In the
first volume of “The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis” (entitled The Sense and
Non-Sense of Revolt), Julia Kristeva, a theorist and novelist,
presented readers with a model of revolt whose primary mode of enactment
involves, unsurprisingly, the writing of theoretical or literary texts. In evaluating the volume, this reviewer (the
review is also posted here on the Metapsychology web site) took Kristeva
to task promoting a narcissistic, self-congratulatory narrative about “revolt”
at the expense of more concrete, politically relevant understandings of this
notion; unfortunately, regardless of the book’s theoretical merits, the writing
in Intimate Revolt (volume two) is pervaded by tones of pedantic conceit
and self-satisfied smugness. The reader
is left with no doubt that the author is someone incredibly pleased with
herself. One of the troubling features
of both volumes is that a retreat back into the rarified world of the
intelligentsia, a retreat leaving the larger status quo firmly intact,
is magically transformed into its opposite with a little dash of
sophistry: once one “deconstructs” the passé
metaphysical theory/practice distinction, why not maintain that writing texts
about psychoanalytic theory is a form of revolutionary practice? Why bother linking revolution to actual
material change?

A
charitable reading of the second installment of “The Powers and Limits of
Psychoanalysis” might see it as, at least in part, a retroactive justification
and a more developed defense of the contentious depiction of revolt from The
Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. In Intimate
Revolt, Kristeva argues that forceful constraints exist today, constraints
placing genuine limits upon the potential magnitude and significance of
revolts, rebellions, and upheavals of various sorts. The contemporary age, in her view, isn’t one of grand, sweeping
revolutions. Faced with these powerful
obstacles to macro-scale revolution, only micro-scale modifications offer any
hope—“the culture of words, the narrative and the place it reserves for meditation,
seems to me to offer a minimal variant of revolt. It is not much, but we may have reached a point of no return,
from which we will have to re-turn to the little things, tiny revolts, in order
to preserve the life of the mind and of the species” (pg. 5). Against something like capitalism and its
commercial culture, external revolt (i.e., overt political conflict aimed at
toppling this sort of society’s public institutions) seems both improbable and
unfeasible given present circumstances. 
Instead, practices of “intimate revolt,” the enactment of different
“tiny revolts,” must suffice, perhaps being nothing more than a means of
keeping alive a spirit of non-conformity while waiting for the arrival of
socio-political changes making possible a genuine polis-level
transformation in a future yet-to-come:

Am I essentially pleading the case
of intimate revolt as the only possible revolt? I am not unaware of the
commercial impasses and spectacular miasmas of all the imaginary productions in
which our rebellious intimacy manifests itself. There are periods when even he mystical path—this acceleration of
liberating transformations—is confined within treatments aimed at pathology or
else within spiritualist or decorative ghettos. This is one of those periods. 
Faced with the invasion of the spectacle, we can still contemplate the
rebellious potentialities that the imaginary might resuscitate in our innermost
depths. It is not a time of great
works, or perhaps, for us, contemporaries, they remain invisible. Nevertheless, by keeping our intimacy in
revolt we can preserve the possibility of their appearance (pg. 12-13).

This passage already contains an answer to the obvious
question as to why Kristeva believes standard conceptions of revolt to be
unlikely or impossible today. Borrowing
directly from Guy Debord, Kristeva contends that “the society of the spectacle”
(more specifically, the mass media apparatuses of western societies) directly
installs the ideological matrices of the given order within the interior
psychical space of individuals. She
points to a certain paradox here: with
the massive acceleration of the creation and dissemination of products of the
imagination in the present age, the imagination itself, as a person’s capacity
for constructing idiosyncratic psychical images and scenarios, is destroyed
rather than enhanced. When human
imagination is externalized, projected onto so many screens, individual
imaginations atrophy in coming to rely too much on these commercial cultural
prostheses. As she states in the course
of examining Sartre, “if everything is imaginary, the imaginary is dead, along
with my margin of freedom” (pg. 128). 
There is a certain refreshing honesty about the modesty of Kristeva’s sense
of revolt. Unlike many intellectuals of
her generation, she isn’t stuck in the increasingly comical position of
awaiting something like a Marxist revolution in an era where the chances for
such a political event seem to be dropping close to nil. Those who still cling to these visions must know,
on some level, that they’re now engaged in harmless theatrical posturing,
making empty theoretical-political gestures that have no chance of ever being
called as bluffs by being put to the test of realization.

Intimate
Revolt consists of several distinct portions. The first involves reflections on psychoanalysis and philosophy;
there, Kristeva discusses the topic of temporality in Freudian thought, and
seeks to clearly define her understanding of the imaginary and its role in
psychical life. Following these first
five theoretical chapters, she returns to the same three figures addressed in The
Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: 
Barthes, Sartre, and Aragon. 
Finally, the closing three chapters return to general theoretical
reflections, raising questions about freedom and translation in
psychoanalysis. This review will
restrict itself to highlighting the most interesting and promising
contributions made by the book.

In the
opening chapter (“What revolt today?”), Kristeva isolates “negativity” as a
significant theme running through philosophy from Hegel to Heidegger (and
receiving careful attention in the writings of Freud). In particular, Heideggerian phenomenology
and Sartrian existentialism highlight the manner in which human beings are shot
through with nothingness, with a relation to, as Heidegger so melodramatically
puts it, “the Nothing.” Dasein
feels this void, having an awareness of being somehow “out of joint” with
Being. Similarly, Sartre’s conception
of freedom demands a subject perpetually in the process of questioning,
doubting, denying, and destroying its stable points of identity, of continually
tearing apart the fabric of its ego (Kristeva aptly draws out the connection
between Sartre and Lacan as regards the distinction between ego and
subject). Fours years prior to
Heidegger’s 1929 “What Is Metaphysics?,” the text in which he pontificates
about “the nothingness of the Nothing,” Freud touches upon the notion of
negativity in his essay Die Verneinung (“On Negation”). Starting from considerations dealing with
the function of verbal negations in analytic treatment, Freud concludes this
piece by speculating that some of the earliest phases in the development of a
differentiated psychical apparatus involve a “primordial negation,” an original
expulsion, motivated by the pleasure-unpleasure dynamic, establishing a line of
division between the self and the non-self (elsewhere, in Powers of Horror,
Kristeva expands this Freudian idea via the concept of “abjection,” of a
pre-verbal negation drawing a line between “me” and “not me”—the presence of
this boundary is signaled, in adult life, by sensations of disgust, nausea,
repulsion, horror, and so on, sensations arising in the presence of objects
like feces and corpses). In Kristeva’s
view, the upshot of Freud’s musings on this matter is that without an original
act of pre-verbal negation, subjectivity would not be ushered into
existence. Likewise, the collapse of
this thus-established border heralds the onset of psychosis. All of this leads Kristeva to propose that
philosophies of negativity entail a kind of experimental courting of
psychosis. Certain forms of theoretical
speculation put the thinker in touch with instabilities that, if not kept at
arm’s length by intellectualization and conceptual articulation, might
compromise the integrity of the ego—“These different currents of theoretical
thought in philosophy and psychoanalysis have had this particularity in
modernity: they have attained, through
retrospective questioning—that is, through inquiry or analysis—this border
region of the speaking being that is psychosis” (pg. 10). Clearly, in this first chapter, Kristeva
aims to shore up her insistence that writing, in and of itself, can be
revolutionary: if the cutting edge of
intellectual activity can approach the very limits of sane subjectivity, then
specific practices of analysis do indeed harbor the potential to undermine the
self produced by dominant social, cultural, political, and economic formations.

The third
chapter (“The Scandal of the Timeless”) focuses its attention on Freud’s
proclamation that the unconscious is fundamentally ignorant of the passage of
time, that is, that the unconscious is Zeitlos. Kristeva correctly observes that one of the
most novel features of psychoanalysis is the recasting of the psyche’s relation
to time (and, moreover, that the divisions in and of the psyche represent
differing modes of human temporality). 
Alongside Bergson and Heidegger, the two major philosophers of
temporality in the first half of the twentieth century, Freud simultaneously
elevates temporality to a central place in the life of the subject while
arguing against the total reduction of time to a linear sequence of
now-points. However, unlike these
philosophers, Freud’s model of temporality combines the standard, everyday
notion of time as sequential chronology (i.e., the time characteristic of the
ego and its perception-consciousness system) with a dimension involving the
complete absence of time (i.e., the synchronic array of ideational inscriptions
forming the layers of the unconscious, as well as the cyclical repetitiveness
of the id’s drives): “Freudian
temporality relies on the linear time of consciousness in order to inscribe a
rift there, a breach, a frustration: 
this is the scandal of the timeless (Zeitlos)” (pg. 30), and,
“only in Freud has a breach of time that does not temporalize been established”
(pg. 31). One sees here the connection
between temporality and the earlier musings about negativity: the decentered consciousness of
psychoanalysis is nothing other than the perpetually disrupted linearity of a
time haunted by something chrono-logically out of context, by things that
resist smooth integration into the flow of superficial daily events. Kristeva goes on to identify this timeless
dimension as closely linked to the biological constitution of the human
organism. However, she doesn’t thereby
argue that psychoanalysis proposes a naturalistic view of the individual. Instead, Homo analyticus is stranded
somewhere between two poles, between chronological temporality (perhaps akin to
Kristeva’s notion of the symbolic) and an absence or ignorance of time (in
tying it to the body, Kristeva hints at its proximity to the semiotic). Generally speaking, one of the things that psychoanalysis
illustrates is that compulsive, repetitive, and atemporal patterns frequently
intrude into the linear order of lived history, upsetting arrangements in the
present through the covert reintroduction of repressed past materials left
stagnating in the unconscious. The
split subject of psychoanalysis, split between the temporal and the timeless,
is, in a certain sense, a subject revolting to/against itself.

Later, in
the fifth chapter on “Fantasy and Cinema,” Kristeva returns to her thesis that
the proliferation of images and spectacles in today’s mass media societies
inhibits rather than augments people’s capacity for sustaining a rich inner
fantasy life. She postulates that this
impoverishment of the private imagination is complicit in generating new
variations on psychical pathologies:

I hear you asking: don’t we inhabit a veritable paradise of
fantasy today thanks to images in the media? 
Aren’t we saturated with fantasies, stimulated to produce them and to
become imaginary creators in turn?

Nothing is less certain.

The so-called society of the
spectacle, paradoxically, is hardly favorable to the analysis of fantasies or
even to their formation. The ‘new
maladies of the soul’ are characterized by a reigning in, if not a destruction of,
the phantasmatic faculty. We are
inundated with images, some of which resonate with our fantasies and appease us
but which, for lack of interpretive words, do not liberate us. Moreover, the stereotype of these images
deprives us of the possibility of creating our own imagery, our own imaginary
scenarios (pg. 67).

Thus, one of the pressing tasks facing psychoanalysis in
this contemporary context is to rehabilitate “the phantasmatic faculty” in
those who suffer from an inability to detach themselves from the swirl of
stereotypical images and roles circulating in the hegemonic social
imaginary. Perhaps breathing a degree
of quirkiness into the workings of the mind will aid modern society’s
neurotics. Furthermore, one easily
perceives the “practical” program at stake here: if today’s “society of the spectacle” has crippled the
idiosyncratic individual imagination by goading it into conforming to a set of
hackneyed generalized templates offered by the mass media—and if non-conformist
imagining is essential for the catalyzing of any large-scale revolution (be it
cultural, politic, economic, or intellectual)—then psychoanalysis, by striving
to keep the private sphere of fantasy from being swallowed whole by the public
domain of images, is a means of patiently preserving the possibility for a
revolt à venir. By encouraging
“little revolts” in the day-to-day mental existence of the individual, analysis
helps to prevent a total foreclosure of resistance to dominant social forces,
leaving open spaces for resistance by discouraging people from opting to become
hollow media caricatures. Toward the
end of the volume, Kristeva is quite emphatic about this point—“Let us say
without false modesty: no modern human
experience aside from psychoanalysis offers man the chance to restart his
psychical life and thus, quite simply, life itself, opening up choices that
guarantee the plurality of an individual’s capacity for connection. This version of freedom is perhaps the most
precious and most serious gift that psychoanalysis has given mankind… psychoanalysis is alone in aspiring to and
sometimes even succeeding at this wager of new beginnings” (pg. 234). Kristeva is optimistic despite her rather
dark assessment of the present situation. 
Obviously, she still thinks that there’s some inner depth to be
salvaged, through analysis, behind the superficial façade of capitalism’s
various ego structures. But, what if,
so to speak, the mask is no longer a mask? 
What if today’s “one-dimensional man” (to borrow a phrase from Marcuse)
simply lacks any intimate mental sphere that remains independent from his/her
publicly maintained visage? Or, to go
even further, what if Kojève and Lacan are right that “man’s desire is the
desire of the Other,” that psychical intimacy is always-already “extimacy”
(i.e., that the inner core of the libidinal economy is itself inherently
intertwined with external mediating factors)?

In the
middle portion of the book, Kristeva once again turns her attention to the
three writers dealt with previously in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. Her readings of Barthes, Sartre, and Aragon
basically emphasize two related claims: 
one, due to contemporary circumstances, the imagination, rather than
being (as it used to be) the epitome of human autonomy, is now largely a site
of slavery to the reigning order; and, two, theoretically dissecting the
imaginary sub-texture of cultural practices (through psychoanalysis,
philosophy, semiotics, literature, and so on) has the liberating potential to
undo the bonds shackling psyches to socially validated fantasy-products.

The final
three chapters of Intimate Revolt, collected under the heading “The
Future of Revolt,” deal with three topics: 
the concept of freedom in psychoanalysis, the status of the bi-lingual
subject, and certain dimensions of the relation between Europe and
America. As already seen, Kristeva
clearly believes that psychoanalysis, instead of being a pessimistic “discourse
of determinism” underscoring nothing more than the heteronymous nature of the
psychical subject, is a practice aiming at the enhancement of autonomy. Isn’t this the position of the American ego
psychologists, those who read Freud’s “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” as
“The ego must dislodge the id?” Aren’t
these analysts anathema to a French analytic perspective thoroughly shaped by
Lacan’s bitter invectives against ego psychology’s doctrine of conformity to
the much-loathed “American way of life?” 
The salient difference is easy to explain. Ego psychology advocates that “freedom” (defined as the ego
attaining a degree of conscious mastery over the impulses of the id) is best
realized through the analysand’s ego coming to emulate and internalize those
features best adapted to a healthy consensus reality (i.e., socially sanctioned
ideals as embodied by the analyst’s ego). 
Following Lacan, Kristeva maintains a diametrically opposed position,
namely, that the ego’s conformity with “reality” is precisely what inhibits
anything that could genuinely be qualified as autonomy proper. Thus, the analyst’s therapeutic strategy
should be to foster patients’ capacity for resisting the various lures of
identification, to encourage the emergence of asocial unconscious
fantasies. Although noting that Freud
rarely uses the word “freedom,” Kristeva insightfully insists that the
inherently mediated status of the drives—these minimal components of human
nature, these fundamental units of the libidinal economy, are invariably routed
through various representational matrices—inscribes possibilities for change within
the very heart of the supposedly deterministic/overdetermined psyche:

…it is the emergence of thought as
produced by shared language that checks impulse and command. This command from then on becomes intrinsic
to the drive insofar as it is human (a drive at the outset is a weaving of
energy and representation) and raises it to a higher level of the psychical
apparatus, where the drive becomes desire: 
that is, it is translated into the code of social communication, always
already structured by language, in which the dialectic of freedom may be
deployed (pg. 228).

Consequently, the Freudian drive isn’t a brute force of
nature, a mindless mechanism opposed to the “higher spheres” of intellectual
cognition. The ethico-moral codes
transmitted by languages and shared systems of representation, as necessarily
involved in sustaining humanity’s autonomy, become internal to Trieb,
instead of remaining forever in external opposition to the libidinal economies
of individuals—“although certain of Freud’s formulations suggest that he
believed in a naturalness free of the drive, the entire enterprise of
psychoanalysis involves inscribing this drive in representation and making it
depend on the internalization of prohibitions” (pg. 229). And yet, how is one to reconcile these
assertions about a psychoanalytic conception of freedom (i.e., the
socio-symbolic mediation of the drives allows for autonomy) with the earlier
claims that analysis frees people by helping to divorce them from this same
mediation?

The partially
autobiographical chapter “The Love of Another Language” contains Kristeva’s
reflections on the fashions in which being a “stranger in a strange land,” of
abandoning one’s mother tongue in taking up a foreign language, affects the
psyche (Kristeva herself came to Paris from Bulgaria, but has been speaking and
writing in French for the majority of her adult life). Her serious investigations of these
phenomena are punctuated by sometime quite humorous observations about French
society and culture. In an earlier
book, Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Strangers to Ourselves), Kristeva
contends that the empirical/anthropological figure of the foreigner is actually
a reflection of a universal human condition: 
everyone, due to the splitting of the psyche and the radical alterity of
the unconscious, is, in a manner of speaking, a foreigner in relation to
him/her-self. In this chapter of Intimate
Revolt, the figure of the translator is the springboard for ruminations
about a more general position: every
writer, whether writing in a native or foreign language, is engaged in the
labor of “translation,” of rendering that which is constitutively irreducible
to language in a linguistic medium (as is often the case in Kristeva’s
writings, the semiotic-symbolic distinction is lurking in the background
here). The more interesting
implications have to do with the clinical practice of psychoanalysis. Given Freud’s uncovering of the role that
everyday discourse, with its metaphors and imagery, plays in aiding and
abetting repression (not to mention Lacan’s contributions along these lines),
how must analytic listening and interpretation change in response to an
analysand being analyzed in a second language? 
Are non-native speakers harder to analyze by virtue of having a
different relation than the analyst to the language in which the sessions are
conducted? Having been on both sides of
the couch as a non-native speaker of French, Kristeva potentially has something
to offer as regards these sorts of questions (however, she doesn’t, in this
text, follow out these inquiries in any detail).

In the
final chapter (“Europhilia-Europhobia”), Kristeva discusses a range of
topics: the division between
Anglo-American analytic philosophy and European/Continental thought (especially
as brought to light by the Sokal affair), European intellectuals’ attitudes
towards America, American perceptions of Europe, as well as differing
conceptions of freedom. It concludes
with what amounts to a plea for multicultural tolerance and exchange.

Recently, Slavoj
Žižek criticized Kristeva for depriving psychoanalysis of its subversive
political sting. Žižek, whose own work
involves marrying Marx and Lacan, accuses Kristeva of rendering analytic theory
as nothing more than an elaborate rationalization of a pervasive psychologism
that itself is symptomatic of an apolitical “culture of narcissism”—and is
ultimately motivated by capitalist ideology. 
Pop-psychological wisdom frequently boils down to claims encouraging
troubled individuals to accept external reality as an inalterable given and
“turn inward” instead. Even if a
person’s objective material conditions truly are horrible and should indeed be
altered through overt practical action, “self-help” is an exhortation to forgo
genuine gestures of rebellion in favor of shifts in introspective
(in)activity. Do “intimate revolts”
likewise insidiously serve as distractions forestalling real changes? In Žižek’s eyes, the thesis that, for
example, racism, xenophobia, and so on (i.e., hatred of the Other) can be explained
as stemming from hatred of the Other in oneself (i.e., an inability to tolerate
being a stranger to oneself) is an example of the deceptive de-politicization
of fundamentally political issues. He
rebukes Kristeva on the basis of an old-fashioned Marxist suspicion of any kind
of philosophical/psychological “idealism.”

Although Žižek’s
own political program is, once the exuberant Marxist rhetoric is stripped away,
ill defined and perhaps not sufficiently realistic regarding the fait
accompli of the current world order, is his condemnation of Kristeva
justified? One cannot help but be
struck by the fact that the strategy of therapeutically salvaging one’s
“intimacy” through a retreat into the imaginary interiority of academic theory
and avant-garde literature is an option mainly open just to those who are
already in a socio-economic position to engage with and appreciate high
culture. Of course, it’s also often
been noted that psychoanalysis is a “class therapy,” being too time consuming
and expensive for those confined to lower rungs on the capitalist ladder. Whereas the crude and vulgar psychologies
circulating about under the heading of “self-help” at least proffer their
(false) hopes to anyone with enough money for a cheap paperback, Kristeva,
while echoing the self-help call for a turn back toward one’s mental
interiority—whether this interiority is dubbed the “inner child” or th

Categories: Psychoanalysis