, Hannah. 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1926. “The Question of Lay Analysis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XX. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Cited as SE XX. Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Trans. Thomas Burger, with Frederick Lawrence. London: Polity Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1970. “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” Kant’s Political Writings. Trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 54–60. Kristeva, Julia. 2002. Intimate Revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. Zeitlin, Froma. 1996. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

12 Humanism, the Rights of Man, and the Nation-State

 Emily Zakin

“If God exists . . . everything . . . is permitted.” So Slavoj Žižek pronounces in a recent editorial in the New York Times (March 12, 2006). This Dostoyevskian inversion, in seizing on the political climate of religious extremism, is published on behalf of what Žižek calls “Europe’s most precious legacy.” Atheism, or more particularly a secular public sphere, is this vital inheritance deemed crucial for not only the past but the future of Europe, and it demands, in an obvious reference not only to Marx but also to Kant, what Žižek calls “a ruthless, critical analysis” of religion as “the wellspring of murderous violence.” While Žižek has sometimes allied himself with various forms of fundamentalism, or appointed himself the representative or guardian of a (quasi-?)Stalinist or fascist set of political convictions as against liberal openness, multicultural inclusiveness, do-gooder fervor, and especially humanist sincerity, nevertheless in this editorial Žižek puts forward a hard-hitting attack against religious conviction and a fortification of atheism, atheism with its undeniably Enlightenment heritage and distinctively European tradition. Žižek concludes that only atheism can provide the public space requisite for a nonpatronizing and nonrelativist respect for the beliefs of others. In part, Žižek is addressing the crisis confronting Europe, the crisis, we could say, of political correctness, of not trusting oneself. And in part, Žižek is addressing the ramifications of this crisis for world politics, for relations to the “other” as he might scoff. But more profoundly, he is confronting the question of legitimacy, the legitimacy of Modernity, and in particular the Modern nation-state (and, it seems, affirming that legitimacy). 195

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If the Modern legitimation crisis is brought about by what is always called “the death of God,” this death derails the relation between the subject and politics, rendering it tenuous and unstable, regardless of the laws that are put in place to order and maintain that relation. No state of law, no nation-state or republic, can replace the homogeneity promised by the pre-Modern world of status, the certainty of having a fixed place in the order of the world. The mobility produced by Modernity’s replacement of status with contract generates a disconnect between the newly established citizen and politics,1 a dissatisfying heterogeneity (and ultimately an irresolvable tension between nation/people and state/citizen). No wonder we are now witnessing the resurrection of God in politics. What I will address in this chapter is not the sometimes circuitous and rambling political commitments of Žižek but rather two convergent and salient points he raises clearly and directly in the editorial cited: first, the already noted crisis of European political structures and in particular the legitimation crisis it implies, and, second, the way in which this crisis dovetails with the loss of transcendent values (not only the death of god, but also that of nature and history) and thus, concomitantly, with the absence of any guarantee, or even hope, of grounding law in either eternal ideas or human nature or the progress of spirit ( geist). Both Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva directly tackle these issues in a number of works, including especially Arendt’s On Revolution (1963), The Human Condition (1958), Origins of Totalitarianism (1966), and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982), and Kristeva’s Nations without Nationalism (1993), Crisis of the European Subject (2000), Strangers to Ourselves (1991), and Hannah Arendt (2001). For my purposes here, I will disregard Žižek’s contempt for Arendt and her theory of totalitarianism that he takes to be fully allied with reactionary politics. But what we can take from Žižek is a crucial insight that might help us pursue the political significance of Arendt and Kristeva’s work: that it is in our worldly relations with others, not in looking into one’s own heart or soul for inner truth or access to the transcendent, but in actively participating in the world, that we become political. Given this worldly concern, the pursuit of political legitimacy must take place within the public space of appearance and cannot depend on access to the soul or another world or nature. As already hinted by Kristeva’s interest in Arendt, I will make this argument, incongruously enough considering Arendt’s disrespect for psychoanalysis, by appealing to the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious, contending that the missing god of Modernity is akin to the missing (or divided, nonself-identical) self, both of which represent the insecurity and limits within which we have to live with ourselves and others. Bringing psychoanalytic theory together with Arendt is less surprising than might perhaps appear since Arendt is certainly not a rationalist who believes in egoic self-mastery and self-authorship. Arendt makes clear that the human “agent is not an author or producer” of her or himself (1958, 184) and that the story of our lives and of history is not something that is “made at all” (186). Her work, and in particular the last chapter of

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Origins of Totalitarianism, “Ideology and Terror,” as well as chapter 24 of the “Action” section of The Human Condition, makes room, as Kristeva notes, for a “political psychology” (2001, 137) in which the self embraces a “daimonic” element (173). Kristeva’s reading of Arendt attempts to explore the “chasms of the human psyche” to which Arendt’s work is not always attentive, not only to reveal how “the death drive . . . gives life to the speaking being” (xvi) but also to more fully theorize the destruction of that psychic space (137). Such a reading does not contest Arendt’s insistent distinction between worldliness and our inner disposition but renders it more complex, making it clear that the psychoanalytic unconscious is at odds with, rather than allied with, a theological view of the soul, since it can only promise that human life will be permanently unsettled.2 While Kristeva acknowledges “the limitations of Arendt’s diatribe against society” (2001, 162), she nonetheless admires Arendt for distinguishing between the social (which Kristeva, like Arendt, allies with need or, in psychoanalytic vocabulary, the imaginary) and the politically “dangerous freedom of bonds with other people” (161) (which Kristeva allies with desire or the symbolic, not dissimilar to Arendt’s idea of political speech). Kristeva appreciates Arendt in particular for recognizing the correspondence between a value system that deems “life to be the ultimate good” (xv) and one that finds human life “superfluous” (7) since both are ultimately “nihilist” (40). Whether the life process is raised to the highest good as in “the vitalist restlessness of the consumer culture,” or held only in contempt as in totalitarianism, in either case what is missing is a sense of human possibility beyond predictable, automated, or conventional confines and expectations. By providing a psychoanalytic vocabulary, Kristeva provides new insight not only into the social threat to intimacy, but also into who we are as political actors and citizens. Psychoanalysis helps us see what is left when the egoic predicates of whatness, the armor of our identity and objective qualities, are not taken as wholly determinative of who we are, and when we abandon the idea that we can fabricate ourselves and our political communities. Because the fantasies of self-authorship and self-ownership (both liberal fantasies) are fundamentally egoic,3 they do not afford us the precarious hazards of freedom but lock us in what Lacan has called “the knot of imaginary servitude” (2006, 80). But the “who,” as we will see, is not “entrenched in the fixation of vision” (Kristeva 2001, 173); it is rather excessive, reducible to neither biological nor social metabolisms (174). This excess reminds us of the “nonsubjective foundation for politics” (219). Just as we are not our own individual authors, we are also not communal authors of the polis. The polis is not premised on some human ideal, essence, or telos, and it emerges from acting not fabricating. Rather than seeing the polis as an artifice of the human, we should say rather that the human emerges from the artifice of politics. Political Modernity can be characterized by the tension between, on the one hand, an abstract and substanceless commitment to universality, realized

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practically in legal neutrality as the basis of civil order, and, on the other hand, a material attachment to blood or soil manifested not only in our social loyalties and identifications, but also in the formulation of the definition of the legal citizen (with reference to parentage or land of birth). This tension is what both defines and imperils the unstable amalgamation that is the Modern nation-state. Kristeva offers an analysis of the nation-state’s odd and unavoidable hybridity, and in so doing makes a crucial distinction between the dangerous, but inexorable, spirit of the national, on the one hand, and the juridical, and therefore potentially empty, promise of the state as guarantor of rights, on the other. In contradistinction to the liberal tradition, however, Kristeva does not advance a commitment to the state as purified and rational, claiming that such an idea is vacant and without affective force. Nation and state always contaminate each other. Kristeva considers what she takes to be the two dominant models of the nation-state and the relation each has to a specific notion of the foreign and then attempts to reconsider both in light of a third model. The two primary forms or models of the nation-state, each with its own foreigner, are, according to Kristeva, the organic and the contractual. The first, “organic,” “feudal,” and “spiritualistic” (1991, 176) concept is founded on blood and soil, on physical kinship and linguistic identity (and is based on inheritance). In this model, social harmony and homogeneity are the central traits; the foreign is represented by different cultures, blood, soil, language, religion, and so forth. We could say that this is a “nation” understanding of the nation-state. Second, there is the “contractual” concept (1991, 175) premised on the right to freedom (based on civic, rational, and universal ideals and capacities). In this model, a certain kind of heterogeneity is presumed, since neutrality before the law presupposes, even as it negates or obscures, individual difference; here, the foreign is figured as the particular, the irrational, that which resists subsumption by the universal. We could say that this is a “state” understanding of the nation-state. Kristeva claims that this latter, contractual concept is affectively empty, unmoored, “hollow” (178) and thus that it easily collapses into the former in a search for affective bonds. So, on the one hand, the state needs the nation (the bonds of affective identity) that nonetheless threatens it. On the other hand, the spirit of liberal contractualism produces its own foreigner in the form of the irrational, and this reemergence of an alien outside of reason also presages a return to a national concept from within the state’s own rationalism (“we” are rational, defenders of freedom, saviors of democracy, and so on; “they” are precivilized demonic hordes who hate our freedom). The implication of this analysis is that Enlightenment rationalist cosmopolitanism cannot sustain itself, but this is not quite Kristeva’s conclusion. The second model both tolerates and represses difference (the difference manifest in the particularity/singularity/corporeality that disappears before the law). Nation, we could say, is repressed, even as it returns.

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Kristeva proceeds to offer a third understanding of the foreign, the one developed by Freud (1991, 181), in the hope that this might provide a third model of the nation-state (or perhaps better, a more self-reflexive version of the contractual and cosmopolitan state). This foreign is neither “banished as disruptive of rationalist urbanity” nor “glorified as a secret volksgeist” (181). Instead, Kristeva writes, “we are our own foreigners, we are divided.” This form of foreignness is thus more primordial than the other two, even their very source. It is my own “perturbed logic” as a “bundle of drive and language” that is the source of my “discontent in living with the other.” It is here that we can find a different, or more self-reflexive, understanding of the nation-state, one that cannot disown either its affective bonds or its affective volatility and divisiveness (the inability to live with others), one that does not run from, but grapples with, the return of the repressed. In discussing this revised view of the nation-state, Kristeva invokes an ethics of respect that she claims to find in a kind of Freudian cosmopolitanism that begins with an “ethics of respect for the irreconcilable” (1991, 182), of the drives with language, the life of the body with the rule of law, kinship relations with abstract citizenship, and natality, carnality, mortality, and maternity with reason and universality. Kristeva concludes Strangers to Ourselves with the prospect that “the ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics,” a “cosmopolitanism” (192). We could say, in other words, that the return of the repressed suggests an alliance between Freud and Kant linking Freud’s respect for the unconscious with Kant’s call for cosmopolitanism as both “separation and union” (173), preserving difference “at the very heart of the universal republic” (172), an alliance that might transform the identity of the nation-state through the secular and profane, rather than sacred and profound, promise not only of the plural coexistence of states, but also of this plurality within. But it is with regard to the peaceful coexistence of nation-states, and neutrality within nation-states, that both Arendt and Kristeva identify a crisis. As Arendt puts it, “human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities” (1966, ix). For Arendt then, “the great problem in politics . . . is how to find a form of government which puts the law above man” (1963, 183). This might sound regressive to those of us unfamiliar with the Foucauldian critique of “the repressive hypothesis” and who therefore equate freedom with liberation, emancipation, and transgression, the breaking or overcoming of law, or anarchy. While I will take only a limited foray here, Foucault makes clear (in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 [1978]) that the dream of liberation is itself allied with the juridical discouse it contests. Foucault mocks the sexual or political hope that links together “enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures” (7) and that promises a new age of freedom in the future if only we would revolt today. He argues instead

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that the claim that we are repressed or oppressed is itself an evasion of new forms of nonsovereign power, and therefore is complicit with those forms. Sovereignty, in both its juridical and monarchical versions, is, for Foucault, on the decline. It is replaced with what he calls “disciplinary power and biopower,” power that operates not primarily through law but through social formations embedded in our identities and practices (and productive of them), power of, over, and through our corporeal lives. It should be noted, of course, that Foucault does not believe that the revival of sovereignty is the solution to discipline and biopolitics—he calls instead for “a new form of right” that is “liberated from the principle of sovereignty” (Foucault 1980, 108). Nonetheless Arendt’s reformulation of the traditional problem of legitimacy resonates with Foucault’s analysis and with his concerns about the administration or management of life. Yet we must look more closely at the internal transformation of sovereignty from its monarchical to its democratic form to understand the problem. The Modern legitimation crisis has been analyzed by Claude Lefort who articulates specifically this transformation in the form and meaning of political sovereignty. Lefort proposes in his essay “The Logic of Totalitarianism” that to understand the distinctive political logic of Modernity we must first discern “the meaning of a mutation which lies at the origin of modern democracy: the establishment of a power of limited right” (1986a, 279). He writes in the essay “The Question of Democracy,” that in monarchy “power was embodied in the person of the prince” who “condensed within his body” the principle of order (1998, 17). The prince’s power, and his body, thus “pointed toward an unconditional, other-worldly pole,” acting as “guarantor” of “the kingdom itself represented as a body, as a substantial unity” (17). But Lefort directs us toward the democratic demise of this substantive form of power and the rise of “the symbolic character of power” (1986a, 279) in which “the locus of power becomes an empty place” (1998, 17). This claim has two aspects: first, that “the legitimacy of power is based on the people” but, second, that “the image of popular sovereignty is linked to the image of an empty place.” In other words, Modern democracy arises with and creates the paradox that democracy lies in the distinction or contradiction: “power emanates from the people . . . but is the power of nobody” (1986a, 279) because there is no such thing as “the people” or the demos.4 The people does not exist. This means that Modern democratic power is substanceless, dematerialized, or as Lefort claims “purely symbolic” (1998, 17). For Lefort, democracy is not a substantive or organic unity, but an empty symbolic place, the place left by the body of the king. Although power itself is not empty or impotent, the place of power is empty (or again, to use Kristeva’s term, “hollow”), residing in the lack of a popular will to assume the place that had been occupied by the king’s will. The singular place of power that had been occupied by the sovereign is vacated, replaced by law (i.e., the symbolic form of power) and this rule of law works by keeping the content or substance of power empty, by thus being “uni-

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versal” (all citizens are equal before the law) and disembodied. Sovereignty is then situated as a void; it is symbolic rather than substantive. Even if a vestige or residue remains in the sublation of king into law, the latter has lost its transcendent ground. The supposed subject of politics, the people, is therefore merely a placeholder. Universal suffrage for citizens within a particular nation-state means that we are no longer recognized by the law as distinctively embodied with a particular political status; for instance, peasant or aristocrat, man or woman, rural or urban, and so forth. The system of status and privilege gives way to a system of universal rights. This revolution in citizenship is not unproblematic. As power becomes disincorporated, Lefort writes, “democratic society is instituted as a society without a body” (1998, 18), leading to “the emergence of a purely social society” (18; emphasis added) while at the same time dissolving social bonds in favor of statistics such that “number replaces substance” (19). This is the moment that Foucault diagnoses as the movement from juridical sovereignty to biopower. The paradox here is that the dissolution of social status actually dissolves politics in favor of society, opening the reign of “the good of all,” in which democratic politics takes as its mission the flourishing of life, and thereby smuggles the body back in. Power, in the sanctimonious propensity of democracy to sustain a belief in its own integrity, harmony, and moral supremacy, becomes identified with society, “is declared to be social power” (284) and thus “ceases to designate an empty place” (285). The logic of democracy thus reverses itself as democratic sovereignty becomes difficult to distinguish from biopower and the management or administration of populations. The moment of the juridical nation-state is thus ephemeral, passing fleetingly between pre-Modern forms of government and postpolitical forms of managing the life of peoples and societies. Why is this so? Arendt points to the “vicious circle” of legislation, namely, that “those who get together to constitute a new government are themselves unconstitutional” (1963, 183–184). Before the law, there is no law. From whence does the legitimacy of “the fundamental law” arise (184)? Kristeva is right when she answers in the affirmative the question whether for Arendt “the search for political renewal, that is, for a secularized humanity, is tantamount to what was once known as transcendence” (2001, 165), but she perhaps misunderstands her own claim. For Arendt does not wish to replace the transcendence of gods or history with “the people” or some such secular concept. She is seeking instead to come to terms with Modernity’s legitimation crisis, the impossibility of replacing the loss of transcendence, and with the danger that that impossibility will, by provoking atavistic but potent and compelling attachments, yet simultaneously isolating us from a common world, produce either a monochromatic social life and identity or an impossible ideal of wholeness that will result in totalitarianism. From a psychoanalytic perspective, we can consider these the “once-promising fantasies” that emerge from “the breaking up of national, political, and religious bonds” and “that prove to be deadly strains of fanaticism” (136). This form of

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homelessness, this loss of ground (both in the literal sense of refugees forced into statelessness and in the slightly more metaphorical sense of the death of transcendence) provides a crucial key to considering how the uncanniness of our own drives and their phantasmatic and often self-destructive quest for satisfaction is bound to the fear of groundlessness and the desire for a secure place in the world, for a home.5 But given our psychic and political need for safe haven, what bonds are possible or necessary to both legitimate and sustain the Modern nation-state? Let me approach this question and its alliance with the question of secularism obliquely at first, through Arendt’s criticism of Roussseau. Arendt takes Rousseau to task for both his notion of the general will and his notion of natural compassion. As Arendt characterizes Rousseau, he understands that “to put the law above man and thus to establish the validity of man-made laws, il faudrait des dieux, ‘one actually would need gods’” (1963, 184). But Rousseau resolves this conundrum with the notion of the general will. The will of the people is singular, lacking plurality, turning many into one. Arendt writes that “the shift from the republic to the people meant that the enduring unity of the future political body was guaranteed not in the worldly institutions which this people had in common, but in the will of the people themselves” (76), producing the idea of “the nation as a body driven by one will” (76), that is, an organic unity. Hence, according to Arendt, the French Revolution merely replaces the body of the king with the body of the people as one: “the men of the French Revolution put the people into the seat of the king” (156) and thereby deified the people (183). The people, in other words, remains a theocratic idea, emerging not as an empty placeholder, but as a site of fullness, harmony, and singularity, a site of transcendence. The will of the people, “the general will” of Rousseau or Robespierre is still the divine Will, transubstantiated, this will[-]made flesh. Moreover, the result of this concept of will is that “an enemy existed within the breast of each citizen, namely, in his particular will and interest” (1963, 78; emphasis added)—the particularity of our wills becomes the common enemy and this Arendt takes as the origin of “terror” (79), the idea that “the common enemy resides in everybody’s hearts” (79). Rousseau is thus complicit with Robespierre’s “terror of virtue” (79) where we must be permanently “suspicious” of “our innermost motives” lest we be “hypocrites” (97). Such a view turns the self into a natural enemy and makes of compassion the birth of terror and terror the fruit of compassion. Arendt thus claims that “the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men” (71). The general will, while defiantly not the sum total of private wills, nonetheless returns us to an introverted contemplation of the state of our personal souls, removing us from the community of appearances into the pathology of expiation and interiority. Ironically, the general will necessitates the absence of others and immersion in the self if only to immolate it. We are no longer concerned with the world, but have become otherworldly in our focus on inner life and dispositions. It should be clear, therefore, that

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Arendt is not seeking to idolize secularized humanity as a transcendent value, but is, in fact, attacking this tendency within humanist political philosophies (and Marx could be included as an example here as well). Arendt’s sustained critique of Rousseau and the French Revolution can be compared both to her more favorable outlook on the American Revolution and to her very different assessment of the violence involved in the founding of law laid out in the introduction to On Revolution. This introduction concludes by stating that “in the beginning was a crime” (1963, 20)6 and that “whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origin in crime” (20). Arendt’s point here is twofold: first, that “a political realm does not automatically come into being wherever men live together” (19), that is, that the political is not something natural or innate but requires an event; and second, that this prepolitical event preliminary to the advent of a polis will always be violent, creating order out of chaos (nomos out of anomos). The question of legitimacy is thus the question of beginning, of origin, and that question cannot be evaded with reference to inner nature, especially to any evocation of a benign inner nature. Arendt is opposed to the idea of a natural or even artificial demos, premised on a notion of the unity of a people, that would provide the seamless ground for its own law, instead noting that law arises out of that which it cannot contain, a prepolitical violence, and that citizenship does not presuppose natural equality but is the artifice of an isonomic form of government, where each is equally ruler and ruled. This view is adamantly secular in its disregard of the soul. The tradition of political philosophy proposes to answer the question, How might we live in peace with one another? If we turn to Hobbes, peace is a problem because of our selfish nature, but this is also the solution to that problem since we find within ourselves natural laws (corresponding to rational selfinterest in self-preservation) that lead us to seek peace. If we turn to Rousseau, we have a different problem because, though we are at peace in nature, we are solitary and do not live together. If, for Hobbes, in the state of nature we live together but are at war, for Rousseau we live in peace but do so in isolation. For Hobbes, the creation of artificial institutions gives us the means by which we might transform our natures, becoming capable of new powers, especially those that depend on cooperation. As we have already seen, Arendt is contemptuous of Rousseau’s understanding of compassion and of his dissolution of the public realm into the inner workings of the soul. The Hobbesian idea of a new world order, created artificially through institutions might be somewhat more palatable, but he continues to hold not only a view of human nature that is mechanistic and determinist, leaving no room for natality and new beginnings (1958, 300), but also a conceptual hold on absolute rule rooted “in the image of divine power” (1966, 171). Regardless of who one takes as a starting point, this tradition of political philosophy has always hinged on a theory of human nature (this is true with

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Locke and Hume as well). Each begins with a presuppostion about the nature of man; for example, innocent or acquisitive, solitary or competitive, love of self or love of glory. Such a conception, any conception of human nature in this vein, supposes that politics can be built on a given “what” rather than be creative of a “who.” It is here, crucially, that Arendt departs from the political tradition in refusing to posit a theory of human nature. She instead discusses the human condition (worldliness, plurality, temporality) and the human capacity for natality that allows us a second birth in which we might disclose and become a unique “who” “in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is—his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide” (1958, 179). This “who,” as Kristeva reminds us, “arrives in the midst of life’s conditions . . . as an excess [that] is achieved through a constant attack on biological life, against the metabolism with nature” (2001, 174). In reading Arendt, Kristeva is interested in the revolutionary political possibilities of this “revelation of a ‘who’” (2001, 230) that can never be reduced to an egoic or predicated “what” where the latter is allied with, as Kristeva puts it, “social appearance and biological attributes” (172).7 While the weakest parts of Kristeva’s text on Arendt delve into cheap psychobiography (e.g., interpreting Arendt’s political and philosophical commitments on the basis of her relation with her mother), and while Kristeva is for the most part more suggestive than argumentative about the benefit to Arendt’s political philosophy of a concept of the unconscious, it is nonetheless clear that this unconscious has nothing to do with the innermost recesses of the soul, discussed earlier, but rather with the symbolic space of the psyche that simultaneously enables, refracts, and solidifies but also disables, obscures, and dissolves the symbolic space of politics. Kristeva thus provides a critical supplement to Arendt’s account of the “who” of politics, of the relation between citizen and self, citizen and polis, and citizen and foreigner. And this has nothing to do with the political tolerating its foreigners, which assumes that the polis is a unity, a one or totality, but rather with the polis itself as divided and yet defined, porous yet bounded. In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt writes strikingly of the act of judgment as an enlargement of the mind that involves taking the other into oneself. Yet she is quite specific that this act is not one of empathy and that empathy would in fact be a hindrance to the disinterest required, merely substituting or multiplying interest, rather than dissolving it (1982, 43). The enlargement of the mind is not driven by affect, but is a disinterested act of the imagination. Arendt thus posits a relation of the other within that is a necessary basis for political life and yet that is nonetheless solitary without being firmly bounded or limited. This otherness within is related to the solitude of thinking that Arendt describes as being two-in-one and in both cases we might posit this otherness as a unique form of productive or creative disidentification and a move away from egoic boundaries. Writing in support of Arendt’s account of judgment, Kristeva hopes it provides an alternative to the rationalism and quest for knowledge of

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contemporary political theory (a barb she aims at Habermas in particular), and even more she suggests that it shares a kinship with “a theory of the unconscious,” a claim she recognizes as “radical” (2001, 230). Kristeva insists adamantly that Arendt’s accounts of thinking and judging reveal “the fundamental estrangement of the thinker” (2001, 192). Kristeva, in other words, interprets Arendt’s idea of the solitary thinker who is always a “two-in-one,” as commensurate with (though not equivalent to) the “original split” (194) or “original duality” exposed by the unconscious (193), a split that she considers both “endogenous” and “endemic” to the psyche (194). Kristeva also approvingly cites Arendt’s disdain for “the futility of the fashionable search for identity” (193; Arendt 1981, 187). This returns us to the idea of the symbolic from a different perspective, in terms of a “split in the thinking ego” as Kristeva puts it (2001, 194). For Kristeva, the symbolic acts as a triangulation of both social and egoic relationships, each of which is fundamentally dyadic. The promise of the symbolic is to move us away from the imaginary security and trap of identity, compensating for this loss with a kind of psychic freedom or movement that can only be sustained within language and law. By rendering both psychic and social identity less rigid, less likely to stay stopped in place, the symbolic provides the mediation of movement or the movement of mediation that keeps us capable of new beginnings. We can now juxtapose Arendt’s reading of Rousseau with her reading of the American founding fathers. According to Arendt, the American revolutionaries, although they may have maintained rhetorical allegiance to the idea of divine authority, nonetheless acted as if “laying down the law was pre-political, prior to the existence of the polis, the city-state, just as building the walls around the city was prior to the coming into existence of the city itself ” (1963, 186). Rather than conflating law with power, with the people as the source of both, the Americans thus located the source of law in something worldly and stable, like the walls of a city, a written document (157). The authority of positive laws thus derives not directly from the people but from a more fundamental law, the constitution. This is why Arendt reminds us that the law (nomos) is, etymologically, related to wall (nemein) (1958, 63); it establishes and distributes the boundaries between households, and between the public and private realms, preserving the public space of appearances, and making possible a city or political community (64). The law does not shield us from one another (as in liberalism where the aim is to keep politics out of private individual life, a life that is assumed to be directed by its author and defined by its predicates), but establishes an expanse that we can enter together like the walls of a room that give us a public space. Arendt both favors constitutional law as the source of authority and recognizes the import of positive laws, in their changeability. Positive laws are necessary to mediate between the permanence of legitimating authority and the impermanence and temporal uncertainty of human life, of the “ever changing actions of men” (1966, 463). But, Arendt argues, having followed the route of

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Rousseau and the French Revolution, Modernity has become mass society in which humans are “imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience, which does not cease to be singular if the same experience is multiplied innumerable times . . . [but] permitted to present itself in only one perspective” (1958, 58). We seek “goodness” rather than “excellence” (73–78) and in this we seek something that cannot appear and is fundamentally worldless. This distinction between goodness and excellence becomes especially critical when considered in light of the last chapter of Origins of Totalitarianism and its critique of the totalitarian dissolution of positive law into fantasies of transcendence, the realization of heaven on earth. Totalitarian movement, Arendt writes, benefits from the idea of disagreements “beyond the power of reason.” By exploding “the very alternative . . . between lawful and lawless government, between arbitrary and legitimate power” (1966, 461), totalitarianism manages to be arbitrary but not lawless since “far from being ‘lawless,’ it goes to the sources of authority from which positive laws received their ultimate legitimation” (461), that is, nature, history, God, promising “the rule of justice on earth” (462). Its “defiance of positive laws” rests on a claim to “a higher form of legitimacy,” namely, “the laws of Nature or of History” (462). Arendt considers this recourse to authority “monstrous” since it dissolves the “discrepancy between legality and justice” (462), and sacrifices “everybody’s vital immediate interests” (461) in favor of a higher notion of their good in which the human species is transformed into “the embodiment of law” (462) with which they are fully, totally, identified. Arendt here clearly gestures toward the limits of democracy and the asymptotic movement of law toward justice. Instead of a nomos or positive law that, like four walls, provides a stable frame for the movements and transformations of human beings, “terror is the realization of the law of movement . . . [that] seeks to ‘stabilize’ men” (463) by having the law itself be constantly in flux and unstable. Terror thus renders men immobile and isolated (incapable of both action and of sharing a common world) because it destabilizes the source of authority. Arendt thus identifies in the totalitarian process not a new form of government or a seizure of power, but an antipolitics, “a movement that is constantly kept in motion: namely the permanent domination of each single individual in each and every sphere of life” where the aim is “to set and keep [the people] in motion” (1966, 326). While the constancy or continuity of law encourages the possibility of human spontaneity and action, the “monstrous” absolutization of Law fully realized—“totalitarian lawfulness pretends to have found a way to establish the rule of justice on earth” (462)—by keeping law permanently on the move erodes the human ability to act. Instead, human beings are either/both rendered immobile, fixed, rigidified, or are themselves put into the permanent motion of “behavior.” In any case, the movement here is antithetical to action and serves not to disclose agents but to atomize and isolate individuals in a state of perpetual motion.

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It is in this context that Arendt discusses isolation as “the psychological basis for total domination” (1966, 323). Once rendered homeless (literally stateless or figuratively uprooted—suffering the loss of traditional values and status), a human being, according to Arendt, can derive “his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement” (324), from finding some form of attachment to its arbitrariness and becoming part of it. Given the need for some affective social bond, ideology provides the only cement available. Ideology then replaces the everyday, common, mundane world with unwavering loyalty and holds the individual to itself even while being devoured. Even as its logic of identification promises security, it can nonetheless only be a practice of self-effacement. As “the logic of an idea” (469), ideology defies both common sense and the world of experience and is closed to persuasion. Its workings are deductive, not deliberative, and it thus carries the violent force of necessity that nothing can elude. Once the ideological premise (History or Nature) is set in motion, everything follows inevitably from it. The logic of ideology is thus also the logic of reattachment or, as Kristeva puts it, it is “a paranoid delusion that seeks to compensate for social atomization” (2001, 136). By providing something to cling to in the face of a lost common world, it thus also, paradoxically, binds many into one, eradicating plurality. In making this conceptual connection between ideology and isolation, Arendt astutely points to the threat posed by a world released from law and citizenship. How then can we think politically human instability and its relation to law? As we have seen, unlike the social contract theorists, Kristeva, and psychoanalytic theory generally, gives us an entirely different way of conceptualizing “human nature,” one that presupposes neither innocence nor avarice, nor any other substantive binary. Instead, Kristeva offers a conception of the drives and their relation to language, a notion of the unconscious and of the symbolic that supplements Arendt’s analysis as well as Lefort’s. By allowing us to recognize symbolic (and violent) processes within both psychical and political formations, we can characterize both the subject and the polis as neither self-identical, nor homogenous, nor at one with itself. Neither subject nor polis seeks, or merely seeks, its own good and each is equally foreign to itself and horrified by its foreigners. The political experience of strangeness, especially as it is knotted to the psychical strangeness we experience within ourselves, sheds light on the impossible task of civilization: living peacefully with others and doing so (within the confines of nation-states) without repressing the violence that is “the ultimate condition of our being with others” (1991, 192). Kristeva herself is stymied by the question, “[T]he rights of man or the rights of the citizen?” (97). In reflecting on “the distinction that sets the citizen apart from the man,” she claims the result to be the “deadlock” of the Modern nation-state (97). Citizenship, by definition, always implies limited rather than universal citizenship and thus within its essence is contained the difficulty of the foreigner, the one who is a man but not a citizen. As Kristeva incisively

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wonders, does this not mean that “he who is not a citizen is not fully a man?” (98). Kristeva points out that there is a slippage between man and citizen in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, one that obliquely acknowledges the political reality of nation-states and the impossibility of “natural egalitarianism” even while purporting to assert it (148–149). Equality is thus, from the outset of its Modern theoretical and political origins, a fundamentally political attribute: “the free and equal man is, de facto, the citizen” (149). Kristeva finds this political state of affairs “regrettable” and notes its “drawbacks” (1991, 150); in allying herself with Arendt (150), however, she seems to miss precisely Arendt’s neo-Burkean point, that in fact the “rights of man” are helpless when faced with those “who are not citizens of a sovereign state” (150). Arendt writes that “no paradox of contemporary politics is filled with more poignant irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as ‘inalienable’ those human rights, which are enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves” (1966, 279). Arendt, in other words, seems to understand quite well, the pessimistic truth (which Kristeva tries to evade) that one does not “belong to mankind” when “one is not a citizen” (1991, 150). Indeed “the loss of a polity itself expels [the human] from humanity” (1966, 297). The phenomenon of statelessness makes manifest the fragility of civilization, and our own dependence on artificial human institutions. Arendt believes that the loss of citizenship (the “right to have rights” [1966, 296]) corresponds to a loss of humanity; it is not, according to Arendt, that human beings have natural rights, but that the artifice of rights is necessary to render us human, that is, citizens. As Arendt herself witnessed, “the conception of human rights, based on the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human” (299). Arendt mocks the pious rhetoric of those who cling to human rights as bearing “an uncanny similarity in language and composition to that of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals” (292). While Kristeva allies the “barbarity” of National Socialism with the “very core of the nation-state system” (1991, 151), Arendt allies it instead with its breakdown and transience. Kristeva retains the “rights of man” as an immanent principle “of universal dignity” (152) that has symbolic and ethical value beyond political and historical dynamics of strife and barbarity.8 At the same time, and in my view trying to have it both ways at once, she wants to wrest human dignity from “the euphoria of classic humanists” to see it “laden with the alienations, dramas, and dead ends of our condition as speaking beings” (154). In this idea of a “cosmopolitanism interior to the nation-states” (154), Kristeva appears to prevaricate on Arendt’s more honest insight that we can never be world citizens and that the

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plurality of nation-states is the best that we can hope for. Citizenship, and not compassion, is a better guarantee, or at least promise, of dignity and respect. If we have lost an appeal to transcendent authority, to absolute justification of the laws within which we live, then we live without guarantee or stable bedrock. If instead we erect the “good of all” in the place of this transcendent authority, we are in danger of loving too much our social status (no matter what it is), of escaping from politics by taking refuge in the social (and in identity) and of retheologizing our own human status in the name of humanism. This social world of “whats” rather than “whos,” of predicated identities already positioned, renders self-disclosure, and hence politics, if not impossible or obsolete, then at serious risk. In place of god, we now have humanism as our transcendent value and hence the all-pervasive rise of the management and fostering of life. Here we have the perverse convergence of theocracy, global capitalism, and institutional depoliticization, all promising justice on earth through the eradication of the distinction between public and private realms and the digestion of a common world by the administrative care of need. Romanticized cosmopolitanism or appeal to a universal demos is not an antidote to either liberalism or theocracy but a variant of them. The alternative is the agonal equality of excellence premised on a plurality of perspectives and honest about the tension between equality and freedom. The “pessimism” that acknowledges that “each ‘who’ is driven by its inherent impossibility of being” must, according to Kristeva, accompany any hope for fostering political bonds and tolerating their fragility (2001, 239). Working through the political, like working through the psyche, would then be an interminable and nonutopian process, permanently grappling with the insoluble trauma of loss. If the demos is neither the premise nor the promise of politics, the ways in which democracy broaches its own limits might reveal its immanent and insistent dangers. This involves accepting the tragic view that neither happiness nor “life is the highest good” (Arendt 1963, 64). And that may not be such a bad thing.

Notes I first formulated many of the ideas presented here at an NEH Summer Seminar on Hannah Arendt in the summer of 2005, led by Russell Berman and Julia Hell. I thank them as well as my fellow participants in the seminar, especially Stephen Schulman and Edward Dickinson, for their thoughtful comments. 1. For a discussion of the distinction between status and contract and the transformation of one to the other, see Pateman (1988). 2. Kristeva writes that “in direct contrast to the reconciliation of man in his isolation in the face of God . . . psychoanalytic anamnesis reveals that permanent conflict is a precursor of psychic life” (citing Arendt 1958, 37). This

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tension also corresponds to that between immortality and eternity that Arendt discusses in The Human Condition (1958, 17–21). 3. Liberalism assumes a substantive and self-identical subject endowed with a free will; in spite of its friction with democracy, it is because of this shared idea of the subject that we can still talk about liberal democracy. 4. The idea of a homogenous people sharing a general will (as in Rousseau) is, as we shall see, a significant target of Arendt’s philosophical and political ire. 5. The link between Modern statelessness or homelessness and Freud’s idea of the uncanny (unheimlich) is something I will pursue further in a longer work of which this is a chapter. 6. We might find this claim uncannily similar to Freud’s analysis in Totem and Taboo (1913). 7. Here we can clearly distinguish between social appearance and political appearance: only the latter is linked to the “plurality of the world” (Kristeva 2001, 172), while the former is constituted through an isolating conformity. 8. Lefort (1986b) makes a similar point in defense of human rights and their political status, though more carefully elaborated and rigorously developed. In contrast, Giorgio Agamben (1998), Alain Badiou (2001), and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) all raise compelling arguments against human rights.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1963. On Revolution. New York: Viking. ———. 1966. Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt. ———. 1981. The Life of the Mind. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. ———. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics. New York: Verso. Foucault, Michel. 1978. History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage. ———. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews, 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1913. Totem and Taboo. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

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———. 1993. Nations without Nationalism. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2000. Crisis of the European Subject. Trans. Susan Fairfield. New York: Other Press. ———. 2001. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Ecrits. Ed. and trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton. Lefort, Claude. 1986a. “The Logic of Totalitarianism.” The Political Forms of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1986b. “Politics and Human Rights.” The Political Forms of Modern Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 1998. “The Question of Democracy.” Democracy and Political Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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13 Kristeva’s Uncanny Revolution: Imagining the Meaning of Politics

 Jeff Edmonds

How can we make our thinking more political? What would political revolt look like today? Where would it take place? What, particularly, would it overcome? And what sort of society would we hope to achieve by means of this revolt? In short, what is the meaning of politics? That these questions fascinate us today is a certainty. The question of the political has dominated intellectual discourse in recent years. What is the meaning of this political turn in intellectual thought? One way to begin an answer to this question is to turn to a thinker who has openly resisted this move to political thinking. Julia Kristeva’s work never shies away from the most fundamental political problems of the day—her work has contributed much to feminist theory, to cosmopolitan political theory, and to political questions about immigration, excluded communities, and terrorism. Yet, in spite of the apparent political relevance of Kristeva’s work, her own relationship to the political is uneasy at best. Indeed, despite this discomfort with the idea of being a political thinker—perhaps because of this discomfort—Kristeva constantly finds herself having to explain and address the political element of her work. Perhaps her ambivalence toward the political is best expressed in the following excerpt from an interview with Rosalind Coward. Here she responds to the statement by Coward that “some of your [Kristeva’s] more recent statements about politics have been bewildering” (2002, 341). Kristeva replies that I suppose we have a new religion which is not only sex—which may be important but also very pleasant and not dangerous—we have a 213

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religion which is politics. We think that everything is political. When we say political we say something which cannot be analyzed, it’s the final act. This is political . . . stop. It’s tremendously important this final enigma, which is politics. (2002, 343) While this reply is a response to Coward, it certainly is not intended to relieve her sense of bewilderment. In fact, Kristeva’s response here places bewilderment at the heart of the political, suggesting that politics today is, in fact, “something which cannot be analyzed . . . this final enigma” (2002, 343). Moreover, Kristeva suggests here that it is precisely because politics is enigmatic that it is tremendously important. On the other hand, however, Kristeva is frustrated by the way in which readers want to receive her work politically from the outset, as if its entire value could be captured by its political dimension. It is in this moment that the political takes the form of fundamentalism, as that which cannot be analyzed. She sees the repetition of the political in the vacuous form of political correctness and the constant question of how her work is related to the political as sort of meaningless and passionless fetishization of politics. Kristeva fears that this desire to see everything through the lens of politics will lead to a mystical or spiritual crisis. In the same interview, Kristeva states that what is needed is more of a questioning about the discourse that can take the place of this religious discourse which is cracking now. And I don’t think political discourse can take its place. . . . If we stay with only a political explanation of human phenomena we will be overwhelmed by the so-called mystical crisis, or spiritual crisis—that happens, it’s a reality. Every bourgeois family has a son or daughter who has a mystical crisis—it’s understandable because of this very simple schematic explanation of such phenomenon as love or desire simply by politics. (2002, 343–344) Indeed, our very familiarity or heimlichkeit with the political—our tendency to gauge the adequacy of a work in terms of “the political” as if we knew from the beginning what shape or substance the political takes—threatens to cover over the uncanniness or unheimlichkeit of the political.1 Kristeva’s refusal to answer directly the question of whether her work is “political” is no rejection of politics. It is a rejection of the simplistic and fetishistic repetition of the political as a criterion for thinking. The thought here is that the almost neurotic repetition of the call to politics heard in the intellectual world today is a symptom of a deeper problem. The ubiquity of the political question and the lack of subtlety with respect to the political is a sign of its inability to represent human experience fully. The very repetition of the political question represents the failure of the political

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discourse to give meaning to human problems. If this is true, then, perhaps the domain of politics has moved beyond politics. Kristeva puts it like this: So my problem is: how, through psychoanalysis or something else like art, through such discourses can we try to develop a more complicated elaboration, discourse, sublimation of these critical points of the human experience, which cannot be reduced to a political causality. (2002, 344) In short, Kristeva gives us an analytic approach to politics. She is interested in asking why the question of the political is so familiar to us rather than with addressing the political directly. While this analytic approach to the political is certainly not immediately recognizable to a traditional political thinker, her writings are also not a naive rejection of the question of the political. I hope to indicate, in fact, quite the opposite. Kristeva’s analysis of the political does certainly call the political into question, but this questioning of the political is in no way an abandonment of it; on the contrary, it is an attempt to reinvigorate political discourse— to give it meaning by bringing it into relation to experience and imagination. I would like to suggest, in short, that Kristeva’s complicated relationship to the political shows the way toward a more vibrant conception of politics. By working through the problematic of Kristeva’s relationship to the political, I hope to be able to articulate a way of engaging her work that requires neither the rejection of her work as apolitical, nor an immediate embrace of her as a political thinker. Indeed, it is her ability to occupy an ethical space on the margin of politics—neither absolutely political nor apolitical—that allows her to more effectively criticize the sorts of fundamentalism that threaten the very connection between politics and intellectual life today. Kristeva’s analytic ethic provides a form of unity better suited to democratic community than the forms of solidarity offered by traditional political theory. Hers is a community found through the work of imagination, interpretation, and analysis, rather than in allegiance to an ideal.

From Fundamentalism to the Uncanny: An Analytic Ethic in Strangers to Ourselves Kristeva’s analytic ethic is elaborated through a criticism of fundamentalism. Of course, political fundamentalism is not the only sort of fundamentalism that threatens the possibility of a more adequate political language. Fundamentalism is perhaps the most recurrent problem within today’s political horizon. From the Christian right to Islamic suicide bombers, the fundamentalist drives political discourse (or the lack thereof ) today.2 Though Kristeva was writing before the events of 9/11, her analysis of fundamentalism resonates even more clearly today. In Strangers to Ourselves, she describes fundamentalism as “purely

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symbolic,” a sort of emptied ritual.3 The bonds of the fanatical religious community are “cemented by pure, hard fantasies” (1991, 24). She writes, “Fundamentalists are more fundamental when they have lost all material ties, inventing for themselves a ‘we’ that is purely symbolic; lacking a soil it becomes rooted in ritual until it reaches its essence, which is sacrifice” (24). The argument here is complex. Stripped of “all material ties,” the fundamentalists are essentially adrift. They are a community of foreigners, but their foreignness is absolute. Having been excluded from all other communities, they invent a “we” that has no basis other than that of exclusion. Kristeva puts it this way: “As enclave of the other within the other, otherness becomes crystallized as pure ostracism: the foreigner excludes before being excluded, even more than he is being excluded” (1991, 24). The hardness of the cemented fundamentalist bonds that allow for the tightness of the community also cement the ostracization of the foreigner. Their very impenetrability is a sign of their emptiness. Their inside is cement. And yet these bonds are formed on the basis of a previous exclusion.4 This logic of fundamentalism, the emptiness of its ritual, the firmness of its dogma, and its lack of interpretation leads to its essence, which is death. One recognizes a sort of Hegelian thought here. The purity of the fundamentalist’s fantasy can only manifest itself in her willingness to sacrifice everything for her fantasy. That is, the universality of the fantasy is its essential emptiness. The purely symbolic becomes rooted in ritual alone and eventually reaches its essence as emptiness—sacrifice and death. The question thus becomes how to disrupt the absolutism of the fundamentalist that manifests itself in the tight link between ideology and death.5 Kristeva finds resources to address this issue in Freud’s short work, “The Uncanny.” In this work, Kristeva writes, Freud shows that “in the very word, heimlich, the familiar and the intimate are reversed into their opposites, brought together with the contrary meaning of ‘uncanny strangeness’ harbored in unheimlich” (1991, 182). In other words, the meaning of the familiar is constituted by a sort of strangeness, and vice versa. “Consequently therefore,” writes Kristeva, “that which is strangely uncanny would be that which was (the past tense is important) familiar and, under certain conditions (which ones?), emerges” (183). Indeed, the political question of how to engage the absolutist fundamentalist may be asked in the following fashion: Under what conditions might one’s most familiar belief appear strange? Or under which conditions does the uncanny emerge? And what should our reaction be to this emergence? Freud writes that “whatever reminds us of this inner repetition-compulsion is perceived as uncanny” (1919/1953, 391). What would remind us of this, of the vacuous eternal recurrence of the repetition-compulsion? How might the fundamentalist be able to see the uncanny emptiness of her most meaningful rituals? It is in response to this question that Kristeva develops her ethics of analysis. For Freud, Kristeva explains, it is the confrontation with death that produces the feeling of the uncanny. Kristeva writes that “the fear of death dictates

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an ambivalent attitude: we imagine ourselves surviving (religions promise immortality), but death just the same remains the survivor’s enemy, and it accompanies him in his new existence. Apparitions and ghosts represent that ambiguity and fill with uncanny strangeness our confrontations with the image of death” (1991, 185). Precisely, here, at the heart of the emptiness of fundamentalism, then, Kristeva locates a sort of uncanny possibility. Indeed, the simultaneous contradiction between and proximity of the suicide bomber and her dream of immortality produces a sense of the uncanny. The fantasy of the suicide bomber, that through her death she might overcome her death, can lead to the horrific realization of the uncanny. It is at this moment that Kristeva locates a sort of ethical choice. The appearance of the uncanny, whether in the approach of a strange foreigner or in the coincidence of death and immortality in the form of the suicide bomber, leads to two possibilities of confrontation. The first possibility is to meet the uncanny with analysis: with curiosity and imagination. The second possibility is to refuse the uncanny: with fear and abjection.6 Kristeva puts it this way: On the one hand, the sense of strangeness is a mainspring to identification with the other, by working out its depersonalizing impact by means of astonishment. . . . And yet the uncanny strangeness can also be evacuated: “No, that doesn’t bother me; I laugh or take action—I go away, I shut my eyes, I strike, I command . . .” Such an elimination of the strange could lead to an elimination of the psyche, leaving, at the cost of mental impoverishment, the way open to acting out, including paranoia and murder. (1991, 190) It is in this choice that Kristeva identifies her ethic of psychoanalysis. If the cost of the universal is always exclusion of the foreigner and if the heimlichkeit can only be constructed on the basis of unheimlichkeit, then there is a sense in which the one is always present in the other. It is only by abjecting the foreign completely that one could arrive at the sort of empty ideology, the elimination of psychic space, that would lead to terror activities. In a swift dialectical move, Kristeva locates the terror of the terrorist fundamentalist within. But what the fundamentalist is most terrified of, what she must exclude completely is the unheimlichkeit of her deed. It is only on the basis of the exclusion of the uncanny that the certainty of conviction can pave the way for the actualization of the death drive. What is needed instead is deferral, displacement, sublimation. This would only come if the uncanny were recognized as an imaginative possibility, as an “astonishment” or wonder that calls for analysis. This is what Kristeva means when she writes: To discover our disturbing otherness, for that indeed is what bursts in to confront that “demon,” that threat, that apprehension generated by

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the projective apparition of the other at the heart of what we persist in maintaining as a proper, solid, “us.” By recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. . . . The ethics of psychoanalysis implies a politics: it would involve a cosmopolitanism of a new sort that . . . might work for a mankind whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious— desiring, destructive, fearful, empty, impossible. (1991, 192) The ethical duty that would provide for “a mankind whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of his unconscious” elaborated here would be a constant analysis of the forms of rejection that must take place for the “us” to be formed. This analysis would be desirous in that it would call for a curiosity toward what had been rejected, destructive in that it could not possibly fully articulate the loss of those rejected, fearful in that it would have to confront the reasons why it had rejected the others, empty in that it would be a mere sublimation or representation of the loss, and impossible in that for all of the above reasons, the lost or repressed other would surely return. We could say that the solidarity that Kristeva offers here is political, but the analytic ethic is not the solidarity of traditional political theory. Because the unity of this solidarity is founded on an ethic of analysis, on a working out or working through of forms of social unity and exclusion, the unity it provides is not theoretical, but one of practice. It is a kind of politics in-process/on trial. She offers no a priori theory of politics, but a practice of political analysis. For this reason, it is “far removed from a call to brotherhood, about which one has already ironically pointed out its debt to paternal and divine authority—‘In order to have brothers there must be a father’” (1991, 192). Through her idea of an imaginary politics, Kristeva attempts to give us a picture of politics beyond brotherhood—and also beyond paternalism, authority, and political theory as traditionally construed. Kristeva’s notion of solidarity is not organized around a controlling ideal, but around an analytic practice. It is not grounded in a meaning, but in the constructions and reconstructions of the political imaginary. This point is most evident in Kristeva’s style. Her work cannot be judged according to its theoretical completeness, for she is not interested in giving a final and comprehensive theory of politics. The politics of her work is found in its effects on our own conception of how a political theory should work. Her writings operate on the boundary of the political as a sort of play that entices us beyond the political, that shows us a new space into which politics might move and become something else. In short, instead of asking the imagination to answer to the demands of politics, she asks politics to yield to imagination. Instead of imagination and philosophy serving politics, Kristeva calls for a politics that is imaginative. She works to identify the concept of the political itself with an imaginative analytics. On the one hand, this identification breaks down the idea that we could possibly understand what sort of writing was or was not political

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from the outset. But on the other hand, this identification of the imaginary with the political provides the possibility of giving new life to both imagination and politics.

Appetite after the Feast: Toward a Postprandial Politics Kristeva’s notion of the political as “beyond brotherhood” raises some important questions. If politics has been transformed from a more traditional statecentered understanding to a more imaginative, psychic realm, then it seems reasonable to ask how one could identify the form of authority in this new political landscape. If the domain of politics is imaginary, then are the forms of authority operative here as well? The question is crucial. If Kristeva’s treatment of the political is not to be read as a flight from authority into a romantic imaginary space, it must be read as an engagement with forms of oppression, alienation, and suffering in a new realm. What is the relation between this new political realm and the traditional way of understanding political authority? In other words, we might ask: Is imaginary revolt possible? Against whom would we revolt? And who are we? To put the question in psychoanalytic terms, if solidarity is not brotherhood, which is to say if “we” are not held together by the memory of the death of the father, then how really might this solidarity be provided? In other words, if solidarity always comes through revolt or the overcoming of some authority, then where or what or who is the authority against which this new cosmopolitan politics could be constituted? It is clear that politics without a discourse of authority is almost unimaginable and most likely irresponsible, but perhaps a healthy answer to this question can be found somewhere between abandonment and fixation. If the difficulty of conceiving a kind of solidarity or cosmopolitanism beyond brotherhood rises because of our insistence on conceiving this unity in terms of an absolute authority, then perhaps in working through an analysis, together, of the sources of this conception something like this solidarity might appear. We can find solidarity in the engagement with this problematic. I take Kristeva to be beginning this task most explicitly in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt (2000) when she identifies the traditional form of this problematic in the Freudian fable of the founding of the social link with the murder of the father in Totem and Taboo (1913). As she already indicated in her call for solidarity beyond brotherhood, Kristeva suggests here as well that we are at the limits of the logic of this fable. To understand what a politics beyond brotherhood might mean, we must look a little more closely at the Totem and Taboo myth, which Kristeva summarizes nicely: One day, the sons plotted a conspiracy and revolted (there we are!) against the father: they killed him and ate him. After this totemic meal,

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they identified with him, and after this primary ceremony of humanity, which saw the concomitance of revolt and feast (remember this concomitance!), they replaced the dead father with the image of the father, with the totem symbol of power, the figure of the ancestor. From then on, guilt and repentance cemented the bond, the social pact, among the sons, among the brothers; they felt guilty and banded together as a result of this guilt, and “the dead father became stronger than the living one had been.” (2000, 12) In essence, the myth tells the story of the founding of religious consciousness. The primitive strength of the father is transformed into a transcendental power—“a sense of wrongdoing” (2000, 12). The social link, so the myth goes, was primarily a religious link, worked out through the ritualization of an idealized image of the father. So long as this totem reminds the sons that they killed their father, the social bond is maintained through the feeling of guilt and the remembrance of the death of the father through the totemic rite. At the limits of this logic, however, the bond between the brothers becomes a mere association, and the rituals that memorialized the father become meaningless and empty. The ritual of remembrance degenerates into riot on the one hand and empty, fetishistic fundamentalism on the other. At this moment the basis of the social bond transforms from one based on a common memory to one based on exclusion and sacrifice. We have returned to the moment of fundamentalism and of the repetition of the political—the clinging to empty rituals that require empty sacrifices. Kristeva asks: Why does one sacrifice? Why does one enter into a religious pact and embrace fundamentalism, of whatever sort? Because Freud tells us, the benefits we extract from the social contract threaten to disappear “as a result of the changing conditions of life”: unemployment, exclusion, lack of money, failure in work, dissatisfactions of every kind. From then on, assimilation into the social link disintegrates; the profit “I” finding my integration in the socius collapses. What does this profit consist of ? It is nothing other than the “appropriation of paternal attributes.” In other words, “I” felt flattered to be promoted to the level of someone who could, if not be the father, at least acquire his qualities, identify with his power; “I” was not excluded (2000, 14; emphasis added) Kristeva mentions exclusion here in reference to her analysis of fundamentalism in Strangers to Ourselves. The logic is precisely the same—because of the loss of material ties, the “profit” of integration into the social collapses. What was once a society governed by the memory of a single authority literally disintegrates into and through the logic of exclusion. The authority is no longer located transcendentally and shared equally. Instead, power operates horizontally

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between the brothers at the level of normalization: “‘I’ feel excluded; ‘I’ can no longer locate power, which has become normalizing and falsifiable” (2000, 14). At this moment, the social bond is based on what both Freud and Kristeva call “filial rebelliousness” (2000, 14). The brothers, having lost the memory of the dead father who once united them, turn against each other. This leads to a multiplication of acts of defiance: “Thus we see the development of new attempts at rebellion, different from the primary revolt that was the murder of the father, in the form of religious worship and its pageantry, which today we consider aesthetic or artistic. A sacrificial situation is reproduced through which an imaginary power (which is not immediately political but has this latent vocation) is established and activated” (14). After the death of the father, after the identification with him, occurs the “concomitance of revolt and feast,” which Kristeva earlier asked us to remember. This is our moment, the passing of the memory of the father into empty, normalizing, and pervertible ritual, into a fantastic, tumultuous rebellion. The revolution of the sons turned them into a band of brothers, but at the limits of this logic, the band disintegrates into a mob— the culture of the spectacle. Here we are. The memory of the father’s death has been finally killed and we are all, on the one hand, constantly and frantically, gorging ourselves in the feast, consuming so quickly that we forget why. The inundation and repetition of images, spectacle, and hollow ritual has crowded out another possibility: that of actively and creatively representing this loss together in a politically meaningful way. The father has been dispersed, digested, completely consumed. Revolution used to be killing the authority of the father and providing for the possibility of this feast. Now all we have is feasting; the feast characterizes our moment: “Perhaps this is where we are: neither guilty nor responsible but consequently incapable of revolt” (2000, 15). What to do now? We cannot bring the father back to life. We understand all too well that he was, in fact, an invention of our imagination, an imaginary father. The totem is (was) a hollow ritual. Yet, in a strange way this hollowness and emptiness provides for the possibility of a return of a more democratic solidarity—a solidarity founded not on the basis of paternal authority but on an active working through of the loss of that authority. The loss of a unified source of authority in the form of a religious or secular discourse (God or State as paternal function) uncovers a concealed possibility. At the very moment when the father’s memory has been lost, the possibility of bringing him back imaginatively, aesthetically, and artistically has been opened. This imaginary return gives meaning to revolution today as an analytic, imaginative revolt. The father cannot be brought back to life, but through imagination we can sublimate this loss, this death, instead of actualizing it. Kristeva’s revolt thus calls for a giving of meaning to the loss of ground or authority that is involved in the culture of the image and of the spectacle. It would be the attempt to keep “filial rebellion” from mob mentality. It will require

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negotiation, discourse, and engagement without the possibility of an end. Instead of a conspiracy against the father, political revolution would be the constant and never finished sublimation of the conflict between brothers without the possibility of the return of some final authority. It would require an analysis of the social in terms of a familiar memory that has been lost at some point but again returns,7 never fully present, unconscious, indeed unheimlich— “a mankind whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconsciousness” (1991, 192). Kristeva presents us the challenge of articulating this solidarity through an analytic ethic. This is the revolutionary and political task she sets out. The space of the political is again an imaginary domain: aesthetic, subjective, linguistic, symbolic—in short psychic. Its dangers and forms of authority are operative on this domain as well. Kristeva puts it this way: A sacrificial situation is reproduced through which an imaginary power (which is not immediately political but has this latent vocation) is established and activated. Each participant hopes to satisfy the need to confront an authority in his/her imagination; it becomes possible not only to protest indefinitely (the rite is repeated) but also to renew the rite, in a way, with the dazzling expenditures that accompany religious celebrations: dances, trances, and other festivities inseparable from the scene of the sacrifice. (2000, 14) The choice is between politics as a repetitive, empty protest (which costs nothing) against an imaginary authority or as a sort of jouissance—a celebration with expenditures, festivities, guests. The difference is subtle, but essential. The question boils down to who will control our imagination. Will we remain stuck protesting indefinitely against the same empty image of the father, “pounding our fists for a while, then changing the channel or falling asleep?”8 Or will we take the absence of the father as an opportunity to celebrate, to invite others in, to imagine possibilities for encounters with others from different families? Will we fixate on the heimlich, clinging uncannily to a lost family resemblance, or will we invite the foreigner in on the off chance that he, too, is uncannily familiar? In short, Kristeva draws the authority of the father (and politics thought in terms of this authority) into question in a revolutionary way. She presents the political response to this question as leading to two possibilities. On the one hand the response to this loss of authority could be abjection—a forgetting, a denial of the father’s death, a repression of his memory. If the psychological analogy holds, this repression would cause a return of the father in some horrifying way—it would bring his image back as real,9 as an uncanny return of authority in the form of an image that would fill psychic space with its spectacular emptiness. Fundamentalism and terrorism are manifestations of this today. On the other hand, the response could involve an active reimagining and

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deferral of this loss, an attempt to bring an imaginary father back through an infinite process of imagination, analysis, and interpretation. Kristeva puts the options this way: [I]t is no longer a matter of conforming to the universal . . . or asserting one’s difference (ethnic, religious, sexual) as untouchable, sacred; still less of fighting one of these tendencies with the other or simply and skillfully combining them. It is a matter of pushing the need for the universal and the singular to the limit in each individual, making this simultaneous movement the source of both thought and language. . . . The borders of philosophy and literature break down in favor of a process of meaning and the speaking being, meanings emitted and values received. (2000, 19) This very process would require the analytic ethic elaborated in Strangers to Ourselves. It figures the ethical as curious, endless engagement as opposed to exclusion and rejection. It figures politics as imaginative revolution of meaning. The process calls for subjecting our own meanings to the values of others, “meanings emitted, values received” instead of giving in to a repetitive rebellion. Perhaps politics as paternalism is dead, and democracy is on the rise, but Kristeva shows us that the passing of paternalism is just the beginning of a process of working through that death. Her imaginary politics raises the question of how to deal with the lack of an identifiable authority. Kristeva thus draws the authority of politics into question in a revolutionary way, but her revolution is not meant to consume the father by means of indifferent and vacuous ritual, image, and text. It is instead the postprandial articulation of a revolutionary process; a process that is not only an end, a consuming or consummating feast, but the birth of an appetite, a drive, a beginning—which involves not only loss but the birth of a memory of that loss.

Conclusion? Let’s return to the questions that opened this chapter. What is the meaning of politics today? And are Kristeva’s writings political? A third question now comes into view: What would it mean to answer these questions in theory? And thus what would it mean to assume that one could decide theoretically what the shape or form of the political is and which works met the criterion of “being political?” Following Kristeva’s analytic ethic demands interrogating the community that is guided by political questions. Indeed, if we follow the uncanny logic elaborated on in this chapter, the repetition or fetishization of the political as a question emerges as a symptom of the rejection of the political from the rest of the passions that guide and sustain our lives. Faced with the death of political consciousness, we academics

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have been trying to conjure it through the repetition of images of political rebellion or a desperate sort of seeking for its lost essence. This intellectual who sees everything in terms of its implications for political theory threatens to undermine the ethic of analysis and the practical solidarity this ethic provides. It is to sacrifice the fragile but sustainable bond built through a process of analysis to the absolute and empty bonds of political theory. Kristeva’s description of the fundamentalist bears repeating in today’s political context: “Fundamentalists are more fundamental when they have lost all material ties, inventing for themselves a ‘we’ that is purely symbolic; lacking a soil it becomes rooted in ritual until it reaches its essence, which is sacrifice” (1991, 24). If those of us today who are concerned with the threat of fundamentalism to politics respond with a fundamentalist allegiance to the political, we sacrifice attention to material realities that might not be captured by traditional political discourse. This sort of fundamentalist politics is built more on the separation between political theory and the rest of life, the lack of material ties between the political “we” of academia and the apolitical “them” that lies outside our politicized theory. What are the consequences of our desire to be politically relevant for the communities in which we live? What sorts of lines does the discourse of politics draw between people? And how can these lines be reconfigured? These are the questions that Kristeva’s analytic ethic places before us. They are political questions, to be sure, but to address them we must examine how the meaning of politics functions in community. How have the practices of political theory already decided who is to engage in political reflection and how that political reflection is to take place? For Kristeva, the meaning of politics remains enigmatic. But the enigmatic nature of politics is a call to imaginative analytics. Kristeva’s work attempts to show a sort of narrow path that we might tread with regard to finding a meaningful place for politics within the larger context of life. Her response to the enigma of politics is neither an abandonment of politics nor the repetition of a question concerning its essence. Instead she takes a calculated distance from “the political,” pausing for a moment to reflect on the reasons, forces, and desires behind our political consciousness. This distance provides space for reflection, for sublimation, for return, for revolution. One could thus say that for Kristeva the space of the political is psychic— or that psychic space is the condition of possibility of politics. But to understand the political as a process, as the birth of an appetite instead of the return of an empty repetition, a continuous interpretation of what it means for politics to be guided by imagination must continue. At the very least it means that we must be able to imagine possibilities for judging the effects of discourse beyond the simplistic question of whether and how the discourse is politically relevant. We must understand Kristeva’s call for an imaginary politics as a demand to look toward what has been overlooked in our fascination for finding political implications. In this sense it is in the very imaginative articulation of politics as imag-

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inary that an imaginary politics would appear, and it is in this uncanny articulation of a politics beyond the political that Kristeva’s work finds its political implications. Instead of a collectivity centered around an image of authority, she points toward a democracy to come: one that is always in process, its unity founded on an imaginative process of analysis of that unity. This unity must always be provisional. As soon as this imaginative process of articulation is finished, Kristeva’s uncanny unity between politics and imagination will be evacuated, leaving an emptiness, words on a page, a mere image of imaginary politics. For these reasons, Kristeva’s work gives us no answers; it gives us questions that demand analysis. Her work calls for an imaginative confrontation with her own uncanny, shifting, and difficult text. Indeed, if her remarks concerning the political are bewildering, it is because they call for interpretation. Her interpretation of the political disperses its meaning. What is the nature of the political? The question repeats itself, continuously. It calls for interpretation, for an imaginary revolution.

Notes 1. I will return to the relation between the familiar and uncanny, which is extremely important in Kristeva’s work. She acknowledges that her use of the familiar and uncanny derives from Freud’s 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” in which he writes, “What interests us most . . . is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheimlich. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich…In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous but belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory are yet very different: on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight” (1919/1953, 375). 2. The recent violence in Europe and the Middle East over the political cartoons depicting Mohammed dramatizes in an extreme way both the failure of the political discourse and the emptiness of the fundamentalist reaction to that failure. These events have made it increasingly clear that we lack the language to address the political and religious differences that threaten the possibility of a more democratic or cosmopolitan global community. The death of political discourse dramatized by these events calls ever more urgently for analysis, for a more imaginative sort of politics. 3. I will return to this notion of the empty ritual in my analysis of revolution in a different light in the second section of this chapter. 4. The question of who is responsible for what one might call a “primary” exclusion seems wrong to ask here. Kristeva is not interested in locating who or what is to blame for the exclusion of certain groups and for their counterexclusion. Indeed, the attempt to finalize and/or demonize some group as carrying the sole responsibility for starting the process of exclusion would be absurd on

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her account. As she makes clear, rejection is always necessary—it is more a question of the manner in which the exclusion would occur. 5. Another question arises at this point, which is that insofar as we have identified the absolute fundamentalist as the “terrorist,” perhaps we have already succumbed to the logic of exclusion that Kristeva is elaborating. Again, however, it is not merely a question of identification, but of how we deal with that identification—with violence and rejection or with analysis? 6. These two possibilities are dramatized in E. T. A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman.” The protagonist, Nathaniel is antagonized by uncanny visions, and though in the end they drive him to suicide, they also drive him to correspondence and curiosity and eventually love. Interestingly, he falls in love with Clara, who analyzes his uncanny fantasies as products of his imagination. It is only when he takes these fantasies to be real that he cannot love Clara and commits suicide. Hoffman dramatizes these options as follows. First, the uncanny as a source of curiosity and imagination: “[N]ever could I accustom myself to the uncanny ghost: the image of the cruel sandman never grew paler within me. What it could be that he had to do with my father began to engage my imagination more and more. An invincible timidity prevented me from asking my father about it; but to investigate the mystery myself, to see the fabled sandman myself—this desire grew more and more intense as the years passed. The sandman had started me on the road to the strange and adventurous that so easily find a home in the heart of a child” (1988, 89). But when Nathaniel’s imagination becomes confused with reality, the sandman becomes an object of horror and abjection: “When now I saw this Coppelius, my soul was filled with fear, and with horror that it was he of all people who had turned out to be the sandman; the sandman was now no longer that bogeyman of the nursery tale who took children’s eyes as food to his owl’s nest in the moon: no! he was now a repellent spectral monster bringing misery, distress and earthly and eternal ruination wherever he went” (90). 7. The brothers, having forgotten the father at this point, are no longer brothers, but perhaps they have the unconscious memory of having been a family. Perhaps, upon the appearance of the other, there is an uncanny recognition. What was once familiar (heimlich) has been transformed into the uncanny (unheimlich). “Thus heimlich,” writes Freud, “is a word the meaning of which develops toward an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich” (1919/1953, 377). 8. This idea was suggested by Kelly Oliver. This chapter arose from a graduate seminar in the spring of 2005 and owes much of its development to Kelly’s help both inside and outside the seminar. 9. It is helpful at this point to remember the two choices for representing this uncanny return as depicted in Hoffman’s “The Sandman.” The first involves love, analysis, and imagination. The second, which conflates image with reality, involves rejection, horror, and death.

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References Freud, Sigmund. 1913. Totem and Taboo. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. ———. 1919/1953. “The Uncanny.” Collected Papers. Trans. Joan Riviere. London: Hogarth Press. Hoffman, E. T. A. 1988. “The Sandman.” Tales of Hoffman. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books. Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. _____. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. _____. 2002. “Julia Kristeva in Conversation with Rosalind Coward.” The Portable Kristeva. Ed. Kelly Oliver. New York: Columbia University Press.

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14 Religion and the “Rights of Man” in Julia Kristeva’s Work

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O harp and altar, of the fury fused, (How Could mere toil align thy choiring strings!) Terrific threshold of the ’sprophet’s pledge, Prayer of pariah, and the ’slover’s cry,— —Hart Crane, To Brooklyn Bridge

Julia Kristeva’s writings on religion, I would like to suggest, redefine the relation of language and desire. According to Kristeva the institution of a productive relation between desire and language enhances the rights of man. A useful connection of language and desire might enable human beings to experience being, not just safely participate in doing, or successfully circumvent difficulties that crop up in daily living. In Kristeva’s writing, the most important human right is the right to unite with the sacred, in the religious phrase, or to have a sensation of being, in the language of psychoanalysis. Kristeva, I would like to show, both detects and creates a correlation between the religious mind and the psychoanalytical mind on profound levels of thinking and meaning production. Kristeva foreshadows the linguistic proficiency that engenders dominant narrativepatterns, and shows that the acquisition of language and the oedipal phase are fundamental to all narrative systems around which our minds revolve. The Christian narrative, which is grounded on the three advents: of conception, death, and resurrection, and the psychoanalytical narrative—comprising three cardinal phases: unity with the mother, subjection to the taboo against incest, and the 229

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institution of a flow of information between the conscious and the unconscious mind—are narratives very similar to one another and thus they contain overlapping ideas. Kristeva initiates a scholarly and humanistic study that crystallizes ideas that are common to religion and psychoanalysis, as these ideas enhance our ability to have meaningful experiences.

The Son and Murderous Desire In Kristeva’s book In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (1987), she relates the structure of the unconscious with the very structure of monotheism. She interprets the Christian Credo and shows that religion points to the narcissistic wound that man suffers as he begins to talk and develop his subjectivity: We believe in one God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible: And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of his father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of Very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man, and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate. (1987, 37) In the Credo, Kristeva argues, Christ is the symbol of human living that the believer could identify with. Christ is both a “Son” and a “son,” or a young boy. It is possible to identify with Him because this “son,” with a small s, is at the same time inherent in God, identical to light, and is “very God of Very God.” The son of God does and does not coincide with the father; the father’s existence implies a paternal function in the life of the son, Jesus Christ, and of all human beings. In analysis, too, the son realizes that he is not identical to the father; the discourse of the monarch or the father is metaphorical and might exist in the son through the acquisition of language. The son abandons a jubilant unity with the mother, when he learns to speak. In the aftermath of the loss of the mother’s body, melancholia inhabits the son’s psyche, and language, which expresses this depression, enables him to communicate his desire to the others. Yet, death is inherent in this transition. From the crucifixion of Christ, the analyst learns that murderous desires toward the father lurk in the very structure of monotheism. In psychoanalysis, too, analysands suffer from an almighty father or from the lack of a powerful father. The analyst interprets Christ’s passion as guilt that is visited upon the Son who is put to death. According to religion, then, the sacred is inherent in crucifixion. Kristeva shows that sublimation of the death drive, and language acquisition, are connected to one another. In An Ethics of Dissensus, Ewa Płnowska

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Ziarek suggests that Kristeva’s analysis of language acquisition is to do mainly with an ethical role assigned to sublimation, “the deflection of the aggressivity of the death drive for the destruction of the narcissistic unity of the ego and for the restructuring of language” (2001, 133). Ziarek is not at ease with Kristeva’s narrow characterization of sublimation, and I subscribe to the discomfort. Here, love is excluded from the structure of sublimation. But Kristeva, too, is unhappy with her own interpretation as it presupposes that interaction with the other is grounded on sacrifice. Thus Kristeva examines the possibility that a nonsacrificial sacred exists too.

The Mother and the Son Kristeva continues, “Seen in psychoanalytic terms, the rights of man comprise not the right to calculate what life is but to understand the unconscious, to understand it even to the gates of death” (1987, 62). Kristeva institutes a new theoretical viewpoint of the relation of the Mother and the Son. In the definition of human rights in the last section, the Power that resides in the symbolic order of signification is undermined by the obligation to understand the “death” that presides in the semiotic order of affective significance. This means that human beings do not have a moral right to restrict meaningful living and uniquely deploy symbolic “calculation,” thus dissociating sublimation from love and concern for the other. The expression the “Rights of Man” has a double valence: it means that human beings have a right to tend to those aspects of the personality that emerge from trauma, but at the same time this expression announces that human beings are answerable to new moral discriminations. Kristeva examines the mother’s posture in discourse and deduces that man is subject to a moral imperative to explore memory traces in the unconscious mind. Understanding the unconscious might teach the man of faith, the analysand, and the reader to assign significance to the affects pain, sorrow, and loss, and this understanding will give meaning to ideas such as love and concern for the other; ideas on which human existence is founded. In “Stabat Mater,” Kristeva represents the mother’s posture in discourse. She shows that the mother’s love begins to develop when she encounters death. “The calm of another life, the life of that other who wends his way while I remain henceforth like a framework. Still life. There is him, however, his own flesh, which was mine yesterday. Death, then, how could I yield to it?” (1976/1987, 243). The mother’s subjectivity is characterized by the emergence of the capacity for concern for the other.1 In this case, Kristeva singles out the relation of love to death: love necessitates complete openness to the other; it is consubstantial with an experience of personal annihilation, or with perfect openness, an acceptance of death. The Virgin’s love appears at the instance of her own death as the Madonna is transformed in the process of Dormition or Assumption.2 In both of these cases the mother encounters death uniquely as it is inherent in love; death is embedded in giving life.

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In The Feminine and the Sacred, in her reply letter to Catherine Clément, Kristeva detects a striking parallelism between the religious mind and the psychoanalytic mind. She shows that “from the Nativity to the Pieta, and including the Mater Dolorosa and the Regina Caeli, the Virgin is . . . exclusively the devoted mother. The ‘good mother’ as Melanie Klein would say, who gives herself body and soul to her son, to the extent that, without her, the dear son would have no body, since that god is a man precisely, only by the grace of his journey through the body of Mary ‘full of grace’” (2001, 76). We are told that no human being could survive without maternal love and care. Kristeva connects the religious myth with the narrative of psychoanalysis and states, “In short, Mary rehabilitates that primal bedrock of our identities, which modern analysts call ‘mother-baby excitation,’ and which Winnicott identifies with the serenity of ‘being’” (76). The continuity of love and death, inherent in motherhood, is a gift that precedes other drive-related phallic definitions of rights of man, such as freedom, equality, knowledge, and justice. In Cecilia Sjöholm’s recent book Kristeva and the Political, she examines the secularizing gesture that presides in Kristeva’s study of religion and psychoanalysis: “Psychoanalysis repeats the Christian form of meaning production. Psychoanalysis could even, at least to some extent, be said to have taken the place of religion. After theology, psychoanalysis studies how language produces meaning, through the notions of transference and countertransference. Rather than being a science, or a question of truth, psychoanalysis is faith. Its object is also a question of the imaginary” (2005, 82). I take issue with this argument as it seems to turn matters upside-down. As I indicated, psychoanalysis studies the human mind and examines religious devotion precisely in the respect that both scripture and analysis introduce difference to language. Kristeva, I suggest, does not hold that religion is a meaningful language in and of itself. Rather, I think that she elucidates the power that the religious narrative has over the believer, or the archaic mind, in order precisely to show that a different, scientific or humanistic narrative holds the same explanatory power and it, too, ushers in meaningful living. The psychoanalytical model of transference and countertransference—conterminous with recognition and love of the other—becomes the preferred model of communication, because meaningful living emerges from these intersubjective relationships. Contemporary psychoanalysts—particularly the American psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell—go a step further to show that indeed intersubjective interactions enhance acts of consciousness construction.3

The Semiotic and the Symbolic Yet, Kristeva’s description of the mother has to explain the breakdown that separates the semiotic from the symbolic orders of language. Because the cuts and breaking inherent in giving birth and child rearing do not imprint death in the

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mother’s unconscious they introduce difference to language. Kristeva relates the semiotic both with the unconscious and the imagination. The mother resides in the prelinguistic phase and beyond the parentheses of language, and thus we call the son’s language the “mother tongue.” Motherhood means that the mother experiences the body and the transmission of speech as continuous with each other. In an early article, “The Abject Maternal: Kristeva’s Theoretical Consistency,” Mary Caputi writes, “That mode of expression which most articulates jouissance, which is the most ‘maternal,’ is poetic language. In its self-conscious abjuration of symbolic logic, poetic language carries out the project of semanalyse, lending credence to the claim that a connection between language and revolution indeed exists” (1993, 32). Revolution is a central concept in this discussion, as according to Hannah Arendt (1963), it is directly related to freedom.4 Yet I think that Caputi short-circuits the fact that the use of the idea of revolution obligates one to endorse the utopian Kantian description of the autonomy of the will, which emerges from one’s subjection to the ethical imperative. But it is precisely this utopia that Kristeva’s oeuvre challenges. Thus, I view the role that jouissance and poetry have in language differently. Affect and literature do not merely furnish the revolutionary mind with the tools needed to refute symbolic categories, such as the taboo, and the law. More important, jouissance and poetry do to language what the relation love-death does to the human being. In both cases tenderness or the sublime creates a union between the human subject and being.5 The aforementiond claim also explains why the mother resides in abjection. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Kristeva shows that the mother has difficulty with the symbolic realm and with acknowledging and being acknowledged by the father or the husband. In this situation, the third or the father enters into the picture and helps the son—activates his drive energy in the son—and orientates him toward doing. The father initiates a struggle against this thing that was the mother and is now the abject. The son internalizes this struggle, “Repelling, rejecting; repelling itself, rejecting itself. Ab-jecting” (1982, 13). Thus, the mother’s significance is to do with a primeval object of impossibility—she is the excluded or the one that is outside of meaning; the abject. She is the “Atopia,” a kind of nowhere to which the son’s being continuously refers. Precisely because the mother remains outside the symbolic order of language abjection presides in literature and psychoanalysis; two discourses that give metaphor to abjection, or alter meaning through the excess of sublimation.

Literature and Psychoanalysis Kristeva likes to interpret Antonin Artaud’s relation to Christ’s corpse. The corpse provokes horror and in writing Artaud attains resurrection. Kristeva writes:

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The death that “I” am provokes horror, there is a choking sensation that does not separate inside from outside but draws them the one into the other, indefinitely. Artaud is the inescapable witness of that torture—of that truth. . . . At the level of downfall in subject and object, the abject is the equivalent of death. And writing, which allows one to recover, is equal to a resurrection. (1982, 25–26) For Kristeva’s Artaud, Christ and the author are similar to one another. Christ, too, is abjected, rejected, excluded, because his language recalls the death, sin, or loss in which our lives are immersed. According to Kristeva the history of religion—not uniquely of Christianity—is conterminous with the history of purifying the object. It culminates with art, the most cathartic occupation, “on the far and near side of religion” (1982, 17). Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double clearly relates maternal language with instituting a new cultural ideal: Here is what is really going to happen. It is simply a matter of substituting for the spoken language a different language of nature, whose expressive possibilities will be equal to verbal language, but whose source will be tapped at a point still deeper, more remote from thought. . . . Gesture is its material and its wits; . . . [this language] springs from the necessity of speech more than from speech already formed. But finding an impasse in speech, it returns spontaneously to gesture. In passing, it touches upon some of the physical laws of human expression. It is immersed in necessity. (1958, 110) Artaud implies that speech emerges from trauma. Traces or physical sensations inscribed in the semiotic and the abjected memory of maternal care make speech necessary. For Artaud theater is the art that should bring the semiotic back into the symbolic realm, thus enhancing meaning, turning meaning into a personal experience. The theater is heartrending precisely because at the navel of this cultural experience abjection presides. In Kristeva’s famous phrase, the language of psychoanalysis is grounded on “a gaping wound.” She relates that Lacan views the importance of psychoanalysis in the saintliness of the analyst who embodies the linkage and is imbued with uniquely one mood: blackness. The analysand’s wound has to be kept open, as in it she or he resides. The analyst’s “poetic” speech is an antidote to the sadness that pervades the analysand’s speech; it shows that this sadness is the way in which one gains knowledge of the abject. The language of the analyst exhibits identification but moves away from it through the use of interpretation. Thus the analytic speech becomes incarnate, in the true sense of this word. Psychoanalysis is “Cathartic,” as it enables the analyst and the analysand to experience not just purification, but, “rebirth with and against abjection” (Kristeva 1982, 31).6 In “Forgiveness and

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Community,” Kelly Oliver relates the meaning that emerges in the transference to forgiveness, “As the unconscious makes its way into signification through the semiotic dimension, the possibility of forgiveness emerges from meaningful response. The meaninglessness of life, more specifically the meaninglessness of trauma, is thereby forgiven by becoming meaningful” (2004, 9). According to my line of thinking, forgiveness is one of the rights of man.7 These rights belong to a political discourse and, thus, suddenly politics has to contend with difference and relate the rights of man to love.

Notes 1. In Winnicott’s seminal article, “The Development of the Capacity for Concern,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, he writes, “Concern refers to the fact that the individual cares, or minds, and both feels and accepts responsibility. At the genital level in the statement of the theory of development, concern could be said to be at the basis of the family, where both parents in intercourse—beyond their pleasure—take responsibility for the result” (1990, 73). This citation is relevant to Kristeva’s text as it locates concern beyond the pleasure principle. Yet, in “Stabat Mater,” it seems to me that Kristeva goes a step further when she directly relates giving birth to “still life,” or to the cessation of the existence that preceded the delivery of an infant into the world. Her concern for the other directly emerges from the syncope that pervades maternal existence. 2. Kristeva studies the Madonna’s Assumption—the process in which the Madonna rises up to the heavens body and soul—because she believes that it endows the body, too, with continuity. As the Mother of God does not die she need not rise from the dead, and thus her body is not subject to suffering and decay. This fate, which is more radiant than the Son’s, renders the woman’s body both seductive—after death Mary becomes Queen of Heaven and the Church— and, at the same time, disembodied, spiritual, or desexualized—the sexuality of the maternal body is censored, and it contains neither the life instincts nor the death drive. Always intact, the Madonna’s body accomplishes the totality of the woman and thus Mary protects the child and the artist against an oedipal anxiety. The seductiveness of the Virgin, characterized by Kristeva as seduction withheld and experienced as incorporeal, appears on canvases devoted to this topic. Mary McCarthy began to interest the later Kristeva, who was writing Hannah Arendt, the first volume in Kristeva’s trilogy on female genius. Thus, it is interesting to note that in her masterpiece on the grandeur of Venice, Mary McCarthy relates Titian’s Assumption to the Jesuit ideology that aspires to bring the believer closer to the dogma of the Church. “The Frari ‘Assumption,’ moreover, though owned by the Franciscans, is quite in the Jesuit taste. Ruskin detested it, rightly, I think; with its gaudy reds and blues, it seems to be the first sample, of that religious propaganda art which the Jesuits used to ‘sell’ the faith to the masses” (1963, 138).

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3. Stephen Mitchell’s work is devoted to articulating a new role for the psychoanalyst, one in which the analyst imparts knowledge to the analysand and yet neither loses his authority nor obstructs the flow of materials that reside in the analysand’s unconscious mind. In Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis, Mitchell claims, “In a complex interpersonal situation, one can present to another in many different ways what is or was in one’s mind.” He continues, “In an important sense, consciousness comes into being through acts of construction either by others or, through self-reflection, by oneself ” (1977, 218). 4. In her comparative study of revolutions, Hannah Arendt compares the French revolution to the American revolution in regard to how they view the relation of revolution to freedom. “Crucial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide.” Arendt continues, “And since the current notion of the Free World is that freedom, and neither justice nor greatness, is the highest criterion for judging the constitutions of political bodies, it is not only our understanding of revolution but our conception of freedom, clearly revolutionary in origin, on which may hinge the extent to which we are prepared to accept or reject this coincidence” (1963, 29). 5. Emmanuel Levinas attributes pure alterity to the feminine. In this sense, Levinas views the feminine as an integer in the relationship that exceeds the encounter between two people. The feminine belongs to the sublime as woman cannot be reduced to knowledge and thus she remains contrariety—or that which is not reduced to sameness by a correlation with its other that emerges within the relationship—woman is the signifier of contrariety within the relationship. Contrariety is a term that inhabits the absolutely other; it is equal to the feminine. Levinas uses the example of tenderness to show that woman’s contrariety remains intact within the relationship with the other. The feminine enhances desire even while woman pacifies the claims of desire. In Le Temps et l’autre (Time and the Other), Levinas writes, La caresse est un mode d’être du sujet, où le sujet dans le contact d’un autre va au-delà de ce contact. Le contact en tant que sensation fait partie du monde de la lumière. Mais ce qui est caressé n’est pas touché à proprement parler. Ce n’est pas le velouté ou la tiédeur de cette donnée dans le contact que cherche la caresse. Cette recherche de la caresse en constitue l’essence par le fait que la caresse ne sait pas ce qu’elle cherche. Ce “ne pas savoir,” ce désordonné fondamental en est l’essentiel. Elle est comme un jeu avec quelque chose qui se dérobe, et un jeu absolument sans projet ni plan, non pas avec ce qui peut devenir nôtre et nous, mais avec quelque chose d’autre, toujours autre, toujours inaccessible, toujours à venir. La caresse est l’attente de cet avenir pur, sans contenu. Elle est faite de cet accroissement de faim, de promesses toujours plus riches, ouvrant des perspectives nouvelles sur l’insaisiss-

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able. Elle s’alimente de faims innombrables. Cette intentionalité de la volupté, intentionalité unique de l’avenir lui-même, et non pas attente d’une fait futur, a toujours été méconnue par l’analyse philosophique. The caress is a mode of being of the subject, where the subject in contact with an other goes beyond this contact. The contact as a sensation is a part of the world of light. But what is caressed is not touched properly speaking. It is not the smoothness or the warmth given within the contact that the caress searches. The research of the caress constitutes the essence of the contact by the fact that the caress does not know what it searches. This “not to know,” this fundamental disorderliness is the caress’s essence. It is like a game with something that takes itself away, and a game absolutely without a project or a plan, including not with what can become ours or we, but with some other thing, always other, always inaccessible, always yet to come. The caress is the expectation of this pure future, without content. It is made of this increase of hunger, of always richer promises, opening new perspectives on the elusive. It nourishes numberless hungers. This intentionality of the voluptuous, unique intentionality of the future itself, and not expectation of a future fact, has always been unrecognized by the philosophical analysis. (1983, 82–83; translation mine) Levinas’s portrayal of the caress, and by extension the feminine, is reified. Levinas, I suggest, aims to define the feminine or the caress as an action and an affect that enhances consciousness even while it evades the hold that consciousness has on the advent of the encounter with the other. Yet Kristeva, who, I have every reason to believe, accepts the content of Levinas’s argument, offers a complex, profound analysis of the relation of the emergence of conceptual thinking to the development of the body or of the relation of tenderness with Power. Kristeva shows that the mother inherits to humanity a capacity to meet the other when she discloses her own experience, “which defers eroticism into tenderness and makes an ‘object’ an ‘other me’” (2001, 57). Uniquely the shared experience of motherhood, I would like to suggest, could transform the body to significance or to a semiotic system, and thus relate desire to language and institute the free play of desire and desire’s sublimation. Kristeva writes, Now I can set forth my idea: through these two prototypes of filth (excrement and menses), what is fundamentally warded off is maternal Power. Why? Just think of the maternal authority that oversees the training of the sphincters, through archaic frustrations and prohibitions, and forms a first cartography of identity out of our autoerotic baby bodies, well before our identity cards, a cartography composed of zones, orifices, points and lines between “proper” and “improper,” to

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be precise, possible and impossible. A primal cartography of the body I call “semiotic,” which is the precondition for language even though it depends on language, and which suffers and takes pleasure in an other logic, complementary to the logic of linguistic signs imposed and consolidated by paternal laws. (2001, 95) 6. The epigraph of this article is particularly relevant to Kristeva’s view of the relation of religion or the sacred to abjection. Hart Crane conveys the feeling that Brooklyn Bridge is more magnificent than a monumental cathedral is and possesses discrete sanctity, as does an altar, precisely because the bridge is forged by the furies that reside in the hearts of the prophet, the pariah, and the lover. In plate 11 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake asserts, “All deities reside in the human breast” (1988, 38). But Hart Crane courageously examines the wilderness and abjection—“the gaping wound,” in the language of Kristeva— in which human living is immersed and from which the myth of God emerges. The poet shows that “mere toil” endows man’s impure existence with objects that are the fruit of a thriving imagination that “lend[s] a myth to God” (1986, 43). 7. In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Jacques Derrida articulates two different aspects of forgiveness. The first, directly related to the law, was established in the Nuremberg Tribunal, when the conviction of those who perpetrated crimes against humanity stood as a symbol for humanity that desired its own condemnation, because it needed to forgive itself and continue living while believing in the Power of laws even in the face of historical catastrophe. Derrida adds that the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa was established when the United Nations decided to define Apartheid as a crime against humanity. The second form of forgiveness does not bring about totality. Derrida writes, “In order to approach now the very concept of forgiveness, logic and common sense agree for once with the paradox: it is necessary, it seems to me, to begin from the fact that, yes, there is the unforgivable. Is this not, in truth, the only thing to forgive? The only thing that calls for forgiveness?” (2001, 32). According to my understanding, Derrida articulates the role that forgiveness plays in introducing difference to the construction of history and memory. And yet, I think that uniquely after we have further analyzed the various aspects of love—inherent in maternal concern for the other and in transference in the psychoanalytical encounter, as indicated by Kristeva—we may be able to articulate the empirical bases that enhance global politics to contend with difference and redefine the status of persons who offer forgiveness within states of affairs whose very existence emerges from unforgivable deeds.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1963. On Revolution. New York, London: Penguin Books. Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press.

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Blake, William. 1988. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. New York: Doubleday. Caputi, Mary. 1993. “The Abject Maternal: Kristeva’s Theoretical Consistency.” Women and Language 16 (2): 32–36. Crane, Hart. 1986. Complete Poems of Hart Crane. New York: Liveright. Derrida, Jacques. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1976/1987. “Stabat Mater.” Tales of Love. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———1987. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia, and Catherine Clément. 2001. The Feminine and the Sacred. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1983. Le temps et l’autre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. McCarthy, Mary. 1963. Venice Observed. San Diego, CA: Harcourt. Mitchell, A. Stephen. 1977. Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis. London: Atlantic Press. Oliver, Kelly. 2004. “Forgiveness and Community.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 42 (Suppl.): 1–15. Sjöholm, Cecilia. 2005. Kristeva and the Political. London: Routledge. Winnicott, W. D. 1990. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Karnak. Ziarek, Ewa Płnowska. 2001. An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism, and the Politics of Radical Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Contributors

 Idit Alphandary is adjunct faculty of Poetics and Comparative Literature and Women and Gender Studies at Tel Aviv University. She submitted her doctoral dissertation at Yale University (2001). She is currently completing the manuscript of her first book The Subject of Autonomy and Fellowship in Guy de Maupassant and D. W. Winnicott. Caroline Arruda is a graduate student in the Philosophy Department at State University of New York–Stony Brook and is currently writing her dissertation, entitled The Practice of Recognition: Hegel, Social Reproduction, and the Epistemic Foundations of Social Theory. Sara Beardsworth is associate professor in the Philosophy Department at Southern Illinois University. She is author of Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity (2004). Her research is in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy, and she has published articles on psychoanalysis, feminism, and critical theory. Jeff Edmonds is a graduate student at Vanderbilt University. He received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Williams College in 1999 and worked as a high school teacher in Asuncion, Paraguay, and Bell Buckle, Tennessee, before deciding to pursue his Ph.D. in 2004. His areas of interest are political philosophy, philosophy of education, and philosophy of language. Robyn Ferrell is presently attached to the University of Western Sydney’s Writing and Society Research Group. She is the author of Copula: Sexual Technologies Reproductive Powers (2006), Genres of Philosophy (2002), and Passion in Theory (1996). She is currently working on a book: Untitled: Art Culture Gender Law. S. K. Keltner is assistant professor of Philosophy at Kennesaw State University. Her research interests fall within social and political philosophy, broadly construed 241

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Contributors

to include continental thought, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and discourses concerning social difference. She has published essays on de Beauvoir, Levinas, Kristeva, Irigaray, and Heidegger. She has a book forthcoming entitled Julia Kristeva: Thresholds. John Lechte is professor of Sociology at Macquarie University in Sydney with a special interest in Continental theory. He has published, with Mary Zournazi, The Kristeva Critical Reader (2003), and with Maria Margaroni, Julia Kirsteva: Live Theory (2004). In 1990 he published his influential book Julia Kristeva. Maria Margaroni is assistant professor in Literary and Cultural Theory at the University of Cyprus. She is coauthor, with John Lechte, of Julia Kristeva: Live Theory (2004) and coeditor, with Effie Yiannopoulou, of Metaphoricity and the Politics of Mobility (2006) and a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies on “Intimate Transfers” (2005). Kelly Oliver is W. Alton Jones Chair and professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of fifteen books and more than fifty articles, including The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Oppression (2004); Noir Anxiety: Race, Sex, and Maternity in Film Noir (2002); Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (2001); Subjectivity without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (1998); Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture (1997); Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to “the Feminine” (1995); and Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind (1993). Frances Restuccia is a professor in the English Department at Boston College, where she teaches contemporary literary and cultural theory as well as modernism and film/film theory. In 1989, she published James Joyce and the Law of the Father and, in 2000, Melancholics in Love: Representing Women’s Depression and Domestic Abuse. Restuccia has also published numerous articles in journals such as Raritan, Contemporary Literature, Novel, Genre, Genders, American Imago, JPCS (Journal for Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society), Gender and Psychoanalysis, Clinical Studies, Religion and the Arts, literature and psychology, and Lacanian Ink. She is cochair of the “Psychoanalytic Practices” seminar at Harvard’s Humanities Center and editor of the Contemporary Theory series at Other Press. Her most recent book, Amorous Acts: Lacanian Ethics in Modernism, Film, and Queer Theory, appeared in 2006. Cecilia Sjöholm is associate professor in Comparative Literature and has a Ph.D. in philosophy. She teaches at Södertörn University College, Stockholm, Sweden, where she is currently director of the Program of Aesthetics. Her work includes articles and books on literature, psychoanalysis, and philosophy in English

Contributors

243

and Swedish. Her latest works are the titles Kristeva and the Political (2005) and The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire (2004). Lisa Walsh is a lecturer in French Studies and Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham and member of the editorial board of Culture, Theory, and Critique. Her articles on psychoanalysis and feminism appear in Hypatia and differences, and she is author of Subjects of Love and Desire (2009). Emily Zakin is associate professor of philosophy at Miami University of Ohio. She is the coeditor of Derrida and Feminism and Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference and the Formation of the Polis, and of numerous essays in Continental philosophy, political philosophy, and psychoanalysis. She is currently completing a book manuscript tentatively entitled Fantasies of Origin: The Birth of the Polis and the Limits of Democracy.

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Index

 Abjection (the abject), 52, 54, 55, 63, 144, 222, 233, 234; of Duras, 157; eroticization of, 52, 55, 62; of the foreign, 217; and intimate suffering, 163, 170; overcoming, 60; and the sacred, 238n6. See also under sacred Abu Ghraib, 49, 51, 53, 57, 61 Adami, V., 87 adaptation, 24, 26, 112, 115, 187. See also freedom Adorno, Theodor, 183, 192 affectivity (affect), 2, 3, 67, 87, 122n13, 130–140, 186–188, 198–199; and the icon, 116; and image/ representation, 50, 56, 80, 102–105, 132; and literature, 146, 155, 233; and revolt, 166; and word/discourse, 2, 49, 50, 173, 175 Agapitos, Panayiotis, 115 allegory, 108, 109, 112, 113, 121n4 Allori, Cristofano, 33, 37; Judith and Holofernes, 33 amorous disaster, 60–62 anguish, 132, 151, 152, 154 Antigone, 194n1 anxiety, 6, 7, 34, 36, 106, 235n2; in Being, 172; about capital punishment, 99; of influence, 145. See also under castration Arendt, Hannah (Arendtian), 25, 164–167, 170–175, 181–186, 193, 196–209, 233, 236n4; The Human Condition, 170, 196, 197, 210n2;

and the intimate, 164, 165, 170, 172, 174, 175, 180, 193; Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 196, 204; Origins of Totalitarianism, 196, 197, 206; political phenomenology, 12, 13, 164, 166, 170, 171; On Revolution, 196, 203; “What is Authority?” 164 Argus, 30 Aristotle, 132, 159n21, 172; Politics, 185 Artaud, Antonin, 233, 234; The Theater and Its Double, 234 artistic sublimation, 11,127–129, 135, 138 asymbolia, 145, 147, 148, 171 atheism, 119, 145, 150, 155, 195. See also religion Augustine, Saint, 26, 167, 190 authority, 4, 21, 22, 164, 209, 218–225; maternal; 237n5; source of, 205, 206, 221 Auzepy, Marie-France, 115 Balibar, Etienne, 117, 120 banality of evil, 22, 69, 70 Barthes, Roland, 20, 88, 89, 97–99, 102, 153, 154; Camera Lucida, 88; L’étrangère, 153 Bataille, Georges, 3, 151, 159n18 Beardsworth, Sara, 2, 3, 158n9 Benjamin, Walter, 87, 108, 113, 121n4; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 108

245

246

Index

Bergson, Henri (Bergsonian), 80, 90, 91, 165 Berman, Antoine, 168 betrayal, 38 Bildung, 168, 169 bio politikos, 185 birth, 32, 235n1; re-birth, 56, 61, 70, 119, 147, 148, 204, 234 Black Sun (Kristeva), 129, 145–147, 151, 154, 164, 170–173 Blake, William, 238n6 Böckenförde, Ernst-Wolfgang, 21, 22 Boleyn, Anne (queen), 35 borderland(s), 146, 148 brotherhood, 203, 218, 219 Bush, George W., 58, 59, 117 Cambiaso, Luca, 30; Mercury Beheading Argus, 30 Cameron, Averil, 120 Caputi, Mary, 233 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 39, 41, 57 caress, 237n5 Carter, Kevin, 105, 106 castration, 7, 29, 32–37, 41, 70, 93n4; anxiety, 32, 36, 56; fantasy, 35, 44n24. See also under mother catharsis (cathartic), 152, 154, 155, 159n20, 159n21, 234 Cavallino, Bernardino, 33, 42n16; Judith’s Servant, 33 chambre noire, la, 148–150, 155, 157 Chirac, Jacques, 121, 123 cinema, 66, 69–71, 79–83, 89–92, 93n3, 97, 98; as allies of psychoanalysis, 68. See also film citizenship, 201, 203, 207–209 Clément, Catherine: The Feminine and the Sacred, 99, 232 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle, 26 commodity (commodification), 183, 188, 190, 192, 193; of emotions, 180, 183, 188, 190; as fetishistic, 84; meaning as, 51; of reality, 57; of the unconscious, 179, 180, 187; of women’s sexuality, 59

contrariety, 236n5 corporeality, 191, 193, 198 corpse, 39, 108, 117, 121n4, 233. See also death Correggio, 33, 43n17; Judith and her Servant, 33 Coward, Rosalind, 213, 214 Crane, Hart, 229, 238n6 crystallization, 89, 90 cultural failure, 127, 128, 130, 132 David, Michel, 160n24 death, 29, 36–39, 56, 57, 169–175, 216, 217, 230–234; -bearing, 129, 171; and consciousness, 76; culture of, 60, 62; father’s, 219–223; fear of, 35, 36, 38, 216; of God, 196; malady of, 152, 170; sensationalism of, 99; and time, 67. See also corpse; and under drive; event; passion Debord, Guy, 7, 79, 80, 83, 84, 110, 121n6. See also society of the spectacle decapitation, 29, 30, 32–36, 41, 56, 57 de Certeau, Michel, 151 decollation: definition of, 41 deferred action, 35 defloration, 32 Deleuze, Gilles, 79–82, 89–93, 93n3, 151 del Garbo, Raffaellino, 33; Judith, 33 democracy of the guillotine, 57 Denes, Dominique, 148 Denis-Diderot, 22 Denon, Vivant, 36 depression, 56, 60, 61; artists’, 37; narcissistic, 129, 131–134, 137, 138. See also melancholia de Roucy-Trioson, Anne-Louis Girodet, 36; Study for the Revolt of Cairo, 36 Derrida, Jacques, 109, 113–115, 121, 238n7; On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 238n7; The Other Heading, 110, 113 desire: cause of, 71, 74, 75; object(s) of, 71, 72, 74, 76, 130, 140. See also under law detachment, 41, 74, 137, 139

Index

Didier, 69, 70, 81, 111 distortion, 189 Doré, Gustave, 34; Jehu’s Companions Finding the Remains of Jezebel, 34 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 120, 131, 145, 146, 155, 195 doubt(s), 65, 155 dream(s), 102, 103 drive(s): death, 7, 22, 56, 66, 67, 74, 129, 138, 139, 171, 173, 174, 197, 217, 230, 231 (see also under negativity); life, 139; sexual, 22, 69; violent, 52, 56. See also instinct Duras, Margeurite, 143–160, 163, 164, 170–175; Le Camion, 149; La Douleur, 159n14; The Ravishing of Lol Stein, 159n18. See also under abjection ec-static other, 22 ego, 89, 102, 137, 139, 140, 144, 147, 205, 231. See also superego Eisenstein, Sergei, 69, 82, 83 England, Lynndie, 61. See also Abu Ghraib Enlightenment (Aufklärung), 21, 55, 58, 115, 179, 181, 187–193, 195, 198 equality, 58, 59, 61, 194n2, 203, 208, 209 Ernst, Max, 30, 42n4 Eros, 39, 69, 73, 139. See also drive; instinct; Thanatos Europe: crisis of, 109, 110, 196; Europhilia, 113 event, the, 171, 173; of death, 169, 170, 173 (see also death); of natality, 164, 166, 170, 171 (see also birth) evocation, 86–88, 97 exclusion, 59, 60, 216–218, 220, 223, 225n4, 226n5 extimacy, 188, 192. See also intimacy; Lacan fantasm, 80–83, 89, 92 fantasy (fantasies), 60, 68–76, 77n4, 81, 89, 90, 111, 188; of the certainties of salvation, 25; colonization of, 50; fundamentalist’s, 216, 217; masculine, 32; production, 80. See also realism; and under castration; mother; reality

247

father, 31, 35, 218–223, 226n6, 226n7, 230, 233. See also under death female homosexuality, 154 feminine, the, 35, 44n24, 130, 141n9, 141n11, 145, 171, 194n1, 236n5 Feminine and the Sacred (Kristeva), 14, 99, 232 feminine unconscious, 32 femininity, 31, 186, 188 festival, 83, 222 fetishism (fetishistic), 36, 51, 70, 71, 76, 84; anti–, 71 filial rebellion, 221 film, 68. See also cinema; and under horror filth, 237n5 fixation(s), 67, 72, 76, 219 fore-give, 49. See also forgiveness foreign, the (foreignness), 109, 168, 169, 192, 198, 199, 216, 217 foreigner, the, 1, 4, 153, 154, 167, 169, 176, 198, 199, 204, 207, 216, 217, 222 for-giveness (par-don), 51, 56, 61, 67, 156; gives-for, 155 forgiveness, 49, 61, 67, 76, 146, 155, 156, 235, 238n7 Foucault, Michel, 58, 199–201; The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 199; and power, 58, 76, 200, 201; Society Must Be Defended, 76 Frankfurt School, 181, 183, 188, 190 freedom, 23–25, 62, 70, 111–116, 184, 194n2, 198, 199; and autocommencement, 23, 58, 116; conception of, 6, 112, 115, 236n4; emergence of, 171; of intimate space, 182; and revolution, 233, 236n4; to shop, 58, 59 Freud, Sigmund: “the dark continent,” 130, 134, 137, 140, 187; Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, 102; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 137; “Mystic Writing Pad,” 101; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 54; Totem and Taboo, 141n5, 210n6, 219; The Uncanny, 216, 225n1, 226n7 (see also under uncanny)

248

Index

Fundamentalism (fundamentalists), 60, 61, 144, 195, 214–217, 220, 222, 224, 225n2, 226n5. See also terrorism; and under fantasy Gauthier, Xavière, 151 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 32, 39, 40; Judith Beheading Holofernes, 32, 40; SelfPortrait as the Allegory of Painting, 40 German nationalism, 163, 167 globalization (globalism), 24, 51, 58, 65, 110, 112, 117, 158 Godard, Jean-Luc, 69, 70, 80, 83; Contempt, 71, 75 Graner, Charles, 61. See also Abu Ghraib Greek tragedy, 185, 186, 194n1 grief, 26, 131, 151, 170, 171. See also mourning guilt, 29, 52, 220, 221, 230 Habermas, Jürgen, 21, 180–183, 186, 188–193, 205; Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 188, 190 Haine et le Pardon, La (Kristeva), 3, 7, 49, 54, 55, 58, 156, 164, 170, 172 Hannah Arendt (Kristeva), 164, 175 Hansen, Mark, 93n3 hatred (hate), 49, 54–56, 87, 154, 156, 172. See also forgive; forgiveness Hayles, Katherine, 91 head, 45n39; severed, 37, 39, 57. See also skull Hebbel, Friedrich, 31, 42n14 Heemskerck, Martin van, 30; David and Goliath, 30 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (Hegelian), 127, 133, 139, 186, 216. See also negativity; spirit Heidegger, Marin (Heideggerean), 21, 24, 66, 112, 132, 165, 172–174; concept of finitude, 172; Dasein, 173. See also temporality; time heterogeneity, 3, 165–167, 196, 198 Hitchcock, Alfred, 69, 80, 82; Psycho, 82 Hobbes, Thomas, 203 Hoffman, E. T. A.: “The Sandman,” 226n6, 226n9. See also uncanny

Holberg, Ludvig, 23–26; Holberg Prize, 5, 19–21, 26 horror, 7, 36, 72, 75, 82, 105, 143–145, 170, 172, 226n6, 234; film/movie, 75, 80, 82, 83 humanism, 21–23, 36, 55, 195, 209 human nature, 203, 204, 207 human rights, 58, 208, 210n8, 229, 231 Hume, David, 204 Husserl, Edmund, 110, 147 identity politics, 176 ideology, 207 illusion, 75, 84, 87, 94n7, 111, 129, 189 image(s): mental, 79, 93n3; as nothingness, 84, 90, 92; qua image, 80, 85; saturation of, 50, 68 imaginary, the, 90, 111, 219, 232; double character of, 88; and jouissance, 68; for Lacan, 187, 188, 193; role of, 67 imaginary: of peace, 62; politics, 218, 223–225; scenarios, 68; spectacular, 70 imagination, 50, 86, 88, 136, 141, 217–225, 226n6, 233 imago, 81, 89. See also Lacan imitation, 86–88 immortality, 210n2, 217. See also death impotence: childhood/infantile, 35, 36 incantation, 87, 88 instincts (instinctual), 54, 67, 69, 102, 235n2. See also drive integration, 62 interiority, 5, 70, 76, 81, 118, 148, 164, 167, 190–192; register of, 68 interpretation, 51, 61, 81, 83, 102, 189, 234; lack of, 216; need for, 55, 56, 156 In the Beginning was Love (Kristeva), 230 intimacy (the intimate): concept of, 164, 166, 180, 192; and private, 164, 165, 172, 180–182, 193; and public, 163, 165, 166, 170, 171, 175, 182–186, 188, 193; ravaged, 164, 169, 170 intimate revolt, 1, 50, 65–77, 164–166, 176, 180 Intimate Revolt (Kristeva), 55, 66, 70, 111, 163, 166, 167, 173, 192

Index

intimist, 163, 164, 169, 170, 175 involution, 167–169 isolation, 207, 209n2 “Is There a Feminine Genius?” (Kristeva), 164 Jameson, Fredric, 183 John the Baptist, 29, 30, 32, 37, 39, 41 John the Damascene, Saint, 116 jouissance, 50, 51, 56, 60, 62, 66, 144, 146, 147, 152, 157, 222, 233. See also under the imaginary Juranville, Anne, 152, 153 Kant, Immanuel, 23, 58, 112, 181, 184, 195, 199, 233; The Critique of Practical Reason, 23; The Critique of Pure Reason, 23; Perpetual Peace, 61; “What is Enlightenment?” 181 khora, 81, 82, 92, 93n4 Klein, Melanie (Kleinian), 1, 138, 145, 187, 188, 232 Kusturica, Emir: Black Cat White, 92 Lacan, Jacques (Lacanian), 51, 100, 153, 158n4, 159n10, 159n21, 179–181, 187–190, 192, 197, 234; conception of lack, 71, 93n4; Encore, 73; The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 188; The Four Fundamental Concepts, 71, 74; “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” 158n10; on love, 73–75, 77n4; mirror stage/image, 81, 88, 173 (see also mirror). See also imago; objet a; and under the imaginary language: acquisition, 230, 231; and desire, 229; of intimacy, 179, 191–193; maternal, 25, 234; meta-, 87, 104; poetic, 233; as translation, 132; visible, 98, 104. See also semiotic law: “dead letter” of, 4; and desire, 3, 49, 52; paternal/symbolic, 49, 50, 52, 54, 62, 118, 134–136, 141n5, 187, 190, 238; positive, 205, 206 Lefort, Claude, 200, 201, 207, 210n8; The Logic of Totalitarianism, 200; The Question of Democracy, 200

249

lekton (lektonic), 69, 80, 82, 83 Levinas, Emmanuel, 56, 236n5; and the face, 56 literature, 143–146, 150, 154–157; and art, 127–129, 135, 136, 187, 190; authentic/ real, 143, 144, 147; and psychoanalysis, 5, 6, 21–23, 68, 233; and revolt, 66 Locke, John, 204 loss: dynamic of, 127–129, 135, 138; failure of, 127, 128; latent, 130, 132, 138; “the lost,” 128, 129, 131–138, 141n11; primal, 129, 131, 136–138; of self, 128, 129, 136–140 love: as metaphor, 89, 140; self-, 129, 140. See also narcissism Lynch, David: Mulholland Drive, 70–77 MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 159n20 malady (maladies): of civilization, 3, 50, 51; of death, (see under death); of the soul, 50, 51, 68, 72, 103, 111, 129, 134, 145, 156, 170, 172, 175 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 37, 44n27, 151 Margaroni, Maria, 77n1, 77n4 marginality, 174 marginalized, the, 176 Marie-Antoinette (queen), 35 martyrdom, 60. See also suicide bombers Marx, Karl, 189, 190, 195, 203 maternity (maternal), 141n11, 199; feminine, 11, 128, 130–136; protospace, 35; Thing, 147, 152. See also under authority; language McCarthy, Mary, 235n2 McGowan, Todd, 74, 77n3 meaning(s): and being, 50, 51, 55, 56, 60, 62; crisis of, 128, 132, 133; production of, 7, 9, 12, 50, 100, 104, 106, 229, 232 mediation, 80, 83, 84, 89, 205; of the drives, 144; the foreign as, 168 Medusa (medusan), 31, 35, 39 melancholia (melancholy, melancholic), 12, 34, 36, 129–132, 136, 137, 141n1, 146–148, 152, 153, 158n8, 172, 175, 230; allegorical, 108, 114,

250

Index

melancholia (continued), 117, 119; cultural, 11, 133, 135–139; definition of, 145, 158n6. See also under writing Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 81 metaphysics, 29, 103 Metz, Christian, 75, 76 Michaels, Eric, 100 Michelangelo, Buonarroti, 37 Millot, Catherine, 145 mirror, 82, 90. See also under Lacan Miserablism, 30 Mitchell, Stephen, 232; Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis, 236n3 Mitry, Jean, 93n5 Mitterand, François, 114, 121 modernity, 117, 134, 166, 170, 184, 193, 195–197, 200, 201, 206 monotheism, 14, 140, 230. See also religion Montaigne, Michel de, 172 mother: all-powerful, 6, 31, 35, 36; archaic, 130–133, 136–138; and castration, 7, 31, 32; fantasy of, 31. See also maternity; motherhood motherhood, 32, 141n11, 232, 233, 237n5 mourning, 29, 131, 132, 137–139, 147 Mr. & Mrs. Smith (movie), 52, 53, 56, 63 Murder in Byzantium (Kristeva), 10, 26, 107–121, 160n26 narcissism (narcissistic), 40, 81, 129, 130, 136, 140, 149; primary, 129, 130, 137, 138, 140, 141n4; wound, 8, 14, 55, 230. See also love negativity, 11, 66, 70, 71, 127, 136, 138; and the death drive, 129, 139; as fourth term of the dialectic, 55; of the intimate, 173. See also under questioning Nestroy, Johann, 42n14 neuroses, 187, 189 New Maladies of the Soul (Kristeva), 9, 50, 97, 104 Nicodemus the Hagiorite, 115 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 21, 94n6 nihilism, 11, 21, 120

nondifferentiation, 130, 131, 138 non-sense, 66 normative consciousness, 21 nothing (nothingness), 38, 70, 74–76, 150, 154; and Being, 66; refusal to transcend, 145; and Sartre, 9, 84, 90, 92 Nothing/Real, 72, 73 object, 22; love, 72–74, 77n3; metaphorical, 140 objet a, 71, 74, 75, 93n4 Oedipal, 141n5, 175, 187, 229, 235n2; pre-, 122n13, 147, 192; triangulation, 130 oedipalization, 134 oikos, 184–187, 193, 194n1 Oliver, Kelly, 159n19, 226n8, 235 omnipotent self, 147, 148 passage, 10, 29, 41n1, 116 passion, the, (as suffering), 108 passion: for death, 154, 172–175; for life, 8, 51, 62, 63, 174, 175 passivity, 32, 166 paternal complex, 32 peace, 58, 61, 62, 203 perception, 92 perversion, 52–62, 70, 184; infantile, 54 Petit, Philippe, 175 phallic: equality, 61; order, 175; power, 32, 35 phallus, 175 phobia, 52, 55, 62. See also neuroses photograph (photographic), 51, 53, 56, 61, 80, 85, 88, 90–93, 97–106; press, 9, 97, 98, 100–101, 105, 106 poetics, a, 89, 191 political revolt, 1, 4, 5, 213 polyphonic logic, 144 Powers of Horror (Kristeva), 54, 55, 143, 144, 157, 163, 170, 171, 233 preverbal, 67, 70, 130, 132, 133 primacy of the body, 103 principle: pleasure, 53, 103, 235n1; reality, 53, 103 procreation, 60, 62

Index

prohibition, 7, 49, 51, 52, 54, 59–62, 134, 237; and cut, 38, 100 Protestantism, 24, 112, 116. See also religion Proust, Marcel, 1, 26, 39, 82, 164, 165 psyche, the, 50, 66, 67, 83, 101, 102, 174, 205; colonization/takeover of, 7, 8, 13, 70, 180; elimination of, 217; formation of, 175; the life of, 66, 127, 128 psychic (psychical): identity, 26; space, 5, 7, 9, 51, 55, 56, 65, 76, 79, 81, 86, 87, 180, 197, 217, 222, 224. See also singular psychic life; and under reality psychoanalysis: as emancipation, 189; ethics of, 199, 216–218, 222–224; and narrative, 229, 232; need for, 55; practice of, 127, 189, 192 psychosis, 66, 74, 102 public: vs. private, 2, 165, 170, 179–182, 184, 185, 192, 193, 205, 209 purification, 7, 52, 55, 61, 152, 234 questioning, 24, 50, 51, 59, 66, 70, 113, 121n1; and psychic life, 166; transforms negativity, 55 Raffet, August, 57 Ratzinger, Joseph, 21 realism, 9, 87, 98, 99, 103. See also fantasy; reality reality: conceptions of, 9, 84; of consciousness, 81; construction/ production of, 9, 57; and fantasy, 53, 57, 72, 80, 85; and image, 103; mechanical analogue of, 98; psychical, 66, 68. See also under principle reduplication, 173, 174, 176 Regnault, Henri, 36, 37; Execution Without Trial under the Moorish Kings of Granada, 36; Standing Moor, Arms Raised, 36 regression, 8, 52–55, 62, 63 religion(s), 6, 134, 143, 195, 213, 214, 229–238; collision/clashes of, 20, 55, 60, 156, 160n26. See also atheism; monotheism; Protestantism

251

Rembrandt (van Rijn), 32, 34, 37; The Blinding of Samson, 34 repetition, 55, 173, 174, 176, 183, 216 repressed, the, 8, 35, 49, 52–54, 140, 222; return of, 30, 38, 55, 199 Resnais, Alain: Hiroshima mon amour, 170 responsibility, 8, 52, 235n1; ir-, 152 resurrection, 13, 29, 147, 149, 229, 233, 234 revolution, 4, 25, 146, 147, 158n5, 233, 236n4; American, 203, 205, 236n4; French, 25, 57, 112, 202, 203, 206, 236n4; in poetic language, 50 Revolution in Poetic Language (Kristeva), 55, 104, 151, 158n5 Richardson, Samuel: Pamela, 182, 183 Rimbaud, Arthur, 3, 21 ritual, 61, 216, 220–224 Roland, Philippe-Laurent, 34; Samson, 34 Romanticism, 163, 165, 167, 168 Rothko, Mark, 87, 103 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 83, 165, 167, 184, 186, 202, 203, 206; and the general will, 202, 210n4 sacred, the, 6, 9, 30, 99–101, 103, 104, 106; and abjection, 238n6; and crucifixion, 230; Eastern notion of, 143; and human right, 229 sacrifice(s), 6, 57, 59–61, 100, 216, 220, 222, 224, 231; eroticization of, 34 sacrificial terror, 36 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 9, 22, 79, 80, 84–88, 92; concept of intentionality, 87; L’Imaginaire, 84, 85, 111. See also under nothing seeing, 93n4, 110–112, 114, 116, 119; all-, 30 self-authorship, 196, 197 semiology, 9, 81, 141n1. See also semiotic semiotic, the, 67, 80–83, 89, 92, 130, 132–135, 146, 238n5; and symbolic, 2, 3, 11, 12, 104, 133, 232, 233 sentimentalization, 183 September 11 (9/11), 3, 58, 100, 101, 109, 143, 156, 164, 215. See also terrorism

252

Index

Sergel, Johan Tobias, 34; Samson and Delilah, 34 sexual thing, the, 22–24 Shapiro, Meyer, 104 sharing ( partager), 6, 23, 25, 27n5, 181, 183, 185, 193; unsharable, 23, 25 signification, 13, 55, 82, 191, 192, 231, 235; dialectical model of, 157, 158n5; and media images, 50; and our survival, 146; and thetic phase, 77n1; two modalities of, 2, 3 silence, 116, 145, 147, 148, 152, 157 singular psychic life, 4, 5, 10, 12, 13, 163, 167, 175 Sjöholm, Cecilia: Kristeva and the Political, 232 skull, 35, 36, 43n23 society of the spectacle, 5, 7–10, 65, 8–70, 76, 79–86, 90, 93, 110, 111. See also Debord Solario, Andrea, 37, 44n30 solidarity, 14, 218–222, 224 somatic symptom, 50, 54 speaking being, 3, 8, 10, 22–24, 175, 197, 208, 223; and psychosis, 66 speaking subject, 22, 35, 54, 102, 146, 156 Speech-Being, 59 spirit ( geist), 196. See also Hegel Spivak, Gayatri, 60 Spranger, Bartholomeus, 33; Judith and Holofernes, 33 Strangers to Ourselves (Kristeva), 1, 4, 163, 167, 199, 215, 220, 223 Stuart, Marie, 35 subject: abysmal, 55; formation, 104, 129–135, 140; -in-process, 3, 89, 90, 93; -object, 2, 9, 66, 80, 85, 88, 137. See also speaking subject substitution, 51 suffering, 57, 58, 67, 70, 108, 133–135, 150–158, 159n14, 170, 172, 174; intimate, (see under abjection); melancholic, 131; and pleasure, 183 suicide bombers, 8, 60, 215. See also martyrdom superego, 53, 135

surveillance, 49, 54, 57–59 symbolic, the, 2, 3, 49, 54, 89, 93, 133, 148, 190, 205, 232–234 symbolic: life, 128, 132–134; order, 89, 92, 187, 192 Tales of Love (Kristeva), 88, 89, 163 talking cure, 156, 166 temporality (temporal), 67, 97, 165–167, 173; atemporal, 67, 114; of intimacy, 165, 167, 173. See also time terror, 202, 206 terrorism, 11, 143, 144, 213, 222. See also September 11 Thanatos (thanatology), 39, 67, 69, 70, 77. See also death; drives; Eros thetic, 70, 104, 146–149, 158n5; consciousness, 85. See also under signification Thing, the, 173, 188 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 155, 156 time, 19, 67, 80–82, 90–92, 93n4, 94n6, 117, 158n8, 165, 173, 174; absolute, 107; before responsibility, 52; future anterior, 10, 117, 120; -image, 82, 93n3; -less, 37, 67, 70, 74, 80, 118, 151, 165; unconscious, 67. See also temporality; and under death Time and Sense (Kristeva), 164, 173 totalitarianism, 21, 100, 110, 167, 184, 196, 201, 206 transference, 25, 89, 112, 140, 159n19, 179, 232, 235, 238; counter-, 25, 191–193, 232 transfiguration, 29, 57 transgression, 51, 199 trauma, 104, 105, 166, 231, 234, 235 Traumarbeit, 187 uncanny (unheimlich), 109, 169, 216–218; effect of the real, 53, 57; Freud’s notion of, 168, 210n5, 225n1, 226n7; and life of intimacy, 186; otherness, 55; of the political, 214; in “The Sandman,” 226n6, 226n9 unconscious, the, 13, 14, 21, 39, 67, 69, 70, 158n10, 179, 180, 187–190, 205,

Index

207, 222, 230, 231, 233, 235. See also feminine unconscious; and under commodity; time universality, 13, 20, 62, 186, 187, 197, 181 unreality (irreality, unreal), 75, 80, 81, 84, 85. See also reality Valéry, Paul, 110, 171 Venus of Willendorf, 35 Veronese, Paolo, 33; Judith and Holofernes, 33 Victor, Barbara, 60 visibility (the visible), 10, 29, 36, 68, 69; and the invisible, 111, 116, 119; terminus of, 40 Visions Capitales (Kristeva), 7, 43n23, 56, 57, 59 vulnerability (vulnerable), 8, 22, 54–57, 59, 60

253

Weber, Max, 24, 112 Wenders, Wim: Until the End of the World, 109 William of Orange, 120 Winnicott, W. D., 232, 235n1 Woolf, Virginia, 152 working-through, 11, 13, 14, 68, 176, 209, 219, 221, 223 writing, 148–150; and “an other cinema,” 69; experience(s) of, 6, 25; and melancholy, 131, 153, 155; in revolt, 66 Zeitlin, Forma: Playing the Other, 194n1 Zeitlos, 67, 71, 74, 76, 165, 173. See also time Zernike, Kate, 61 Ziarek, Eva Płnowska, 230–231 Žižek, Slavoj, 13, 80, 117, 183, 195, 196; Welcome to the Desert of the Real!, 113

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