Julia Kristeva’s choice of title is
apt in a way that she herself probably doesn’t intend. Parts of this book make good sense, but, as
is too often the case with works characteristic of what could broadly be referred
to as “postmodernism,” other parts of it veer into realms of rhetorically
stylized non-sense. One always has the
lingering suspicion that the heart of a failed poet beats in the chest of every
French-speaking theorist, manifesting its desires in endless references to
exclusively French literature (the usual suspects: mainly Proust, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud) and attempts to imitate
rather extreme, obscurantist literary styles— all the while remaining
ever-so-tenuously situated in the domain of ostensibly philosophical
thinking. It must be conceded that
Kristeva is not nearly so severely afflicted with what many suspect to be a
disease plaguing virtually all Parisian intellectuals (one would hate to
surmise that this is simply because she originally comes from Bulgaria). When addressing, for example, foundational
metapsychological issues pertaining to psychoanalysis in the context of this
volume, she’s quite lucid and conceptually rigorous. But, as soon as her attention turns towards the three writers she
engages with in the second half of the book (Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes), the
reader struggles to discern the pathways charted in the earlier chapters, being
forced to sift through a murky deluge of loose associations and flights of
theoretical fancy.

The first two chapters of the book
open by posing a now-familiar question: 
Is any kind of meaningful revolt, rebellion, or resistance possible in
today’s status quo? Within the confines
of contemporary permissive societies, it is said, traditional forms of
“counter-cultural” defiance have been co-opted by the powers-that-be, more
specifically, by the encoding forces of the market economy. The various signs and activities by which
individuals attempt to mark themselves off as different from the dominant
socio-symbolic space are transformed, by capitalism’s operations, into yet
another set of consumer choices, into just one more cluster of attributes
standing for an adopted “lifestyle.” In
the end, it all amounts to the same thing: 
continually purchasing pointless products, for whatever inconsequential
personal reasons. This problem is a
familiar theme, particularly for the left-wing French theoretical movements
connected with May ‘68. Deleuze and
Guattari, radicalizing Freudo-Marxism in their analysis of “capitalism and
schizophrenia,” speak about this dynamic of rebellion and re-conquest within
the socio-cultural order as the inevitable outcome of a “schizoid” capitalist
logic dictating an endless cycle of transgression and codification (for Deleuze
and Guattari, “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization”) as the very
means of capitalism’s uninhibited self-expansion. Foucault speaks of the perpetually oscillating struggle between,
on the one hand, the norms and prohibitions issuing from various loci of
“power,” and, on the other hand, evasions of these dictates within the concrete
field of bodies and behaviors. In
Foucault’s view, no system of power can ever achieve complete and total
domination. And yet, no manner of
transgression can ever avoid being somehow “colonized” or incorporated by the
mobile machinations of networks of power relations. An appropriate example of his springs to mind here: if, for instance, society lifts particular
prohibitions dealing with the naked body, this isn’t a situation in which being
allowed to reveal certain parts of one’s flesh is suddenly liberating; the
“negative” norms banning nakedness are removed only to be immediately replaced
by a new set of “positive” norms consisting of injunctions dictating ways of
“disciplining” the body (“Be comfortable with your body, your ‘self’… but,
make sure that the body you ‘freely’ display to others is trim, fit, tanned,
and attractive”). In a
different-but-related intellectual tradition, the Frankfurt School, the same
set of concerns stemming from this intersection between rebellion, authority,
and psychoanalysis manifests itself. 
Theorists in the Frankfurt School forge the concept of “repressive
desublimation” to capture the hopeless, futile sense that, today, the various
forms of individual revolt are not only capable of being absorbed and
domesticated by the social system in which they arise, but might very well be
internally structured by the codes and commands of the capitalist order.

Similarly, for Kristeva, this situation, in which
she sees homogenizing normalization winning out over idiosyncratic forms of
revolt, is especially worrisome—“revolt… in our modern world is endangered by
an easy—not to say perverse—fit between law and transgression; it is spoiled by constant authorization, if
not incentives, made by the law itself, to transgress the law and to be
included” (pg. 25). She claims that,
according to psychoanalysis, any sustainable mode of identity involving a
reasonable degree of psychical well being is established vis-à-vis what she designates as “revolt.” But, what is revolt? What, exactly, does this term mean in the
context of the present discussion?

Kristeva begins by letting the
etymological meanderings of the Latin verb volvere
establish the rough parameters of her use of the term “revolt.” This verb has, throughout history,
accumulated a plethora of diverse meanings, many of which don’t have clear,
direct connections with each other save for the contingent fact of historical
association via linguistic developments. 
Thus, in this text, readers are evidently encouraged to understand
revolt as, among other things, curve, turn, return, vault, aversion, and
evolution. Kristeva notes that it isn’t
until the beginning of the eighteenth century that “revolt” and “revolution”
acquire their present socio-political meanings, connoting an upheaval and
overturning of a governing regime. And,
Kristeva makes clear that she has no intention of lending to “revolt” a
narrower sense (this stretching of semantic scope becomes crucial later in the
book, where she wishes to advance the position that literary writing is a
particularly important form of “revolt”—naturally, if one seeks to qualify
literature, poetry, and philosophy as techniques of rebellion, a broader sense
for the term is needed).

In chapters three, four, and five,
Kristeva devotes herself to a detailed examination of a range of concepts in
psychoanalytic theory. The third
chapter, entitled “The Metamorphoses of ‘Language’ in the Freudian Discovery
(Freudian Models of Language),” is quite rewarding for those interested in the
controversies surrounding the structuralist recasting of the Freudian
unconscious and its emphasis on the role of language in psychical life. Kristeva contends that language is not part
of the unconscious strictly speaking. 
In laying out this contention, she walks readers through a detailed,
subtle examination of various facets of Freud’s texts relevant to the topic of
language, demonstrating that the Freudian theory of language is much more
complex than it’s usually given credit for, even by its enthusiastic proponents
(in claiming that Freud is, in certain respects, too detailed to be easily
mapped onto Saussure’s signifier-signified opposition, Kristeva takes aim, of
course, at Lacan).

Kristeva argues that language subsists in a
mediating position between the operations of the unconscious (problematically
characterized, in her thought, as the reservoir of the drives, as the seat of
the pre/proto-linguistic primary processes) and the stable, socio-symbolic domain
of conscious cognition. She situates
language at the interstices of several different dichotomies in a way
reminiscent of her previous discussions, starting in Revolution in Poetic Language and tirelessly reiterated throughout
all of her subsequent writings, of the dynamic operative between the “symbolic”
and the “semiotic”; language straddles the line between thought and energy,
cognition and corporeality, conscious and unconscious, drive and the polis, and so on. That is to say, psychoanalysis is neither a
cybernetic-like theory of the bloodless structural workings of the signifier
nor an investigation into the base somatic urges of quasi-human animality. As Kristeva puts it, the Freudian field
involves a simultaneous engagement with both “thought” and “sexuality.” She also observes that linguistic structures
permit access to the unconscious, allowing the analyst a glimpse into the
“other scene” constitutive of subjectivity. 
Freud’s metapsychological treatment of linguistic phenomena is thus part
and parcel of a larger justification for psychoanalysis’ therapeutic
efficacy. In other words, exaggerating
the alterity of the unconscious to the point where it’s totally foreign to any
kind of symbolic order would make analytic intervention impossible. Additionally, by situating language in this
manner, Kristeva sets the stage for her later insinuations that literary and
theoretical uses of language are privileged forms of revolt, since language, in
mediating between libidinal and social economies, permits a subliminatory
struggle with the existing cultural-political matrix.

Chapters four and five are devoted
to meditations on the Oedipus complex and sexuality. At this point, the guiding threads of a generally unified
thematic line begin to fray; it becomes increasingly difficult to see how
Kristeva’s musings on psychoanalytic issues hang cohesively together. The basic idea that remains clear is the
thesis that full and genuine subjectivity, as understood by psychoanalysis, is
only possible at the price of some sort of revolt or rebellion. For instance, Oedipus’ passing through the
ordeal of patricide is, in Kristeva’s view, partially representative of the
fact that the space of subjectivity is established and demarcated through the
negation of the authority of a paternalistic big Other. Kristeva implicitly but firmly rejects the
notion, fostered by critics of Freud, that the Oedipus complex is a culturally
relative pattern falsely generalized by analytic theory. And, as far as debates about feminine
sexuality are concerned, she takes great care to note her endorsement of the
view that the Oedipus complex, as arising from the fixation upon the maternal
figure as the primary love-object, applies equally to children of both sexes. Thus, one could infer, female
heterosexuality entails an extreme rupture and denial (a “revolt” in a very
loose sense), since it requires not only a withdrawal of libidinal investment
in the mother (something demanded of young boys as well), but also a complete
shift in terms of the very template of object-choice. Unlike male children, who can, through sublimation, continue
desiring other women besides the mother, female children must succeed in
completely abandoning feminine love-objects in favor of masculine ones. The Kristevan woman is, one could say, a
rebel without a phallus. Under the
autocracy of what Kristeva terms “phallic monism,” feminine sexuality is forced
to be much more deviant than masculine heterosexuality, the latter being closer
to the default modus operandi of the
libidinal economy.

And then, suddenly, starting with
chapter six, Kristeva launches into her examination of three exemplary
“rebels.” All three are writers, and
the way has already been paved for the questionable, culturally elitist glorification
of haute couture literature as a
privileged mode of radical revolution. 
She begins with the surrealist author Louis Aragon. Her argument in this chapter basically boils
down to the idea that Aragon became a dogmatic, card-carrying Stalinist in a
kind of desperate “acting out” aimed at stabilizing his identity in the face of
the de-subjectifying abyss he flirts with through his writing and sexual
relations (for Kristeva, writing and sexuality are closely intertwined, with
“poetic language” serving as a means for staging encounters with the semiotic
as the maternal, as feminine jouissance,
etc.). Near the end of the chapter,
Kristeva bluntly asserts that, “Political engagement is a marker and a mask”
(pg. 147). Evidently, resistance
through activism (i.e., concrete socio-political practice) ends in apologies
for totalitarianism, and Kristeva reassures the reader that, because she spent
her childhood in Bulgaria behind the Iron Curtain, she knows a thing or two
about this. Individuals become directly
engaged in politicized causes because they need the security provided by
institutional membership as a kind of, as Kristeva disparagingly phrases it,
socially recognized “safety belt.” Even
if this is true, which psychoanalysis suggests is often the case, utilizing
such notions as a means to implicitly belittle and dismiss activism amounts to
nothing more than the reduction of analytic theory to a handy toolbox of
specious ad hominem devices.

Kristeva handles Sartre in the same
fashion. For much of his life, Sartre
remains fully committed to writing as an exemplary form of praxis. He refuses a
teaching position in the university in order to remain devoted to writing
alone. He refuses the honor of a Nobel Prize
so as to resist being subtly co-opted through recognition and legitimation by bourgeois
ideology. His desire to be an author
with as few innerworldly ties as possible binding him into any institutional
framework is consonant with his theory of human freedom, and makes him a
Kristevan rebel par excellence. But, one could say, Sartre too eventually
“sells out”: like Aragon, he is tempted
and seduced to regress away from his avant-garde
ways by the illusion that an “active life,” in the shadow of the “moral
disaster of Word War II,” is preferable to the “contemplative life” (pg.
185). The distinction between thinking
and acting, one is told, is merely an outdated leftover from the “metaphysical
tradition.” By embracing social praxis, Sartre evidently avoids “the
arduous task of demystification through writing.” Struggling for the rights of downtrodden workers or mistreated
minorities is obviously mere laziness and frivolity when compared to the
grueling labor of coolly and nonchalantly uttering, through a breath of exhaled
cigarette smoke, subtle profundities about neglected nuances of Hegelian
dialectics to attractive female admirers while sitting at a Left Bank café
table sipping espresso.

Perhaps Kristeva is not being so incredibly silly
here—one would sincerely hope not—but the thrust of her argument points in this
direction. Of course it’s true that
“writing” plays a vital role in social, cultural, and political change, that
contemplation indeed produces the groundwork for truly revolutionary
interventions at the level of practice (Kristeva is here, despite herself,
being very traditional—in, for example, the “Euthyphro” dialogue, Socrates
makes clear that action without prior knowledge is ethically worthless). Obviously, inspiration for the Communist
revolution comes from Marx’s texts. 
However, the insidious aspect of Kristeva’s statements resides in the
fact that she insinuates that an absolute mutual exclusivity holds between
“revolt” qua political action and
“revolt” qua subversive literature,
that opting for the former requires compromising on the latter (and that such a
compromise is to be denounced).

The book closes with a chapter on the structuralist
semiotician Roland Barthes. A reader of
Barthes would readily acknowledge that he is an author straddling the line
between literature and theory. While
analyzing the inner workings of cultural phenomena, he writes with the beauty
and elegance of a prose poet (texts such as The
Eiffel Tower and Mythologies are
as much exercises in cultural theory as they are collections of stylistically savory
reflections). Kristeva, who first came
to Paris in order to study with Barthes, celebrates her deceased teacher as a
true master of linguistic revolt, as an expert at debunking the deceptive
appearance of given obviousness presented by numerous aspects one’s everyday
socio-symbolic universe. Insofar as he
suspends the illusory normality and naturalness of the cultural ethos of the status quo, Barthes represents a
rebellion against whatever is offered as automatically acceptable and
unremarkable in present contexts.

In his later seminars, where he finds himself called
upon to speak to those with a stake in the leftist student upheavals of the
late 1960s, Lacan takes pleasure in noting that “revolution” has two
meanings. Whereas the young Parisian
radicals think of themselves as embarking on a path of revolution in terms of an
overturning of all previous values, Lacan smugly reminds them that a revolution
can also amount to a rotation around a fixed, stable point (i.e., the celestial
meaning of revolution). Thus, a
revolution might be, ultimately, nothing more than one more turn along the same
course of an old orbit, a process that leaves the same center in place. Kristeva would do well to keep this warning
in mind. She waters down the sense of
“revolt” to such an extent that it comes to signify everything, and hence means
nothing. Furthermore, she manifests a
disturbing tendency to rationalize an insular intellectual sub-culture (namely,
avant-garde cultural cliques and
their ivory tower connoisseurs) as somehow more revolutionary and rebellious
than those who remain faithful to any “common sense” project that involves
changing the world through concrete interventions. What she ends up offering, despite her conscious intentions to
the contrary, is a vision of revolt that is fully compatible with a passive, consumerist
system. Her tacit devaluation of
traditional notions of praxis carries
within itself a betrayal of Marx’s materialist outlook in favor of a
self-congratulatory narrative that detached theoreticians have a clear
motivation to embrace so as to flatter themselves. Who or what could possibly be threatened by this revolt?

© 2002 Adrian Johnston
 

Adrian Johnston recently completed a
Ph.D. in Philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. His dissertation was Time Driven:
Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive.

Categories: Psychoanalysis

Tags: Psychoanalysis