Radicalism in French Culture (Public Intellectuals and the Sociology of Knowledge)

Radicalism in French Culture A Sociology of French Theory in the 1960s

Niilo Kauppi

Radicalism in French Culture

Public Intellectuals and the Sociology of Knowledge Series Editors Dr Andreas Hess, University College Dublin, Ireland Dr Neil McLaughlin, McMaster University, Canada The sociology of knowledge has a long and distinctive history. Its function has always been that of attempting to bridge the aspirations of the discursive and institutional founding fathers of sociology with that of modern attempts to define the discipline through the study of the emergence, role and social function of ideas. However, since Mannheim first outlined his program in the 1920s, the sociology of knowledge has undergone many changes. The field has become extremely differentiated and some of its best practitioners now sail under different flags and discuss their work under different headings. This new series charts the progress that has been made in recent times – despite the different labels. Be it intellectual history Cambridge-style, the new sociology of ideas which is now gaining strength in North America, or the more European cultural analysis which is associated with the name of Bourdieu, this series aims at being inclusive while simultaneously striving for sociological insight and excellence. All too often modern attempts in the sociology of knowledge, broadly conceived, have only looked at form while they downplayed or disregarded content, substance of argument or meaning. This series will help to rectify this.

Radicalism in French Culture A Sociology of French Theory in the 1960s

Niilo Kauppi CNRS/University of Strasbourg, France

© Niilo Kauppi 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Niilo Kauppi has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Kauppi, Niilo. Radicalism in French culture : a sociology of French theory in the 1960s. -- (Public intellectuals and the sociology of knowledge) 1. France--Intellectual life--20th century. 2. Radicalism--France--History--20th century. 3. Philosophy, French--20th century. 4. Literature and society--France--History--20th century. I. Title II. Series 306.4’2’0944’09046-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kauppi, Niilo. Radicalism in French culture : a sociology of French theory in the 1960s / by Niilo Kauppi. p. cm. -- (Public intellectuals and the sociology of knowledge) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4094-0783-6 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-0784-3 (ebook) 1. Radicalism--France--History--20th century. 2. France--Politics and government--20th century. 3. France--Intellectual life--20th century. I. Title. HN440.R3.K3817 2010 303.48’4094409045--dc22 2010022218 ISBN 9781409407836 (hbk) ISBN 9781409407843 (ebk) II

Contents List of Tables   Acknowledgments   Introduction  

vii ix 1

Part I  From Literature to Revolution 1

The Nouveau Roman and Rebellion  

11

2

The Tel Quel Saga  

17

3

Julia Kristeva’s Invasion of Paris   

25

4

Kristeva’s Power-Ideas: Ideologeme and the Zerologic Subject  

33

5

Rebellion around Tel Quel  

47

6

Sollerspierre, the Revolutionary of the Text  

59

7

“Sciences” of Meaning, Work and the Unconscious  

69

Part II  Désenchantement and Disintegration 8

Neo-surrealism: Breton and Mao  

77

9

The Symbolic Revolution of Jacques Derrida  

83

10

The Taming of French Theory  

91

11

The Power-idea of Structure  

107

12

The Bourgeois Political Order: A Critique  

115

13

Constructing an Academic Sociology  

121

Radicalism in French Culture

vi

Epilogue

French Theory as Symbolic Transgression and Political Rebellion  

Bibliography   Index  

131 137 149

List of Tables 9.1 The “science” of the text and Marxism   10.1 Saumjan’s and Kristeva’s theoretical models (partly based on Kristeva 1969a: 287)  

89 97

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Acknowledgments This work has been long in the making. It started in 1984 while I was a philosophy major at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Interested in modern philosophy, I had written pieces on Derrida, Foucault, Saussure and Weber, to the irritation of my teachers—most of them students of the late Georg Henrik von Wright—versed in analytical philosophy. Encouraged by my mentor Ilkka Heiskanen, I decided to explore for my master’s thesis the politics of knowledge involved in the semiotic theory of Julia Kristeva. For my Ph.D. thesis, I started looking for more social scientific ideas. Ilkka proposed I read Pierre Bourdieu, whose work had started to come out in Finnish. Intrigued by the social scientific perspective developed by Bourdieu, especially in his study on the political ontology of Martin Heidegger, I decided to send him a Ph.D. proposal. Through my readings my previous philosophical interests had turned into more empirical ones, and I composed a Ph.D. project on the avant-garde journal Tel Quel (of which Kristeva had been a member) in the 1960s in France. The journal was then, in the mid-1980s, little known outside of France. Only a few doctoral dissertations existed, produced by German linguists and literary theorists. To the surprise of everyone, including myself, Bourdieu liked my proposal, and invited me to join his doctoral seminar at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris starting from the Fall of 1986. The Academy of Finland—a publicly funded research institute—provided me with a generous grant. The fieldwork I did in Paris in French intellectual milieus and Bourdieu’s as well as his associate’s Monique de Saint Martin’s teaching and advice enabled me to develop a sociological perspective on Tel Quel and the French intelligentsia of the 1960s. As a preliminary, however, I wrote in Finnish a nearly 800-page Licenciate thesis (a “small” thesis preceding the Ph.D. thesis) on the history of Tel Quel that I defended in 1987. For the Ph.D. dissertation, I composed in French a more compact, sociological analysis that scrutinized the links between Tel Quel, the social conditions of its existence and the institutional context of the French intellectual field. Defended at the University of Helsinki in 1991, the Ph.D. thesis (La constitution sociale d’une avant-garde) had left out—because of size requirements—the analysis of the texts and ideas produced that was included in the “small” thesis. The work at hand is a rewriting of these parts that were not included in the Ph.D. thesis and its English language expanded version (The Making of an Avant-Garde: Tel Quel 1994). Since those times my point of view has evolved into a more Weberian one. This development is visible in my books that have come out since 1991/1994 (French Intellectual Nobility in 1996, The Politics of Embodiment in 2000 and



Radicalism in French Culture

Democracy, Social Resources and Political Power in the European Union in 2005). Since the 1990s I have moved from the sociology of culture and intellectuals to political sociology. The subsequent changes in the sociology of ideas, notably the development since the 2000s of the so-called “new sociology of ideas,” revived the idea of publishing, in a worked out form, my earlier textual analysis of what has become “French theory.” From this “post-post-Kantian” perspective, the social cannot be separated from the symbolic and the normative, nor the personal from the collective. The dramatis personae of this study can already be found in my earlier works. I have provided each chapter with an epigraph that illustrates the ironic, playful and irreverent “spirit of the 1960s.” The exhaustive list of individuals to thank would be too long. I owe an immense sense of gratitude to my teachers the late Pierre Bourdieu and Ilkka Heiskanen, for their interest and encouragement. I would also like to thank the late Jacques Derrida, who recommended I proceed to an “internal” analysis of texts, a suggestion I took up in my Licentiate thesis. I am grateful to the former Telquelians I succeeded in meeting, Jean-Louis Baudry, Jean-Joseph Goux, Jacques Henric, Julia Kristeva, Paule Thévenin and Jean Thibaudeau for the information they provided me concerning intellectual life in the 1960s. I want to express my thanks to those friends and colleagues who have commented critically on this work at various stages, Pami Aalto, Kimmo Absetz, Laurent Jeanpierre, Nely Keinanen and Henri Vogt. And above all I am grateful to my family, my parents Ellen and Risto, who have always been supportive of my intellectual quest, and to Anne Epstein as well as to our children Oona and Caius. Without their unfailing support, I would never have gotten where I am now. I would also like to thank the series editors, Andreas Hess and Neil McLaughlin, as well as Claire Jarvis at Ashgate, who have done an excellent job.

Introduction Cours camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi! (Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!) Sorbonne 1968

The purpose of this sociological study is to examine the social and semiotic process whereby a unique form of theoretical and political radicalism (later labeled “French theory”) was forged in France or more precisely Paris in the second part of the 1960s. A cultural revolution provided the background for this radicalism. This cultural revolution undermined the old social conventions and social relationships of authority and power (Hobsbawn 1999: 334) and created new types of intellectual identities. This development was embedded in broader social and economic transformations that affected key social institutions such as the university (Bourdieu 1984, Kauppi 1996). All parts of French society were touched by these developments. Some major transformations took place in French culture with the nouveau roman in literature, the new wave of French cinema, and intellectual production with radical ideas that were later labeled “French theory.” In part, this radicalization was due to the rapprochement between leftist political and intellectual radicalism, the French Communist party and its networks and the intellectual movements later known as “structuralism” and “poststructuralism.” This radicalism was an integral part of the collective Weltanschauung and style of thought of a generation of students and young intellectuals who had a predisposition to rebel against authorities of every kind. The symbolic effervescence that followed the sociological reorganization of the producers and consumers of intellectual goods was, however, only seemingly chaotic. Just as the organization of symbolic revolution was surprisingly orderly, so was the dismantlement of radicalism at the end of the 1960s and the restoration of the symbolic order that went with it. Rebellion and integration were state sponsored activities, as many of the protagonists worked or would work in the French public university. A minority, like the leader of the irreverent Tel Quel group Philippe Sollers, worked for private publishing houses. These cases demonstrate that the successful French iconoclastic intellectual of the 1960s was comfortably employed and could devote his whole time to the production of outrageous ideas. The prophetic moment was a window of opportunity that enabled, for a certain time, innocent students to become domineering radicals and political judges in one of the most creative intellectual moments of the twentieth century (Reader 1987, Jameson 1996).   In this work, I use italics to refer to the journal and plain type to refer to the intellectual group.



Radicalism in French Culture

An invisible pattern draws together most studies dealing with French cultural radicalism in the 1960s. It is the genius of certain individuals that have been elevated to intellectual stardom that explains these theories (see for instance Coward and Ellis 1977, Ferry and Renaut 1985, Starr 1995, Sjoholm 2005). These studies tend to reduce intellectual creation to individual creation and to minimize the role of semiotic and social factors that influence intellectual innovation. For their part, sociological approaches often see a more or less external link between social location and intellectual production (Debray 1981, Lamont 1987, Bourdieu 1988, Kauppi 1994, Frickel and Gross 2005). Because of their structural approach, they are incapable of taking into account unique historical circumstances, personal impulses, and more importantly the logic of ideas as ingredients of innovative thinking. In this study, I will seek to avoid Carlyle’s “Great Man Theory of History” and sociological institutionalism by focusing on radicalism through the prism of the social force of ideas. Unfortunately, in the division of labor between disciplines, sociology has been assigned the analysis of the links between ideas and social and cultural contexts. This has meant that sociologists have not bothered with analysis of textual productions or ideas (exceptions include Bourdieu 1982, 1991b). For their part, specialists in literature or philosophy have concentrated on internal (interpretative) readings of texts and intellectual production. This way, a sociological, internal reading of texts that would examine ideas relationally inside out so to speak, has not developed. One of the aims of this study is to further an internal sociological analysis of ideas and styles of thought. I will argue that the defining but largely neglected feature of what has become “French theory” was a collective style of thought, an explosive but fragile mixture of scientific and political radicalism that promoted an alternative intellectual value hierarchy that rather quickly watered down to academic orthodoxy. For some time, some intellectuals succeeded in producing ideas that were perfectly in tune with the lifestyle requirements and self-conceptions of the consumers, mostly the young university audience (and aspect not enough emphasized by sociologists, see Lamont 1987). Ideas were used as part of a radical, exciting “rock ‘n’ roll” posture that was set in opposition to the establishment and “those in power.” Faced with a system that was felt as being archaic, youth was eager to change everything. There was a social demand for heroic, iconoclastic revolutionaries to produce what students needed. Ideas could not be too empirical or verifiable, and they had to shock and be outrageous. Pretentious erudition and jargon was part of the game. It is not surprising that a slew of new sciences and concepts were invented to indicate this radical posture. Instead of analyzing all the theories developed in France in the 1960s, I will concentrate on some avant-garde intellectual production of the moment, both well-known, successful theories and forgotten, or failed theories (see for analysis McLaughlin 1998). I will analyze the theories developed in the networks of the famous review Tel Quel and, as a contrastive case, the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu. I understand ideas in a very broad sense as thoughts or suggestions about a possible course of action, as mental impressions, as belief and as aims

Introduction



and purposes. Although they are the result of logical reasoning, ideas do not just consist of concepts and theories as combinations of concepts. When infused with emotions and combined with other ideas to form a style of thought (Fleck 2008), ideas leave the purview of logical reasoning. Some of these “paper bullets of the brain” (Shakespeare) can then be transformed into power-ideas (Fouillée 1908, Belin 1939, Bakhtin 1970, Bourdieu 2001, Llobera 2003, Kauppi 2005) that attract other ideas, dominate them and through dissemination of this semiotic bundle displace the locus of struggles and, possibly, inverse the prevalent symbolic order (see Reader 1987). When ideas such as the Derridean “deconstruction” acquire this symbolic status, their social force will not depend on their veracity but rather on their capacity to inspire and mobilize individuals and groups to engage in certain intellectual postures and practices (Burke 1966, Searle 1969). Personified in their creators that become totemic emblems and eponymous heroes, powerideas function as banners that rally the intellectual troops on the battlefield of symbolic production and consumption. On this battlefield, what is at stake is the success of ideas, and through them the content and limits of social and political imagination. In this sociological analysis, power-ideas constitute intellectual metapreferences, ideas of a higher order that determine the value of ideas of a lower order (derivative ideas). In theory, these intellectual metapreferences can be challenged only with ideas of a similar order. They function as symbolic guarantors that work from a distance, as presuppositions of symbolic social action and as objects of belief more than reason. Embedded in modes of symbolic action and habits that are not just intellectual but also practical and even bodily, they are extremely difficult to overthrow. Power-ideas require from their inventors manners that contribute to the construction of a theoretical juggernaut. In fact, the accumulation of intellectual fame necessitates “internal” changes in the individuals concerned, growing self-assurance, ideas of universal scope and domineering manners (see for an illustration Kristeva’s description of Derrida, Kristeva 1992: 109). For these reasons, abandoning a power-idea involves more than just changing intellectual clothes. It requires from individuals a total conversion from one power-idea to another, from one set of social networks to another, from one set of intellectual habits to another, from a self-perception to another, a life-style conversion that resembles religious conversion (see Berger and Luckmann 1966). The intrinsic truth of an idea is a social phenomenon as it is lived as original and true by an individual socialized at framing issues in a certain way. The role of social networks can hardly be overemphasized in a context like the French intellectual field where ideas “belong” to individuals and, through them, to their followers and derive, to a large extent, their social prestige and intellectual power from this collective membership (for sociological analysis see Clark 1973, Collins 1998). In this context, collisions of concepts are always collisions of affections. Concepts are also Shibboleths: only certain individuals know how to use them correctly (see Chapters 9 and 10). Under the authority of intellectual gurus, patrons, demons, mandarins or samurais, “inventors” and thus



Radicalism in French Culture

“owners” of concepts, social networks are built around symbolic and physical supports, styles of thought, power-ideas, university seminars, exposés, dinners, parties, books, journals and articles. The locus of this study will be the Parisian intellectual scene. Although its impact was global, radicalism at this time was highly Parisian, that is embedded in this particular sociological milieu (see Lemert 1981, Kauppi 1996 and Higonnet 2002 for analysis). The tendency of old and new sociologies of ideas is to downplay the specificities of ideas and ideals and their objective and subjective effects (for critique see Munz 2000). Ideas as social, intersubjective and interindividual phenomena have to be analyzed in dynamic relational or dialogic spaces involving communities of ideas, individuals and groups. The dynamic character enables us to explore the shifting status of ideas. For instance, prior to the publication of several important works in 1967, Derrida’s theory of deconstruction had not acquired the status it would acquire after 1967 when it became an obligatory reference point to all avant-garde intellectuals and a key product of “French theory.” However, the making of theories does not only involve sophisticated symbolic goods, but also the making of persons that “swallow” the theories to embody them. Abstract, ahistorical, formal and linear approaches such as the “new sociology of ideas” have difficulty grasping the ideational and often retroactively created character of intellectual and scientific innovation. Relational spaces are objective, external to individuals, and internal to them. Intellectuals as individuals of ideas live off ideas that give meaning and structure to their existence. Dostoyevskyan idea persons are dominated by ideas that create complicities and affinities between individuals from different backgrounds and occupying different social positions. The effect of ideas will vary depending on background and habitat. For instance, the middleclass background of socially central intellectuals like Philippe Sollers enabled them to fully play the intellectual game whereas intellectuals from more modest backgrounds like Jean Thibaudeau did not have inherited resources at their disposal and were thus relegated to the margins of influential social networks. Social leaders like Sollers were dependent on ideas in a different way than intellectual leaders like Kristeva. Sollers needed the ideas of intellectuals like Kristeva to make a mark with his review Tel Quel, whereas Kristeva as an upcoming intellectual leader who lived through her ideas needed Sollers to publish her work. While Sollers exerted his influence through his central social position, Kristeva exerted hers more through her ascending ideas than through her social position. Intellectual self-identity is then variably dependent on ideas, depending on factors that have to do with background and habitat. The internal transformation is clear in Kristeva’s intellectual career, from an unknown student in the mid-1960s to a domineering intellectual star a few years later. I will however not have enough space to analyze the personal relationships between Kristeva and Sollers nor will I examine the “intellectual lives” of Julia Kristeva (see Moi 1987 for an overview). In the twentieth century, European avant-gardes such as Italian futurism and Russian formalism as well as Surrealism had developed around reviews and journals that provided the social infrastructure for “coalitions in the mind” (Collins

Introduction



1998). These sites and their collaborative circles (Farrell 2001) took over the task of literary and intellectual innovation from princely courts and literary salons. In my interpretation of Farrell’s concept I will concentrate on the dialogical nature of ideas. Because intellectual culture is always personified (contrary to folklore), scholarly accounts of French cultural radicalism systematically minimize the significance of the broader environment and the historical traditions that condition innovation (see also Ross 2002). Culture is conceptualized as the chasse gardée or private hunting ground of a few supermen who mould reality following their genius (see for instance Forest 1992a, 1995). Individuals are not seen as group and clique members, struggling to choose between different lines of action, both free and constrained in their actions. Obviously there are gender dynamics involved. I will point to some aspects here and there but will not be able to analyze them more systematically. Two different approaches, one historical and the other sociological, have recently deepened our knowledge of the life of ideas. The so-called Cambridge school and Reinhard Koselleck’s conceptual history (1998) seek to contextualize ideas and study their “lives” in specific environments. These approaches, while not sociological, have contributed a great deal to a sociology of ideas through their careful reading of texts (see also Pocock 2003). Quentin Skinner (1978) has sought to find a middle ground between texts ad contexts, arguing for a dialogical relationship between the two. Analyzing meaning in context, he has demonstrated how ideas get their meaning in relation to other ideas in intellectual contexts. Taking into account “intellectual facts” and ideas as searlian speech acts addressed to specific audiences enables Skinner to gain new insights into the development of political thought. The relative autonomy of ideas was also the object of Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte, history of concepts, through analysis of the semantics of political discourse, an analysis Koselleck combined to social history (see also for sophisticated analysis Palonen 2008). The relative autonomy and relational character of ideas are valuable principles central to the approach developed in this book. Reinhart Koselleck’s theory focuses on fundamental concepts, how they are invented and how they develop. Some power-ideas, such as that of structure, can be considered as forming a fundamental concept in France after the Second World War. The specific historicity of French intellectual life involves distinctions into historical periods such as those dominated by existentialism or structuralism (and poststructuralism). But they are still objects of debate. One of the central features of symbolic struggles is not the sense of history typical to European culture as Koselleck sees it but rather the opposite, the denial of history. Intellectual and political isms pretend to reveal essential features of human existence. In this sense, they lack a sense of history. The culture of French radicalism studied in this book is no different. A second, sociological approach is developed in Neil Gross’ Bourdieusian study of the American philosopher Richard Rorty (Gross 2008). Charles Camic and Gross construct, on the basis of other studies such as Lamont’s (1987), a



Radicalism in French Culture

“new sociology of ideas” (Camic and Gross 2003) that they contrast with an “old sociology of ideas” represented by authors such as Karl Mannheim and Robert Merton. In his hagiographical usage of Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins, the main representatives of the “new sociology of ideas,” Gross introduces the concept of “intellectual self-concept” as a theory of the self, following Jeffrey Alexander’s critique of Bourdieu (Alexander 2001). This concept enables Gross to argue that his approach is theoretically distinct to that of Bourdieu and Collins. The concept has the merit of deepening analysis of intellectual agency through a fusion of psychoanalytical, psychological and sociological ideas. However, several biases can be detected in Gross’ otherwise sophisticated work on Rorty. First, in his operation of theoretical sublimation, he is led to minimize the role of the concept of “habitus” in Bourdieu’s and his associates’ numerous empirical studies. Second, Gross seems to consider the sociology of ideas as being of relevance mostly to sociology and not to a broader audience. The chapters that deal with the “new sociology of ideas” are curiously separated from the body of the text in which Gross analyzes in a rather descriptive fashion Rorty’s illustrious career. Third, the vibrant “new” European tradition of the sociology of ideas that has been largely inspired by Bourdieu and others, works by scholars such as Christophe Charle are missing from the analysis. This is a pity, as it would have enabled a more nuanced reading of Bourdieu and a necessary position taking vis-à-vis other studies in the sociology of ideas inspired by Bourdieu’s work. And fourth, the social logic of ideas, its internal value hierarchies and oppositions, as analyzed for instance by the Cambridge school, is not systematically scrutinized. Instead, following in this the example of Lamont, we find a sociologically conservative organizational analysis of ideas that explores in a formal, ahistorical and linear fashion the development of universities and broader political and economic contexts in the US (see also Frickel and Gross 2005). In this theorization, the differences between intellectual and scientific movement are neglected. At least in the European context intellectual movements are broad and often fuelled by political ambition (see for instance Kauppi 1996). Formal organizational fit does not explain intellectual success, which is the explicit aim of Gross’ study of Richard Rorty. In contrast to a Kuhnian analysis of paradigms, in the present study ideas are collective symbolic instruments used to arouse and direct objective and subjective energies. These energies involve definitions of one’s intellectual identity and of one’s in-group(s). The social force of ideas will depend on the followers’ or believers’ inner conviction (Certeau 1987), on the collusion of their psychic energy with for instance professional career plans and political ideologies, and on the synchronization of conviction and psychic energy with broader political, social and economical developments. The central argument of this study is that ideas become power-ideas only if they succeed in acquiring a symbolically dominant position by uniting individual and collective psychic investment in powerful social networks with significant institutional and political backing in the intellectual field. As I will show, for some individuals and ideas these unique

Introduction



conditions were met in the French context for a certain amount of time. From roughly the mid-1960s to the beginning of the 1970s, radical intellectuals such as Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers developed a host of new ideas, concepts and theories some of which have subsequently been labeled as French theory (Corral and Patai 2005, Cusset 2005). How can their success be explained? First, some of their ideas became power-ideas encapsulated in concepts such as “deconstruction” (Jacques Derrida) and “intertextuality” (Julia Kristeva). But concepts never rule alone. Second, power-ideas constitute with other concepts semiotic colonies that “live together” and acquire an inner coherence: a concept such as différance cannot be used without implicitly referring to other concepts like logocentrism. The theory of deconstruction is semiotically and socially tied to concepts such as différance and logocentrism. Likewise the theory of intertextuality is embedded in a broader semiotic space comprised of concepts such as “symbolic chora” and “geno/phenotype.” Third, this colony is linked with other colonies in hierarchical relationships to form a style of thought and collective mind in which some ideas will be more powerful than others. For some time, these colonies formed around concepts such as deconstruction and intertextuality correlated positively with some other colonies and more specifically with the political interests of the Communist party and radical student movements. Their success had little to do with their veracity or some inner quality that made them “better” than some other colonies. For many intellectuals of the 1960s studied here, the “science” of the text combined to a political position close to the French Communist Party, various leftist cliques and/or the anti-establishment student movements constituted the “unsurpassable” horizon of symbolic action and intellectual identity. The structure of the work reflects its central focus, transformations in symbolic production in a period characterized by rapid social and economic transformation. This acceleration of history took the form of decolonization, technological change, an expansion of industrial output and of the university, urbanization, and so on (see Hobsbawn 1994). This kind of acceleration increases the likelihood of disruptions in symbolic production and uncertainty in terms of political and intellectual positions (Kauppi 1996, Anderson 2005, Gobille 2005b). The first part of this work illustrates one side of a double symbolic movement of symbolic convergence and divergence. These movements were not totally successive or totally simultaneous. Symbolic convergence meant the gradual building up of a common worldview or Weltanschauung that some have labeled as “structuralist” and “poststructuralist” and later forming “French theory.” Less structured and more diverse and contradictory than Kuhn’s scientific paradigm, a certain Wittgensteinian family resemblance united the very different ideas and theories that were developed starting from the end of the 1950s. The building of this new “in-group” was constructed, often non-consciously, in opposition to various “outgroups,” the Sartreans being intellectually the most influential (see for instance Lacan 1966a). Editors launched new journals. Young intellectuals organized events, mainly in Paris. Personalities that desired to and could act as charismatic



Radicalism in French Culture

leaders were propelled to the front of the French intellectual scene. A relative chaos followed, in which everything old was devalued and everything new was elevated. In a more invisible, but nevertheless crucial manner, a symbolic caution for any kind of experimentation and rebellion, the French Communist party, was set into place. This symbolic caution glued together experimentation and rebellion, giving these a leftist note. Working from a distance, this symbolic caution provided a crucial moral support to new ideas that were, by definition, illegitimate in the eyes of the intellectual establishment. Apart from economic support and intellectual visibility through its publications, this alternative source of legitimacy could also provide its protégés other symbolic services, mostly the concepts, ideas and theories linked with Marxism, of which the French Communist Party was the official representative in France. Theoretical radicalization took the form of an arms race of increasing bidding, of an escalation in the frequency of breaking the rules of the established game (“philosophy of transgression”) that quickly outpaced the logic of political radicalism. A pathology of radicalism started to develop in intellectual life that could be distinguished from the normalcy of rational debate. They had different ends: escape through feedback into indeterminacy and the critique of the French bourgeois order. While the first part of the work analyzes the fusion of these partly contradictory logics in various productions, the second part of this work focuses on the very different forms symbolic divergence took in the theories produced in the 1960s. The symbolic caution provided by the French Communist Party gradually, and very unevenly, disappears. This increase of the (relative) internal heterogeneity of this collective mind and style of thought turned into an integration of some of the rebels into the university and literary establishments and of a political dilution of their radical message into a variety of marginal leftist narratives. The rebels quickly became what they had denounced, representatives of the establishment and the bourgeois order. For some, rebellion turned into orthodoxy, for others into oblivion. For many, intellectual and emotional dependency to the French Communist Party led to a long and painful process of detachment.

Part I From Literature to Revolution

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Chapter 1

The Nouveau Roman and Rebellion Un flic dort dans chacun de nous, il faut le tuer (A cop sleeps inside every one of us, we must kill him) Censier 1968

In French intellectual culture, reason and morality have historically been merged to such extent that philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once declared that the political convictions of French intellectuals are nothing but moral attitudes (Maurice Merleau Ponty quoted in Rémond 1959: 6). In the 1960s, reason seemed to have the upper hand over morality. When talking about the French intellectual achievements of the 1960s, connoisseurs mostly remember certain thinkers such as Barthes, Derrida and Foucault. Others think of the concept “structuralism,” an ism that attempted to make humanist and social sciences into real sciences, largely by imitating the model of linguistics. In the second half of the 1960s, structuralism became a general intellectual a priori, and its relative value declined. The birth of post-structuralism can be dated to the end of the 1960s and early 1970s when, largely through the input of the so-called Yale school, American literary criticism began to criticize the mechanistic qualities and scientific utilitarianism (logocentrism) of structuralism, using psychoanalytic and deconstructive vocabulary in this critique. Heideggerian connotations were obvious. In their book La pensée 68 (1985), the French philosophers Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut focused on re-interpretations of Heideggerian philosophy in French philosophy of the 1960s, limiting, however, their discussion to certain figures (Bourdieu, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan). They coined the term “thought 68,” as if styles of thought could be so precisely dated, to talk about this form of philosophizing, which was characterized by a critique of reason, humanism, and the subject or subjectivity. Following this script, Bourdieu is interpreted as a combination of Marx and Althusser, Foucault of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Lacan of Heidegger and Freud, and Derrida of Heidegger and Derrida himself. Ferry and Renaut emphasize the critique of humanism and reason, and, through structural linguistics, the move towards scientification and the tendency to integrate and rationalize elements not previously rationalized (the unconscious, madness …). The emphasis on structural linguistics links this theorizing to the rise of the humanist sciences through structural anthropology, and to the emergence of certain schools of humanist and social sciences (the so-called Paris school, structural constructivism, structural Marxism, etc.). Likewise, it highlights the symbolic revolution that the 1960s thinkers carried out against the previous generation. In his well-known book Le mirage linguistique, Thomas Pavel talks about moderate, scientific and speculative structuralism (Pavel 1988: 12–13, for a

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critique Lefebvre 1971). Pavel concentrates on the uses of structural linguistics in theorizations. Pavel’s classification follows the formula science-ideology, where scientific applications are classified as either hard or soft, and literary, political or aesthetic applications are considered speculation. Judging by the concepts used and the critique presented by Pavel in his book, his own preferences side with moderate structuralism. But bringing up the inner contradictions in or shortcomings of Derrida’s interpretation of Hjelmslev (Pavel places Derrida within speculative structuralism) or Lévi-Strauss’ phonological model (Pavel considers Lévi-Strauss a representative of scientific structuralism) does not as such suffice to explain more clearly how structuralism developed into a universal paradigm, beyond which French intellectuals dare not tread. In order to distinguish themselves from French phenomenology, Sartreism and its view of politics, the new generation of intellectuals who began to emerge at the end of the 1950s let themselves be labeled as belonging to Lévi-Strauss’ rather than to Sartre’s club. This choice of labels revolved around certain packages of concepts (bundles), relatively heterogeneous yet contradictory wholes that were not reducible to the dichotomy of right or wrong. Labeled first and foremost through negation, attributed identities are always unavoidably inaccurate and unjust. In other words, the process of labeling or becoming labeled—which are inseparable since any act is always itself labeled—does not necessarily correspond to the subject’s own view of his/her own acts. Subjectivism, intentionality and reference were for these thinkers at least initially only secondary problems, and their critique targeted the previous intellectual generation. The new 1960s generation was characterized by eclecticism, which became a central criterion of excellence. They valued daring hypotheses, the ability to perceive hidden analogies, in short, intellectual danger and the overstepping of academic conventions, all of which were combined with a wide range of eclectic references (from poetry to mathematics, via ethnology and film criticism). Eclectic erudition provided the external hallmarks of novelty and a definition of excellence emerged where the most important component was the ability to read and interpret texts. The general scientifization process led to reading and to a “science of the text”: “symptomatic reading” in Althusser’s terminology, “deconstruction” in Derrida’s framework, “the working of the signifier” to the Lacanians, “intertextuality” for Kristeva and her followers. All of these processes were distinguished from mere commentary on a text in the way an avant-garde artist is distinguished from a primary grade art teacher. In France, the ideal type intellectual has been on the left and independent from any kind of establishment. In reality, however, French intellectuals have had to comprise with worldly authorities such as the Catholic Church and the French Communist Party. This was especially clear in the 1960s, when, seeking to develop a total critique of society that resonated with the young public’s aspirations, radical intellectuals flirted with the Communist party. The 1960s “neurosis of the text” was linked to more general intellectual effervescence the central terms of which were “signifier” and “text,” and “structure” was the central axiom of science.

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Theoretical-intellectual updating led to a new hierarchy of academic subjects and scientific objects, where the upper echelons were occupied by “sciences of the text” (linguistics, semiology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, literary theory …), i.e. inner reading; in the middle was ethnology (Lévi-Strauss and his followers); and on the bottom were sociology (Bourdieu) and psychology or external reading. The inner economy of a text became its truth, and that was where science had to direct itself. In France, the foundation for this linguistic turn was in the works of the so-called nouveau roman, which attempted to create a new literature on the ruins of the old. A key journal in these aspirations was Tel Quel, a theoretical-literary publication issued four times a year, edited from the start (1960) by Philippe Sollers. In the 1960s, a significant group of thinkers gathered around the journal, among them Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva. As they emerged at the end of the 1950s, the members of the Tel Quel group became developers of the socalled nouveau roman. In the 1950s, the nouveau roman presented an alternative to young authors. This development was linked with broader intellectual transformations, mainly the development of the humanities and the social sciences. The nouveau roman presented an objective, “scientific” literature that functioned also as a way to tap on intellectual radicalism, represented by Claude Lévi-Strauss and structuralism. This radicalization culminated in the events of May 68 when students and writers occupied the building of the venerated Société des gens de lettres. The nouveau roman attempted to tear down the individual-centered and psychologizing traditional novel, which it wished to replace with meticulous description and an objective style. It resembled what the famous critic Saint-Beuve said about Gustave Flaubert’s way of writing: “Flaubert manipulates the pen as some others manipulate the surgeon’s scalpel.” Protagonists used the stream-ofconsciousness technique invented by James Joyce. Compared with the surrealists and their automatic writing, the crucial difference was that the nouveau roman emphasized mathematics and the structure of a literary work. The nouveau roman also attempted to question the roles of both the reader and the author. In the 1950s, the philosophy of the nouveau roman was called phenomenological realism, neorealism, or the school of the gaze. By admitting the independence of fiction from reality, the nouveau roman attempted to get away from literature’s function as a reference (conventionalism). As Jean Ricardou, one of the movement’s leading theorists put it, “fiction is no longer writing about adventure but the adventure of writing” (Ricardou 1971: 33). In the text, conflicts between individuals were replaced by battles between sentences, and priority was given to grammatical units. Grammatical units replaced unchanging individuals. Paraphrasing Roland Barthes, objects were just there; they were never something. Writing (écriture) had become an all-encompassing truth that hinted at nothing. “On a white plate on the kitchen table there are three thinly cut slices of ham” (Alain Robbe-Grillet). With textualization, even characters in books became mere words and slaves to letters (lending to the development of letterism). According to the philosophy of the nouveau roman, language was not

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a neutral tool for representing the world. The nouveau roman attempted to discard the classical view of language as some transparent bridge between thought and world—largely following the critique put forward by the surrealists. The text was like a body, which, when it functions well, is unnoticed and problem-free. The literary theory of the nouveau roman was, all in all, strongly oriented towards processes. The concept of writing that Barthes developed in the 1960s immediately found followers from within the nouveau roman movement. However, many of Barthes’s reforms could be traced back to the Russian formalists and futurists (Bradbury and McFarlane 1976: 269–70). In his time, Barthes was important in bringing to France the thoughts of Russian formalists such as Viktor Schlovsky. The translations of Russian formalists like Viktor Schlovsky by the Bulgarian literary scholar Tzvetan Todorov were well received. The literary theorist Gérard Genette, for instance, noted “in 1966 this collection of texts, the most recent writing of which dates from 1928, comes at the right time and speaks to us in the present tense” (Genette 1966: 34). Todorov himself explained his task thus, testifying to the relatively closed nature of French intellectual life in the 1960s: When I arrived in France in 1963 from my small country which was afflicted with xenophobia, I was surprised to realize that in the field of literary theory the French did not know about what had been written in Bulgarian or Russian— which are exotic languages—nor what had been written in German or even in English. My first intellectual task here was to translate from Russian into French (Todorov 1986: 20).

From then on, the word would become the lash of a whip, as Aeschylus had already said, and the same lash also slashed both humanity and sanctity, to say nothing of politics, from the text. Authors no longer saw themselves standing in front of their products as the creators of their books, but rather as being inside their text as a word among words and letters. All that remained was the time and space of words. The space of the text was re-organized according to mathematical principles, yet gave authors absolutely free rein to construct their books. For example, the murder in a murder mystery might not take place in the beginning but at the end, the murder being caused by the text. Books and texts became problematic entities, where combining grammatical units together and conducting syntactic and lexicological experiments was central. Literature had become a great experiment, used to prove the literary superhuman’s absolute liberty in relation to the world. The body of language, whose holiness was incessantly guarded in the classical novel, had been transformed into the object of abuse and violence. In the fashion of the Prague school, linguistics was used to find homonyms, paronyms, synonyms, variants and oppositions. The nouveau roman made a clear distinction between political beliefs and literary praxis, although its theoretical foundation remained formalistic. Literature and politics were thus separated. In the texts of the nouveau roman, contents emerge

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from the interplay and linkage of forms. As the author Bernard Pingaud aptly said (Pingaud 1968a: 8–9), “its [language’s] essence is in its activity.” Problems arise, however, when language and the world are radically separated in this fashion. How can we understand the world, or can we understand it at all? This problem can be solved only by claiming that the world is like a text. Thus the text becomes an omnipotent theoretical principle. Later in the 1960s, this argument was boosted by Jacques Lacan’s motto that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” The discontinuity was not located between the world and words, as it had been for Karl Marx and other political theorists, for instance, but between the unconscious and the text that exposed it. Following the idealist tradition, the reference, or the world, had been reduced to a by-product of language. As we shall see later, Barthes and his followers assimilated political revolution with textual revolution. It is interesting to note how close the nouveau roman is to the naturalism of Flaubert and his contemporaries: the endeavor of its protagonists to refrain from practical action, the cold expression and description, the avoidance of morality and the renunciation of life. In the nouveau roman these aesthetic requirements became ontological and scientific principles, whereby the text is granted primacy relative to life. This elevation of the text is thus in a sense the elevation of art and a certain aesthetics. The primary role of art relative to life not only reflects an ideology of art for art’s sake, but also a modern Bovaryism, the forgery of life. This development unites the nouveau roman to the literary tradition of the entire twentieth century, a tradition that emphasizes two factors (Hauser 1982: 78 and 79): the routinization and mechanization of life; and the destructive, relentless character of time. Both of these are reflected in the works of the nouveau roman in the form of localization of time and temporalization of space, a fragmentation of time that is manifested as the abandonment of linearity and the disintegration of the subject’s identity. These works were, of course, wholly the products of the subject’s imagination and associations. A paradox arose, since their authors were writing elitist and abstruse texts while declaring that they were intended for everyone. A common feature of the nouveau roman was reification, the absolute priority of the object over the subject, or over the problematic subject or protagonist of the novel. Protagonists had disappeared from texts. But instead of concentrating on depicting the objective world, as did some of the representatives of the nouveau roman, especially Alain Robbe-Grillet in his earliest works, these writers preferred—to distinguish themselves—to replace this objectivism with a description of the subject’s process of disintegration. Theoretically, these thinkers attempted, with varying degrees of success, to link together the theories of Marx, Saussure and Freud. For many of them, a central problem became the status of the subject in western philosophy and science. By the subject was meant the thinking, speaking, acting, doing or writing agent (Roudiez 1992: 19). Julia Kristeva, for example, attempted in her semanalytical theory to scientifically explain the process of the subject’s formation. Without Marx, Kristeva’s theory would be idealist; without Freud she would return to a kind of

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mechanical materialism. In their scientific aspirations, theorists like Kristeva and Sollers, in their own view, succeeded in avoiding ideology and in creating a new, materialistic theory of signification and knowledge. Following Barthes we could say that ideology was manifested as something natural and self-evident. According to Jacques Derrida, significance forms a so-called transcendental content or signified, which governs other meanings. This significance is perpetuated and remains outside of criticism. Kristeva in turn linked ideology to the subject’s consciousness, to humanism and to idealism. Ideology creates a consistent, stable and unified subject to which meaning is attached. If ideology creates the subject, then language creates ideology, since every representation in language presents certain meanings as natural and self-evident. For these theorists to escape ideology and idealism, they had to create a theory that would avoid the transcendental signified and the representative function of language. Julia Kristeva’s solution was, following Lacan’s view of the unconscious (Lacan 1966b), to talk about a structure without a center. In Kristeva’s framework, the formation of meaning and the subject were both always processes of becoming something and never actually being anything, so that a center could not be created through fixation. Perpetual motion guaranteed that no meaning could become dominant: through constant motion, all meanings are equal influences of language. This was a perfect metaphor for what was happening in the theoretical and social fields, rebellion against the bourgeois order.

Chapter 2

The Tel Quel Saga Notre espoir ne peut venir que des sans-espoir (Our hope can come only from the hopeless) Main hall of Sciences-Po, 1968

From the beginning of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s, the intellectual review and group Tel Quel provided a unique synthesis of all the major theoretical innovations of the moment. At first a literary review, Tel Quel quickly developed into an intellectual review and a symbol of radicalism for a whole generation of French intellectuals. As the leader of the group Philippe Sollers put it: In 1960, we had made our choice. We wished to support Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Butor, Robbe-Grillet etc. But we also wanted to introduce to the public writers such as Bataille, Artaud or Ponge. Our central objective was to invent a new way to read texts. At the time, we ourselves did not understand this yet (Sollers 1970a: 44–5).

The English translation of Tel Quel is “as such,” “as is” or “as it is.” Why is Tel Quel important? Because Tel Quel was more than a review, it was one of the symbolic spaces where innovations such as structuralism and poststructuralism were developed. It presented “the most prodigious theoretical synthesis of the age,” to quote Fredric Jameson (1996). These two words symbolized for many the intellectual elite of the moment. Philippe Sollers and Jean-Edern Hallier, scions of middle-class and upper middle-class families, were the two young and inexperienced writers behind the establishment of Tel Quel in 1960. Partly because the young audience was looking for new objects of identification, their publisher Le Seuil wanted new faces, blank slates on which previously unseen texts could be written. Sollers and Hallier and their school comrades from Parisian elite business schools such as the ESSEC and the HEC were given money and opportunity. Before publishing in Tel Quel, Sollers and his friends had already written some texts in Le Seuil’s series “Écrire,” whose purpose was to present young authors. In their literary début, the future Telquelians had been encouraged by writer Julien Gracq, who was a teacher at the prestigious Lycée Claude-Bernard, as well as by Francis Ponge and Jean Paulhan form the iconic literary review Nouvelle Revue Française. However, it was Francois Mauriac, columnist at the weekly L’Express and frequent contributor to literary weekly the Figaro littéraire, who became Sollers’ greatest mentor. Both were from Bordeaux in the southwest of France, and Sollers had met Mauriac already in 1956 at the latter’s summer home Malagar, one of French literature’s

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mythic places. Mauriac decided to help the aspiring writer. In 1958 Sollers won the Félix Fénéon prize with his short story Le défi. Shortly afterwards, Mauriac declared victoriously in one of his Express columns: “I promised Philippe Sollers glory and I am not going back on my word.” For a couple of years, Tel Quel was a literary review more than intellectual review and thus functioned mostly in the French literary field. By its name it referred to both Paul Valéry’s essays entitled Tel Quel and Friedrich Nietzsche’s slogan, “I want the world and I want it as it is or AS IS.” Tel Quel took as its model Surrealism, the previous artistic avant-garde, and published texts by former surrealists Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) and Georges Bataille (1897–1962). However, since the 1930s huge transformations had taken place. The intellectual field had changed dramatically: humanities and social science students had supplanted the bourgeois; large-scale book production had replaced specialized book production; the literary and intellectual markets had expanded considerably; and, as a result, young writers were published (Kauppi 1994). In the 1960s, new reviews and book collections in the humanities were created to ease the growing appetite of the young readers for intellectual novelties: these included reviews such as Tel Quel, Cahiers pour l’analyse, Scilicet, Change, Poétique, and collections such as “Le champ freudien,” “L’ordre philosophique,” “Poétique” and “Points,” an intellectual paperback series. In these conditions, avant-garde works could paradoxically become best sellers. This is an important distinction because literary scholars who are members of Sollers’s collaborative circles see Tel Quel as a similar avant-garde to Surrealism (Forêt 1995). Structurally (that is, in relation to other elements on the French intellectual field at that time), Tel Quel was against Jean-Paul Sartre and his theory of engagement. Tel Quel’s writers wanted to accept the world as it was, without submit thinking to moral and political imperatives, as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus had done in their minds. In the literary field, a sector of the intellectual field, the alternative to Sartrian committed literature was the nouveau roman-movement (Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute … ). The Telquelians were promptly labelled (dangerously for them) as forming the second generation of the nouveau roman. Robbe-Grillet even stated that “Obviously, I am the father of Philippe Sollers.” The nouveau roman had developed an objective and “scientific” literature, free of psychologism. It was seen as a critique of the literary canon. In the French intellectual field, the main oppositions were developing around the rivalry between existentialism and structuralism, represented by Sartre, an independent writer and philosopher, and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, holder of the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France since 1959 and since 1973 member of the Académie française. Some of the oppositions or contrasts in the French intellectual field in the 1960s included engagé/apolitical, marginal/ established, dominant/dominated, Les Temps Modernes/Tel Quel, classical literature/nouveau roman, philosophy/human and social sciences. Tel Quel joined Lévi-Strauss’ side, and with this move it presented itself as an anti-Sartrian review. Tel Quel demonstrated that, in contrast to Sartre’s philosophy of engagement,

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intellectual radicalism could be politically conservative and artistically radical (art for art’s sake) which was very provocative in the midst of the Algerian war. At the beginning of the 1960s, the review assembled all new ideas in music, philosophy, literature, art criticism, etc. By presenting explorations in all domains of thought the review found numerous, often surprising allies. These included the Catholic writer Francois Mauriac, the Communist writer Louis Aragon, as well as some established writers like Academician Emile Henriot from Le Monde, who had helped Robbe-Grillet in getting his start. As the Catholic readership was shrinking, Catholic reviews such as Esprit were also willing to back Tel Quel. Its editors saw in this cooperation an opportunity to win some new readers. La Nouvelle Revue Française anxiously promoted Tel Quel’s “uncommitted” literature that lacked moral and political claims. Even the high profile fashion magazine Vogue was delighted to see in the Telquelians the latest enfants terribles of literature in the pure French tradition: “Distinctive signs: they practice an uncompromising insolence: manifest active contempt for a number of their elders: are members of the best bourgeoisie and make no mystery of it.” The enthusiasm Tel Quel’s activities aroused in the French intellectual field in the first half of the 1960s was extraordinary and perhaps difficult to imagine. Among other things, the Tel Quel group organized public lectures in the Latin Quarter, inviting famous thinkers that cultivated scandalous ideas. The journalist Yves Roni reported the following on Tel Quel’s public lectures in the Nouvel Observateur in 1965 (Roni 1965): How many of them were there? One or two thousand? An enormous crowd, in any case. Well-known people: poets, philosophers, professors, psychoanalysts, and especially students, with their innocent, calm faces. They had come to the Place Saint-German-des-Près to listen to Pierre Klossowski speak about “Sign and perversion in Sade’s work”. The review Tel Quel that had organized the session had also invited the philosophers people were talking about: Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Michel Tort … Klossowski first congratulated the audience: “Twenty years ago”, he said, “this would have been inconceivable”. Increasingly pensive, students and professors understood that night that Sade would from then on be included in the program for the agrégation (in philosophy) (a competitive state exam, NK). The comparison between (JeanJacques Rousseau’s, NK) Juliette and (Sade’s, NK) Justine was established. And everything seemed to indicate that selections from (Sade’s, NK) 120 days would be published by Classiques Vaubourdole or Larousse. In eight days, “Perversion” had become a philosophical category. Who could have guessed it?

A symbolic revolution was thus underway in the French intellectual field, and Tel Quel was one of its most important protagonists. This revolution needed new thinkers, such as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, new ideas such as perversion and textuality, structure and difference, new reviews such as Tel Quel, and a new audience that it found in university students. In the intellectual

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press Sollers became Sollerspierre, the feared revolutionary judge, a takeoff of Robespierre, a Jacobin leader. But this revolution of ideas could not have fully developed without political turmoil in the Sorbonne. Inside the review Tel Quel important changes were also taking place. A power struggle started already in 1960 between on the one hand Hallier and Sollers and on the other hand Jean-René Huguenin and Renaud Matignon. In literary terms, Hallier and Sollers were partisans of the nouveau roman whereas Huguenin and Matignon represented psychological literature in the tradition of Mauriac. The resignations of Huguenin and Matignon and later Hallier from the group meant that Sollers controlled the review in 1962–3. He became book series director at le Seuil and started recruiting new collaborators. Sollers took distance from Mauriac and Sartre through attachments to authors such as George Bataille, editor in chief of Critique, Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes. With the political radicalization of a part of the students in the first half of the 1960s Tel Quel—a real pop phenomenon if there was one—abandoned its antipolitical stand: it became openly leftist and started to seek closer contacts with Communist intellectuals and student leaders but by keeping its distances to Sartre and his collaborative circles. At the same time with changes in the review’s content from artistic and literary to intellectual concerns, Tel Quel’s audience changed as well to include politicized students. The review stopped presenting texts by established authors and began publishing experimental, theoretical works. The literary press started to use the term nouveau nouveau roman to characterize the Telquelians’ novels. Some well-known alternative thinkers started to collaborate with Tel Quel. Roland Barthes had known Sollers since the end of the 1950s, who had distanced himself from Robbe-Grillet and Foucault. Michel Foucault took part in the “Debate on the novel” organized by Tel Quel at the Mutualité theatre in 1963. In 1965, Jacques Derrida published his first article in Tel Quel, “La parole soufflée,” which dealt with Antonin Artaud’s theatre. At that time, Derrida’s writings were important because they applied some of the ideas of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to literary criticism and philosophy. Additionally, because Derrida’s philosophy concentrated on writing and textuality, it could also legitimately be considered “materialist” and thus politically and ethically radical, fitting the style of thought. Derrida eclectically combined ideas from such different registers as literature, linguistics and philosophy. During this time texts by Russian formalists such as Victor Shklovsky and literature theorist/philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin started to be translated from Russian into French by émigrés Bulgarian linguists Tzvetan Todorov and Julia Kristeva. “Ideologemes” as the main units of meaning were now embedded “intertextually” forming a “poetic language” whose function was to “make strange” (ostranenie) both language and world. Julia Kristeva had arrived in Paris in December 1965 on a grant from the French government. She became the student of another émigré, the Rumanian sociologist Lucien Goldmann, and soon one of Tel Quel’s main collaborators. It was no accident that Kristeva, later a member of Tel Quel’s editorial board, found her first job as a research assistant at Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Laboratory of Social Anthropology.

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In 1969, she published her most important work entitled Séméiotiké. Recherches pour une sémanalyse composed of articles she had published since 1966. By combining psychoanalysis and linguistics she set out to create a new science called semanalysis or the “critique of meaning, of its elements and its laws” (Kristeva 1969a: 19). Like in the writings of numerous of her contemporaries, Kristeva’s work contained an analysis of literature and a re-evaluation of the categories of the author and the subject, wrapped up in a critique of bourgeois class values. Unfortunately for her, the Sokal-affair picked up only one aspect of her study, the use of mathematical symbols (Sokal and Bricmont 1999). Tel Quel’s special issues in the second part of the 1960s are telling of the review’s leaders’ theoretical ambitions: in 1967, a special issue on Sade and in 1968 on Soviet semiology, a French accursed writer and Soviet science. More generally, the master idea of many of this second generation of post-war French intellectuals was to emulate the Russian formalists of the 1920s by combining science, literature and politics. What I have called the “Tel Quel punch” (Kauppi 1994) presented a version of this emulation. It consisted of one part avant-garde literature, one part Leftist politics and one part the “sciences of the text” as they were called at that time, peppered with a dash of charismatic male leadership, by Philippe Sollers, now known as “the pope of Saint-Germain” (another name for the Latin Quarter, where the university had its main buildings) (Kristeva 1992: 22). Textual revolution was squarely equated with political revolution. Let me give you a sample of Sollers’ theoretical work (more in Chapter 7). Theory marks the radical non-expressiveness of textual writing, its variable, multi linear game, its function as integrative, active and productive knowledge, of “reality”; its reference to “monumental history”, as a challenge to “cursory” history. It underlines the limits between textual writing (a literal network of several dimensions, empty sums of the consuming of language by its articulation) and linear non-textual writing (expressive, causal, uninscribed and unbound to the “written space”) (Sollers).

Textual writing was revolutionary because it challenged an unilateral vision of the world, which was represented by linear and non-textual writing. In 1965 Philippe Sollers published Drame, an example of a new kind of “textual literature” that declared the break from the Nouveau Roman. Historian of psychoanalysis Elisabeth Roudinesco gives a vivid account of Philippe Sollers’s writing: Sollers put together a skilful amalgamation with the help of concepts elaborated during the structuralist years. From Foucault he borrowed the pair reason/ madness, making it the site at which a “textual rupture” was emerging. From Derrida he took the idea of a “proto-trace,” transforming it into the possibility of a “repressed” écriture. In Lacan he was able to find essentially a way of integrating Freudian discourse into the entirety of his project. And finally, through Althusser, he was able to tinker with the bachelardian notion of an

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Radicalism in French Culture epistemological break, which allowed him to situate the history of textuality within dialectical materialism. On the basis of that mix, which intended to be explosive, the history of literature was conceived through a series of textual ruptures, which could be grasped in the works of Sade, Bataille, Artaud (Roudinesco 1986a).

In Sollers’ texts, accursed or condemned writers such as Bataille and Sade became the protagonists of a political revolution. Compared to other Telquelians Sollers never created his own “science.” Foucault invented first archaeology and then genealogy, Derrida grammatology, and Kristeva semanalysis. At the end of the 1960s, philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux was the founder of numismatics, a new science of the text that combined Marx and Freud and sought to analyse social value in a new way. Novelist Jean-Louis Baudry’s new science called materiology, or the materialist study of meaning, had the same goal as Goux’s numismatics (see Chapter 8). Like in Soviet Russia in the 1920s, neologisms such as grammatology and concepts such as genotext and archaeology used in an unusual semantic context (theoretical discourse) were ways of indicating serious thinking. Symptomatically, profound reflexion was equated with on the one hand the opaque and on the other hand the unconventional. The Telquelians worked closely with Communist intellectuals gathered around reviews such as La Nouvelle Critique and La Pensée. During the May 68-events most Telquelians supported the main Communist trade union Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), while a minority composed of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, among others, stayed indifferent. Tel Quel succeeded in being close to the sensibilities of the students and on the side of the CGT. “Les structures ne descendent pas dans la rue” or “Structures do not take to the streets”—was a popular slogan invented by Lucien Goldmann to justify not taking part in the events. Derrida stated timidly in a text dated October 1968 “this historical and political horizon would call for a long analysis.” During the May 68-events Sollers openly presented himself as the representative of the Communist party and its main union the CGT. For instance, he did not sign the Writer’s Union (a writers’ pressure group led by former Telquelian Jean-Pierre Faye) protest against the government’s extradition of student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit from France. After May 68 some Telquelians like Marcelin Pleynet became Maoists, although the review as a whole continued to “officially” support the Communist party until the beginning of the 1970s. Tel Quel’s adventure with the French Communist Party is reminiscent of the Surrealists’s affair with Communism 40 years earlier. It was more a tumultuous honeymoon than a marriage. Tel Quel tried to use the Communist party to gain influence among its intellectuals, to get a moral booster, whereas the Communist party attempted to invade the “Telquelian armada” (E. Roudinesco) in order to widen its popularity among students. For radical intellectuals the Communist party was as much a guarantee of “political correctness” as a source of symbolic rewards. Herbert Lottman clarifies in his work on literary milieus in Paris what

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the Communist party meant for French intellectuals and artists in the 1950s and 1960s: If one stayed close to the Party lines, as did André Stil, a protégé of Aragon, one might win a Stalin prize for a novel and become the most-translated French author in the world, hailed in banner headlines in L’Humanité, the object of daily meetings all over France, covered with gifts. The painter André Fougeron, another Aragon protégé, enjoyed a similar promotion; he was launched in a newspaper campaign unlike that given to any other artist of his time. For the Communist world was so complete, with its daily and weekly newspapers, its cultural and political magazines, social affairs and rallies, national and international congresses (not to speak of its cell meetings), that one could believe it was the whole world (Lottman 1998).

No wonder the Telquelians were so keen to keep up good relations with Louis Aragon and Communist groups such as the Union of Communist Students (UEC, Union des étudiants communistes). According to Jean Ricardou, novelist and Telquelian, the review cooperated with the Communists in order not to get isolated in its enterprise of total re-evaluation of dominant, bourgeois values. However, ideological wreck was the destiny of both Tel Quel’s Communist and Maoist adventures. Maoism replaced Communism at the beginning of the 1970s, but this elbow rubbing was destined to be as short-lived as the romance with the French Communist Party. Already in 1971 Italian Communist journalist MariaAntonietta Macciocchi published De la Chine after a disappointing trip to China. Some Telquelians, Sollers, Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet (secretary of the review), Roland Barthes and humanities editor at Le Seuil, Tel Quel’s publisher, François Wahl, made their own estrangement trip to China in 1974. Despiting the fact that its pages were filled with Maoist propaganda, Tel Quel continued to issue literary special issues, one on Roland Barthes and another one on James Joyce. In 1977, Kristeva published Des Chinoises, her first book to be translated into English (On Chinese Women). In 1976, after Mao Zedong’s death, Tel Quel abruptly took a pro-American turn. The US had been important for Tel Quel for some time. The staffs and students of American universities had provided an important part of Tel Quel’s foreign audience. The French cultural attaché in Washington had even recommended to his collaborators an immediate subscription to Tel Quel. Now Tel Quel started introducing to its domestic audience American literature and visual arts more actively than before. Editorial secretary Marcelin Pleynet specialized in American art criticism. At this time, Sollers became a good friend of the “nouveau philosophe” Bernard-Henri Lévy. In some way, Tel Quel returned to the apolitical pre-1963 times. Until 1982, it was published by Le Seuil. That year, Sollers’ and Le Seuil’s directors relations broke, and Sollers moved to Gallimard and founded a new review called L’Infini which continues to be published.

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I have sketched in a contrastive manner Tel Quel’s evolution in the French intellectual field from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s. The similarities and affinities between Tel Quel and other intellectuals stemmed from an opposition to the previous intellectual generation (symbolized by Sartre) and the intellectual establishment of the moment. Between approximately 1963 and 1976 Tel Quel was a leftist intellectual review that published radical and innovative texts. Tel Quel’s ideological adventures were concordant with the ideological evolution of the part of the audience that belonged to the same age cohort as the Telquelians. First they were Communists, then Maoists, and then apolitical. Little by little, opposition gave way to symbolic integration. The Tel Quel saga ended as it started: as an apolitical literary and artistic review that assembled a disparate group of thinkers and writers. During Tel Quel’s radical phase opposition was, however, never total. Defined in concrete situations, opposition needs to be fine-tuned. Contrasts have to replace opposition. Politically, many Telquelians were close to the Communist party and, later, Maoist movements. Some like Roland Barthes stayed apolitical all along, however. Furthermore, some were more eager than others to promote revolutionary texts. All Telquelians were engaged in multiple activities that created contradictions and the need for compromises. For instance, Jacques Derrida was simultaneously professor of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure at the rue d’Ulm, one of France’s most prestigious schools, and Tel Quel’s collaborator. He wrote both to Tel Quel’s readers, allergic to their studies and devouring Blanchot and Bataille and to his domestic philosophical audience saturated with the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger. These partly contradictory requirements were bearable until the end of the 1960s, when Tel Quel became openly Maoist and Derrida’s friendship with Sollers ended. Likewise, Tzvetan Todorov collaborated with the review in the mid 1960s, but soon integrated into the academic field. The collaborators who were the most loyal to Tel Quel from beginning to end were Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. Sollers and Kristeva married and became the new generation’s AragonElsa or Sartre-de Beauvoir, to the extent that Kristeva published a roman à clé entitled Les samouraïs, an evident ironic clin d’oeil to Beauvoir’s Les mandarins. Barthes stayed the couple’s closest friend and loyal friend of Sollers’ until his premature death in 1981. “Structuralism” and “poststructuralism” were the symbolic catchwords of a whole generation of intellectuals, including Barthes and Kristeva. I will next turn to Julia Kristeva’s innovative theoretical work.

Chapter 3

Julia Kristeva’s Invasion of Paris Comment penser librement à l’ombre d’une chapelle? (How can one think freely in the shadow of a chapel?) Sorbonne 1968

The career of one of the leading intellectuals of the generation of the 1960s, Julia Kristeva, offers us an occasion to examine more in detail the constitution of new power-ideas. Towards the end of 1966, the Bulgarian linguist Julia Kristeva arrived in Paris to do graduate work at the Ecole pratique des hautes études (EPHE) in the literary sociology seminar of another émigré, the Romanian-born sociologist of literature Lucien Goldmann. At the same time, Kristeva also began to participate in Roland Barthes’s seminar, as she later recalled: At EPHE, which at the time was located in the C-staircase of the Sorbonne, Roland Barthes’s teaching captivated me with its richness. His teaching made formalism, which I previously had condemned as reductionist, something worth striving for (Kristeva 1983: 43).

Two years later Kristeva published an article about Mikhail Bakhtin in Critique (Critique, April 1968), a journal edited by Georges Bataille until his death in 1962 that introduced foreign books to the French reading public (Patron 2003). With this article, Kristeva brought Bakhtin’s postformalism to the West. Bakhtin’s name was undoubtedly already familiar in expert circles, but Kristeva must be credited with bringing him to wider intellectual consciousness. Kristeva’s timing was right, and she served to reinforce the formalist and postformalist fashion that had already begun in Paris. Kristeva made an immediate and powerful impression on Barthes. Barthes announced that he was an admirer of Kristeva and that they were friends: Kristeva had taught Barthes as much as he had taught Kristeva. Barthes described Kristeva’s book Séméiotiké (Kristeva 1969a) as follows: As I have owed her a lot from the very beginning, I have once again come to feel, this time in full, the power of this work [Séméiotiké]. Power here means a shift. Julia Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the latest preconception (Barthes 1984: 197–200).

When Barthes in 1973 served as one of the opponents at Kristeva’s Ph.D. defense, he refused to comment on Kristeva’s work (Buleu 1973: 15, Encrevé 1987). He regularly published reviews of Kristeva’s works in journals like Critique.

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Since Kristeva was participating in Barthes’ seminar, it also became inevitable that she should meet Philippe Sollers, the leader of Tel Quel, and her future husband: When I arrived at EPHE and joined Barthes’s seminar, all they talked about was the Mallarmé lecture Philippe Sollers had just given. I then read a couple of issues of Tel Quel, and then Gérard Genette introduced me to Philippe Sollers in May 1968. At the time, Genette was attending the same seminar as I, but he was also very well known as a literary critic (Kristeva 1983: 43).

By 1967 Kristeva was a research assistant at CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique), a publicly funded research institution. However, getting to know Sollers in many ways changed her life. Despite the fact that Kristeva came from a communist country, she became, like Sollers, a leftist intellectual: Clarté, the communist student journal, had published towards the end of 1965, I think, a large picture of Philippe Sollers. Under the picture was a text where he chiefly made the point that only a socialist revolution could bring about a social and political atmosphere conducive to avant-garde writing. For me, again with the help of Genette, this was my first meeting with Tel Quel. And the first time I fell in love (Kristeva 1983: 48).

In Kristeva’s own words, Sollers’ journal Tel Quel “seemed to offer the success of a futuristic utopia” (Kristeva 1983: 48). Kristeva’s theoretical influence was later to become central to Tel Quel. After first working at CNRS, she switched to the texts and documents department of Paris VII University that was founded after May 1968 at Barthes’ initiative, and in 1974 after having successfully defended her doctoral dissertation was appointed a professor there. Before that, in 1968, Kristeva finished a thesis preceding the Ph.D. thesis (Le texte du roman. Mouton: La Haye 1968). She edited issue 35/1968 of Tel Quel, which was dedicated to Soviet semiology and contained some of the lectures and papers of a semiology colloquium held in Tartu, Estonia, including V.V. Ivanov’s lecture on the writing of the poet Khlebnikov. The first part of a brilliant two-part article “Numismatiques” by the young philosopher and student of Derrida’s Jean-Joseph Goux was also published in the same issue. This article was important in the sense that Goux attempted to transcend Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the sign (Derrida 1967), on the one hand towards Marx and his analysis of money in Capital, and on the other hand towards the functioning of dreams and the silent work behind them as studied by Freud. A later example of a work paralleling Kristeva’s and Goux’s aspirations was Jean-Louis Baudry’s materiology, or science of materialism (Tel Quel 44 and 45/1971) (see Chapter 8). The theoretical and symbolic significance of Kristeva’s work was immediately apparent, however. In the spring of 1967 she published in Tel Quel (29) her article “Pour une sémiologie des paragrammes,” in issue 32/1968 her article “Distance et antireprésentation” where she criticized the

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representative work of the sign, in issue 34/1968 the article “Du symbole au signe” and in issues 38 and 39/1969 a two-part text “L’engendrement de la formule.” Tel Quel thus effectively functioned as the first forum for Kristeva’s theoretical work. All of these essays were then republished in Kristeva’s monumental book Séméiotiké. Recherches pour une sémanalyse (1969a). An equally important journal for Kristeva and the Tel Quel circles was Critique, where the Telquelians could publish book reviews on one another’s books (see Kauppi 1994, Patron 1999: 307). Kristeva borrowed the concept of “gram” from Derrida who meant by the term the material element of writing, the marking, or the trace (see for discussion Roudiez 1982: 19), ideas already developed by Ignace Gelb in his book Grammatology: A Study of Writing (1952). In Séméiotiké, which can be considered the outstanding work of Kristeva’s early period, she attempts, like some many others, to transcend the formalism of structuralism, moving through critique of the sign and structure to postformalism (for a general presentation of her work see Moi 1987). Compared with the theories of Derrida, Michel Foucault or Jacques Lacan, for example, Kristeva’s early work differs in one important way: Kristeva explicitly attempted to create a materialistic science of the text, uniting theoretical and political radicalism. Like a number of other central figures of the Tel Quel circle such as Baudry, Goux and Sollers, Kristeva took the possibility of a science of literature quite seriously. In this sense she and these other Tel Quel figures represented Thomas Pavel’s scientific structuralism. The wave of scientification boosted by Kristeva’s work in effect gave students of literature and languages the possibility of becoming critics of philosophy, history and other social and political science all at one go. Radical intellectuals were now talking about writing in the margins, the oppression of bourgeoisie ideology and logocentrism, and the science of textuality. At the same time, it was possible in the name of Marxism-Leninism to criticize power and take the side of the oppressed, represented by the French communist party. Key terms in Kristeva’s semanalytical project are process, experience, praxis, negativity, excess and signification. Psychoanalytic influences are evident, and semantic shifts a rule. In Kristeva’s framework, the concept of process is separated from process in the traditional sense of the word as being the final product or an activity that has a given goal, i.e. as a teleological activity. To a large extent, to Kristeva the concept of process replaces the concept of human being, which for her is too substantial, static and value-laden a term. The terms human being, subject, humanism, empiricism etc. are at the very bottom of Kristeva’s symbolic value hierarchy. She attempts to define the terms of her theory in such a way as to avoid all connotations and theoretical buzzwords connected to these delegitimized values. With respect to process this is especially clear. How can we factually talk about a process if the process has no goal? This is possible only if process is defined as a dual term that, in addition to its ordinary meaning, also has a theoretically more refined definition. This strategy of double definition is also applied to the concept of writing (écriture).

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If we follow Derrida, the reason for evading teleology—goals and purposes— is to avoid the cornerstone of ideology, the epicentre which organizes discourse, or, if we choose theological terms, God. Kristeva’s concept of experience is quite close to George Bataille’s sovereign self, that again and again returns to heterogeneity and uncertainty, thus eternally questioning itself (see, for example Quaghebeur 1972: 364). Experience always brings us back to the unknown, catastrophe and consumption, at the expense of immediate communication. The subject is always heterogeneous, plural, and it is against this background that we must understand Kristeva’s conceptualization of the process as a never-ending activity. Praxis in turn is both the subject’s participation in the class struggle and the process of negativity that forms the subject. Negativity is the logic of the process itself (see also Hegel 1965: 49); it is the heteronomy that again sets the spiral in motion. Negativity, as the ability to say no, is the necessary prerequisite of freedom. Kindred terms to negativity are heterogeneity, the other and the prefix “trans” as opposed to the prefixes “supra” and “inter.” Here again we can see the subtlest of subtle symbolic distinctions that Kristeva uses to separate the process from the more essentialist definitions of logic. Excess in turn anchors negativity in the pulsating system, biology and the body, materiality and language. Excess and discharge are in fact the logic of aggression, activity and dynamism; they are the logic sustaining the process. Signification, in turn, sustains the mechanisms of language and language’s underlying structure, the effect of which is the subject. The subject inevitably becomes drawn into this underlying structure, “the vortex of hilarity and horror” as Stéphane Mallarmé has said. Julia Kristeva’s semanalysis, or scientific semiotics, can justifiably be considered one of the most important “French theories” of the 1960s, particularly in its focus on poetic language: We know for a fact that since antiquity the idealist tradition which defines today’s dominant ideology has been formed on the basis of two exclusions: on the one hand the exclusion of atomism and the materialism of antiquity, and on the other the exclusion of work from language, or, to put it more formally, the exclusion of poetic language (Kristeva, Glucksmann and Peytard 1970: 28).

According to Kristeva, analytical semiotics or semanalysis is a thought process where science is alive and is conscious of its own theoretical nature. Because it is its own theory, semiotics thinks about itself. “Semiotic study remains a study which, when it reaches the end of its study, does not find anything but its own ideological movement” (Kristeva 1969a: 30). Semiotics cannot be the only science; rather, it is an open investigative road, a continuous critique, returning back upon itself but nevertheless forming its own science of ideology (Kristeva 1969a: 32). Kristeva combines semanalysis with Sollers’ so-called monumental history (Sollers 1967: 10), which is meant to form a foundation, or a prerequisite, for science. If semanalysis forms a foundation, its purpose is to describe history itself, thus to function as metahistory, providing history with mathematical and

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logical models. Semanalysis would thus be the measure of scientificity of other sciences. According to Kristeva, it could become a supralinguistic methodology that would transcend the boundaries of purely linguistic investigation. By being the topic of its own investigation, it would form the science of signifying practices (Kristeva 1970a: 1519). It would be a meta-science par excellence. Their writings on texts brought Kristeva’s and Sollers’ theories closer to one another. Kristeva understands the text as a translinguistic mechanism that reorganizes the order of language. The purpose of semanalysis and semiotics is to study intertextual signifying practices by treating them as translinguistic operations. The text combines speech that communicates with various synchronous and earlier statements. The text is a productivity with two tasks: 1. Its relationship to the language in which it exists is destructive-redistributive. Thus it functions in accordance with logical rather than linguistic categorizations. 2. It is an intertextuality, a space where numerous or countless texts come into contact with one another. We can follow Barthes in understanding intertextuality as a paradoxical concept, as it reduces one text to other texts, thereby neutralizing and questioning the text’s originality. But at the same time the concept of intertextuality struggles against the concept of context, since context and historical and sociological methods based on it limit the polysemy of the text in a theoretically undesirable way. According to Barthes, the concept of intertextuality takes the text back to a certain kind of rationalism (Barthes 1971: 101). Kristeva’s position is not very far from Barthes’s. The idea of language in semanalysis is closely connected to Kristeva’s concept of paragrammatical networks. By this she means a tabular, i.e. non-linear, model of formulating textual language. In theory, every component of language, every paragram, functions as a dynamic sign, just like a shape-giving (mouvant) gram, which does not so much express a meaning as forms a meaning (see, for example Ducrot and Todorov 1972: 446). This position is close to that of the protagonists of the nouveau roman for whom meaning is not external to the functioning of the language but rather its result. If we understand language as paragrammatical praxis, three conclusions influencing poetic language, the specific language of literature, follow: 1. Poetic language is the only infinite of language. In other words, only in poetic language and literary praxis does language become manifested as infinity. In practice this means that literature is prioritized over other artistic practices, and the privileged tool for the study of poetic language, semanalysis, over other approaches. 2. A literary text has a dual nature: writing/reading. A text is a reading/writing machine, with one of its products being the reader and another the writer (see also Sollers 1968b: 89–92). The text thus becomes a quasi-metaphysical concept. 3. A literary text always exists in a network of relationships. A text is never alone, but exists always in relation to other texts. Following Bakhtin’s

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polyphony model, Kristeva calls this principle the principle of intertextuality (Kristeva 1969a: 175). In Kristeva’s view, the formalization of poetic texts leads to two alternatives: either one has to formalize poetic language on the basis of trivalent, n-valent logic, or one must incorporate the plurality of poetic structures into Boolean 0-1 logic. Poetic language is juxtaposed with the language of communication and with binary logic. According to Kristeva, poetic language continuously moves in the boundary area between logic and non-logic, reality and non-reality, being and non-being, speech and non-speech (Kristeva 1969a: 265). Paragrammatical writing is thus typical of poetic language, and the means by which binarity is avoided. The following example illustrates Kristeva’s theoretical praxis. Kristeva uses the Count of Lautréamont’s work Les Chants de Maldoror to analyze the intertwining of consciousness and the subject with the text. Kristeva chooses the following paragraph as the target of her analysis: “There are moments in existence when lousy-headed (à la chevelure pouilleuse – A) man, his eyes staring, casts wild glances (l’oeil fixe, des regards fauves – B) into the green membranes of space (les membranes vertes de l’espace – C); for he thinks he hears before him the ironic hooting of a ghost (les ironiques huées d’un fantôme – D). He staggers and bows his head; what he has heard is the voice of conscience (c’est la voix de la conscience)” (quoted in Kristeva 1969a: 186, for English translation ffrench and Lack 1998: 34). In her analysis, Kristeva finds the following paragrammatical network in this text (Kristeva 1969a: 187, for English translation ffrench and Lack 1998: 35): A – body (a1), hairs (a2), flesh (a3), filth (a4) … B – body (b1), tension (b2) … C – matter (c1), loud colour (c2), sinister (c3), abstraction (c4) … D – sinister (d1), fear (d2), spiritualization … E – spirit (e1), idealization (e2).

According to Kristeva, the inner seme division (a1 … e2) within each class (A,B,C,D,E) creates functions within the class itself and in relation to semic entities in other classes. Meaning (signification) is a function which is formed on the basis of relations between entities and which can be formalized with Set Theory (théorie d’ensemble) developed by Nicolas Bourbaki, a group of French mathematicians in the 1930s. With the shift from human being (categories A, B, C) to consciousness (categories D and E), the text represents processes of becoming conscious (Kristeva 1969a: 186, ffrench and Lack 1998: 34–5). In this case the body, which in Kristeva’s framework is connected with materialism, and consciousness (romanticism) seem to be opposites. In Kristeva’s commentary, the next step, however, is crucial: the morpheme (and word-theme) “phallus” is manifested as a word-theme of the text on a phonetic level: f(v) – al(oe) – s(z) (Kristeva 1969a: 186, ffrench and Lack 1998: 34). Exactly how she finds this word-theme remains unclear. In this discovery, Kristeva applied a method similar to Saussure’s anagram analyses (see Starobinski 1969: 3–33). Following Saussure

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and Barthes, Kristeva maintains that letters in the text must be connected to meanings and ideas, since without this link we either remain in the realm of pure formalism or, alternatively, in a pure world of meanings or contents (essentialism): this dichotomy must be overcome. Meaning (signification), the result of functions between semes, is the result of the working of poetic language that does not obey Aristotelian logic. Everything that in the text has not become petrified as law, i.e. as something objective, relatively stable and action orienting, is poetic. Poetics refuses to form a system, and is thus manifested as self-denial. In Kristeva’s semanalysis, explicit legitimation of n-valent logic is followed by implicit binary definition of her own work as contra empiricism, expressionism, speech etc. Kristeva proclaims that semanalysis is anti-formalist (see, for example, Kristeva 1969a: 189) after which, in order to classify her work as being scientific, she resorts to the very same formalism (see, for example Kristeva 1969a: 186–99, 257–77 and 318–25). The imperative to define herself thus leads to continuous contradiction: positing herself at the crossroads is the discursive economy of Kristeva’s textual strategy. Combined with semantic polysemy, this textual economy gives her the possibility of simultaneously playing on a number of boards and to rescue polysemy and semantically ambivalent practices from anathema. Kristeva’s textual politics has two phases: firstly she joins a certain intellectual movement—structuralism—and then proceeds to radicalize certain apparently insignificant symbolic differences between the movement and her own work. The concept that crystallizes the uniqueness of Kristeva’s theory is the text. The text is a translinguistic machinery which reorganizes language. The text’s relationship to language is destructive-redistributive; thus, according to Kristeva, its operation follows logical rather than linguistic classifications. Logic precedes linguistics, and the process of the text is revealed as an eternal process of aggregating and segregating, a process where numerous texts meet in an intertextual space. In Sollers’s terminology, the theorization of the text leads to materialistic semantics (Sollers 1968a: 278). The deepest level of the text is composed of writing, as traces of traces and numbers, the middle level by intertextuality, and the surface by words, rhymes, sentences, sequences, motifs etc. In the science of text, the text paradoxically becomes an all-encompassing speculative and metaphysical principle to which everything else is reduced. The author and the reader are its effects, and at the same time the world is the product of the text. Reading is only to dive under the surface of the text, to concentrate on the silences, the blank spaces. For Sollers, reading means insinuating one’s way into the numerical space the text constitutes (see Sollers 1971a: 155–6). The metaphysics of the text is identified with the panthah of Sanskrit, the neverending road that is the road of pain, danger and uncertainty, the road where the journey is not pre-determined but which is continuous and eternally transcendent. Sollers believes the science of the text leads directly to number mysticism: if we know the beginning, we know the end; if we know the numbers, we know the things.

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Kristeva’s semanalysis, for its part, concentrates on the process that precedes meaning: This type of semiotics – we shall call it semanalysis – will take as its starting point (and, perhaps, even construct itself out of) marginalized or unknown signifying practices … in order to draw new concepts out of them; concepts which could think about aspects which no longer belong to the order of the sign but which penetrate it: signification (Kristeva 1970a: 1521).

What is the relationship of semanalysis, a science studying the formation processes of ideology, to social and political reality? Semanalysis studies signifying practices that are relatively independent of history, the logic of which steers the class struggle. As its starting point semanalysis takes excluded, that is marginalized and therefore unknown, in other words not-yet-thought signifying practices. According to Kristeva, her new science deconstructs Hegel’s metaphysics of the Idea, which is inseparable from sociologism, and reveals the workings of ideology, which historical materialism has only looked at from the perspective of its social function. Semanalysis studies the way ideology works. Toward the end of the 1960s, Kristeva gradually separates herself from both Marxism that is embodied in the French communist party, and from Hegel and empirical sciences and the concrete study of ideology. This complex process of symbolic distance taking is simultaneous to Kristeva’s integration into the academic establishment. At the end of 1960s and early 1970s, Kristeva’s privileged area of semiotic study was still, in accordance with the general trend of scientification, the text. In the course of the 1970s it was to give way to a more psychoanalytically oriented approach. In her science of meaning, semanalysis, Julia Kristeva sought to reveal ideology’s face and to demystify power by constructing a theory that would avoid false consciousness and illusion. By rescuing Marx, and combining his theory of historical materialism to Saussurean linguistics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, she created a modish cocktail of theoretical sophistication that was paralleled only by Derrida’s theory of deconstruction. By revealing the workings of the production of knowledge and power, Kristeva sought to overcome dichotomies, Boolean logic and western metaphysics. By uniting scientific and political radicalism Kristeva’s sought, however, to surpass all her competitors, Derrida included.

Chapter 4

Kristeva’s Power-Ideas: Ideologeme and the Zerologic Subject L’insolence est la nouvelle arme révolutionnaire (Insolence is the new revolutionary weapon) Médecine 1968

Kristeva’s theory of semanalysis aimed at studying the formation of signification or more precisely signifiance (the act of signifying) and the ways in which it works. Concepts central to her theory were the ideologeme and the zerologic subject. In her attempt to link literary output with a social context, Kristeva relied on the works of the Russian formalists of the 1920s and 1930s. Kristeva’s new “science” of semanalysis is an attempt to combine all the radical ideas of the moment into a grand synthesis that aimed at presenting a distinctive theory that resonated with a whole symbolic Weltanschaaung, that of the young and politically radical audience in the rapidly expanding French university system (see Bourdieu 1988, Kauppi 1996). The radical profile and its power-ideas (materialism, production, the exterior) composed a symbolic register that the rebelling intellectuals attempted to impose on their competitors. This register was opposed to the perceived dominant register of One Meaning (the establishment, the bourgeois order), represented by the literary, academic and cultural establishment and such a diverse group of names of “elders” like Sartre, Aron, and even in some cases Lévi-Strauss, one of the fathers of structuralism. By building on the works of the main intellectual patrons of French radicalism of the 1960s, Ferdinand de Saussure and Sigmund Freud, language as a system of difference and the silent work of the unconscious, Kristeva paves the way for Karl Marx and social and political revolution through an interpretation and introduction of some less well-known theories of the moment such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s work. With another Bulgarian academic, Tzvetan Todorov, Kristeva translated some of Bakhtin’s works into French and introduced new concepts. Her new science semanalysis as the analysis of signifying practices and as the production of models is first and foremost an activity that exposes ideology understood in the Althusserian sense. Semanalysis is the science of ideology or the ideology of science (Kristeva 1969a: 31–2). In her analysis of the ideologeme, the basic unit of ideology, Kristeva follows to the letter the observation of the Russian formalist Bakhtin/Medvedev that “literary science is one of the branches of the study of ideology ... the study of ideology covers all the areas of human ideological creativity” (Bakhtin and Medvedev 1928: 11). In this chapter I will analyze the ideas that form the semiotic background of Kristeva’s theory building

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and the strategies she uses in presenting her theory as being more radical and refined than those of her competitors. Kristeva’s theory of semanalysis is about studying the formation of the control over signification and the ways in which it works (see Kauppi 1985: 301–8). Concepts central to her theory are the ideologeme and the zerologic subject. In her attempt to link literary output with a social context, Kristeva uses the term ideologeme (idéologème) which she borrows from Mikhail Bakhtin. She was possibly also inspired by the semiotic concepts used by A.J. Greimas, as well as by the concepts of episteme and mytheme developed by Foucault and Lévi-Strauss. Intellectual novelty could only be expressed by developing totally new concepts that, however, had to take part in a wider (“scientific”) semiotic universe, in this case that composed of concepts that ended in “eme.” In relation to Greimas’s semiotics we might say that Kristeva studies the immanent semantic world of ideology. Bakhtin, for his part, did not explicitly define the term ideologeme. Kristeva defines it as the function of intertextuality, which can be read as it is materialized on the different levels of the text’s structure and which expands giving the text its historical and sociological correlations (Kristeva 1969a: 114). For Kristeva ideologeme is thus a socio-economic term. She makes her definition even more precise by stating that in the case of intertextuality—another term Kristeva borrowed from Bakhtin—she does not mean that a linguistic fact would be ideological. She maintains that by considering the text as an ideologeme we predetermine the course of semiotics and think about it as intertextuality in society and history. Kristeva defines ideologeme as a function that links the various translinguistic practices of a given society, thus crystallizing the prevailing ideology (Kristeva 1969a: 60). When it comes to structure, she follows in a more conservative fashion the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev by interpreting the ideologeme as an autonomic entity of inner interactive relationships. The target of Kristeva’s critique is a linguistic ideology that attempts to give center stage to the sign-subject pair while favoring the voice of the speaking subject. Kristeva calls the entity formed by object-representation-intentionality the theological triad of the ideologeme of the sign. This triad dyadically divides praxis and space. Binary opposites such as subject/object, speech/reality, logic/experience, presence/absence, known/unknown etc. destroy volume and space, reducing them to surfaces. Kristeva does not directly say, in the footsteps of Marx, the ideologeme is a reflection of the base structure and thus tightly bound to it. Rather, she sees the ideologeme as a methodological tool which is used to classify, and which also offers a way to avoid defining the relationship between the base and superstructure. While she does not explain the relationship between ideologeme and structure, it is clear that the typology of ideologemes follows a linear model where the most highly sophisticated form is the paragrammatical ideologeme developed by Kristeva herself. Kristeva differentiates between the following semiotic practices:

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1. First, a systematic semiotic practice founded on the sign, therefore on meaning: conservative and limited, its elements are oriented toward denotata; it is logical, explicative, interchangeable, and not at all destined to transform the other (the addressee). Second, a transformative semiotic practice, in which the “signs” are released from denotata and oriented toward the other, whom they modify. Third, a paragrammatic semiotic practice, in which the sign is eliminated by the correlative paradigmatic sequence, which could be seen as a tetralemmaeach sign has a denotatum; each sign does not have a denotatum; each sign has and does not have a denotatum; it is not true that each sign has and does not have a denotatum (Kristeva 1969a: 113–14, English translation in Kristeva 1982: 59n.1).

In this Hegelian classification, Kristeva combines non-Aristotelian logic with political action. The first praxis, systematic semiotic practice, corresponds to the classical view of signs. From Kristeva’s perspective, it is conservative and counter-reformatory. From the perspective of the politics of the sign, it is formed around a single point: Derrida’s transcendental signified. Kristeva’s second semiotic practice, transformative semiotic practice, resembles the transformative grammar of the American linguist Noam Chomsky. In Kristeva’s assessment, it is ethnocentric—and thus limited in its intellectual scope-by nature as it is based on the subject-predicate sentence. The third, paragrammatical semiotic practice, corresponds to Kristeva’s own views. It emphasizes dissimilarity and polysemy as well as pluralistic logic. It is relatively close to philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s paralogism (Lyotard 1979). Semiotically, we can formalize the matter by saying that for Kristeva the relationship in paragrammatical semiotic practice between dissimilarity, polysemy and pluralistic logic is syntagmatic, whereas for example the relationship between dissimilarity and binary logic is paradigmatic. Another central typology in Kristeva’s theory is based on the sign and the symbol. According to Kristeva, the ideologeme of the symbol began to crumble at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries, being gradually replaced by the ideologeme of the sign. These ideologemes differed in terms of text production and modes of operation. The semiotics of a symbol typical of the middle ages was cosmogonical by nature, and its symbols brought one back to the unknown, non-representative, universal and transcendent (Kristeva 1969a: 116, Kristeva 1982: 38–9). In this economy of the sign, the symbol did not resemble the object it symbolized, and its two parts, the symbolizer and the symbolized, were not connected to one another. The logic of the semiotics of the symbol was anti-paradoxical, its activity tended to reduce the number of symbols (heroism, bravery, valiance … ) and it emphasized repetition, limits and the ubiquity of the symbols. In opposition to the ubiquity and abstraction of symbols, the semiotics of the sign is real and concrete. When the symbol in its vertical activity emphasized universals, the sign in turn concretizes and reifies universals by turning them into objects in the strong meaning of the word. Objectivity would thenceforth mean verisimilitude:

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Radicalism in French Culture Within their horizontal function, the units of the sign’s semiotic practice are articulated as a metonymical concentration of deviations from the norm signifying a progressive creation of metaphors (Kristeva 1969a: 118, English translation Kristeva 1982: 40).

In the ideologeme of the sign, the formation of metaphors and opposite terms, as well as differences, can be manifested as surprises in the narrative structure. Compared with the infinity of the poetic code, the semiotic practice of a sign is closed as an ideologeme, however. To say this in the language of logic: if in the semiotics of the symbol, conflicts and paradoxes were resolved either through an exclusive disjunction (non-equivalence) ---≠--- or non-conjunction ---/---, then in the semiotic practice of the sign they are resolved through non-disjunction – ---V--- (Kristeva 1969a: 119). It could be objected that it is questionable to limit the property of the directly visible only to the ideologeme of the sign, as Aristotle, among others, had already a long time before the end of the ideologeme of the symbol talked about the sign and the “directly visible” in his Rhetoric (Fages 1968: 45–7). According to Kristeva ideological activity in a text is manifested by some signified attempting to be universal and all encompassing, as well as by the form of statements in the text attempting to be a final form. Ideology in the text on the one hand appears as something universal and all encompassing, and on the other as a closed and final form. Ideology is thus by definition conservative and counter-reformatory (Kristeva 1969a: 137, Kristeva 1982: 55) and is the opposite of Bakhtin’s polyphony. In Bakhtin’s framework, the basic unit of discourse is the word (Bakhtine 1970: 240), and the word is always half the property of the other, i.e. always exists in relation to other words, and is thus polyphonic by nature. The polylogic or dialogic text is the opposite of monologism, in Kristeva’s conceptualization of the Aristotelian logic 0 < x < 1 and its inescapable consequence, the tyranny of the system. In polyphony, by contrast, no single term rules over others. For Kristeva, this liberalism and laissez-faire setting in the text is the criterion and manifestation of non-ideologism. If in the semiotics of the symbol the book was understood as a story, then in the semiotics of the sign it is understood as literature and discourse. Moving away from the semiotic practice of the sign and the snares of literature as well as the death of the novel as a work of art is simultaneously a problem of rhetoric and of social praxis. In Kristeva’s typology, transcending speech, the work of the author and the book (as the final product) corresponds to moving away from the semiotic practice of the sign. Kristeva questions meaning as a final product, the rule of one single Meaning. She opposes speech with the death of speech, with writing as textual production (Kristeva 1969a: 140, Kristeva 1982: 57). Kristeva’s ideologemic analysis has thus led to a historical situation where the semiotic practice of the sign is crumbling and being replaced by a paragrammatical practice. In Kristeva’s typology and diachronic model, paragrammatical practice seems to be a logical consequence of earlier stages following a deterministic Hegelian historical view.

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The message here is clear: to be resolutely radical one should question the control of one Meaning. What the exact contents of this one Meaning are remains unclear. In Kristeva’s framework, history has been reduced to a linear model where different stages follow one another. This is undoubtedly the goal of her theory. She attempts to find logical support for her theory by paradoxically—given her theoretical and ethical emphasis on perpetual movement—giving it the impression of inescapability. However, Kristeva’s framework is generally problematic because she attempts to justify the transgression of limitations set by language by resorting to a model of historical development. Strictly speaking, however, there always exists agrammatical activity no matter what the ideologeme in question is. For instance, in the middle ages people played various kinds of etymological, semantic and syntactic games within texts themselves. To cite another example, James Joyce was aware of the similarities between his work and certain medieval texts. In the last, paragrammatical stage of her typology, Kristeva nevertheless equates agrammatical and antigrammatical activities. Antigrammaticality becomes externality, which can be used to justify systematic transgression. This interpretation is problematic because agrammaticality, in the form of anomalies, is part of grammaticality. For instance, in literary theory anomalies are accepted on the basis of certain aesthetic and moral criteria. This does not mean that anomalies would somehow be external. Kristeva blurs the boundary between the external and the anomaly, and interprets all anomalies as manifestations of externality. Materialism and the Zerologic Subject As it has become clear, Kristeva’s scientific semiotics, semanalysis, does not see meaning as structure as the structuralists such as Lévi-Strauss tended to do, but rather as a process shaping the subject and forming a system of meanings. This enables Kristeva to take distance to French structuralism and its canonic authors. Semanalysis literally is a science of signifying practices that attempts to create a materialistic gnoseology as a materialistic theory of signifying practices. This link between meaning and materialism enables Kristeva to argue that her theory is both intellectually and politically the most radical of the moment. The purpose of the theory is to lay bare the functioning of ideology as universal and final statements by deconstructing the metaphysics of the Idea and by classifying various signifying practices according to the topology of the subject. According to Kristeva, semanalysis is material and dialectical. By materially analyzing the logic of meaning (logique du sens) it attempts no less than to fill the analytical gap left by dialectical materialism (Kristeva 1969a: 8). In her semanalysis, Kristeva attempts to bring under the concept of materialism several strands of reflection, the constituting movement of the sign (gramma) of Derrida’s analysis, Saussure’s formal division (Signifier/Signified) and the study of the materiality of the sign or graph itself. In Kristeva’s theory, materialism seems to mean at least three different things: 1. The material of language, for example letters such as the letter “w” in

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Freud’s analyses and its associations with wolves’s ears, etc. Connected with this is Lacan’s comment that words should be taken literally. 2. The human body in general, i.e. the opposite of the mind or the soul, or the counterpart of idealism. 3. Economic processes and ownership of the means of production in the society. The first of these definitions of materialism, the functioning of the signifier in this semantic context, clearly ranks highest in Kristeva’s mind. The second definition also has a central role in the form of sexuality. The third definition, in turn, is clearly more in the background in Kristeva’s early work though it assumes a somewhat more pronounced role in her book La révolution du langage poétique (1974) in which Kristeva discusses Marxist analyses of the class struggle dating from the nineteenth century (Kristeva 1974: 375–97). In her early work, her use of the term ideologeme minimizes concrete economic and social analyses. This minimization is in line with traits of certain types of French radicalisms of the 1960s, its speculative tendency and the uniting of symbolic and political revolution. In Kristeva’s theory, the human body and concepts closely related to it also function through a kind of shock effect, shaking the traditional bourgeoisie double morality in a way similar to Barthes’ terms pleasure (jouissance) and desire (désir), a flawed translation into French of Freud’s term Wunsch (Roudinesco 1988). In a certain sense Kristeva’s paragram ideologeme is a logical continuation of the revolution of dynamics that was characteristic of western science and art in the twentieth century. As a metaphor, however, the paragram ideologeme expresses the absence of determination and total freedom. Similarly as in other French theories of the 1960s such as deconstruction, numismatics, monumental history or materiology, the dialectics of liberation and limitations connects Freud’s ideas about dreams, Marx’s value and formation of capital and Saussure’s analyses of language. Kristeva’s topology of the subject, however, has nothing to do with Cartesian topology of the subject, the traditional cogito ergo sum: Analytical semiotics – semanalysis – understands signifying practices IN PLURAL according to the specific topology of the subject (which is not similar to ego cogito) and the mutation which this topology causes in the matrix OF THE SIGN itself (like the Stoics presented it in the projection of the syllogism) and through this in the SIGNIFYING SYSTEM (for example in its grammaticality) (Kristeva 1970: 7).

What does Kristeva propose in place of the coherent subject? If the speaking subject is, in western metaphysics and philosophy—political theory included—in the position of a Derridian transcendental signified, then in a semanalytical theory the subject is zerologic. The transcendental signifier needs a concept of similar magnitude. Kristeva borrowed this concept from the Soviet semiotician and Buddhologist Linnart Mäll (professor at the University of Tartu), who had found the term “zerologic subject” in old Buddhist texts where it was called sunyavada (Mäll 1968: 54). According to Kristeva, the zerologic subject provides an alternative because it has the following characteristics: 1. The zerologic subject reveals the

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importance of the road. 2. It can be linked to the number mysticism already used by Sollers in his monumental history. 3. Through the zerologic subject we can connect this new subject to the Orient through metaphor and Gnostic theory. Sunyavada means becoming free by transcending negation and affirmation. The road of zero is found when one is liberated from the conflicts and pain of the world in a kind of a dissolution process. In addition to the model of the zerologic subject, Mäll presents a cognitive model that has three stages: prelogical thinking (avidya), logical thinking (viljana) and postlogical thinking (prajna). The third stage corresponds to wisdom or total knowledge (sarvajnata). Movement from the second stage to the third is non-conscious, so there exists no point in time and space where we could say the change took place. Mäll simply notes: “we might say that prajna appears by itself” (Mäll 1968: 62). Kristeva incorporates the zerologic subject into her semanalytical model. Kristeva’s model of systematic, transformative and paragrammatical practices can be substituted with the Sanskrit concepts drsti (theory, gaze), yoga (change) and sunyata (emptiness). To Kristeva, the zerologic subject offers a new reference point as the subject of paragrammatical praxis. Translated into Kristeva’s theoretical language, the zerologic subject becomes an anti-subject or a non-subject that is open to death, the sexual act and productivity prior to the sign. The opposite of the zerologic subject is the subject-individual, or Mäll’s western human, who is born out of the sign. The zerologic subject, by contrast, is realized as an eternal process in the productivity of the text. In Kristeva’s semanalysis, the zerologic subject finds itself in all those marginalized phenomena that are subject to the principles of the sign and of reason (Kristeva 1969a: 274). Here Kristeva yet again uses the meta-concept of the sign to group marginalized and repressed parts of society into integral parts of her theory. If the logical subject is postulated as intentional and coherent to the extent that we always assume that a sentence has either an implicit or an explicit subject or otherwise the sentence would be senseless, then the subject of poetic language is scattered into a chain of signifiers as in Lacan’s psychoanalysis. In Kristeva’s formulation, the subject disappears along with the disappearance of the linguistic sign. A new, qualitatively higher-level subject is found in Buddhist theories: If this “empty” space where the zerologic subject moves is contrary to the logical space governed by the speaking subject, then the poetic semiotic practice with its unique characteristics becomes a place where these two meet in an eternal movement from one to the other (Kristeva 1969a: 274).

Repression becomes identified with dream, poetry, madness and sexuality. It remains unclear how the Buddhist texts could in reality be applied to the use of such a subject. To what extent is the zerologic subject an antisubject or a nonsubject? This is the question.

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Ideology and Science Kristeva’s semanalysis is to a large extent based on an ambivalent Althusserian view of ideology. This ambivalence is manifested as relatively loose definitions of ideology and science. According to Kristeva, the new, so-called scientific object— this is her theory semanalysis—can retain elements of the old object. This would seem to mean that the move would not take place all at once like with Gaston Bachelard’s epistemological break and Louis Althusser’s interpretation of it. It is undoubtedly sensible also from a strategic viewpoint to make such a reservation, although the credibility of Kristeva’s theory rests on the break being absolute. Kristeva thinks that the semiotic project is tied to the epistemological break that Althusser found in Marx’s work between the young and the old, the nonscientific and the scientific Marx. The crucial scientific criterion is that the new object, the scientific object, has a new structure and the structure a new function. Through terminological innovations and structural reforms, the semiotic approach offers then a new perspective on signifying practices. Such a strict separation of science and ideology is quite problematic, however, especially when Kristeva continuously talks about ideology and science in the singular rather than speaking about ideologies of various social classes and their significance in the class struggle, which would be necessary in some Marxist frameworks. In Kristeva’s semanalysis, the battle between ideology and science has the nature of a battle between non-personal, timeless and immaterial titans. We can see that in Kristeva’s theory ideology functions on two levels: on the one hand it is contrary to science, and on the other it parallels the bourgeois worldview. The first of these is more essential to Kristeva for the very reason that semanalysis aspires to be scientific. Kristeva’s theoretical work rests on the notion that science, as objective knowledge, automatically assists the proletariat in its battle. Political and theoretical radicalism are fused to such extent that science is automatically revolutionary and ideology is bourgeois by nature. Due to the lack of concrete analyses, the relationship between science and ideology remains abstract in Kristeva’s theory. The philosopher Jacques Rancière crystallizes this problem (Rancière 1974: 250): The control exerted by the bourgeoisie and its ideology is manifested through the structure of the environment in which the ideology is communicated, not in the contents of the knowledge itself. The scientific nature of knowledge in no way touches upon the classroom nature of teaching. Science is not the opposite of ideology, its other. Science is in the institutions and in those forms of communication where the ideological rule of the bourgeoisie is manifested.

From this alternative perspective, scientific production is first and foremost tied to who produces it, how it is produced, and for whom it is produced. However, the Althusserian view of ideology enables the science of the text and semanalysis to be revolutionary, and it also makes it possible for Kristeva not to have to deal with

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the bothersome categories of time and place. It is thus possible to maintain the two imperatives of sophisticated theorizing: the monopoly of theorizing in the name of science and metaphysics, and its distancing from everyday life. However, the incongruence of Althusser’s (and Kristeva’s) view of ideology yet again shuffles the cards and makes the relationships between ideology and science more obscure. If ideology is eternal like the unconscious (Althusser 1986: 238–43), we would end up with a bisected view of ideology: on the one hand everything is ideological, and on the other there exists false awareness, bourgeois or idealistic awareness, and true awareness, dialectic-materialistic awareness. This would result in a conceptual differentiation between scientific ideologies and non-scientific ideologies. This semantic shift causes substantial difficulties for example when it comes to logical propositions. If ideology does not end where logic begins, then we would be forced to admit that a logically congruent proposition can also be ideological. From the perspective of Kristeva’s theoretical project it is problematic that in the Althusserian view of ideology, logic is useless in deciding the truthfulness of propositions. As Rancière noted, this means in practice that evaluating science would become the privilege of an extra-scientific authority. In Althusser’s theory, truth is equated with the class interests of the proletariat. As the French Communist party represents the proletariat, its central committee is the highest authority in scientific matters. However, this outcome is highly problematic for many reasons, not the least of which is that it would mean that the work of intellectuals such as Freud, Bataille and Artaud would have to be classified as idealism, as well as possibly also the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, which Kristeva likes to refer to once in a while. Undoubtedly this is one reason why Kristeva so strongly emphasizes that psychoanalysis has been the target of repression by bourgeois ideology. Kristeva’s break with Althusser and the French communist party in the early 1970s, moreover, led to a new theoretical setting. Materialism, which became a theoretically crucial discursive element in her theory, could be salvaged only through a radical psychoanalytic and linguistic reinterpretation. As we have seen, in Kristeva’s theory social and political reality play a relatively insignificant part. She privileges mathematical and logical models. Covering all areas of human activity, semanalysis would form a metahistory that would explain the processes of meaning formation. According to Kristeva, semiology as a superscience has discovered the general law that governs social and political activity. However, Kristeva does not tell us what that law is. Class Struggles According to Kristeva, Marx was the first who began to think of the social as a mode of production (Kristeva 1969a: 35). To Marx, labor was not only subjective or part of man’s nature, but also included production and the social relationships of production. Labor became the target of value, and exchange value became a central topic of research. “Marx states the problems clearly: from the perspective

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of distribution and social consumption or the perspective of communication, labor is always value, use or exchange” (Kristeva 1969a: 36). According to Kristeva, Marx revealed another dimension, where labor would be understood as being external to value, as something prior to produced goods and the chain of communication linking goods to one another. Kristeva does not, however, specify where Marx presents such an alternative. However, this inexplicable theoretical connection between meaning and labor was crucial for Kristeva’s semanalysis. It was precisely at this stage—where work did not yet represent any value and therefore did not yet mean anything—where Kristeva discovers the relationship between the body and excess (dépense) (Kristeva 1969a: 37). However, this level that precedes meaning has a relatively ambiguous role in Kristeva’s theory. In contrast to Lévi-Strauss, who sought to find a simple, formal structure behind all of reality’s conflicts and plurality, Kristeva, following Derrida and Lacan, does the opposite: behind social and political plurality, which has quite arbitrarily been reduced to language, she discovers an even richer and more pluralistic jungle of traces and traces of traces, etc. The legitimacy of the science of the text is dependent on the play at two levels of the meaning of the term writing or écriture; the normal act of writing and the second stage. The metaphor at the core of this theoretical construct of meaning is the carbon paper metaphor. Words written on paper are etched onto the carbon paper behind the paper proper, forming a jungle of traces fleeing interpretation. Some like Derrida have supplemented this metaphor with the metonym of a telephone conversation or the sending of a postcard in place of more conventional interaction. The metonymy creates an unusual feeling and seems to transcend convention. Kristeva uses two additional means of connecting Marx with semanalysis: loosely defined materialism that is identified with certain social production relationships (Kristeva 1974: 11 and 470–71) and the traditional reification theory with its adjacent identification of the book with the product. But crucial for the political and theoretical credibility of Kristeva’s theory was to be able to bring Marx into her analysis of “labor prior to meaning.” She found the analogy to money in Derrida’s work, where money substitutes signs for things. Money is the movement of abstract analytics. Just as a product hides its prior production, the meaning of a sign, which sneaks into the exchange of social and political symbols and signs, shrouds the process, the labor prior to its value, which produces it. The labor that precedes value is a specific semiotic system, a “permutative” game, a process. Kristeva prefers to ignore the fact that Marx said that all labor is crystallized in some value and that all labor has some meaning. Kristeva borrows Freud’s idea that the functioning of dreams transforms the process. The process does not count nor think. More generally speaking, it does not judge; in other words, its game matrix does not consist of the dichotomies of good/bad, right/wrong etc. It evades both morality and epistemology. By concentrating on labor prior to value, semanalysis attempts to create a new kind of problèmatique while seeking support from the findings of Freud and Derrida. However, this theoretical radicalization also creates new problems.

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According to Kristeva, the object of study of semanalysis cannot be represented but it can be talked about, some of its symptoms and through them, its operating principles can be studied. The paradox here is quite apparent. How can we talk about something without representing it? And if we do represent it, then we come back to the ideology of representation that Kristeva was trying to avoid in the first place. However, let us put these objections aside for the time being, and allow Kristeva to continue. So it is possible to approach the other as a theoretical construct that has specific rules of operation, just as in quantum mechanics we can speak about an object that is unobservable. From the standpoint of Marxism and political axiomatics it is the next question which is crucial: if meaning is no longer a pre-given relationship between the signifier and the signified, but the result of a fixation in a given chain of signifiers, then how do social practices and production circumstances influence this process? Kristeva’s critique of representation is unable to answer this question, since her critique is both too extensive and too narrow. It is too extensive because both proletariat and pre-capitalist societies have relied on the representative and communicative function of language. It is too narrow because the critique almost completely excludes the historical and social mechanisms that steer representation. A mere repression argument according to which bourgeois ideology represses alternative formulations of meaning, alone does not shed light on the specific features of social and political battles. On the contrary, it expands and universalizes certain assertions while understating their social-historical connections. An additional theoretical and political problem involves the idea of exchange. The purpose of semanalysis is to form a science of meaning. In a wider sense, it also strives to be a methodology of the so-called human sciences, one which looks at social-historical practices as signifying practices. It takes the hard sciences as its model. According to Kristeva, semanalysis emphasizes polyvalent logic, topology and mathematical as well as linguistic models (specifically models of generative linguistics). Logic, topology and mathematics do not depict anything. Their purpose is to typologize non-observable activity. In Kristeva’s own words, semiotics replaces linear history with the typology of signifying practices, conventional historicism with a plurality of productions (which cannot be reduced to one another) and exchange with work and production. The central problem here is that Kristeva assumes that she will be able to avoid the problem of exchange. It is clear that she herself continuously practices exchanges in her theoretical output, exchanging semiotics with semanalysis, exchange value with production, subject with zerologic subject, symbolic with semiotic, literature with textual production semiologic and semiotic, man and subject etc., always herself participating in the communicative chain. Kristeva attempts to replace old, ideological terms with new terms which would better correspond to the scientific nature of semanalysis. This replacement takes place at every level and can be seen for instance in the differences between two versions of the same text. For instance, the first version of the article “Towards a Semiology of Paragrams” published in Tel Quel 29/1967 contains terms such as “man,” “ideas” and “semiology” which

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are substituted with “subject,” “theories” and “semiotics” in the second version of the article published in Séméiotiké in 1969 (ffrench and Lack 1998: 47 n.2). The latter terms corresponded better to Kristeva’s strategy of distinction vis-àvis her competitors. To justify her attempt, Kristeva presents theoretical claims that are designed to increase both the utility value and exchange value of her theory. Such “claims” include, for instance, her use of Marx’s metaphors and her linking of semiotics to socialist revolution and dialectical materialism, Freud’s functioning of dreams and Derrida’s functioning of activity preceding difference (the untranslatable différance). From the viewpoint of political radicalism, one of the main problems of Kristeva’s semanalysis is the relationship to class struggle and the theory of the subject. In Kristeva’s theory, the relationship to class struggle is mostly metaphoric. A priori there is no reason to consider it essential to link Lacanian theory of the subject with Marxist materialism. There is no reason to assume that there is a gap in Marxist theory that could be filled with Lacanian theory of the subject. It is questionable whether these theories can even be linked together with the mere concept of “subject,” as the concept links with other terms in different ways depending on the semiotic context. Following Paul Hirst (Hirst 1976) we may note that the human subject is not necessarily an essential element for the study of the functioning of ideology. Ideologies are manifested for instance through political institutions or certain legal institutions such as corporations. On the other hand, the subject that constitutes the cornerstone of Kristeva’s revolutionary theory is an individual. Jorge Larrain presents the following critical view of psychoanalytic theories of the subject: In the same way as ideology produces a subject for regressive meaning, psychoanalysis produces a subject for revolutionary meaning. There is nothing truly materialistic in this conceptualization. It is just a return to idealism: meanings and discourses become fundamental while subjects become the passive target of their “activity” (Larrain 1979: 171).

In a psychoanalytical framework, conflicts are brought back to the individual level. Kristeva’s project thus de facto turns its back on Marxist political praxis that emphasizes the role of class in the revolutionary battle. The relative autonomy of the subject in relation to class struggle seems to justify moving class struggle away from center stage. Adlam and Salfield summarize the main argument of Marxist critique of the psychoanalytical subject: We can say that the permanence of certain representations is not exclusively or predominantly due to the fixation of certain subject positions, but to a series of material practices and forms of political organization that are the result of historical circumstances to which the production of subjects has not been a primary concern (Adlam and Salfield 1978: 103).

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In contrast to this view, only by emphasizing textual production, writing, can we avoid the birth of a new meta-language and ideology (Kristeva 1969a: 193–5). Kristeva’s text consists of an infinite number of codes that, like a game, constantly change the intertextual network. No single code can thus gain supremacy, and ultimate truth therefore cannot emerge (see, for example, Heath 1972: 36). There is much at stake in this game. According to Jacques Derrida, the problem of supremacy cannot be solved and the struggle against origins and presence is neverending (Derrida 1972: 44). If we stay in the framework of a game, as Kristeva does at least to some extent, we see that the game continues forever whereas origins and presence change the game into hierarchy and everlasting regression into anxiety. Derrida thinks that the problem of interpretation results in one or the other, and that the possibility of reaching a compromise is very small indeed. In Lyotard’s postmodern interpretation, the game is equated with breaking the rules and finding something new on the basis of the unknown (Lyotard 1983: 37). Using the concepts of semiology, the question is largely about a process of dissemeios similar to Derrida’s. In Kristeva’s case, the problem is how her own polysemeity links with the game as a process. In contrast with Derrida and Lyotard, Kristeva upholds some scientific criteria, although, in Hegelian manner, she notes that science is a process. It might seem strange that Kristeva does not attempt to offer more precise arguments for the scientific nature of semanalysis, for instance by relating its epistemology to other theories of science such as that of Karl Popper. Partly this can be explained by the monopoly in the French intellectual field at that time of the epistemologies of Althusser and his predecessor Bachelard. Logical positivism, for instance, was then poorly known in France (see, for instance, Bowker and Latour 1987: 715–48). This monopoly, however, does not explain everything. In contrast to Kristeva, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss openly analyzed the relationship of his own structuralist research method to science and logicalmathematical constructs. In the case of Kristeva’s theory, the conflict between intertextuality and the fixation of meaning is clear. Dissemeios by no means leads to giving up semeios; rather, the two depend on one another (see for a discussion Finlay-Pelinski 1982: 243). In addition, which meanings govern is not a matter of indifference to Kristeva’s semanalysis, nor to Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism, nor even to Lyotard’s postmodern interpretation. By this I mean that they implicitly always favor certain meanings. Roughly speaking, talking about dissemeios and the game would seem to be fruitless unless one also admits the limits of one’s own game, as Derrida did. Instead, Kristeva contrasts different types of ideologemes. In distinction to the paragram ideologeme, the sign ideologeme ignores production and space. A lecton (meaning, sign) is the denegation of dimension. By this Kristeva means that through representation and performance the theater itself, as praxis and game, fades into the background. The lecton is manifested as the loss of space and as death (as theatrical praxis). Its purpose is to function as a substitute for space and work. Space is reduced to a surface which only

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contains two alternatives: to be present and known, or to be unknown and absent. Here Kristeva is undoubtedly thinking about Heidegger’s notion of aléthéia. The polyphonic text of the paragram ideologeme cannot be ideological, as it does not have an ideological subject. The text is located in a constellation where different ideologies meet. Kristeva parallels Bakhtin by noting that a text is ideological only if it contains a coherence of consciousness, or the coherence of a speaking “I,” which guarantees the truthfulness of the ideology. Kristeva calls the science of the disintegration of the coherent “I” and therefore of the polymorphic “I” the translinguistic science, as it transcends the traditional subject/predicate structure. Kristeva attempted to link the analysis of signs to Marxism and thus to surpass in radicalism literature or philosophy. We have observed in this chapter on the “science” of semanalysis how Julia Kristeva’s scientific ambitions were intricately woven with political goals and attempts to present herself not only as an intellectual authority but also as a political one, rivaling in these Derrida for the first and Althusser for the second. This ambition led to the creation of a distinctive theory that exemplified French radicalism of the 1960s as a variety of speculative radicalism. In Kristeva’s semanalysis this speculative radicalism is further developed—due to the increasing symbolic arms race for intellectual distinction—to include old Buddhist concepts such as the zerologic subject as well as (by then) more familiar Russian formalist theories of the 1920s to challenge such immaterial opponents and competing power-ideas as logocentrism, the word or the sign. However, as we have seen, combining the less developed political radicalism (class struggle, critique of the bourgeois order, socio-historical situations) to a more developed version of speculative radicalism (totalization, critique of the established and of the determined, escape from the rule of One Meaning, sublimation of the external and marginal) that mobilizes a variety of power-ideas of the moment (materialism, production) creates numerous unresolved contradictions. The symbolic differentiation of these two registers is a parallel development to the institutional shift in Kristeva’s position in the French intellectual field from that of a marginal academic research assistant at the CNRS to a professor’s position in a Parisian university and regular visiting appointments at Columbia University. As Kristeva and her work was increasingly integrated into the French academic field in the 1970s (culminating in an appointment as full professor at the University Paris VII in 1974), the speculative ambition of uniting political and intellectual radicalism and the contradictions it created disappeared to give way to more introspective, politically conservative psychoanalytical and novelistic endeavors.

Chapter 5

Rebellion around Tel Quel Les frontières on s’en fout (To hell with boundaries) 1968

A “structuralism” boom characterized the second half of the 1960s. In 1966, the publishing company Le Seuil published Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits and Roland Barthes’ Critique et vérité; Gallimard Michel Foucault’s Les mots et choses; the leftist Edition Sociales Lucien Sebag’s Structuralisme et marxisme and Pierre Macherey’s Théorie matérialiste de la littérature; and the conservative Larousse A.J. Greimas’ Sémantique structurale. Even Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes published a theme issue on structuralism. In 1967, the moderate Catholic journal Esprit came out with its own theme issue on structuralism. Published were also Lucien Goldman’s Genèse et structure (Gallimard) and three books by Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Seuil), La voix et le phénomène (Presses Universitaires de France) and De la grammatologie (Minuit). The frenetic pace of publishing continued in 1968. Seuil published Philippe Sollers’ L’écriture et l’expérience des limites (Writing an the Experience of Limits) and Nombres, Tel Quel’s Théorie d’ensemble, Qu’est-ce-que le structuralisme?, coordinated by Seuil editor François Wahl, and in 1969 Julia Kristeva’s Σηµειωτιχη. Séméiotiké. Recherches pour une sémanalyse (in Greek letters in the original, to give it an additional distinctive flavor). After all this, no one could avoid being a structuralist or at least a passive supporter without the threat of being branded a counter-progressive and “out of it.” Young intellectuals were thrilled by these developments, as one of them testified: “Impression exaltante que tout va se débloquer-même le PC” (An exhilarating impression that everything was going to be unjammed—even the Communist Party) (Houdebine 2001: 52). This publishing activity demonstrated that the force and direction of the theoretical movement existed chiefly at the margins of the university establishment or entirely outside of it. The vitality and higher public profile of the developing intellectual culture contrasted with the conservativeness and slowness of the academic culture. This perpetual motion was reflected in the statements of the rising intellectual stars: (But) to participate in the revolution of thought, writing itself, while knowing that the text and revolution are homological since they both create a “mute” force of change, is much more difficult. It requires a certain power to produce ceaseless interpretation (Sollers 1968e: 10).

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The fusion of political and theoretical avant-gardes was nowhere clearer than in the activities of the review Tel Quel. The meetings of Tel Quel’s Group for Theoretical Studies that started in 1968 were Parisian mass events open to all, and resembled other similar events, especially Lacan’s seminars at the hotbeds of alternative theories and ideas, the Ecole normale supérieure and the Ecole pratique des hautes études. The Lacanian psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco who attended these events describes their atmosphere: For a year, the group attracts masses. The entire Parisian intelligentsia rushes into the midst of students in order to hear about the science of the unconscious, “différance”, the death of the author and the revolution through writing/text. Barthes, Derrida, Klossowsky and many others participate in these theatrical meetings. Lacan makes a somewhat hesitant appearance at the edge of a packed auditorium (Roudinesco 1986a: 541).

In 1968, Sollers published in Tel Quel’s publication series his collection of essays entitled Logiques, which in many ways is his most successful theoretical work. It consists of essays that he had published in Tel Quel between 1962 and 1967. Three years later, after it had been selling well, the collection was released as a paperback in the Point series under the sexier title of L’écriture et l’expérience des limites. The authors discussed by Sollers are from the circle of Barthes’, Derrida’s, Foucault’s and Kristeva’s commentaries: Dante, de Sade, Mallarmé, Artaud, Bataille and Lautréamont. However, Sollers differs from Derrida in one important respect: like Kristeva, he straightforwardly attempts to create a science of materialistic semantics (Sollers 1971a: 6) and, like the previous avant-gardes, to participate in the class struggle alongside the proletariat and against the bourgeoisie. Political struggle, therefore, guides Sollers’ theory just as much as purely theoretical problem setting. His theory cannot be read except through a dual approach where theoretical and political readings are inseparable. Sollers’ essays all take up the problem of being in the margins and the experience of the margins. Writing (écriture) enables him to move into the margins and to experience the censorship that tyrannizes the text, the text as text. Sollers refers to Nietzsche and the problématique of the death of God and its consequences (Sollers 1971a). The death of God proclaimed in Nietzsche’s Gay Science means the disappearance of the unlimited borders of the divine, thus opening to humans a world where the experience of borders sentences us to an impossible but necessary task: to eternally transcend borders, i.e. a world where the negativity of transgression is transformed into positive transgression. Through this move beauty and good are inseparably mingled with ugliness and evil. Endless transgression and the experience of horror are the hallmarks of modern aesthetics (see, for example, Ramoneda 1987: 44–7). Creation becomes identified with transgression, the endless (positive) transcending of borders, social norms and conventions. The language of transgression is the inverse language of the language of geography and topography—the language of philosophy par excellence—an inverse language that attempts to avoid the traps

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of the dichotomies concealed by geography. Because of this, writing leads to a new logic and a new concept of space that is no longer linear and horizontal but an n-dimensional volume. At the same time, the new topography avoids dichotomies and the moral and epistemological language residing in the old topography. About his work, Sollers notes: “The irreversible experience is every time a game, which in its complexity reveals shared problématique” (Sollers 1971a: 6). According to Sollers, the margins established by linear history are mysticism, eroticism, madness, literature and the unconscious. Sollers’ criticism, for its part, targets humanism, logocentrism, speech, linearity, and telos. In his essay “Dante et la traversée de l’écriture” he notes that humanism quickly petrified Dante’s work, which had been classified as unreadable, inhuman and monstrous (Sollers 1971a: 14). To Sollers, Dante had become de Sade’s kin. What is essential in Sollers’ reading of Dante and de Sade is not, however, certain ideas or how these are represented to the commentator (Sollers 1971a: 15). Sollers looks at literary works through the concepts of writing, thanatos and the margin (Sollers 1971a: 31 and 143). Writing is always a transgression that cannot be halted; it is a perpetual work of signifiers, a change that cannot be reduced to a work of literature, to linearity (which Sollers compares like Kristeva and Mäll with the panthat of Sanskrit (Sollers 1971a: 149–50)) or to a center, a hierarchy. Writing is an ocean, mathematics and a vortex. Only mathematical writing, which leads Sollers to number mysticism (Sollers 1971a: 189 and Sollers 1968b), can capture the conflicting identity of textual writing. Thus Sollers is able to say that de Sade has not been read yet. In fact, de Sade continuously renders questionable the ways of reading, i.e. the reception of a written work, which the bourgeois society upholds. Sollers criticizes the reading public for its ignorance and backwardness. Sollers links de Sade’s perversion with neurosis and speech: Through de Sade emerges the violent and holistic transformation of writing that has continuously been suffocated by idolizing speech. Transformation is not so much anarchy as a cosmogonic stratum that, by destroying and reforming the totality governed by a primitive game, battles the idea of a creation dependent on a final, halted and determined intent (Sollers 1971a: 49, 1983: 46).

The game, like creation, is a continuous destruction and creation. Writing reaches for the infinite and endless, as it cannot do otherwise. Following Nietzche’s critique of causality, Sollers criticizes the concept of “cause.” Following Nietzsche, he equates woman with anti-cause and the Law with cause. Sollers quotes de Sade who has noted that “perhaps the causes do not determine the effects” (Sollers 1971a: 49, 1983: 46). God is a cause that has been ingrained in us through fear and teaching. Sollers relies on psychoanalytic terminology and especially on the concepts of neurosis and perversion. Desire (désir) is a lack of boundaries and an endless and irresponsible energy that is channeled by the society. The society’s role is primarily limiting, and this limiting role provides its foundation. It is impossible for the individual to live his own language, and he thus has only two

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alternatives: neurosis or perversion (Sollers 1971a: 52). Through a critique of the concept of cause Sollers criticizes religion, which he calls the “most common form of neurosis,” a “hypostatization” where fiction is confused with reality. The concept of writing offers Sollers an opportunity for universal critique, since everything that limits, channels or renders questionable individual desire dooms the person to perversion and is thus in and of itself condemnable. Freedom comes from within the individual, whereas restriction comes from the outside. This also means that we cannot discuss the status of writing: it possesses the same Holy status as did dialectics as a power-idea at a certain phase of Sartre’s philosophy. Writing is the foundation of desire, sexuality, the body (Sollers 1971a: 59): it is an all-encompassing metaphysical principle. Of de Sade’s Juliette, or the Rewards of Vice Sollers (1971a: 60, 1983: 56) notes “society is located at the centre of ideology.” The society consists of arbitrary conventions and thus, according to Sollers, resembles Saussure’s concept of langue. In Sollers’ interpretation of de Sade, transgression becomes an infinite affirmation that is only reduced in itself and which commits the greatest imaginable crime: it actively transforms reality (réalité) into fiction (Sollers 1971a: 66), into a product of pure and unrestricted desire. In the Marquis de Sade’s text Juliette ou les Prospérités du vice, history becomes fiction. Real, genuine and objective historical narrative does not exist. Following Nietzsche, there are no facts, only interpretations. In spite of this, in Sollers’ mind de Sade also reveals the true nature of things, one that is hidden behind facades and appearances, the double game which people play. In Sollers’s logic, there is a short way from the proposition that “fiction is reality” to the conclusion that the world is a text. Sollers, like Kristeva (1974), sees Mallarmé, who in France is classified as a symbolist poet, as an early critic of the institution of literature, the first who saw the impersonality of the author as essential for literature. Behind words Mallarmé finds death, emptiness and madness. In Sollers’ interpretation, death and emptiness in turn lead to mysticism (Sollers 1971a: 120). Sollers re-interprets Mallarmé’s role as not so much trying to answer the question “what does that mean?” but as making an altogether different point: a text “does not ‘mean or wish to say’; it writes itself” (Sollers 1971a: 120). This interpretation is important for two reasons. Firstly, by thus emphasizing the movement of writing and critique of the representative function of language, Mallarmé together with Count Lautréamont performs a break with respect to earlier literature (Sollers 1971a: 171–2, 1983: 63–4). This break is similar to the break Althusser, following in this Bachelard’s epistemological theory, found in Marx’s work (ideology/science, humanism/antihumanism), which the prevailing ideology actively strives to suppress. Sollers is thus able to proclaim that it is a fundamental aesthetic mistake, as well as an economic-political mistake, to think that language (langage) is merely a tool for representation (Sollers 1971a: 71, 1983: 79). Sollers finds support for his interpretations from the fact that Mallarmé’s work “Coup de dés,” is a dissemination, deconstruction and atomic disintegration of a single sentence: “A toss of the dice will never abolish chance.”

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Revealingly, Mallarmé notes that the infinite loneliness of the writer is characterized by the “lack of a destination, at least of a social destination” [le manquement à la destinée, au moins social]. The author trots the unbeaten path, accepting death through the text, through literature: the text creates him and kills him. Sollers quotes and comments upon Mallarmé: Literature belongs to the future, and the future as Mallarmé writes, “never anything but the flash of what must have been produced previously or near the beginning.” By virtue of a strange circularity, the man who is nothing and the one who has nothing are thus profoundly joined, vis-à-vis those who possess and consequently believe themselves to be something. Mallarmé’s thought, then, is neither betrayed nor distorted if we affirm that his work was ultimately directed toward a single thought, a thought we might refer to, moreover, as the formal thought: that of revolution, in its most literal sense (Sollers 1971a: 86–7, 1983: 84).

Considering Mallarmé’s political choices, we can assume that he hardly would have agreed with Sollers. In any case, in Sollers’s interpretation, the author is nothing since he is simultaneously a product of and the victim of his own words: “to think is to write, to read is to read what we are” (Sollers 1971a: 79). Sollers links Mallarmé to his own formal revolution that, at the same time, is also inseparably a political revolution. According to Sollers, Mallarmé is a direct precursor and model for the science of the text developed by Tel Quel. Better than any other avant-garde, Tel Quel more clearly embodies the altruistic, moral, scientific and formal literary tradition. Solidarity between the proletariat and the author is chiefly metaphoric, as Sollers’ and Tel Quel’s future political development was to prove. The elite/the masses, the fundamental antimony of political philosophy, is only ostensibly solved. Sollers’ interpretation of Antonin Artaud, another totemic author, largely follows these same lines. Sollers notes that Artaud opposes thinking and knows that he has to go to extremes in order to question the very control over the subconscious that shapes our society and its logic (Sollers 1971a: 90). But instead of following Artaud’s example—Artaud had left the surrealist movement in 1927 when it started having closer tied with the Communist party—Sollers became an enthusiastic fellow traveler of the French Communist party. Artaud, by contrast, wanted to stay out of all institutions and political parties. Indeed, Artaud had noted “poetry is anarchic insofar as it calls into question all relationships between objects and between forms and their meanings” (quoted in Sollers 1971a: 97, 1983: 95). In order to get Artaud behind his political program, Sollers interprets Artaud largely through a critique of the dichotomy between thought and the body. About the significance of the body to writing, Sollers writes: An inner experience – let us understand: an experience of corporal writing (and it could be shown how, from Juliette to the Chants de Maldoror, to Le théatre et

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The emphasis on the body, language, and excess means that idealism remains on the level of the spirit and reversed idealism on the level of the body. Poetics is about non-codified thought that, paradoxically, is a unique and eternally repeatable experience (Sollers 1971a: 101–2). A central textual characteristic of Sollers’ essays is the dual movement of rationality (order, numbers) and irrationality (spontaneity, intuition). Sollers presents his texts, especially his analysis of Lautréamont (“La science de Lautréamont”), as serious texts. But at the same time, he emphasizes the irrationality of transgression, or, more precisely, that transgression cannot be studied scientifically (Sollers 1971a: 109). Sollers contrasts literary language with reality, which is rational, practical and ordinary. The novel becomes an independent aesthetic microcosm that follows its own rhythm and order. On the other hand, Sollers also notes that Bataille, for example, did not object to science, but was not wholly on its side either (Sollers 1971a: 73). Likewise, in his text Littérature et totalité, Sollers notes (1971a: 73) that Mallarmé thought that literature might be a science whose scientific model was linguistics. The relationship between literature and linguistics is very conflicting, however: in a note on page 112 Sollers discusses Bataille’s science by questioning the viewpoint he presented on page 109 about knowledge as an abstraction and a judicial approach. Likewise, when interpreting Lautréamont, he refers to Derrida’s De la grammatologie and the “science of the possibility of science” and the “science of the unmotivated trace,” two conceptual structures Derrida introduces to refer to the problématique of writing (Sollers 1971a: 141, 1983: 137). The qualification that the science in question is not traditional does not clarify the status of this new science. The conceptual confusion is further increased by Sollers’ talking about science as a petit bourgeois ideology, which is thus also a humanistic ideology (Sollers 1971a: 110–11). This leads him to write that the science in question does not pursue truth, since truth is not its object. In Sollers’ hands, science thus becomes an endless process of producing and destroying a text. In his attempt to define Bataille’s project, Sollers writes the following revealing sentences: Bataille is neither a “man of science” nor a “philosopher,” but he is above all not a “writer” or a “poet.” What is he? Nothing that can be expressed by a substantive, nothing the society we live in which we live can invest with positive value without falsification (Sollers 1971a: 111, 1983: 108–9).

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Bataille does not fit into the categories of the prevailing ideology. He is literally everything and nothing, a negation of classification. This status of an outsider undoubtedly also to some extent reflects Sollers’ own position, or his ideal of a philosopher. He himself, Bataille and other writers and thinkers he discusses are the “others” of Nietzsche (Nietzsche 1968: 114). These others are not located within the social and intellectual division of labor except by being rendered banal, which would be unfair if we wish to do justice to their originality and to the fact that they are unclassifiable. They themselves create their own categories. A scientist or a philosopher would undoubtedly brand Bataille a pseudoscientist and a pseudophilosopher (Sollers 1971a: 134, 1983: 127). This marginalization provides the opportunity to be something—for example a poet—without nevertheless being it completely. Alternatives are always the wrong alternatives. Indeed, Sollers places the concept of “science” in quotes, thus illustrating the distance he took from it. Quotes authorized him to move from a literal to a metaphorical meaning, whereby he could not be accused of scientism or irrationality. Others, however, were both or neither, depending on the situation. This derridean discursive logic that avoids a dualist vocabulary leads to a prolific use of mediating terms: non-sommeil (non-dream) and non-savoir (nonknowledge) (Sollers 1971a: 128 and 165, 1983: 108). These “concepts” bring Sollers’ theory closer to James Joyce’s writing in Finnegan’s Wake and to Jacques Derrida’s “concepts” of différance and pharmakon. These thinkers are guided by a new discursive economy that attempts to transcend antinomies. If traditional reflection resembled a game of roulette, where the ball would land on red or black, then here the ball does not land on either but rather moves endlessly between them. According to this logic, Sollers comments that the de Sadean monster does not fit the dichotomy inside/outside, but the space in between (Sollers 1971a: 57). The de Sadean monster is a magnifying glass through which pleasure flows. In a similar vein, Sollers writes the following about Lautréamont’s science, simultaneously distancing himself from surrealism and its interpretation of Lautréamont: Once again, nothing is free, nothing automatic, nothing confused, or tritely “rebelling,” nothing pseudo-transgressive in this clear state without any surrealism, one into which antinomy does not fit, at least not one like “old” and “new” (Sollers 1971a: 177).

In his attempt to link writing and the theory of text to the class struggle, Sollers follows two, partly contradictory textual strategies: on the one hand, in accordance with God’s death-logic, he questions causality, the body and the mind and several other dichotomies of the established theoretical discourse; on the other hand, he maintains the dichotomies representation/non-representation and humanism/ antihumanism. Sollers’ interpretation of these authors is thus polemical. Their inner contradictions seem to him to be a virtue rather than a vice. The shift from contradiction to virtue corresponds to the shift from irrationality to a higher-level

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intelligence that has observed its own contradictoriness and which, without being able to get rid of it, turns it into virtue and moral purity. When la pensée commune (everyday thinking) and philosophy, like the discourse of science, believe in getting away from the confines of language, the only remaining alternative in reality is death through text and the disintegration of philosophy and science in the world of game or play (Sollers 1971a: 136–7). Thus Sollers’ contradictory discourse becomes a “scientific” discourse par excellence, which, when linked to the class struggle and the potential for human liberation, is the one and only correct discourse. A central problem for Sollers’ “materialistic science” is the relationship between psychoanalysis and the class struggle, since as Sollers came closer to Lacan toward the end of the 1960s, he also clearly distanced himself intellectually and on a personal level from leading intellectual figures Althusser and Derrida. Theoretically, Althusser had in 1969 surrendered to a political authority, the central committee of the French communist party, the highest decision-making power in theoretical matters, as we can read in Althusser’s foreword to a new French translation of Marx’s Capital (for analysis see Descombes 1979: 158, Bowd 1999). To Sollers, this symbolic coup meant a greater dependence on Lacan, whose theory and psychoanalytic practice Sollers interpreted as opposing the university and political institutions such as the French communist party. At the same time, for Sollers and Kristeva psychoanalysis became the only legitimate way to step down from the level of theory to the level of practice. In 1974, Sollers wrote about Althusser and Derrida in a critical tone: Both in the matters he took up and in the form of his discourse, Lacan basically questioned the institution, including the psychoanalytic institution. This was intolerable, also to these two philosophers (Althusser and Derrida), both of whom represented a philosophy of “dividing the world”. As a literary avantgarde, we face the same problem, although it is represented in different historical and practical terms. We cannot yield to the discourse of the institution, and especially to the pernicious union of academic discourse and the conservative political machinery. If we yield, we might lose everything: the critical outlook and revolutionary nature of Marxism, which can only function in close contact with history and the society (and not as an academic subject under the auspices of a bourgeois university); the subversiveness of psychoanalysis (which cannot be weakened by academic attempts at integration); the development of the language of modern literature. I say that all of this can be lost, of course, to the political left (Sollers 1974b: 127–37).

Sollers attempted to equate Lacanian psychoanalysis, which he considered the only legitimate psychoanalysis, with the status of anti-institution. He noted that Althusser had positioned himself with the Communist party behind the shared program (Programme commun) of the communists and the Leftist Union (Union de gauche). In Sollers’ interpretation, this transformed political situation forced

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Althusser to publish a self-critical work (Althusser 1974) without putting into question the validity of his theory. About Derrida, Sollers claimed that he had become closer to the communist party (see also Houdebine 1984: 186 and 190, Kristeva 1992). The party used Derrida, viewed as an idealist philosopher (Tel Quel 1972: 2 and 19), as a stepping-stone for a more generalized critique of philosophy. This interpretation, however, is not supported by Derrida’s own statements (Derrida 1987a) any more than by recorded historical events. Central to Sollers’ pursuits was to use the examples of Althusser and Derrida to reinforce the notion that psychoanalysis was discriminated against in academia. Paradoxically, Sollers used the very same argument when defending Lacan, who at the time was doing a seminar on psychoanalysis at Ecole pratique des hautes études. Sollers declared that Lacan was an out-and-out anti-institutionalist, and thus Sollers’ kindred spirit. The reason for Sollers’ glorification of anti-institutionalism was that he himself worked as a novelist outside academia in the publishing house Le Seuil. This might explain why Lacan and Kristeva, for example, did not similarly propagate anti-institutional stances (see, for example, Certeau 1987: 195). Breaking off personal relations with both Althusser and Derrida literally isolated Sollers and his followers, both socially and theoretically. On the level of political ideology, however, Sollers steadfastly held on to his fundamental aim: to combine Marxism and psychoanalysis without returning to previous synthesis like freudo-marxism: “Freudo-marxism” does not exist and has not existed. This slanderous term used by Marxist or bourgeois ideologies in effect attempts to make it impossible to combine the theories and practices of historical and dialectical materialism and the Freudian unconscious. However, to us it seems that precisely these need to be linked (Sollers 1974c: 138–41).

Behind Sollers’ statements is a seemingly precise view of ideology (Sollers 1974c: 141–2): ideology’s influence on the relationship between language and the unconscious is manifested as idealism-metaphysics and anti-dialectics. Within psychoanalysis, idealism attempts to conceal ideology, which is manifested in theorization as a tendency towards the homogenous while ignoring the fact that what one is attempting to focus on can only be viewed from the perspective of heterogeneity. Another strategy of this ideology is to replace Freudian dualism with monism. Sollers no longer equates ideology with the transcendental signified nor does he consider it a complement to science, as he had done in his Althusserian and Derridean phase in the 1960s. Ideology is now anti-dialectics, monism and homogeneity. Even if concepts have changed, the rhetorical, cognitive and emotional significance of ideology nevertheless remains the same: to function as a mechanism for regulating, orienting and correcting theoretical and psychological tensions. Idealism influences psychoanalysis by preventing the processing of the

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problem of ideology. In other words, Sollers seems to be saying that idealism is a wider concept than ideology. Kristeva’s argument about ideology as a binary logic or the logic of the verdict is absent in Sollers’s theory. For Sollers, ideology becomes a problem between language and dialectics, one that is, however, subordinated to the problem of homogeneity/heterogeneity. Ideology seems only to be manifested in a homologizing discourse. Sollers expresses this as follows (Sollers 1974c: 141– 2): language without a subject, i.e. without psychoanalysis, is idealism; ideology without language, i.e. dialectics without the problématique of language, linguistics and psychoanalysis, is mechanistic materialism; and language and ideology without the theory of the subject, i.e. psychoanalysis, is metaphysical materialism. These three lead to the abstraction of or the destruction of class struggle. In a place devoid of ideology, certain interpretations of language, the subject and dialectics merge. In theory, this pattern follows the formula of the so-called semiological view of ideology (Kauppi 1985). Sollers clearly links dialectics and ideology. Ideology is not about difference and the process of differentiation; it is, however, about a certain interpretation of heterogeneity. Sollers’s argumentation is made clearer by the following comment: Understanding materialism as a component of the pair (idealism/materialism) – and, indeed, materialism cannot become defined as a node except in relation to idealism – is insufficient and threatens to undermine, as well as to remove, the scope and historical significance of the battle supporting and limiting philosophy. The pair idealism/materialism does not allow us to think about this fundamental discrepancy in the necessary way. In this sense, it would be best to say that there are two materialisms, or better yet, that materialism cannot be but a dual unity (historical materialism/dialectical materialism in the Marxist tradition.) Thus one phase of materialism would have been presented in the opposition materialism/idealism, while the other would be the cause of this juxtaposition (Sollers 1974a: 96–7).

In sum, the concept of materialism functions on two levels, and with this, Sollers is able to salvage the absolute primacy of materialism with respect to idealism. This move is analogous to saying that “male” and “female” are opposite terms, but that, for example, the term “female” would function on two levels: as the opposite of male, and as a term preceding the pair. “Female” would thus have absolute primacy in relation to “male.” Paradoxically, Sollers’ entire discourse takes causality as an a priori, otherwise he would not write a single line. The fulfillment of desire, which escapes causality and motivation, i.e. intention, leads him to adopt an ethos of rebellion and aestheticism. Desire and pleasure are in conflict with work if we understand pleasure as a shortcut, as immediate excess, and work as a detour that postpones consumption or excess. In Sollers’ discourse, we can differentiate between the

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world of theory where writing and the text are opposed to everything restricted and defined, and the practical world, the phenomenal world of Sollers’ text, where everything functions in accordance with convention. As this analysis of Sollers’ usage of the power-ideas of materialism and science demonstrates, these ideas were for him symbolic weapons that took different forms depending on the symbolic struggles in which he was engaged, against academia at one point, against Althusser and Derrida at another point. In the following chapter I will analyze how Sollers put into textual practice these symbolic power tools.

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Chapter 6

Sollerspierre, the Revolutionary of the Text Je suis marxiste, tendance Groucho (I am a Groucho Marxist) Nanterre, room C20, 1968

The rhetorical strategy of political revolution in the texts of writer/philosopher Philippe Sollers provides an example of the ways “revolution” was textually constructed. Sollers traced a revolution of thought through writing (écriture), which he conceptualized as a mute force of change. A Bataillian eternal transgression was the solution to the problem of ideology and illusion. Philippe Sollers’ “Programme,” published in Tel Quel (31/1967) six months after Kristeva’s ground breaking article “Pour une sémiologie des paragrammes,” can be considered one of the most important political and scientific manifesto of the 1960s. The essential points of Sollers’ revolutionary program—which Roudinesco calls the manifestation of intellectual terrorism (Roudinesco 1986a: 532)—were: 1. A comprehensive theory (théorie d’ensemble) derived from the practice of writing demands to be elaborated; 2. The theory of textual writing takes shape (se fait) in the movement of this writing’s practice; 3. The theory of textual writing’s history may be termed “monumental history” insofar as it serves as a “ground” (fait fond) in a literal way, in relation to a “cursive,” figural (teleological) history which has served at once to constitute and dissimulate a written/exterior space; . The theory, which applies only to texts, is, therefore, insofar as it reads them (les fait lire) in their “monumentality,” the punctuation, the scansion, the spatial distribution of texts. It is by definition plural. It goes by the name logics (Sollers 1967: 3–10, 1983: 6–8). Following the prevailing theoretical fad, Sollers avoids terms such as fundamentalism, expression and teleology. He wants to formulate a science based on the logics of texts. Strategic points in Sollers’ program are madness, mysticism, eroticism, and literature as a break. According to Sollers, all of these were targets of repression by the dominant ideology. Madness and eroticism were absolute threats to the dominant ideology and the French bourgeois order. In contrast to “ordinary,” linear and teleological texts, Sollers’ text was n-dimensional and “scientific.” Science had to leave behind the linear view of time that repressive ideology relied on, and had to bring forth a non-linear time that would not fall into teleology and logocentrism. Sollers’ strategic areas, which he

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linked to the history of reading/writing, provided an antithesis for the dominant and repressive ideology. The task of this new history was to concentrate on censored texts and gaps and differences within and between texts. Blank spaces or gaps referred to Althusser’s symptomatic reading. Blank spaces were also a metaphor for the not-yet-said. Blank spaces were linked to textual writing as the continuous destruction/creation of language, its continuous transgression, its being in the area between dream and waking states, the border between normal and anormal, its being in the fold in a Derridean sense. Writing and text created a permanent feast where the pain of writing was replaced by endless textual fireworks, where the author did not need to be anything, as everything would in any case have changed since everything was equally worthless/valuable. Everything was destroyed and nothing prevailed. There was no longer any a priori linearity, teleology or expressivity in texts, as they would have led back to the subject and to psychology. They had disappeared in the movement of the text. The de-realizing effect of discourse was taken to the extreme, taking the form of “nonpresence” and silence. The text turned into a group of word fetishes (Meaning, Logos, Work etc.), which in the symbolical game were linked to a variety of textual topoï (repression/freedom, power/freedom, bourgeoisie/intelligentsia … ). The politization and the scientification process led by Kristeva and Sollers— the new generation’s Sartre/de Beauvoir—unleashed a storm of criticism on the pages of cultural journals. As early as January 1968, the author Bernard Pingaud, close to Sartre and representing thus a very different type of political engagement, published an article entitled “Where is Tel Quel going?” (Pingaud 1968a: 8–9). Pingaud argued that Tel Quel’s discourse was becoming excessively theoretical and metaphorical. Everything was happening “as if a description would create a meaning, as if the unconscious were a language, as if a text were a revolution.” According to Pingaud, it was insane to contrast bourgeois writing with revolutionary writing. Excessive use of analogy led to contradictory results, since Sollers was a bourgeois author publishing for a bourgeois audience through a bourgeois press. Pingaud also thought that the questioning of all ideologies including the ideology of representation (traditional literature) and the ideology of participation (Sartre and existentialism) shrouded Tel Quel’s own ideology, which he called the denial of the signified. It offered the Telquelians a substitute for experience. The signified naturally cannot exist without the signifier, and text/writing is always a form of expression also, not just a game of the signifier. Roughly speaking, Pingaud had two objectives: firstly to show that Tel Quel’s science of the text was nothing more than ideology, and secondly that an author must choose either concrete revolutionary activity or writing which results in the denial of revolutionary ideology. In his critique, Pingaud returned to the existentialist’s setting which Tel Quel and the young generation of intellectuals it represented was attempting to get away from through its revolutionary and scientific writing. Pingaud’s critique forced Sollers as the leader of Tel Quel to analyze the contradiction between textual theory and intellectual activity. Pingaud implied that Sollers’ solution was only a pseudosolution. Pingaud articulated the non-resolved contradictions and non-reversible

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dichotomies between action and theorizing, or writing, of the entire preceding intellectual style and its philosophy. Sollers’ reply to Pingaud was entitled “Réflexe de réduction” (Sollers 1968e: 10–12), where he accused Pingaud of simplifying things and of not understanding the issues. According to Sollers, Pingaud’s article was not carefully researched and its purpose was purely polemic. In his reply, Sollers in a schoolmaster’s manner presented the canonical theories of the science of writing. Lacan, Saussure, Derrida and Kristeva formed the foundation from which Sollers’ argumentation proceeded. Sollers declared that a critique of Tel Quel’s works would require a meticulous reading of the texts whereas in his article Pingaud had referred to “a few superficial generalizations, a series of incoherent ‘jumps.’” The leader of Tel Quel proceeded to briefly discuss a number of emblematic totems of the science of the text, Breton among the surrealists, Tynianov and Jakobson from the field of linguists, as well as Lacan, Barthes and Derrida. Sollers had the following to say about the central role of Derrida’s thinking: It is true that the work carried out by Derrida is so impressive that the way in which it has been received—recognized so to speak, and also more widely underrated and refused to be recognized—would warrant a separate essay. Let us just say that no intellectual thought process can avoid positioning itself in relation to this event (Sollers 1968c: 12).

As could be expected, the main focus of Sollers’ criticism was Pingaud’s Sartreism and his dichotomization of revolutionary activity and texts/authorship. In fact, this dichotomy questioned the credibility of the new solution to the relationship between theory and action presented by Sollers. According to Sollers, text/writing specifically attempts to avoid sanctification, and he therefore could not accept the kind of simple reduction Pingaud was proposing. Sollers, nor any theorist of the text, did not explicitly define what he meant by the term writing or écriture. A better translation would be scription, as Roudiez points out (Roudiez 1982: 1–20). In Finnish, for example, we can differentiate between kirjoitus, the way in which something has been marked down, the phenomenological level of text, and kirjoittaminen, the act of writing and more generally, the production—and the process of production—of a text. In French (as in English), however, the same term écriture (writing) is used for both. Sollers systematically plays with these two conceptual levels. Sollers’ response also contained a more polemic section where he accused Pingaud of falsifying texts and manipulating quotations. After Sollers’ response, Pingaud was given one more turn. According to Pingaud, having to choose between politics or writing did not mean that one would need to give up being rebellious in one’s writing, but it did mean that one had to give up posing as a revolutionary through one’s writing. Sollers confused the text with the world, and thus also writing with concrete political action. Pingaud accused Sollers of speaking in metaphors and mixing reality and language through a kind of “ultranominalism”

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and by ignoring the reference. It was idealism to interpret the text as reality. The debate between Pingaud and Sollers reveals the main theoretical contention point, the contradiction between writing (theory) and politics (action). The dust of the Pingaud-battlefield had not yet settled when, in early 1968, Sollers published two books, Logiques and Nombres. In these works, Sollers notes that his aim is to escape from representation onto a different stage, bodily material, which in turn requires a different kind of logical and rhythmic working method (Sollers 1968d: 3–4). In his novel Nombres, Sollers proclaims that the author does not exist at all, the text was thus not a phenomenological text. In relation to phenomenology, Sollers notes that his text does not aspire to represent anything that would be prior to or be deeper than words, in other words a subject or truth. The only world was the world of words. A text is always written in relation to other texts. Therefore, texts cause chain reactions which destroy the finished book and with it also the author. The text transcends the material entity formed by the book. The term “intertextuality” developed by Kristeva following Bakhtin is a handy intellectual schema, since all texts and books are, by definition, linked together. But for Sollers, the text becomes a quasi-metaphysical principle that buries everything under itself and approaches mysticism (“In the beginning, was the Verb … ”). Through the concept of text it is possible to create a science of the text that, by definition, is more general and fundamental than subject, author, book or literature. However, Sollers got into trouble when he was asked why he had signed his work. How was it possible to combine collective work—the metaphor that united Marxism and avant-garde theoretical production—and genius? For instance, the futurist Soviet poet Khlebnikov had been more consistent, as he had refused to sign his books and only used them as pillows on long train journeys across Soviet Russia (Bradbury and MacFarlane 1976: 259–72). The problem of signing delineates the areas of writing/non-writing. Despite everything, the author is still always an individual who makes his/her work his/her own. The logical continuation of the science of the text would be the disappearance of the author in the form of the disappearance of the signature. Sollers answered the question why he had signed his book Nombres in the following Lacanian fashion: [I signed it] because the published text is not a real (réel) text. The published, visible text is but a part of the global work that has produced this result. It is, if you may, a relic. What remains must be signed (Sollers 1968d).

Without his signature, Sollers would have been the prisoner and product of the real text. With his signature, by contrast, he controlled it. Paradoxically, his text questioned the cult of the individual while simultaneously supporting it. In Sollers’s view, there was nothing contradictory in this. Undersigning, signing under, as the end (“the last word”) and as the foundation (“the first word”), the acceptance of the text and the responsibility it carries, at the same time gives the author’s name to the text, reinforces and creates a text which remains a product, outside.

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Signing revealed a borderland where individual experience and the mystical and metaphysical dimension of transgressive philosophy met. Signing grounded the subject and put him/her into a controlling position with all the connotations (consciousness, linearity … ) as opposed to a quasi-metaphysical text that in turn is “scientific” and impersonal. However, for Sollers to be able to show that he is the product of the signifiers’ work—one who, at the same time, also works like a proletarian—he would have to reveal the principles underlying his work. Then the danger would be that by explaining his writings Sollers would return to the ideology of representation, the subject and consciousness. This conflict is irreconcilable. The same trap would also await other theorists of the text, like Derrida commenting on his texts (Derrida 1972). Sollers’ text Nombres was organized like a theatre with four sides: one side was written in the present tense, and three sides in the imperfect tense. The imperfect tense symbolized history, while the present tense symbolized the present. “A side is the index of empty volume where the basic elements are born: atoms, numbers, letters.” The volume found its theoretical equivalents in the unconscious, in Plato’s chora (Plato 1981: Steph. 49), Kristeva’s phenotype and Derrida’s différance. These concepts form another level that cannot be brought back to the expressivity of language, the subject and concepts linked to the subject (speech, consciousness … ). They also escape Hegelian totalizing, the self-motion of the Spirit. According to the political philosophy of the theory of the text, the structures of language limit the individual who, steered by instinctual drives and the underground functioning of language, thus becomes an eternal rebel or, to use a telling analogy that essentially means the same thing, an aesthete and an artist. A second stage, where the unconscious, gram, writing, différance, being an outsider and heterogeneity met, offered in Sollers’ view an inexhaustible area of theoretical reflection where one could successfully link together literature and politics: We have arrived at a stage where there exists the possibility for dialectically linking change in language with revolutionary practical and social change. This has been the goal of all avant-gardes, the Russian formalists and futurists with Mayakovsky, the surrealists with the great problems they set for themselves. In my view, we trust their formulations too much (quoted in Brodier 1972: 13).

Sollers noted that his text was a theatre—on one side knowledge, on the other ignorance—without a deus ex machina. This crystallized the theoretical formulation of the science of the text. The text had no choirmaster, no author. At the same time, through the eternal, unending movement of the text, it destroyed the bourgeois relativist text. According to Sollers, “nothing comes for free and no revolutionary truth is ever definitively signified” (quoted in Brodier 1972: 13). The first level of Sollers’ text, its phenomenal level, consisted of quotations that led back to the canonical texts of transgressive philosophy, as well as to

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Leibniz and Lucrecius. The second level was their interpretation. The third level was a numerical order formed out of the number 100 [(1+2+3+4)2]. This level symbolized an order that was new relative to the prevailing order. In this formal organization—which was clear, had a single interpretation and was logical— there was to be found, according to Sollers, the essential element of his text’s revolutionary nature. The new text was a critique and a reorganization of the form of the prevailing order. The fourth level was formed by the text’s not having a writer. In Sollers’s mind, the lack of a writer, owner and creator was analogous to the impersonality of science. Sollers’ thoughts about revolution as a form were close to Barthes’s theory, which he further developed in his critiques of Sollers’s work. Barthes’s review article of Sollers’ texts was aptly titled “Le refus d’hériter” (Barthes 1968: 35, 1979: 47–54): “Revolutionary thought has died in the West. From now on, it exists elsewhere.” The revolution that Barthes described as primarily a formal phenomenon consisted of questioning the subject in a western sense. In Barthes’s interpretation, Sollers was first and foremost attempting to rebel against the “political language of our fathers”: Our fathers in this case are the leftist intellectuals and writers who have monopolized the antistalinist battle during the past two decades. Their political stance (mode d’inscription politique) now has to be unwritten (doit être désécrit), to be written in a contradictory, ‘scandalous’ manner. ‘Communism à la Tel Quel’? Why not, if it means that the anticommunism, which has fed (and overfed) the leftist intelligentsia, is removed from writing and if together with it—and this must not be forgotten—the traditional anti-formalism of communist intellectuals is also removed from writing? (Barthes 1968: 35).

Barthes’ provocative text placed Sollers in diametrical opposition to the predominant leftist intellectual style and its power-ideas. Sollers’ new style attempted—without concern for contradiction, irrationality or antiintellectualism—to bring about new criteria of readability, a new relationship between the writer and the reader, and in doing so to tear down traditional categorizations and implicit agreements. The propagation of transgression clearly indicated that Sollers was the champion of rebellion in accordance with the formalist ideology. Barthes continued: Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Roussel, Artaud and Bataille, whom Sollers discusses in Logiques, are the first to use this other language. Their writing is in no way a style or a fashion which one would join due to “taste” (according to this old Voltairean tradition which reduces all phenomena to their smallest possible cause) but an act of denegation which is intended to shake the natural rights of old texts and to remove from use those concepts [subject, reality (réel), expression, description, narrative, meaning (sens)] upon which their creations and reading rested (Barthes 1968: 35).

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Barthes sought support from the symbolists (Lautréamont, Mallarmé) and the philosophers of transgression without going so far as to use their aesthetic superiority as an argument, since that would have led back to the trap of the prevailing ideology, the reduction of literature to aesthetics. The modernization process of literature took place through these writers and thinkers. Backing them became a moral obligation, the choice of good over evil. Barthes cited the importance of the example set by painting to the development of literature. In painting, immense changes had taken place between Paul Cézanne and Marcel Duchamp. In Barthes’ mind there was no doubt. Sollers was literature’s Duchamp: The stake was the same in both: from a page to canvas, and with it to the target which Sollers calls “the line” as opposed to “the voice,” the mythical organ of expression. With the help of the line, writing sets itself outside, into interaction with those writings through which the world which is in motions writes itself (Barthes 1968: 35).

Because of this analogy, the development of literature acquired a linear form: it has to get away from the ideology of representation in order to be radical. However, the analogy covers up some differences. A text could create a world if the border between the real and imaginary fades away. A text, such as Hegel’s theory of state, can have a concrete effect on world history. Discourse solved the unsolvable conflicts of reality and enabled detachment from everyday reality. The relationship between representation and reference was purely conventional, but this did not by any means mean that meanings could be created through individual decision. The analogy between painting and literature concealed the very fact that literature was perhaps more essentially a tool for political power, and language the product of social interaction. It was this social aspect that Barthes’ assessment largely ignored, and for this very reason it was possible for him to develop a purely formal analogy between painting and literature: What is the relationship of all of this to revolution? A writer can only be defined through his/her work. From the perspective of this work, revolution is first and foremost a form, the form of the ultimate difference, the difference that does not resemble anything. In face of the new historical situation, Sollers uses this to his advantage: he utilizes the long-censored principle that there cannot be an analogous relationship between revolution and literature, only a homologous one. Why should a revolutionary copy reality, as in doing so s/he would be forced to use the bourgeois language par excellence, the language of copying? (Barthes 1968: 35).

A closer look at another text of Sollers’s reveals some of the textual strategies that he used to attempt to fuse theoretical and political radicalism. In “Support/ surface” (Sollers 1969), Sollers diametrically opposes “analytical process” with “institution.” “Subversion” is the opposite of “reformism,” “religion” and “rules.”

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“Matter,” “new symbolical control” and, paradoxically, “non-thinking” (3) are linked, with the aid of Marxism, to revolutionary activity, which is equated with “work” and “theory.” Theory forms a “divided,” “non-uniform,” “non-integrable” and “non-hierarchical heterogeneous space” (4). From a psychoanalytic-Marxist perspective, “non-thinkable matter” is thus determined negatively through everything that it is not, or, better, through that which it has never been nor will ever be. “Work” is a place which has no “privileges,” that is “pluralistic” and which attempts to shake the foundations of society and its “nervous system, its ways of revealing itself and its immobile linguistic network” (4–5). The battle is between good and evil, which through linguistics is escalated into a battle between institution and non-institution. The tyranny of “Church fathers” finds its opposite in Marxism, which opposes “bourgeois idealism and a materialistic position” thus remaining outside the “information hegemony” (5). Basing his views on the authority of Althusser, Sollers asserts “the present technocratic and positivistic ideology” and “dominant positivism” force “dialectical materialism to fight against scientist empirism” (6). In addition to Althusserian and Lacanian vocabulary, Sollers finds an ally in Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, which according to Sollers, literally perform a “perfect critique” (7) when it challenges the “privileged status of the speaking subject” and creates a space for “a second stage.” The “second stage” acts as a mythical space where Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and the science of the text meet, thus forming a platform of resistance to idealism and bourgeois ideology. Opposing the “subject-substance” and “western metaphysics,” the “second stage” helps bring about political revolution. Moving to the outside is manifested in Sollers’ texts as countless metaphors, “qualitative leaps,” “shifts,” “mutations” and “slides.” Moving to the outside represents the move from false knowledge to real knowledge, a distancing and objectifying process after which it would be possible to displace the axes of reference and perform the desired symbolical revolution. Elevating the outside, the unconscious and materialism as well as related power-ideas, serves the purpose of equating the functions of these concepts with one another. Thus, a critique of one concept leads to a critique of them all, resulting in the simultaneous mobilization of these concepts. The central discursive strategy is to legitimize the hierarchy of values by turning the bottom tiers of the hierarchy (empirism, positivism, western metaphysics, idealism, scientism, positivism etc.) into targets of different textual strategies of devaluation. Following the rhetoric of Marx’s German Ideology, Sollers renders ridiculous the discourse of his opponents. He equates “controlled discourse” with “the grimacing mask of reformist social democracy,” the “verbal sewing circle” dressed in “a spiritual garment.” Its “mediocre dream of a verbal bureaucracy” forces opposing discourses to adopt a “relentless brutality” (13) without leaving “a single area protected” as it acts “on the ruins of literature or the arts” (9). Since he wants to avoid anything smelling of the commonplace, Sollers classifies his opponents as mediocre, caricaturing them as bureaucrats, whose primary criterion

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of excellence is to remain impersonal. In addition to ridicule, Sollers creates a so-called determination effect. The purpose is to create the impression that in the past, in the future, or any other time things have happened, are happening or will happen in the same way as things happen in Sollers’s discourse. Thus, “evidence everywhere shows” (3) “the founding of a history which already … has been classified as textual” (7), “in principle a new way to read goes away permanently” (8), “only a practice like this can avoid” (8), “a science which would—which will be—a science of ideologies, demands …” (9), “if we consider that in the near future it will not be possible to forget or censor this kind of reality” (14) and “from now on a linear series will begin.” Close to the determination effect is the creation of a sense of urgency: “Unprecedented breakthrough” (8), “a new way to read” (7), “we are already approaching a certain very universal, but also very urgent aspect of the issue” (14). In this text, Sollers equates institutions with everything old: tradition, obligations, invariability, patriarchal rule, tyranny, the imaginary, idealism and the illusory. An institution’s phenomenality, thematism, empirism, scientism, positivism, impressionism and psychologism represent everything that is forced upon us. This symbolic area corresponds to the determined aspects of human existence, those without alternatives and thus without real significance. By contrast, the forces that oppose institutions are freedom, work, materialism, difference, game, process, novelty and truth. Transgressive philosophy, as the sublimation of symbolic transgression, is the codification and systematization of the negation of this social order that devalues sexuality, rebellion, revolution and the exotic. The apocalyptic tone of Sollers’ text is colored by medical metaphors such as “to cleanse” or “aseptic,” as if at issue was a collective textual cleansing process, a pre-emptive catharsis to fight evil. In Sollers’ discourse, symbolic revolution is a goal to strive for. His discourse adopts a commanding tone, and the arguments do not need to be proved, as in the parallel textual world causes and effects follow automatically from one another. There is no interval between a wish and its fulfillment (for analysis see, for example, Mauss 1985: 56). Sollers’ apocalyptic approach leads him to anticipate a “massive counterattack” and foster a siege mentality. Whenever possible, Sollers attempts in this text to present Tel Quel, and the knowledge it possesses as esoteric knowledge. Tel Quel represents a minority in possession of the truth and the victim of a conspiracy. The persecution of the group and its allies is manifested as “pseudo-revolution” (16) and “halfconsciousness,” as the group itself is the real revolutionary vanguard. The “inevitable and permanent” consequences of Marxist and psychoanalytic theories are constantly facing “petit-bourgeois” efforts to obscure them. On another level, Sollers’ text creates between himself and the reader a shared history, shared memories and causes for celebration. The significance of shared assumptions between Sollers and reader is emphasized with such phrases as “since we well know that …,” “naturally,” “in this instance” etc. Sollers’s objectivity and control of the issues are, in turn, supported by expressions such as “for example” (he provides only one example while implying he could provide several), “but not

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only” (he provides several examples), and “in actual fact” (he reveals a previously unknown causal relationship), etc. Sollers’ discourse attempts to generalize local interests by cloaking them in the guise of anti-institutionalism and marginality. In so doing, he uses selfsuggestion to reinforce this relative isolation through various symbolic strategies and discursive mechanisms while concealing the terrorist characteristics of his own activities. Thus he can bring together both the advantages of an institution— discursive predictability in the form of systematic transgression—and the advantages of anti-institutions—altruism and morality. Under the pretext of antiinstitution it is possible to rely on Indian philosophy (8), China, the Orient or Chinese characters, and to use them to confront the western alphabet, imperialism and bourgeois ideology. “Confrontation” finds its homology in the “outside,” the “forgotten,” the “oppressed” etc. In their texts, Barthes and Sollers make two strategic moves: first in relation to Sartreism and world views preceding it, which attempted to change the world by describing it, i.e. by providing information about it, and secondly in relation to the language of copying and representation, which they equate with bourgeois language. The first of these moves aimed at creating a qualitative difference and distinguishing non-modern from modern, and the second move aimed at equating and reducing the ideology of representation into the political establishment. Real world political events had a limited value: “Bréhal (Barthes, NK) was there (Tel Quel’s analysis group meeting, NK), of course. He took an aloof attitude to the ‘vulgarity’ of the May ‘events’” (Kristeva 1992: 108–9). In closing his article, Barthes pondered what kind of a revolution in text Sollers’ writing would cause. Symptomatically indicating the gulf between theory and practice, following the opening section of Sollers’ Nombres he equated writing with fire.

Chapter 7

“Sciences” of Meaning, Work and the Unconscious La nouveauté est révolutionnaire, la vérité aussi (Novelty is revolutionary, so is truth) Censier 1968

In a similar manner to Jacques Derrida, philosophers Jean-Louis Baudry and Jean-Joseph Goux combined in their theories—materiology and numismatics respectively—Marx, Saussure, and Freud. Baudry analyzed historically the metamorphosis of materialism, while Goux examined the homologies between money, meaning, and political power. In contrast to deconstruction, materiology and numismatics are “failed” theories that never made to the pantheon of “French theory.” While Baudry and Goux were both quite visible thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s, they were outsiders, in positions of dominated-dominated, for different reasons. Baudry was by profession a dentist and by hobby a philosopher, film theorist and novelist. Goux, for his part, exited the French intellectual field by accepting a teaching position in the US. They did not operate as full-time professional intellectuals and consequently could not insert themselves efficiently in powerful collaborative circles. Furthermore, they produced their theories after the major works by Derrida and Kristeva. Symbolically they were thus more the followers of Derrida than pioneers of speculative thinking. In 1968, Tel Quel publishes a collective work entitled Théorie d’ensemble. On one hand, the title refers to a collective, a jointly created theory that has a common denominator, and on the other to mathematics, the paradigm science of sciences and its theory of sets. In the foreword to the 1980 paperback edition of the work, Sollers noted the following: What is most essential about this book is based on a dream: to bring together reflection, and to use it to launch a general revolution. This “coming together” emerged from a burning awareness of the potential powers of literature, which the established and rooted repression attempted to belittle, slow down and oppress. Literature is thus not in the service of theory, as nearly everyone seemed to believe about Tel Quel at the time, but precisely the opposite. The sciences of language, philosophy, psychoanalysis helped to isolate the fabric of fiction, which is, to put it straight, endless (Sollers 1980: 7–8).

More clearly than any other publication of the 1960s, this book was linked to the avant-gardist theoretical tradition represented by the Russian formalists and

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futurists as well as the surrealists. Sollers admitted that each of the contributors to the book had, after its publication, retreated to their own corner. With hindsight, he noted: That is a pity. This collection caused concern precisely because it did not respect boundaries, institutions or specialties. It shocked the scientific rationality, philosophical arrogance, literary indolence (unforeseen indolence), and the control of the publishing markets, which was increasingly becoming subject to the imperatives of fiscal management. It spoke to the university, and may yet do so again. It revealed those thousands of pages printed in the past that were guided by the desire to renounce knowledge, and, from its tumultuous subjectivism, posed questions to knowledge. Briefly put, the program meant juxtaposing oneself and an endless debate (Sollers 1980: 7–8).

The theory of the set had been preposterous. But Sollers kept the essential: the strict dichotomy between knowledge produced within the university and outside of it, a dichotomy that, undoubtedly, had only become more pronounced. However, this dichotomy could not be taken all that strictly, since many of the participants in the collective work, such as Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva, were at the time working within institutions of higher learning or research. In fact, they never left them. Several important texts that never made it to the canon of French theory were published in the book. Jean-Louis Baudry’s article “Freud et la création littéraire” discusses Freud’s production from the perspective of writing and representation. Baudry attempts to find in Freud’s work the reasons that have kept psychoanalysis ensnared by speech and representation and prevented it from finding a textual fabric. To a relatively large extent, the article builds on Jacques Derrida’s essay “Freud et la scène de l’écriture.” Baudry looks at Freud’s works from the perspective of textual dynamics and production. He is interested in how Freud interpreted the productions of artists, creators and poets. Baudry’s aim is to analyze how Freud used the term representation. Baudry linked his theory to concrete changes in the society. In another work, Baudry noted that within the petit bourgeoisie, a group of active people was gradually emerging, forming a conscious avant-garde: In the class struggle, the conscious avant-garde would thus be in the service of the proletariat, a specialized organ within the revolutionary organization, one whose role would be to neutralize ideology and its effects through direct action focused on the places where this ideology is being produced (Baudry 1971: 59).

On the whole, his argumentation differentiated the working of the signifier, the text and the petit bourgeois avant-garde from the bourgeoisie. In this way, Baudry justified a theoretical monopoly, and in this process the petit bourgeoisie thus

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defined became a crucial factor in the battle against ideology. The petit bourgeoisie superseded the proletariat. Sollers used a similar textual strategy of creating an intermediary, third category, in his essay “L’ouest s’éloigne”: Just as we must maintain the break between science and ideology, we must also write a second break between ideology and the text … To not know the third term of the break (the text) would mean to simplify the break, to re-ideologize it, or, to be more precise, to break it off of language, to sever its tongue (Sollers 1971f).

Thus the text always takes the side of science, and ideology positions itself to oppose the science of the text as Sollers is developing it: to criticize Sollers is automatically to be ideological. But at the same time that science is identified with the text and materialism, and ideology with idealism, we are dealing with a battle between ideas—immaterial entities—where materialism throughout history takes different forms (for example, taoism=materialism, Confucianism=idealism). This indeed is the fundamental idea of Baudry’s new science, materiology: to be the science of the historical variations of the metaphysical battle between two powerideas materialism and idealism. Baudry notes the following about his new branch of science: Ideological battle is permanent. It is always the same antagonism and battle, the battle of materialism against the prevailing idealism. We will call the study of this battle, its various fields, its various forms … by the name materiology (Baudry 1971: 51).

According to the Marxist-Leninist journal Cinéthique, this theorizing aims to neatly combine in one packet Saussurean linguistics, Marx’s theory and psychoanalysis, by using homologies between structures, identifying historical time and using similar methodologies (Cinéthique 1971: 47). These homologies and the identity of historical time (the myth of One Time) are manifested also in Kristeva’s semanalysis, in Jean-Joseph Goux’s numismatics and in Sollers’ monumental history as the universal science of values. Goux attempted to bring together in a great synthesis the forms of economic and signifying production (see Goux 1970: 212n, 218n): the primitive form of production, iconographic and pictographic writing, control of the unconscious; the Asian form of production, ideographic and pre-conscious writing; the form of production of the ancient Greeks and Romans, alphabetical and conscious writing; and the capitalistic form of production—the après coup of the ancient Greek and Roman form of production—an alphabetical, idealistic and monetary economy which is ruled by the signifier “phallus.” Compared to Baudry, Goux’s text “Marx et l’inscription du travail” has a somewhat different perspective. The focus of numismatics, Goux’s new science, is values. His objective is to find structural homologies between the texts of Marx and Freud, and to reveal the logic of history. According to Goux, Saussure’s sign

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not only has exchange value, but also utility value (Goux 1968: 174), which the dominant ideology has concealed. Goux’s fundamental idea is that, by a circuitous route, this utility value is also a means of production: Just like a product is the means of production for other products (a circuitous route by which other products are produced—through the wasteful use of a given labor force) signs (entities formed by signs, or parts of such entities) form the means of production of other signs (other sign combinations) (Goux 1968: 173–4).

The work of the signifier as the process of meaning formation, has been repressed by bourgeois ideology at the expense of the exchange process of the sign—in other words, the circulation of signs or their communicative function. With the aid of another homology, Goux links the study of the process of producing meaning to Freud’s meaning—preceding silent work of the unconscious and to Marx’s analysis of the emergence of money which he presented in the first book of Capital. In other words, Goux finds a homology between the linguistic sign and the favoring of exchange values between material objects, a homology that also reveals a shared genetic process and structure formation. It is precisely through studying these that Goux is able to present the dialectic logic of the symbolization process. Starting with the homology between the sign and the material object, Goux deduces that everything that precedes the sign—or, more precisely, the process of writing or the trace and work—is the target of repression by the bourgeois ideology. Goux identifies the exchange value of the sign with speech, or, more widely, with communication, and thus manages to group behind his project Jacques Derrida’s analyses of the writing/spoken act. In a Derridian fashion, Goux formulates his outcome as follows (Goux 1968: 183): Thus it is revealed that logocentrism and the fetish of material objects and money are co-conspirators. Generally speaking, just as “circulation obliterates the limits set by time, place and the individual for the exchange of products” (Capital I, Chapter III) and thus enables the hypostasis of value, so also the hypostatized meaning (logos) is not only the outcome of the concealment of the value of the productivity of signs, but also of parenthesizing the production relationships of signs.

Goux criticized Saussure for having shut the process of sign production outside of linguistic analysis. Saussure had written: “The tool used for producing the sign is totally irrelevant, since it does not interest the system … From the perspective of meaning, it is totally irrelevant whether I write letters in black or in white, embossed or engraved, with a feather or with scissors” (Saussure 1960: 165–6). In his critique, Goux follows the critique elaborated by Derrida and Kristeva, among others.

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Baudry and Goux attempt to advance the science of text/writing, the sign and the text. An overall theoretical goal is to link together the working of the dream, work, and the production of significance. On one side of this theoretical setting we find capital, speech and consciousness, on the other labor, writing as a scriptural operation, and the unconscious. In this way, via numerous homologies and with the precision of a theoretical surgeon, a division into two opposing camps is neatly achieved. The objective is to bind together a non-working, speaking bourgeois ideology which functions only on the level of consciousness, and to juxtapose it with a revolutionary ideology that automatically is on the side of the working-class and the proletariat. On one side there are culture and the bourgeoisie, and on the other is labor and the working-class. The work-like nature of intellectual activity brought every intellectual worker closer to the working class. In Dialectique et histoire, Goux notes: Thus the critique of political economics which exposes the fetish of money and the reification of exchange value, and which writes itself into historical materialism, has profound solidarity with the critique of metaphysical thinking in dialectical materialism. In both instances, the objective is to transcend invariance, unchangeability, immobility … towards a process either seeking to establish or to undermine balance, which is the same as the work of tensions, in other words the understanding of living contradictions, either in the society or in thought (Goux 1973: 34–5).

Petrification and unchangeability were the primary targets of Baudry’s and Goux’s criticism, which was in line with the objective of advancing the sciences of the text. A general problem with Goux, as well as with Baudry, Derrida, Sollers and Kristeva, was a lack of clear definitions for the concepts used and a tendency to argue on a purely formal level. Logocentrism and the concealment of work are implicitly equated with one another, as is the unconscious—which, as we recall, is being repressed—with labor and writing. This textual strategy is based on the following textual steps: first, one attempts to find a second level to a given problem, preferably a level of lower value or one subjected to the first level; secondly one shows that this level is repressed and forgotten; thirdly one equates the repressed level with some other corresponding level; and, fourthly, one shows through homologies that these two are equally repressed, whereby they can both be linked to, for example, bourgeois ideology. The theory was proved correct by the existence of all the repressed components, and it was thus necessary to bring them forward. With the magic of structural homology, it became possible to neatly package everything into a kind of everyman’s do-it-yourself-revolution kit (see, for instance, Rée 1985: 337–60). There is a problem, of course, in that the bourgeois also work, even though work is linked with the proletariat and culture with the bourgeoisie. The proletariat also has an unconscious within which are hidden structures, power relationships and fantasies of the bourgeois political and social order. Logocentrism as a

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supremacy of speech, if one can even speak of such, does not only cover the levels of the bourgeois society, but the levels of all societies throughout history. The panoramic nature of logocentrism—a central ethical-political principle for finding direction in the jungle of competing ideas—conceals historical differences and development, lumping everything together under the metaphysics of the text. However, it is impossible to separate the components of the sign, the signifier and the signified, and to study the former alone, since it would literally have no meaning. In addition, these analysis totally overlook the social-historical level, despite it being in many respects the essential part of Marx’s work. In many ways, these radical theories resembled the ideology of Baudelaire and other bohemians and decadents from the early nineteenth century. Sex, revolution etc. were all repressed. A relentless critique of moral codes was combined with a guilt complex and Romantic and individualistic unrealism. But the political revolution remained half-finished: the ennoblement, fetishization, and idealization of the text, work, the body etc. remained abstract operations. A Marxist might argue that the bourgeoisie propped up this unrealistic activity in order to support its own class rule. However, Tel Quel received backing from other rebellious intellectuals and communist intellectuals. For some time the Communist party succeeded in attracting young members of the intelligentsia to its ranks in its battle against the capitalist system. The fusion of political and theoretical revolutions had historically led to similar frictions between intellectuals and the Communist party. Problems arose specifically when a revolution of values within a text was equated with socialist revolution. With respect to Russian futurists, Leon Trotsky did not hesitate: he branded their thinking pre-revolutionary thought. In a similar vein, Lenin ordered that the print of Mayakovski’s work 150,000,000 would be limited to 1,500 copies precisely in order to more effectively fight against leftism. About Mayakovski, Lenin had said: I understand nothing about this enthusiasm over Mayakovski. His verses are nothing but absolute gibberish with the word “revolution” tacked onto them. In my view, revolution does not need clowns à la Mayakovski playing games with it. It is futile to assert that Mayakovski is a hundred times better than Béranger (quoted in Besançon 1977: 238–9).

Theoretical radicalism had its own symbolic logic that did not follow the symbolic logic of political radicalism. Tel Quel’s Maoist turn accentuated this contradiction, as will be shown in the next chapter.

Part II Désenchantement and Disintegration

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Chapter 8

Neo-surrealism: Breton and Mao A bas le réalisme socialiste, vive le surréalisme (Down with socialist realism, long live surrealism) Condorcet 1968

Detaching itself from the communist world at the end of the 1960s forced the Tel Quel group and its collaborative circles to clarify their problematic relationship with surrealism, which had earlier been the model for Tel Quel’s avant-gardism, as well as with Maoism. Brought into the limelight by rightist groups and journals, the relationship to surrealism illustrates the contradiction (and challenge to authenticity) Tel Quel was continuously running into: it affirmed its status as an avant-garde by denying that it followed the previous avant-gardes. In the case of Maoism, while it provided an alternative to the dependence of Communist circles several leading intellectuals such as Althusser and Sartre and their circles had already espoused Mao’s philosophy as an alternative to western philosophy and identity. Indeed “What could be more ‘Chinese’—in the French sense of strange, absurd, quirky—than China? Through the Chinese you could free yourself from yourself. Break the mask of conformity” (Kristeva 1992: 146). This distancing from communist circles took a multitude of social and symbolic forms. Julia Kristeva increasingly focused on psychoanalysis, and underwent her own analysis in the IPA (International Psychoanalytical Association). According to her, the Lacanians were too politicized (Kristeva and Kurzweil 1986: 220–21). The former surrealist Jacques Cabau wrote an article entitled “They have polluted surrealism” (Ils ont pollué le surréalisme) (Cabau 1971: 91–2), where he lamented that ideologues and merchants had betrayed surrealism in France. Cabau’s attack was directed at four journals: Opus, led by Alain Jouffroy, Change, Tel Quel and Christian Bourgois’ Kitsch. Tel Quel was now threatened with being branded a 1960s copy of surrealism. Cabau accused Tel Quel’s neo-mandarins of being brilliantly though perversely intelligent and of using scientific jargon. The point of Cabau’s attack was directed at the way in which surrealism had been politically and economically exploited. As a continuation to Cabau’s article, L’Express published a response by the Montreuil group of surrealists (Surréalistes de Montreuil 1971: 106). In it, Sollers’ group was called “the new Stalinist rogue” and “the sad, megalomaniac group.” A few weeks later, Sollers published a rebuttal in which he undertook an aggressive countercharge: I ask you to inform your readers that we have a number of times protested against this slander campaign directed at us, a campaign not justified by any facts whatsoever. It is odd that you have wished to publish this systematic

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In Sollers’ view, the attack was a scheme in which the rival journals participated. The literary weekly Le Figaro Littéraire also belonged in the bourgeois front, for which the surrealist André Biancourt had written an article entitled “Return to the Imaginary” (Retour à l’imaginaire). Already in 1970 Tel Quel had published a critique of neo-surrealism (Tel Quel 1970b: 101–4). Issue 46/1971 was a special edition on surrealism, in which Tel Quelian Jean-Louis Houdebine began his article by reviewing the current ideological state of affairs: To the observer of the present ideological situation-both “literary” as well as journalistic and other publishing activities tied to the monopolistic capitalist policy of the state—situation, there is one phenomenon which takes center stage: the recirculation of surrealistic ideology (Houdebine 1971: 35).

Through a critique of surrealism or neo-surrealism Tel Quel redefined its avantgardism despite the fact that Tel Quel and its leading members were themselves inside the fortress of monopolistic capitalism, the editor Le Seuil. But the irony of it did not make anyone laugh. Tel Quel’s critique of surrealism consisted of four points, which Sollers had already presented in Tel Quel issue 44/1971 under the title “Thèses générales” (Sollers 1971b: 96–8). The first criticism was that the surrealists had not considered Mallarmé’s and Lautréamont’s critique of the bourgeois rhetorical code. The second point was that the surrealists were oriented towards Jungian psychology and had not taken Freud’s discoveries sufficiently into account. His third criticism was that the surrealists had not focused enough, as Artaud had done, on the importance of Oriental cultures. The fourth point was that surrealists remained supporters of utopian or Fourierian socialism. By substituting Marxist dialectics with Hegelian dialectics, surrealists subjected politics to ethics. In their attempts to harmonize materialism and idealism they ended up with spiritualism. According to Sollers, surrealism as a whole formed a “phantasmatic system.” Houdebine’s article had the honor to attempt to argue this case. In his narrative, Houdebine concentrated on two lines of development, ideological development and the development of class structures in the society. Houdebine noted that in the 1960s changes had taken place on the ideological arena that could not be ignored. These changes can be summarized by three names: Althusser, Derrida and Lacan. With respect to class structure, socialism had progressed into the Third world countries and imperialism had begun to decline. In France, due to the emerging petty bourgeois powers, an enormous change had taken place in the ideological machinery of the state since the end of the 1950s. From the perspective of class structure, the situation was essentially different from that in the 1920s and 1930s. Petty bourgeois ideology had assumed an ever-

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increasing importance in ideological battles, as seen in the events that took place in May–June of 1968. Houdebine noted that the present ideological situation called for a new rise of surrealism. The new rise would have a delaying effect, which facilitated the repression of real forces of change (read: Tel Quel, NK) (Houdebine 1971). The repression argument of Houdebine’s analysis was much used in the 1960s and 1970s. Sollers, for example, in an interview he granted to the Bulgarian journal Student, noted that the new novel had had a delaying effect that prevented the new avant-garde, Tel Quel, from rising (Sollers 1970e). According to Sollers’s line of thought, when in May of 1968 the intelligentsia and students referred to surrealist motto by using slogans such as “let the imagination take power,” they objectively jeopardized Tel Quel’s status as a developer of revolutionary science and theory. It was however difficult to be more “radical” than Breton had been: “The simplest surrealist act is to go on the street with a revolver in your hand and to shoot randomly into the crowd for as long as you can” (Breton 1972: 78). Since bourgeois ideology was always spiritual and metaphysical, it managed to push aside Mallarmé’s and Lautréamont’s textual theory reforms and to replace them with the less dangerous philosophy of the new novel. The dominant ideology could easily take possession of the new novel by making it academic and formalizing it. The repression argument relied on the idea that ideological production was so independent of the situation in the class struggle that greater or lesser delays were inevitable. Houdebine’s use of the repression argument shows the tendency of Althusserian and Lacanian discourse to apply the results of psychoanalysis to the level of the whole society’s ideological production. Despite Houdebine’s and Sollers’s efforts to prove the uniqueness of the ideological situation in the 1960s and 1970s, there were many similarities between the surrealists and Tel Quel. In 1923 in its “Resolution on the French Question,” the congress of the Fourth Communist International expressed what the French Communist Party demanded of Tel Quel some 50 years later: The communist avant-garde of the proletariat naturally needs the intellectuals who bring to the organization their theoretical knowledge, their agitator’s or writer’s talents, but only on the condition that these persons totally and irreversibly sever their relationship to the habits and morality of the bourgeois circles, burn all the bridges behind them which would link them to the camp from which they come, do not ask for exceptions or privileges, and subject themselves to discipline just as do ordinary militants (Lourau 1981: 141).

Houdebine tried to discredit rivals by arguing that, taking into account the ideological and social changes which had taken place, only Tel Quel would be able to create a new theory which bourgeois ideology could not control. Henry Deluy, poet and the leader of the competing journal Action Poétique, wrote a firm answer to the theorizing of the Tel Quel group:

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Radicalism in French Culture Why this reduction of surrealism to ideology? Would ideology have been its only specific practice? What is at stake? The victory of “writing/text” over speech? The victory of science over ideology, of critical analysis over spontaneity, of “text” over automatic writing, of revolution over rebellion? What do they wish to prove to us? That Breton was a Hegelian? We have known already for 40 years that the surrealists didn’t read Althusser and Lacan (Deluy 1970b: 193).

Behind Houdebine’s ideological arguments and his thoughts on the development of the class structure was the idea that it would be against dialectical materialism to directly apply theories that were developed 40 years ago to the present (see also Heffner 1974: 128). Houdebine declared that the political work would focus on three problems: the relationships between Breton and Hegel, between Breton and Trotsky, and between Breton and Freud. The problem of surrealism led Marcelin Pleynet to present in Tel Quel’s second Group of Theoretical Studies an exposé entitled “Lautréamont politique” (Pleynet 1971: 23–45) that focused on the surrealist’s relationship to Lautréamont. But instead of refusing to subject themselves to a political authority, as Artaud had openly done when surrealism was moving closer to the Communist party, Tel Quel and its followers continued until 1971 to be steered by an explicit political ideology. The surrealism debate was short-lived, however, as the whole of Tel Quel’s issue 47 was dedicated to Roland Barthes, and the following issue (48–9/1972) to China testifying of a symbolic reorientation from French structural Marxism to Chinese Maoist Marxism. Even the Barthes special issue included several articles on China. Already in issue 46, Tel Quel had openly attacked the communist party journal La Nouvelle Critique because of a “Sinophobic” article it had published (La Nouvelle Critique, November 1971). In its Barthes issue, Tel Quel published a “Manifesto,” where it exposed the bourgeois-revisionist ideological hegemony. The ostensible reason for attacking the party and its journals was that at the annual festival of the l’Humanité, the daily of the French communist party, MariaAntonietta Macciocchi’s book De la Chine had not been allowed to be displayed (Le Monde 3.3. 1972). Macciocchi was the correspondent in France of l’Unita, the journal of the Italian communist party, and a friend of Philippe Sollers. Sollers had met her in Seuil, and had arranged for her book to be translated into French. Sollers had already, on September 11, published in Le Monde an official protest about the policy of the communist party. Sollers had sent Pierre Rottenberg, with an armful of books, to man Tel Quel’s booth at the l’Humanité festival, but Rottenberg’s attempt was obstructed. The French communist party organ published a crushing critique of Macchiocci’s book, saying, for example: What is most astonishing is that M.A. Macchiocci seemed to be enthusiastic about the kind of society that marches in line behind pictures of Mao (Durand 1971: 6).

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The “Manifesto” published by Tel Quel was followed by an article which was titled “Positions du mouvement de juin 71.” The newly founded June 71 movement was a Maoist movement fighting within Tel Quel, and which positioned itself to oppose the “petty bourgeois” line. As Kristeva put it, illustrating thus the ambiance of the moment “the wind from the East was sweeping away bureaucracy and urging the group to oppose all the ossified old establishments. The whole world was turning in the same direction” (Kristeva 1992: 96). The movement announced that Tel Quel’s theoretical studies group had, for the time being, suspended its activities due to the ideological battle that was going on. It was noteworthy that the movement declared that Tel Quel’s silence about the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and also about the events in Vietnam was misguided. The movement’s rhetoric revealed that Tel Quel’s leading members, Sollers, Kristeva and Pleynet, participated in it: The opposition that the June 71 movement has met with is powerful. It is a paper tiger, but with much paper. However, the movement declares that it is capable of guaranteeing Tel Quel’s administrative activity. Revisionist or rightist stances taken here and there in Tel Quel’s name do not bind Tel Quel, which will fight against them whenever it can. Within Tel Quel, the battle between two lines will inevitably reflect on texts and the journal’s table of contents, as it will elsewhere. The movement invites everyone to not necessarily believe anyone who, in passing, declares that they support or sympathize with the movement. Actions, proof, nothing else will do. The movement is determined to win over a majority of Tel Quel’s members and present contributors, whom the rightist and revisionist line has led astray. The rightist and revisionist front both within Tel Quel and outside of it, the front that attempts to infringe the leftist line and the study of avant-garde, which attempts to perpetuate the old and to prevent the new, will inevitably be broken. Down with dogmatism, empiricism, opportunism, revisionism! Long live the real avant-garde! Long live the Mao Zedong-philosophy (Tel Quel 1971f: 141).

The manifesto proved that paranoia had become fact: Tel Quel was veritably swarming with henchmen of the dominant ideology. All undesirable events were a result of repression or scheming by the dominant ideology. Starting in late 1971, a mimeographed bulletin titled “Tel Quel-Mouvement de juin 71-Informations” was published. The bulletin was mostly propagandist. It was illustrative of the bulletin’s line that Derrida, a former friend of Sollers, immediately came under attack. The lead article of the bulletin’s second issue attacked all political enemies and gathered under its protection revolutionary intellectuals, who, according to the text, backed Tel Quel’s activities. Typical of the ideological setting was a new alliance of the masses and the intellectuals, an alliance opposed to the revisionism within leftist political parties such as the French communist and socialist parties:

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Radicalism in French Culture LET US EVERYWHERE EXPOSE THE BOURGEOIS/REVISIONIST IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONY! TOWARDS A FRONT OF REVOLUTIONARY INTELLECTUALS! By publishing this second bulletin we continue our work that immediately received wide support from activists. This is an important encouragement to us. Characteristic of the present situation is not only the counterattack of the monopolistic bourgeoisie (capitalist Europe) that has internationalized its interests, but also a failure of the ‘leftist alliance’. It reveals to the masses the alliance’s inability to stand against this counterattack. Increasingly and on all levels, the masses must take their politics into their own hands. In a limited (to intellectuals, artists, students, professors …) but especially striking and neurotic way, this bulletin attempts to promote this process. On the ideological field, where the praxis of our everyday intervention exists, we might say that our central task—despite all obstacles—is the continuous expansion of the revolutionary left (Tel Quel 1972: 1).

After distancing itself from the French communist party starting from the end of the 1960s, Tel Quel’s justification for theoretical discourse was again a problem. The Maoist phase testified of the symbolic disintegration of the political and theoretical avant-garde and its key symbolic references that included the theories and power-ideas developed by Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida. The classical debate between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta on the theoretical status of materialism and heterogeneity reveals some of the impasses of the leftist avant-garde after May 68. By a close reading of this theoretical debate, the author reveals some of the rhetorical strategies used by both parties to construct two distinct radical political ontologies, a Marxist and a deconstructionist. In this context, Derrida’s critique of materialism amounted to a delegitimation of leftist radicalism and of the fusion of intellectual and political radicalism.

Chapter 9

The Symbolic Revolution of Jacques Derrida Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible (Be realistic, demand the impossible) Censier 1968

The debate between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta, both former collaborators of the Communist review La Nouvelle Critique, in 1971 is an important milestone in French intellectual history. In this debate, Derrida as one of the figureheads of the radical generation torpedoed the project of a materialist theory of society that was the dream of the leftist intelligentsia at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s (see Derrida 1972 for a full account). This theory would have permitted leftist intellectuals like Jean-Louis Houdebine, a future professor of linguistics at University Paris VII, and Guy Scarpetta, a future professor of modern literature and cinema at the University of Reims, both members of Tel Quel’s collaborative circles and disenchanted with Communism (Houdebine 2001: 53), to continue developing their theory independently of the tutelage of the French communist party. In this debate, the status of “materialism,” one of the power-ideas of “French theory,” was the bone of contention. In the debate, Houdebine and Scarpetta attempted to identify the externality of materialism with its irreversibility, whereas Derrida—using his familiar strategy— claimed that the heterogeneity of materialism was an unsolvable dilemma. The basic problem was that Derrida was not a dialectician (see Derrida 1987) like Houdebine/Scarpetta. Derrida’s central theoretical goal was to develop a general strategy of deconstruction, one that would avoid the simple neutralization of metaphysical binary oppositions while staying within the closed field formed by these oppositions. First and foremost, Derrida was concerned that materialism would lead back to another intellectual register, a kind of Hegelian dialectics where one term would be maintained by the negation of the others, as Kristeva did in her semanalysis. Derrida noted about his theory: In fact, I am trying to channel the critical operation to oppose this endless claiming that the simulacrum is one’s own in Hegelian dialectics (which goes so far as to idealize and “semanticize” the value of this work) (Derrida 1972: 59).

In contrast, Houdebine and Scarpetta attempted to uphold heterogeneity as the term uniting otherness and identity. The Marxist project with its historical materialism placed itself beyond both the history of meaning and linearity. In addition, the

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Marxist view of history as the history of class struggle was a history of “full” meaning in the most literal sense of the word. The point of Derrida’s critique was aimed precisely against this history of meaning and its correlative terms: I have attempted to systematize deconstructive critique precisely to be the opposite of the authority of meaning (sens), as the transcendental signified or the work of an author, or, in other words, as a history of significance understood against history, as history in its logocentric, metaphysical and idealistic representation (Derrida 1972: 67).

According to Derrida, simply elevating the status of matter did not place materialistic philosophy in conflict with idealistic philosophy. Houdebine, however, was not satisfied with this explanation. As the debate between the two proceeded, Houdebine adopted a more active stance. He brought into the debate matter as something which was an irreversible, pure heterogeneity, and thus by definition something which could not be reversed back into the meaning of a subject (Derrida 1972: 82–3). Houdebine was especially concerned about the relationships between historical materialism and writing/text. Derrida answered that he had not yet found reading protocols (Derrida 1972: 86) that would fully satisfy him. At first, however, Derrida gave a subtle answer that could almost, but not quite, be read as a concession: It goes without saying that if, and in so far as in this general order of things, matter expresses, as you said, radical otherness (more precisely: in relation to philosophical opposition) then what I write can be considered “materialistic” (Derrida 1972: 86).

And then, being faithful to his basic strategy of transcending dichotomies through a critique of their absoluteness, Derrida went on to make a reservation to his concession. He doubted whether a materialist text existed in the first place, and if it did, he said, it could not exist in a materialist text itself, if materialism was defined as absolute externality or radical heterogeneity. This is because when we speak about materialism and matter, we return to certain logocentric values such as presentness, for example observable presence, realism and empiricism. In Derrida’s vocabulary, materialism as a fundamental principle would, through theoretical regression, lead back to the transcendental signified. It would turn out to be a kind of metaphysical materialism. This same move would lead us back to the idealism of the text, which would be manifested as a new internality to itself (Derrida 1972: 89). Derrida’s seemingly harmless critique shipwrecked the project of a Marxist science of the text. Until now Houdebine remained relatively passive, but the prospect of a total catastrophe activated him. To rescue materialism, Houdebine chose the concept of the text and asked what were the relationships between Derrida’s own work and literary textual work (Derrida 1972: 92). That Houdebine chose the text as his concept was naturally

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no coincidence, since it was, together with materialism, the cornerstone of Kristeva’s and Sollers’s theories. Houdebine did not mention the science of the text. This silence over the issue of scientificality was a sign of uncertainty, which Houdebine channeled into a discourse on materialism. Admitting that materialism was absolute, he thought, would guarantee its scientificality. In fact, Houdebine’s discourse was based on this link between materialism and science that was not explicitly brought up, but which both sides knew was directing the dialogue and was also, in fact, what was really at stake. With his question, Houdebine attempted to force Derrida to accept certain definitions of the text and of work, along with their clusters of connotations and semantic links, and thus in a way to begin the discourse anew while ignoring Derrida’s earlier reservations. Derrida began by reviewing in a schoolmasterly fashion the significance of literary criticism for the concept of the text, as well as the general theoretical significance of writing. This was not, however, enough for Houdebine. Houdebine’s long question, which was shaped to anticipate its answer (see Derrida 1972: 96–9), attempted to bring the concepts of subconscious and contradiction closer to each other. Referring to Kristeva’s theoretical work on signifiers, Houdebine attempted—in repetitio veritas—to bring forth matter as radical heterogeneity and as the foundation of contradiction. Thus, via a detour to Kristeva and Freud, he reformulated his theoretical stance. In his response, Derrida presented what he had already stated earlier: I do not believe that there exists a “fact” which enables us to say: in a Marxist text the contradiction, dialectics, escapes metaphysical control … You see, once more, I do not believe that we can, even from a Marxist perspective, speak of a homogenous Marxist text, which once and for all would liberate the concept of contradiction from its speculative, teleological and eschatological horizon (Derrida 1972: 100).

Here Derrida indirectly criticized Houdebine and Scarpetta for implicitly believing that without having first analyzed the texts of the Greek materialists metaphysical reflection repressed contradiction. Because of this oversight, Derrida was able to build a clumsy bridge to reconcile the contradiction between materialism and Freudism. According to him, the external was never wholly on the outside and the internal never wholly on the inside. Or, in other words, we did not have homogeneity on one side and heterogeneity on the other, perfectly separated from each other. Characteristically, however, Houdebine in his next question again took as given something that, in fact, was not: It was precisely this (the dual motif of matter and contradiction) which led me then, but from a different perspective, to pose the question about the relationship between the logic emerging from the dual register “matter/contradiction” and the logic presupposed in the motive of “différance”: a relationship which has

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In fact, at no point had Derrida said precisely this. Houdebine’s interpretation was based on an extrapolation he had made of Derrida’s discourse, which consisted chiefly of reservations, cautions, and ambiguous statements. For example, Derrida had noted “if we wished to schematize—but this is, however, not really a schema— what I am attempting can also be written as ‘critique of idealism’” (Derrida 1972: 85). Derrida’s most frequent textual strategy was to use an interplay of concessions and reservations to position himself in such a way that he could always-by further clarification-deny what he had said before without openly contradicting himself. This economy, in both meanings of the term, leaves an unusual mark on the entire discourse, where the reader easily loses direction in a jungle of interpretations. At the same time, the economy of the discourse leads those who might attempt to interpret it to experience a latent feeling of guilt and chronic impotence: commenting on it can only lead to endless exegetics of the master’s (Derrida’s) texts, as the “correct” reading protocol has never been explicitly laid out. A couple of pages later Derrida moves to his other main topic, Lacanian psychoanalysis and a critique of its philosophical status. From Sollers’s and Kristeva’s point of view, this critique was crucial as it distanced Derrida from Lacan and by the same token from Tel Quel’s social networks. In his customary way, Derrida presents his critique in the margins, in the form of a long note (Derrida 1972: 112–9). Derrida’s critique of Lacan consists of four main points: Lacan remains ensnared by speech, which he sees as implicitly alive and full; by returning to Freud, he falls into using a massive Hegelian set of concepts; he relies on Saussure’s concept of the sign which is based on speech; and he fails to put into question the concept of writing. Derrida’s criticism reveals that he was slipping away from a strategy where he had literally attempted to place himself in the fold of discourse, in a position where both an answer and its opposite were possibilities, and was moving towards a strategy where he criticized another totemic emblem of “French theory” for not sharing his own premises. Derrida was ambivalent about the existence of two stages in the deconstructive project, making the reservation that a stage is more a structural than a chronological term (Derrida 1972: 57). According to Derrida, differentiating the stages in fact corresponds to two strategic moves: first the critique which was directed outwards from within materialism, and secondly the development of “anti-concepts” which took place within materialism itself. Derrida’s critique incessantly, almost imperceptibly, slid back and forth between the two, and its strength was precisely in this shift. An “anti-concept” could not be understood within the philosophical opposition (Derrida 1972: 58) nor within the earlier régime (Derrida 1972: 57). Derrida illuminated the strategic function of these “inconclusives” as follows: What I have analogically called the inconclusive, in other words the units of simulacrum, the “false” verbal, nominal or semantic characteristics which no

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longer let themselves be understood in the philosophical (binary) opposition and which nevertheless reside in it, oppose it, unorganize it but which never form the third term, which never create a solution in the form of speculative dialectics (pharmacon is not a medicine nor a poison, good or evil, inside or outside, speech or writing) (Derrida 1972: 58–9).

Derrida puts the concept “false” in quotes, thus no longer meaning by false the usual sense of the word. Likewise, the concept “never” (jamais) attempts to provide absolute certainty that a third term will never be formed. In light of Derrida’s discursive economy, this is a questionable wish, however. In addition to this script of endless guerrilla warfare (and it is, of course, questionable to what extent we can even say it is endless), we can recognize Derrida’s other textual strategy: he plays on two boards, criticizing both from without and from within, creating terms which cannot be reduced to either register or to a synthesis of these. The first phase is critical for the very reason that it relies on some clear hierarchy that, in the familiar style, is simultaneously questioned. The critical function cannot, however, only be limited to the first phase. Derrida takes for granted the foundation of his critique, then he himself criticizes this foundation just as he criticized Houdebine’s materialism or Lacan’s phonocentrism (see, for instance, Derrida 1972: 60 note 6). However, a critique always needs a reference category and a target category. In other words, in order to elaborate his critique, Derrida must paradoxically resort to an implicit hierarchy dominated by “anti-concepts.” The concept “anti-concept” also obviously needs to be placed in quotes, as strictly speaking there is no such thing as an “anti-concept.” The textual function of “anti-concepts” is dual: economical, as they condense several activities or processes; and strategic as they relate to ordinary concepts. The word “economy” here means that it is possible to condense without abstracting, in other words without stepping into the trap which separates the particular from the general. Strategic refers to the possibility of using “anti-concepts” to criticize something without returning to the pattern of original-derived, where “real” concepts operate. Thus Derrida notes, similarly to Lacan and Kristeva, that “the unconscious is insensitive to contradiction” (Derrida 1972: 60 note 7). In Derrida’s textual strategy, the status of “anti-concepts” is not only dependent of their function but also of their very conceptuality. Derrida attempts to define them in such a way that they would evade certain philosophical traps. Derrida manages to assemble into his “anti-concept” the advantage of concepts, their function (even a dysfunction has a function in the system of language) and the advantage of the “anti-concept,” its role as the precursor and as something that says nothing. In actual fact, “anti-concepts” speak through the mouths of others, as the interview shows. In order to point out how he distances himself from concepts and conceptuality in his philosophical system, Derrida parenthesizes all the concepts he has invented. Strictly speaking, and Derrida is aware of this, he nevertheless always remains in the realm of meaning, and the work and the task of

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“anti-concepts” is colored by eternal (but even this cannot be said) rebellion. No one can escape metaphysics. Derrida invents a new “concept” while simultaneously creating a discursive need for it, as his approach can no longer be explained without this “concept.” The lesson is that the “concept” can no longer be erased. “Différance is ‘the origin’, non-complete, non-simple, the structured and differing origin of differences” (Derrida 1972: note 22). An “inner reading” of Derrida’s text takes the reader back to a pre-determined script, the outcome of which is already known. Whether the original idea is truly original or only “original,” or a simulacrum, really does not matter, since the most important thing is that it only partially—but never fully— fulfills the tasks of the concept “original.” Derrida’s basic textual strategy corresponds to a continuous change of perspective, whereby all questions are radically problematic. However, in contrast with the concept polysemy, Derrida maintains that dissemination penetrates the semantic horizon. It is an open chain (Derrida 1972: 61), which can only be temporarily halted through an example. Houdebine and Scarpetta attempt to retain the results of Derrida’s theoretical work (the critiques of logocentrism, speech, etc.) while ignoring the most important, the economy of the discourse itself that escapes into the indeterminate. Concerning his discursive economy, Derrida is undeniably a revolutionary, but not when it comes to the outcome itself. Imitating the economy of discourse to some extent has been the hallmark of Derrida’s interpreters, as demonstrated by the works of Baudry, Goux, Kristeva and Sollers. What distinguishes Houdebine and Scarpetta from Derrida can be summarized as follows: Derrida acknowledges the existence of hierarchy, but refuses to explicitly promote the legitimation of any alternative value hierarchy. Derrida’s own discourse follows a different economy (fleeing from dichotomies, promoting disparity, non-linearity and “everything flows”). Houdebine, in turn, wishes to establish a hierarchy which is ruled by Marxist thinking and which has the goal of establishing a materialistic textual science. Derrida’s ideal is transgression in the form of eternal critique and skepticism. For him, questioning and skepticism are values in themselves that lead to the acceptance of one form of reality as legitimate as any other. In Derrida’s symbolic revolution, reality has evaporated into thin air as a result of sophism. Perhaps the formal and simplified Table 9.1 can clarify the relationships between the “science” of the text and Marxism. In this table, Derrida moves in spaces 1A and 2A without entering 3A. Kristeva, Houdebine and Scarpetta as well as Sollers attempt to combine all of these in their texts. In a theoretical sense, stopping the chain of signifiers and founding a hierarchy is always arbitrary and always takes the form of a judicial act. The critique of topography is undoubtedly also a critique of jurisprudence. Derrida’s reflections “precede” dialectics, which is the Marxist method par excellence, in the sense that he attempts to criticize the philosophical a priori underlying dialectics. For Derrida, the text is not a self-reflective and homogenous entity but rather a problem; for Marxism, the production of the text is the problem. In the case of the problem of ideology, for the science of text ideology is in the text, or, we

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Table 9.1

The “science” of the text and Marxism

2. Text

A. Science of the text Grammatical product of language Chain of Signifiers

3. Ideology

Intertextual

1. Subject

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B. Marxism Class subject Capitalist/worker Product of the author and circumstances Material production

should rather say, in texts, whereas for Marxism the development of ideology is tied to the development of production forces and production relationships. As a concept, the text is on a different level in the “science” of the text and Marxism. Combining them is therefore problematic. Other concepts, such as the concept of the “subject,” for instance, are likewise problematic. What precisely do we mean by the subject: the Spirit in the Hegelian sense, the person in a judicial sense, a corporation, an individual? What is it that makes the science of the text a better theory than some other theories? In Derrida’s and Houdebine/Scarpetta’s debate the issue was the scientific foundation of the science of the text. Until the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970d, Kristeva’s, Sollers’ and Houdebine/Scarpetta’s discourses had strongly relied on Derrida’s analysis. Derrida’s concept of writing/text as well as the “indissolubles” such as différance were defining power-ideas for, among others, Goux’s and Baudry’s numismatics and materiology. Collective distancing from the communist party and rapprochement with Lacan and Maoism necessitated a more active political philosophy, which could justify giving up the communist party line. This was at stake not only in the debate between Derrida and Houdebine but also more broadly in all the debates and symbolic struggles that were taking place. After May 68, a macro-level symbolic transformation was occurring that loosened the ties between political and intellectual avant-gardes. In this context, symbolic recognition from Derrida was seen as a sine qua non condition for detachment from the tutelage of the communist party and intellectuals like Althusser. However, the greatest problem of Derrida’s philosophy was that it lacked an explicit political philosophy. Derrida’s implicit political philosophy was relatively close to the philosophy of transgression and a form of political conservatism. At around the same time as Tel Quel and the members of its social networks adopted a Maoist political philosophy, Barthes, in his book S/Z (1970), gave up on the scientific ideal. Tel Quel did not, however, give up their ultratheoretical approach as a form of radicalism. According to Derrida, his critique of Lacan did not please Sollers (Derrida 1987a). After breaking off relations with Derrida, the Tel Quel group increasingly turned their focus towards Lacanian psychoanalysis and its collaborative circles. The break between Derrida and Sollers was partly caused by Sollers noticing that he had lost his hold on Derrida. The bitterness was palpable (see Kristeva 1992: 109–10). In the spring of 1972, Tel Quel’s

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Maoist bulletin published an article on Derrida—ironically titled “O mage à Derrida”—where Derrida was scorned for his esotericism. The title plays with the homophony between mage (wizard, witch) and hommage (homage). At the same time, Derrida’s intellectual debt to Sollers was exposed: Derrida’s book La Dissémination, which forms a pretext (pré-texte) to this gathering of intellectuals who have espoused the policy of the communist party, owes its title to a hundred-page essay (one third of the book) that Derrida has dedicated to Philippe Sollers’ novel Nombres. Do we even need to say that no signs of Sollers’ work, or even Derrida’s work discussing Sollers, are to be found in this issue of Lettres Françaises? (Tel Quel 1972a: 2).

As this debate between Derrida and Houdebine demonstrates, symbolic struggles are attempts to tease out recognition, in this case the privileged status of materialism and heterogeneity. These struggles for intellectual recognition are always with personal relationships—a dimension difficult to get to. Recognition from an authority like Derrida would have licensed Houdebine and his troops (read Sollers) to continue developing a materialist theory of society. Derrida’s attempt to avoid final solutions and to flee into the unsolvable did not at that moment satisfy the still rebellious leftist intelligentsia that had to look for symbolic guarantors after the distancing of the French communist party. With closer scrutiny, we can highlight the weaknesses of the “science of the text” patched, as it were, with a political theory—an interim solution if there ever was one. Attempts to develop a leftist deconstruction get tangled in irresolvable contradictions and are soon abandoned as Derrida was increasingly drawn into transatlantic symbolic struggles (see Cusset 2005). The debate also revealed that Derrida’s radical theory of deconstruction was politically conservative, as it did not back the strategies of politically progressive forces in the political field. Like the other “French theories” examined in this work, it led to an infinite, negative critique. Symbolic chaos followed the withering away of the French communist party’s caution. While the Sokal scandal (Sokal and Bricmont 1999) has highlighted some problems of the theories of the 1960s, detaching these debates from their historical context, it simplified these theories by repeating only some of the (mathematical) criticism raised (Roubaud and Lusson 1969, 1970, see also Kauppi 1994 for discussion). Roubaud and Lusson were both university professors of mathematics (Rennes and Poitiers respectively) and Roubaud a member of the famed literary group OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle). The main objections to these theories, formulated by linguists, philosophers, and literary theorists integrated in competing collaborative circles, revolved—not surprisingly—around issues of conceptual obscurity and metaphysical dramatics.

Chapter 10

The Taming of French Theory J’ai quelque chose à dire mais je ne sais pas quoi (I have something to say, but I don’t know what) Censier 1968

Disenchantment with the French communist party and the deeper integration of many radical thinkers into academe led to a loosening of the networks and symbolic hierarchies that had dominated the French and Parisian avant-garde scene until then. This situation led to outright symbolic war between a variety of leftist cliques that had developed around institutions of higher education and journals like Action Poétique, Tel Quel, Critique and the Communist La Nouvelle Critique. The process of disintegration of the affinities between political and intellectual radicalism led to veracious symbolic struggles between the “scientists of the text” and the increasingly heterogeneous Marxist-Leninist camp. The previously so powerful combination of Marxism-Leninism and theoreticism and the selfevidently legitimate existence of power-ideas such as “text” and “materialism” began to break up, as did the formerly close personal ties between Sollers, Althusser and Derrida. Many of the young radicals such as Henri Meschonnic, Mitsou Ronat and Bernard Sichère became professors at the newly founded University of Paris VIII Vincennes. The taming of “French theory” passed through a symbolic (and physical) disintegration of its collaborative circles. In this chapter I will analyze the symbolic struggles between different circles. Meschonnic Literary theorist Henri Meschonnic’s critique was directed at Tel Quel’s and Kristeva’s theorizings (Meschonnic 1973). Meschonnic linked the group with the so-called post-surrealistic tradition, and his critique focused on Tel Quel’s Maoistic jargon. Meschonnic described Tel Quel’s language and vocabulary as a closed phraseological package (Meschonnic 1973: 77). Tel Quel’s rhetoric of truth was comprised of abstract and emotionally laden Manichaean language, as the use of phrases such as “Our great leader” and “a brilliant philosophical doctrine” proved (Meschonnic 1973: 141–2). Tel Quel’s analyses of ideology were, according to Meschonnic, more tactical than theoretical. The development of theory was secondary compared to the temporary political advantage the group assumed its attacks would bring. Tel Quel’s myth of the avant-garde led the group into territory that Meschonnic called utopian and intellectual-abstract. In this territory, discourse had no history. Tel Quel’s discourse, which emphasized chains of expression and

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the principle that language did not describe anything, was non-referential. At the same time, it was cut off from political praxis. Political thought became purged of history, non-situated (désitué) (Meschonnic 1973: 80). Revered Maoism was purged of the disturbing problematic of time and place. Linguistically stated, Tel Quel’s field of expression was heavily leaning towards the word (mot). The group’s vocabulary was in Meschonnic’s view both phantasmic and Christian. According to Meschonnic, comparing alchemy and chemistry to writing and text as Sollers’ had done, only served to reinforce this phantasmatic impression. The concept signifiant not only displayed Sollers’ and his follower’s theoretical indecisiveness, but also the tangle caused by the group’s epistemological choices. While previously the concept of signification (signifiant) was monosemic, in Tel Quel’s manipulation it became lost in a terminological mist: the signifying system (système signifiant), signifying ideality (idéalité signifiante), signifying disposition (disposition signifiante), signifying practice (pratique signifiante), signifying materiality (matérialité signifiante), signifying work (travail signifiant), signifying network (tissu signifiant), etc. Some of these conceptual entities referred to the functioning of the sign, while others referred to another, entirely different logic which remained unspecified. This other logic was heavily guided by the context. In addition, the materiality of the sign (Sj/St, the emergence of the sign) was intentionally confused with the sign’s materialism, thus making it possible to construct a clumsy bridge to Marxist materialism. In the minds of some commentators (Finlay-Pelinski 1982: 241, Meschonnic 1973: 187, Ronat 1970: 132) integrated in competing circles and journals, nonrepresentation, the substantialization of the text and the essentialization of expressions were the worst mistakes of the “scientists of the text.” Expression had become language as a system of rules (langue) in Saussure’s sense of the word. Meschonnic’s most serious charge against the “scientists of the text” was that through substantializing expressions, they—unknowingly—had ended up prisoners of the Sign they so feared (Meschonnic 1973: 90). The metaphysics of signs and letters found its predecessors in Vedic and cabbalistic idealist traditions. It was difficult to see how this type of discourse was linked to dialectical materialism. Problems could also be found in the one-sided way the cabbala was handled: what fit with the plan was adopted; what did not fit was ignored. For instance, in her analysis of letters and Chinese ideograms, Kristeva repeatedly succumbed to a tendency to metaphorize. According to Kristeva, the letter “a” represented the opening up of the body and the beginning of signification (signifiance) (Kristeva 1969a: 306). In Meschonnic’s view, this was an arbitrary interpretation. The issue was more of a will to knowledge (vouloir-savoir) than of knowledge as such. Kristeva’s praxis was not theoretical but apocalyptic. Kristeva also interpreted Chinese ideograms figuratively, as metaphors, not linguistically or functionally as a part of a language system. Kristeva’s method consisted simply in decontextualizing the Sinitic and using an ahistorical process to transfer it to the abstract world of writing. However, in Meschonnic’s mind, these methods that attempted to combine Sinitic and avant-garde activity were naïve.

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In what sense could we consider anti-humanism a form of non-ideologism? According to Tel Quel, evading humanism, consciousness, subject and history took place through emphasizing structures and language. This road led to avoidance of ideology and made it possible to achieve truth. According to Meschonnic, Tel Quel’s discourse presented itself as an ideology, and was destroyed as ideology in order to find a new form as ideology. Linguistically, philosophically, action … is not materialistic or dialectical. The constructed rhetoric … must be analyzed like an idealistic philosophy of language (Meschonnic 1973: 107).

Within a materialistic and dialectic text, Sollers’ straightforward goal was to create writing which would know what it wanted to do and which would behave according to its true nature. This was very close to the semanalysis ideal presented by Kristeva, where semanalysis, through self-reflectivity, would be an activity critically evaluating its own development. According to Meschonnic, these theoretical goals were founded on three delusions. Firstly, they assumed that one could get away with denegating Freud (the non-Freudian argument). The second delusion was that they knew exactly what they were doing. Thirdly, they imagined that a text had an essence, which takes one back to the Heideggerian theme of essence. Kristeva’s and Sollers’ theoretical objectives also led to the delusion that the paragrammatical movement would bring together the essence and the nonessence, or, in other words, materialism and non-materialism (idealism!). What use was such a philosophy to Marxism? In Meschonnic’s view, Kristeva’s and Sollers’ project could be interpreted as Leibnizian in the sense that it attempted to “use mathematical writing outside of mathematics” (Meschonnic 1975: 238). From a Marxist and dialectical perspective, Kristeva’s dichotomy of production/ product appears mostly to be a metaphorization of Marx’s formulae, one that simultaneously prevents us from looking at the relationship between production and the product. Meschonnic accused the “scientists of the text” of resacralizing the text and of founding a poetic ideology of writing. The text had to be a hieroglyph: in other words it had to be holy, esoteric and controlled by the group. This Bataillean mysticism and the Freudian emphasis on the sacrifice (since a text is also a sacrifice!) took precedence over Marxist dialectics and materialism. Tel Quel’s “self-mystifying formalism” (Meschonnic 1973: 114) had led to an abstract and endless search for a combinatory world. According to Meschonnic, in Tel Quel’s discourse contents had been transferred to expressions. If the text was not writing, then it was left for the bourgeois. If a text did not form a pulsional, multidimensional space, it was not important. These kinds of universal deconstructions were based on Tel Quel’s project of an exotic science of the kind that, at least in China,—Tel Quel’s utopian country— would have been impossible to realize. In its evaluations of day-to-day politics, Tel Quel’s discourse regularly resorted to deconstruction into the universal (all other countries save China are heretical)

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and utopian deconstruction (China’s views cannot be wrong). Tel Quel’s hysteria about the cultural revolution in China blinded the members of the group for instance to the numerous mass murders and brutalities which were carried out by Chinese authorities at the time. In addition, they conveniently ignored the theoretical problems of Maoism. The role of the party in relation to the popular movement was one of the most important theoretical problems in Maoism. In Chinese, yundong (the movement) specifically meant a popular movement that nourished and provided models for the elite. In Tel Quel’s case, it was a thorny question whether this relationship could be reversed. Other assessments by the group were likewise problematic. For instance, in the footsteps of Lenin, Sollers declared (Sollers 1969c: 17) that future revolutions would take place in Russia, India and China. The arguments he provided for this were a mixture of Leninist nostalgia and Lévi-Straussian avoidance of ethnocentrism. Cinéthique The influential cinematographical journal Cinéthique concluded in its editorial that Tel Quel’s activities had introduced an idealist factor into dialectical and historical materialism (Cinéthique 1971: 38–76). Cinéthique’s comprehensive critique of Tel Quel is too long to be summarized here, but I shall briefly indicate its central points. According to Cinéthique, the textual strategies applied by Tel Quel in their attempts to combine Marxism and psychoanalysis could be reduced to three words: analogy, metonymy and homonymy. In its theorizing Tel Quel utilized Marxist terms in a metaphorical way. The objective here was quite obvious: to gradually deconstruct Marxist concepts into the terminology of constructs of the subconscious (Cinéthique 1971: 43), and to blur the line between psychoanalytic and Marxist statements by a prolific use of analogies. Metonymy in turn enabled the Telquelians to borrow terms from other discourses without subjecting them to more rigorous scrutiny. From Cinéthique’s viewpoint, the clearest example of this was Tel Quel’s use of Althusser. Signifying practices became a series relatively independent of history (see also Rée 1985: 337–60). New “theoretical practices” were springing up like mushrooms. Another construct borrowed from Althusser and re-shaped by the Tel Quel group was the dichotomy science/ideology. Cinéthique focused on the interpretation of this dichotomy chiefly in five Tel Quel texts. These were Jean-Louis Baudry’s “Pour une matériologie I et II” (Tel Quel 44 and 45/1971), Julia Kristeva’s “Cinéma: pratique …” (Cinéthique 9–10/1971), Julia Kristeva’s “Littérature, sémiotique, marxisme” (La Nouvelle Critique 38/1971) and Jacqueline Risset’s “Lecture de Gramsci” (Tel Quel 42/ 1970). The Tel Quel group differentiated relatively strictly between science and ideology. Especially Kristeva forcefully highlighted the scientific task of semiotics and semanalysis. In Baudry’s text “Pour une matériologie II,” the relationship between science and ideology was interpreted in quite an unusual way: science was a correct reflection, whereas

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ideology was a backwards reflection (Baudry 1971: 79). This line of theorizing gradually led to science being identified with the proletariat and ideology with the bourgeoisie (Baudry 1971: 54 and 59). Ideology was thus interpreted as an epistemological illusion and false information, rather than as an expression of the interests of a social class, its truth. Cinéthique calls Sollers’ production eclecticism (Cinéthique 1971: 49). In Cinéthique’s view, propagating the relative independence of signifying practices and supporting two revolutions, firstly in the base and then in the superstructure, blurs the fact that the base directly influences the superstructure (Cinéthique 1971: 49). A central element of Tel Quel’s “ideology” is the relegation of politics to a secondary role. Politics becomes an instrumental concept that is subordinated to the autonomy of the textual level. In fact, in an interview titled “Écriture et révolution,” Sollers notes—expanding Clausewitz’s motto—that “writing is an extension of politics through other means (Sollers 1968b: 80). Cinéthique in turn proclaimed: “The revolutionary nature of an artistic praxis reduces Logos to criticism, an ideology, which has the purpose of deconstructing, rather than to class struggle and resistance to ideologies” (Cinéthique 1971: 50). Cinéthique argued that Tel Quel’s primary objective was to deconstruct bourgeois ideology, to change its signifying practices. Writing was not there for the class struggle against the bourgeoisie. In order to maintain its political facade, Tel Quel attempted to systematically blur the boundary between an artistic avantgarde and a political, revolutionary avant-garde, and to maintain a typically petitbourgeois relationship to politics (Cinéthique 1971: 51). Politics assumed a purely decorative role, and concrete political analyses were conspicuously absent. During the Maoist period, the tendency to metaphorize led to the kinds of juxtapositions as “the Capitalist West” and “the Massive Rise of the East.” Cinéthique noted that these developments did not take place by chance. Communist Party support had also served as an alibi for the Tel Quel group, which wished to develop new theories with a clean political conscience. Tel Quel was reduced to a melting pot of both subjective and objective idealism, where the specific material circumstances of history were forgotten (“History without history”). For example, the role of petit-bourgeois avant-garde movements in relationship to Tel Quel as well as the group’s special role in the field of class struggles had been totally ignored. Baudrillard From a very different stand point, in his book Le mirroir de la production (1973) Jean Baudrillard, professor of sociology at the University of Paris X Nanterre, criticized Julia Kristeva and what he called the entire school of transgressive philosophy that attempted to fuse the logics of theoretical and political radicalism. His main argument was that it was impossible to combine Marx and Bataille, political and intellectual avant-garde. Baudrillard notes that Kristeva remembers Marx when it suits her, and forgets him when she does not need him. Kristeva’s

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interpretation of Marx is, in fact, thoroughly colored by Bataille. To Kristeva’s emphasis on the body, discharge, excess, play, non-finality and non-utility Baudrillard’s comment is: “Marx did not think about these issues.” In a somewhat more substantial vein, Baudrillard notes that Marx’s concept of production is an economic, production-related and finalized term, whereas Kristeva’s and Bataille’s metaphor of re-production and discharge is a genital concept, i.e. it concerns sexuality. In contrast to Bataille’s concept of production, Marx’s concept of production is not a prisoner of play and of game. Marx’s discharge is an investment, and thus a utilitarian discharge: This discharge is thus directly the investment of a value, the valuing of something, in contrast to all the symbolic putting at stake, as in a gift or a discharge (Baudrillard 1973: 44).

In Baudrillard’s view, Kristeva makes a serious mistake when she expands the concept of “work” to also cover activities preceding value. According to him, Kristeva would want to get rid of the concept of value without giving up on work or Marx. Marx’s concept of work is nevertheless—in Baudrillard’s view—tied to the rationalization process that results in bodily and social exchange being stripped of all ambivalent and symbolical characteristics, thus reducing them to rational, positive and unidirectional investment. It would be flawed to generalize Marx’s concept of “production” to serve a wider symbolic revolution. Bataille’s principles of excess and non-utility correspond to the potlach phenomenon in many primitive societies. There, work and production is directed towards excess in the form of gift giving. The tribal chief’s power depends on constant lavish squander. The chief must give back more than he receives, and the entire tribe is mobilized behind this production. Gifts cannot be turned down. One must accept them and give back more in turn, even if this would mean that the entire tribe starves to death. In his famous “Essai sur le don,” Marcel Mauss notes that: To give is thus to express one’s superiority, to be more, higher, magister. To receive without giving back or giving more means subjection, becoming a client, becoming small, falling beneath (minister) (Mauss 1985: 269–70).

But at the same time, potlach as non-utility (which it, nevertheless, literally is not) and excess creates social hierarchies within and between tribes. As Mauss notes somewhat further, the objective of potlach and of the gift to the giver is specifically to be the most powerful, beautiful, strong and rich. Through Bataille, Kristeva transposes into her theory Mauss’s analysis of pre-capitalistic societies and mechanisms of symbolic power that were prevalent in them. She juxtaposes non-utility and excess with Marx’s concepts of work and production. At the same time, “non-utility” and “excess” represent something that cannot be reduced to capitalism and the economic production embodied by capitalism. They are literally outside it; they cannot be reduced to capitalist praxis. They also represent

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something that precedes the capitalist system. The reason why these concepts are so important to Kristeva is precisely that they are, when looked at from this perspective, so fundamental. However, one difference between Kristeva’s and Mauss’s theories is crucial. When Mauss explains excess with social processes, Kristeva does the contrary: she explains power through excess. The issue of fusion of theoretical and political radicalism was also a central issue in the linguistic criticism of the Telquelians’ theories. Linguistic Critique Like the members of avant-garde groups, journals such as Tel Quel and Change were manned by young academics especially in humanistic disciplines such as semiology/semiotics, literary theory, philosophy and linguistics. The tensions that existed between the journals and the various cliques were reproduced in more scholarly debates in linguistics one of the academic fields that developed rapidly in the 1960s. Through collaboration between La Nouvelle Critique, the journal of Communist Party intellectuals, and Tel Quel, colloquiums were organized in 1968 and 1970, the topics of which were linguistics and literature (1968) and literature and ideologies (1970). Especially in the latter colloquium, Kristeva’s semanalysis, and particularly its linguistic foundation, came under vehement attack. The most prominent critic was the French Chomskyan linguist Mitsou Ronat, who was a member of the editorial boards of competing reviews Action Poétique and Change (led by former Telquelian Jean-Pierre Faye) and later professor of linguistics at Paris VIII Vincennes. I shall discuss Ronat’s central arguments on a general Table 10.1

Saumjan’s and Kristeva’s theoretical models (partly based on Kristeva 1969a: 287)

Applicative model

Genotext

Phenotext

G--→ G-→ G-→ Correspondence

Genotype Language formula

Phenotype (empirical Symbolism Mathematics

languages Statements) ideologism myths

Categories Formula

of language

rules

SAUMJAN’S MODEL

KRISTEVA’S MODEL

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level to pinpoint the major theoretical differences between Kristeva and Ronat as examples of the symbolic power strategies of individuals embedded in different collaborative circles. According to Ronat (1970a: 129), Kristeva’s linguistic S.K. Saumjan/N. Chomsky potpourri was flawed, since the theories that she used were based on different kinds of mathematical formalizations and epistemological a priori. Both Saumjan and Chomsky represented generative linguistics, but while Chomsky was American Saumjan represented Soviet and European structural linguistics, at least before moving to Yale University in 1975. According to Ronat, the essential issue was the status of these formulae in the theories as a whole. In Ronat’s view, Kristeva’s formula was the starting point of semanalysis, whereas with Saumjan the formula was the outcome of the theory. The problem was that Kristeva from the outset attempted to limit conceptual positions in a way that would make them favorable to her own pursuits (Adlam and Salfield 1978: 104). Undoubtedly, classifying linguistic critique as academic discourse was an easy way to avoid answering Ronat’s criticism. Kristeva also did not offer any clearer arguments for having chosen this specific pattern and not some other. More generally, Ronat maintained that Kristeva’s semanalysis resulted in a scriptocentric ideology. Arguments that Kristeva put forward in her critique of Chomsky were, in many respects, insufficient. In other words, Ronat thought that there were no valid arguments for applying Saumjan’s model rather than adopting Chomsky’s, save perhaps that Chomsky positioned himself clearly within the American structuralist tradition. In another text, Kristeva maintained that Chomsky, who “proclaimed to be anarchist in politics” (Kristeva 1977: 206), bases his theory on the speaking subject and logocentrism. Kristeva’s charge that Chomsky’s transformative grammar would somehow favor the subject/predicate sentence, and thus the western metaphysical tradition, was simply not true (Ronat 1970a: 132n. 16). On the contrary, Chomsky’s model was wholly based on constituents and functions derived from them, the whole structure forming a tree—at least in the standard theory. Constituents had to be justified in the theory and within it. Ronat even hinted that Kristeva fell for a certain substantial temptation when, like Saussure, she was looking for hidden meanings in sentences (Saussure’s anagrams). In many ways, Ronat’s most important criticism was that semiotics and semanalysis were a déjà-vu: “The science of sciences and the science of itself, of ideologies—does not this semiotics resemble the old fantasy of finding a general science to explain the world?” (Ronat 1970a: 133). In the same colloquium, the French philosopher and literary scholar, future professor of French literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) Denis Guénoun (1970: 134) noted that Kristeva attempted through all possible means to separate significance and signification. This distinction revealed an underlying belief that signification could be separated from significance as such, which in turn was linked in Kristeva’s framework to simple exchange of value according to Marxist homology. In other words, how could signification escape being power over significance? In Guénoun’s view, Kristeva fell for the fallacy that language submitted itself—and language here includes significance—in all its purity and

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identity, as mere exchange value. Like Derrida, in whose collaborative circles Guénoun took part through Jean-Louis Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Guénoun was disturbed by the existence of absolute otherness, or that which is outside. The psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco (1970: 135) in turn expressed the idea that Kristeva’s zerologic subject, and through it her entire theory, was based on a kind of nirvanistic metaphysics. The linguist Anne Nicolas talked about the problem of studying the phenotype and genotype. Kristeva’s analyses seemed to only apply to the phenotype. Interaction between genotype and phenotype was totally ignored in Kristeva’s works (Nicolas 1970: 135). In Kristeva’s theories, it was precisely the study of the genotype that made it possible to reach another level. With her theory, Kristeva attempted to study the work preceding meaning. Thus, work precedes meaning, and the problem becomes how anything could be said about it. If it literally has no meaning, it follows that discourse about it cannot have any meaning either. The solution to this paradox is to talk about that which cannot be talked about in a form where one is, in actual fact, not really saying anything about it. This is a move analogous to the one used in the myths analyzed by Lévi-Strauss: when a true solution to an unsolvable contradiction is impossible, the contradiction is solved on the level of illusion. If a real solution cannot be produced, an illusion of a solution is produced instead. When nothing can be said about the other, one uses the concept of structure when talking about this other, which—and it is precisely this that Nicolas is criticizing—in reality does not say anything about this other. When the matter cannot be confirmed, the discourse as a whole is either a priori accepted or rejected. Kristeva’s answer to Ronat’s critique was stern. Ronat, she said, did not understand at all the problematics of writing (Kristeva 1970c: 138). She compared Ronat’s discourse to a discourse not familiar with its object: If it is not idealism, it is a mirror discourse which only reduces everything to its own image and which is incapable of thinking about anything save its own image. It is a discourse talking to itself; it is self-experimentation without the “other” outside of oneself (Kristeva 1970c: 138).

The psychoanalytic connotations of Kristeva’s critique were obvious. Her goal was to emphasize that Ronat’s discourse missed the essential points and lacked expertise. As Ronat was known as a Chomskyan linguist and an expert in her own field, Kristeva’s attempt to discredit her, hardly by chance, was based specifically on psychoanalytic and political vocabulary. In her attempt to dodge both linguistic (“positivist”) and psychoanalytic critique, Kristeva attacked both Ronat and Roudinesco in the following terms: We have, in addition, seen two things: a linguistic, positivistic attempt to reduce our work, and an attempt to reduce it to the field of psychoanalysis. Our work,

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Kristeva viewed critiques questioning her semanalytic project as attempts at reductionism. From the perspective of her project, they did not bring anything positive, undoubtedly because the critics questioned the existence of a new branch of science. Negativity was ignorance and ideology as well as scientism. Kristeva’s discourse was dogmatic in the sense that she refused to verify the principles underlying her theory, i.e. its foundations: all comments criticizing semanalysis were interpreted as either badly informed or ideological. In other words, semanalysis could not be criticized. Despite all this, Ronat’s observations—harshly as they were rejected—were not fully without basis. In her own words (Ronat 1970b: 140), Ronat wished to expose the ideology (choices and the criteria underlying them) that served as the foundation for Kristeva’s and Tel Quel’s work. The problem thus concerned reading. How had Kristeva read Plato, Saussure and Chomsky? Kristeva linked Saussure’s theory of language based on the sign to Platonic and metaphysical traditions. Not only was Kristeva’s interpretation of Plato relatively one-sided, but from Saussure she adopted one-sidedly the anagrams (out of which Kristeva developed her paragrams) as well as the role of semiotics in science (semiotics, or, rather, semiology, was to become the science of signs). Chomsky was subjected to similar treatment. From Ronat’s perspective, the revolutionary part of Chomsky’s theory was forgotten, while the performance model (production) of his project was rather one-sidedly favored (Ronat 1970b: 140). In Adriaens’s (1981: 184) and Guénoun’s (1969: 141–60) view, it cannot be methodologically correct to start with a certain word-theme like “phallus” and then magically find it in the text itself. This move is analogous to Althusser’s move when he first postulates that Marx’s book is classified into two parts (ideology versus science) and who then, miraculously, found this dichotomy in Marx’s texts. Adriaens calls Kristeva’s analysis an arbitrary and impressionistic interpretation. In Guénoun’s view, phonemes in Kristeva’s example “phallus” could just as well form the lexemes valise (suitcase) or falaise (river-bank). The problem is thus the lack of clear criteria according to which certain lexemes could be derived from given phonemes. Kristeva did not elaborate how she had discovered this lexeme. “Phallus” seems to be a research a priori, which linked her theory to psychoanalysis and facilitated transferring linguistic categories outside of the

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realm of linguistic competence and debate. According to Adriaens, there are two methodological reasons for this error (Adriaens 1981: 195). Firstly, Kristeva confounds the macro- (word-theme) and microlevels (semantic, phonetic and syntactic complexes) of the text. As of yet, no text-grammatical theory has been able to develop a transformative model that would combine these levels. Secondly, from a linguistic perspective it is erroneous to semanticize phonological entities, since certain morpho-phonetic units such as “oe” and their structures are purely formal entities and therefore, as such and on their own, without meaning. Kristeva commits two errors: she confounds formal description with subjective interpretation, and she assumes that a part can be deduced from the whole and vice versa (Adriaens 1981: 195). If we follow Finlay-Pelinski (Finlay-Pelinski 1982: 241), we can say that Kristeva’s and Tel Quel’s view of ideology is schizophrenic. On one hand, Kristeva wanted to keep a pejorative view of ideology with which she could criticize competing cultural products. On the other hand, she also noticed a relationship between ideology, idealism and the idea, according to which not only are concepts ideological but also the relationship between the phonetic form (signifier) and the concept (signified) is ideological, to use Saussure’s terms. From the perspective of the theory of signification, forgetting the reference was nevertheless a poor solution, since both sense (Sinn, sense) and reference (Bedeutung, reference) were necessary (Norris 1987: 98–9). Some linguists have argued (Adriaens 1981: 216–17) that Kristeva’s analyses of ideologemes are often flawed. For example, the claim that non-disjunction would exclusively be a domain of the sign-ideologeme was questionable, since the symbol-ideologeme used this type of a structure in, for instance, concealing and revealing the truth (Adriaens 1981: 202). If the paragram-ideologeme was selfreflective (Kristeva 1969a: 140), i.e. one where the author continuously monitored his or her own writing praxis, we could well say that to some extent this was also taking place in the so-called ideologeme of the symbol. Clearly Kristeva wanted to show that a writer, by staying within a symbol- or a sign-ideologeme, in other words by placing him- or herself within a given time period, would simultaneously stay within a given ideological structure characterized by certain meanings or a certain Meaning (semiotic determinism). The failure of the fusion of intellectual and political radicalism, the harsh criticisms addressed to her early work—that had propelled her to the French intellectual scene—and Kristeva’s promotion in academe all contributed to a shift in her intellectual interests, from semiotics and linguistics to psychoanalysis. The Maoist phase of the Tel Quel circles also came under heavy attack, from other Maoist circles. Tel Quel had been close to the “Lacano-Alhusserian” review Cahiers pour l’analyse, created in 1966 by students of Althusser, and basing their theoretical foundation on the works of Althusser, Derrida and Lacan. Three years later Lacan’s seminar at the Ecole normale supérieure is suspended, the Cahiers pour l’analyse is terminated and some of its members join the Maoist group Gauche prolétarienne.

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Sichère Bernard Sichère, a Maoist activist who had been involved in Tel Quel’s collaborative circles in the early 1970s and later became professor of philosophy at the University Paris VII (René Descartes), resigned from the group at the end of 1974. His resignation was a consequence of a change in the political line of Tel Quel and its leader, which was the result of a trip to China by certain Tel Quel members and their friends in the spring of 1974. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, Philippe Sollers and François Wahl (editor at Le Seuil) went on the trip. Lacan was also going to participate. At first, the plan seemed to stall because the Chinese embassy in Paris, with which Sollers had splendid relations through Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, refused to grant a visa to Lacan’s female companion. Sollers also had strategic reasons for wanting Lacan to come with. Sollers had told Elisabeth Roudinesco that Lacan’s coming on the trip would have meant a break in the “objective alliance of Lacanism and revisionism” (Roudinesco 1986a: 549). From the end of the 1960s onwards, the whole Tel Quel group had increasingly been drawing nearer to psychoanalysis and Lacan. Lacan, however, did not go on the trip to China. Towards the end of 1974, the publishing company François Maspéro, one of whose editorial directors was Louis Althusser himself, decided to publish a series of books called Yénan on Marxism-Leninism, Maoism and psychoanalysis. One of the most important publications in the new series was a volume entitled Marxisme-Léninisme et psychanalyse. Two of its authors, Marie-Christine Boons and Bernard Sichère, had been active members of the Maoist June-71 Movement. Sichère published the article “False materialism ‘Tel Quel’: Against those who Interpret,” which criticizes the science of the text. In Sichère’s view, idealism’s ultimate ruse was to clothe itself in a materialistic robe. Everyone was, to a greater or lesser degree, a materialist: Authors, since they deal with the matter of language. Painters, since they manipulate colours. Musicians, since they manipulate notes. Psychoanalysts, since they are the prisoners of instincts (Sichère 1975: 111).

However, real materialism dealt with concrete social and political relationships, class conflicts. Idealists, who were masking themselves as materialists, brought the other and pleasure (jouissance) to the forefront. The body, which their materialism was based on, was nothing but an abstract body. Sichère criticized Derrida, among others, for not taking materialistic production into account. Repeating Marx, Sichère noted that the goal of intellectual activity was to change reality, not to interpret it, and that the interpreters’ body was a phantasm that exposed the denial of history. However, he did not deny that Kristeva’s semanalysis might contain grains of a materialistic conceptualization and theory of the subject. But Sichère claimed that on a general level, Kristeva had forgotten two things: history and real materialism.

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In Sichère’s view, Kristeva, in analyzing the body instead of analyzing materialism, failed to see that the body under investigation was a product of a certain class status. Tel Quel had done nothing more than introduce its own petitbourgeoise class subjectivity without taking into account more general historical facts: inner conflicts of opinion within the bourgeoisie, the strengthening of social democracy, the premises about social-fascist dictatorship held by the revisionist parties, the disintegration of the revolutionary block after 1968: Petit-bourgeois interpreters, while talking about the “play” and “the desire (désir) of the masses” expose their own class desire: their primarily phantasmatic relationship with social reality and history (Sichère 1975: 126).

To idealism, the world was not a place where one fought until death. It was language and endless interpretation. When Barthes asks “why does an activist decide to become militant” Sichère answered that there was no answer to be found within the interpreters’ system; rather, the answer was to be found in certain historical and social circumstances and conflicts which produced a certain kind of subject. This subject is a class subject, and Kristeva’s theory of the subject could never take this aspect of the subject into account. Kristeva’s revolution of poetic language attempted—without success—to link together the process of the formation of significance and political revolution. In Sichère’s view, it would have been more intelligent to think about the historical and ideological limitations of one’s own view of social relationships. On a more general level, Kristeva was incapable of putting into perspective her own discourse and taking into account the circumstances under which psychoanalysis emerged, as well as the future of psychoanalysis. In Sichère’s opinion it was flawed to talk about a revolution of language. One could only talk about systematizing revolutionary practices. By linking authors of the previous century, Mallarmé and Lautréamont, with the revolutionary battle, Kristeva only reinforced the predicament created by the inner conflicts of the class subject when the revolutionary masses did not support it. In Sichère’s view, the main culprits for false materialism were specifically psychoanalysis and Georges Bataille. Like Baudrillard, Sichère maintained that especially through Bataille Kristeva and the Telquelians had been led to faulty materialistic dialectics. Psychoanalysis was not a science. It did not know what it was talking about, and the unconscious had become an omnipresent, omnipotent monster and also a powerful tool for intellectual power and manipulation. In addition, the Tel Quel group assumed that the theoretical gaps in Lacanian theory could be patched with Marxist historical materialism. This “patch-up theory” most clearly revealed the lack of conceptual critique: How to “reconcile” (this is the correct word, the idealistic word) the theory of the universal subject, a theory which parenthesizes the theory of reflection and

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This was the central theoretical problem which Kristeva and other theorists of the science of the text attempted to solve without success. According to Sichère, finding a solution was indeed impossible unless one became a Bataillean idealist dualist (desire and Law, forbidden and transgression, excess and economy) or a Deleuzian. If idealism was manifested first and foremost as a philosophy of the scene (scène) and representation (performance), then the purpose of materialism was precisely to historically depict this process by which the stage was formed. The discourse of the theorists of the text did not take into account the dialectical interaction between the stage and the process. Kristeva’s theory thus led to the typically idealistic stance where the theory of a subject in process attempts to look at the logic by which the subject is formed independently of the material circumstances, i.e. the institutional and historical framework to which it is tied. Sichère noted that we cannot know anything about the subjective constructs of tomorrow’s communist society. In Sichère’s view, only the science of performance as the science of ideologies could depict the processes of subject formation. But contrary to what the theorists of the text thought, these processes were strictly tied to concrete social and historical circumstances. Since Mallarmé and Lautréamont, the great literary geniuses of the bourgeois society, had not accounted for this basis, they did not know what they were saying or doing. The boundaries of our language and our re-presentation are historical boundaries. Bataille’s moment of silence was not dependent on the individual but on history, which had decided whether there was silence or not: Desire is not a shape, a concept that would form all reality in order to be realized in it, nor is it a fundamental Structure of humans. To believe that to be the case is tantamount to returning to Metaphysics. Unlike Feuerbach, Bauer and Stirner, we no longer have the Human, Reason, Uniqueness, but Love (with Lacan, that forgotten romantic), Desire (with Deleuze, that false pervert), Pleasure (with Tel Quel, those false optimists) (Sichère 1975: 147).

Sichère was outlining the impasse the avant-garde subject had gotten into. The impasse consisted of the subject’s wish to transcend certain historical boundaries created by the dominant ideology. When we speak of neurosis, psychosis, perversion, paranoia or homosexuality, we speak of a body different from the one that was tied to history and the class struggle. Sichère notes laconically that Marx did not have a theory of desire, the unconscious or phantasm. In his view, the avantgarde authors whom the theorists of the text were talking about had remained stuck in bourgeois pleasures on the one hand and in the hope for a new, free society on the other. The discourse sustained by the interpreters was a farce, since it described itself while denying itself access to its own history. The interpreters only talked about a decentralized, pluralistic, “exploded” subject without advancing the class

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struggle or history one iota. Kristeva’s dialectics of instincts and the thetic was only a parody of dialectics. “It is time for so-called ‘textual practice’ to cease functioning as a metaphor for revolutionary activity” (Sichère 1974: 155). Always missing the latest train, the petit-bourgeois intelligentsia with its semiotic instincts fell for endless biologizing, thus reflecting the individual lost during the crisis of capitalism whose subjective and misguided consciousness was groping in darkness. Thinking about the inhuman in the form of instincts [pulsions], desires and semiotic mobility was placed alongside the dominant, humanistic thought and ideology. The moral of liberation in the form of transcending boundaries paralleled the ideal consumer who consumed for consumptions’ sake while leaving on an implicit level the principles of liberation and consumption and the mechanisms steering this process. In Sichère’s view, the decentralized subject, happy and irresponsible, was only a re-print of holy Stirner’s Uniqueness, and a very poor one at that: Baby Sade and little washer-girls, Baby Bataille and daddy on the potty and Marcelle piss-into-pacifier, Sollers-baby whom all the girls wish to suck-andlick, Baby Deleuze and the organless body, Baby Artaud and rejection-analamygdala-shit (Sichère 1974: 161).

The problem brought up by Sichère concerns the demands of semanalysis, which are relatively straightforward and clear: to create a new science that would study the constitution of meaning and of the subject. With the analysis of ideology, Barthes, Althusser, Derrida and especially Lacan were the central theorists. But even from them, Kristeva adopted certain thoughts while ignoring those that did not fit her science of the text. One of the central problems was that the concept of “subject” had a different meaning in the Marxist framework and in the semiological or linguistic framework. Kristeva and the other theorists of the text were convinced that Marxism had to be linked with psychoanalysis. The use of the same concept of “subject” in different semantic and disciplinary contexts served to create the fallacy that there were essential relationships between certain ideas. The factor that, despite all, led Kristeva to theorize like this was the theoretical necessity to create a new theory of the revolutionary subject that could be linked to the Marxist theory of revolution. This was an old dream of the Parisian intelligentsia, one that would have solved the fundamental antinomy between the collectivity and theory of the party and individualism or the subject. In the 1930s, André Gide in his communist phase talked about founding communist individualism. This theoretical goal could not be detached from a theoretical and philosophical context, or, in other words, of the problems of avant-garde and relationships to the communist party (see, for example, La Nouvelle Critique 1972: 86–7), which more generally steered the formation of politically radical theory in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Sichère’s criticism focused chiefly on two problems: those of materialism and history. The first was linked with the subject and with psychoanalysis’

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interpretation of materialism, and the second with the class struggle. These same problems have featured prominently on the lists of other critics as well. All of the critics were already integrated into the academic field and many were to become university professors. Bernard Sichère became professor of philosophy at ParisVII, Henri Meschonnic professor of linguistics at Paris-VIII, Denis Guénoun professor of literature at Paris-IV, Julia Kristeva professor of linguistics at ParisVII, and Mitsou Ronat professor of linguistics at Paris-VIII. Such was the social and symbolic attracting force of the university. The fusion of theory and politics meant the symbolic expansion of terms such as materialism or the text and their collusion with progressive political forces. Power-ideas evolved in specific social networks that covered certain journals and university departments. Academia served as a diffusion mechanism for the ideas devised by “French theorists.” The taming of these dangerous ideas and the establishment of a new symbolic order starting from the beginning of the 1970s was also visible in other developing areas such as the social sciences.

Chapter 11

The Power-idea of Structure Ici, on spontane (Here we’re spontaneous) Censier 1968

Historian of religion and Jesuit priest, Michel de Certeau (1925–86) sought to grasp through his works the specific contradictions of a period without separating politics from culture. Author of numerous books, including Heterologies and The Practice of Everyday Life, he underscored the freshness of popular culture and its capacity to undermine the legitimacy of authority (for a recent appraisal see Davis 2008). Contrasting Bourdieu’s and Certeau’s analysis of human action will reveal some of the limits of both approaches. The more specialized field of sociology was not immune to the broader changes taking place in the French intellectual field starting from the 1950s. Younger sociologists adopted instruments of analysis from the developing sciences, mostly linguistics. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1930–2002) academic and intellectual career followed closely these broader developments, building on power-ideas such as “structure” (for a sociological discussion see Sewell 1992). He sought to renew sociology itself through application of new instruments and the creation of new research problems that closely followed the intellectual trends of the moment. This critical sociology resonated with a general suspicion of authorities and the establishment visible in all radical ideas of the 1960s. While for Bourdieu and other structuralists authority stems from the structures that control human activity and compel individuals to act in certain ways (domination), for Certeau authority is connected to inner experiences (resistance). In other words, in the first case potentiality of action is formal and events are the effects of structures whereas in the second case potentiality is substantial and events are seen as an exhaustion of potentiality. Both perspectives share a metaphysical basis: structures and inner experiences are not directly perceivable and thus verifiable. The cultural theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Claude LéviStrauss exemplify structural potentiality and that of Michel de Certeau substantial potentiality. Here, I will contrast structural and social scientific conceptions of structure, and then follow with a discussion of some of Certeau’s ideas on authority. “Structure” is the technical term used in some social and linguistic sciences to describe reality scientifically. Etymologically, “structure” is equivalent to “organization” (Petitot 1986: 991), or the form of organization of a substance. The term has two common uses. A structure can be visible, for instance the structure of a building, it can also be invisible. In the first case, structure is a

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concrete principle of organization, whereas in the second case, structure is an abstract principle of organization. For many anthropologists, a social structure is perceived reality (Goddard 1965: 408–27). In contrast, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s kinship structures are immanent, timeless, non-material, logical entities. Similarly, for the Lithuanian-French semiotician A.J. Greimas, history “closes the door to new significations contained, as virtualities, in the structure on which it depends. Instead of being a driving force, history is a break” (Greimas 1990: 98). In Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus the structure of the university field is invisible: he seeks evidence of its existence in the structure’s empirical (statistical and discursive) actualizations both in external (power structures in society and their material actualizations) and internal (habitus, or internalized ways of seeing and evaluating) forms (Bourdieu 1988). Lévi-Strauss’ kinship structure is not an object of experience. It cannot be directly perceived and therefore, its epistemological and ontological status is uncertain. Anyone can see a building’s structure. For this reason, its ontological status is unequivocal and unquestionable, although one could argue that even the perception of a building is to a certain extent socially and culturally constructed. Why then use the same term in both cases? Because we are discussing the form of organization. In the first case the form is concrete, in the second abstract. If the immanent, non-perceivable structure is invisible, its effects and substantial actualizations can be observed and experimentally tested. Proof of its existence will always be indirect, however, and for this reason questionable. The form of kinship is a theoretical object. How is this structure achieved? First, the observer perceives certain events that, in a second phase, s/he interprets as being the structure’s actualizations. S/he retroactively constructs on the observed effects the structure’s actualizations. A curious reversal of cause and effect occurs in this process: events are perceived, the structure is constructed on the basis of these events, and they in turn are interpreted as being the effects or actualizations of the structure (Schatzki 1987: 127). A.J. Greimas expressed this position in the following “Structure, which was timeless, could produce sequences of significations that were both evenemential and temporal. It generated historical events” (Greimas 1990: 93). For instance, the use of certain terms in a language is postulated as being part of a linguistic structure which cannot be perceived as such, but which manifests itself constantly. In this sense, the abstract linguistic structure is both real and ideal. The idea of homology presents the reversal of cause and effect in another form. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels noticed a homological relationship between ideas and social class in The German Ideology, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (Marx and Engels 1977: 64). This homology has, subsequently, been generalized by other scholars, among them Bourdieu, and taken as the starting point of further research. For instance, in his study of Gustave Flaubert in the French literary field (for further examples see Bourdieu 1992), Bourdieu comments:

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The science of cultural works has as its object the correspondence between two homological structures, the structure of the works (i.e. of genres, forms and themes) and the structure of the literary field, a field of forces that is unavoidably a field of struggle (Bourdieu 1993b: 183).

Not surprisingly, for some scholars the status of this homology is problematic (Grignon and Passeron 1989: 25). At the level of generality of Marx’s and Bourdieu’s examples, the homology is unverifiable and prevents examination of the specific ways in which social domination is reproduced. Further, postulating formal similarities between different areas of research masks all differences, and hides the problems tied to generalization by analogy. For instance, what does a homology between areas x and y say to us about x and y? It merely states that they are in some respect structurally homologous. But isn’t this homology totally dependent on the observer’s intent? In a structural social analysis, two options are then possible. A scholar can emphasize either the empirical nature of structures, as for instance RadcliffeBrown has done, or emphasize their idealness (nominalism), as is the case in LéviStraussian anthropology and Bourdieusian sociology. Lévi-Strauss formulates his conception of structure the following way: The term “social structure” has nothing to do with empirical reality, but with models that are built up after it (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 331).

Structures are always related to other structures, indefinitely. Similarly, for Edmund Leach, “the structures which the anthropologist describes are models which exist only as logical constructions in his own mind” (Leach 1954: 5). Leach differentiates social structure from social relations, whereas authors such as Evans-Pritchard (1940: 262–3), Radcliffe-Brown (1952: 190), and Firth (1963: 31) assimilate social structure to social relations. For these authors, “social structure is in the facts or derived directly from them” (Goddard 1965: 413 n. 9). Familiar examples of a structuralist “structure” are the popular games published in newspapers, in which the reader has to find a specific animal in a drawing presenting a whole array of animals, or to draw the picture of an animal by connecting with lines a group of dots. The game starts with the instructions “Find the cat in the drawing,” or “Draw the lion.” In the cat drawing, its creator has drawn the animal into the picture. In the lion drawing, its creator has erased the drawing’s lines, leaving only dots on the page. In both the structuralist case and the drawings, a structure has been created intentionally. The existence of a mythical structure among the Bororo as Lévi-Strauss has described it is of the anthropologist’s, not the Indians’, creation, although there probably is considerable overlap between the two conceptions. The similarities between popular games and Lévi-Straussian structures are clear. The structure is not visible as such, but it exists nonetheless. Its existence manifests above all an intention on the part of the reader/observer, a way of seeing things.

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Because the reader is convinced that there is a lion in the drawing, s/he must try to see beyond this group of dots to put them into a spatial order. The process by which the creator of the lion drawing made a structure was the following: s/he first thought of what a lion looked like, then drew the lion, then erased the lines and replaced them with dots at various points. For the anthropologist or sociologist used to going beyond the perceivable, events appear in reality as effects of a structure, which s/he has created and which organizes the distribution of the dots or empirical events. The anthropologist is the first to concede that each of us will see the lion differently. The definition of the lion could be the sum total of all of these variations (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 249). For a structural social scientist, human beings actively organize reality using structures. For ordinary human beings, reality and the world are mediated by something that is both ideal and real, which does not in itself exist materially but which subsists ideally because of human activity. In this sense, the aim of structuralist research will be to show how abstract schematism (relationships such as a:b, a1:a2, b1:b2 … ) is empirically actualized. As structure is both real and ideal, structuralist scholarship is characterized by a constant tension between empiricism and nominalism. The danger is to become the carrier of a systemic disease, in which the scholar’s model of reality will necessary be the correct one. Goddard emphasizes this point: But this guarantee of having got the right model rests on no more than an appeal to a subjective sense of satisfaction, and has no independent (objective) justification. This does not seem to me to provide a valid criterion. The trouble is that models of hidden realities cannot be directly checked, and indirect checks are not in this case really checks at all (Goddard 1965: 417).

According to Goddard, the correctness of the model has no objective justification. The model is purely intuitive and subjective, applicable with difficulty to empirical research. The problem is the relationship of abstract dichotomies to social practices, or of formal potentiality to chronotopic action. Empirical complexity is so great that the real practices of members of social groups can not be easily reduced to abstract dichotomies or triangles, contrary to structuralist precepts (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 99 ff.). Sociologist Claude Grignon has brought up this point in relation to food consumption in France: Instead of a bipolar scheme, a continuum can be drawn from foods usually intended to stay raw (radishes, oysters, cold smoked ham, and so on) to products already cooked destined to be recooked, or at least to be reheated (vegetable cans), passing by products that stay raw or that can be cooked (carrots, lettuces, bananas, apples, strawberries, pears, peaches, eggs, ground beef, and so on), raw products to be cooked (wheat flour, pasta, rice, fresh fish, potatoes, peas, spinach, leeks, dry vegetables, pork, and so on), already cooked products to be consumed as such (biscuits, dry cakes), and already cooked products that

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can be consumed as such or recooked (bread) … In the case of overly varied consumption of the average French household, it seems particularly difficult to bring real practices together to a “concrete triangle” and to enter this into an “abstract triangle”, molded on the model of oppositions between phonemes (Grignon 1988: 23).

To be fair, in comparison with Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu has tried to make model building more empirically verifiable and justifiable. This intention is manifest in numerous semantic and technical shifts in Bourdieu’s theory: strategies instead of rules and the use of interviews and surveys, for instance. If, as Bourdieu suggests, the logical and universal divisions of the mind independent of social conditions are Lévi-Strauss’ topic of research (Bourdieu 1980a: 158), Bourdieu himself concentrates on the dialectics of social structures and of structured and structuring dispositions (Bourdieu 1980a: 55 and 90). However, he has maintained the idea of model building as the main element of scientific activity (cf. Bourdieu et al. 1991). Consequently, discovery of new facts and disproof do not necessarily have transformative effects on model building, the cornerstone of which is the duality between economic and cultural capital and their distribution in a structured space (organized according to the volume and structure of capital). In Bourdieu’s theory of social action internalized and externalized social structures “explain” action and behavior. Individuals internalize the structures of fields of human activity (the literary field, the political field, and so on), which take the form of a habitus (cf. for instance Bourdieu 1993a). The individual then externalizes his/her habitus in the form of action (Shmatko 1993: 14–17). The intellectual sources of this conception of structure are twofold: on the one hand linguistics and on the other hand the social sciences (cf. Kauppi 1996). In Bourdieu’s cultural theory, structure is both immanent and non-perceivable, extrinsic and perceivable. Because of this duality, structure is partly based on something that cannot be proven right or wrong. For this reason, the structure’s immanence provides Bourdieu with a stable basis for the application of a hypothetical-deductive method. Bourdieu’s use of the concept “structure” reveals the deep affinities between his ideas and those of other members of the second postwar generation of French scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel Foucault. In Bourdieu’s theory of social action, two types of structuration are in a dialectical relationship to one another: on the one hand, structures formed by fundamental oppositions, and, on the other hand, structures as social regularities. How are these converted into one another? What is their precise relationship? These questions remain unanswered. How both Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu use the schema of the unconscious is tied to the problem of defining structures. Bourdieu and Lévi-Strauss imply that unconscious structures determine human consciousness. But as long as the unconsciousness of the structures cannot be empirically checked or further analyzed, its effects will appear to be everywhere: in the model, everything will fall into its right place.

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While Bourdieu’s and Lévi-Strauss’ theories undoubtedly further our understanding of human action by sketching the structural features that organize it, these approaches indirectly emphasize abstract explanations of social action and authority, creating a picture of a too-plastic individual who adapts him/herself without effort and struggle to changing external conditions. Furthermore, events and situations are pushed to the background as explanatory factors of human activity. Events are mere effects and actualizations of structures. Authority, or what compels an individual to act in specific ways, emits from a superior in a formal hierarchy or in a field of formal positions, from an individual in a homological position, or from a collusion of internal and external structures. Authority’s source is ultimately in internalized external structures, such as relations of power in the family. The individual acts through the authority of his/her habitus, reproducing these structures. In Bourdieu’s framework, the individual’s position in a field of social activity will determine his/her range of options. In contrast, in a certellian framework belief replaces form. Activity in the social realm is preceded by inner acts that are the presuppositions of activity. For instance, defying a governmental authority requires from an individual a feeling of power that makes open defiance possible. This sense of power might be a form of inner conviction or certitude in relation to moral principles. Social action is preceded by a sense of power, a mental space for action. Subjectively and intersubjectively experienced fields of credibility condition human behavior. Inner experience is the source of authority and credibility. It can take the form of inner conviction/certitude, indifference or resignation. The powerless are often resigned: they have abandoned all hope. When belief no longer inhabits representation, authority is deserted, bereft of its basis. The desertion of belief displaces the fragile equilibrium of a system of representation (de Certeau 1997b: 26). Individuals are always involved in various situations and taking part in events. Certeau analyzes in conjunction with the events of May 68 in France, the unnamable feeling of belief that united the protesting students as a kind of mystical communication that preceded the exchange of signs, the “you too” that was never uttered. This “dialogic and transcendental process” is not necessarily tied to a formal position in a field, however, but rather to common experiences that enable mystical communication to take place. From the individual’s point of view, events are not of equal value. Some bond individuals more strongly than others, and have more authority over them. An account of the mechanisms of domination requires taking into account the invisible subjective level as domination is most effective when authority is felt to be legitimate. In contradistinction to Certeau’s inside-out perspective, Bourdieu’s and LéviStrauss’ approaches present a very different picture of authority. But are things, events and actions in the world as simple and clear-cut as linguistic theories suggest? Obviously not, although Leach has defended this approach in the following way, worthwhile quoting in its entirety:

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A structure of any kind has a tendency to reproduce itself in the form of a mirror image … According to this doctrine then, any kind of structure viewed diachronically in the course of history will constantly tend to produce inversions of itself. Likewise if we examine the distribution of a structural pattern, asynchronically over a geographical area, we shall find similar structures appearing in inverse form in neighboring areas. This sounds very complicated, but is really quite simple. If you want to express your difference from your neighbor for any reason whatsoever you will act in a manner exactly opposite (emphasis added) to that in which you expect him to behave. And our attitude to our predecessors and to our neighbors always has this kind of ambiguity. We admire them, but we also want to be quite different from them (Leach 1965: 778).

This “exactly opposite” reflects a general theoretical necessity (black or white) rather than an empirical reality (shades of gray). In Bourdieu’s approach, this “exactly opposite” takes the form of two hierarchic opposites (bourgeois/petit bourgeois habitus, for instance), which form the internalized social structure and the basis for action. The structuralist conception of structure is based on discontinuity (either, or). For its part, empirical reality reflects ambiguity, social possibilities and impossibilities, and continuity (for instance, the distribution of a property forms a continuum from very rare to very common). How likely is it that conceptual extremes would manifest themselves in empirical reality in such a clear-cut manner? The linguistic theory which is the basis of both Lévi-Strauss’ and Bourdieu’s models creates numerous biases and problems, preventing development of a more nuanced analysis of social action and choice. For Bourdieu, duality is enough to warrant the use of the term “structure.” However, in the case of a binary opposition such as “a:b” the definition is too loose, as anything can be isomorphic to just about anything else. If duality is identified with schema, and schema with structure (Bourdieu 1984b: 170), structures are everywhere, and we wouldn’t be able to discriminate “structure situations” and “non-structure situations” from one another. The danger for a theory of habitus is that structures would be nowhere. Joining formal and substantial conceptions of authority and credibility can produce insights into the political mechanisms of domination. The inner experiences of individuals can reinforce or disqualify the formal domination of a political regime. Inner resignation or desertion of belief can double the power of formal domination in the sense that individuals will not resist it: psychological domination reinforces formal domination and thus prevents liberating action. This doubling takes the form of illegitimacy: meaning has deserted domination (tyranny). Conversely, inner conviction or the invention of liberty can reinforce or invalidate this same domination. Through a sense of power and capacity to act domination can be either legitimated or made null and void. While Bourdieu’s conception of credibility and authority offers structural analysis of domination, Certeau’s inside-out point of view enlightens the subjective dimension of

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domination. Because domination is always rule that is subjectively felt as being more or less legitimate, it cannot be adequately understood only through its most formal aspects. Furthermore, structures do not do anything by themselves. They do not “explain” action. Structures are activated by something more fundamental, such as inner certitude or belief, which provides individuals with one of the conditions for obtaining agency. The power-idea of structure became to such an extent influential that nobody cared about the weaknesses of the concept: all self-respecting and aspiring intellectuals had to use it. For the second generation of French postwar intellectuals, the power-idea of structure functioned as a rallying banner that organized the activities of the protagonists of new theories and concepts. It still fulfils this function at the beginning of the new millennium. I will next have a closer look at the scholarly works of Pierre Bourdieu, whose work exemplifies the fusion of French structuralist social science and intellectual radicalism.

Chapter 12

The Bourgeois Political Order: A Critique Je pense, donc tu suis (I think, therefore you follow) Men’s toilet at the Sorbonne, 1999

Pierre Bourdieu’s work as a whole illustrates the double strategy that an upcoming thinker had to engage in the French intellectual field in the 1960s: on the one hand, one had to take part in broader intellectual movements such as “structuralism” and the political radicalization in the university, including the critique of bourgeois order, on the other hand one had to craft one’s own niche and collaborative circles within these broader movements. This double movement is especially clear in Bourdieu’s relationship with Marxism and those French intellectuals who were considered by many radical intellectuals as being its “official” representatives in France, Louis Althusser and his students (for a sharp critique, see Bourdieu 1982). Apart from the analysis of cultural production, it is perhaps in the analysis of political representation that Bourdieu’s adaptation of some of Marx’s (and Althusser’s) concepts is the clearest. The usage of Marxist concepts enabled Bourdieu to keep up his profile as a theoretically innovative sociologist who, although integrated into university and holding a position as a directeur d’études at the institutionally marginal but intellectually prestigious Ecole pratique des hautes études, was also politically radical, that is on the left and with the students. Combining empirical and theoretical analysis, he wanted to expand the area of sociological intervention to include politics and culture. Like other intellectuals of the 1960s, his work contained a radical critique of the state of French democracy as a bourgeois order that excluded the weak and powerless. In Bourdieu’s theory of political representation, the right that its citizens have to formulate political opinions and emit political judgments is the fundamental characteristic of any democratic regime. In theory, democracy is composed of citizens who, with certain age limits, are all equal. However, as Bourdieu demonstrates in his numerous studies on political opinion (see for instance Bourdieu 1984a, 1984b: 397–465), socially the ability to produce a political opinion and to emit a political judgment is unequally distributed. The technical competence that has to do with political judgment is actually a social competence. This ability varies with educational qualifications and age, among other factors. As in other areas of social activity, in politics concentration of the objectified or embodied instruments of production of political opinions can be observed. In this sense, the French republic is already a selective democracy, as only part of the population has the symbolic means to produce a political opinion, to access the order of political discourse, and thus to fully partake in political culture.

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Not every answer to a question considered as being political is necessarily the product of a political judgment. Bourdieu differentiates three modes of production of opinion (Bourdieu 1984b: 417–18). The first depends on class ethos, which enables the opinion provider to formulate coherent, common sense answers that follow the logic of everyday existence. Political principles, “slant,” or logos provide the grounding for the second mode of production of political opinion. Both modes are amenable to logical control and reflexive scrutiny. A third mode of production of political opinion consists of delegation of the formulation of political opinions to an organization providing a political line, such as a party, trade union, or other political organization. This delegation can be based on either class ethos or “slant.” What differentiates the first mode of production from the second and the third is that in the case of class ethos the principles of production of political judgment are implicit. The relationship between class and opinion is direct and unconscious. In Bourdieu’s mind, this is very problematic, as “dispositions without consciousness are self-opaque and always exposed to seduction by false recognitions” (Bourdieu 1984b: 420). In contrast, the relationship between social class and political opinion is indirect in the second and third modes, mediated by the logos of either a specific political axiomatics or a political organization. Bourdieu provides a complementary division in the analysis of political opinion with production by proxy versus first-person production. He designates as production by proxy the delegation of the power to produce political opinions to a party or other political organization that represents the individual. By first-person production Bourdieu means that individuals use their own resources to formulate political opinions. As the ability to formulate political opinions is unequally distributed, those with more educational resources are more likely to be able to formulate them than those who have none. In Bourdieu’s words, “The probability of producing a political response to a politically constituted question rises as one moves up the social hierarchy (and the hierarchy of incomes and qualifications)” (Bourdieu 1984b: 427). Bourdieu also analyzes the social mechanisms that influence the ability to produce an answer to a “political question” (Bourdieu 1977: 55–89). Variations in this ability depend less on technical expertise or on knowledge of politics than on the social competence that translates into the feeling of having the right to have a political opinion (Champagne 1991). In other words, the ability to imagine the political is as unequally distributed as political competence. Bourdieu is interested in the role played by faith and trust in political judgment, especially in the case of production by proxy. An element of implicit faith is inscribed in the logic of political choice. The choice of representatives involves choosing not only among programs and ideas, but also among personalities. The first element of uncertainty concerns the object of judgment: is it a person or is it a set of ideas? Because a person is endowed with a certain habitus, that is ways of seeing and evaluating social events, s/he embodies certain ideas that might not be expressed at the moment of choice. These unexpressed ideas and opinions exist in an implicit mode. On the one hand, the representative expresses the already

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formulated ideas of his/her electors, and, on the other hand, s/he follows his/her own “internal program—or the specific interests associated with his position in the field of ideological production” (Bourdieu 1984b: 424). In some cases, there is correspondence between speech and spokesperson. However, even in these cases usurpation is possible, as the representative might bring into existence opinions that were not previously expressed and thus were not known by the electors at the moment they made their choice. In surveys, the least competent persons in matters of political opinion must choose between answers that take on their meaning in relation to a political issue, that is, to a political position in the field of ideological production. Because these individuals can produce a “yes” or “no” answer to a question but cannot necessarily grasp the political meaning of the question asked, those asking the questions can impose on them a political position. In this way, “the respondents are dispossessed of the meaning of their response” (Bourdieu 1984b: 428), a response that is totally alien to their own opinion but which is nevertheless presented as being their opinion. These least competent persons either then respond to an alien question or answer the question as they understand it, retranslating it into their own language. Thus, “rationalization of budgetary options” becomes “not wasting money” (Bourdieu 1984b: 428). Through this mechanism, the respondent resorts to his or her class ethos and its unconscious presuppositions. Bourdieu underlines the conservative nature of these predispositions, tied to the world by practical logic. The task of formulating revolutionary political stances is left to political organizations. In a Weberian fashion, the field of ideological production is the realm of professional politicians, an area from which the profanes are excluded. It is in this realm that political problems, programs, and ready-made solutions are produced. This production of political opinion and judgment attempts to achieve collective mobilization around common problems, to universalize certain particular interests by making their particular condition appear universal. However, part of the problem of translation of the implicit into the explicit is that there is a radical discontinuity between condition and discourse, between ethos and logos. That is, the unconscious character of practical logic, its inscription in bodily hexis, that is, in everyday schemes of perception and appreciation, and in the implicit political underpinnings of class habitus, do not necessarily translate into definite political stances or opinions understood as positions in the field of ideological production. It is precisely because of the indeterminate character of the relationship between ethos and logos that professional political agents of all kinds—politicians, journalists, publicists, etc.—play such a key role in the production of political opinion, shaping the world of the politically imaginable and the structures and main dividing lines of the field of ideological production. Bourdieu’s theory of electoral and democratic politics concentrates on analysis of political representation and symbolic political struggles. Following Thomas Aquinas, Bourdieu discusses the delegation of political power by the people to a representative as a form of alienation (Bourdieu 2001: 101). The people alienate

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their original sovereignty to a plenipotentiary representative, a party and/or an individual. An isolated individual cannot make himself heard in politics unless s/he transforms this isolated voice into group voice. But this means s/he must dispossess him- or herself of a voice in order to escape political dispossession. In a landmark study entitled “Delegation and Political Fetishism,” Bourdieu analyzes the power of delegation as a purely political power that enables a group to form by delegating power to a representative (Bourdieu 1981: 49–55, 1991, 203–19). In very Durkheimian fashion, the process of delegation becomes a case of social magic in which a person such as a minister, a priest, or a deputy is identified with a group of people: the workers, the nation, believers, etc. The group no longer exists as a collection of individuals but rather, through this representative, as a social agent. In this case, delegation signifies alienation implicitly consented to by those represented and dissimulated usurpation by the representative. As Robert Michels put it in his ground breaking work on power in political organizations, “le parti, c’est moi” (Michels 1962: 220). Bourdieu reveals the double process of recognition and misrecognition inscribed in political delegation: “A symbolic power is a power which presupposes recognition, that is, misrecognition of the violence that is exercised through it” (Bourdieu 1991a: 209). The representative exists in a metonymical relationship with the group. S/he is a member of the group, that is, a part of it, but at the same time s/he stands for the group as a whole, is a sign of the group. The representative represents the group and speaks in its name (Bourdieu 1981: 50), the relationship between representative and represented being similar to that between signifier and signified. But at the same time, those represented have a fides implicita in the representative. S/he is given a blank check. Bourdieu seems to say that this separation of rulers and ruled means that democracy is impossible. The paradox of the monopolization of collective truth is for Bourdieu the principle of all symbolic imposition: a person speaks in the name of the group and thus manipulates the group in its own name. (Bourdieu 1981: 52). The organization quickly supplements the group. “People are there and speak. Then comes the party official, and people come less often. And then there is an organization, which starts to develop a specific competence, a language all of its own” (Bourdieu 1981: 54–5, 1991: 218). In his discussion of how groups function, Bourdieu sketches two approaches to the problem of political opinion and competence. The first type centers on markets, votes, and polls. In such approaches, individuals are demobilized and groups are reduced to aggregates (Bourdieu 2001: 85). In the case of individual speech or of voice, to use Albert Hirschman’s term (Hirschman 1970), the mode of aggregation is statistical or mechanical. It is independent of the individuals and the group does not exist politically, that is, as a political entity. Bourdieu contrasts this conception, which he calls liberal (Bourdieu 2001: 82), with Émile Durkheim’s corporatist conception of political opinion. According to Durkheim (1950: 138), and before him Jean-Jacques Rousseau, individual votes would ideally be animated by a collective spirit. They would express the community’s opinion, will, and constitute a relatively permanent and coherent group. The elementary electoral

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college should be not a collection of isolated individuals but rather a permanent and integrated group, a body with a spirit animated by tacit accord founded on complicity. For Bourdieu, this corporatist philosophy is the implicit philosophy of electoral democracy (Bourdieu 2001: 83). Bourdieu analyzes political action as consisting mostly or even exclusively of symbolic action: speeches, writings, and other symbolic interventions. A key concept in Bourdieu’s sociology of domination is that of symbolic violence. Here he is not referring to symbolic systems à la Durkheim. Symbolic power does not stem from the illocutionary force of speech, as it does for Austin or Searle. Rather, words have an effect when they confirm or transform the vision people have of the world. Behind the words is belief in the person who utters them and in the legitimacy of the words being uttered. Who is speaking? is the first question that should be asked when the legitimacy of a political message is being evaluated. Symbols make visible and make invisible. They reveal certain aspects of reality while hiding others. The working class does not exist as a physical entity. It is a symbolic construction that has become real because it has become an accepted part of political reality. The same goes for the state and most concepts that form part of political reality. These entities exist to the extent that representatives feel authorized to speak in their name, thus giving them real political force. Symbolic violence is the basic mechanism by which domination is unconsciously reproduced by the dominated. In Bourdieu’s theory, the dominated have to participate in the domination that is exerted on them otherwise it would not be legitimate. Reproduction of domination takes place with the consent of those dominated. Symbolic violence is transmitted in language and in social practices, and can be found in all human interaction. It is everywhere. Theoretically, at least, it can be contrasted with actions performed voluntarily. In practice, however, it is difficult to separate the two. The concept of symbolic violence can also be contrasted with that of physical violence, which is the monopoly of the state. In contrast to Michel Foucault’s work (see for instance Foucault 1977), Bourdieu barely talks about physical violence and mastery over bodies (Bon and Schemeil 1980: 1203), though the public control of this kind of violence is a key feature of state formation. Instead, Bourdieu emphasizes the symbolic aspects of domination and the symbolic violence exercised by the schooling system, art, law, and more generally culture. Political action means acting on the social world, often by attempting to break with the world as a natural entity. Radical political action engages a radical epistemology (Bachelard 1980) that questions the world as it is usually interpreted. Like science, politics then has to do with the struggle over the legitimate definition of reality. For Bourdieu as for Foucault, the object of politics par excellence is knowledge of the social world. In the political arena, the value of an idea depends less on its truth-value than on its power to mobilize: ideas are power-ideas (idéesforces) (Bourdieu 2001). Power-ideas cannot be proven true or false. The only way for opponents to refute them is to oppose to them some alternative power-ideas. The political weight of power-ideas will depend on their capacity to mobilize, or

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to universalize which is the precondition for mobilization. In politics, saying is doing only to the extent that a political agent is politically responsible and capable of guaranteeing that the group will carry out the actions that the agent requires. Only then will political agents consider a political statement to be equivalent to an act. But the truthfulness of power-ideas is not verifiable or falsifiable when the ideas are expressed. Only if a statement such as “I will win the elections to the presidency” is realized in the future, will it be considered historically true. Bourdieu’s analysis of political opinion, delegation, and the symbolic aspects of politics reduce politics to a struggle for domination, minimizing the transformations brought about by democratic politics. However, this conflict model is constructed on a harmony model based on the social characteristics of the agents involved in the struggle and their structural positions in various fields. The social field functions as the base structure of politics, the political game being the superstructure. In this vision that resembles in some aspects Derrida’s conception of politics (see for instance Derrida 1993), politics is about fetishism and the world of appearances. The real game is backstage in the social field, connected to the political field by any number of homologies or structural equivalences. In the social field as in any field of social activity, social class is the ultimate determinant of success or failure for any individual. Instead of the traditional dichotomy of the economic versus the cultural, one finds in Bourdieu’s theory of politics the dichotomy of the social versus the symbolic or the political. Bourdieu’s analysis of social domination creates a uniform picture of social life (see Alexander 2001 for criticism). Although some might say that modern Western states including the French state keep a monopoly over physical violence through the army and the police, it is grossly exaggerated to say that the state holds the monopoly over symbolic violence. This is because while physical violence can be monopolized and its existence empirically verified, the same cannot be said of symbolic violence (Addi 2001: 950–54). The power over bodies is of a different nature than the power over minds, which cannot be dominated by just one institution. Families, religions, companies, the media, and various kinds of associations and organizations compete with the state and other public institutions for control of this kind. Bourdieu succeeds in fusing sociological and political theories of bourgeois domination and power. But although he was one of the most visible young sociologists in the 1960s, his work, because of its empirical and social scientific character, never made it to the annals of “French theory” that has come to be defined as consisting of works in philosophy, literary theory or psychoanalysis. These composed the dominant elements in the alternative value hierarchy developed by many of the authors analyzed in this book (see also Dosse 1992).

Chapter 13

Constructing an Academic Sociology Debout les damnés de l’université (Arise, you wretched of the university) 1968

Pierre Bourdieu’s integration into university and legitimate knowledge is especially clear in his attempt to offer his own interpretation of the work of a classic in sociology, Max Weber. In this chapter, I will provide an analysis of this strategy as part of a broader symbolic and social process of integration. Raymond Aron, professor of sociology at the Collège de France and importer of Max Weber to France between the wars, might have been surprised to see one of his favorite but rebellious protégés, Pierre Bourdieu, publish articles on Weber at the beginning of the 1970s (for criticism see Aron 1983). A growing interest in Weber certainly helped Bourdieu transform his avant-garde sociology (Kauppi 1996) for which he was known at the time into a more academically acceptable variety of sociology, and to help him succeed Raymond Aron as a professor at the Collège de France in 1983. The main difference between Bourdieu’s work and the other “French theories” of the 1960s analyzed in this study is that Bourdieu sought to develop a critical and scientific type of sociology. He shared some of the references of the “scientists of the text,” mostly Bachelard, Lévi-Strauss and Saussure. But these he combined with empirical social research and social scientific references. It is perhaps in Bourdieu’s concept of the political field that his debt to Max Weber is the clearest, as he acknowledges himself: “(Max Weber was) the scholar who came the closest to the notion of ‘field’ yet, at the same time, never reached it” (le chercheur qui s’est le plus rapproché de la notion de champ et qui, en même temps, a toujours été privé de cette notion) (Bourdieu 1996). In contrast to Weber’s social spheres (Weber 1922, Gerth and Mills 1991: 331), Bourdieu’s concept of the field is structural and relational: There are general laws of fields: fields as different as the field of politics, the field of philosophy or the field of religion have invariant laws of functioning. (That is why the project of a general theory is not unreasonable and why, even now, we can use what we learn about the functioning of each particular field to question and interpret other fields) (Bourdieu 1993a: 72).

In his political theory, he conceptualizes politics topologically. The political field constitutes a space that is structured such that the value of each element of it is formed through the network of relationships this element entertains with

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the other elements in the field. In theory, then, the relative value of an element is determined by this set of relationships and not by any external factors, such international politics or the state of the economy in the case of the political field. Following Saussurean precepts, value is relational and not substantial. For this reason, distinction does not imply a search for distinction, as in Thorstein Veblen’s theory of the leisure class. An element is always distinctive, that is distinguishable in theory and practice from other elements in a structure. If it was not, it would not exist. For this reason, intentionality is not an issue in Bourdieu’s field theory, or in his theory of politics as social domination. Like any field, the political field is subject to some general principles. The most important of these modus operandi is the field’s organization around two opposite poles: the protagonists of change and the apostles of law and order, the progressives and the conservatives, the heterodox and the orthodox. This binary logic not only structures political parties and ideologies; it permeates the political field as a whole, from political parties and other political organizations between the progressive and conservative wings, all the way down to the habitus of an individual who might have evolved from a radical youth into a conservative party official. The tension between order and change is present in the activities of revolutionary movements at all times: for instance, in the hesitations of their leaders about using violence against their own supporters in order to effectively combat state authorities. As the political field becomes more autonomous, these struggles are sedimented and institutionalized, eventually forming part of the objectified and materialized social unconscious. Each political organization and the field as a whole develop their own esoteric cultures that are alien to outsiders. The social resources that structure the political field are political capital, as the specific resource that agents attempt to accumulate in the political field, economic capital, and cultural capital (Caro 1980: 1171–97, Gaxie 1973). “Political capital is a form of symbolic capital, credit founded on credence or belief and recognition or, more precisely, on the innumerable operations of credit by which agents confer on a person (or on an object) the very powers that they recognize in him (or it)” (Bourdieu 1991a: 192). Individuals are distributed throughout the field firstly according to the overall volume of capital they possess and, secondly, following the composition of their capital (Bourdieu 1991a: 231). Those who succeed in accumulating the most political capital will be the dominant, while those who have the least capital will be the dominated (Bourdieu 1984b: 451–3). The position of an individual in this structure determines his or her assets and discourses. An individual cannot occupy two positions at the same time. The structure is also a set of power relationships between individuals and groups in the political field. Moving beyond his former teacher Claude Lévi-Strauss, who developed the dominant social scientific interpretation of Saussure’s theory, Bourdieu innovates by adding to structures the analysis of power. Relationships are not only linguistic or symbolic but also social, involving power relations. In his text “Champ politique, champ des sciences sociales, champ journalistique,” Bourdieu discusses the political field as a microcosm of the social

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macrocosm. Like other areas of social activity it has its dominant and dominated, its “rich” and “poor,” its right and left. As in other areas of social activity, the more autonomous a field is, the more closed off it is from the outside world. In a relatively autonomous political field, the position of an individual will determine his or her political stances. Political agents attempt to monopolize the legitimate means of manipulating the social world (Bourdieu 1996: 13). They compete with journalists and social scientists in the struggle for the “monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence” (Bourdieu 1996: 19), a phrase borrowed from Weber’s discussion of the priesthood having the monopoly over the legitimate manipulation of the means of salvation and the state’s monopoly over legitimate violence (Weber 1966: 27–8, 1972). The political field is “understood both as a field of forces and as a field of struggles aimed at transforming the relation of forces which confers on this field its structure at a given moment” (Bourdieu 1981: 3, 1991: 171). It is composed of producers who have monopolized the production of political goods offered on the political marketplace. Ordinary citizens are reduced to the role of consumers exterior to this political field. The political stances of the moment, as seen, for instance, in electoral outcomes, are the result of an encounter between supply and demand. Both legitimate supply and legitimate demand are historically formed through social struggles between different groups to define them. Political supply consists of political goods offered by political enterprises, parties, trade unions, political clubs, and so on. These goods can be either symbolic, consisting of ideas and programs, or material, such as posts in the party hierarchy. The same applies to demand, which has been collectively and historically conditioned to take certain forms. Citizens have to choose among different types of political goods, problems, programs, analysis, concepts, events, and so on. Formally, consumers have equal access to political goods. In practice, however, social factors such as education and wealth limit access. Those who do have access to these social resources become knowledgeable consumers. Those who lack these resources have no alternatives, and abstain in elections or rely totally on their political representatives. The influence of Weber’s discussion of the priesthood is also evident in Bourdieu’s analysis of the relationship between political professionals and amateurs. As the political field gains in autonomy, the profanes become increasingly dispossessed of the properly political means of production. Professional politicians that have gone through elite French schools like the Instituts d’études politiques or the Ecole nationale d’administration gradually replace amateur political activists (Bourdieu 1989). This way the criteria that regulate entry into the political field also change. Bourdieu does not theorize the levels of autonomy, but as the field becomes more autonomous its internal mechanisms play a more central role in political activity (Weber 1972: 608). To understand the specific meaning of a political stance, one must situate it in a relational network composed on the one hand of the other stances formulated at the time in the political field and, on the other hand, of the structure of the demand.

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As political capital becomes objectified into posts in the party apparatus, relative independence from electoral sanction develops. For individuals in normal times, the temptation to integrate into the political apparatus grows as the material and symbolic spoils accumulated by the party are redistributed to the followers (Weber 1966: 63–4, Bourdieu 1981: 19–21). Conversely, in exceptional or revolutionary times staying in the political apparatus can be risky. Political agents are always, though to varying degrees, involved in a double game, the first internal to the political field and the second external to it, in the larger social field. In the political field itself professionals seek recognition from peers, whereas in the social field they seek support from the voters in elections. A political agent’s power in the political field depends on his or her capacity to speak in the name of those exterior to it, the profanes. A political agent’s dependence on the political apparatus varies according to his or her capital structure and volume. The less of other social resources such as education and personal wealth political agents have, the more dependent they are on the resources provided by delegation. The more they invest in the political apparatus, the more they become dependent on it (Michels 1962). Bourdieu has analyzed the social effects of this dispossession in the case of the French communist party (Bourdieu 1981). In contrast to intellectual groups or an aristocratic club, this type of political organization is built on both objective characteristics such as the posts it offers for its followers, and on subjective dispositions such as fidelity to the party and the convergence of its followers’ vision of the world and that of its leaders and militants. As political parties get more professional and more bureaucratic, professionals enter into competition among themselves for control over the political apparatus. “The struggle for the monopoly of the development and circulation of the principles of division of the social world is more and more strictly reserved for professionals and for the large units of production and circulation, thus excluding de facto the small independent producers (starting with the ‘free intellectuals’)” (Bourdieu 1981: 19, 1991: 196). Thus, according to the logic of monopolization of the supply of political goods, the relatively limited access to these political goods of those most deprived of economic and cultural resources is reinforced. The more socially incompetent agents are in politics, the more they will depend on the supply of political goods and the more readily they will delegate their power to political entrepreneurs and organizations. This mobilization requires, from professional politicians, a double game, one in relation to the citizens and the other aimed at their competitors. Bourdieu assimilates political parties to military organizations that mobilize their resources to defeat their competitors on the battlefield of political life: In parliamentary democracies, the struggle to win the support of the citizens (their votes, their party subscriptions, etc.) is also a struggle to maintain or subvert the distribution of power over public powers (or, in other words, a struggle for the monopoly of the legitimate use of objectified political resources—law, the army, police, public finances, etc.). The most important agents of this struggle are the political parties, combative organizations specially adapted so as to engage in

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this sublimated form of civil war by mobilizing in an enduring way, through prescriptive predictions, the greatest possible number of agents endowed with the same vision of the social world and its future. So as to ensure that this enduring mobilization comes about, political parties must on the one hand develop and impose a representation of the social world capable of obtaining the support of the greatest possible number of citizens, and on the other hand win positions (whether of power or not) capable of ensuring that they can wield power over those who grant that power to them (Bourdieu 1991a: 181).

The main object of struggle among professionals in the political field is recognition from peers, or political capital as a specific type of symbolic capital. Bourdieu differentiates between two types of political capital, that acquired by the individual and that acquired by delegation. Individual political capital is the result either of slow accumulation, as in the case of French notables, or of action in a situation of institutional void and crisis (Bourdieu 1981: 18), in which case the concept is close to Weber’s charismatic legitimacy. Personal political capital disappears with the physical disappearance of the person holding this power. S/he is recognized and known for characteristics that are considered his or her own. Political capital is acquired by delegation through investiture by an institution, for instance, a political party or other political enterprise. A person such as a priest, a professor, or any official, receives from the institution a limited and provisional transfer of collective capital composed of recognition and fidelity (Bourdieu 1981: 19). Through this process the capital is partly transformed from collective to personal. Political capital becomes institutionalized in the form of posts and positions. Those in the service of political enterprises are their delegates. Political capital by delegation thus refers to a situation where the power of a politician depends on the power of his or her party and of his or her position in the party. The leader of the party becomes, through investiture, a banker (Bourdieu 2001: 65) and the party a bank specialized in political capital. The banker controls access to this collective capital, which is bureaucratized and certified by the party’s bureaucracy. Citing Antonio Gramsci, Bourdieu writes that political agents such as trade union representatives are “bankers of men in a monopoly situation” (Bourdieu 1991a: 194, Gramsci 1978: 17). Following Max Weber in his Zwischenbetrachtung (Weber 1922: 542, Gerth and Mills 1991: 323–62), Bourdieu analyzes politics like any other area of social activity such as the economy, religion, or education (Bourdieu 1971a: 3–21, 1971b: 295–334). In his theory the political field has the same structural characteristics as any other field. Political capital is symbolic capital in the field of politics, a type of capital that the agents involved in this field compete for. The political field has its own, autonomous logic, a formal binary logic that is substantiated by the historical development of political ideas, ideologies, and practices. Agents at the autonomous pole of the political field possess the most legitimate type of political capital, whereas agents at the heteronomous pole of the political field agents accumulate alternative types of political capital. The dominant have a lot

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of capital, the dominated relatively little. Through a process of mimesis, agents’ political stances and political strategies follow their positions in the political field. According to Bourdieu, “It is the structure of the political field, that is, the objective relation to the occupants of other positions, and the relation to the competing stances they offer which, just as much as any direct relation to those they represent, determines the stances they take, i.e. the supply of political products” (Bourdieu 1991a: 246). Bourdieu presents the struggles of the representatives as offering nothing but mimesis of the stances of the social groups or social classes they represent (Bourdieu 1991a: 182). Representatives are thus simultaneously conditioned by their positions in the political field and their positions in the social field, at times miming one, at times the other, or even both at the same time. The homologies between their positions in the political field and the social field, and their locations in the political field and the field of production of political stances explains why they satisfy the needs of their electors without even consciously attempting to do so. As the congruence between representative and represented is of a semiotic or symbolic nature, resembling the relationship between signifier and signified, congruence between what the representative says and what the electors think is necessary for representation to exist. This congruence also explains why, while competing with other politicians or political enterprises in the political field, representatives also satisfy the interests of those they represent. They serve themselves while serving others. Bourdieu’s theory is Durkheimian and functionalist in its holistic analysis of the political field, and Weberian in its attempt to think of social and political processes using economic terms as models. Following Durkheim, Bourdieu sees the political in functionalist terms as forming a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The logic of the whole conditions the role of the parts and the whole takes on a life of its own that is independent of the parts. The logic of the political field determines the stances taken (Bourdieu 1991a: 184). Bourdieu also sees political activity in terms of rituals, institutions, and symbolic action. A central ritual in his theory is that of investiture, whereby an individual is chosen to represent and constitute a group. Like Weber, for whom the modern state is an “enterprise” or a “business” (Betrieb) (Weber 1972), for Bourdieu the offer and demand of political goods and the monopolization of capital are the main processes of political activity. As a result, sociology and political science paradoxically become subfields of economics (types of minor economics) miming economic terms and thought schemes. Political action becomes an inferior, because less rational, form of economic action. In Bourdieu’s theory of the political field, politics is seen as the realm of groups fighting for domination. Phenomena usually seen as political, such as the public sphere (Habermas 1989) and the rule of law, have no place in Bourdieu’s theory. Incorporating them would require drawing qualitative differences and distinguishing politics from other human activities in non-formal terms. Bourdieu’s sociological theory of politics does not elaborate on the specificity of democratic politics as a specific area of social activity. Perhaps because politics

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is assimilated to power struggle other, crucial aspects of modern politics are not taken into account. For instance, Bourdieu does not reflect on the specific historical meaning of elections. This is curious because, after all, the student does not choose his professor, children do not choose their parents, and workers do not choose their bosses. But citizens choose their representatives. By law public officials are supposed to further public interest, although they also use their legitimacy to further their particular ends. Political power is public power, and the state is the guarantor of public order. In contrast to Weber, whose approach was historical, Bourdieu does not distinguish among different kinds of political fields. For Bourdieu, the mechanism of power delegation seems to operate the same way in the totalitarian Soviet Union as in democratic France (Bourdieu 2001: 101) and in the religious and political domains. In the manner of Rousseau, he overemphasizes the profanes’ blind belief in and total submission to the delegate. But people might not be as easily duped as Bourdieu would have us believe, they might develop strategies to deal with this (indifference to politics for instance being one) and the media regularly denounces politicians for their wheeling and dealing. Bourdieu’s analysis of the state, to which he devotes a considerable amount of energy, is handicapped by insufficient analysis of the concept of the public. Since the 1960s and his works on education and culture Bourdieu has been studying the state, and specifically the French state. In Bourdieu’s theory of politics, the genesis of the state is “the culmination of a process of concentration of different kinds of capital, capital derived from physical force or instruments of coercion (the army, the police), economic capital, cultural, or better still informational capital, symbolic capital; a concentration which, as such, translates into possession of a sort of metacapital giving the bearer power over all the other kinds of capital and those who possess them” (l’aboutissement d’un processus de concentration de différentes espèces de capital, le capital de force physique ou d’instruments de coercition (armée, police), capital économique, capital culturel, ou, mieux, informationnel, capital symbolique, concentration qui, en tant que telle, constitue l’état détenteur d’une sorte de méta capital donnant pouvoir sur les autres espèces de capital et sur leurs détenteurs) (Bourdieu 1994: 109). Through a process of privatization of public power prior to the existence of the state, certain social groups succeed in monopolizing various kinds of public authority. The new authority that emerges becomes responsible for calling the shots and deciding about the relative value of social resources and the exchange rates of these different types of resources. The state participates in a decisive manner in the production and reproduction of the instruments of construction of social reality. In Bourdieu’s formulation, the state seems to be a kind of grand social organizer that “constantly exercises a formative action of durable dispositions,” of dauerhabitus to use Weber’s term (Weber 1922: 541). It imposes fundamental principles of classification on everybody—sex, age, competence, and so on (Bourdieu 1997: 209). Its influence is everywhere. In the family, it controls the rites of institution; in the schooling system, it creates divisions between the chosen and the rejected, durable, often definitive symbolic divisions that are universally recognized and

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that often have determining effects on the future of individuals. The individual’s submission to the French state order is the result of the harmony between cognitive structures, either collective or individual, and the objective structures of the world to which they apply. It seems to be total. Public authority is thus always private authority disguised as public authority which has succeeded, through symbolic violence, in transforming itself and presenting itself as representing the collectivity. Competition and symbolic violence among various groups—homo homini lupus—are endless, instituted by society in Rousseaun manner but lacking the positive basis Rousseau’s theory of primitive man has. There is no end to the struggle, no light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, it seems that paradoxically in Bourdieu’s theory politics is by definition stateless, understood as genuine shared public authority. This conception resonates with Mannheim’s ideal of the independent intellectual. Following Weber (see Lassman 2000: 83–98) and authors such as Michels (1962) and Marx, Bourdieu assimilates political action with the continuous struggle for power. In this he follows the Macchiavellian tradition. The task of social science is to unmask and demystify the mechanisms of power. Because he sees the mechanisms of domination as universal, Bourdieu does not attempt to theorize a specific kind of democratic legitimacy that would take the form of a democratic political field based partly on public debate, deliberation, and the public sphere and partly on specific mechanisms of power struggle that would contrast with Weber’s charismatic, legal, and traditional rule (for an attempt see Kauppi 2005). Instead, he is concerned with demystifying the political game, showing how delegation leads to alienation and usurpation, how social domination is everywhere, and how the dominated reproduce their own domination. Politics as the noble activity of organization and regulation of human communities turns into social domination. In Bourdieu’s theory of the political field, politics is a game. In this simplification, the public domain is studied one-sidedly as an area where various private interests, masquerading as group interests, try to grab the public interest for themselves, or transform their particular interests into the public interest. Politics is seen neither in terms of the institutional construction of a public sphere and public instruments that aim at promoting the general interest and preventing the private use of physical violence to settle accounts, nor as a process of adjustment to social pressures (Lipset 1962: 32). Bourdieu’s theory of politics is very much tied to France, its political structures and culture of resistance and critique of the establishment. It found backers among radical students and social scientists. Bourdieu’s model for analyzing delegation, the monopoly of production of political goods, and political power as symbolic power comes from Weber. So does his conception of politics as a separate life sphere (Weber 1922: 542, Ben-David and Collins 1966: 451–65) or field, which he developed starting from the 1970s using linguistic models adopted from Saussure and Lévi-Strauss. Political value is Weberian in the sense that it is fiduciary value that is dependent on the legitimacy attributed to a person, organization, or idea, and Saussurean in the sense that it is relational value. But Karl Marx’s (and Louis Althusser’s) influence is also apparent.

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Apart from Bourdieu’s analysis of political fetishism, which duplicates in another semantic register Marx’s analysis of fetishism and merchandise circulation (Marx 1954: 72), and his presentation of social value in terms of modes of production and capital, the division of society into social classes is the ultimate explanatory device by which Bourdieu analyzes the political. Class struggle in the social field takes a sublimated form in the political field (Bourdieu 1991a: 182). Social classes structure the social field, a kind of superfield that is present in various forms in other spheres of social activity, including in politics. The social field and the political field are united by a pre-established qualitative harmony consisting of structural homologies. This harmony enables agents operating in different fields to find common interests tied to their relative positions in these fields. Thus for instance, those dominated in the field of power, the intellectuals, can, in certain historical circumstances, find common interests with those dominated in the social field, the working-classes. In many ways, Bourdieu’s pessimistic analysis of politics is reminiscent of Plato’s critique of the Sophists. Politics is the realm of the arbitrary and the symbolic: it is deceit and cannot be the realm of the true and the beautiful. Perhaps for this reason he saw himself until the end as a critical intellectual, as a man of science among the people, at a distance from the political establishment. Political parties, the key institutions of western democracies, did not play a key role in his theory. Bourdieu’s underlying ideal model of the political seems to be based on direct democracy in a polis composed of critical individuals, without parties or political organizations. Delegation of power and political representation logically lead to usurpation and manipulation, not to real democracy. Bourdieu’s reading of Max Weber, his structuralist interpretation of Weber’s sociology of religion, the generalization of Weber’s value spheres and the “scientific” analysis of politics can be seen as part of broader process of symbolic integration of radical productions into the university and its curricula. This way, Bourdieu’s critical sociology becomes more academic and acceptable for scholarly reproduction.

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Epilogue French Theory as Symbolic Transgression and Political Rebellion Attention: les arrivistes et les ambitieux peuvent se travestir en “socialards” (Warning: Ambitious careerists may be disguised as “progressives”) Sorbonne 1968

In this study, I have tried to respond to some of the current challenges of a sociological study of ideas. Ideas have to be taken seriously. In many sociological studies they are reduced to communication and intellectual networks (Collins 1998) or to organizational structures (Lamont 1987, Gross 2005). Ideas are interpretations of the world and of human existence and as such they involve statements about the world. Their analysis requires that the sociologist be acquainted with the original works and not just with secondary sources (Munz 2000). In some rapidly developing contexts like France of the 1960s the links between specialized ideas and broader political and social horizons are absolutely crucial in order to understand the social developments underway. The logic of intellectual movements cannot be equated with that of scientific movements (Frickel and Gross 2005) as the former are broader and historically anterior and are not subject to the same criteria of specialization. An excessive concentration on conflict as the “energy source of intellectual life” (Collins 1998: 1) prevents from seeing that conflict is never pure opposition but always requires and produces cooperation. Furthermore, conflict and cooperation do not suffice to understand the social life of ideas. Individuals as members of social groups have to acquire a belief in the truth of certain ideas or better ideals, a sentiment of authenticity and commitment to oneself and to one’s values that will make possible sustained and credible social action. A broad symbolic development evolved starting from the mid-1960s in France, from an intensifying politicization of intellectual production to, after 1968, a growing but uneven disenchantment with leftist political and intellectual radicalism. The collective movement of radicalization was, for many, a total experience that drained their energies. They were swallowed into fierce symbolic struggles with “those in power.” Many of them, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida, for instance, held positions in institutionally marginal but intellectually ascending university institutions: they never were total outsiders but they adopted an anti-establishment intellectual posture and collective style of thought. Opposition empowered these individuals and absorbed them into a collective endeavor to develop ideas and theories that escaped bourgeois

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recuperation. A lack of self-consciousness and a total immersion in a radical culture that grew out of a critique of all social conventions paradoxically led to an opposite development, integration into society. Radical culture was the golfo mistico that turned everything into its contrary. What they denounced in theory they had to reproduce in practice. It is this, apparently contradictory movement that I have analyzed in some of the “French theories” that were developed in the 1960s. The driving force for both seemingly contradictory social and symbolic forces, opposition and integration, investment and divestment, was a broader endeavor that required non-intellectual, collective and nearly bodily investment first in the form of rebellion (self-assurance, prophetic style, theoretical extremism …) and then in that of divestment of this rebellion, of compliance to the conditions they actively contributed to. Rebellion was their modality of social and symbolic integration. The theoretical works studied here with their emphasis on transgression, eternal youth and escape into a mythical space out of the reach of bourgeois take over were equivalent to The Who’s “Hope I die before I get old.” In this context, ideas were not just ideas. They were invested with an emotional, collective charge that took the form of brute spontaneity. Paradoxically, the production of the extraordinary, “mental levitation,” was for some time what young intellectuals and students expected from themselves. This way they thought they could contribute to a broader political revolution together with the communist party, famously named “the party of catastrophe” by economist Keynes. For a moment too much theory was absolutely necessary, given the aspirations (a total critique) and intellectual means (theory not practice) of the intellectual heroes and their admirers. There was no other alternative. But in the end the radical students, their idols and the French communist party had different Gods. Some of the numerous ideas or concepts circulating became power-ideas (Fouillée 1908) attached to totemic emblems such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure, ideas that were recoined by local intellectual rebels such as Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers. These power-ideas and the symbolic bundles that were coproduced were not the objects of logical debate and argumentation, but rather the rallying cries of collective symbolic rebellion, of a process of symbolic inversion reminiscent of Bakhtin’s the “carnivalesque” where the undervalued, psychoanalysis, linguistics and semiotics, becomes the overvalued. It is this central feature of power-ideas that explains the social force and intellectual success of theories such as “deconstruction” or concepts like “intertextuality.” But more is needed to understand why certain ideas and theories succeed and others fail. In order to make it through the perilous journey from novel concept to power-idea, the concept has to be carried by as many carriers as possible in order to spread and be duplicated. In contrast to physical objects, symbolic goods live from usage and recognition, and die from silence or lack of recognition. The more they succeed in being recognized, the more they will have power. This activity requires that the eponymous heroes like Derrida or Kristeva be nodal points of social networks that become carriers of new ideas. In order to succeed,

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intellectual prophecy requires stable structures of material and symbolic support in the university or in intellectual and literary institutions such as Tel Quel, both nationally and internationally. To put this in a more provocative form, to succeed intellectual prophecy and its temporality of urgency require priests (or patrons, Clark 1970, see also Collins 1998) embedded in “normal” reproductive structures and their rhythms, otherwise the message will die away. Ideally placed were those intellectuals who were employed by the state in government-financed institutions that were marginal to the system of reproduction of French higher education. Civil servants, they could full-time and with full salary devote their time to rebellion and intellectual novelty. Men of two antagonistic cultures like Simmel’s stranger, these armchair rebels were torn between the requirements of the institution and of its radical critique. This acrobatics was more difficult for those free-floating intellectuals like writer Jean Thibaudeau who had to spend a lot of their time searching for ways to materially subsist. But institutional success is only part of the story, symbolic logic the other. To get on top on competitors intellectuals had to universalize their message, to be more comprehensive or the “first” ones of the alternative symbolic order. Moving to higher levels of universality through theoretical synthesis enables intellectuals to disqualify competitors as theorizing only part of reality and therefore being more limited in theoretical scope. This is what Kristeva was involved in, when she argued that her theory semanalysis included the linguistic narratives of her competitors: the transformative semiotic practice represented by scholars like Noam Chomsky was according to her an out-dated modality that corresponded to structural linguistics and historically preceded her own paragrammatic semiotic practice, the nec plus ultra of intellectual modernity. Being more theoretical than the others was a way to dominate intellectually and intimidate competitors. Being a pioneer is another key stake of symbolic competition, of the partial dismantlement and renewal of the intellectual order. The creators of a new problématique, like Derrida, have the privilege of being considered the eponymous heroes, and the carriers of authenticity and originality. The danger for any ambitious intellectual is to be relegated to the second place, as a mere follower and producer of derivative ideas. This was a constant concern of Sollers. Despite the fact that he was the editor-in-chief of Tel Quel, he was largely considered a developer of derivative ideas (despite a decades long activity to prove the contrary, see for instance Forest 1994, Sollers 1980a, Kristeva 1992, ffrench 1995, ffrench and Lack 1998). The same concern haunted the second generation of nouveau roman writers, in danger of being labeled the followers of the nouveau roman, the real innovators. As we have seen, the review Tel Quel was also involved in constant struggles to affirm its originality vis-à-vis historical models, Russian formalism and surrealism. The issue of (socially defined) authenticity and the struggle for recognition is a key dimension of French cultural radicalism. The struggle for cultural recognition and retroactive reconstructions of historical memory and creativity (a key aspect neglected by sociologists of intellectual movements) went hand in hand with a struggle for moral high ground.

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This also explains, perhaps better than organizational fit, pure opportunism or naive belief in the ideology of the French communist party why fusing intellectual and political legitimacy was so prized by the radicals of the 1960s, and before them by the formalists and the surrealists. Backing anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and antiAmerican forces in French society was mixed with being on the side of all victims, the poor, the powerless, women, the students, the Third World, and so on (for analysis in another context see Watts 1998). Being convinced of being on the moral right side was a crucial emotional ingredient necessary for sustained intellectual work in the margins. As new ideas were by definition illegitimate in the eyes of the establishment, affinities united all those working against the establishment, in the university and outside it. The nearly 500,000 students in French universities provided the operational and financial support for the symbolic rebellion under way, and the faculty in marginal institutions such as the Collège de France (LéviStrauss, Foucault), the Ecole normale supérieure (Althusser, Derrida, Lacan) and the Ecole pratique des hautes études (Barthes, Bourdieu, Greimas) were ready to step in as the intellectual heroes of the moment. These individuals served as the official certifiers of the legitimacy of the students’ illegitimate claims. In order to be qualified to do that, they had to be inside but not totally (for a sociological discussion of optimal marginality see McLaughlin 2001). Students were not looking for real prophets, total outsiders but rather for individuals who were in a similar, ambiguous existential situation as they were, inside the institution but against it, in the margins, priests pretending to be prophets or half-priests and halfprophets. Reproducing the symbolic order meant achieving the moral high ground by forging alliances with the “men farthest down” to paraphrase Robert Park in order to universalize what seemed intellectually delegitimized. The repertoire of marginal authors-writers and academics closely followed that of collaborative circles such as Bataille’s between the wars and after the Second World War (Aron 1984, Patron 1999). The margin and its metaphors (non-knowledge, pharmakon, intertextuality…) acquired in this context a valued cultural status precisely because they were neither inside nor outside but rather both. Consequently, intellectual obscurity and risk-taking had both intellectual and social functions. Producing obscure and convoluted ideas through pretentious erudition (combining Lacan to Jakobson and Mäll, or psychoanalysis to structural linguistics and buddhology), choking formulae (“the author is dead”) and critique of the established order was perfectly logical given the social and existential situations of both producers and consumers. These corresponded to the perceptions and self-perceptions of the protagonists and their followers, engaged in a frenetic struggle against the establishment. The establishment has to be understood in both objective terms, for instance the university and its rules, but also in subjective terms as internalized forms of appropriate behavior. Individuals like Sollers and Derrida had been socialized to become part of the establishment, something that they could not escape. For them and many others speculative radicalism was the only way out of this trap: at war against the establishment and most of all themselves.

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The new intellectual fashion and what was later coined “French theory” left out theories that did not fit the symbolic and social format of speculative radicalism that succeeded in being reproduced. Theories that were too political (subordinated to a different symbolic logic) or too empirical (too clear, experiencebased or self-evident), or that were in contradiction with the strategies of the most powerful intellectuals and the taste and interests of their collaborative circles were not integrated into the alternative canon. The first ones included the works of Communist intellectuals and political followers of Althusser; the second one studies in social psychology and sociology (Bourdieu and others); and the third one, theories developed by individuals who exited the French intellectual scene (Baudry and Goux for instance). The “winners,” like Derrida and Kristeva, succeeded in integrating the university and of duplicating their ideas, which have made it to the pantheon of French culture and to official manuals of French intellectuality such as the Dictionnaire des intellectuels français (Julliard and Winock 1996), a retroactively created dictionary of intellectual high talk.

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Index

academia expansion of 1, 2, 4, 7, 21, 33, 131 and radicalism 8, 19, 26, 46, 47, 54, 70, 83, 90, 91, 95, 98, 102, 106, 115, 121, 129, 133–5; see Centre national de la recherche scientifique; Collège de France; Ecole normale supérieure; Ecole pratique des hautes études; marginality; priests Action Poétique 79, 91, 97; see Tel Quel Adriaens, Marc 100, 101; see semanalysis Althusser Louis 11, 12, 21, 33, 40, 41, 45, 46, 50, 54, 55, 57, 60, 66, 77–9, 80, 82, 89, 91, 94, 100–2, 105, 115, 128, 131, 134, 135; see marxism anthropology 11, 18, 20, 45, 108–10; see Bourdieu; Lévi-Strauss; structure; structuralism Aragon, Louis 19, 23, 24 Aron, Raymond 33, 121, 134 Artaud, Antonin 17, 18, 20, 22, 41, 48, 51, 64, 78, 80, 105; see surrealism Austin, J. 119 avant-garde 77, 131, 133; see formalism; surrealism Bachelard, Gaston 21, 40, 45, 50, 119, 121 Bakhtin, Mikhail 20, 25, 29, 33, 34, 36, 46, 62, 132; see semanalysis; text Barthes, Roland 7, 11, 13–16, 19, 20, 22–6, 29, 31, 38, 47, 48, 61, 64, 65, 68, 70, 80, 89, 102, 103, 105, 131, 132, 134; see Kristeva; text; writing Bataille, Georges 17, 18, 20, 22, 24, 25, 28, 41, 48, 52–4, 93, 95, 96, 103–5, 134; see radicalism; transgression

Baudrillard, Jean 95–7, 103; see Kristeva; semanalysis; transgression Baudry, Jean-Louis 22, 26, 27, 69–71, 73, 88, 89, 94; see materiology Beauvoir, Simone de 24, 60, see Sartre Biancourt, André 78 Blanchot, Maurice 20, 22 Boons, Marie-Christine 102 Bourdieu, Pierre 2, 5–7, 11, 13, 107–30, 132, 134, 135; see capital; field; sociology Bourgois, Christian 77 Breton, André 61, 77–82; see surrealism Butor Michel 17, 18; see nouveau roman Cabau, Jacques 77 Camic, Charles 5; see ideas; intellectual movements; sociology Camus, Albert 18 capital 38, 112, 122–7; see Bourdieu; Marx Carlyle, Thomas 2 Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) 26, 28, 50; see academia; marginality Certeau, Michel de 97, 112, 113; see symbolic order Change 18, 77, 97; see Tel Quel Charle, Christophe 6 Chomsky, Noam 35, 97–9, 100, 133; see linguistics Cinéthique 71, 94–5; see semanalysis Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 22; see May 68 Collège de France 18, 104, 105; see academia; marginality Collaborative circles 5, 18, 20, 23, 24, 69, 77, 83, 89–91, 97–9, 102, 115, 134, 135

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and symbolic recognition 89–91; see French communist party; symbolic revolution; Tel Quel Collins, Randall 6; see intellectual movements; sociology Dante, Alighieri 48, 49 deconstruction 3, 4, 7, 12, 32, 38, 45, 51, 66, 69, 82, 83, 90, 93, 94, 132; see Derrida; différance; gram; text Deleuze, Gilles 19, 104, 105 Derrida, Jacques 3, 4, 7, 11–13, 16, 20–22, 24, 26–8, 32, 35, 37, 42, 44–8, 52–5, 57, 61, 63, 65, 66, 69, 70, 72, 73, 78, 81–90, 99, 101, 102, 105, 120, 131–5; see deconstruction; différance; gram; text différance (the process of differentiation) 7, 44, 48, 53, 63, 85, 88, 89; see deconstruction; Derrida; gram; text Durkheim, Emile 118, 119, 126; see sociology Ecole nationale d’administration (ENA) 123; see symbolic order Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) 24, 48, 101, 134; see academia; field, academic; marginality Ecole pratique des hautes études (EPHE) 25, 48, 55, 115, 134; see academia; field, academic; marginality Engels, Friedrich 108; see Marx; marxism epistemological break 22, 40, 50; see Althusser; Bachelard existentialism 5, 60; see Sartre field, academic 106; see Ecole normale supérieure; Ecole pratique des hautes études intellectual 3, 6, 18, 19, 24, 45, 46, 69, 107, 115 literary 18, 108, 109 political 90, 111, 119–29; see French communist party Finlay-Pelinski, Marika 101 Flaubert, Gustave 13, 15, 108; see writing formalism, Russian 4, 25, 27, 31, 64, 93, 133; see avant-garde; surrealism

Foucault, Michel 7, 11, 13, 19, 20–22, 27, 34, 47, 48, 70, 111, 119, 134 French Communist Party 32; see symbolic revolution Freud, Sigmund 11, 15, 16, 18, 21, 22, 26, 33, 38, 41, 42, 44, 55, 69, 70–72, 78, 80, 85, 86, 93, 132; see Lacan; psychoanalysis; unconscious freudo-marxism 55, 66; see radicalism Gelb, Ignace 27 Genette, Gérard 14, 26; see structuralism Goldmann, Lucien 20, 22, 25; see structuralism Goux, Jean-Joseph 22, 26, 27, 69, 71–3, 88, 89, 135; see numismatics Gracq, Julien 17 gram and anagram 30, 98, 100; see Saussure and grammatology 22, 27, 38, 47, 52; see Derrida; différance and paragram 28–30, 34–9, 43, 45, 46, 59, 93, 100, 101, 133; see Kristeva; semanalysis Greimas, A.J. 34, 47, 108, 134; see structuralism Gross, Neil 5, 6; see ideas; intellectual movements; sociology Guénoun, Denis 98; see Kristeva; semanalysis Hallier, Jean-Edern 17, 20; see Tel Quel Hegel, G.W. 32, 35, 36, 45, 63, 65, 78, 80, 83, 86, 89; see Derrida; idealism Heidegger, Martin 9, 11, 24, 46, 93; see Derrida Henriot, Emile 19; see Tel Quel heterogeneity 8, 12, 28, 55, 56, 66, 82–5, 90 and the exterior 56, 63; see Derrida; homogeneity; materialism; otherness; subject Hjelmslev, Louis 12, 34; see structuralism Houdebine, Jean-Louis 78–80, 82–90; see marxism Huguenin, Jean-René 20; see Tel Quel L’Humanité (daily of the French communist party) 80

Index Husserl, Edmund 24; see Derrida idealism 51, 52, 55, 56, 70, 71, 92, 93, 101; see Hegel; materialism ideas derivative 3, 133 new sociology of 1, 4, 6 as power-ideas 2–8, 12, 35–46, 50, 57, 64–6, 71, 82, 83, 89, 91, 106, 107–14, 119, 120, 122; see Camic; Gross; ideology; materialism; science; symbolic order and semiotic colonies 4, 7 ideologeme 33–46, 101; see Kristeva ideology bourgeois (dominant) 52, 53, 59, 60, 66, 68, 72, 73, 78–81, 95 uses of 12, 15, 16, 17, 28, 32–4, 36, 40–46, 52, 59, 60, 63, 65, 66, 70, 71, 100, 101; see ideas; logocentrism; semanalysis intellectual movements 13, 14, 18, 31, 37, 51, 81, 94, 95, 102, 115, 122, 131–3 sociology of 1, 6, 7 intertextuality 7, 12, 29–31, 34, 35, 62, 132, 134; see Bakhtin; text Jakobson, Roman 61, 134; see structuralism Jouffroy, Alain 77 Joyce, James 13, 23, 37, 53; see writing Khlebnikov, Velimir 26, 62; see formalism Koselleck, Reinhardt 5 Kristeva, Julia 4, 7, 12, 13, 15, 16, 20–23, 25–50, 54–6, 59, 60–63, 69–73, 77, 81, 83, 85–9, 91–106, 132–5; see semanalysis; text Kuhn, Thomas 6, 7 labor (work) uses of the concept 41, 42, 53, 72, 73; see Marx; marxism Lacan, Jacques 11–13, 15, 16, 21, 27, 32, 38, 39, 42, 44, 47, 48, 54, 55, 61, 62, 66–9, 80, 86, 87, 89,

151

101–5, 134; see psychoanalysis; structuralism; Tel Quel Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 99; see Derrida Lamont, Michèle 5, 6; see intellectual movements; sociology Lautréamont, comte de (Isidore Ducasse) 30, 48, 50, 52, 53, 64, 65, 78–80, 103, 104; see Kristeva; semanalysis; text; Sollers; writing Lenin, V.I. 74, 94; see also marxismleninism Lévi-Strauss, Claude 12, 13, 18, 20, 33, 34, 37, 42, 45, 94, 99, 107–109, 111–13, 121, 122, 128, 134; see structuralism linguistics uses of 11, 12, 14, 20, 21, 29, 32, 34, 39, 41, 43, 46, 52? 56, 66, 71, 72, 92, 93, 97–101, 105–8, 111–13, 122, 128, 132–4; see Derrida; Kristeva; Pavel; Saussure literary theory 5, 13, 14, 20, 29–37, 52, 54, 70, 90, 91, 97, 120; see Barthes logocentrism 7, 11, 27, 45, 46, 49, 59, 72–4, 88, 98; see deconstruction; Derrida; différance Lyotard, Jean-François 34, 45; see gram Macciocchi, Maria-Antonietta 23, 80, 102; see maoism Macherey, Pierre 47; see structuralism Mallarmé, Stéphane 26, 28, 48, 50–52, 64, 65, 78, 79, 102, 104; see monumental history; text; writing Mao Zedong 23, 80; see maoism maoism 22–4, 74, 77–82, 89–92, 94, 95, 101, 102; see Mao Zedong marginality 53, 54, 134; see academia; prophets; radicalism; science; text Marx, Karl 11, 15, 22, 26, 32–4, 38, 40, 40–44, 50, 54, 66, 69, 71, 72, 74, 95, 96, 100, 102, 104, 108, 109, 115, 128, 129, 132; see marxism marxism structural 11, 40, 80, 91 uses of 8, 11, 32, 38, 44, 47, 54–6, 59, 62, 66, 67, 78, 82–5, 88, 89, 92–4,

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98, 103, 105, 115; see Althusser; French communist party marxism-leninism 27, 71, 91, 102 materialism 54–6, 84; see deconstruction; materiology; numismatics; radicalism materiology 22, 26, 38, 69, 71, 89; see Baudry Matignon, Renaud 20; see Tel Quel Mauriac, François 17–20; see Sollers Mauss, Marcel 96, 97 May 68 13, 22, 68, 78, 79, 82, 89, 112 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 63, 74 Mäll, Linnart 38, 39, 49, 134; see semanalysis; zerologic subject Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 11 Meschonnic, Henri 91–3, 106; see text monumental history 21, 28, 38, 39, 59, 71; see Sollers Nancy, Jean-Luc 99; see Derrida neologisms uses of; see radicalism Nicolas, Anne 99; see Kristeva; linguistics; semanalysis Nouvelle Critique, La 22, 80, 83, 91, 97; see French communist party Nouvelle Revue Française, La 17, 19; see field, literary nouveau roman 11–16, 23, 29; see field, literary; radicalism novelty social status of; see radicalism numismatics 22, 38, 69, 71, 89; see Goux obscurity social functions of 90, 134; see radicalism otherness 83, 84, 99; see heterogeneity; marginality OuLiPo 90 Paulhan, Jean 17; see Sollers; Tel Quel Pavel, Thomas 11, 12, 27; see structuralism Pensée, La 22

phonology; see Derrida; linguistics; logocentrism Pingaud, Bernard 15, 60–62; see existentialism; Sollers Pleynet, Marcelin 22, 23, 80, 81, 102; see Tel Quel; Tel Quel poetic language 20, 28–31, 36, 39, 52, 93, 103; see Barthes; Kristeva; semanalysis Ponge, Francis 17; see Tel Quel Popper, Karl 45 poststructuralism 1, 5, 7, 17, 24; see structuralism priests; 107, 188, 123, 125, 133, 134; see academia; marginality; radicalism prophets; 1, 132–4; see marginality; obscurity; radicalism psychoanalysis uses of 6, 11, 27, 32, 41, 44, 46, 49, 54, 66, 67, 77, 94, 99; see Freud; Lacan radicalism intellectual 1, 2, 4, 5, 13, 19, 27, 32, 40, 46, 74, 82, 89, 91, 95, 97, 101, 114, 131, 134, 135 political 1, 8, 38, 40, 44, 46, 65, 74, 82, 95, 97, 101, 131, 133, 134; see maoism; marxism; marxismleninism social conditions of 1, 8, 132–4 speculative 8, 27, 38, 46, 65, 134, 135; see academia; marginality and transgression 11–16, 47–57, 64, 67, 68; see symbolic order Ricardou, Jean 13, 23; see nouveau roman Risset, Jacqueline 94; see Tel Quel Robbe-Grillet, Alain 13, 15, 17–20; see nouveau roman; writing Ronat, Mitsou 91, 97–100, 106; see semanalysis Rorty, Richard 5, 6; see Gross Rottenberg, Pierre 80; see Tel Quel Roudinesco, Elisabeth 21, 22, 38, 48, 59, 99, 102; see psychoanalysis

Index Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 19, 118, 127, 128; see symbolic order Sade, marquis de 19, 21, 22, 48–50, 53, 105; see radicalism Sarraute, Nathalie 17, 18; see nouveau roman Sartre, Jean-Paul 7, 12, 18, 20, 24, 33, 47, 50, 60, 61, 68; see existentialism Saumjan, S.K. 97, 98; see linguistics; semanalysis Saussure, Ferdinand de 15, 20, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 50, 61, 69, 71, 72, 86, 92, 98, 100, 101, 121, 122, 128, 132; see gram; linguistics Scarpetta, Guy 82, 83, 85, 88, 89; see materialism science and ideology 32, 40, 41, 71, 80, 94, 95 and universalism 2, 4, 11, 13, 15, 22, 26–9, 31, 33, 48, 69–74, 79, 98, 107, 119; see ideologeme; ideology; linguistics; semanalysis Schlovsky, Viktor 14; see formalism Searle, John 119; see Bourdieu; symbolic order Sebag, Lucien 47; see structuralism semanalysis (analytical or scientific semiotics) 21, 22, 28, 29, 31–4, 37–46, 71, 83, 93, 94, 97, 98, 100, 102, 105, 133; see Kristeva; linguistics; poststructuralism; structuralism Seuil, Le 17, 20, 23, 47, 55, 80, 102; see Sollers; Tel Quel Shakespeare, William 3 Sichère, Bernard 91, 102–6; see maoism signifier; see linguistics; text Skinner, Quentin 5; see intellectual movements sociology 2, 4, 5, 6, 13, 25, 95, 107, 109, 119, 121–9, 135; see Bourdieu; intellectual movements; field, political; structure Sokal, Alan 21, 90; see Kristeva; semanalysis

153

Sollers, Philippe (Philippe Joyaux) 1, 4, 7, 13, 16–8, 20–24, 26–9, 31, 39, 47– 57, 59–68, 76–81, 85, 86, 88–95, 102, 105, 122–4; see monumental history; Tel Quel speech; see subject structuralism uses of 1, 5, 11–13, 17, 18, 24, 27, 31, 33, 37, 47, 115; see Pavel; poststructuralism structure 5, 12, 15, 19, 22, 27, 28, 30, 34, 34, 36, 37, 40, 42, 52, 63, 71–3, 93, 98, 99, 101, 131, 133; see Bourdieu; Certeau; Lévi-Strauss; structuralism and class 78, 80; see Bourdieu and social theory 107–14, 120–26, 128, 129; see Bourdieu without a center 16; see heterogeneity; subject subject 11, 15, 16, 21, 27, 28, 30, 56, 60, 62, 63, 66, 84, 89, 98, 102–5, 113, 114 zerologic 33–46, 99; see heterogeneity; Kristeva; logocentrism; materialism; psychoanalysis; semanalysis surrealism 4, 13, 18, 22, 51, 53, 61, 63, 70, 77–82; see Breton; radicalism symbolic logic of ideas 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 28–32, 34–9, 41, 49, 51, 59, 62, 64, 71, 72, 74, 85, 86, 92, 95, 104, 108, 109, 11, 116, 117, 122, 124–6, 129, 131–5 polyvalent 36, 43 and ideology 53, 56; see Bakhtin; radicalism; semanalysis symbolic order 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 15, 17–33, 43, 49, 50, 51, 54, 60, 63, 66, 67, 74, 90, 91, 96, 106, 112, 120, 122, 125, 129, 131, 133, 134 and domination 7, 27, 28, 59, 69, 80, 82, 89, 108 and symbolic violence 119, 120, 128 and theoretical distinctions 21, 32, 43, 44, 46, 54, 77; see transgression

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Tel Quel (networks) 1, 13, 19, 26, 27, 47, 48, 61, 64, 67, 69, 74, 77, 78, 80–83, 86, 89, 91–5, 100–4; see collaborative circles; Pleynet; Sollers Tel Quel (journal) 1, 2, 4, 13, 17–27, 43, 47–61, 68, 69, 74, 77–82, 91, 97, 133; see Pleynet; Sollers text as a power-idea 12, 13, 14, 15, 19; 20–22, 24, 29–32, 37, 45, 47, 50, 51, 54, 57, 59–68, 79, 83, 84, 86, 88–94 science of the 7, 12, 21, 27, 29, 30, 34, 39–41, 53, 70, 71, 73, 74, 100–6; see ideologeme; materialism; science; writing Todorov, Tzvetan 14, 20, 24, 29, 33; see formalism transgression logic of 8, 37, 48–52, 88, 89, 104, 131–6 and social norms 59, 60, 64, 65, 67, 68; see Bataille; radicalism

Tynianov, Yurij 61 Unconscious uses of the 11, 15, 16, 33, 41, 48, 49, 55, 60, 63, 66, 69–76, 104, 111, 116, 117, 119, 122; see Baudry; Derrida; Freud; Goux; Kristeva; Lacan; materiology; numismatics; psychoanalysis; semanalysis Veblen, Thorstein 122 Wahl, François 23, 47, 102; see Seuil; Tel Quel Weber, Max 117, 121, 123, 125–9; see capital; prophets; sociology Wittgenstein, Ludwig 7 writing (écriture) 13, 14, 20, 26, 27, 29–31, 26, 42, 94, 101 automatic 13 textual 21, 45, 47–53, 57–65, 68–73, 80, 84–86, 89–93, 95, 99; see Barthes; Derrida; gram; Kristeva; labor; nouveau roman; Sollers; text