Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries Of Kristeva's Polis (Suny Series in Gender Theory)

Revolt, Affect, Collectivity

SUNY series in Gender Theory Tina Chanter, editor

C

R

E V O L T,

A

F F E C T,

O L L E C T I V I T Y

The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis

Edited by TINA CHANTER AND

EWA PLONOWSKA ZIAREK

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Cover image: Detail of sculpture by Anne Boudreau Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2005 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 12210-2384 Production by Judith Block Marketing by Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Revolt, affect, collectivity : the unstable boundaries of Kristeva’s polis / edited by Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. p. cm. — (SUNY series in gender theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7914–6567–5 (hardcover : alk paper) — ISBN 0–7914–6568–3 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Kristeva, Julia, 1941– I. Chanter, Tina, 1960– II. Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska, 1961– III. Series. B2430.K7544R48 2005 194—dc22 2005003403 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

INTRODUCTION: Tina Chanter and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek PART I. FEMININITY, RACE, AND REVOLT

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Chapter One. Julia Kristeva and the Revolutionary Politics of Tel Quel Joan Brandt

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Chapter Two. From Revolution to Revolt Culture Sara Beardsworth

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Chapter Three. Kristeva and Fanon: Revolutionary Violence and Ironic Articulation Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

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Chapter Four. Revolt and Forgiveness Kelly Oliver PART II. AFFECT, COMMUNITY, POLITICS Chapter Five. The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation Sara Ahmed

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Chapter Six. Bearing Witness in the Polis: Kristeva, Arendt, and the Space of Appearance Noëlle McAfee

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Chapter Seven. Political Affections: Kristeva and Arendt on Violence and Gratitude Peg Birmingham

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PART III. ABJECTION, FILM, AND MELANCHOLIA

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Chapter Eight. The Exoticization and Universalization of the Fetish, and the Naturalization of the Phallus: Abject Objections Tina Chanter 149 v

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Contents

Chapter Nine. On the Border between Abjection and the Third: The (Re)Birth of Narcissus in the Works of Julia Kristeva Pleshette DeArmitt

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Chapter Ten. Black and Blue: Kieslowski’s Melancholia Frances L. Restuccia

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Contributors

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Index

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Introduction

TINA CHANTER AND EWA PLONOWSKA ZIAREK

Kristeva’s varied and voluminous corpus is still growing, and critical commentary has not yet caught up with her most recent concerns. Focusing largely on Kristeva’s most recent work, this collection of original essays examines a number of interconnected strands, in particular, Kristeva’s reevaluation of the concept of revolt, crucial to her early work, in the context of the changing cultural and political conditions in the West; the questions of the stranger, race, and nation; Kristeva’s reflections on narrative, public spaces, and collectivity in the context of her engagement with Hannah Arendt’s work; and finally, Kristeva’s development and refinement of the notions of abjection, melancholia, and narcissism, which proved so central to her work in the 1980s, in her ongoing interrogation of aesthetics. A particular focus of two essays in this volume is a hitherto neglected area of Kristeva’s work, namely her contribution to film theory, within the parameters of these psychic states. Kristeva’s work has been often criticized for focusing primarily on the personal or the psychic maladies of modern Western subjectivity rather than on group formations or the political structures of oppression. Presupposing a rather stable private/public distinction, this criticism has failed to address, however, how Kristeva’s work on affect, such as abjection, disgust, pleasure, or melancholia, not only challenges this distinction but also elucidates the process of constitution of the traversable private/public boundaries. By discussing Kristeva’s new work in the light of her corpus as a whole, this collection argues that one of the central tasks emerging in the aftermath of feminist critiques of the private/public distinction is an inquiry into the role affect, fantasy, and negativity play not only in the formation of what Judith Butler has aptly called “the psychic life of power,” but also in the emergence of collectivities and the transformation of social relations. In response to this task, a number of essays reinterpret the notion of abjection, which, with all of its ambivalence, is played out precisely on the borders of the self and other, the 1

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private and the public, and the psychological and the political. Erupting along the fault lines of these supposedly discrete structures, abjection both constitutes and undermines the stable distinctions between the life of the psyche and the life of the polis. The failure to attend to the social and psychic consequences of this fluid in-betweenness necessarily involves a certain blindness, which is sometimes evident in the work of Kristeva herself—the thinker of abjection. The question that this collection poses is: Under what conditions does abjection appear as a manifestation of the narcissistic crisis and under what circumstances can it lead to social transformation? Indeed, how can it sustain a “culture of revolt,” increasingly threatened in the West by the commodification of bodies and by the hegemony of what Guy Debord has called “the society of spectacle”? The question of abjection has lead Kristeva to a brilliant reinterpretation of Freud’s primary narcissism, as a pre-symbolic ternary structure, where the emerging subject is neither absolutely fused with the mother, nor fully separated from her. The relationship is mediated through the identification with the paternal pole, a loving father who precedes the Oedipal symbolic father. Thus, primary narcissism is predicated on the existence of a brittle border between abjection (which, as Kristeva writes in Powers of Horror, “is a precondition of narcissism”) and the primary identification with the idealized and loving Third Party (1982, 13). “A borderline case indeed” modern Narcissus, as Kristeva tells us in The Sense and NonSense of Revolt, is not sure of herself, of her borders, or of her identity; she is on the border between security and insecurity, between fusion and separation (see 1996, 46). If abjection is one of the most painful and ambiguous manifestations of the narcissistic crisis, how can it be transformed into a revolt culture? That is one of the central questions this collection interrogates as a whole. How does the negativity of revolt inform Kristeva’s corpus, what are its nuances, and how does it change from her early to her later work? What are the promises and limitations of the revolt culture elaborated in Kristeva’s recent texts? One of the implications of Kristeva’s work is that the revolt culture has to redirect the aggressivity of drive from the abjection of the self to the transformation of the social relations. Thus, it must negotiate between the rupture of signifiance and the articulation of the existing social and psychic contradictions. There are two consequences of this claim: The first consequence, stressed more strongly in her earlier work, is that the disregard for the negativity of the drive and the return of signifiance in the dominant theories of revolution, risks a paranoid reduction of the revolutionary process to a struggle of “a dilated, tenacious ego, armed with ideological and theoretical assurance, combating the old theses . . . the signifying process gives itself an

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agent . . . that of the revolutionary who has no need of knowing and even less of closely examining the process of rejection that pulverizes . . . him” (1984, 206). By contesting this paranoid reduction of revolt and by articulating the revolutionary subject as a passageway of signifiance, where a struggle is as much rooted in affective relations of drives as it is in social conflicts, Kristeva, in her later work, argues nonetheless that the culture of revolt not only has to de-center but also to renew the psychic life and social bonds through symbolic rearticulation, which leads to the institution of new forms of social relations, collective identifications, and representations. Understood in this double sense, as a rupture and rearticulation, revolt culture is indispensable not only for the renewal of psychic life and social bonds, but also for creativity, freedom, and construction of meaningful lives, as long as revolt “remains a live force and resists accommodation” (2002, 38). The second consequence of Kristeva’s analysis is that the erosion of the capacity to rebel “is the sign of national depression” similar to “what the depressed individual feels in his isolation” (83). In this case, the unbinding power of the death drive turns against the subject and its relation with collectivity. According to Kristeva, “Melancholia offers a striking representation of this: links with the others are cut, ‘I’ isolate myself from the word, ‘I’ withdraw into my sadness. . . . And this unbinding that has cut me off from the world will end up cutting me off from myself” (47). As this claim makes clear, Kristeva’s analysis of “the new maladies of the soul” is not a retreat from the tasks of social transformation but precisely a demonstration of the psychic consequences of such a retreat. To understand the changing emphasis in Kristeva’s notion of revolt we need to situate her early work, in particular Revolution in Poetic Language, within the historical context of the workers’ and students’ rebellion of May ’68 and the revolutionary politics of the Tel Quel group. As Kristeva points out, the enduring legacy of May ’68 is “a fundamental version of freedom: not freedom to change or to succeed, but the freedom to revolt. Thirty years on, because of technology and liberalism, we’re so used to identifying freedom merely with free enterprise that this other version doesn’t seem to exist” (2002, 12). Thus, even though Kristeva calls for the transmission of the spirit of the May ’68 rebellion, she also provides a diagnosis of the impasses of revolt in late modern European society. In this respect, she is in agreement with Foucault’s analysis of the erosion of the juridical model of power, an erosion manifested by the weakness of law and absence of responsibility. The replacement of the juridical model by the new procedures of normalization and commodification of bodies not only implies the demise of the Hegelian and Freudian model of revolt as dialectical political transgression, but also risks an erosion of the revolutionary subject by transforming Kristeva into a commodified “patrimonial person,” dispersed into marketable organs.

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This diagnosis of modern social deformation constitutes the basis of Kristeva’s departure, from an early, dialectical conception of revolt based on the law/transgression model and founded on Freud’s Oedipal account of patricide, as the obverse side of the paternal law. The crucial question, emerging here, is whether it is possible to formulate a non-Oedipal, nondialectical notion of revolt and what role femininity has in this model. Two possible lines for exploration that emerge at this juncture in Kristeva’s work refer, on the one hand to the feminine ironization of the phallic logic of revolt (followed by Ziarek), and on the other hand, to the role of the pre-Oedipal loving father as a psychic support of revolt and forgiveness (explored by Oliver). In order to prevent the limitation of the Kristevan notion of revolt either to the transformation of the psychic space or to aesthetic experimentation, several of the essays confront a question that is central to Kristeva’s engagement with the work of Hannah Arendt: namely, the role of affect and narrative in the formation of a modern political community. Toward the end of her interview with Philippe Petit, Kristeva proclaims: “I revolt, therefore we are . . . still to come” (2002, 45). Yet, how are we to think of this collectivity to come? The essays collected here address this question in two different ways: first, by reexamining Kristeva’s reflection on the formation of the skin as the first fragile container of the ego (see 2000, 53–54) and in the context of the alignment of individual bodies with the body of the nation—a process that often leads to the exclusion of racialized bodies from the national community. Second, Kristeva’s revision of Arendt’s notion of narrative is explored. According to Arendt, narrative provides a moment of articulation and public representation of the significance of an act in the political realm. Storytellers, whether historians or fellow citizens recounting a deed, finally make the actors who they are: for instance, Pericles was indebted to Thucydides for his own actualization as a political being. Narratives, or symbolic accounts, constitute retrospectively individual and collective identities. Kristeva radicalizes this disjunction between the narrative and the political act—a disjunction, which as we have seen, characterizes the necessary tension between the two aspects of the revolt: between rupture and symbolic rearticulation. On the one hand, Kristeva argues that the act, deprived of the narrative rearticulation of collectivity, leads to collective and individual trauma. On the other hand, she claims that the necessary political role of rendering public, by means of narrative, memory, and testimony, has to be reformulated in the light of psychoanalytic conceptions of the heterogeneity of language, the split subjectivity-in-process, and the intertwining of recollection and anamnesis. Ultimately, both the formation of the “skin of the community” (discussed by Sara Ahmed) and the narrative rearticulation of political acts, demonstrate the fragility of the public space of appearance and political identities.

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By exploring the contributions of Kristeva to political theory, this volume also underscores the limitations of her work, in particular in the context of race, racism, and colonialism. Ziarek’s essay extends Kristeva’s concept of the revolt by examining the inscription of antagonism on the black body in the work of Frantz Fanon, while Sarah Ahmed focuses on the concept of the stranger and the question of nationhood, asking how Kristeva’s notion of the abject connects with her understanding of nation. Ahmed’s essay dovetails with Tina Chanter’s attempt to formulate the political logic of abjection, which can provide a model of thinking not only sexual difference but also racial and ethnic difference. Another contribution of this anthology lies in the rethinking of Kristeva’s long standing concern with aesthetics in the context of contemporary film. As signaled by her inclusion of a chapter on “Fantasy and Cinema” in her recent book, Intimate Revolt, the issue of film is one in which Kristeva has become increasingly interested. Yet it has so far been neglected by most Kristeva scholars, despite the fact that one of her earlier essays (which is reworked in Intimate Revolt) was included in a film theory anthology intended for use as a textbook. In Intimate Revolt, the second volume of The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Kristeva examines the cinematographic image, as a central place of contemporary imagination. She says that specular fascination reaches perfect and total accomplishment in cinema, and suggests that the cinematic representation of horror would be the specular par excellence. If the tragedies of Sophocles were the site of catharsis for the ancient Greeks, it is the films of Hitchcock, The Birds, or Psycho, that perform this role for us. Kristeva’s work raises the following questions for film theory: Does the spectacle of cinema amount to an opportunity to engage in sadomasochistic fantasy? Is it the authorization of perversion? Is it a site in which, in a phrase Kristeva borrows from Arendt, the “banality of evil” is apparent? Or, on the contrary, does film allow for a “demystification” and critique of “the society of spectacle”? The first section of the book, entitled “Femininity, Race, and Revolt” explores the changing conception of revolution in Kristeva’s early and later work. It begins with Joan Brandt’s essay, “Julia Kristeva and the Revolutionary Politics of Tel Quel,” which examines the ways Kristeva’s relationship to Tel Quel’s aesthetics and politics are reflected in the structure of her early work, particularly in Revolution in Poetic Language. The essay provides a welcome intervention into the reception of Kristeva, since her relationship to the avant-garde journal Tel Quel has often been neglected in the discussion of her work. Its reception in the English speaking world has been largely confined to the questions Kristeva raises with regard to feminist issues, and little attention has been paid to the highly politicized intellectual and social environment that initially fostered Kristeva’s revolutionary project.

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That environment was characterized not only by the theoretical upheaval wrought by the structuralists’ and poststructuralists’ interrogation of traditional philosophical and literary precepts but also by the political turmoil that erupted in the 1960’s, particularly in the form of the student-worker uprisings of May, 1968. These social movements fueled the political radicalism that had been emerging at Tel Quel. Brandt’s essay begins with a historical examination of Tel Quel and of Kristeva’s relationship to the journal, before looking more directly at her theoretical texts. Brandt argues that Kristeva’s tendency to formulate her theoretical distinctions in rather categorical terms can be attributed to the revolutionary politics that structured her writing during the militant period of Tel Quel, when the politicization of the semiotic, and the affirmation of its revolutionary potential, were part of a transgressive, dialectical model of revolt that Kristeva’s recent texts call into question. Sara Beardsworth argues that a significant shift takes place in Kristeva’s work: the revolutionary stance of the 1970s gives way to a position in the 1990s that is marked by her profound engagement with psychoanalysis in the 1980s, which reveals “the failings of subject formation in Western cultures.” Taking as her starting point Kristeva’s diagnosis of the pervasive crisis in contemporary society, Beardsworth follows the implications of this crisis for the subject’s relation to authority, law, and values. She traces how Kristeva’s fundamental distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic develops from her early work to her later work. The symbolic has a tendency to repress semiotic processes, a repression that is effectively accomplished under capitalism as the repression of its process of production. By reconnecting the semiotic and the symbolic, art can achieve a transformation of meaning and subjectivity—a Revolution in Poetic Language, as Kristeva puts it in the title of her 1974 book. The semiotic, which consists of the primary processes of condensation and displacement, is “heterogeneous to the symbolic order and the position of the subject within it, both of which are presided over by paternal law.” As such, these primary processes constitute the possibility of transgressing the symbolic, paternal law, thereby disrupting the order of castration and sexual difference. The semiotic register, since it precedes the separation between subject and object that will be instituted through the paternal, symbolic function, is incapable of producing meaning at the level of signification. Through a certain refusal on the part of the symbolic, the semiotic is taken up by the symbolic in a way that forbids its existence outside the parameters of discourse as already predicated on distinctions between subject and object, and signifier and signified. Nonetheless, through a process of reactivating the thetic phase in reverse, as it were, and from a position that is irretrievably symbolic, the sym-

Introduction

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bolic can be reconnected with the semiotic. Such reconnections open up the possibility of the transformation of meaning, which takes shape as the transgression of the symbolic order that art and literature can effect. As Beardsworth says, “Semiotic functioning exists in vocalic, gestural or kinetic differences. It can be inscribed in color, sound, forms, words. It can therefore be harnessed in the signifying chain. . . . Musical and poetic practices decompose the signifying chain of communicative discourse . . . and recompose them into some kind of ‘totality’ or integrity.” Whereas in 1974, psychoanalytic theory itself is powerless to transform the rigid symbolic structures of dominant signifying practices, in the 1980s, with the publication of Kristeva’s trilogy, Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, and Black Sun, the status of psychoanalysis changes. It is no longer simply a theory that “makes artistic practice intelligible,” but is also a practice in its own right. It is a resource for subjects who suffer the malaise of the disjunction between affect and representation, between semiotic and symbolic. In this crisis ridden era, the capacity of the symbolic to represent drives as heterogeneous is undermined, as the forms of authority, both secular and religious, have an increasingly tenuous hold on individuals. Whereas previously Kristeva emphasized the destabilization of the subject, now she emphasizes the need to symbolize, or stabilize the semiotic. Beardsworth shows that what is at stake in Kristeva’s rethinking of the semiotic is a recasting of the semiotic as a suppressed maternal authority. She suggests that the fragility of paternal law permits the recognition of this latent authority, which was already present in its nascent form in 1974, as the maternal ordering of drives. Kristeva recasts narcissism in a diachronic way, such that abjection, love and melancholia are articulated as the moments of primary narcissism. The question is “how the symbolic function impacts on the preverbal child who is hardly dissociated from the other—the mother’s body—on which it is dependent for its life.” What is decisive is that, prior to the subject’s entry into language, that is, prior to its inauguration as a subject, produced by the symbolic lack of castration, the infant encounters loss or emptiness. This loss is inscribed in the “stream of drives articulated through primary processes: the semiotic,” and not through the signifying function. It is initiated by the failure of the maternal figure to meet the infant’s demand that it constitute “the site of all gratification.” In abjection, the infant must initiate a border between itself and the mother, such that it can delineate its emergent ego from the drives that bind it to the maternal body. In love, or in idealization, the site of the mother’s desire is designated as the imaginary father, a figure who, like Freud’s father of individual prehistory, occupies an ambiguous position in relation to sexual difference. The mother-child dyad is thus transformed into a pre-Oedipal triangle, whereby loss is figured by this third term, a loving father, not yet the prohibiting Oedipal father, but

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one who compensates for loss. In depression, the subject is imprisoned with the primal affect of loss. Divorced from symbolic expression, the semiotic appears in “outbreaks of abjection, or the instability of the inside/outside border; in the inability to idealize, which is the inability to innovate; and in a depression/melancholia that afflicts modern subjects, where the violence of the drive is locked up in isolated individual suffering.” Because political institutions and discourses fail to address such suffering, that task is left up to art. The “symbolization of abjection, primary idealization, and loss is produced . . . in symbolic discourses in the imaginary register, such as literature and art. The 1980s trilogy unfolds the literature of abjection, love stories, and artistic works of mourning that bring the semiotic into the light of day.” Thus, the task of reconnecting the semiotic and the symbolic is infused with a different meaning than it bore in 1974, when the revolutionary potential of the semiotic lay in relation to its capacity to disrupt the stable symbolic system of capitalism. Now, “the semiotic is a weight of non-meaning that intensifies the experience of the loss of meaning, leading to the downfall of the subject and death. That is why, in the trilogy and especially in Black Sun, Kristeva seeks out the artistic instances that bring that weight of non-meaning into symbolic form, removing it from a subjectivity that has become the site of suffering.” One of the questions raised by Beardsworth’s analysis is how far Kristeva lapses into what could be called an “aesthetics of malady.” If it falls to art to reestablish a connection between the semiotic and the symbolic, does Kristeva succumb to a view of art that values it only insofar as it plays a therapeutic role? As Beardsworth points out, “artistic forms themselves arise in the conditions of nihilism and are affected by the tendency for the semiotic and symbolic to fall apart.” Yet the question remains as to whether Kristeva privileges certain forms of art over others, as a consequence of the therapeutic value that it embodies. Such a privilege is suggested by Kristeva’s preference for a “culture of words” over a “culture of images.” Ewa Plonowska Ziarek’s essay works out the political logic of revolt in modernity and the role of the sexed, racial subject in that logic by juxtaposing two different thinkers writing in different historical circumstances. Frantz Fanon’s reflections on the revolutionary process of decolonization, and Kristeva’s recent assessments of the insights and the limits of the Freudian discussion of revolt in the context sexual difference serve as her major reference points. By taking Frantz Fanon’s controversial theory of revolutionary violence as her point of departure, Ziarek rethinks political antagonism in the context of the drive, and the rupture of the real, on the surface on the body. Fanon’s reactivation of antagonism for the sake of decolonization inscribes the traumatic rupture of violence on the surface of the skin. Thus, the black

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colonized body in Fanon’s work is not only associated with the traumatic epidermalization of oppression but also with the epidermalization of revolt. Ziarek argues that Fanon’s rethinking of the rupture of antagonism leads from the absolute opposition of Good and Evil to the extimacy of “violence just under the skin.” However, if the encounter with the real of the body, experienced as a traumatic rupture of the symbolic structure of the colonial world and of bodily identity, is to have an effect in the possible, the revolutionary practice has to redirect the aggressivity of drive—“that violence which is just under the skin” (Fanon 1963, 71)—from self-destructive abjection to the transformation of social relations. In other words, Fanon’s conception of revolution negotiates between the spontaneity of violence (the rupture of the real) and its sublimatory rearticulation. By drawing on Laclau’s notion of hegemony, Ziarek argues that the necessary moment of symbolic articulation of revolutionary violence is based on the conflicting relation between the universal and the excluded particular, between the impossible moment of reconciled society (Fanonian new humanism) and the black historical subject aiming to realize it. In contrast to Sartre’s assessment of Negritude, such an antagonistic formulation of the universal calls for the paradoxical preservation of race in the struggle for universality rather than its dialectical self-destruction. Although Kristeva fails to explicitly elaborate the political logic of revolution, Ziarek argues that there are two important implications of her analysis of femininity and revolt in this respect. First, Ziarek points out that the struggle of the excluded particular for the hegemonization of the universal (for the inclusion in the social bond) all too frequently follows the quasi-religious, dialectical path of the Oedipal rebellion, sustained by the promise of phallic jouissance, implied in the impossible fullness of the universal. Second, Ziarek points to the role of feminine ironic play with illusion, its adherence and nonadherence to the phallus, which precisely sustains the gap between the universal and particular, preventing a transformation of the revolutionary imaginary into another form of political myth. By letting go of the psychic defenses against finitude and the contingency of the social order, the ironic play with illusion not only opens the symbolic to ongoing transformation but also cultivates what Fanon calls “the subtlety of thinking” within hegemonic practice. This ironization of the hegemonic articulation enables us to move from the all too common game of the feminization of the excluded particular to the feminine ironization of the universal. Oliver argues that the intimate or psychic revolt Kristeva advocates as necessary for the psychic health of individuals is associated with identification with the imaginary father (Freud’s father in individual prehistory). Revolt has become progressively difficult, according to Kristeva’s analysis of contemporary society, as the authorities against which we used to revolt have

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become more diffuse. Oliver argues that “While in her earlier work Kristeva was concerned with a revolution within language analogous to political revolution, in her later work she emphasizes the affects of the sociopolitical context on the possibility of individual revolts necessary to psychic life and still dependent upon language and its semiotic drive force.” “Revolt, then, is not a transgression against law or order but a displacement of its authority within the psychic economy of the individual.” The imaginary father as plays the role of the third, facilitating the progression of the infant from its immersion in the abject, thereby providing a “counter-balance to the abject mother.” The imaginary father is “a conglomerate of the maternal and paternal, needs and demands, drives and law.” As such, he combines the functions of the loving father with the paternal law. The coexistence of these two aspects of the imaginary father as both loving and stern, allows the representation or signification of affect, or at least their forgiveness. Forgiveness is understood as a communication or “form of transference or a transfer of affects” rather than as symbolic. Forgiveness gives meaning but it is a meaning that “takes place of the level of the semiotic.” As a creative restructuring of psychic space, forgiveness operates as a kind of reactivation, and therefore as a revolt, as a renewal. The second section of the book, devoted to the questions of the public space of appearances, affect, and collectivity, begins with Sara Ahmed’s contribution. In her essay, “The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation,” Ahmed examines the question of collectivity from a different angle by focusing on the role of affect and racialized bodies in the formation of subjective and national boundaries. Focusing on Kristeva’s work on abjection in Powers of Horror, and her concern with strangeness in Strangers to Ourselves, and also the reflections on race questions that are scattered throughout her work, Ahmed argues that “we need to consider the relation between the forming of the subject and the nation as metonymic as well as metphoric, as involving the proximity or contact between bodies.” It is the way in which “bodies come into contact with other bodies that allows the nation as a collective body to emerge.” Kristeva’s argument “moves from the national idea to a ‘national ideal’ via an analogy with the ego ideal.” Ahmed suggests that Kristeva appeals to an idea of nation that “takes the shape of a particular kind of body, which is assumed in its ‘freedom’ to be unmarked. The ideal is an approximation of an image of ‘Frenchness,’ as an ideal that is deferred, but which nevertheless depends on being inhabitable by some bodies rather than others.” Ahmed argues that for Kristeva “strangerness is universalized as belonging to everyone” but cautions that “some others are recognized as stranger than others and as already ‘not belonging’ to the nation in the concreteness of their difference.” An example Ahmed develops is Muslim women’s scarves, understood as a veil that symbolically marks them as Other.

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Drawing on Kristeva’s earlier development of the notion of abjection in Powers of Horror, Ahmed argues for a different conception of nation than the one that Kristeva offers in her more recent Nations without Nationalism, and Strangers to Ourselves, one that takes into account the way in which emotions “allow for the very surfacing of bodies and collectives.” Feelings, Ahmed suggests ‘affect’ the very distinction of inside and outside, such that we can think of: the skin surface itself, as that which appears to contain us, but as where others impress upon us. This contradictory function of skin begins to make sense if we unlearn the assumption that the skin is simply already there, but begin to think of the skin as a surface that is felt only in the event of being ‘impressed upon’ in the encounters we have with others. Developing this point in relation to abjection, Ahmed goes on to discuss the sense in which “borders need to threatened in order to be maintained.” Abjection can illuminate the tendency of the Western body politic to constitute itself as white, maintaining itself on the basis of racism, at the expense of certain bodies that become marked as dirty or disgusting, as Ahmed shows with reference to Audre Lourde’s Sister Outsider. It is through processes of intensification that surfaces and boundaries, such as the skin itself, are both formed and undone. Such alignments are crucial to the racialization of bodily and social space. The next two essays in this section are concerned with Kristeva’s reading of Arendt. Noëlle McAfee’s chapter, “Bearing Witness in the Polis: Kristeva, Arendt, and the Space of Appearance,” focuses on the key concepts in Kristeva’s engagement with Arendt: political subjectivity, narrative, and the space of appearance. For Hannah Arendt, human beings are very much as Aristotle thought: political animals who come into being as such through their sharing of words and deeds in the polis. We are not mere homo faber; we are potentially actors in the public realm shared by others. Those who step into the polis and act become who they are, not just by their own actions, but through the stories that others tell of their actions. Reading Arendt through Kristeva’s analysis of her, McAfee’s contribution focuses on a tension in Arendt’s understanding of the relationship between narrative and action. “Arendt denigrates poiesis as mere fabrication (done for the sake of something else), the stuff of work and production, not true praxis or action (carried out for its own sake).” Yet, narrative is essential for the disclosure, through storytelling, of the meaning of action. McAfee stresses that narrative cannot be adequately understood as merely mimetic reportage, but must be understood as “a testimony that draws on the experiences and the

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psyche of the narrator to give meaning to events.” As McAfee comments, “Arendt would like to consider narrative as action not production, but here the line between these two activities blurs, especially given the fact that the kind of narrative that interests her is the one that is ‘memorializing’ and to remain so must be recorded, a story turned artifact.” Developing her point, McAfee recalls that Arendt conceives of the narrator as crystallizing the meaning of events, appealing to Kafka as a model, since she believes his prose is pared down to the minimum, letting the meaning of the events come through unfettered. Yet, as McAfee contends, Kafka’s minimalism cannot be reduced to a purging of style, but is itself a style. McAfee’s consideration of Kristeva and Arendt focuses on Arendt’s preference of phronesis (practical wisdom) over sophia (intellectual or theoretical wisdom), a privileging that responds to Heidegger’s reading of the Greeks, which rests on the elevation of sophia over phronesis. Peg Birmingham’s discussion of Arendt and Kristeva uses the work of Melanie Klein to establish a bridge between them, arguing that in her reading of Klein, Kristeva significantly revises her conception of abjection. According to Birmingham, “rather than understanding abjection as the border conflict between the semiotic drives and symbolic processes,” as she does in her earlier work, “Kristeva’s reading of Klein relocates the border conflict of abjection in the conflict between the inherent destructiveness of the sadistic aim (the paranoidschizoid position) and reparative aim of gratitude (the depressive position).” Birmingham notes the importance of Montesquieu’s conception of politics for both Arendt and Kristeva, in particular his understanding of the political bond that cements a community as animated by affect. She reads both Arendt and Kristeva as thinkers of natality, and her contribution follows through how each of them understand fear and violence in relation to the event of natality. She shows how “gratitude for the given” in both thinkers facilitates a new understanding of the political bond. Instead of relegating foreignness outside the political sphere, as Arendt does, Birmingham suggests that Kristeva takes up the foreigner as excluded Other, which “becomes a challenge or call for the gratuitous embrace of the alien.” The last section of the book, “Abjection, Film, and Melancholia,” examines the psychic and political stakes of abjection and melancholia by extending Kristeva’s long standing concern with aesthetics to the realm of contemporary film. Taking Kristeva’s reflections on art and film as its starting point, Chanter’s essay, “The Exoticization and Universalization of the Fetish, and the Naturalization of the Phallus: Abject Objections” suggests that Kristeva’s notion of abjection can provide an alternative model for feminist film theory. One of the reasons Chanter contends that the abject can serve as a powerful tool of film analysis is that it can illuminate difference and discrimination not simply along the axis of sexual difference, but also in the

Introduction

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context of race, class, sexual preference, and sexual identity. Furthermore, the concept of abjection represents a challenge to the privileged role castration anxiety enjoys both in the analyses of Freud and Lacan, and in Mulvey’s analysis, which has acquired an almost canonical status for feminist film theorists, who feel obliged to cite it even if only to mark their disagreements with it. By shifting the focus from castration to abjection, Kristeva rewrites the Lacanian paradigm in a way that directs the emphasis away from the mirror image and Oedipus, and toward the pre-Oedipal history that leads up to the mirror stage. Kristeva’s analysis of abjection provides resources for correcting the tendency of film theorists, who pursue what has come to be called apparatus or gaze theory, to neglect the pressing question of how to account for diversity. It also answers to a problem that many of Mulvey’s critics point out, namely, her failure to take seriously the question of women’s pleasure. Abjection is situated in a pervious relation to pleasure and pain, fascination and disgust, and to attraction and repulsion. When Kristeva writes in Powers of Horror, “so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if not its submissive and willing ones,” one could almost imagine that she is describing the much lamented fascination that female cinema spectators are supposed to experience in the face of masochistic identification with women in films who are objectified and represented as passive, helpless victims. The ambiguity of abjection neither situates the subject as entirely in thrall to the image (as if cinema spectators passively and uncritically consume the idealized and ideologically loaded visions that confront them, unwittingly colluding in their victimization, as upholders of the status quo), nor does it entirely negate the powerful fascination of the image, its capacity to seduce, and its ability to fascinate. Kristeva describes “a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant” (1982, 9). Pleasure and danger are inseparable here. Chanter explores the possibilities opened up by Kristeva’s notion of abjection for an interpretation of Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, a film that both employs and interrogates the trope of fetishism. Along with the mirror stage, castration theory and fetishism have taken center stage in the transcription that Freudian and Lacanian ideas have undergone in film theory. Not only is the specular aspect of Lacan’s mirror stage thereby taken up, but also the moment of recognition in which the child takes the image for itself, is understood in terms of a set of preestablished codes that situate the speaking subject in relation to others. Since the inception of language is bound up for Lacan with the recognition of sexual difference, and since the castration complex is construed by Freud as a resolution (albeit incomplete) of the Oedipus complex, castration theory becomes an indelible part of the story that film theory tells itself about the cinematic experience. This narrative assumes the experience of the male subject as paradigmatic, and consequently one might have expected the

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status of castration to become a focal point for feminist critiques. Curiously, feminist critiques have been driven by a dynamic that has remained, for the most part, within the confines of masculinist film theory discourse, insofar as fetishism—one of the defenses exhibited by the masculine subject against castration anxiety—has remained a centerpiece. This puts feminist film theory in a somewhat awkward position vis-à-vis the masculinist discourse it seeks to contest. On the one hand, the assumption that the spectator is male needs to be upset, but on the other hand the privileged role that castration theory has accorded to fetishism has gone unquestioned. The explanation for the apparently ubiquitous legacy of fetishism lies in part in the apparent inseparability of the acquisition of language from the recognition of sexual difference, and in part in the way in which the concept of disavowal that the trope of fetishism privileges has been transcribed by film theory. The inseparability of the subject’s entry into language from the acceptance of sexual difference concerns the role of the phallus, as symbolic of the penis and of its lack—and the status of this lack in relation to the recognition of sexual difference needs to be parsed out carefully. The phallus has been understood as the emblem of language, as the very possibility of representation. In order to interrogate the precise ways in which the phallus has come to stand in for the conditions under which it is possible to conceive of a speaking subject, the mimetic processes by which the phallus substitutes for the penis—the significance of which is itself dependent upon an already constituted set of sedimented meanings—need to be revisited. In particular, Chanter is concerned with the suppression of racial significance that is effected by fetishistic, phallic discourse. By revisting feminist critiques of Lacan’s dependence on LéviStrauss, whose notion of the symbolic rests centrally on the exchange of women, she uses Marx to illuminate the sense in which the symbolic remains dependent upon women’s use-value in a way that it fails to acknowledge. By relegating women to the real, as presupposed by the social contract but unthought by the processes of symbolic exchange thereby facilitated, Lacanian psychoanalysis makes unavailable for interrogation the preparatory role played by women, and the racial imaginary assumed by the figuration of femininity as the dark continent. Pleshette DeArmitt’s contribution, entitled “On the Border between Abjection and the Third: The (Re)Birth of Narcissus in the works of Julia Kristeva,” addresses abjection in the context of Kristeva’s theory primary narcissism. From his first appearance on the scene in Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Freud’s “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” and beyond, the figure of Narcissus has repeatedly flourished and faded in the Western imagination, as the myth of Narcissus has died out and been reborn so many times, in so many configurations. The Western subject’s fascination with the figure of Narcissus has been an ambivalent one, a true love-hate relationship. From

Introduction

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Ovid and Plotinus to Freud and Levinas, there has been an attraction to, and a harsh repudiation of, this shimmering figure, who is infatuated with mere images. Narcissus is not only condemned for loving appearances instead of reality, but also for closing himself off from the outside, in particular from others, and remaining morbidly enclosed in a symbiotic structure where the same is vertiginously and infinitely reflected back on itself. Narcissus is rejected because he fails to fully individuate, to become a subject, and hence to truly live, as he is wholly given over to the death drive. Although Kristeva believes that Narcissus runs such a risk, as he exists on the perilous border between love and death, she maintains in Tales of Love, and The Sense and the Non-Sense of Revolt, that Narcissus remains a necessary figure, and that primary narcissism is an indispensable structure, for the modern subject. DeArmitt asks why Kristeva seeks to rehabilitate the controversial figure of Narcissus as the model for the modern subject. In order to address this question, DeArmitt turns to Julia Kristeva’s Tales of Love, to examine her charge that there is a crisis in contemporary love and, by extension, a crisis for the psychic life of the modern individual. Kristeva analyzes this crisis, which is fundamental to our lives as speaking subjects, by reading and interpreting the stories of, and about, love that Westerners have told themselves since the time of Plato. In her analyses, one figure reappears, time and again, in various incarnations—Narcissus—as lover, child, artist, pervert, psychotic, and so forth. However, it is today’s Narcissus that concerns Kristeva—a Narcissus who is in exile and deprived of psychic space, as he/she is in want of love. According to Kristeva, Narcissus remains an essential source for the formation of the Western individual, given that he is neither a god nor a hero, just every man in the “the banality of his person.” Through a provocative and original rereading of the notion of narcissism in Freud, Kristeva claims that our modern crisis of love is directly linked to “our inability to respond to narcissism” (1987, 381). Thus, what Kristeva describes as the “abolition of psychic space” and the demise of love discourse reveals our failure “elaborate primary narcissism” (374). The essay examines the reasons why Kristeva believes this fragile, pre-symbolic border from which Narcissus is born is critical for the (re)birth of the modern subject as a loving subject. In her essay, “Black and Blue: Kieslowski’s Melancholia,” Frances Restuccia continues to examine the psychic, political, and aesthetic effects of melancholia by focusing on the Colors Trilogy of Krzysztof Kieslowski, an Eastern-European film maker. Approaching Kieslowski’s work from a Kristevan point of view, especially as articulated in Black Sun, Restuccia argues against Zˇ izˇek’s interpretation of Kieslowski’s films as performing the “work of mourning.” Zˇ izˇek claims that at the end of Blue Julie’s tears signal that her work of mourning performs a reconciliation with the universe and

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leads her to the acceptance of the mystery of life. Yet, is the melancholia of Blue, White, and Red so easily resolved? Are the final tears shed at the denoueˇ izˇek assumes? Or does the melanment of each of these films as upbeat as Z cholia (over multiple, subjective, and social losses constituting the very fabric of Kieslowski’s films) that these tears might be said to point to persist in aesthetic form? Master of ambiguity—itself akin to melancholia, as Kristeva notes—Kieslowski would seem to be more faithful to sadness than Zˇ izˇek’s reading allows, more similar to Marguerite Duras in Kristeva’s conception of her as an artist who perpetuates rather than overcomes the malady of grief. Blue epitomizes this point, cultivating depression rather than exhausting it, disseminating the pain—as Kristeva argues about the work of Duras. Julie, in Blue, would also seem to be, like Duras’ heroines, a crypt inhabiting a living corpse—the primary model for which is apt to be Julie’s mother, confined to a nursing home, incapable (now, as always?) of recognizing Julie. In this film, as in all of Kieslowski’s work, a feeling of abandonment blankets everything—as if everyone has been orphaned—and in Blue, it is (again, as Kristeva proposes about Duras) formed about the maternal figure. Rather than a triumph of mourning, of agape, of love, melancholia and a complicity with death prevails. The essay ends with an important question about a political role of Kieslowski’s melancholia. In The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Between Theory and Post-Theory (2001), Zˇ izˇek observes that “a fidelity to the Real . . . compelled Kieslowski to abandon documentary realism” and that Kieslowski began, like “all cineasts in the socialist countries,” with “the conspicuous gap between the drab social reality and the optimistic, bright image which pervaded the heavily censored official media.” Although ˇZizˇek is making a subtle point about Kieslowski’s turn from an initial authentic documentary approach to a less invasive fiction, it still can be objected that the affirmation of life, the “Yes!” that he attributes to Julie, has a way of seeming disturbingly similar to the supposed communist euphoria, so well depicted in ˇ izˇek the writing of Milan Kundera (where angels dance in a circle), that Z himself acknowledges Kieslowski was improving upon. Is, then, the political function of melancholia, an ironic antidote to lightness of being and to the utopian promise of social reconciliation?

Works Cited Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1987. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

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———. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. The Sense and Non-Sense of the Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. Revolt, She Said. Trans. Brian O’Keeffe. New York: Semiotext(e).

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PART I FEMININITY, RACE, AND REVOLT

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CHAPTER 1

Julia Kristeva and the Revolutionary Politics of Tel Quel

JOAN BRANDT

In a number of interviews following the dismantling of the avant-garde French journal Tel Quel, Kristeva has often emphasized the important role that the members of the Tel Quel group played in furthering her own intellectual development (Guberman 1996, 3–11, 33–58, 257–70). And yet, her association with the journal, which began shortly after her arrival in France in the mid-1960s and continued until the journal’s demise in 1983, has often been neglected in the discussion of her early work. Her reception in the English speaking world, which has been largely confined to the questions Kristeva raises with regard to feminist issues, has not devoted much attention to the highly politicized intellectual and social environment that engulfed Tel Quel in those early years and that initially fostered Kristeva’s revolutionary project. That environment was characterized not only by the theoretical upheaval wrought by the structuralists’ and poststructuralists’ interrogation of traditional philosophical and literary precepts but also by the political turmoil that erupted in the 1960s, particularly in the form of the student-worker uprisings of May, 1968, and that fueled the political radicalism that had been emerging at Tel Quel. An examination of the history of Tel Quel and of Kristeva’s relationship to the journal indeed shows that although it is true that Kristeva’s semiological project exerted a major influence on the writers and poets associated with the journal, it is also true, as Kristeva herself suggests, that her early theoretical texts were shaped by the revolutionary politics that prevailed at Tel Quel in the 1960s and 1970s. Tel Quel’s influence began, in fact, exerting itself almost immediately after her arrival in Paris in December, 1965, as a doctoral research fellow from Bulgaria. Following her introduction to Philippe Sollers, 21

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the founder of Tel Quel, she soon became caught up in the journal’s activities just as it was moving into what Sollers has described as the journal’s second phase. That phase constituted a major turning point for Tel Quel in that it took on a more theoretical focus and moved beyond the strictly literary concerns of its formative days to incorporate the works of those who were to become leading French philosophers and theorists, many of whom were still relatively unknown (Ristat 1975, 158–68). One of the earliest essays by Jacques Derrida “La parole soufflée” had already been published by the Tel Quel journal and writers such as Barthes, Foucault, Jakobson, and Ricardou were also becoming important contributors. Thus, arriving in Paris in the mid-1960s amidst what Kristeva describes as the theoretical ebullience generated in and around the offices of Tel Quel, which by that time had become the center from which many of these new ideas were disseminated, Kristeva was immediately caught up in the intellectual fervor of the period and soon came to be recognized as an innovative thinker in her own right. Her work on Bakhtin initially was presented at one of Barthes’ seminars in 1966, and her effort to oppose the more formalist approach of the structural linguists through her reading of Bakhtinian dialogism and her well-known concept of intertextuality were not only incorporated into the literary practice of the Tel Quel poets but also, so it is said, caused Barthes himself to revise his own more structuralist approach (Forest 1995, 258). Other essays written in 1966, “Towards a Semiology of Paragrams,” “The Closed Text,” and “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” for example, were also devoted to countering the structuralists. In opposition to their tendency to view language and the literary text as self-enclosed systems cut off from their social and historical context, Kristeva formulated the notion of the text as productivity, as paragram, as a translinguistic, signifying practice in which the social and historical were also inscribed. All of these notions could easily have been integrated into Tel Quel’s political program but, if one looks closely at these early essays, the political implications of her analysis are almost imperceptible. That will change, however, as Tel Quel moves into its third phase when Kristeva’s (and Derrida’s) critique of the formalist premises structuring linguistic theory allow for the articulation of a subversive pratique textuelle that would become increasingly politicized by Tel Quel. Indeed, as France was nearing the explosive political events of May 1968, Tel Quel began displaying its growing commitment to Marxist theory. As early as 1966, however, the political radicalization of the group was already underway. A quasi-clandestine political committee was formed, according to Philippe Forest, a Tel Quel historian, whose focus was not the Marxism of the Soviet or French variety, but of the kind practiced in China (1995, 272–76.) Thus, contrary to those who claimed that Tel Quel

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first embraced communism in France and then converted in 1972 to Maoism, the interest of some members of the Tel Quel group (particularly Sollers) in the Cultural Revolution in China was evident early on. This precipitated, however, a certain amount of debate among the members of the Tel Quel group, for although it was believed that the Cultural Revolution offered greater possibilities for a subversive, avant-garde textual practice to intervene politically and socially, it was believed that consideration should be given to the French context in which Maoism played no role. In addition, it was felt that although the French Communist Party (the PCF) was rather orthodox in its views, there were encouraging signs of a possible change. The PCF received in 1967 almost a quarter of the votes in France; it was very attractive to young intellectuals, and most important of all for Tel Quel, it was interested in avant-garde literature because of its potential to breathe fresh air into the asphyxiating confines of social realist art. As a result, Sollers agreed to a provisional renunciation of Maoism and to the opening of a dialogue with the PCF. If it is true, however, that Sollers needed convincing, so too did Kristeva but for very different reasons. Having come from Bulgaria, Kristeva was well aware of the deficiencies of Communist regimes, but she too was persuaded an alliance with the PCF would be beneficial and that “in France,” as she later writes, “it would be different”(1987, 229). An alliance was thus formed which allowed Tel Quel to view its literary work from a Marxist perspective while at the same time guarding a certain theoretical distance. For the members of the group believed that by engaging in a theoretical restructuring of Marxist theory, they could prevent the subordination of Tel Quel to the Party’s political agenda. In this case, the group would be able to make use of the Communist Party without being used by it, to take advantage of an alliance on a cultural and intellectual level while maintaining Tel Quel’s theoretical purity as protection against the Party’s and orthodox Marxism’s doctrinaire logic. And indeed, in the early stages of their relationship, Tel Quel’s alliance with the PCF was quite successful, for through Party publications and two important colloquia much of the work by Tel Quel and other avant-garde writers became known to the public. This rapprochement led to the publication of a number of position papers in the Tel Quel journal. The first, written by Sollers in 1967, outlined Tel Quel’s “Programme.” It called for the radical reversal of bourgeois culture’s fetishized notion of literature while making its first open declaration of the link Tel Quel would establish between its revolutionary literary practice and Marxist theory. Sollers wrote: “This textual rupture . . . is contemporaneous with the rupture in Western history and thought demonstrated by Marx, that is to say, by the materialist dialectic. It is the very crisis, the violent revolution . . . of readablity”(1968, 9–14).

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This declaration was followed by the publication in the summer issue of 1968 of La Révolution Ici Maintenant (Revolution Here, Now), a statement signed by seventeen Tel Quel members and associates, including Kristeva, which made a more explicit connection between textual practice and social revolution: The construction . . . of a theory drawn from textual practice . . . must be involved according to its complex mode of production of Marxist-Leninist theory, the only revolutionary theory of our time . . . any ideological enterprise which does not today present itself in an advanced theoretical form and is content to organize around the eclectic or sentimental designations of individual and only weakly political activities appears to us counter-revolutionary to the extent that it ignores the process of the class struggle which is to be objectively pursued and reactivated. (La Révolution 1968, 4) In contrast, then, to the earlier more literary years at Tel Quel, when the journal advocated a politically disengaged textual practice in an effort to challenge the major literary currents of the postwar years (dominated by Sartrean engagement and its instrumentalist view of language), the members of the Tel Quel group began laying the groundwork for a highly politicized collective textual practice. And that practice clearly fit in with the tenor of the times, emerging when France was caught up in the explosive political events of the late 1960s. The intellectual and social environment, which added fuel to Tel Quel’s and Kristeva’s revolutionary project, was characterized not only by the theoretical upheaval wrought by the structuralists’ and poststructuralists’ interrogation of traditional philosophical and literary precepts, but also by the political turmoil surrounding the student-worker uprisings of May, 1968. Instigated initially by a group of students at the university in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, the protest against an authoritarian university system quickly transformed itself into a general student-worker strike that ended up paralyzing the entire country and almost toppled the de Gaulle regime. And although the revolt was ultimately unsuccessful, the events of May, as Kristeva’s recent writings attest, pointed the way toward the possibility of a radical contestation of all forms of authority, including not only that of the state, the family, and a repressive socioeconomic system but also on a more theoretical level the exclusionary and ultimately oppressive notions of identity at the very foundations of Western thought. The contestatory spirit that found its expression in the Parisian streets was thus closely echoed in the theoretical and literary work of Tel Quel, whose interests diverged in certain respects from those of the students, but whose activities became radically politicized in the years surrounding the

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explosive political events of May 1968. Rather than becoming directly involved in the student effort to overturn an oppressive social system, however, the members of the Tel Quel group believed that the revolutionary struggle should take place on a more fundamental level, on the level of language itself. Claiming that communicative language is a principal vehicle in the preservation of the ideological structures that dominate Western culture and revealing their growing interest in Marxist theory, Kristeva and the other members of Tel Quel attempted to formulate and put into practice a revolutionary materialist theory of language. Their effort was to work against the traditional concept of the literary text and of language itself as predominantly meaningful structures and thus to help achieve, by indirection, a transformation of the social order and its oppressive laws as well. The revolutionary intent of Kristeva’s own writings of the period can thus be considered a logical outgrowth of the political and theoretical upheaval of the times, a reenforcement of the spirit of contestation that erupted in May ’68 and even before then in the writings of Tel Quel, which sought by different means to further the cause of social revolution. The politicization of Tel Quel thus led to the publication in 1968 of a collection of essays that some regard as the collective manifesto of the Tel Quel movement. Entitled Théorie d’ensemble or Group Theory, it laid the foundation, according to Sollers, for its third, most politically militant phase. In this work, one finds the preliminary sketches of some of the major motifs that would structure Tel Quel activity until its break with Maoism in the mid-1970s, including, as enumerated in its introductory essay, the nonrepresentational notion of “writing” (écriture), of the “text,” of “history,” the “unconscious,” “work,” “trace,” and “production,” all of which would be tied to the articulation of a politics grounded in Marxist theory, or more precisely in “dialectical materialism” (Théorie d’ensemble 1968, 7–10). The collection includes Derrida’s “La Différance,” numerous essays on Marx, an essay on Freud, two essays on a revolutionary practice of writing by the two Tel Quel poets, Marcelin Pleynet and Denis Roche, and numerous essays by Sollers who consistently makes the tie between writing and a Marxist revolution: “In relation to ‘literature,’” he writes in one essay, “what we propose wants to be as subversive as Marx’s critique of the classical economy” (68); “writing and revolution have a common cause” (79). That tie is developed further in one of the two essays that Kristeva contributes to the volume. Translated later in The Kristeva Reader as “Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or Critique of Science,” the article clearly develops the political implications of Kristeva’s work by making an explicit connection between semiotics, the practice of the text and Marxist economic theory (1986, 74–88). By drawing upon Marx’s analysis of the relations of production within the capitalist system Kristeva concludes that Western communicative language and Western society are governed by a similar logic,

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subjected to the very same laws of exchange that structure the capitalist marketplace. For whether the reference is to the exchange of commodities or the exchange of messages, the focus in a capitalist system is always on the goods produced, on the finished and immediately consumable product that hides the processes of production. Thus, in a capitalist economy, which measures the value of a particular commodity on the basis of the labor time necessary to produce it, the activity of labor is not considered on its own terms, but only in terms of its relationship to what it ultimately produces. Productive labor, as a consequence, is essentially denied by the capitalist system, concealed by society’s fetishization of the product and of the money that serves as its sign in the system of exchange. Kristeva’s emphasis on textual productivity and her attempt to uncover the multiple, pre-linguistic processes that both constitute but also undermine the unity of meaning are thus not only central to her own and Tel Quel’s critique of traditional notions of language, they are also directly related to Tel Quel’s critique of the social order as a whole. It should be pointed out that Marx himself was implicated in this critique. Although he was the first, according to Kristeva, to focus on productivity before it becomes part of the system of merchandise, his own emphasis on the circulation of values, on the product of labor rather than on the productive process, binds him, in Kristeva’s view, to the capitalist system he investigates. The attempt by Kristeva and the other members of the Tel Quel group to distance themselves from some of the reifying aspects of Marxist theory explains, in part at least, Tel Quel’s recourse to Freudian theory, which in conjunction with the revolutionary aspects of Marx’s critique of bourgeois ideology, was to provide a means of counteracting not only the more dogmatic uses of Marxism but the more conservative strains within Marxist theory itself. By incorporating Freud’s problematization of the subject and notions of libidinal heterogeneity that were excluded by a strictly Marxist analysis, the group believed that it could, in a sense, save that analysis from falling back into the subjectivist trap from which orthodox Marxism, in Tel Quel’s view, had never completely liberated itself. Despite its focus on struggle, contradiction and practice (that is, on those elements that undermine the unity of the individual and social subject), orthodox Marxist philosophy, as Kristeva later argued in Revolution in Poetic Language falls prey to the anthropomorphization that characterized the thinking of its philosophical predecessors. But in this case the notion of “human unity . . . is represented in Marx by the proletariat, which is viewed as the means for realizing the total man—mastered and unconflicted” (1984, 138). Kristeva’s reading in Revolution in Poetic Language of Marx in light of Freudian (as well as Lacanian) psychoanalysis is thus based upon her own and Tel Quel’s understanding of dialectical materialism, and it allowed the group to stress the more revolutionary aspects of Marxist theory by viewing

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the subject as that which is no longer constitutive of but as instead inscribed within a set of productive relations. That reading was in many respects made possible by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who, in turning to the writings of Freud, Lacan, and Mao Tse-tung in an attempt to reconstruct Marxism in antihumanist terms, contributed significantly to Tel Quel’s Marxist / Freudian critique—despite the fact that various Tel Quel members later criticized Althusser for going too far in his denial of the subject. According to Althusser’s account, Marxist philosophy or, more precisely, dialectical materialism, emerges in its more radically antihumanist form following the development, most notably in Marx’s Capital, of a “new science of history of ‘social formations’” (that is, historical materialism) when history and society are viewed not as the products of a collective or individual human subject, who constructs social reality in accordance with some predetermined design, but as the processes or practices in which subjectivity is itself situated (1990, 166–7). Althusser’s concept of practice thus became central to Tel Quel’s revolutionary project. In its ability to contest capitalism’s unifying, reifying logic, by focusing on the productive forces that disturb notions of identity, system, and order, it could undermine a culture whose structures Tel Quel regarded as totalizing and repressive. Tel Quel’s concept of practice, however, expanded upon the Althusserian version by focusing on the material elements involved in the production of the text and by delving further, as a result, into the problematic of the subject and language, both of which remained within the realm of a fundamentally capitalist ideology. Indeed, it was Althusser’s failure to deal with the question of the subject that brought a marked change in Tel Quel’s attitude toward Althusserian Marxism in the 1970s, aggravated no doubt by Tel Quel’s break in 1971 with the French Communist Party, of which Althusser was still a member. For they believed that the Althusserian perspective had ceased to be materialist. His emphasis on the theoretical antihumanism he found in Marx’s later work, with its notion of history as what Althusser described as a “process without a subject,” constituted a denial of “material process” in which the subject is also inscribed and thus erased the plurality of contradictions that reside within any social or signifying practice (See Sollers 1974a, 35–36). This failure to account for the category of the subject, which Tel Quel found troublesome in both Althusser and Marx, thus fueled Tel Quel’s interest in Maoism, which in seeing social change as determined by a plurality of external and internal causes, including the work of a subject, provided, in the group’s view, a more authentically revolutionary practice of Marxist theory. Tel Quel’s strict adherence, however, to its particular interpretation of Marxist-Leninist doctrine not only played an important role in its turn in the 1970s toward Mao, it also contributed to what the historian Forest describes as the “theoretical terrorism” that prevailed at Tel Quel, for it led

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them eventually to reject anyone who failed to follow the Party line, including the PCF itself. Despite frequent declarations of solidarity with the Communist Party, signs of conflict between the two began to appear as early as 1968 and were related to what Tel Quel saw as a growing conservatism within the Party organization. The sequence of events leading up to the final break with the PCF is outlined rather clearly in Tel Quel’s “Chronology,” published in the fall of 1971, giving a sense of the conflict and cleavages that resulted from Tel Quel’s political allegiances. It also gives one a sense of the explosive political climate out of which Kristeva’s earlier work, most notably, Revolution in Poetic Language, and her essay “The Subject in Process/on Trial,” ultimately emerged: 1967 At this time a crisis is emerging inside the committee of Tel Quel between those who want to follow a Marxist-Leninist line and others. . . . “The others” are the same ones who tried . . . to repress information of the Chinese cultural, proletarian revolution. Scission. 1968 Beginning of the campaign by the bourgeois press against Tel Quel . . . the first sign of a profound disagreement with the PCF, which is giving more and more recognition to the socalled Union [the “Union of Writers,” a more conservative group]. 1969 Redoubling of the bourgeois press’s campaign against Tel Quel. . . . It seems that the PCF is supporting more and more actively the opposition to the right of Tel Quel. 1970 [Kristeva is now on the editorial board]. . . . Slander and defamations on the part of Tel Quel’s opposition. . . . What is becoming increasingly evident [in the Communist Party] is the organic unity dogmatism-revisionism. (1971, 142–43) Tel Quel’s disenchantment with the Communist Party had clearly been building for some time. The Party’s veering to the right while Tel Quel remained committed to the revolutionary aspects of Marxist-Leninist theory and to its restructuring of orthodox Marxism by incorporating the writings of Freud, Mao, and Mallarmé, among others, led inevitably to Tel Quel’s break with the Party in 1971—one year before the publication of Kristeva’s “The Subject in Process/on Trial” and two years before Revolution in Poetic Language. Tel Quel published its “Movement of June ’71” in opposition to the Party’s “Stalinist” tactics. The Party’s refusal to recognize the profoundly revolutionary implications of Maoist doctrine constituted a betrayal, in Tel

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Quel’s view, of Marx’s revolutionary spirit and transformed the Communist Party in France into a conservative instrument of the French social system and its bourgeois ideology. The “Movement of June” thus issued what was nothing less than a call to arms to all those who sought to renounce the PCF’s “dogmatico-revisionism” in favor of “the revolutionary line,” and it concludes with a rhetorical flourish that stands in striking contrast to Tel Quel’s presumably open-ended, perpetually self-critical pratique textuelle. Down with the corrupt bourgeoisie! Down with rotten revisionism Down with their polarization of the superpowers ... Long live revolutionary China! Long live Mao Tse-Tung! Signed: Movement of June ’71 against opportunism, dogmatism, empiricism, revisionism; for the thought of Mao Tse-Tung. (1971, 135)

What explains or justifies such a marked discrepancy between Tel Quel’s politics and its notion of a nonrepresentational theoretical praxis is difficult to say. But this transformation of practice into dogma exposes and dismantles one of the fundamental illusions of the entire Tel Quel project, one that is derived not simply from Tel Quel’s utopian vision in all its practical manifestations but from a certain theoretical idealism that also structured the Tel Quel enterprise. Kristeva later outlined their thinking in “My Memory’s Hyperbole”: Dialectical materialism, which, in our view represented Hegel overturned by Lucretius, Mallarmé and Freud (to cite only three parameters of a nonmechanistic materialism), gave us some hope, if not of modifying the bureaucratic defects of an oppressive machine . . . at least of bracketing them. (1987, 231) Thus, in turning toward Maoism as an “anti-organizational, anti-partisan antidote” or as “a utopia in pure form, which had nothing to do with sects of the left” (1987, 232), Tel Quel thought it had found a particularly efficacious means of countering the forces of revisionism within the PCF, whose belief in a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism had led it to seek common ground with the capitalists and thus to abandon the revolution. Mao, on the contrary, had tenaciously held, so the members of the Tel Quel group maintained, to the idea of the class struggle, a tenacity that stemmed from what Sollers described as Mao’s radical appreciation of the complexity of the

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movement of history, whose contradictions could not be reconciled by the politics of revisionism. Contradiction, as Mao tells us, is “inherent in the very essence of things” and must therefore be seen as an integral part of any form of social change. Indeed, as Sollers insisted, in a work entitled On Materialism, which he published in 1974, the year that also saw the publication of Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, Mao’s theories on contradiction constituted a “considerable and completely original ‘leap forward’ for the theory of dialectical materialism,” due in part to Mao’s attempt to account for what Marx had consistently neglected: the contradictory role of the subject (1974b, 121). It is this concern for the category of the subject that provided the impetus for Kristeva’s turn toward psychoanalysis, both in her essay “The Subject in Process/on Trial,” which was presented in 1972, one year after Tel Quel’s break with the PCF and its open endorsement of Maoism, and in her Revolution in Poetic Language, which was defended as her doctoral dissertation the following year. As Kristeva argued in the latter work, it was Mao, more than any other Marxist theorist, who viewed “the personal and direct experience” of a subject as “the essential materialist feature of practice.” Mao argued that the subject is placed “in process,” caught up in the contradictions shaping social history, while retaining at the same time, through its “personal participation in the practice that changes reality,” its capacity to influence to some degree, the course of human events: “‘Direct’ and ‘personal’ experience,” Kristeva wrote, “is perhaps stressed [in Mao’s writings] more than anywhere else in Marxist theory and Mao’s emphasis on it tends to bring to the fore a subjectivity that has become the place of the ‘highest contradiction’ . . . Maoism, it would seem, summons and produces, above all this kind of subjectivity, one that it views as the driving force behind the practice of social change and revolution” (1984, 200–201). As the “theoretician of contradiction,” (Forest 1995) Mao was thus considered by Tel Quel as the only true heir of the Marxist-Leninist revolution. His ability to think history as a struggle of contradictions that collide and interact on many different levels and in which the subject is also a productive force provided a more genuine understanding of the materialist dialectic. What is more, and adding further to Mao’s appeal, if social change cannot take place without the involvement of a subject, according to Mao, neither can it occur if it is confined solely to the sphere of the economic class struggle. Given the Marxist view that the economic substructure and the superstructure are mutually dependent, with each serving as the condition of the other, Mao recognized that a proletarian revolution was not enough, that the struggle had to be played out on the cultural and ideological level as well. Needless to say, Mao’s rejection of a mechanistic, economic determinism and his insistence upon the transformation of the superstructure as essential to

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the advancement of the revolutionary struggle provided the necessary justification for Tel Quel’s own revolutionary project. Indeed, in light of Kristeva’s claim that Mao was “the only man in politics and the only communist leader since Lenin to have frequently insisted on the necessity of working upon language and writing in order to transform ideology,” Maoist theory lent considerable support to Tel Quel’s effort to combat, by means of a radical transformation of language and the literary text, all forms of cultural and political institutionalization (1980, 123, 17n). Thus under the banner of a rekindled interest in Maoism, Tel Quel saw its revolutionary poetic practice as an important weapon in its struggle for a revolution in the political realm, and it led to the publication of what Forest describes as a “new wave of texts.” Two of the most radical of Tel Quel’s poetic texts, Denis Roche’s “Le mécrit,” (1972) and Marcelin Pleynet’s “Stanze” (1973) appeared at this time as well as Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), a work that can be considered, to some extent, as a response to Tel Quel’s search for a more Maoist understanding of the materialist dialectic by attempting to integrate into the dialectical process the category of the subject. Recognizing that the modification of language cannot take place without a modification of the subject who speaks it, Kristeva thus extends her textual investigations in Sémiotikè, to examine the complex and contradictory linguistic and nonlinguistic processes involved in the constitution of subjectivity. And she does so by reworking previous notions of the dialectic, most notably those of Hegel and Marx, through an encounter with the materialism of Freud. As Kristeva writes in her introduction to the work: We will make constant use of notions and concepts borrowed from Freudian psychoanalytic theory and its various recent developments in order to give the advances of dialectical logic a materialist foundation–a theory of signification based on the subject, his formation, and his corporeal, linguistic, and social dialectic. (1969, 14–15) Kristeva’s notion of signifiance and of the dialectical relationship between the two modalities that constitute it—the symbolic order of language and the semiotic, pre-linguistic realm of the drives that precedes but also participates in the constitution of meaning—is thus the result of Kristeva’s reworking of the materialist dialectic, a reactivation through Freud, and under the impetus of Mao, of the heterogeneous contradictions, the conflicting, productive processes in which subjectivity is situated. The dialectical model, which is now applied to the subject and brought to the foreground by poetic language, thus places the subject in process / on trial and becomes the ultimate means of society’s transformation, a subversion of the socio-symbolic order through the reactivation of what that order normally represses.

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Kristeva’s well-known distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic is thus central to her own and Tel Quel’s revolutionary project. And it is a distinction that, as readers of Kristeva know, has been quite controversial— with a number of Kristeva’s detractors becoming highly critical of her tendency to define the semiotic and the symbolic in essentialist, phallocentric terms. Her view of the semiotic as the outside of language that must be restored to discourse if the symbolic order of identity is to be undermined reveals, according to some, not simply an essentializing celebration of the semiotic’s disruptive potential but also a conception of the symbolic that, in the words of one critic, is “exclusively prohibitive” (Butler 1993, 177). A review of Kristeva’s recent work in which she rejects what she now considers as an outmoded dialectical, transgressive model of revolt makes such an argument all the more convincing, particularly when one considers the ways Kristeva modifies the semiotic/symbolic relation in the works following Revolution in Poetic Language. In Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva tries, it is true, to affirm a more Maoist notion of heterogeneous contradiction by stressing the interrelatedness of the two dispositions—with the perpetual conflict between the semiotic and the symbolic bringing an endless and fundamentally unresolvable pulverization and reconstitution of the subject. And yet, Kristeva’s and Tel Quel’s celebration of the subversive capabilities of the unconscious semiotic seemed in the final analysis to assume not that heterogeneity, pulsionality, or otherness were a fundamental component of the human psyche but that they emerged only when the integrated status of the subject and its language were destabilized through an act of transgression. Once Kristeva abandons her revolutionary rhetoric, however, the notion of a subversive outside is much less in evidence. If one considers her work of the 1980s, for example, it becomes clear that she looks at the distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic in a rather different light. When she claims in Tales of Love that the different expressions of love throughout Western civilization are in a sense reconstructions of the unconscious, preOedipal stage of psychic development, she suggests that the individual’s libidinal impulses are no longer a form of abjection that has been cast aside; they remain instead an integral, unrepressed part of the symbolic itself. The distinction is further undermined by the fact that symbolic structurations are now inserted by Kristeva into the semiotic. They take the form of the preOedipal father of individual prehistory who interrupts the bodily exchange between mother and child and establishes even before the structuring relations of the Oedipal triangle what Kristeva calls a “position of symbolicity” that is now to be found within the semiotic as well. And while the stabilizing work of the symbolic was always provisional for Kristeva and should never be understood as a desire to reconstitute its repressive power, there was clearly a move in a more conservative direction, a

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move that stemmed from changes in Kristeva’s perception of the social organization and of the place that the individual subject occupied within it. These changes become particularly evident in Strangers to Ourselves in which she abandons her focus on the exclusionary logic structuring Western society and concentrates on the inscription of otherness, in the form of the foreigner, who has been granted a certain legitimacy throughout history by the social system and its laws. Thus, one can conclude that the forces of otherness which are also linked to the Freudian unconscious are not a form of abjection that has been cast aside, nor are they a form of psychosis that reveals the failure of the symbolic to perform its censoring function; they remain instead an integral part of the symbolic itself. The revolutionary rhetoric that structured her earlier work is thus hardly necessary here, for the symbolic is perceived by Kristeva as that which is always already undermined. Indeed, it is the very insufficiency of the symbolic dimension that becomes an important issue for Kristeva in her work of the mid to late 1990s beginning with The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt (2000) and continuing through Intimate Revolt (1997) and the still untranslated, Contre la dépression nationale (1998b) and L’avenir d’une révolte (1998a). In these works, the concept of revolt returns once again to her discourse but it is formulated by Kristeva in response to a whole range of social problems that, in her view, no longer stem from an oppressive capitalist system but come instead from the contemporary crisis in identity that has placed both the individual and the French nation in a state of disarray. Her effort to deal with that crisis leads her to formulate a notion of revolt that is nonconfrontational, one that incorporates the contestatory spirit of Tel Quel and of the generation of May ’68 while rejecting the old dialectical model of revolt which assumes a dramatic confrontation between the law and its transgression. That model, Kristeva writes, is no longer operable in the current era primarily because the structures of authority against which the protestors rebelled have lost their capacity to exercise power. The disintegration of the family, the replacement of political authority with an amorphous, fluctuating global market, rapid developments in technology and the rise of the mass media with the proliferation of its mindnumbing images have not only rendered contemporary society infinitely more complex but have constituted a power vacuum that deprives individuals of a stabilizing center. Thus, rather than facing an excessively prohibitive society in the 1990s, the individual suffers from a debilitating lack of constraints and finds that his capacity for revolt is dramatically weakened. As Kristeva asks repeatedly in her recent texts: “Against whom does one revolt if prohibitions are absent or hypercomplex” and who becomes the agent of this rebellion if the individual “suffers from an unbearable fragmentation?” (1998a, 102–3). As a remedy, then, for both the public and private malaise that plagues Western culture, Kristeva draws upon a Freudian notion of “re-volte.”

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Linked to the etymological meaning of revolvere, the term, as Kristeva uses it, is understood not as a transgression, as it was during her more militant phase, but as an anamnesis, a movement of “re-volt” that returns to the past, that repeats, interrogates and re-elaborates the most archaic, intimate phases of psychic development (2000, 64–65). It is this reconstruction through psychoanalysis of the initial stages of subjectivation (the identification with the father of individual prehistory, the separation from the mother, the Oedipal prohibition of incest and the final revolt against the Oedipal father which establishes the autonomy of the self) that allows for the reinstatement of the limits and prohibitions so essential to our condition as speaking beings, and in so doing, it both rehabilitates the individual subject and gives him “a capacity for contestation and creation.” As Kristeva writes, “it is by focusing on the individual microcosm, by rehabilitating it, by valorizing it, and by restoring to it the pride [that allows it] to desire, to love and to revolt, that society can have a chance to avoid becoming fixed in a world of business management. Without that, we have as the only promise of liberty [our] adaptation to the laws of production and of the marketplace” (1998b, 104–5). This version of revolt thus constitutes Kristeva’s challenge to contemporary consumer society, and in this sense it is similar to her work of the 60s and 70s, but it also underscores to what extent her earlier revolution in poetic language, with its celebration of the subversive capabilities of the unconscious semiotic, relied on a more transgressive, dialectical concept of the semiotic/symbolic relation. Although her recent work has not entirely avoided the problems of Revolution in Poetic Language—it still reveals an uncritical acceptance of the Freudian Oedipal framework and an affirmation of the subversive capabilities of a literary and artistic avant-garde that often relies upon the old semiotic/symbolic distinction—when she discusses the details of her modified version of revolt, she avoids some of the problems of her earlier work. She offers what could be called a more holistic concept of the subject, one that focuses less on the undermining of the symbolic through the insertion of semiotic motility and more on the subject’s rebellious imaginary which incorporates elements of both. As a series of stages that mobilize the entire range of identifications including the pre-Oedipal, narcissistic relation to the mother, the primary identification with the benevolent father of individual prehistory and the secondary identification with the Oedipal father, the imaginary becomes a kaleidoscope of the images of the self instituting the limits and prohibitions necessary to the self’s constitution while providing access to the semiotic’s archaic representations, to the unconscious desires and fantasies that are linked to those representations and that motivate the infant’s identifications. By returning through psychoanalysis to a realm that incorporates not simply the instinctual corporeality of the semiotic

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but the structuring prohibitions of the symbolic as well, Kristeva’s re-volte is designed to save us from this robotization of culture, and it attempts to do so not by merely pitting the revolutionary potential of the semiotic against the symbolic but by inscribing the symbolic into the notion of revolt as well and thus giving voice, perhaps more successfully than did Revolution in Poetic Language, to the contradictory, heterogeneous processes that lie within the most intimate reaches of the self. Thus, in the context of Kristeva’s work of the 1980s and 1990s where she raises questions that ultimately complicate the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic, we can conclude upon reexamination of her earlier project that her tendency at times to formulate her distinctions in rather categorical terms can be attributed to the revolutionary politics that structured her writing during the period of militancy at Tel Quel, when the politicization of the semiotic, the affirmation of its revolutionary potential, were part of a transgressive, dialectical model of revolt that she has very recently called into question.

Works Cited Althusser, Louis. 1990. For Marx. London: Verso. Originally published in1965 as Pour Marx. Paris: François Maspero. Butler, Judith. 1993. The body politics of Julia Kristeva. In Ethics, politics, and difference in Julia Kristeva’s writing, ed. Kelly Oliver. London: Routledge. Déclaration sur l’hégemonie idéologique bourgeoisie/révisionnisme. 1971. Tel Quel. 47 (Fall): 135. Guberman, Ross Mitchell, ed. 1996. Julia Kristeva interviews. New York: Columbia University Press. Forest, Philippe. 1995. Histoire de Tel Quel 1960–1982. Paris: Seuil. Kristeva, Julia. 1969. Sémiotikè: Recherches pour une semanalyse. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1980. How does one speak to literature? In Desire in language: A semiotic approach to literature and art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1984. Revolution in poetic langauge. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1986. Semiotics: A critical science and/or a critique of science. Trans. Seán Hand. In The Kristeva reader, ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press.

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———. 1987. My memory’s hyperbole. In The female autograph: Theory and practice of autobiography from the tenth to the twentieth Century, ed. Domna C. Stanton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1997. La révolte intime: Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse II. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard. ———. 1998a. L’avenir d’une révolte. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. ———. 1998b. Entretien avec Philippe Petit. Contre la dépression nationale: Julia Kristeva. Paris: Les Editions Textuel. ———. 2000. The sense and non-sense of revolt: The powers and limits of psychoanalysis. Vol. 1. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. La Révolution Ici Maintenant. 1968. Tel Quel 39 (Summer): 4. Ristat, Jean. 1975. An Interview with Philippe Sollers. In Qui sont les contemporains? Paris: Gallimard. Sollers, Philippe. 1968. Programme. Logiques. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1974a. Critiques. Tel Quel 57 (Spring): 35–36. ———. 1974b. Sur le matérialisme: De l’atomisme à la dialectique révolutionnaire. Paris: Seuil. Théorie d’ensemble. 1968. Paris: Seuil.

CHAPTER 2

From Revolution to Revolt Culture

SARA BEARDSWORTH

Kristeva’s book The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (1996) can be viewed as returning to a major theme of her thought in the 1970s, especially Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) with its emphasis on the modes of and resources for subversion in the contemporary Western world. Her more profound turn to psychoanalysis in the 1980s elicited some disappointment at an apparent reduction of her vision to the level of the individual and implied abandonment of the social and political dimension of her thought. Nonetheless, Revolution in Poetic Language bore an uneasy tension between Kristeva’s high confidence in the practice of poetic language and a much less confident assertion of its historical impact. This tension is connected to the way in which psychoanalysis and art stand to one another in that text, where the former has the status of theory and art is practice, as I will show. This chapter argues that there is a major difference between the revolutionary stance of the 1970s and her 1990s position, one which is rooted in the subtle but momentous changes in her thought that appear in the 1980s writings owing to her closer exploration of psychoanalysis. In contrast to the 1974 position, the psychoanalytic and aesthetic thought of the 1980s, especially the trilogy Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Tales of Love, and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, does not reside in a revolutionary stance. Rather, it follows through and expands upon the discoveries of psychoanalysis in a manner that reveals the failings of subject formation in Western cultures. These failings display the pervious border between the individual and the social, so that Kristeva can link the psychoanalytic conception of the subject to a certain crisis in late modern societies which bears on meaning and values, but also law and authority. 37

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The paper links Kristeva’s assessment of how we stand in relation to authority, law and value to her own reformulations of the Lacanian symbolic—separating, “paternal”—function and, more broadly, her fundamental categorial distinction between the semiotic and symbolic. I first address how the distinction is introduced in Revolution in Poetic Language, and then consider how it appears in the trilogy, seeking to draw out and question Kristeva’s assessment of what is possible for us in respect of revolt, and where the impasses lie.

Revolution in Poetic Language It is important that Revolution in Poetic Language contrasts psychoanalysis and art not as different practices, but along the lines of theoretical and practical reason. Psychoanalysis, fundamentally the discovery of the unconscious, is the theory that permits the recognition and articulation of what art and literature practice. Kristeva asserts that, because the social order is always a socio-symbolic order, there can be no social transformation without transformation of meaning and the subject. Art and literature enact this deeper-lying transformation, although how this is so is only intelligible since Freud. Psychoanalysis allows us to recognize that meaning and the subject are altered fundamentally through a reactivation of what the symbolic order tends to repress: its process of production, and centrally what Kristeva calls the “semiotic,” a functioning, close to instinctual, that is distinguished from strictly symbolic functioning. The repression is energetically and successfully upheld in the bourgeois, capitalist, social symbolic system. In these conditions, art can transform meaning and the subject through a kind of reconnection of the semiotic and symbolic, a revolution in poetic language whose relationship to possibilities of socio-historical change Kristeva attempts to outline. In the 1980s texts the import of such a reconnection of the semiotic and symbolic looks very different. The trilogy does not unfold or even especially build upon her theory of negativity in late modern societies. Rather, it explores in wider connections a crucial precondition of the negativity emphasized in Revolution in Poetic Language: Lacan’s symbolic function, converging on the paternal apex in Oedipal triangulation. The notion of the symbolic function never disappears in Kristeva’s thought. Her earlier thought works to undermine the conception of its rigidity, and her later thought readdresses the significance of its “fragility.” She accepts that the symbolic function is the advent of the socio-symbolic order. But the “good news” of Revolution in Poetic Language is surely that the symbolic function is not an untransgressable law, often referred to in criticism of Lacan as the phallocentric law (1984, 62). If the symbolic can be transgressed it does not represent the definitive

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imposition of castration or of the binary arrangement of sexual difference constituted through it. Revolution in Poetic Language demonstrates the possibility of transgression of the symbolic by means of a diachronic account of the formation of the speaking subject, placing the symbolic, paternal function within a thetic phase that embraces the mirror stage. Moreover, and more consequentially, the thetic phase includes the production of the semiotic. On Kristeva’s account of the entrance into language—now a phase—presymbolic instinctual (semiotic) functioning is posited as heterogeneous to the symbolic order and the position of the subject within it, both of which are presided over by paternal law. The instinctual functioning is first presented at the level of subjective diachrony as presymbolic drive motility and the articulation of drives according to the primary processes, above all condensation and displacement. Condensation is Freud’s term for the intersection of unconscious associative chains, and displacement his term for the detachment of the intensity invested in one idea and its transfer onto others related to the first by a chain of associations. These processes operate in the dreamwork as a means of avoidance of censorship. Kristeva emphasizes their significance as processes that articulate drive facilitations and their stases into a combinatorial system that amounts to a space but not a place: the semiotic chora. Subject and object positions are missing from the chora. What is significant in Kristeva’s return to the theory of the drives is that she releases the primary processes from their Lacanian identification with operations dependent upon the presence of the structure of the sign: signifier/signified. The structure of the sign corresponds to the appearance of the object as such for a subject. This relation is established through the absence of the object, which is a condition for the object being signifiable. The subject-object relation is therefore always inscribed in the double articulation of the sign: signifier/signified. The signifiable object rests on the lost object. Thus, in psychoanalytic terms, the entrance into language (the symbolic order) is correlated with separation from the primary object, the mother. Moreover, this break-up of (what is assumed to be) the dualistic relationship of infantile dependence is owed to the symbolic (paternal) function. However, with Kristeva, theory, by adopting the diachronic perspective of the maturational processes of subject formation, can grasp the presymbolic as a space where there is no symbolic functioning because the double articulation of the sign—signifier/signified—is absent. Kristeva’s point is that there is a lot more going on in the so-called dualistic relationship, at the level of subjectivity corresponding to preverbal infantile dependence, than either Freud or Lacan have drawn out. She doesn’t show just how much until the trilogy of the 1980s.

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Revolution in Poetic Language argues that the articulation of the drives by primary processes forms a combinatorial system that means nothing, since meaning and the positions it implies, including the position of the subject, are absent, but which is highly consequential for the nature of language nonetheless. The crucial point is that instinctual functioning is neither erased nor subsumed on entrance into the symbolic order, but—to repeat—posited as heterogeneous to it. Semiotic functioning is inherent, and only exists, in language. The other dimension of language, strictly symbolic functioning, tends to refuse the semiotic functioning that gives access to it. The dominance of symbolic functioning in language maintains the social unit and the position of the subject in the symbolic order. For there to be transformation of the subject and meaning the symbolic must be reconnected with the semiotic it refuses, through the heterogeneous “contradiction” of the semiotic and symbolic, which is to be understood as a reverse reactivation of the thetic phase. The term heterogeneous contradiction recalls the Hegelian dialectic but emphasizes that neither mode of functioning fully subordinates the other, and especially that the contradiction does not in and of itself lead to a position, as determinate negation does, for all its grasp of contradiction. Heterogeneous contradiction is a clash which opens up a signifying process (signifiance) where the semiotic and symbolic functioning coexist assymetrically, allowing for the most fundamental alterations in meaning and the subject. Signifiance is especially the province of art and literature, which can therefore be understood as the site of possibility of transgression of the social and symbolic order, a transgression rooted in the negativity that Kristeva will call drive rejection: the influx of drives into the symbolic. We see that Revolution in Poetic Language is a return to the crossroads of idealism and materialism, foregrounding the drive basis of language or a materialist negativity that can return to upset the symbolic functioning that organizes the social unit. However, Kristeva insists that for all practical purposes the actual foundation, the condition of possibility, of drive rejection is not the presymbolic instinctual functioning itself, which “only theory can isolate as ‘preliminary’ in order to specify its functioning” (1984, 62). Transformations in meaning and the subject are not activated by some presymbolic force. Rather, the condition of possibility of drive rejection comes from the thetic phase that posits the semiotic and symbolic as heterogeneous. Kristeva calls this the logical phase of language. Thus “although semiotic functioning can be defined as the articulation of [drive] facilitations and stases that mean nothing, this mechanism must immediately be considered within the signifying chain instituted by the thetic” (1984, 81).1 Semiotic functioning is produced and becomes complex on the basis of that logical phase of language, which embraces the symbolic function whose significance as thetic—positing the order of language—is what Kristeva is aiming at.

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The emphasis put on the thetic moment, here, is meant to underline the claim that Kristeva is reformulating the import of the symbolic—paternal— function. The thetic moment is no longer the originary moment of the symbolic order, whether thought of in idealist fashion as a positing that devolves upon a free, spontaneous ego (from a Fichtean or even Husserlian standpoint) or in Lacanian fashion as the (symbolic) Law prior to all positive and changing human law, which decenters the subject. Although Kristeva accepts the Lacanian view that the symbolic function opens up the universal signifying order that binds the social unit, for her the symbolic function is a thetic moment that is liminary rather than originary, and thereby traversable. The symbolic function is the “break” that institutes the nature-culture diremption and posits the subject as a split subject: conscious/unconscious. Yet in this break semiotic—instinctual—functioning is gathered up within the positing of signifiers. If this were not so unsymbolized drives could not be in excess of the social-symbolic order or a threat to it. The destructive wave of the drive could not attack all theses. When Kristeva asserts that there is a gathering of instinctual functioning into signifiers she cannot mean linguistic signifiers understood in terms of the structure of the sign (signifier/signified). Rather, her thought is that certain materials are susceptible to the inscription of the semiotic articulation of drives, a mode of differentiation and repetition in which no separation happens, so that no object is posited and no subject emerges. Semiotic functioning exists in vocalic, gestural, or kinetic differences. It can be inscribed in color, sound, forms, words. It can therefore be harnessed in the signifying chain. The drive charges invested in these materials are then carried into (subject-object) positionality and meaning, and so into the socio-symbolic order. Drive rejection therefore takes place at the limits of signification (communicable language) and sexual identity. But it is “not at all thetic” (1984, 69). Musical and poetic practices harness that functioning. They bring “a resumption of the functioning characteristic of the semiotic chora within the signifying device of language,” thereby “pulverizing the thetic through the negativity of transgression” (1984, 69, 50). Moreover, the negative, destructive moment is accompanied by a positive moment. The essential operation . . . is that of the appending of territories—corporeal, natural social—invested by drives. It involves a combination: fitting together, detaching, including and building up “parts” into some kind of “totality.” These parts may be forms, colors, sounds, organs, words, etc., so long as they have been invested with a drive and, to begin with, “represent” only that drive. (1984, 102) Musical and poetic practices decompose the signifying chain of communicative discourse into these drive-invested parts and recompose them into

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some kind of totality or integrity that is the artwork. The idea is reminiscent of Adorno’s aesthetic thought. However, Kristeva’s expansion of the Freudian theory of the subject brings into this thought the notion that the meanings and identities used to uphold the dominant ideological systems are ruined owing to a specific process: the subject is put in process/on trial because the elements of the artwork initially “represent” only a drive. The drive-based subject is a destabilized subject, one that is deprived of the identities and meanings that compose and support the ego. In parallel fashion, Revolution in Poetic Language defines psychoanalytic discourse in terms of the destabilization of a subject, here exposed to an other in the transference-relation, a destabilization ultimately invoked by the reactivation of nonsymbolized drives. An analysis must first overcome intellectualizing discourse, for example. The signifying chain is blocked on a word, or dominated by tone. An affect takes over. Yet, Revolution in Poetic Language also claims that psychoanalytic discourse encloses negativity within the confines of an ego. Kristeva does not suggest that art is safe from this process. For her, elitism and esoterism in art are tendencies rooted in the attachment of the most unstable moments of the signifying process—drive re-jection—to the unity of the subject. Once again, it is psychoanalysis that permits us to grasp this process thanks to its account of ego-formation. The claim is that esoterism in art follows the path that protects an ego in the process of formation against the destructive force of the drives: the path of narcissistic fixation. The problem of elitism or esoterism in artistic representation arises from art’s tendency to define itself in opposition to social and political practices. “[The] total exploration of the signifying process generally leaves in abeyance the theses that are characteristic of the social organism, its structures, and their political transformation: the text has a tendency to dispense with political and social signifieds” (1984, 88). Poetic language becomes complicit with the marginalization through which the bourgeois system avails itself of the negativity it abuts against, using dissent for its own continuation. This is the case with the artistic phenomenon that is the object of Kristeva’s doctorat d’état, the late nineteenth-century avant-garde.2 What is crucial to Kristeva’s argument for revolution in poetic language is that the impact of the avantgarde requires the Freudian discoveries: “the poetic experience of the end of the century constituted a breakthrough that was quickly concealed or refetishized (Appolinaire), even academized (Valéry). Only after Freud has it had a future (Joyce, Bataille) and it is only starting with Freud that one may attempt to measure its significance” (1984, 85). The importance of Freud lies in is his exploration of sexuality as “the nexus between language and society, drives and the socio-symbolic order” (1974, 84). Thus Freud’s theory of the drives and of the establishment of the socio-symbolic order is the precondition of Kristeva’s discourse.

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However, in 1974 her view is that psychoanalytic experience itself is irredeemably caught up within a structure it has discovered, narcissistic fixation. This is because a boundary moment must be restored to the subject-in-process if the destabilized subject is not to founder in instinctuality. In the analytic setting the boundary moment arises through identification. In other words, the boundary moment which wards off the collapse into mere instinctuality is personified. That is to say, it is an addressee ultimately caught in prevailing familial and social structures. In 1974 this need of identification in analytic experience sets the limits of psychoanalysis. In contrast, poetic language can overcome the limitation because of the absence of any addressee in the restoration of the boundary moment. Here the boundary moment is “the site of language itself or, more precisely, its thetic moment” (1984, 187). Since the boundary moment is not personified, but is the very limit of signification itself, “significations (ideologies) that preoccupy the social group—the ones implied in its acts of controlling them—are put in play by the process of the subject they wanted to ignore” (1984, 208–9). In other words, the realization of semiotic motility in art must embrace social and political forms (or signifieds), and only does so if it attacks the thetic moment. As the account of separation in subjective diachrony illuminates, this is the moment in which the symbolic/real distinction is posited along with subject-object positionality. Since these are preconditions of meanings and identities, attacks on the thetic get to the roots of social and symbolic identities and meanings. In sum, revolution in poetic language sustains negativity within the objective arena and so counters its prevailing organization, dismantling the significations that preoccupy the social groups. Poetic language is the site of transformation of meaning and the subject, which takes place in representation. Given that a major objective of Revolution in Poetic Language is to modify historical materialism by exposing it to the discoveries of psychoanalysis and to artistic representation, Kristeva’s book turns to the problem of social transformation, attempting to illuminate the transition from revolution in poetic language to its historical impact. One passage describes the transition in terms of an unself-conscious agent of negativity. Having joined the course of historical processes—though uniquely within representation—the signifying process gives itself an agent, an ego, that of the revolutionary who has no need of knowing and even less of closely examining the mechanism of rejection that pulverizes or brings him together again, since objectively this misjudging—imaginary or ideological—ego is the module by which the mechanism of rejection in question invades the social realm. (1984, 206)

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The idea of this mediation that carries negativity into the social realm corresponds to the interest Kristeva has in the Cultural Revolution in 1974. Nonetheless, the notion of the transition from revolution in representation to social transformation is tentative. The whole undertaking of working out the historical impact of signifiance disappears along with Kristeva’s withdrawal from Maoism. The underlying philosophical problem, however, lies in the way in which her project in 1974 recapitulates the classical Marxist arrangement of theory, the problem, and work. Psychoanalysis is the theory that articulates the signifying process in respect of the problem of the symbolic inflexibility that characterizes the dominant signifying practices of modern Western societies. The theory itself is powerless in respect of the problem since psychoanalysis locks the signifying process up within a discourse that tests intrafamilial relationships. The moment of work that actually counters the problem, carrying out the transformation of meaning and the subject by symbolizing their process, is located in art. Yet, on this arrangement, one cannot move from artistic representation to social change. There are no resources left to do so.

The Trilogy of the 1980s Kristeva’s trilogy of the 1980s, Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, and Black Sun, contains a subtle but momentous change of emphasis that is easily missed. First, the significance of narcissism is profoundly altered. Second, this brings a change in the status of psychoanalysis, which is of import not only as theory but as a practice of a unique kind. Third, psychoanalytic experience has implications that affect the very significance of the semiotic/symbolic distinction. It now appears that the distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic can be made only in conditions of the tendential severance of the semiotic and symbolic, that is to say, conditions in which the resources are lacking to have the semiotic and symbolic dimensions of language intertwine at the everyday level. The appearance and significance of psychoanalysis itself as a discourse seems to correspond to this lack, for it is psychoanalysis that exposes the problem by tracking its impact on individuals, and what they come up with. The difference between the thought of Revolution in Poetic Language and Kristeva’s 1980s thought can be put as follows. Revolution in Poetic Language made it clear that the semiotization of the symbolic is symbolization of the semiotic, but emphasized the former, promoting the intimate relationship between jouissance and revolution. The book presents a positive nihilism insofar as it stresses the destabilization of the subject, and so the moment of destruction—the ruination of meanings and identities. The trilogy, in con-

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trast, analyses the condition and manner in which the semiotic and the symbolic fall apart, emphasizing the need of symbolizations of the semiotic because it is concerned with the requirement that the semiotic take on, be given, symbolic form. The trilogy turns on the problem of negative nihilism, that is to say, on the conditions in which resources are lacking for the semiotic to be able to take on symbolic form. At the same time, Kristeva’s more profound exploration of psychoanalysis leads to an alteration in the very significance of semiotic functioning. She now rethinks the narcissistic structure, taking it back into the archaic realm of the drive-based semiotic chora itself. In consequence, narcissism is no longer restricted to the process of fixation, which, in Revolution in Poetic Language, meant the arrest of semiotic functioning that complements official ideology. Rather, Kristeva unfolds a narcissistic structure which actually substantiates her conception of the semiotic in subjective diachrony. Primary narcissism is an ensemble of presymbolic structurations of the subject crucial to ego-formation since they give access to symbolic capacities. These are abjection, primary idealization or primary identification, and primal melancholy/depression. Each moment turns on the impact of the symbolic where it cannot function in its distinctive way as the break that establishes the entrance into the symbolic order by positing the object as absent and thereby signifiable. As the earlier text argued, the production of the sign (signifier/signified) produces the subject as absent from the signifier. The question drawn out further in the 1980s is what the effect of the symbolic function is where it is not the “break” and does not establish separation as such. In other words, the question is how the symbolic function impacts on the preverbal child who is hardly dissociated from the other—the mother’s body—on which it is dependent for its life. Kristeva’s view is that here the symbolic impact cannot impose castration or lack. Instead, because the mother is a separate, symbolic—incomplete and desiring—being, the bodily exchange of mother and child bears the symbolic within it in the shape of the non-satisfaction of the demand that the mother be the site of all gratification. This impossibility of the phallic mother is registered as the impact of loss/emptiness, not lack, and is a real, imaginary and symbolic threat to the emergent subject. The mother’s want (desire) is the infant’s loss. Thus Kristeva frequently calls the impact of the symbolic the impact of want/loss. Above all, the symbolic impact does not produce the sign but, rather, triggers the drive as the initial deflection from the somatic to the psychic register. The most primitive moment of the psychic register, therefore, is loss or emptiness and the drive-based narcissistic structure built up around it. The drive itself is a corporeal-psychic inscription of the symbolic that is also immediately the reaction to its impact. It is because the symbolic impacts on the preverbal child without establishing separation, and so without imposing

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castration or lack, that there is a nonsignifying functioning which evolves as a stream of drives articulated through primary processes: the semiotic. In the 1980s trilogy, Kristeva’s narcissistic structure has three dimensions. Each is a moment of what is now seen as the nonsignifying struggle with the impact of the symbolic qua the impact of want/loss or emptiness. In the first moment, explored in Powers of Horror, the destructive wave of the drive is turned on the life-support so that an inside/outside boundary may be consolidated as a condition for the emergence of a space for the ego. This means, with Kristeva, that the death drive is a condition of separation, and so of access to the life of signs. She calls this dimension of the narcissistic structure ab-jection of the mother’s body. Since abjection bears on the life-support it is highly ambiguous. Life and death drives both support the emergent ego, as we have seen, for the death drive is the carrier wave of the life drive. Yet the drives go in conflicting directions. Moreover, the life-support is itself the bearer of the imperative to set up the inside/outside border, a demarcating imperative that Kristeva calls primal repression. Primal repression institutes the struggle with nondifferentiated otherness. The second dimension of the narcissistic structure, explored in Tales of Love, comes with the impact of loss opening up the space of a third in what has been seen as a dualistic relationship. This third is non-objectal since primary narcissism belongs to the archaic realm in which subject- and objectpositions are absent. In brief, there is a preoedipal third in primary narcissism. Kristeva describes its manner of emergence in terms of a transference onto the site of the mother’s desire (want). Following Lacan, desire is metonymic, receding. It therefore registers as a withdrawing third, a third without a place, but which occasions the transference. Kristeva articulates this thought through a certain deployment of Beckett. The mother’s desire institutes a gap, and the third arises out of the question that desire poses, “What does a mother want?” The question can only be answered as follows: “At any rate not-I. . . . And it is out of this not-I (see Beckett’s play with that title) that an Ego painfully attempts to come into being” (1987, 41). For Kristeva, it is this transference onto the metynomy of the mother’s desire, which has no place but which looms as a withdrawing third—a sound or silence on the fringe of my being—that forms the nucleus of the ego. The difference between the mother as the site of the demand for gratification and the withdrawing third leads her to call the latter the imaginary father, building upon Freud’s notion of the father of individual prehistory. In sum, the impact of the symbolic on the preverbal child does not only bring on the negativity of abjection but also enables, at the same time, a compensation for loss. “The immediate transference toward the imaginary father, who is such a godsend that you have the impression that it is he who is transferred into you” (1987, 41). The imaginary father does not partake of the judging,

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prohibiting, separating qualities of paternal law but, rather, is a conglomerate of maternal and paternal qualities before these are sexually positioned. Thus Kristeva calls it “the mother’s gift.” The third moment of the narcissistic structure, explored in Black Sun, is the shadow of despair thrown on the emergent ego by the impact of loss/emptiness. Narcissistic depression represents a subject imprisoned with the primal affect of loss, owing to which the destructive wave of the drive is restrained from an outward discharge. Kristeva stresses that each of these dimensions of the narcissistic structure requires symbolization—“making the drives signify,” she says in Revolution in Poetic Language. Here we might say making abjection, the mother’s gift, and despair signify. Yet this signifying must be different from the structure of signification that refuses the semiotic. Thus, with Kristeva, the symbolization of abjection, primary idealization, and loss is produced in imaginary rather than symbolic discourses or, more precisely, it is produced in symbolic discourses in the imaginary register, such as literature and art. The 1980s trilogy unfolds the literature of abjection, love stories, and artistic works of mourning that bring the semiotic into the light of day. Thus there is a kind of reversal from the emphasis in Revolution in Poetic Language on the semiotization of the symbolic to the emphasis in the 1980s trilogy on the symbolization of the semiotic. They can certainly be understood as the same process, viewed from a different perspective in each case. However, the significance of the reconnection of the semiotic and symbolic has altered. In the 1980s what is important is that, deprived of symbolization, the semiotic is a weight of non-meaning that intensifies the experience of the loss of meaning, leading to the downfall of the subject and death. That is why, in the trilogy and especially in Black Sun, Kristeva seeks out the artistic instances that bring that weight of non-meaning into symbolic form, removing it from a subjectivity that has become the site of suffering. The problem of negative nihilism is especially discernible in her account of narcissistic melancholy/depression in Black Sun. The view that art and literature are symbolizations of the semiotic which release suffering presents the “therapeutic” aspect of the artistic process. However, this is not the whole of the significance of artistic representation. Art must also transform art, which is why Kristeva emphasizes new technique and “surprising imagination” when she selects her artworks. In other words, imaginary discourses cannot counter negative nihilism simply by bringing the semiotic into artistic form, for the artistic forms themselves arise in the conditions of nihilism and are affected by the tendency for the semiotic and symbolic to fall apart. They are easily transformed into abstract codes.3 The abstraction freezes the literary or artistic experience that counters negative nihilism. Thus Kristeva’s notion of the “experience”

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of art and literature carries the full senses of movement and innovation: “something unknown, surprise, pain, delight, and then comprehension of this impact” (1996, 11). Psychoanalytic experience itself is analogous to the experience of art and literature. The transference-relation is no longer deemed to constrain the subject-in-process through personification, as Revolution in Poetic Language regretfully claimed. Rather, it is a mode of intersubjectivity in which the subject becomes a destabilizing-stabilizing “open system” connected to another (1987, 15). The idea of destabilization recalls the reactivation of non-symbolized drives known from Revolution in Poetic Language, which destroys the identities and meanings that support the ego. The idea of the stabilizing moment refers us to the thought of primary idealization, for this is a binding moment in support of the emergent ego. However, the binding—previously “boundary”—moment is not personified, since it is the nonobjectal third of primary idealization. The binding moment makes the nonsymbolized drives susceptible of receiving a symbolic graft. It is now primary identification, and not the mode of repetition of drive-rejection itself, which accounts for the possibility of the appearance of the symbol. Moreover, psychoanalysis offers this conception of the subject to the arts and sciences as a new model of the individual. “The image of man as a fixed valorized entity is abandoned in favor of a search, less for his truth . . . than for his innovative capacities” (1987, 15). Psychoanalytic experience is the source and prime site of the dynamic of transindividuality described in Kristeva’s notion of the destabilizing-stabilizing open system. Thus psychoanalysis no longer has the status of the theory which makes artistic practice intelligible. Rather, psychoanalysis and art, though not to be confounded, are both practices which may transform the subject and meaning. It needs to be noted, however, that Kristeva’s very presentation of the conception of primary idealization presupposes the wider problematic of negative nihilism. Psychoanalysis arises as a discourse once the mechanisms of idealization in a society have run into difficulty: “the lack of a secular variant of the loving father makes contemporary discourse incapable of assuming primary identification—the substratum for our idealizing constructions” (1987, 374). In secular modernity the variants of the loving father, which are seemings (illusions) rather than objects, are unable to take themselves seriously. The failing is one dimension of the failure of modern institutions and discourses to come up with symbolizations of the semiotic at the everyday level. The fate of the tendential severance of the semiotic and symbolic is played out in individual experience alone, and this restriction is responsible for the modern isolation and new maladies of the soul (see Kristeva, 1995). Psychoanalysis is a resource for the individual who bears the burden of this failure. Religions are a possible recourse, but in contemporary conditions they

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represent only a dispersion of individuals into various temporal and spatial moments bequeathed by the history of religions, which are no longer historical, that is to say, which no longer provide us with experience. Art steps into the gap. The major significance of art is its introduction of exteriority with respect to psychic despair. The artwork, in specific instances, gives form to drives and affects so that these emerge from the psychic prison of individual suffering and gain meaning for, and in support of, a social group. Although art’s capacities to reconnect the semiotic and symbolic can be specified in exactly the same way as before, what gave us the traversability of the symbolic in 1974—its fragility owing to its being liminary and not originary—takes on a second meaning. The fragility of the symbolic now also has the sense that there is something weak or missing in respect of the symbolic function. That is to say, whereas the symbolic can be grasped conceptually as the function of authority underlying all specific social authority, value or law (the Law before the law in Lacan), in actuality it is unable to give them any substance or flexibility. The following passage from The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (1996) shows the influence of the exploration of negative nihilism in the 1980s, notably the view unfolded in the trilogy that psychoanalysis is witness to a collapse of (confidence in) modern institutions and discourses. One of the reasons for our incapacity to implement revolt symbolically perhaps resides in the fact that authority, value and law have become empty, flimsy forms. . . . As suggested by the title of the work . . . Revolution in Poetic Language, revolt was already the central subject. The power vacuum and lack of values were not yet issues when I wrote that book in the 1970s; the change no doubt appeared in a more obvious, more drastic, more threatening way after the recent collapse of communism. On a political level, however, the evolution in question has probably been under way since the end of the French Revolution and the development of democracy that followed. But I leave this question open for now to return to the profound logic of the passageways and impasses of the revolt internal to our cultural memory. (1996, 25) Authority, value, and law are flimsy, empty social forms. This is not to say that they are without any power. It is to say that they do not have any substance for individuals. Kristeva presses the point that what becomes the symbolic function in Lacan has more to do with religion in Freud than with modern political discourses. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt clearly states what has always been the case given Kristeva’s Freudian point of view. Social revolt is a dialectical conception, dependent upon the intimate connection between law and the violence that assaults it. For violence is law’s condition

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of possibility and always lies subjacent to it. That is to say, Kristeva accepts the Freudian paradigm of the primal horde’s patricide, in respect of which the original ambivalence toward the tyrannical father (affection and hatred) become guilt and repentance, bringing about the form of law or function of authority that is upheld by the murderous sons as the condition of socialization. Investigations of the sacred at the foundation of the social (sacrifice, taboo) explore this process. Moreover, Freud emphasizes the complicity between the foundation of the social and that underlying violence, a complicity which implies the resurgence of the subjacent violence—with its attendant jouissance—against law. However, and this is the crucial point, the dialectic of prohibition and transgression is only possible if law and authority are substantial and meaningfully experienced—even substantially experienced as unbearable, one might say.4 Kristeva announces in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt that this may be so, now, in some contexts, but generally it is not so (1996, 29). Her attention to sexual difference in the formation of subjectivity in Western cultures is tightly linked to this problem.

The Boundary between Semiotic Authority and Paternal Law Close attention to Kristeva’s serious adherence to and continuation of the psychoanalytic tradition reveals that she is trying to draw attention to the boundary between semiotic authority and paternal law. In the first instance, this involves the recognition of a suppressed nonpaternal authority and how it functions. The fragility of paternal law, in the sense of its weakness as the function of authority, is probably what permits the suppressed authority to be recognized. That is to say, Kristeva’s semiotic is more than a dimension of language understood in the technical sense. It is also a drive-based—maternal—authority, from the psychoanalytic point of view. Revolution in Poetic Language indicates this in its conception of the mother’s body ordering the drives. However, this notion led the reception of her thought to think the archaic mother in terms of the phallic mother, which is precisely what Kristeva is attempting to distinguish it from. It is only when the 1980s trilogy explores the whole problem of a semiotic cut off from the symbolic that the full significance of the early mother appears. The early mother is a lost, past authority that can be discerned within the failings of a modern symbolic where symbolic, paternal law no longer substantiates authority, value and law but, instead, takes up dominion in the recesses of the unconscious. The problem of modern nihilism appears in outbreaks of abjection, or the instability of the inside/outside border; in the inability to idealize, which is the inability to innovate; and in a depression/melancholia that afflicts modern subjects, where the violence of the drive is locked up in isolated individual suffering.

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Black Sun argues, further, that the trenchancy of narcissistic melancholy has its counterpart in the unleashing of death in the economic and social realms in the twentieth century. Here Kristeva speaks of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The effects on experience and representation remain unaddressed by the institutions and discourses that—as Blanchot puts it—“remain intact.” Following Kristeva, modern institutions and discourses remain intact in all their emptiness and flimsiness. The effects of political horror, abandoned by public discourses, are absorbed into private suffering. At this point in her thought, Kristeva emphasizes the threat of the psychic prison, that is to say, of a subjectivity caught up with nondifferentiated otherness, which is the upsurge of maternal authority deprived of symbolization in the absence of idealizing constructions and the capacity for loss. It is not so much that the symbolic (paternal) represses the semiotic (maternal) and that their reconnection would in and of itself be a return of the repressed that transforms dominant discourses. Rather, maternal authority is in certain respects more sinister than the paternal law which, as the function of authority, may trigger a revolt tending toward the original crime of patricide, with all its triumph and joy. This social and political dialectic has prevailed so long that the suppressed maternal function is truly a lost past as a social authority. Once the dialectic of prohibition and transgression is weak or missing, theorists of the Freudian unconscious have detected the traces of this lost past in subjectivity. At the developed psychoanalytic level of Kristeva’s thought the semiotic refers to these traces. She focusses on the need of symbolizations of everything that turns on the archaic maternal, without which the semiotic lies in ambush on the subject and society. Yet these symbolizations do not transform the social. They are imaginary discourses—seemings. Kristeva’s thought of the 1980s indicates what is missing in our time with respect to secular discourses. Both semiotic authority and symbolic law, in their mutual isolation, are dimensions of the failings of subject formation in Western cultures. That is to say, they determine the fate of the modern subject. Her fine-grained analyses of art and literature are designed to show changing articulations of the semiotic, which is only thereby released from the psychic prison of the isolated individual into seemings, not into an alternative social authority. Kristeva’s focus is therefore comparable with Irigaray’s in the Ethics of Sexual Difference to the extent that it insists upon the need of recognizing the necessity that the nonpaternal authority must have shifting and changing shapes or appearances. Irigaray’s wager is that performances of the imaginary, the term for these shifting appearances, will transform the symbolic. It isn’t completely clear that Kristeva holds out for this, nor does it follow from her arguments that the imaginary could transform the symbolic.

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The passage from The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt on the current power vacuum and lack of values, quoted above, also refers to the evolution of modern law, “underway since the French Revolution and the development of democracy that followed,” an evolution that is the process of emptying authority, value and law of substance (1996, 25).5 Yet Kristeva “leaves this question open for now” in order to turn to revolt culture. The apparent choice between leaving one question open and turning to another leaves unaddressed the problem of how to articulate the identity and difference between the imaginary and the socio-symbolic, which is to say, how to assess transformations in culture in abstraction from the need of social change. One of the difficulties in confronting the need of transformation of the social realm within contemporary psychoanalytic thought lies in the sheer range of the conception of the symbolic, a range which corresponds to the depth of the problem of modern nihilism, since it appears to be impossible to make a substantial distinction between various meanings. First, there is the symbolic function as the “thetic break” through which the speaking subject and socio-symbolic order as such are posited. Revolution in Poetic Language underlines the meaning of “symbol” as what brings together the two edges of a fissure: “any bringing together that is a contract . . . any exchange, including the exchange of hostility (1984, 49). Second, the symbolic is the imposition of castration, lack, and the sexual binary, and the appearance of desire. Third, we have seen it appear as too weak to reinvoke the struggle-to-thedeath, and so too weak to affect the insubstantiality of modern law or support transformations of it. In other words, on the one hand, the symbolic remains a general concept for the appearance of law, that is to say, for its coming into appearance, which points to the possibility of differing forms of law.6 Thus, first, the symbolic function is the concept of law’s coming into appearance. The psychoanalytic conception of the symbolic captures the implacable violence that lies within any coming into appearance of law. On the other hand, the symbolic has a violence of its own as the regulation that upholds the sexual binary. Moreover, the conception of the punishing superego points to the internal dominion of the dead father, a dominion upheld by the dominated. Psychoanalytic thought and its critics may be thought to diverge over whether the violence of the appearance of law and the violence of the appearance of sexual difference are inseparable, so that the fate of sexuality is continuous with the establishment of the social, or whether the violence of the law of sexual difference is specific, a law that feminist thought, especially, has been concerned to confront. On the latter view, Freud’s success in discovering sexuality as the nexus between drives and the socio-symbolic order is equally his failure to capture the historical specificity of this arrangement of sexual difference. This is often viewed as the limitation of psychoanalysis.

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The dissatisfaction extends into the reception of Kristeva’s thought insofar as she doesn’t appear to come out and say that the symbolic function qua paternal law is the object of criticism as such, even though she is clear about the difficulty it poses for women. Yet can one fault psychoanalysis as much as is wished for the ambiguity it presents with respect to the symbolic? For, if psychoanalysis is a limit discourse of modernity, it cannot overleap the constraints that it analyses. It cannot overleap actuality. It won’t be innocent. We can see that the notion of the symbolic is formulated in conditions in which the whole field of modern institutions and discourses is intact but empty. Kristeva’s frequent references to the French Revolution and especially to the rights of man and citizen confirm this. Her essay “The Speaking Subject is not Innocent” (1993), which both reinvokes the discourse of Revolution in Poetic Language and bears the mark of her 1980s writings, contains a position on violence. First, it contrasts the conflictuality of the human subject that Freud has shown to be universal to a Hegelian collective or individual subject who could bear witness to history. Kristeva believes that Hegel’s subject—his word for its transindividual shape being spirit—reduces discourse to a single law or single meaning. For her, the changing appearances of spirit are tied to the symbolic function that establishes in each case “one meaning,” “one law.” The essay first stresses that if we substitute for spirit the conflictual subject known to psychoanalysis we cannot make the error of thinking that we have moved from the violence of one law to nonviolence. The conflictual subject of psychoanalysis is “devoid of innocence” (1993, 166). Kristeva concisely reiterates the 1974 thesis: Diachronically, [the semiotic processes] can be traced to the archaic period of the semiotic body, which, before recognizing itself in the mirror as identical and therefore as signifying, is dependent on the mother. These maternal, drive-related, semiotic processes prepare the entry of the future speaking being into meaning and signification: into the symbolic. But the symbolic, that is, language as nomination, sign, and syntax, constitutes itself precisely by cutting itself off from this previous state. Though the earlier state survives in the form of “signifier,” “primary processes,” displacement and condensation, and as rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy, these remain subordinated to the main function of nomination-predication, which they underlie. Language as symbolic function is constituted only at the price of repressing both the drives and the continuous relation to the mother. And it is only at the price of the reactivation of the repressed driveand mother-related material that the subject-in-process of poetic language is sustained. (1993, 158–9)

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It is the final sentence that bears the mark of her thought in the trilogy. To repeat, the conflictual subject of psychoanalysis is not innocent. We know this at the level of the literary experiment, for the effacement of meaning by nonsense brings not only jouissance but the upsurge of our psychic cataclysms, with all the violence they portend. Kristeva’s exemplar is Céline, whose literary journey into the downfall of religion, legality, and morality finds its defensive counterpart in the anti-Semitic pamphlets he wrote (1982, 136). His anti-Semitism represents the restoration of a boundary moment to the subject-in-process by means of a hated object. This gives us the political meaning of abjection from a strictly Kristevan point of view: the abject (nondifferentiated otherness) is turned into a hated object. Having made clear the violence that the speaking subject bears and cannot definitively overcome, “The Speaking Subject is not Innocent” closes by announcing an imperative need: A new declaration of the rights of man would have to take seriously the demands, as well as the risks, of this jouissance, to which Céline and the Nephew [Rameau’s Nephew] (among others) have given expression. To make up for two centuries of neglect in its knowledge of a far-from-innocent speaking subject—that is the work that modern society must urgently undertake. It can no longer afford to impose its laws without bestowing upon the demented drives that underlie the speaking being an analytic benevolence, without introducing the psychoanalytic experience into the conception of human rights and laws and, in this way, saving them from abstraction and a pretentious universality. (1993, 174) Human rights and laws are asked to give up their neglect of the speaking subject who inevitably bears the demented drives. Kristeva offers a way out of the identity of “universal” and “singular” consciousness that reigned in the French Revolution, the Terror, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. One wants a way out of this because of its abstractness. To show that the speaking subject is not innocent is at least to show that it cannot fully identify with the abstract principles of modern law. Rousseau’s “general will” made this demand as a way to ground political sovereignty fully and thoroughly in the members of society rather than the mechanisms of government (Hobbes) and ensure the better socialization of individuals who suffered the compromise in modern law between justice and self-interest. However, the very idea that human rights and laws can be saved from abstraction and pretentious universality forecloses the social and political struggle with them. Why would abstraction and pretentious universality ever disappear from forms of human law? This would imply that society could completely regulate

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its members, but if society could do so there would be no subjectivity. Kristeva’s own way out of this problem is a distinctly feminist one. One must perhaps be a woman—that is, the ultimate guarantee of sociality, transcending the collapse of the symbolic, paternal function, and, at the same time the inexhaustible generatrix of its renewal and expansion—one must be a woman, I say, to refuse to abandon theoretical reason, and instead to force it to increase its power by positing for it an object beyond its limits. (1993, 174) Kristeva seems to suggest that the problem of the insubstantiality of modern law, and of the collapse of the paternal function, which leaves no function of authority strong or substantial enough to lead to transformations in modern law, is to be answered not by dialectical struggle, but by a kind of intrigue—calling up the power of theoretical reason through positing an object beyond its limits. This hope helps to clarify something. What adherence to and extensions of psychoanalysis are about is exteriority—its impact—and the relation to exteriority. Initially we saw the symbolic function itself as the impact of exteriority. Now we also have the conception of a further exteriority that is to call the symbolic function up again differently. Kristeva’s extensions of psychoanalysis aim, cautiously it must be admitted, at elaborating what Freud missed about the feminine-maternal, and ask her readers to see changing appearances of it in specific instances of artistic and literary works that are modes of estrangement from the whole logic of the phallus but also from the archaic mother, who must be lost. For, as we have seen, artworks are modes of estrangement from the upsurge of maternal authority as a nondifferentiated otherness which keeps isolated suffering isolated. This double estrangement is the condition for Kristeva’s seemings. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt claims: “It is here,” in this double estrangement, “that we seek experiences of revolt” (1996, 87). Attention to the 1980s trilogy therefore exposes the difference between the thought of negativity in Revolution in Poetic Language and the thought of revolt in her later writings, for the trilogy specifies how the negativity of the influx of drives into the symbolic comes at a price. Revolt culture requires not only the semiotization of the symbolic, but estrangement from both paternal law and the upsurge of the de-formed maternal authority.

Notes 1. Furthermore, “in taking the thetic into account, we shall have to represent the semiotic (which is produced recursively on the basis of that break) as a negativity introduced into the symbolic order, and as the transgression of that order” (1984, 69).

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2. “Expending thought through the signifying process, the text inscribes the negativity that (capitalist) society and its official ideology repress. Although it thus dissents from the dominant economic and ideological system, the text also plays into its hands: through the text, the system provides itself with what it lacks—rejection—but keeps it in a domain apart, confining it to the ego, to the ‘inner experience’ of an elite, and to esoterism. The text becomes the agent of a new religion that is no longer universal but elitist and esoteric” (1984, 187). 3. For example, Kristeva’s discussion, in Black Sun, of the film Hiroshima Mon Amour notes the decision taken by Alain Resnais (director) and Marguerite Duras (screenwriter) not to open the film with an image of the atomic mushroom cloud, as was initially planned. This image has lost its force given the ease with which it—like all images—enters the circulation and exchange of images that undermines the power of the aesthetic (1989, 231). 4. “The goal is to convey how unbearable and yet fragile is the symbolic, naming, paternal function,” she says in “The Speaking Subject is not Innocent” (1993, 161). 5. The thought is consistent with the critique of Enlightenment from Hegel to Horkheimer and Adorno. 6. As is widely known, Hegel tracked the appearance of Greek ethical custom, Roman legal status, natural law, and moral law in The Phenomenology of Spirit.

Works Cited Julia Kristeva, 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1984. Revolution in poetic language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1987. Tales of love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1989. Black sun: Depression and melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1993. The speaking subject is not innocent. Trans. Chris Miller. In Freedom and interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, ed. Barbara Johnson. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1995. New maladies of the soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. The sense and non-sense of revolt: The powers and limits of psychoanalysis. Vol. 1. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Kristeva and Fanon: Revolutionary Violence and Ironic Articulation

EWA PLONOWSKA ZIAREK

In this chapter I hope to work out the political logic of revolt in modernity and the role of the sexed, racial subject in that logic by taking as my point of departure two different thinkers writing in different historical circumstances: Frantz Fanon’s reflections on the revolutionary process of decolonization and Julia Kristeva’s assessments of the insights and limits of the Freudian discussion of revolt in the context sexual difference. By juxtaposing and rearticulating these two lines of thought, I want to rethink four crucial aspects of revolutionary practice—antagonism, embodiment, history, and hegemonic articulation—in the context of racial and sexual difference.

Dialectic, Manichean Allegory, and the Rupture of Antagonism “There is someone who you don’t mention in your book and who I find extremely important: Frantz Fanon, a revolutionary and a psychoanalyst that has written the article ‘On Violence.’” “I have often heard people speak of him, but I have never read anything by him. He isn’t part of the mainstream of Psychoanalytical Studies.” —Kristeva, Revolt, She Said

I begin the discussion of revolutionary violence, embodiment, and history with Fanon’s critique of Sartre, in his 1952 Black Skin, White Masks, where he forcefully contests the Sartrean inscription of the black revolutionary protest into the objective and closed dialectic of history. In his 1948 “Black Orpheus,” a preface to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s anthology of 57

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Negritude poetry, Sartre proclaims the necessity of dialectical overcoming of the “subjective, existential, ethnic notion of negritude” by “the objective, positive and precise, notion of the proletariat” (137). According to Sartre, Negritude can gain admission into universal history only at a price of dialectical self-destruction of race—that is, it has to abandon the notion of the black soul as “the shimmer of Being,” renounce the claim to the particularity of black experience, and to assume instead a universal project of liberation embodied by the proletariat. “Living like a woman who is born to die,” or vanishing like a Euridice, the black soul, the pride of black particularity, challenges its right to existence as soon as it finds itself. Poetry alone can preserve this vanishing unconditional aspect of black experience, which in the context of the dialectical movement of Universal history, appears as “a geographical accident, the inconsistent product of universal determinism” (138). In other words, the black Orpheus, always already inscribed into a European Greek logic, has to destroy his feminized blackness in order to reconceive himself as a universal revolutionary subject. Thus, the Negritude movement, despite its rare unification of “the most authentic revolutionary plan and the most pure poetry,” is merely a “minor moment of a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of Negritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity” which is sublated into a higher “synthesis or the realization of the human in a raceless society” embodied by the proletariat (137). This dialectical self-destruction of Negritude amounts not only to the overcoming of the feminized, subjective particularity of race by the objective universality of class—a movement which for Fanon constitutes yet another version of the colonial demand “turn white or disappear”— but also to an inscription of the revolutionary project within the necessary laws of history. In his critique of Sartre, in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon challenges term by term such a dialectical concept of revolution and history—a concept Sartre himself significantly revises in his 1960 Critique of Dialectical Reason. In particular, Fanon interrogates the status of revolutionary event within dialectic, its relation to black embodiment, and the competing claims of the particularity of race and the universality of new humanism. What he often foregrounds as a problem, but never satisfactorily investigates, is the feminization of the particular excluded from the universal. Rather than interrogating the status of sexual difference, Fanon, more often than not, ironically reverses the game of feminization when, for instance, in The Wretched of the Earth, he calls white European proletariat a “sleeping beauty” that has yet to awaken to the tasks of universal liberation. I will return to the question of sexual difference in the context of Kristeva’s work in order to suggest the ways the feminization of the excluded particular can be reversed into a feminine ironization of the universal. For now let us return, however, to Fanon’s

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inscription of the particularity of race and revolutionary violence into universal history. In his critique of Sartre, Fanon charges that the attempt to give revolution objective historical ground, in fact erases its possibility—“to seek the source of the source”—in the dialectical unfolding of history is to block the very source of revolution (1967, 134). By contesting the notion that black revolution entails a dialectical self-destruction of racial particularity for the sake of the universal, Fanon not only exposes the unacknowledged whiteness of this universal but, more fundamentally, wants to radicalize negativity and defend the possibility of revolution as an event. In contrast to Sartre’s claim that the sublation of the particularity of race by the universality of class struggle is a historical necessity, Fanon affirms revolution as the “unforeseeable” rupture: “In opposition to historical becoming, there had always been the unforeseeable” (1967, 135). Thus, he claims, it is not only the absoluteness of immediacy ascribed to blackness but also the rational laws of history that eliminate the possibility of the radical and discontinuous becoming by turning revolutionary action into a destiny. Consequently, the possibility of revolutionary black poetry and politics does not consist, as Sartre has claimed in “Black Orpheus,” in receiving “the torch handed over and prepared in advance by history” (Fanon 1967, 139) but in the critique of the instrumental notion of history1 and the historical determinations of existence in order to affirm revolution as a creative and disruptive event: “I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence” (229). This rhetoric of a revolution as a creative leap cannot be discounted as an existential residue of Black Skin, White Masks. In fact, Fanon’s political thought as a whole presents itself as a project of a double liberation: as a political struggle for decolonization and as a theoretical struggle for the liberation of the revolutionary event from the telos of dialectical progression. Fanon begins and ends The Wretched of the Earth, one of his most dialectical texts, with a call for “a veritable creation” of a new body, “a new language and a new humanity” (1963, 36): “if we want humanity to advance a step further . . . then we must invent and we must make discoveries [mais si nous voulons que l’humanité avance d’un cran . . . il faut inventer, il faut découvrir (1991, 375–6)]. . . . For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must make new skin (faire peau neuve), we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man” (315–16, trans. modified). What is so interesting about these opening and final exhortations is not only the intertwining of the claims of particularity and universality but also the uneasy coexistence of the dialectical triad, albeit in a different than usual order—“Europe, ourselves, humanity”—culminating in the universal of the new humanism, and the notion of the revolutionary event which shatters the dialectical unfolding of

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history. Revolution is presented here as un cran, that is, as both a notch of progress for humanity and a cut, which interrupts history and opens indeterminate and plural possibilities of becoming. The only historical necessity Fanon grants to Sartre is a paradoxical necessity of inventing new thinking, new skin, and new subjectivities. What does it mean to think about revolution as a disruptive event within the dialectical frame, which, as Fanon’s frequent engagements with Hegel and Marx suggest, he never quite abandons? How are we to approach this apparent contradiction, endlessly reproduced in his critics’ texts, and exacerbated by the Fanonian textual practice of citationality of incompatible discourses? Does this mean that Fanon anticipates postcolonial narratives of diasporic dispersion in the mode of Homi Bhabha (1999) or does he propose a new model of dialectic—what Nigel Gibson (1999) has called Fanon’s “untidy dialectics of history”? Does it imply an abandonment of the universal for the sake of the historical particularity of race advocated by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1991) or, on the contrary, a conceptualization of the politicized particularization of the universal humanism articulated by Fanon’s Marxist critics, like Ato Sekyi-Otu? (1996)2 To articulate the relation between the revolutionary event and dialectics, I would like to adopt the key term of Edward Said’s now classical essay, “Traveling Theory Reconsidered,” namely, the dislocation of dialectics. In fact, Said (1999) elaborates two kinds of dislocations: running counter to Sartre’s “hellenization” of Negritude, the first “geographical” displacement from Europe to Africa reconfigures Lukács’s subject / object dialectic as the revolutionary confrontation between the “native and the settler” and in so doing refuses the notion of utopian reconciliation promised by the class consciousness. The second geotextual trajectory, leading from “the Caribbean setting of Black Skins, White Masks” to the “Algerian setting” of The Wretched of the Earth, transforms the psychological and novelistic observations of the latter text into the philosophical logic of the anticolonial struggle (206). By producing the well-entrenched opposition between psychoanalytical, literary, and subjective Black Skins, White Masks and political, philosophical, objective The Wretched of the Earth,3 Said’s articulation of these dislocations of dialectic are ambiguous: on the one hand, he consolidates, very much in the spirit of Sartre’s reading, Fanon’s earlier novelistic impressions into the mature historical logic of revolution, but, on the other hand, this consolidation is in turn destabilized by the insurrectionary force of displacement, which reignites the fiery core of revolutionary theory: “the point of theory therefore is to travel, always to move beyond its confinements, to emigrate, to remain in a sense in exile. Adorno and Fanon exemplify this profound restlessness in the way they refuse the emoluments offered by the Hegelian dialectic as stabilized into resolution by Lukács” (213). For Said, it is the geographical displace-

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ment of dialectic that keeps revolutionary force alive, but perhaps Fanon’s work reverses this relationship—perhaps it is a certain notion of revolutionary conflict that dislocates the dialectics of history. It is precisely because the insurrectionary force produces the effect of dislocation that revolutionary confrontation between the native and the settler cannot be resolved at a higher level into consciousness of class struggle. Indeed, Fanon’s critique of Sartre’s sublation of the explosive racial protest into the objective universality of the proletariat, as well as his own often misunderstood theory of revolutionary violence, consistently distinguish the militant confrontation between the colonized and the colonizer from a dialectical negation: “The natives’ challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of view. It is not a treatise on the universal, but the untidy affirmation [l’affirmation echevelée] of an original idea propounded as the absolute” (1963, 41). An original idea in question here is of course the violence of colonialism producing the rigid, Manichean compartmentalization of the word into the settler and the native, white and black, Good and Evil. The Manichean world is thus based on the absolute division, admitting no dialectical mediation. Yet for Fanon, dialectical mediation is not a solution to these rigid divisions. Thus counter violence of decolonization is not a dialectical negation of the thesis of white imperialism but rather a messy reactivation of an originary violence implied in the Manichean idea of Evil. Such a messy and ironic appropriation of the absolute and transcendental Evil into a signifier of revolutionary violence produces a radical dislocation not only of the Manichean allegory but of dialectics itself. To clarify the status of this explosive, untidy reactivation of violence, which dislocates the dialectical unfolding of history rather than producing a higher synthesis/reconciliation, it might be useful to refer for a moment to Ernesto Laclau’s distinction between dialectical negation and political antagonism. What distinguishes antagonism from dialectical negation, which remains a necessary, internal moment within the historical unfolding, is its exteriority and contingency. Since the negativity of antagonism cannot be integrated into an overall theory of historical change, antagonism forms what Laclau calls a permanent outside of history. Consequently, antagonism is not internal contradiction within the system but a rupture—indeed a Fanonian leap—which not only dislocates existing power relations, but also blocks the full constitution of historical objectivity. Put in a different way, revolution emerges not from the objective laws of history, such as the contradiction between productive forces and the relations of production, but from the unpredictable emergence of new antagonisms (of which class struggle is only one instance) which dislocate hegemonic power and social hierarchies. This is a crucial reversal: revolution is no longer thought of on the basis of historical objectivity, but historical objectivity is conceived on the basis of the partial neutralization of

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antagonisms and sedimentation of power relations. Thus, if the constitution of social reality is contingent and threatened by dislocations, the possibility of revolutionary change stems from reactivation of the partially neutralized antagonisms (Laclau 1990, 35–6). For Fanon this revolutionary reactivation of antagonism not only shatters the absolute divisions of the colonial world but also produces multiple dislocations in the dialectical model of history. Let me stress that his theory of the violence of decolonization, sketched out in the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, is not an affirmation of violence as such but rather an acute analysis of the specific modality of the reactivation of antagonism under the conditions of colonial power, which, in its regression to the jouissance of absolute violence not tampered by institutions or laws, produces the rigid Manichean compartmentalization of the world. In his ironic appropriation of the racist stereotype presenting the native as the embodiment of the absolute Evil, Fanon transvaluates and desubstantializes Evil into a figure of corrosive violence, which disfigures rather than negates “all that has to do with beauty or morality,” including European Christian values, and by implication its own moral, religious status (1963, 41). By performing a Nietzschean negation of values, including the allegorical substantification of power into the absolute struggle between Good and Evil, Fanon turns Evil into a figure of both a disruptive and creative historical antagonism, which “owns nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power” (Fanon 1963, 36). Although Fanon primarily focuses on the way the Manichean allegory appropriates Christian eschatology to justify the terrestrial violence of colonialism, his de-substantification of Evil is not without consequences for the secular dialectical notion of history. In reference to Hans Blumenberg’s Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Ernesto Laclau diagnoses a very different reoccupation of eschatological Christian imaginary in materialist secularism. In contrast to the substantialization of violence into absolute Evil at work in Manichean allegory (which at the same time admits and negates the threat of antagonism to historical existence), the materialist dialectic appropriates the utopian / apocalyptic notion of redemption, which promises the final elimination of contingency and strife in the Kingdom of God. The secular notion of redemption transfers the necessity and the intelligibility associated with God to the immanent, rational movement of history, but in so doing, it eliminates the radical exteriority and heterogeneity of the event personified by Evil. As Laclau puts it, “if everything that happens can be explained internally to this world, nothing can be a mere event (which entails a radical temporality . . . ) and everything acquires an absolute intelligibility within the grandiose scheme of a pure spatiality. This is the Hegelian-Marxist moment” (1990, 75). The question that emerges from this juxtaposition of Fanon’s contestation of Manicheanism and Laclau’s critique of secularism is how to refigure

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the rupture of antagonism within revolutionary and democratic imaginary without either substantializing it into a transcendence of Evil or containing it within the immanent, rational version of history. Fanon’s political theory provides an ingenious answer to this dilemma by inscribing the rupture of antagonism on the skin of the black body. Thus, the desubstantialization of antagonism locked within the Manichean absolute opposition of Good versus Evil cannot be completed unless it goes through the descent into a “real hell” of the body. The black body in Fanon’s work is consistently associated with both the traumatic epidermalization of oppression and its reversal into contestation and revolt. Preceding symbolic resignification of the abjected black body which Fanon associates with the creation of the new skin, this revolutionary descent into one’s body has to reach “a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born” (1967, 8). How can we understand this inscription of a revolutionary event on the surface of the body? In the psychoanalytical context, this descent into a real hell, experienced as a traumatic rupture or as an unbearable “muscular tension” confronts us with the problematic of the Real.4 We could say that Fanon’s rethinking of the rupture of antagonism, its exteriority and non-integration within rational history, leads from the transcendence of Evil to the extimacy of “violence which is just under the skin” (Fanon 1963, 71) which corrode the identity of the opposing forces simultaneously from within and without, and thus ruins the model of dialectical opposition. As Alenka Zupancˇicˇ writes, “the Real happens to us . . . as impossible, as ‘the impossible thing’ that turns our symbolic universe upside down and leads to the reconfiguration of this universe . . . the question forced upon us by an encounter with the Real: will I act in conformity to what threw me ‘out of joint’, will I be ready to reformulate what has been hitherto been the foundation of my existence?” (235). This is indeed the question Fanon registers in the final line of White Masks, Black Skin: “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” (1967, 232). Occurring at the site of the abjected body, the confrontation with the Real, often described as a cathartic explosion of muscular tension, destroys the very foundation of black nonexistence and enables restructuring of the symbolic universe. If the encounter with the Real of the body, experienced as a rupture of the symbolic structure of the world, is a condition of possibility of revolutionary action, it nonetheless necessitates a rethinking of what it means to be actional. For the impossible real to have an effect in the possible, the revolutionary practice has to include a moment of hegemonic articulation, which redirects the aggressivity of drive—“that violence which is just under the skin” (71)—from the self-destructive abjection of the black body to the transformation of social relations. Revolutionary praxis has, therefore, to

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negotiate between the rupture of the real and the symbolic rearticulation, that is, in Fanon’s terms, between “violence which is just under the skin” and the ongoing reorganization of the revolutionary movement and the restructuring of social reality. In Fanon’s work, there are two crucial moments of the hegemonic articulation of political practice: first, the renegotiation of the relation between the excluded black subjectivity and the universal; and second, the destabilization of the binary opposition between the native and the settler. As Laclau argues, revolutionary struggles are invariably for the hegemonization of the universal by the excluded particular. Consequently, the particular political demands always aim at something other than their realization, at something that transcends them: they aim at the fullness of reconciled society, expressed for instance in the Fanonian ideals of new humanism. Yet, instead of producing their dialectical reconciliation, or, as Sartre has argued, the sublation of the black particularity in the universality of class struggle, hegemonic articulation reveals the disproportion and antagonism between the universal and the particular, between the impossible moment of reconciled society and the particular historical agents aiming to realize it. This constitutive gap and undecidability splits both the identity of the universal and the particular. The struggle for the hegemonization of the universal shows that the universality is an empty political form, which cannot acquire content except through its reliance on the particular claiming to embody it. The contested content of the universal is therefore always already contaminated, not only by the particular that hegemonizes its empty form, but also by the historical struggle among competing claims to it, for instance, between claims of race and class, or between claims of Africa and Europe. If we return in this context to Fanon’s critique of Sartre’s “Black Orpheus,” this formulation of the universal calls for the paradoxical preservation of race in the struggle for universality rather than its dialectical self-destruction. This means, on the one hand, that the takenfor-granted universality of class depends on the unacknowledged hegemonization of whiteness, and, on the other hand, that the blackness does not erase itself but constitutes its split particularity through its antagonistic claim to universality. Yet, the relation toward the impossible universal not only contaminates the universal but also undermines the identity of the antagonistic particulars. Paradoxically, for Fanon it is the contest between Europe and the Third World about the claim to the universal, that is, about the revolutionary task to create a “new history of Man” (1963, 315), that destabilizes the binary opposition between the native and the settler and shows that their illusory identity is a remnant of colonial Manicheanism. Ultimately, Fanon argues that by reproducing the vicious cycle of violence, this antagonistic opposition is fundamentally at odds with a more radical insight that praxis brings about an “invincible dissolution” of the unity of the dialectical opposites. The

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implications of Fanon’s analysis evoke Kristeva’s argument that practice “decenters and suspends the subject and articulates his as a passageway, a nonplace, where there is a struggle between conflicting tendencies, drives . . . are as much rooted in affective relations” as in material contradictions (1984, 203). Produced by both the irruption of antagonism and its symbolic articulation, this dislocation and the internal self-division of the antagonistic forces blurs the clear-cut oppositions between the self and the other, the native and the settler, friend and enemy. By undergoing a difficult process of demystification, the revolutionary black subject discovers that “you get Blacks who are whiter than Whites” (Fanon 1963, 144), that “the iniquitous fact of exploitation can wear a black face,” that the former colonizers can identify with the struggle for the independence and in so doing “become Negroes and Arabs, and accept suffering, torture, and death” (145). And Fanon concludes that only the acceptance of truths “that are only partial, limited and unstable” can disarm the circle of deadly hatred (146). Thus, the negativity of the death drive is redirected once more, this time from the imaginary unity of the dialectical opposites to the contestation of “the brutality of thought and mistrust of subtlety which are typical of revolutions” (147). In this sense, we can read Fanon’s question—“in reality, who am I?” (250)—not only as an effect of the “systematic negation” of the black subjectivity by colonial domination but also as an outcome of the revolutionary action itself, which submits the revolutionary subjectivity to an endless task of dissolution, reconstruction, and interrogation of revolutionary movement and revolutionary thought. For Fanon this task of questioning, which recovers the subtlety of thinking, constitutes the last stage of the desubstantialization and demystification of antagonism.

Hegemonic Articulation and Irony: Phallic Monism, Bisexuality, and the Future of Feminine Illusion The girl, on the contrary ‘believes her eyes’ [rather than believing the word], she accepts the fact that she does not possess ‘it’, so a different set of options is opened to her, from the notorious ‘penis envy’ . . . to the cynical attitude of a fundamental distrust toward the symbolic order (what if male phallic power is a mere semblance?) (Zˇizˇek, 324) What is the relation between the subtlety of thinking Fanon calls for and sexual difference? Is sexual difference doomed to be inscribed in the universal logic of revolution as the feminization of the particular excluded from the masculine universal, as we have seen in Sartre’s figure of black soul as Euridice or Fanon’s metaphor of the proletariat as the Sleeping Beauty?

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What kind of a notion of sexual difference is implied in this exclusion of femininity from the hegemonic universality of the masculine subject? Can this exclusion be contested through the sublation of sexual difference by genderneutral universality? In her The Sense and Non-Sense of the Revolt, Kristeva explores these questions through the juxtaposition of two Freud’s texts: Totem and Taboo, where Freud explicitly analyzes a phallic Oedipal logic of the revolt, its various forms of commemoration, and the mutual imbrication of the religious and revolutionary imaginaries, and The Future of the Illusion, where he raises the question of sexual difference in the most oblique fashion through a comparison of the crippling effects of religious indoctrination to the “intellectual atrophy” produced by the education of women (61). What Kristeva offers as an antidote to the feminization of the excluded particular (which is a consequence of a phallic monism) is the feminine ironization of the phallic universal. The feminization of the excluded particular can be diagnosed in terms of the Oedipal model of rebellion, diagnosed by Freud in Totem and Taboo, where he demonstrates how the libidinal aspects of antagonism—figured as the originary crime of parricide—are transformed into moral law and the symbolic paternal authority. This story of the filial rebellion and the murder of the primal father, the figure of the unlimited phallic power and enjoyment, ends with a joyful appropriation of the paternal attributes through the totemic feast and with the installation of the split symbolic paternal authority, which forms the basis of the social bond. Internalized as a superego, the authority of the dead father, who solicits the feelings of guilt and repentance, becomes more powerful than the power of the living father. Kristeva stresses three aspects of this Oedipal narrative: First, the violence and the jouissance of the crime at the basis of the law haunts the empty place of the paternal authority. Second, the symbolic order formed through the transformation of the patricidal violence into the symbolic authority forms a homosocial order, predicated on a double renunciation of femininity, evident not only in the exchange of women but also in the repression of brothers’ own homosexual erotic desire for the father (2000, 13). And third, she stresses not only the establishment of the symbolic authority through violence, phallic jouissance and antagonism, which constitute the repressed origin of the law and which are commemorated in various private or social rituals, but also the possibility of the reactivation of that violence whenever a group finds itself excluded from the libidinal/symbolic profits of the social bond under the weight of oppression. This commemoration or reactivation of the phallic jouissance of violence can take different forms, for instance, in religious festivals and sacrificial rituals, or more dangerously, in the outbursts of religious or social violence. Yet, as Freud’s frequent references to the Russian experiment suggest, it can also take the form of political revolution or militant movements formed

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by the excluded masses struggling for the inclusion in the new form of the (paternal) political authority. For Fanon, this is precisely the libidinal logic that characterizes the initial stages of decolonization, the stage of reversed Manichean violence, driven by “the impulse to take the settler’s place”: “it expresses his dreams of possession—all manner of possession: to sit at the settler’s table, to sleep in settler’s bed, with his wife if possible” (1963, 53). As Kristeva argues, Freud’s detection of the unrepresentable act of violence within religious rituals and his interpretation of that act within the narrative of Oedipal revolt has its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, the Freudian narrative discloses libidinal elements of antagonism—not just the jouissance of the unlimited phallic power of the primal father but also the jouissance of revolt curbed by the pleasure of the assimilation/identification with the existing symbolic authority or through the formation of the new from of authority. Thus, in contrast to the secular thesis of the death of God, which tends toward the assimilation of the act/event within the immanent, rational, historical order, Freud’s psychoanalytical interpretation of religion stresses the act of parricide at the origin of the law and the psychic necessity of its reactivation both at the Oedipal stage of subject formation and at the moment of social protest. Yet, the disadvantage Kristeva points out is that Freud fails to analyze the role of femininity, which could have provided an alternative or modification of the phallic logic of revolt: “it is indispensable to point out the structuring yet traversable role of phallic organization, which can be challenged. The Freudian tradition has the advantage of having underscored the structuring role of Oedipus and the phallus. But it perhaps has the disadvantage of having done so without indicating forms of modification, transgression, and revolt vis-à-vis this order” (2000, 87). I would add that the limitation of Kristeva’s own account of both the psychic logic of the Oedipal revolt and its feminine modifications is that it is limited to the religious and aesthetic manifestations, and never elaborated explicitly within the political logic of revolution. Kristeva begins to explore the other logic of the revolt by focusing on the feminine exploration of the phallus as illusion. The general implication of her analysis is that this feminine logic of the revolt might be worked out on the basis of Freud’s The Future of an Illusion, rather than the more frequently discussed Totem and Taboo. In contrast to a critical genealogy of the moral law and the symbolic paternal authority redoubled by what Lacan calls the obscene cruelty of the superego, The Future of an Illusion focuses more directly on the fetishistic function of the fixity of the law, which, in order to protect the subject against the radical contingency of existence, seeks its legitimation either in the theological or rational necessity. Freud defines the power of the religious illusion as the fulfillment of “the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind,” for the paternal “protection through love”

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against human helplessness vis-a-vis the terrifying power of nature and “the painful riddle of death” (1961, 19). If we reread this sense of a threatened existence in terms of Laclau’s notion of contingency, then Freud’s diagnosis of the power of religious illusion suggests that the fixity of the symbolic provides a consolation and a psychic defense against contingency, finitude, and the threat of both political antagonism and the violence of the death drive. Consequently, if Freud’s earlier account of religion in Totem and Taboo focused on the repressed origins of the symbolic authority in the violence of the drive and on their various neurotic forms of religious commemoration, now his argument stresses the fetishistic disavowal of contingency by the fixity of the symbolic: “If on the one hand, religion brings with it obsessional restrictions . . . on the other hand it comprises a system of wistful illusions together with a disavowal of reality” (56). On the surface, Freud’s critique of religious illusion is very much in line with the rational secular tradition of Enlightenment: by exposing religious consolation in terms of the fetishistic disavowal, he demystifies the power of religion and calls for a liberation from religious dogma through a secular education. In so doing, he destroys the theological justification of human laws and calls for an adult acceptance of the radical contingency of historic existence. In his uncompromising atheism, he rejects even the “as if” argument, that is, the justification of the paternal, divine authority of the law, as a necessary fiction. This removal of the theological necessity exposes hegemonic power as the legitimation of the law—laws are demystified as “an expression of selfishly narrow interests” (1961, 52–53) and thus can be submitted to ongoing transformation and contestation: “We may foresee, but hardly regret that such a process of remoulding will not stop at renouncing the solemn transfiguration of cultural precepts, but that a general revision of them will result in many of them being done away with” (56). Yet, in opposition to Enlightenment, Freud refuses to replace theological necessity by the rational logic of history, which would explain both the origin and the change of human institutions in terms of reasonable human interests, or social necessity. For Freud, as for Fanon, the rational conception of historical change is another form of a disavowal of contingency, jouissance, and the violence of an act, which religion commemorates albeit in an oblique, distorted fashion: “here our plea for ascribing purely rational reasons to the precepts of civilization—that is, for deriving them from social necessity—is interrupted by a sudden doubt . . . . The religious doctrine tells us the historical truth whereas our rational account disavows it” (53–54). Consequently, Freud’s unveiling of illusion as illusion is based on a double demystification: first, the demystification of the projection of the father complex into God, and second, of the fetishistic disavowal of contingency through the theological and rational legitimations of the fixity of the symbolic.

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In her playful revision of Freud, Kristeva associates femininity with “the future of the illusion”: the feminine demystification of the fixity of the law and the paternal authority is not “a cult of the phallus or something beyond it, much less beneath it, but a maintenance and estrangement of illusion as illusion” (2000, 106). The revolutionary potential of femininity in Kristeva’s account is intertwined less with the feminine jouissance beyond the phallus, at least not in the case when this jouissance, as Lacan adds, supports the other face of God, but more with an ironic exposure of the persistence of the infantile phallic illusion in various forms of authority and revolts against this authority. Consequently, Kristeva does not associate the feminine logic of revolt primarily with the reactivation of the Oedipal rebellion, which is sustained by phallic jouissance and violence, and contests social and religious exclusions in order to reconstruct a more inclusive, universal figuration of symbolic paternal authority (although women function very well within that logic). Rather, feminine logic is associated with the ironic adherence and nonadherence to this new form of authority, and with the refusal of the fetishistic fixity of symbolic and psychic protections against finitude and the contingency it offers. In other words, I claim that the feminine ironization and estrangement of illusion occurs at the moment of hegemonic articulation when the excluded, feminized particular lays claim to universality through identification with the new form of paternal authority. This ironic play with illusion not only opens the symbolic to ongoing transformation but also cultivates what Fanon calls the subtlety of thinking so often renounced by revolutions. Why this privileged relation between femininity and the ironization of the Oedipal logic of revolution and its illusions? For Kristeva, the answer to this question lies in the specificity of female sexuality, which she characterizes in terms of three doubles: double Oedipus, the gap between the sensory and the signifying, and the persistence of female bisexuality. Thus, Kristeva’s ironization of the Freudian account of femininity, implied in this proliferation of doubles, performs her own adherence and nonadherence to the Freudian phallic monism, that “infantile illusion,” which all too often remains “an unconscious organizing principle of the psyche.” In her conceptualization of Oedipus I, Kristeva confirms the primacy of the phallus for the girl in so far as the phallus is narcissistically, erotically, and symbolically invested (2000, 96). Because narcissistic and erotic investment is intertwined with a threat of castration, the phallus in Western culture subsumes all the prior experiences of loss from birth trauma, oral deprivation of the breast, anal separation, to castration, and in so doing becomes a signifier of lack. The phallic signifier, Kristeva argues, becomes indispensable for both sexes, in so far as they are symbolic subjects of representation and thought. One consequence of this phallic reference is that for both sexes access to the symbolic is intertwined with the violence of rejection and parricide, which is another figuration of absence:

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“ ‘the father is the dead father and nothing else,’ Lacanian theory tells us . . . . But the father is not ‘always already’ dead ‘on his own.’ He dies by and through the subject, precisely, who must put him to death in order to become a subject . . . Male or female, ‘I’ must kill the father” (86). Thus, Kristeva draws a rather unconventional conclusion from the phallic reference in the development of a female subjectivity by putting a strong emphasis on the necessity of the female Oedipal revolt, parricide, and the assimilation of the paternal attributes, and by paying tribute to the little girl as a homosexual revolutionary (80). That is, in the first stage of her analysis, she stresses the Oedipal inscription of femininity in the contestation of the universal. Yet, this inclusion of female subjectivity into the Oedipal revolt and the contested universal is not the whole story. The female specificity of Oedipus I lies in a more pronounced dissociation between the sensory experience of imaginary and real pleasure of the body and the symbolic power of speech with its frustrations and new forms pleasures. For Kristeva, the phallic stage for both sexes implies a certain intertwining of the genital excitation (the Real), the imaginary investment in the sexual organ (power/powerlessness associated with visibility) and the symbolic investment in the signifier. Because of this conjunction, speech produces both frustration/separation from the pre-Oedipal pleasures associated with the maternal body and offers a compensation of new pleasures. Yet, although the little girl encounters the intertwining of the power/pleasure of speech and the genital excitation, her “phallicism” is characterized by a far greater disjunction between signification and sensory experience, precisely because the phallus as signifier is not supported in the same way by the imaginary (visibility) and real (excitation) investments in the organ. Kristeva writes, “a dissociation is structurally inscribed between the sensory and the signifying in the phallicism of the girl . . . . Invisible and almost impossible to locate, the real and the imaginary basis of the phallic pleasure in the girl (the clitoris) immediately dissociates the female subject from the phallus in the sense of the privileged signifier in the logos/desire conjunction . . . to which the girl nevertheless accedes with as much ease as the boy” (2000, 99). The position of femininity is thus marked by a much more radical dislocation between the logic of speech, imaginary perception, and real excitation. In particular, I think, it is, as Luce Irigaray has pointed out, the question of how the imaginary structures of visibility and power dissociate the female subject from the phallic signifier. For Kristeva, this disjunction has two consequences: it reactivates the hallucinations and sensory experiences of the pre-Oedipal relation to the maternal body, and it posits the exteriority, strangeness, and the illusory character of the phallus. Because of the illusory character of the phallus, phallic monism is attributed to the other/man, whereas the being of feminine subject in Oedipus I is characterized by a redoubled negation [négativité redoublée]—

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that is, not only by the symbolic negation of being characteristic of both sexes but also by a certain negation / distance implied in the notion of the phallus as illusory: “‘I am not what is’ “I am, nevertheless, because of the force of not’” (100, trans. modified) [“ ‘je ne suis pas ce qui est,’” “je suis quand même, à force de ne pas” (1996, 154)]. To this double negativity, dislocation between signifier and the imaginary visibility, the illusoriness of language and the loss of being, Kristeva adds another disjunction, the split between the positions of the speaking and desiring subject. For a heterosexual masculinity, becoming a symbolic and a desiring subject is one and the same trajectory accomplished within the same Oedipal phase, whereas for a heterosexual femininity, these are two separate paths, constituting a double Oedipus. It is in the second Oedipus that the girl, in so far as she follows the path of heterosexuality, switches the object of her desire. Under the threat of castration, the girl renounces her phallicism (the variant of which persists as penis envy) and transforms her maternal object choice into an identification with the maternal desire. Nonetheless, she still maintains her position of the speaking being, based on the paternal identification with the dead father as the place of speech / law, achieved in Oedipus I. The chiasmus of these two contradictory identifications constitutes the dislocation between the logic of speech and desire. The last point Kristeva makes is that all these doublings and disjunctions (between Oedipus I and II, between desire and speech, between the sensory and the signifying) are, in contrast to the phallic monism of the boy, a testimony to feminine bisexuality. Kristeva unfortunately does not consider the implications of this bisexuality for the specificity of lesbian sexuality focusing instead on “an endemic and ineluctable female homosexuality” within a heterosexual feminine position. In contrast to the fantasy of androgynous fulfillment associated with maternity, Kristeva explores three different modalities of homosexuality of heterosexual femininity. First, there is a certain “structural” homosexuality associated with the symbolic trajectory of femininity based on the “inverted” Oedipus I: “girl’s access to thought and to the symbolic . . . leads to questions concerning certain structural aspects of feminine homosexuality” (2000, 80). This structural homosexuality of the feminine as a speaking being is intertwined with the persistence of the pre-Oedipal relation to the mother, which is revived and strengthened by the illusoriness of the phallus: “Add to this structural homosexuality of the archaic daughter-mother link that normal evolution abandons in favor of the daughter-father erotic choice, a link that will be called a link of primary homosexuality. Thus we have an endemic and ineluctable female homosexuality, subordinated to female heterosexuality, that does not cease to mobilize feminists in a rather dramatic way” (80). And even the heterosexual maternal role implies a certain return and reconciliation with “primary homosexuality,” since the desire for the child is not only a

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desire to finally incarnate the illusory phallus in “the real presence” of the baby (104) but also a displaced homosexual desire for the mother/daughter semiotic reunion (105). What are revolutionary possibilities, what is their future beyond the Oedipal logic, of the feminine position, situated between illusion and disillusionment? The first possibility is associated with female bisexuality, that is, with the return/reactivation of the archaic/semiotic relation to the mother within the symbolic. Kristeva sees in a reconciliation with female bisexuality, an exit from the female masochism (which she diagnoses as the woman’s adherence to phallic monism) and the future of feminine estrangement of phallic illusion (2000, 106): the psychical bisexuality of the woman remains a promised land that we must attain, particularly in psychoanalysis by curving the pleasure that our professional, clinical, theoretical and clearly phallic accomplishments give us toward the barely expressible and highly sensitive territory of our silent mothers . . . . I see in the psychic bisexuality of the woman not a cult of the phallus . . . but a maintenance and estrangement of illusion as illusion. (105–6) The second possibility is associated with the force of the redoubled negativity, which makes speech, law, and the imaginary phallic power a form of a game—speaking becomes pretending. Kristeva plays here on the pun in French between I (je) and play/game (jeu), maintaining the form of double negation of the verb “being”: “Ce n’est qu’un jeu, ce n’est qu’un ‘je’, ‘je’ fais semblant” (1996, 155). She briefly touches on both the Derridean and the Freudian implications of the term “play” as a certain conjunction of chance and necessity, that is, as the acceptance of contingency inscribed within the symbolic, which opens the possibility of the strategic change of the rules of the game. As we have seen, for Freud, the removal of the transcendental, theological sanction of the laws opens them to transformation. And since the phallic cult is at the basis of religion, this traversal of an illusion, or the replacement of the phallic cult by an ironic play with illusion, provides an opportunity to formulate an atheist logic of revolt. In the last section of the book devoted to Barthes, Kristeva defines the atheist revolt as a “semioclasm that dissolves apparent meaning and apprehends writing as negativity: an endless refraction and reformulation of the system of language, the unity of the speaking subject, and the transparency of the social link itself” (214). In the chapter devoted to female sexuality, Kristeva associates the same linguistic capacity of refraction and reformulation with the feminine: The future of an illusion? Necessarily! Freud the rationalist was right: everyone wants an illusion and insists on not knowing that it

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is one. Structurally, however, a woman is better placed than anyone to explore illusion. I am not sure “atheism” means anything more than taking the Other and exploring it [s’en tenir à l’autre et d’en faire le tour] (1996, 164), that is, maintaining oneself in the Other and exploring/turning the Other]. . . . A woman [is] a being . . . that never adheres to the illusion of being, any more than to the being of this illusion itself. And I admit that what I have said may only be illusion as well.”(2000, 106) What the English translation of the crucial phrase, “s’en tenir à l’autre et d’en faire le tour,” fails to convey is the fact that “tour” as “turn” is, for Kristeva, one of the key semantic orientations of the linguistic genealogy of revolt. Thus, the feminine atheist logic of the revolt implies not only a certain curving of the phallic pleasure toward to the semiotic relation to the maternal but also maintaining oneself in the order of language [the Other] in order to subject to an endless refraction and reformulation. Kristeva’s conclusion might seem banal because she does not elaborate the implications of her analysis for the political logic of revolution, in particular, for its two crucial moments—the rupture of antagonisms and their partial hegemonic articulation. In my interpretation of Fanon, I have stressed his demystification of the first moment as the desubstantialization of the exteriority of antagonism and its reinscription as the rupture of the drive within the Symbolic. As Zˇizˇek writes in a different context, in the event of antagonism “the void of the death drive, of radical negativity, a gap that momentarily suspends the Order of Being, continues to resonate” (162–63). It is a radical shift from the figuration of the event as the positive notion of transcendence ˇizˇek, in his proto the rupture of the negativity of the drive within—a shift Z gressive Eurocentrism, associates with the figure of Christ, and Fanon, in his progressive critique of Eurocentrism, with the traumatic reality of the black skin. Yet, for Fanon, revolutionary struggle is also for the inclusion of the excluded black subjectivity in the universal, which constitutes a second moment of revolutionary struggle, namely, its hegemonic articulation. Such a symbolic articulation of antagonism has to maintain the constitutive gap and the disproportion between the universal and the particular, between the impossible moment of reconciled society—the Fanonian new humanism— and the particular historical subjects aiming to realize it. The implications of Kristeva’s analysis in this context are twofold: first, she points out that the struggle of the excluded particular for the hegemonization of the universal, that is, for the inclusion in the social bond, all too often follows the quasireligious path of the Oedipal rebellion, sustained by the identification of the paternal authority and the promise of the phallic jouissance implied in the utopia of impossible fullness. Second, the role of feminine play with illusion

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producing adherence and nonadherence to the paternal authority, phallus, and Being, ironizes this claim to the impossible fullness and in so doing reveals the gap between the universal and the particular. By preventing a transformation of the revolutionary imaginary into another form of myth, the estrangement of revolutionary illusions maintains the conflicting relation between the particular and the universal, and, in so doing, sustains the culture of revolt. Letting go of the fetishistic defenses against finitude and contingency, such an ironization of hegemonic articulation enables us to move from the all too common political game of the feminization of the excluded particular to the feminine play with the universal. Such an ironic play with the illusion of the impossible fullness not only cultivates the subtlety of thinking within hegemonic practice, but perhaps opens the possibility of dissociating the universal from the paternal authority.

Notes 1. “Et c’est en dépassant la donnée historique, instrumentale, que j’introduis le cycle de ma liberté” (1952, 187). Thus, Fanon will claim that “the density of history [la densité] (1952, 187)] does not determine a single one of my actions” (1967, 231, trans. modified). 2. For the articulation of the contested universality in Fanon criticism, see Sekyi-Otu (1996, 16–22, 33–6). 3. This split is frequently reproduced in Fanon criticism: for instance, it is evident in the disagreements between Henry Louis Gates, who stresses the importance of the “psychoanalysis of race” and Edward Said, who stresses Fanon’s reworking of Lukács’s subject/object dialectic, between Homi Bhabha’s and Kobena Mercer’s emphasis on the uncertainties of black desire, and Nigel Gibson’s and Ato Sekyi-Otu’s focus on the reworking of the dialectic in the African revolutionary context. 4. For an excellent discussion of the “zone of non-being” as the realm of the Real, see Samira Kawash. “Terrorists and Vampires: Fanon’s Spectral Violence of Decolonization” (1999, 245–56). For an insightful analysis of the inscription of the violence on the body, see Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, “I am a Master: Terrorism, Masculinity, and the Political Violence in Frantz Fanon” (2002, 84–98).

Works Cited Alessandrini, Anthony C., ed. 1999. Frantz Fanon: Critical perspectives. New York: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi. 1999. Remembering Fanon: self, psyche, and the colonial condition. In Rethinking Fanon: The continuing dialogue, ed. Nigel Gibson. Amherst, MA: Humanities Books.

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Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black skin, white masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove. ———. 1952. Peau noir, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1963. The wretched of the earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove. ———. 1991. Les damnés de la terre. Paris: Gallimard. Freud, Sigmund. 1961. The future of an illusion. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 1991. “Critical Fanonism.” Critical Inquiry 17: 457–70. Gibson, Nigel. 1999. Radical mutation: Fanon’s untidy dialectic of history. In Rethinking Fanon, ed. Nigel Gibson. Amherst, MA: Humanities Books. Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in poetic language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. Sens et non-sens de la révolte: Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse I. Paris: Fayard. ———-. 2000. Sense and non-sense of revolt: The powers and limits of psychoanalysis. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. Revolt, she said. Trans. Brian O’Keeffe. New York: Semiotext(e). Kawash, Samira. 1999. Terrorists and vampires: Fanon’s spectral violence of decolonization. In Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Alessandrini. New York: Routledge, 235–57. Laclau, Ernesto. 1990. New reflections on the revolution of our time. New York: Verso. Mercer, Kobena. 1999. Busy in the ruins of a wretched phantasia. Ed. Anthony Alessandrini. In Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, New York: Routledge, 195–218. Said, Edward W. 1999. Traveling theory reconsidered. In Rethinking Fanon, ed. Nigel C. Gibson, Amherst MA: Humanities Books, 197–214. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2001. Black Orpheus. Trans. John MacCombie. In Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi. Oxford: Blackwell, 115–42. Sekyi-Otu, Ato. 1996. Fanon’s dialectic of experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana. 2002. I am a master: terrorism, masculinity, and the political violence in Frantz Fanon. Special issue; Parallax, Fanon and the Impasses of Modernity, guest editor, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, 84-98. Zupancˇicˇ, Alenka. 2000. Ethics of the real: Kant, Lacan. London: Verso. Zˇizˇek, Slavoj. 1999. The ticklish subject: The absent centre of political ontology. London: Verso.

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CHAPTER 4

Revolt and Forgiveness

KELLY OLIVER

In Kristeva’s latest work, the ability to revolt becomes a litmus test for psychic life. The lack of revolt is a symptom of the flattening of psychic space in contemporary media culture where it is easier to take prozac and surf the web than it is to create a meaningful life. Still, while we no longer talk about revolution in the grand sense of a radical overthrow of everything we know, the ability to revolt is not only possible but also necessary to creativity, freedom, and happiness. By revolt, Kristeva points to a challenge to authority and tradition, analogous to political revolt, that takes place within an individual and is essential to psychic development. This revolt is an intimate or interior revolt, a revolt in the psyche that enables us to live as individuals connected to others. Intimate revolt is Kristeva’s prescription for depression and melancholy. If we analyze her work as a whole, it becomes clear that psychic revolt is associated with the loving facet of the paternal function or what she calls the “imaginary father.” And, the possibility of an identification with this imaginary loving third requires forgiveness that comes only in relation to a responsive other. Extending and reformulating Kristeva’s suggestive associations, we can formulate a notion of psychic life that is dependent upon social support (see also Oliver 2004). In other words, we can formulate a psychoanalytic social theory that explains the intimate and necessary relationship between subjectivity (the structure of agency) and subject position (the historical and social context that supports or undermines agency) based on forgiveness and loving support or responsivity.

The Notion of Revolt as Symptom and “Cure” Julia Kristeva’s two volumes subtitled The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, 2000, and The Intimate Revolt, 2002) 77

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revisit the theme of revolution so prominent in her earlier work, Revolution in Poetic Language (1984). In Revolution in Poetic Language Kristeva identifies the possibility of revolution in language—a revolution she deems analogous to social revolution—with (maternal) semiotic forces in avant garde literature. In Powers of Horror (1982), this semiotic drive force is not only associated with the maternal but more particularly with the abject or revolting (yet fascinating) aspects of the maternal. Here, the revolting becomes revolutionary through the return of the repressed (maternal) within (paternal) symbolic systems. While in her earlier work Kristeva was concerned with a revolution within language analogous to political revolution, in her later work she emphasizes the affects of the sociopolitical context on the possibility of individual revolts necessary to psychic life and still dependent upon language and its semiotic drive force. In The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, Kristeva asks if revolt is possible today. She claims that, within postindustrial and post-Communist democracies, we are confronted with a new political and social economy governed by the spectacle within which it becomes increasingly difficult to think of the possibility of revolt. The two main reasons are that, within media culture, the status of power and the status of the individual have changed. In contemporary culture, there is a power vacuum that results in the inability to locate the agent or agency of power and authority or to assign responsibility. We live in a no-fault society in which crime has become a media friendly spectacle and government and social institutions normalize rather than prohibit (2000, 5). The fact that these institutions are corruptible and full of scandals, however, undermines even their authority to normalize. The combination of the lack of locatable authority and the fact that government and social institutions are corruptible results in the breakdown of authority. Kristeva attributes the inability to revolt to this lack of authority. The problem, then, is that there is no authority against which to revolt. In a no-fault society, who or what can we revolt against? In addition to the power vacuum, Kristeva identifies the impossibility of revolt with the changing status of the individual. The human being as a person with rights is becoming nothing more than an ensemble of organs that can be bought and sold or otherwise exchanged, what Kristeva calls the patrimonial individual (2000, 6). And, how can an ensemble of organs revolt? Not only is there no one or nothing to revolt against, but also there is no one to revolt. Since we cannot locate power, because it has become both normalizing and corruptible, and because there is no clear-cut authority to obey, we try to abolish our own feelings of exclusion at all costs by renewing exclusion at the lower echelons of society. We cannot imagine the revolt necessary in order to make authority our own, because we can’t locate it, and so we feel excluded from the social. Therefore, within this paranoid culture where

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power is both everywhere and nowhere oppressing us, in order to feel included again, we exclude others. Without the possibility of revolt, there are not only these unhappy social consequences but also unhappy psychic consequences. When individuals can’t locate authority and therefore can’t revolt against it in order to assimilate it, then they suffer from various “new maladies of the soul.” Entering the social order requires assimilating the authority of that order through a revolt by which the individual belongs to the world of meaning. Revolt, then, is not a transgression against law or order, but a displacement of its authority within the psychic economy of the individual. The individual displaces the authority that it associated with the law and now sees that authority as its own; this is how the operation of displacement works in intimate revolt. This displacement of the authority of the law authorizes the individual. Paradoxically, social authority becomes individual authority through the individual’s revolt against that very authority. Psychoanalysis and literature become the primary domains of this revolutionary displacement. This displacement gives the individual a sense of inclusion in meaning-making and belonging to the social that support creative activities and the sublimation of drives. Without the displacement of authority and the resulting feeling of belonging (belonging to the social and authority belonging to him / her), the individual does not feel included in the meanings of culture and therefore cannot find meaning in anything. This disowned individual cannot have meaningful experiences but only traumatic ones because meaningful experience requires some assimilation into the social order. Trauma is what is unrepresentable as a result of the inability to assimilate the meaning of the traumatic experience into the social; trauma is what is meaningless or unknown within the social order (2000, 29). Revolt, then, is necessary for meaningful experience. Psychic displacement of authority, or what Kristeva calls intimate revolt, is necessary for both autonomy and connection to others: “through a narrative of free association and in the regenerative revolt against the old law (familial taboos, superego, ideals, oedipal or narcissistic limits etc.) comes the singular autonomy of each, as well as a renewed link with the other” (2002, 440). Revolt as a return or questioning and displacement of the past, the old law, for the sake of renewal in the future engenders the social yet autonomous individual who belongs to a community by virtue of assimilation of its authority. On the level of psychic development, the infant becomes an individual through the process of questioning and the ability to say no. Intimate revolt depends upon this ability to continually question, which Kristeva calls a rebirth perhaps because it recalls a childlike wonder and ravenous desire to ask questions. She calls the intimate revolt an interior revolt that “is most profound and singular in the human experience” (2002, 68). We become who we are through questioning and we remain open to meaning

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and creativity only by continuing to question, continuing with this infinite psychic revolt. Indeed, psychic space is sustained by infinite revolt or questioning. These small revolts ensure both the individual’s autonomy and his or her assimilation or belonging within the social symbolic order. In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva describes this questioning as a form of symbolic castration, a particular form that calls into question castration as loss (1995, 89). Although castration relies on negation and rejection, she insists that in questioning it cannot be reduced to them (1995, 87). She suggests that symbolic castration “owes its benevolent and brutal impact less to its status as a negation than as a question” and that “a question is not a negation” (1995, 87–8). Rather, questioning is a form of castration that precisely overcomes negation. Questioning as revolt can be a counterbalance to depression and melancholia. As Kristeva describes depression, the depressive gives up on words. Questioning overcomes the depressive’s negation of words. If representation demands the negation of things in favor of words, then the depressive’s refusal of words is the result of a melancholy relation to those lost things. Questioning reopens the realm of words or signification through a challenge to signification itself that operates as an invitation to the depressive to find things within words. We might say that, through the question, signification turns back on itself in the movement of a double-negation that negates representations’ negation of things. Within the analytic context in particular, questioning, essential to analytic interpretation, becomes a negation of negation, repudiation of repudiation, a double-negative (1995, 89). We could even say that, within the analytic context, the negativity inherent in questioning becomes the triple negation of the depressed person’s negation of the gap between words and things; that is to say, a negation of the negation of the fundamental negation at the core of signification—the signifier’s negation of the thing. More than a loss, lack, or separation, however, symbolic castration in the form of a question—the form of intimate revolt—becomes creativity and psychic life itself. If castration/negation is necessary for autonomy and if it is the root of human experience, this is only because it gives rise to a castration of castration or a negation of negation— the negation of representations’ negation of things. This negation of negation is a reunion with the world of things, sensations, and affects—the world of the body—through language. Echoing her earlier analysis, in Intimate Revolt Kristeva continues to describe revolt as an interrogation rather than a rejection that “opens onto the symbolic as a double-negation, an indefinite questioning” (2002, 213). Questioning arrives to usher the infant into discourse in a way that opens onto its infinite possibilities. There is always another question to ask and at the beginnings of language acquisition the infant revels in asking yet another question. Through this infinite questioning, negativity is transformed from a

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destructive or merely discriminatory force that separates self and other, inside and outside and becomes the positive force of creativity and the nourishing of psychic space (2002, 226). The negativity of drive force becomes the positive force of signification through repetition and response from the other; it becomes the sublimation of drive force into language. In dialogue the infant enters the realm of signification when “libidinal negativity engenders the symbol of negation: or rather the symbol period, for all symbolism— notably that which presents itself as ‘positive’ in the judgment of affirmation—is the result of a nihilation of the Thing (of desire, of the object of desire) in favor of its representation” (2002, 226). This “no” to the Thing is necessary for signification: Representation requires the denial of things in favor of their representations; the word is not the thing. Yet, through the word we regain the lost Thing, most significantly the maternal body. The “redoubled negativity” of signification “liberates” us from the repression in the face of the maternal body that was our first defense against desire or trauma. (2002, 226) In a sense, then, the intimate or creative revolt turns or returns libidinal drive force back on itself in the form of redoubled negativity that opens up the space for meaning, representation, and creativity—that is to say, for psychic space itself. In other words, the negativity inherent in the infant’s separation from the maternal body gives birth to the symbol of negation (“no”) and all symbols, which in turn open up that possibility of naming things and thereby recovering the lost things (the lost maternal body) through words. The movement from the negativity of abjection to the negativity of signification requires this redoubled negativity, or the negation of negation. This process can also be called the sublimation of drive force into language. The repetition of negativity in bodily drive force discharged in relation to others who care and respond becomes a different order negation and moves the infant from the realm of needs and drives into the realm of demands or words. Drives make their way into language even as their negative force is transformed into signification as a compensation for the loss of the realm of needs. In a sense, signification is an overcompensation for leaving the realm of needs and things insofar as signification transforms the negativity of drives into the negation inherent in language that makes positive representation and sublimation possible. The sublimation of drive force into language is a negation of the negativity of drives because through this process rejection gives way to assimilation and abjection gives way to identification. For Kristeva it is the primary identification with what she calls the imaginary father (Freud’s father in individual prehistory) that provides “the link that

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might enable one to become reconciled with the loss of the Thing. Primary identification initiates a compensation for the Thing and at the same time secures the subject to another dimension, that of imaginary adherence . . . ” (1989, 13–14).

Imaginary Father as Support for Revolt Insofar as Kristeva links intimate revolt to the imaginary father, in order to understand how intimate revolt opens psychic space, inaugurates autonomy, and renews connection to others, it is instructive to analyze the role of the imaginary father in revolt. Although Kristeva’s explanations of the imaginary father do not explicitly identify it with social support, I interpret it as a primary form of social support necessary for psychic development, creativity, and love (Oliver, 2002). My aim is to use Kristeva’s suggestive analysis in order to develop a psychoanalytic social theory that brings the social and attention to subject position back into discussions of the psyche and subjectivity. By doing so, we can begin to diagnose the affects of social oppression and domination on psychic development. Kristeva’s provocative notion of the imaginary father can help supply the missing link between social and psychic space. Kristeva introduces the notion of the imaginary father in Tales of Love. There she defines the imaginary father as an imaginary third party that operates as the vortex of primary identification within the narcissistic structure; this identification sets up all subsequent identifications including the ego’s self-identity (1987, 33, 374). She describes primary identification as a metaphorical transfer to the place of meaning. Drives are transferred into signification through the logic of metaphor, which “bends the drive toward the symbolic of an other” (1987, 31). Kristeva’s metaphorical operation transports bodily needs or drives into demands or words and thereby begins to fill the gap between body and words. The metaphoric transference supports needs as they bend into demand or language through a fantasy of completion, wholeness, or jouissance, rather than lack. This primary transference is to the place of the Other, of others, of meaning, ultimately to the place of signs themselves. We could say that the primary identification is with symbolic or social meaning itself. Through this primary identification with the third, we put ourselves in the place of meaning. We assimilate language and thereby find ourselves through it. We become meaningful by belonging to the world of meaning. If this third is a positive and supportive third, then we find positive meaning through that transference. But, if there is no positive meaning for us within the social, no “loving third” then we are thrown into a narcissistic crisis having to identify with our own meaninglessness or abjection. This is

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why Kristeva proposes that the imaginary father is a counterbalance to the abject mother. The imaginary father supports drives and their affects—which is to say the semiotic element—as they make their way into language. We could say that the imaginary father is the semiotic as it takes form within the Symbolic or signification. The primary identification with the imaginary father is not an identification with the symbolic element of the other’s speech but rather with the semiotic element: . . . being the magnet for loving identification causes the Other to be understood not as a “pure signifier” but as the very space of metaphorical shifting: a condensation of semantic features as well as nonrepresentable drive heterogeneity that subtends them, goes beyond them, and slips away. (1987, 38) The Other—the Meaning of discourse—is not a pure signifier but full of drive force and affects with which the infant identifies in its preobjectal-presubjective state. It is precisely because this identification is not with an object, but rather it is a metaphorical transference to the place of meaning itself that the drives underlying signification play a primary role in the infant’s language acquisition. And, it is only through this displacement of drive force that the transition from need to demand is filled with jouissance. Indeed, it is only through the displacement of semiotic drive force that the maternal body so crucial to the infant’s survival makes its way into language and not only can be named but more importantly can be felt and loved insofar as affects are discharged through signification. This primary identification with the semiotic element of language—not just the semiotic rhythms of the maternal body, but those rhythms as they show up in the speech of the other—allows a transition from the infant’s identification with the maternal body and its assimilation of signification to the acquisition of language. This is why Kristeva calls this primary identification a reduplication of a pattern, a semiotic pattern given form by its symbolic counter-part in the speech of the other: When the object that I incorporate is the speech of the other—precisely a nonobject, a pattern, a model—I bind myself to him in a primary fusion, communion, unification. An identification . . . if there is repression it is quite primal, and . . . it lets one hold on to the joys of chewing, swallowing, nourishing oneself . . . with words. In being able to receive the other’s words, to assimilate, repeat, and reproduce them, I become like him: One. A subject of enunciation. Through psychic osmosis/identification. Through love.” (1987, 26)

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The joys of the primary relation to the mother’s body are transferred into language acquisition by virtue of this identification with the loving imaginary father, the semiotic within the Symbolic and signification. Kristeva insists that we must have two facets of the paternal agency— love and law—in order to support the transition into signification: . . . it is on the basis of that harmonious blending of the two facets of fatherhood that the abstract and arbitrary signs of communication may be fortunate enough to be tied to the affective meaning of prehistorical identifications, and the dead language of the potentially depressive person can arrive at a live meaning in the bond with others. (1989, 23–24) We must have both the loving imaginary father and the stern father of the law or the superego. But the superego, law, or signification itself will only operate as a satisfactory, even joyful, compensation for the maternal body if it is supported by the loving imaginary father, which is to say the possibility of identifying with nonrepresentational and affective elements in language. Without the loving aspect of the paternal function (or the function of the third party in relation to the infant and maternal body) the superego condemns affect, especially affect associated with the maternal body, to remain without an object. As a result, we have meaning without signification. In order to give this meaning to signification and signification to this affective meaning we need the support of the imaginary father. We need both facets of fatherhood (or third)—love and superego—in order to belong to the social. The loving third or social support structures emptiness—the gap between needs/drive and demands/words—and transforms it from threatening absence into productive distance that allows relationships with others and with oneself (cf. Kristeva 1998, 156). This is not the distance of philosophical speculation but of metaphorical transference (1998, 163); it is not the distance that the self takes in reflecting upon itself but rather the metaphorical distance that makes primary identification possible and acts as the very condition of possibility for any sense of self. We could say that this distance is psychic space itself, which allows us access to our bodies and to others (cf. Kristeva 1995, 6). The imaginary father is a conglomerate of maternal and paternal, needs and demands, drives and law. An identification with this mingling of maternal and paternal positions (needs and demands) loads language with preverbal and nonrepresentable drives and affects. It is not a matter of articulating affects, which is impossible since, strictly speaking, they are nonrepresentable; rather it is a matter of supporting them, forgiving them, giving them form, allowing them access to the symbolic. It is a matter of allowing the pri-

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mary relation to maternal omnipotence (Ideal-ego) compensation through the paternal law (Ego-Ideal), the Meaning of discourse itself: “. . . nondesiring but loving father [not symbolic but imaginary] reconciles the ideal Ego [narcissistic omnipotence] with the Ego Ideal [superego] and elaborates the psychic space where, possibly and subsequently, an analysis can take place” (1987, 30). The infant’s “identification” with the phallic mother [Ideal-Ego] is an identification with abjection. This identification is prior to the subject/object split and that is precisely why it is an identification with abjection. The abject is what calls into question boundaries; it is what is on the border, undefinable, uncategorizable. This not-yet-subject in relation to the maternal notyet-object has fallen from the state of narcissistic omnipotence—when it takes its mother/self to be the all-powerful center of the universe—into abjection. The imaginary father addresses and supports the narcissistic crisis that results from the infant realizing that its mother/self is not the center of the universe. When it realizes that its mother desires a third party, then it finds itself at a turning point, a crisis point, where it can take one of many different paths into the Symbolic order with more or less success. The imaginary or loving father facilitates the transition from the maternal body both as safe haven and as abject threat to the Symbolic order governed by laws internalized in the superego. By giving form to semiotic drive force, the imaginary father allows the entry into the Symbolic to be playful and sublimational instead of just threatening (1987, 46). Between the maternal body and the father of the law we find the loving imaginary father that operates in between maternal and paternal functions. The authority of the mother’s body is transferred to the superego or paternal law through the support of love, which is a union of maternal and paternal, of needs and demands, of drives and words. Love is the compensation for leaving the maternal body and it is possible only through language. In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva calls the loving third the “the keystone for the capacity to sublimation” (1995, 121) and the guarantee for the “ability to idealize” (122). “As the zero degree of symbol formation” this imaginary third leads to “the position of subjectivity, that is being for and by the Other” (122). The loving third operates as a conduit between drives/affects and words/symbols and is crucial for one’s sense of belonging in the world of meaning. As we have seen, meaningful speech and a sense of meaning in one’s life depends on the connection between affects and words, drives and symbols. This is the process of sublimation and guarantees the ability to idealize and imagine. Sublimation is the redirection of bodily drives into language and signification. This requires that the negativity of drive force be redoubled to create the negativity of signification, which in turn allows creative representation and the recovery of the (maternal) thing lost

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to the negation of signification. The imaginary father, or loving third, is necessary for the transition from the dependence upon the maternal body through the negativity of drive force and then the entrance into signification or language. In this sense, the primary sublimation that is foundational for language acquisition, more particularly for the connection between words and affects that makes language meaningful, is dependent upon the imaginary third. And, retroactively, this primary sublimation is the foundation for all subsequent sublimation, which is to say that primary identification with the imaginary third is retroactively implied in all secondary identification, and that all secondary identification is based at least retroactively on primary identification. In Sense and Non-sense of the Revolt, Kristeva continues to insist on the links between the loving imaginary third and revolt. There, she repeats her rendering of the imaginary father as a primary loving third: “This primary thirdness allows a space between the mother and the child; perhaps it prevents osmosis as well as the merciless war where self-destruction alternates with destruction of the other” (2000, 54). She describes this primary thirdness as a counterbalance, “thanks to which the subject is not mired in perversion but finds the resources (imaginary, strictly speaking) to continue the revolt integral to his autonomy and to his creative freedom” (54). This integral revolt is essential to creativity and psychic functioning (2000, 2002). The inability to revolt signals not only the inability to be creative or imaginative but also the inability to make or find meaning and ultimately the collapse of psychic space. This revolt is associated with the ability to sublimate, the very mechanism that enables thought and language by translating and directing bodily drives (2000, 57). Again, Kristeva suggests that the ability to sublimate is the result of the loving support of this imaginary third. The imaginary third is necessary for identification, idealization, and sublimation, all of which are necessary for love and meaning. Intimate revolt is the process by which the subject-in-process displaces the authority of the law, which it takes to be outside of itself onto its own individual authority, which it takes to be inside itself. In this way, the individual belongs to the social in a way that supports its own sense of self as well as its relations to others. This revolt is dependent upon a loving imaginary third who beyond the punishing father of the law accepts the individual/infant into the social through forgiveness. As we will see, the individual’s revolt against the father of the law requires the prior guarantee, so to speak, of the loving third’s forgiveness and support. Intimate revolt requires a sense that love is the other side of the law and that the individual can belong to the social. This sense of belonging is crucial for a sense of well-being insofar as it enables sublimation. To put it crudely, killing off the (maternal) thing requires the

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support of a loving third who will forgive this transgression and accept the individual back into the community.

Transference as Forgiveness When Kristeva discusses an imaginary transference to the place of meaning—also known as an amorous identification with the imaginary father— she describes this transference both as a displacement of drives into words and the transference and countertransference of the clinical analytic setting (cf. 1987, 13). As we have seen, because this operation is a form of displacement, Kristeva identifies it with a metaphorical substitution, the “jamming of semantic features” by going from drives and sensations to signifiers and back again (1987, 37). In addition, however, because this operation is a form of transference (of affect on to another person through dialogue that takes the form of an identification), Kristeva associates it with forgiveness. In Intimate Revolt, she calls analytic interpretation “a secular version of forgiveness” that operates through “not just a suspension of judgment but a giving of meaning, beyond judgment, within transference/countertransference” (2002, 444). (Kristeva’s discussion of forgiveness in Intimate Revolt echoes her earlier work on Dostoyevsky and forgiveness in Black Sun.) In her work on Hannah Arendt, she says that “psychoanalytic listening and analyst’s speech within transference and countertransference could be considered an act of forgiveness: the donation of meaning with the effect of a scansion, beyond the madness of the illness, anguish, or symptom and beyond the disintegration of the trauma, allows the subject to be reborn and thus to be henceforth capable of reshaping his psychic map and his bonds with other people. To forgive is as infinite as it is repetitive . . . ” (2001, 235). She describes analytic forgiveness as a form of love associated with the imaginary father as a support for psychic revolt. Although Kristeva does not, we could say that forgiveness is the means by which we reconcile ourselves to culture, language, and the social, and the matricide that is their prerequisite. Ultimately, we must forgive ourselves for leaving the maternal body and enjoying its sublimation in words—we must forgive ourselves in order to sublimate drives and affects associated with this maternal realm into words. In this way, forgiveness forestalls matricide and forges a “third way between dejection and murder,” between becoming abject oneself by identifying with a silent abject maternal body and violently killing it off in order to live (1989, 199). The loving imaginary third is part and parcel of this forgiveness. This loving third supports the sublimation of maternal abjection that prevents matricide:

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Imagination is that strange place where the subject ventures its identity, loses itself down to the threshold of evil, crime, or asymbolia in order to work through them and to bear witness . . . from elsewhere. A divided space, it is maintained only if solidly fastened to the ideal, which authorizes destructive violence to be spoken instead of being done. That is sublimation, and it needs for-giving [par-don].” (1989, 200) Forgiveness displaces and thereby absorbs abjection, melancholy, and asymbolia within a loving relationship with another for whom they become meaningful through language or some form of communication. Forgiveness is “ a gesture of assertion and inscription of meaning” that first emerges as “the setting up of a form” (1989, 206), a form or forum for drives and affects to be bound to this primal syntax enacted through transference on the level of the imaginary. This is precisely the operation that Kristeva associates with an identification with the imaginary father, an identification that begins with the simple yet profound postulation that “meaning exists.” As we have seen, the move away from the meaninglessness and loss that result from the necessary separation from the maternal body is supported by the second facet of the paternal function, the imaginary loving third, which provides compensation for the loss and gives meaning to abjection, melancholy and asymbolia. The postulation of meaning inherent in forgiveness evokes this loving third; there is no meaning (strictly speaking) without the third and no third without meaning. As Kristeva says “whoever is in the realm of forgiveness—who forgives and who accepts forgiveness—is capable of identifying with a loving father, an imaginary father, with whom, consequently, he is ready to be reconciled, with a new symbolic law in mind” (1989, 207). This secular form of forgiveness takes place between bodies for whom communication is a form of transference or a transfer of affects rather than symbolic. In Intimate Revolt, Kristeva insists that the way in which interpretation, specifically analytic interpretation, gives meaning as a form of pardon (par-don, through-gift) “has nothing to do with ‘explication’ and ‘communication’ between two consciousnesses. On the contrary, this par-don draws it efficacy from reuniting with affect through metaphorical and metonymical rifts in discourse” (2002, 41). Forgiveness, then, takes place on the level of the semiotic; it is not the result of intersubjectivity. This is why and how forgiveness is linked to the acquisition of language itself: in the beginning language is acquired through the imitation or reduplication of the patterns of affect in the speech of the other rather than through the imitation of symbols or codes. Imaginary patterns and forms give shape to the semiotic rhythms, tones and gestures and thereby enable the transition from the realm of drives and needs into the realm of desire and demands.

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Forgiveness gives meaning: the don of par-don is the gift of meaning. Kristeva identifies this meaning giving activity with interpretation within analysis. But this reactivation of meaning in analytic interpretation is merely a repetition or repair of primary narcissism or the primary identification with the loving third, which is to say with meaning itself. For Kristeva psychoanalysis moves the discourse of guilt and forgiveness away from Christian discourse and towards “an opening of psychical space toward an always possible re-mission, re-structuring, re-manence, re-volt” (2002, 41). Revolt as return, then, is precisely a return to the identification with the third or meaning that makes creativity possible, not to mention life worth living. Forgiveness enables revolt by supporting the transfer of affects and drives—the unconscious—into language. This transfer takes place in between two bodies engaging in dialogue, in the broadest sense of the term. So, although forgiveness is not the product of intersubjectivity or one consciousness forgiving the other, it is dialogic in the sense that it happens between two bodies in dialogue, two bodies mediated by a third—their means of communication— which gives them meaning. Kristeva describes forgiveness as the “coming of the unconscious to consciousness in transference” (2002, 29). Transference gives pardon; it is not given by another: “Re-mission [Forgiveness] and re-birth are thus acquired through the putting into words of the unconscious; they are acquired by giving conscious and unconscious meaning to what did not have any—for it is precisely this absence of meaning that was experienced as ill-being. Pardon is not given to me by another. I pardon myself with the help of another (the analyst), by relying on his [or her] interpretation and on his [or her] silence (on his [or her] love) in order to make sense of the senselessness troubling me” (2002, 29). In addition, transference is bodily and not intellectual. So, although forgiveness as the support for revolt and creativity comes through a dialogic relationship with another, the referents of signification are irrelevant to the transference. This is to say that referential meaning is supported by semiotic meaning or nonsense that makes sense of sensation itself. In other words, the bodily exchange or transfer of affect makes it possible for us to live within language. The intellectual and the syntactical are supported by affective and preverbal bodily drive force. As Kristeva says, “To give meaning does not mean ‘to intellectualize’, ‘to understand’, or ‘to master’. Alongside these logical operations, and in addition to them, the words . . . actualize preverbal significances, instinctual impulses, affects . . . the ‘semiotic.’ These preverbal significances allow complex intraverbal experiences to be brought to the other; they help him to pardon, to transfer” (2002, 29). The type of meaning given in for-giveness is beyond or before intellection, understanding, or judgment. It is the very meaning of life that is created by bringing the body into language. Experience can be brought, or given, to the other only through the

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semiotic realm of signification. It is the fluidity of the semiotic that allows bodies to speak to and of one another. What makes our experience human is that semiotic fluidity is structured by the syntaxes of signifying systems, which we encounter through the other.

From Forgiveness to Responsivity Only by virtue of a responsive other can we belong to the social and ultimately to the human race. As I tried to show in Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, subjectivity itself is born out of, and dependent upon, responsivity (Oliver, 2001). Subjectivity is dependent upon an addressee and the ability to address oneself to another. The forgiveness that Kristeva describes as essential to revolt and creativity—essential to subjectivity itself—is dependent upon responsivity. Without an addressee and the ability to address oneself to another, we end up with depressive “extraterrestrials” longing for love. As Kristeva says, “it is possible to forgive ourselves by releasing, thanks to someone who hears us, our lack or our wound to an ideal order to which we are sure we belong—and we are now protected against depression” (1989, 216). It is the other’s responsivity that releases our profound sorrow and guilt in relation to the maternal body to whom we owe our lives. The other’s responsivity creates the loving third—the meaning of signification itself— that allows us to communicate through, not in spite of, the distance between our bodies. Language/meaning becomes the third that mediates so that we can have relationships, so that we can make sense of our affects. The loving third created through responsivity enables us to find a home in language. Language is the house of Being and the home of man, as Heidegger says, only if human beings belong to the full meaning of signification that includes both referential meaning and the affective or semiotic meaning that exceeds it. We belong to the ideal order that is signification only if our affects, our bodies, our drives, belong to this order. Our sense of belonging depends on the movement of affects/drives into words, which is psychoanalytic parlance is called sublimation. Moving out of this analysis of the imaginary father, forgiveness, and revolt, it becomes possible to talk about the need for social support for subjectivity or agency. The identification with the imaginary father becomes an identification with the agency of meaning itself. This identification is possible only if the fledgling subject finds itself within that meaning, such that it can belong to the realm of meaning and signification. If there is no loving third, if there is only the law or prohibition, then the affective transfer from drives to words is short-circuited and the result is at best a depressive subjectivity whose agency is impaired. Subjectivity’s need for social support signals the

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importance of subject position in the very development of subjectivity, agency, and the entrance into signification. In Witnessing (2001), I developed a notion of subjectivity as the necessary tension between subjectivity, which is enabled by the structure of responsivity, and subject position, the social and historical context within which subjectivity develops. One’s social or subject position has much to do with whether or not the operations of the loving third are possible and/or successful. What Kristeva calls the loving imaginary father, the place where needs and demands, and maternal and paternal functions meet, can be seen as the place where subjectivity and subject position meet. The tension between needs and demands, between maternal and paternal, is the tension between subjectivity defined as the structure of infinite response and subject position defined as finite social position. This tension guarantees the opening of psychic space and the infinite revolutions that sustain it by at once maintaining the distance between body and language, thing and word, and at the same time constantly and necessarily traversing that distance by bringing the body, particularly the maternal body, back into language and incessantly moving back and forth between the realms of sensation and signification until negativity becomes positive creativity and abjection, melancholy and lack give way to sublimation, belonging, or what we call love. Love is our compensation for being speaking beings.

Works Cited Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1984. Revolution in poetic language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1987. Tales of love. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1989. Black sun: Depression and melancholy. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1995. New maladies of the soul. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2000. The sense and non-sense of revolt. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2001. Feminine genius. Vol. 1. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. Intimate revolt: The powers and limits of psychoanalysis, Vol 2. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Oliver, Kelly. 2001. Witnessing: Beyond recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2002. Psychic space and social melancholy. In Between the psyche and the social: Psychoanalytic social theory, ed. Kelly Oliver and Steve Edwin. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2004. The Colonization of psychic space: Toward a psychoanalytic social theory of oppression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

PART II AFFECT, COMMUNITY, POLITICS

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CHAPTER 5

The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation

SARA AHMED Recognition of otherness is a right and a duty for everyone, French people as well as foreigners, and it is reasonable to ask foreigners to recognize and respect the strangeness of those who welcome them. —Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism

Kristeva teaches us that we cannot think of the question of national identity—of what it means to be in a nation and to have a nationality—without reference to the psychic origins of individuals and their biographies, memories, and families (1993, 31). Such origins are not available to consciousness in the present; they involve “unconscious determinations” (50). As such, her work suggests that national identity needs to be understood through the critical lens of psychoanalysis. The nation is already haunted by strangers, just as the subject is already haunted by “the stranger within,” as another way of describing “the unconscious.” But what is the relation between the story of the subject and the emergence of national identity in her work? Is the subject like the nation insofar as it requires differentiation from strangers, a differentiation that paradoxically renders strangers within rather than without identity? In this chapter, I argue that we need to consider the relation between the forming of the subject and the nation as metonymic as well as metaphoric, as involving the proximity or contact between bodies. That is, rather than considering the stories of subject and nation as corresponding to each other, I will argue that it is how bodies come into contact with other bodies that allows the nation as a collective body to emerge. These forms of contact involve affective readings that differentiate between the bodies of 95

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others in terms of who is a host—the body-at-home who receives others— and who is a stranger. Indeed, my chapter shows how the deconstruction of the host/stranger opposition requires not that we distribute strangerness to everyone (we are all strangers with an equal duty to recognize others as strangers), but that we recognize how strangerness is already unevenly distributed. This uneven distribution reminds us that “who” gets constructed as the host who welcomes the stranger is an effect of relations of power that cannot simply be willed away by the “good will” of the nation, or the national subject. My argument will be indebted to Kristeva’s work on the role of affects (such as disgust) in boundary formation, at the same time as it challenges some of her conclusions about the logic of nationhood as esprit general. I will begin by examining Kristeva’s work on nations and strangers. I will then show how a rereading of her earlier reflections on abjection might allow us to find another way of thinking about the alignments between individual and national bodies, and how such alignments effect what I call “the skin of the community.” And finally, I will offer some reflections on how thinking about the metonymic nature of affect might allow us to reread Kristeva’s model of the nation and to respond differently to the figure of the Muslim woman, as a figure that haunts Kristeva’s more recent work.

Nations and Strangers In Nations without Nationalism (1993), Kristeva asks us to think again. She asks us to think, and to think carefully, by suggesting that a crisis of nationality might not be found where we expect to find it: in the idea of the nation. Hence she seeks to call into a question the politics of nationalism by returning to rather than abandoning, “the idea of the nation.” Returning to some of her powerful arguments in Strangers to Ourselves (1991), Kristeva suggests that nationalism is violent precisely because it forgets how hosts are also strangers and how strangerness henceforth cannot be transformed into a property or characteristic of some bodies and not others. The stranger hence is “me,” as well as “you,” is already part of us, as well as them, and cannot as such be expelled or relegated to the outside. Given that the stranger is already here and has been here from the beginning, the nation does not require violence towards strangers, as strangers are part of the nation and are part of the story of its coming into being as a transitional object. The particularity of strangers is both respected and absorbed into the nation rather than threatening its integrity (1993, 41).1 Indeed, the nation is an effect of the proximity of strangers, rather than the origin of their displacement or exclusion from civic life. Kristeva, in making this argument, is responding to the crisis both in French national identity, and to the question of what it means to be

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European. She asks us to avoid any simple opposition between a politics of nationalism and one that “gives up” on the very idea of the nation, and all that has become attached to that idea. An example of giving up, Kristeva suggests, would be the elevation of difference into a value that was posed against the nation, expressed in the language of the rights of strangers and foreigners to refuse integration into a larger national community (37–38). That is, she asks us, speaking as a cosmopolitan, to separate out nationalism from the idea of the nation, whilst critiquing (somewhat obliquely) any liberal celebration of difference as a value in its own right. The liberal discourse, she suggests, lets go of the promise of the nation as a transitional object tied to a history of freedom and rights. Hence the right of the stranger and foreigner is not the right to refuse integration, but rather the right to integration or to participate in the hope or promise of the nation (47). Kristeva’s argument suggests we will be giving up too much if we give up the nation. What kind of thinking is the thinking that this thinks? The national idea—drawn from Montesquieu’s notion of the esprit general—belongs to no-body in particular, but exists in its abstraction, as a mystical promise for all those who inhabit the nation, a promise that is also a detour to somewhere else that is unimaginable in the present (Kristeva 1993, 41). What interests me here is how the argument exercises an opposition between a politics of empty universality and a politics of concrete difference. Take the following quote, which is noticeably very difficult to read in this translation: First there is the interior impact of immigration, which often makes it feel as though it had to give up traditional values, including the values of freedom and culture that were obtained at the cost of long and painful struggles (why accept [that daughters of Maghrebin immigrants wear] the Muslim scarf [to school]). (36) The bracketed sentence evokes the figure of the “veiled woman” who comes into play as a figure that challenges the idea of the nation. But what the figure challenges is not simply the idea of the nation, but the values of freedom and culture. Hence, in bracketed form, she becomes a sign of the absence of freedom that betrays the idea of the nation. She becomes a symbol of what the nation must give up to be itself, a discourse that would require her unveiling in order to fulfil the promise of freedom and culture. It is not surprising that Kristeva poses the following clearly rhetorical question: “Is it possible that the ‘abstract’ advantages of French universalism may prove to be superior to the ‘concrete’ benefits of the Muslim scarf?” (47). Kristeva implies that the right to wear the scarf (with its multiple meanings) may give Muslim women less than the rights afforded by entry into the abstraction of

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the idea of the nation. Modernity is understood as an empty form of universalism, one that does not take the shape of particular bodies. As such, Kristeva suggests that modernity can allow others into its community of strangers as long as they give up the visible signs of their concrete difference. But we must read more closely. For the argument moves from the national idea to a national ideal via an analogy with the Ego-ideal. The Muslim scarf is not only “not” the idea of freedom “won” as the freedom of the nation, but it also challenges the image the nation has of itself: “That involves a breach of the national image and it corresponds, on the individual level, to the good image of itself that the child makes up with the help of the Ego-ideal and the parental superego” (Kristeva 1993, 37). The trauma of the Muslim scarf for the French nation is like the trauma of “failing” to live up to the Ego-ideal, an ideal that depends on love and identification with the parent. Hence, the nation becomes depressed when it is faced with the scarf and this shame and depression is what is used by the right wing discourse of anti-immigration: “Le Pen’s nationalism takes advantage of such depression” (37). The implication is that the task of the radical intellectual might not be to celebrate the right to the scarf as this would sustain the psychic conditions that enable anti-immigration and nationalism to flourish as a politics. However, Kristeva does not make this argument explicitly. Instead, she suggests that “we must not be ashamed of European and particularly French culture” (37). First, the presence of the veiled Other causes the depression and shame of not living up to the national ideal. Second, the imperative is not to feel shame about French culture. In other words, the juxtaposition of these two arguments implies that “the Muslim wish to join the French community” might also depend on the elimination of the source of national shame: the concrete difference made visible by the veil itself.2 The argument suggests that by eliminating the veil, which stands in for concrete difference, the abstract national idea can be returned to an ideal that is enlarged by the appearance of others. Under such conditions, national pride or love, rather than shame and depression, would be possible, and it would not depend on aggression towards others. However, the argument that the national idea is abstract (and the difference of the Muslim woman is concrete) breaks down. The intimacy of the national idea with an ideal image suggests the national idea takes the shape of a particular kind of body, which is assumed in its “freedom” to be unmarked. The ideal is an approximation of an image of “Frenchness,” as an ideal that is deferred, but which nevertheless depends on being inhabitable by some bodies rather than others. The Muslim woman must give up her concrete difference in the interests of the national ideal, in which freedom takes the form of a particular kind of body (a particularity that is given value insofar as it is represented as abstract-able or detach-able from particular bodies).

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Such an ideal is not positively embodied by any person: it is not a positive value in that sense. Rather, it accrues value through its exchange, an exchange that is determined precisely by the capacity of some bodies to inhabit the national body, to be recognizable as living up to the national ideal and as passing through the ideal. But other bodies, those that cannot be recognized in the abstraction of the unmarked, cannot accrue value, and become blockages in the economy; they cannot pass as French, or pass their way into the community. The veil, in blocking the economy of the national ideal, is represented as a betrayal of not only the nation, but also of freedom and culture itself (as the freedom to move and acquire value). Hence the veil cannot be integrated into the national ideal—as part of the story of the nation as transitional object—and stands for an unassimilable difference. Kristeva’s argument that, “Recognition of otherness is a right and a duty for everyone, French people as well as foreigners, and it is reasonable to ask foreigners to recognize and respect the strangeness of those who welcome them”(1993, 31), must be read with caution. Here, strangerness is universalized as belonging to everyone and its recognition embraced as everyone’s duty. But as we have seen, some others are recognized as stranger than others and as already not belonging to the nation in the concreteness of their difference. The idea that we are all strangers forgets the politics of this differentiation, at the same time as it exercises it, in the prior construction of the French as hosts. By implication, “wearing the Muslim scarf” involves not recognizing the strangeness of the hosts, because it refuses to transform strangeness into an abstract value that can be worn by anyone (it reminds the hosts of a difference they cannot wear). Foreigners are first positioned differently as foreigners (reliant on the hospitality of the hosts) and then asked to forget that difference both in how they encounter the nation (as a community of strangers) and how they present themselves (giving up the concreteness of their difference, which is readable only as a “sign” of failing the national ideal). Such a model performs a certain injustice to those others whose difference is read as a betrayal of the promise of the nation and the freedom of hosts to be strangers.

Affecting Borders But rather than ending here, by noting an injustice, I want us to think again. I want us to think about how the story of the national ideal might be told differently. We can reread Kristeva’s account of the national ideal, by complicating how the story of the subject relates to the story of the nation. Rather than defining that relation as a form of analogy or correspondence, I want to suggest that it also takes the form of metonymy. More specifically, the work

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of metonymy is not just about the contiguity between signs, but about how that contiguity is affective or even dependent on emotional forms of attachment. Within Kristeva’s model of nationhood, emotions are ever present: whether in the passionate attachments to nationhood, or in the shame and pride of failing or living up to the national ideal. Here, I want to think about the role of emotion in aligning individual and collective, and the way in which such emotions do not come from either the inside (psyche) or the outside (collective), but allow for the very surfacing of bodies and collectives. In making such claims, I will draw on Kristeva’s earlier work, Powers of Horror (1982). In the first instance, we can consider the relationship between movement and attachment implicit in emotion. The word “emotion” comes from the Latin, emovere, suggesting “to be moved, to be moved out.” So emotions are what move us. But emotions are also about attachments, about what connects us to this or that. The relationship between movement and attachment is instructive. What moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place. Emotion may function as a contingent attachment to the world (Sartre 1969, 333, emphasis added). The word “contingency” has the same root in Latin as the word “contact” (Latin: contingere: com-, tangere, to touch). Contingency is linked then to metonymy and proximity, to getting close enough to both touch another and to be moved by another. So what attaches us, what connects us to this or that place, or to this or that other, such that we cannot stay removed from this other, is also what moves us, or what affects us such that we are no longer in the same place. Hence movement does not cut the body off from the “where” of its inhabitance, but connects bodies to other bodies—indeed, attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others. Emotions then are bound up with how we inhabit the world “with” others. Since emotions are, in the phenomenological sense, always intentional, and are “directed” towards an object or other (however imaginary), then emotions are precisely about the intimacy of the “with”; they are about the intimate relationship between selves, objects and others. Such intensifications of feeling create the very effect of the distinction between inside and outside, or between the individual and the collective, which allows the “with” to be felt in the first place. Take for instance the sensation of pain. The affectivity of pain is crucial to the forming of the body as both a material and lived entity. In The Ego and the Id, Freud suggests that the ego is “first and foremost a bodily ego” (1964, 26). Crucially, the formation of the bodily ego is bound up with the surface: “it is not merely a surface entity, but itself is the projection of a surface” (26). Freud suggests that the process of establishing the surface depends on the experience of bodily sensations such as pain. Pain is described as a “thing intermediate between internal and external percep-

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tions even when its source is in the external world” (23, emphasis added). It is through experiences such as pain that we come to have a sense of our skin as bodily surface, as something that keeps us apart from others, but as something that also mediates the relationship between internal or external, or inside and outside. However, it is not that pain causes the forming of the surface. Such a reading would ontologize pain (and indeed sensation more broadly) as that which “drives” being itself. Rather, it is through the flow of sensations and feelings that become conscious as pain and pleasure that different surfaces are established. For example, say I stub my toe on the table. The impression of the table is one of negation; it leaves its trace on the surface of my skin and I respond with the appropriate “ouch” and move away, swearing. It is through such painful encounters between this body and other objects, which included other bodies, that “surfaces” are felt as “being there” in the first place. To be more precise, the impression of a surface is an effect of such intensifications of feeling. I become aware of my body as having a surface only in the event of feeling discomfort (prickly sensations, cramps), that become transformed into pain through an act of reading and recognition (“it hurts!”), which is also a judgment (“it is bad!”). This transformation of sensations into an emotion might also lead to moving my body away from what I feel has caused the pain. That is, the transformation affected by recognizing a sensation as painful (from “it hurts” to “it is bad” to “move away”) also involves the reconstitution of bodily space. In this instance, having felt the surface as hurtful, I move my toe away from its proximity to the surface of the table. As I move away, the pain begins to recede. Such an argument suggests an intimate relationship between what Judith Butler has called materialisation—“the effect of boundary, fixity and surface” (1993, 9)—and what I would call intensification. It is through the intensification of feeling that bodies and worlds materialize and take shape, or that the effect of surface, boundary and fixity is produced. What this argument suggests is that feelings are not about the inside getting out or the outside getting in, but that they affect the very distinction between inside and outside in the first place.3 Clearly, to say that feelings are crucial to the forming of surfaces and borders, is also to suggest that what makes those borders also unmakes them. In other words, what separates us from others also connects us to others. This paradox is clear if we think of the skin surface itself, as that which appears to contain us, but as where others impress upon us. This contradictory function of skin begins to make sense if we unlearn the assumption that the skin is simply already there, but begin to think of the skin as a surface that is felt only in the event of being “impressed upon” in the encounters we have with others. Crucially, such an argument follows from Kristeva’s own work, which shows us how affect calls into question the integrity of the subject, or how

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affect is involved in the very making of boundaries. In Powers of Horror, for example, Kristeva suggests that abjection, and the affectivity of disgust, both make and unmake the border between self and other. Abjection names that feeling of sickness caused by the proximity of an object that is already designated as disgusting, a sickness that may involve gagging or pulling away.4 Kristeva suggests that with abjection, “It is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one’s own clean self, but scraped and transparent, invisible or taught, gave way before the dejection of its contents” (1982, 53, emphasis added). It is not that what is abject is what has got inside from the outside; the abject turns us inside out as well as the outside in. Hence, Kristeva suggests that, in abjection, borders become transformed into objects (4). The relationship between abjection and the transformations of borders into objects is complex. On the one hand, it is the transformation of borders into objects that is sickening (like the skin that forms on milk). On the other, the border is transformed into an object precisely as an effect of disgust (for example, as an effect of vomiting). Kristeva shows us that the ambiguity relates to the very necessity of designating that which is threatening: borders need to be threatened in order to be maintained, and part of the process of “maintenance-through-transgression” involves the very appearance of border objects. Border objects are hence disgusting, while disgust engenders border objects. As a result, disgust involves a time lag as well as being generative or futural; it does not so much make borders (out of nothing), but responds to their making in their maintenance, through a kind of reconfirmation of their necessity. So the subject feels an object to be disgusting (a perception that relies on a history that comes before the encounter) and expels the object and then, through expelling it, finds it to be all the more disgusting. The expulsion itself becomes the truth of the reading of the object. Hence there is a truth in the apparently banal statement that border objects are disgusting, while disgust engenders border objects. Is there a route out of this circular economy or is the circularity part of the lure of abjection itself? The border objects that Kristeva describes as polluting include excrement and menstrual blood: the former “stands for the danger issuing from identity” and the latter “stands for the danger to identity that issues from without” (1982, 71). We need to read these sentences carefully. What is noticeable is that such matter (which is transformed into an object through abjection) functions as a substitute or metaphor for danger, rather than being a danger in and of itself: it “stands for” and hence “stands in for” internal or external danger, as such. Abjection is reducible to matter only insofar as it is forgotten that “matter” matters as an object that is itself a substitute, as sign, for something else, which comes from somewhere else. This “somewhere else” opens up a gap in the loop of abjection; it suggests that what is disgusting

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travels down a chain of signification, bound up, in some way, with the very process of materialization. For Kristeva, this “somewhere else” relates to “the not”: the abject “is opposed to I” (1982, 1). Hence the abject is never about an object that appears before the subject; the abject does not reside in an object, as either its quality or matter. Rather objects become abject only insofar as they threaten the identity of the “subject,” of “who I am” or “who we are.” As such, the border object “stands in for” the threat of the “not” to the “I” or the threat that the “I” might become the “not.” But how do some objects become “stand ins” for this threat of the not? To answer this question, I suggest that we need to think about the relation between objects, rather than the relation between the subject and what is “not I” (that the object only stands in for). That is, I would suggest that objects come to matter not simply as stand ins, but rather in the very contact and proximity between objects. As I have already pointed out, the word “contact” is related to the word “contingency.” Is the object that disgusts “disgusting” because of its contact with other objects? It is not that an object is inherently disgusting, but that it becomes disgusting through its contact with other objects that have already, as it were, been designated as disgusting before an abject encounter has taken place. It is the dependency of disgust on contact or proximity that may explain its awkward temporality, the way it both lags behind and makes an object. Take the following quote: The term “disgust,” in its simplest sense, means something offensive to taste. It is curious how readily this feeling is excited by anything unusual in the appearance, odour or nature of our food. In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meal which I was eating . . . , and plainly showed disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear dirty. (Darwin 1904, 269) Why are, for example, native bodies felt to be disgusting in Darwin’s encounter? We could argue that it is through the disgust reaction to the indigenous body that the white body becomes bounded as apart. Disgust, in this sense, has a generative effect. At the very same time, the feeling that the proximity of this other is disgusting is dependent on past associations: in this case, between the Black body and dirt. The association between the two border objects is here very important: the indigenous body stands for dirt (it hence does not have to be dirty), only insofar as dirt is held in place as the border object. We could argue of course that dirt itself stands for something else; it is not in itself inherently disgusting, but comes to matter “as matter out of place” (Douglas 1995, 36). The deferral of disgust along a chain of

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possible connections is only halted given the very contingency of the association (the sticking) between dirt and indigenous body. Through sticking these two objects together (adherence), disgust allows the subject to recoil, as if from an object, even given the lack of an inherent quality to the object. It is this metonymic contact between objects that allows them to be felt to be disgusting as if that was a material or objective quality. As a result the slide of affect means that it does not come from a subject, nor an object, but involves the sociality of encounters, or the intensity of what it means to live with and by others, whereby “withness” involves the differentiation between others. In other words, the circulation or slide of affect has sticky effects, a stickiness that surfaces as skin as the surface of bodies.

The Skin of the Community How does an attention to the metonymic nature of affects such as disgust allow us to re-pose the question of the relation between the subject and the community, including the nation as imagined community? I want to suggest that affects and emotions work to align the subject and community in specific and determinate ways. This alignment does not take place through the subject simply inhabiting the skin of the community, rather the skin of the community is an effect of the alignment of the subject with some others and against other others. Emotions as responses to others do not respond the way they do because of the inherent characteristics of others. For example, we do not respond with love or hate simply because others are loveable or hateful.5 Rather, it is through affective encounters that objects and others are seen as having attributes, or certain characteristics, a perception and reading that may give the subject an identity that seems apart from some others, creating “the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface” (Butler 1993, 9). I want to build on this argument by suggesting that it is through moving towards and away from others or objects that individual bodies become aligned with some others and against other others, a form of alignment that temporarily “surfaces” as the skin of a community. Take the following quote from Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, which shows the crucial role of emotion to the formation of social and bodily space: The AA subway train to Harlem. I clutch my mother’s sleeve, her arms full of shopping bags, christmas-heavy. The wet smell of winter clothes, the train’s lurching. My mother spots an almost seat, pushes my little snow-suited body down. On one side of me a man reading a paper. On the other, a woman in a fur hat staring at me. Her mouth twitches as she stares and then her gaze drops down, pulling mine

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with it. Her leather-gloved hand plucks at the line where my new blue snowpants and her sleek fur coat meet. She jerks her coat close to her. I look. I do not see whatever terrible thing she is seeing on the seat between us—probably a roach. But she has communicated her horror to me. It must be something very bad from the way she’s looking, so I pull my snowsuit closer to me away from it, too. When I look up the woman is still staring at me, her nose holes and eyes huge. And suddenly I realize there is nothing crawling up the seat between us; it is me she doesn’t want her coat to touch. The fur brushes my face as she stands with a shudder and holds on to a strap in the speeding train. Born and bred a New York City child, I quickly slide over to make room for my mother to sit down. No word has been spoken. I’m afraid to say anything to my mother because I don’t know what I have done. I look at the side of my snow pants secretly. Is there something on them? Something’s going on here I do not understand, but I will never forget it. Her eyes. The flared nostrils. The hate. (1984, 147–48) In this encounter Audre Lorde ends with emotion; she ends with “the hate.” It is an encounter in which some-thing has passed, but something she fails to understand. What passes is hence not spoken; it is not a transparent form of communication. The sense that something is wrong is communicated, not through words, or even sounds that are voiced, but through the body of another, “her nose holes and eyes huge.” The encounter is played out on the body, and is played out with the emotions. This bodily encounter, while ending with “the hate”, also ends with the reconstitution of bodily space. The bodies that come together, that almost touch and comingle, slide away from each other, becoming relived in their apartness. The particular bodies that move apart allow the redefinition of social as well as bodily integrity. The emotion of hate aligns the particular white body with the bodily form of the community—the emotion functions to substantiate the threat of invasion and contamination in the dirty bodies of strangers. The gestures that allow the white body—as the body-at-home— to withdraw from the stranger’s body hence reduce that body to dirt, to “matter out of place” (Douglas 1995, 36), such that the stranger’s body is recognized as “the body out of place” (see Ahmed 2000, 39). Through such skin-to-skin encounters, bodies are both de-formed and re-formed; they take form through and against other bodily forms. In Audre Lorde’s narrative, her perception of the cause of the woman’s bodily gestures is a misperception that creates an object. The object—the roach—comes to stand for, or stand in for, the cause of the hate. The roach crawls up between them; the roach, as the carrier of dirt, divides the two

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bodies, forcing them to move apart. Audre pulls her snowsuit, “away from it too.” But the “it” that divides them is not the roach. Audre comes to realize that, “it is me she doesn’t want her coat to touch.” What the woman’s clothes must not touch is not a roach that crawls between them, but Audre herself. Audre becomes the “it” that stands between the possibility of their clothes touching. She becomes the roach—a border object in Kristeva’s sense—which threatens to crawl from one to the other: “I don’t know what I have done. I look at the side of my snow pants secretly. Is there something on them?” Here, the circulation of negative attachments brings others and objects into existence; the emotions of hate and disgust slide between different signs and objects whose existence is bound up with the negation of its travel. So Audre becomes the roach that is imagined as the cause of the woman’s “pulling away.” The transformation of this or that other into a border object is over-determined. It is not simply any body that becomes the border: particular histories are reopened in each encounter, such that some bodies are already read as more hateful and disgusting than other bodies. Histories are bound up with attachments precisely insofar as it is a question of what sticks, of what connections are lived as the most intense or intimate, as being closer to the skin. Such an encounter moves us both sideways (the sticky associations between dirt, the roach, the Black body) and forwards and backwards (the histories that are already in place that allow these associations and not others stick, and that allow them to surface in memory and writing). Importantly, the alignment of some bodies with some others and against others take place through the affecting of movement; bodies are dis-organized and re-organized as they face others who are already recognized as familiar or stranger. The organization of social and bodily space creates a border that is transformed into an object, as an effect of this intensification of feeling. So the white woman’s refusal to touch the Black child does not simply stand for the expulsion of Blackness from white social space, but actually re-forms that social space through the re-forming of the apartness of the white body. That is, the alignment between individual and collective bodies involves metonymy (contact and proximity between bodies and signs), rather than simply metaphor (to stand for or stand in for others). This is not to say that metaphoric substitutions are not important: the others, whom one approaches, or from whom one flees, may themselves stand in for other others, a relation of displacement that opens up the intercorporeal encounter to a larger sociality. At the same time, an other is also touched by other others—the Black body comes to be felt as Black through its proximity to other Black bodies—suggesting that the relationship between the particular and collective depends upon metonymic associations, as well as metaphoric substitutions. The black body of the child may be read as Black precisely insofar as “Blackness” has already accrued meanings, values, and associations over time, which make it readable

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as Black in the first place. Hence moving away from the Black body in hatred or disgust reopens a history of naming, in which the particular body is forced to stand for the collective, or by other others.6 Importantly, the re-forming of bodily and social space involves a process of making the skin crawl; the threat posed by the bodies of others to bodily and social integrity is registered on the skin. Or, to be more precise, the skin comes to be felt as a border through reading the impression of one surface upon another as a form of violence, where an other’s “impression” is felt as negation. The skin of the community is formed by the very process of moving towards and away from other bodies. Such a relation of proximity re-opens histories of contact between others that are affective insofar as they stick to the skin surface, or allow the surface to surface as an effect of “what sticks.”

Conclusion Whilst the differentiation of others through the processes of moving towards or away from those we recognize as strange or familiar has effects, those effects are temporary, and do not solidify into law. Indeed, we can think here about the ambivalence of emotion, by showing that positive and negative are not attributes of emotions or bodies, but are provisional readings and judgments of others that have powerful effects. The ambivalence of emotionality is bound up with the positing of an intimate relation between the I and the we. At one level, the I that declares itself as hating an other—who may be forced to stand for as well as by a group of others—comes into existence by also declaring its love for that which is threatened by this imagined other (the nation, the community and so on). But we also need to investigate the we as the very affect and effect of the attachment itself; such a subject becomes not only attached to a we, but the we is what is affected by the very attachment the subject has to itself and to its loved others. Hence in hating an other, this subject is also loving itself; hate structures the emotional life of narcissism as a fantastic investment in the continuation of the image of the self in the faces that together make up the we. The attachment to others seems to be divided as negative and positive (hate and love) precisely through imaging the faces of the community made up of other “me’s,” of others that are loved as if they were me. When Freud suggests in The Ego and the Id (1964), and Group Psychology (1922), that we identify with those we love, he went some way to addressing this relationship between subject formation and community. The subject is established by imitating the lost object of love; it is based on a principle of a likeness or resemblance, or of becoming alike. However, I would argue that the emotion of love does not pre-exist identification (just as hate does not

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pre-exist dis-identification); so it is not a question of identifying with those one loves and dis-identifying with those one hates. Rather, it is through forms of identification that align this subject with this other, that the character of the loved is produced as “likeness” in the first place. Thinking of identification as a form of alignment (to bring into line with oneself—the subject as “bringing into line”) also shows us how identifications involve dis-identification or an active “giving up” other possible identifications.7 That is, by aligning myself with some others, I am also aligning myself against other others. Such a “giving up” may also produce the character of the hated as “unlikeness.” What is at stake in the emotional intensities of love and hate is the production of the effect of likeness and unlikeness as characteristics that are assumed to belong to the bodies of others. If likeness is an affect and effect of identification, the unlikeness, or difference as a lack (of likeness), becomes an affect of forms of dis-identification that work to read the bodies of others. This separation of others into bodies that can be loved and hated is part of the work of emotion; it does not pre-exist emotion as its ground—“I love or hate them because they are like me, or not like me.” So emotions such as hate can work by providing evidence of the very antagonism they effect; we cite the work that it is doing in producing the characteristics of likeness and unlikeness when we show the reasons for its existence. The intimate labor of emotion involves the transformation of some others into unlikeness (not like me) and other others into likeness (like me) through the very process of moving towards and away from others. This model of the metonymic and contingent relation between the formation of the I and we might allow us to rethink the model of the national ideal and its opposition to the concrete difference of the veiled woman in Nations without Nationalism. I would follow Kristeva by arguing that the nation is an effect of how bodies move towards it. Or more precisely “the it” of “the nation” is produced as an effect of the movement of bodies and the direction of that movement—as a transitional object, it is an effect of such “towardness.” As a result, the promise of the nation is not an empty or abstract one that can then be simply filled and transformed by others. Rather, the nation is a concrete effect of how some bodies have moved towards and away from other bodies, a movement that works to create the very affect and effect of boundaries and borders, as well as allows the approximation of what we can now call the character of the nation (likeness). In Kristeva’s text, moving towards the abstract promise of the nation as esprit general requires moving away from the veiled woman, as a sign of a difference that cannot be inhabited by those who already inhabit the national ideal. This limitation shows how the ideal is not empty, but is already an effect of the privilege for some bodies to inhabit spaces as hosts (bodies-at-home), and hence to decide who gets let into the body of the

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nation, either through intentional acts of legislation or policy formation, or more everyday and inter-corporeal forms of encounter. The only way of undoing the privilege of such bodies-at-home is to open the community to those others precisely in a recognition of their failure to inhabit the national ideal. A politics of opening up the community cannot be achieved simply by saying “we are all strangers,” or by the good will of the national subject. We must acknowledge how others have already been recognized as stranger than other others, as border objects that have been incorporated and then expelled from the ideal of the community. At the same time, opening up the community does not mean unconditional love (differentiation has happened, and conditions will be made), and it does not exclude the ambivalence of affect by imagining we can negate negation (the gestures of moving away leave traces on the skin of others, as well as the skin that surfaces as community). Rather, opening the community to others means turning back or turning around, and moving towards those others we have passed and passed by, who have already been recognized as stranger than other others. It means starting again. This promise of new beginnings is the hope of postcoloniality, the hope that coloniality could be posted as we find another way of living with others. Such a hope is one that may require the pain of shedding dead skin—which means recognizing that old skins will have affects and effects—and the itchiness of the emergence of new skins. This is about hope, but it is also about the labor of love, of working to find better ways of inhabiting the world with others. For the skin of communities could be differently formed, as the forms they take have yet to be formed.

Notes 1. For an exploration of strangerness as within the subject and nation, see also Kristeva (1991). 2. We might note how this narrative constructs the French as “not Muslim” and the Muslims as “not French,” at the same time as it transforms migration into a wish to inhabit “the not.” Hence, hospitality is constructed as opening the nation to others (the not) only insofar as they give up “the not,” so becoming us while “not” being us. We might note here that the idea of “the nation” as hospitality is problematic given the presumption that “we” are the “hosts,” which makes others dependent on our “good will,” or “generosity.” 3. While the former notion of emotions as “the inside getting outside” might be familiar, given how emotions tend to psychologized, the notion of emotions as “the outside getting in “might seem rather surprising. But this model is clear in some of the early sociological work on emotions. For example, Durkheim considers the rise of emotion in crowds, suggesting that the “great movements” of feeling, “do not originate in

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any of the particular individual consciousness,” but come from “without.” Rather than emotions being understood as coming from within and moving outwards, emotions are instead assumed to come from without and move inward. In contrast, I argue that emotions work to create the very distinction between the inside and the outside, and that this separation takes place through the very movement engendered by responding to others and objects (see Durkheim 1966, 4). 4. We might certainly reflect upon the way in which disgust, as an intense bodily feeling of being sickened, is always directed towards an object. One does not feel disgust in the abstract; one feels disgusted by something in which the thing itself seems to repel us. Or as William Miller puts it, “Disgust is a feeling about something and in response to something, not just raw unattached feeling” (see Miller 1997, 8). So the assumption that disgust can be explained by the nature of things is not incidental. Disgust seems to be about the object, such that one’s feelings of sickness become attributed to the object (“I feel sick, you have sickened me, you are sickening”). As a bodily feeling that is directed towards an object, we need to account for how it is that the object of disgust impresses upon us in this way, as if the object contained the truth of our own response to it. 5. As Descartes argues, the objects that move us do not excite diverse passions because they are diverse, but because of the diverse ways in which they may harm or help us (see Descartes 1973, 357). 6. For an extension of this argument, see Ahmed (2001, 345–65). 7. Judith Butler also examines the role of repudiation in love and identification. Her argument reflects on the foreclosure of grief for the loss of the homosexual love object within the heterosexual economy (see Butler 1997).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. London: Routledge. ———. 2001. The organisation of hate. Law and Critique 12: 345–65. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” New York: Routledge. ———. 1997. The psychic life of power. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1904. The expression of emotions in man and animals. London: John Munes. Descartes, René. 1973. The philosophical work of Descartes. Trans. E. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Douglas, M. 1995. Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge.

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Durkheim, E. 1966. Rules of sociological method. New York: Free Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1922. Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. Trans. J. Strachey. London: International Psychoanalytical Press. ———. 1964. The ego and the id. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 19. Trans J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider. London: Crossing Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1991. Strangers to ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. ———. 1993. Nations without Nationalism. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Miller, W. 1997. An anatomy of disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1969. Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology. Trans. H. E. Barnes. London: Methuen.

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CHAPTER 6

Bearing Witness in the Polis: Kristeva, Arendt, and the Space of Appearance

¨LLE MCAFEE NOE

Conventional political understanding of political discourse sharply distinguishes between the public and the private, culture and nature, thought and bodies. But this conventional understanding cannot make sense of the kinds of political witnessing that go on today, that indeed have gone on for a century. In times of trouble, people testify in public to the wrongs that have afflicted their entire beings, public and private, psyche and soma. Note the advent of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), convened in places from South Africa to Haiti, where speakers testify to wrongs done to themselves and their loved ones.1 In fact, in such political discourse, these distinctions between what is properly private and what is public begin to disintegrate.2 Public testimonies not only help heal the speakers’ own psyches they help heal a nation. By speaking in public of the devastating crimes committed, often clandestinely, that robbed victims of their humanity, these speakers begin to restore their own and their nation’s soul, especially the public space and public being of the nation. By attending to this kind of public talk, we can recall, through a new framework, the old feminist mantra: the personal becomes political. Julia Kristeva is one of the few philosophers of our day to provide a language for thinking about how the personal becomes political, namely, how affective and somatic forces enter into language and culture. While it is true that, since Nietzsche, most every Marxist, pragmatic, and Wittgensteinian account of language has considered how subterranean forces make their way into public discourse, these accounts generally tend to the dynamics among people (e.g., historical, productive, and cultural ones) rather than the dynamics within them.3 Kristeva (ever indebted to Freud, Klein, and Lacan) focuses 113

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on how inner tumults make themselves felt in our shared language and world. Kristeva’s recent engagement with Hannah Arendt suggests how affective forces might enter into and transform political space.4 While Kristeva is curiously silent on how her own theory of language can supplement Arendt’s philosophy of the public sphere, her engagement resurrects the Aristotelian idea that what makes human beings political animals is language. As Aristotle writes in the Politics, “Nature makes nothing pointlessly, as we say, and no animal has speech except a human being. . . . Speech is for making clear what is beneficial or harmful, and hence also what is just or unjust. For it is peculiar to human beings, in comparison to the other animals, that they alone have perception of what is good or bad, just or unjust, and the rest. And it is community in these that makes a household and a city-state” (1253a, 7–18). In other words, human beings possess not only the ability to discern but to talk, to share their inner world in public and so to create a public space, what Arendt calls a “space of appearance.” In Arendt’s view, which is thoroughly Aristotelian, if people do not take part in this space of appearance, then they haven’t actualized their potential to be political beings. Following Aristotle, Arendt calls on people to enter this plural world. But what happens when people are denied entrance—when their title as citizens is revoked, not simply by overt disenfranchisement but through trauma and terror, through political crimes of torture, rape, and other humiliations, or through everyday but debilitating instances of racism?5 As humanity has too often witnessed, brutal regimes systematically destroy their victims’ sense of dignity, humanity, and public worth, which are all necessary to effective agency as a citizen. They strip victims of their identity as agents in a common world with others. They often push victims back to the recesses of a presymbolic, mute existence. They deprive people of dignity and humanity, denying subjects a sense of the right to participate in a common world. When those who have been muted begin to speak in the presence of others, they begin to recreate their mental and affective world with its geography that orients them to others in the community. In this chapter, I use Kristeva’s work on Arendt as an opportunity to explore how testimonies in the public sphere can transform political communities trying to recover from regimes of terror. My chapter examines how Kristeva’s ideas can be used to understand the political dynamics of bearing witness in the public sphere. When I say witness, I draw on the meanings Kelly Oliver has given the term in her book, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (2001). Oliver distinguishes eye witnessing, with its notions of evidence gathered through vision, from bearing witness, which usually offers a testimony of something that cannot be seen. Oliver draws on this second meaning to develop a theory of subjectivity radically different from the Hegelian model of recognition—and different as well from most Western theories of how subjectivity arises. The usual,

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Hegelian model of subjectivity arising from recognition takes for granted that recognition is conferred by one person onto another. This model supposes that the social realm is hierarchical and antagonistic. Oliver notes that many social theorists advocating for those who have been marginalized or demeaned accept the recognition model and try to wrest recognition from those in power. Oliver wants to do something else entirely: to offer instead a model of subjectivity that develops through witnessing. In her view, subjectivity can be achieved through bearing witness to one’s own humanity, sometimes by voicing the pain that is inflicted whenever subjectivity is denied. For example, a victim of torture has suffered more than pain; she has suffered being treated as less than human. Her torturer will often humiliate her until she is too wounded to speak of what has occurred. If the survivor escapes her torturer, she will have to do more than heal her physical wounds. In order to recover her humanity she will need to bear witness to the way in which her humanity and subjectivity had been violated. Thus, at the very moment that she is voicing how it had been lost, she will performatively recreate her own subjectivity. Oliver develops this conception of witnessing for two reasons: (1) to address the needs of those who have been denied subjectivity and (2) to offer another way of thinking about the social realm. Here I use it for a third purpose: to reconsider the functions and purposes of testimonies or narratives proffered in the public sphere, in what Arendt calls the space of appearance. Oliver draws on Kristeva to develop her theory of witnessing. A key term here is Kristeva’s notion of psychic space. In Tales of Love (1987), she describes it as an innerness, a “space of psychic solitude” (377). In New Maladies of the Soul (1995), she argues that without psychic space, we fall prey to all the anomie and emptiness that plague people in modern consumer societies. When people lack any meaningful psychic life (what Arendt would simply call the ability to think), they seek meaning in the lures of consumer society: such as drugs, alcohol, consumer goods, images, in short, borrowing from Guy Debord, “the society of the spectacle.” Alternatively, by developing and nurturing our imaginative capacities—our abilities to create psychic space and meaning where otherwise there might be none—we can find meaning and transform our lives. Oliver points to the importance Kristeva places on imagination, which gives us access to our bodies, ourselves, and other people and allows us to represent experience. Taking Kristeva a step further, Oliver argues that this imagination “is inaugurated and nourished through relations with others” (2001, 71). This is to say that we are psychically alive by virtue of our relations. And without acknowledging our fundamental ethical dependence on otherness through which we become ourselves, we lose our

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innovative capacities. Without imagination, that divine space created between people, we lose our ability to represent our experience. We lose our ability to find meaning in life. (71–72) Going beyond Kristeva, Oliver tranforms the notion of psychic space from being subjective to intersubjective. In Oliver’s view, bearing witness to trauma helps recreate this intersubjective psychic space. Oliver focuses on the way that bearing witness, telling stories, and making meaning can, in intersubjective space, change individual lives. She is not thinking about this transformation occurring at the level of the polis. But imagine that it does—imagine that narrative testimonies could transform communities. Such an imagination means, I think, conceiving psychic space even more broadly as a mental and affective world with a geography that orients oneself to others in a community. In this view, psychic space is my imaginative placement of myself in a world of others. This view, I think, overcomes some of the individualistic tendencies in Kristeva’s thinking. Even though Kristeva argues that subjectivity is constituted dynamically by heterogeneous processes, the subject seems always to be by herself. She is a speaking being creating herself. Oliver’s work moves the Kristevan subject from an almost solipsistic inner zone to a space in which one is coming to be (or reclaiming herself) in the company of others. When we see witnessing as a political enterprise, we can go even further, seeing the way that bearing witness in a polis can transform political communities. It might seem wrong to call for bearing witness as an imaginative transformation in settings such as Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, where one might hope that mimesis and accuracy would reign. Let me note here that an imaginative transformation is not a transformation of the truth, but the telling of a truth that can transform communities. Some call such truths “narrative truths” as opposed to “microscopic” or “forensic” truth (Boraine 2000, 152). In the TRC process, notes André du Toit, “the relevant sense of justice, which is intimately connected with that of truth as acknowledgment, is that of justice as recognition” (2000, 136). This process requires settings in which victims tell their own stories. “What is at stake when victims are enabled to ‘tell their own stories’ is not just the specific factual statements, but the right of framing them from their own perspectives and being recognized as legitimate sources of truth with claims to rights and justice” (du Toit 2000, 136). TRC theorists repeatedly note that such story telling is an integral part of the process towards reconciliation. As Martha Minow writes: Bearing witness to their deaths, disabilities, and lost hopes; considering what could help those who survived to return to living; and redressing the dehumanization that both presages and endures after

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mass violence: each of these aspirations calls for a process that focuses on the voices and lives of real individuals. (2000, 254) While many theorists link bearing witness to social transformation, little attention has been paid to how these personal testimonies draw on affective and somatic forces to transform the political. Martha Minow comes close: “the trauma story is transformed as testimony from a telling about shame and humiliation to a portrayal of dignity and virtue; by speaking of trauma, survivors regain lost worlds and lost selves” (Minow 2000, 243). Kristeva’s work can take us even closer. In a broad sense, both Kristeva and Hannah Arendt are concerned with the human condition. In her book by that title, Arendt argues that human beings are primarily, as Aristotle thought, political beings who are best realized or actualized in the public sphere, the space of appearance where their words and deeds can be memorialized via other people’s recordings. In the private sphere of the oikos or household, human beings are mired in the realm of necessity, in the repetitive tasks needed to ensure the survival of the species. In the household, there is no history, no actions worth commemorating, no freedom, no politics. It is not until people enter into the public realm that they can begin to leave their mark or legacy. But their mark isn’t made in just any nonprivate way, certainly not by poeisis, by making things, by production. Claiming her difference from Marx, Arendt insists that human beings should aspire for more than a life of work. We should not be satisfied with being homo faber, someone realized through what he makes and perhaps sells. And so the agora, the market place, is not our destiny: The impulse that drives the fabricator to the public market place is the desire for products, not for people, and the power that holds this market together and in existence is not the potentiality which springs up between people when they come together in action and speech, but a combined “power of exchange” (Adam Smith) which each of the participants acquired in isolation. (1958, 209–10) Arendt will settle for nothing less than the polis, the city, or, as she puts it, the space of appearance, where true action can occur and be memorialized and where “the ‘who,’ the unique and distinct identity of the agent,” can be revealed (180). With these distinctions, Arendt offers her tripartite scheme of modes of living: labor, work, and action, which correlate respectively with the oikos, the agora, and the polis. Through labor we (merely) reproduce ourselves (primarily through the life-maintaining labor of the household) and through work we try to produce things that will have an objective reality. But only

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through action—through word and deed—are we able to “insert ourselves into the human world” (Arendt 1958, 176). Action means bringing about something new. Human beings demonstrate themselves as free, as initiators, when they do something new, unprecedented, and improbable, that is, when they act (177–78). Unlike cultural feminists of the past twenty years, Arendt finds little of value in the household or its ethos of care. She has little sympathy for materialist interest in production, in the condition of homo faber and the site of the agora. She values what takes place in the polis, “the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together” (1958, 198). In this public space of appearance people develop a common sense of an objective world’s reality: “The only character of the world by which to gauge its reality is its being common to us all, and common sense occupies such a high rank in the hierarchy of political qualities because it is the one sense that fits into reality as a whole our five strictly individual senses and the strictly particular data they perceive” (Arendt 1958, 208). In contrast to liberal individualism, Arendt shares the Aristotelian conviction that people are political, social beings. This conviction manifests itself in her rendering of the polis as an arena in which one is always acting in relation with others. She holds that true action is pointless unless it is done in the company of others and recorded by others. It is not enough for an action to occur; the story of its occurring needs to be told. Action has no meaning unless it is accompanied by or followed with a narrative. The narrative will offer others in the polis a way to think about the political, namely the way that Aristotle described: the way of phronesis (i.e., prudence or practical reason). These are the points Kristeva focuses on in the story she tells of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958). On one level, Kristeva’s account of The Human Condition is quite faithful to Arendt. Kristeva reads Arendt carefully enough to draw out of her texts meanings and purposes that are not manifestly evident. For example, Kristeva reads into Arendt’s text—rightly, I think—a conversation that Arendt is implicitly carrying on with Martin Heidegger. In Kristeva’s view, Arendt shares Heidegger’s love of the Greeks but she differs with Heidegger over the kind of reason the Greeks are employing in public life. Heidegger believes the dominant mode of thinking is, and ought to be, sophia, theoretical wisdom, a wisdom that if employed properly can be attuned to Being. Arendt argues that in public life, especially in the speeches that accompany action, phronesis is at work. Instead of the wisdom of theory, public actors need the wisdom of how to act, that is, practical reason or prudence. Kristeva writes, “Arendt’s main point here is that if thinking is sophia, political action accompanies it and transforms it into a phronesis that knows how to partake of the plurality of the living. It is narrative, and not language itself (although language is the

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pathway to narrative), that provides the mechanism for innately political thinking” (2001a, 86). Kristeva highlights the way in which Arendt distinguishes praxis (action) from poiesis (production) (2001a, 70). Where poiesis leaves behind an artifact that may crumble and pass away, praxis “applies to all activities that do not pursue an end and that leave no work behind but that ‘exhaust their full meaning in the performance itself’” (71). While the meaning of an instance of praxis is spent in the event, it need not be lost. If the conditions are right, it could become part of history. The prime condition is that an action should occur in the inter-esse, the in-between, of people in a polis, that is, in their “web of relationships” (Arendt 1958, 183). Then “the spectators are the ones who ‘accomplish’ history, thanks to a thought that follows the act,” Kristeva writes, recounting Arendt’s view. The spectators “make the polis a productive place to organize memory and / or history and stories” (2001a, 72). As Arendt puts it, the polis does two things: first it provides occasions in which people could win immortal fame (1958, 197) and second it offers “a remedy for the futility of action and speech,” which in themselves leave nothing behind. The presence of others in a polis guarantees, says Arendt, drawing from Pericles’s Funeral Oration, “that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene of their daring will not remain without witness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who know how to turn words to praise them” (197). The polis “is a kind of organized remembrance” (198). Though Arendt points out the difference between the enacted story (the events) and the related story (the narrative), she pays little attention to the art of narrative, that is, to the way in which it is a fabrication or poiesis. The narrative that follows an event need not—in fact could not—be a pure mimesis of the event. The narrative, via its structural elements, its choice of beginning, middle, end, and plot, gives the event a meaning. Though she resists the idea that narrative is a fabrication, she does observe that it somehow crystallizes what occurred. Moreover, the event is never really completed until it is thought through and narrated. A narrative has work to do: It must not just convey the meaning of an action but complete it. Even in this sense, it is a kind of production or poiesis. This fact is implicit in Arendt’s formulation, implicit but not acknowledged—for Arendt denigrates poiesis as mere fabrication (done for the sake of something else), the stuff of work and production, not true praxis or action (carried out for its own sake). Kristeva rightly points out this tension in Arendt’s theory: Arendt acknowledges that narrative is not mere mimesis. The narrated story is not an exact replica of lived experience, but neither does it operate independently of experience. In fact, the narrative helps disclose what occurred and who acted, thus completing the action. “In truth,” writes Kristeva, “history owes its very existence to humans [as spectators], but it is not ‘made’ by

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them, according to Arendt and Plato. If we get too wrapped up in the coherence of a plot, we forget that the main goal of plot is to disclose” (2001a, 74). For Arendt, the main task of the narrator is not to invent a story but to recognize “the moment of accomplishment” and to “identify the agent” of the story. This disclosive function of narrative, Arendt suggests, is best served when the narrative is as devoid of style as possible. She praises, for example, Franz Kafka’s language for its “extreme parsimony.” Kristeva notes that when Arendt engages narrative, she prefers to “bypass technique in favor of disclosing social mechanisms” (2001a, 91–92). For Arendt, “the art of the narrative resides in the power to condense the action into an exemplary space, in removing it from the general flow of events, and in drawing attention to a ‘who’” (Kristeva 2001a, 73). Arendt would like to consider narrative as action not production, but here the line between these two activities blurs, especially given the fact that the kind of narrative that interests her is the one that is memorializing and to remain so must be recorded: a story turned artifact. So it is hard to see how she can escape the fact that narrative is a fabrication. Kristeva seems to agree with Arendt that we can set aside the more complicated questions of narrative, those questions of style, subjectivity, and rebellion. But, drawing on Kristeva’s theory of language, we should ask whether such an ideal is possible or even desirable. Could there ever be, as Arendt thinks there is, a Kafka-esque purging of style from public stories? In my own reading experience of Kafka, his minimalism is itself chilling. Could this be because his pared-down prose pares away the semiotic force that makes events meaningful? Many of his texts are about the senselessness of modern life. To tell this story, the absence of style may in fact signify an absence of meaning in life. When narratives attempt to signify more than a lack, should they be purged of style? Would Martin Luther King, Jr. have been a better narrator of the public woes and deeds of African Americans if his language had been pared down? Would Vaclav Havel have been a better leader had he not also been dissident and playwright? These and other public testimonies call for close readings, for an important area for inquiry is the extent to which public testimonies are imbued with semiotic content, indeed to identify the way this content gives meaning to events. Kristeva’s term for this phenomenon is signifiance, what Kristeva’s translator, Leon Roudiez, identifies as “the work performed in language (through heterogeneous articulation of semiotic and symbolic dispositions) that enables a text to signify what representative and communicative speech does not say” (Kristeva 1980, 18). Were it not for the telltale signs of the semiotic chora in public testimonies—the very signs Arendt would have us strip away—there would be no meaning given to events.

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The reason I am pressing this point is this: To the extent that a narrative is poiesis, it is not really an eyewitness account of what in fact occurred (as a mimetic reproduction might be). It is a testimony that draws on the experiences and psyche of the narrator to give meaning to events. Narratives bear witness. But whether a fabrication or an action, the narrative that Arendt describes does call for some kind of psychic investment from the narrator. We rely on the narrator’s hermeneutic capacities, political insights, and rhetorical skill, her ability to bear witness to something vital but invisible (not just what happened but how it is important). The narrator is the medium through which the events crystallize. Arendt seems to think that this narrator is transparent. That the narrator is embodied and desiring, that she may have any semiotic affect—these notions are completely absent from Arendt’s conception. Concerned primarily with communicability, Kristeva notes, Arendt denies the salience of any affect (pleasure or displeasure, anguish or desire) in favor of a repressive communicability (2001a, 225–28). Arendt tries to found political community by repressing what is other to the symbolic—by repressing the semiotic aspects of language. When we bring Kristeva’s analysis of the speaking being to bear on Arendt’s views of narration, this conception will need to change. Kristeva’s theory of the speaking subject points to the difficulty of reading or rendering any political narrative as a straightforward, mimetic report of the meaning of events. In the context of testifying to political crimes, the narrative meaning produced through testimony can draw on the pain, tension, and trauma that have, in silence or without a public audience, had nowhere to go. Note that in a political crime, the victim who survives is not only brutalized and stripped of her title as a citizen with dignity, she is robbed of a community of aid. She cannot go to a public for help because she has been banished from fellowship in that public. She can only search in private for aid, to those few friends and family to whom she dare confide. The TRC setting begins to reverse this double trauma: at one and the same time it helps to re-instantiate her subjectivity and her membership in the community. Moreover, back to the point, the meaning that comes through in such testimonies will be the meaning that results from the speaking being’s working through instead of acting out (in the Freudian sense) the turmoil that she has experienced. Though Kristeva focuses on the analytic session as the scene for such working through, I would like us to consider the analogous setting of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. To the extent that this kinship is apt, there might be a transference relation at work in public testimonies. Like an analysand, the witness narrates her story that she offers to the community for interpretation. Despite Oliver’s claim that witnessing bypasses the recognition model, certainly a witness does seek some kind of acknowledgment, validation, and bestowal of dignity from the community. Kristeva associates this

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acknowledgment with the dynamics of countertransference. She says, “Countertransference love is my ability to put myself in their place; looking, dreaming, suffering as if I were she, as if I were he. Fleeting moments of identification. Temporary and yet effective mergings. Fruitful sparks of understanding” (1987, 11). The claim that TRCs involve counter transference might seem fanciful, but the experience of those present in TRC hearings backs it up. One South African commissioner, the Archbishop Desmond Tutu, writes that even after mental health care workers prepared the commissioners for how wrenching it would be to hear the stories, “we were shattered at what we heard and we did frequently break down or were on the verge of it.” One commissioner’s marriage broke down. . . . Many reported disturbed sleep patterns; some were deeply concerned that they were more short-tempered, quarreled far too easily with their spouses, or were drinking far more than they should. The journalists who reported on the commission regularly were also affected. Some had nervous breakdowns, or cried far more easily than they had known themselves to do previously. (1999, 286) Tutu recounts how difficult the process was for the translators, for they had to speak in the first person, sometimes as victim, other times as perpetrator: “‘They undressed me; they opened a drawer and then they stuffed my breast in the drawer which they slammed repeatedly on my nipple until a white stuff oozed.’ ‘We abducted him and gave him drugged coffee and then I shot him in the head. We then burned his body and while this was happening, we were enjoying a barbecue on the side’” (286). No doubt, translators must have found that speaking the words of either party to be very traumatic. Even those far removed from the testimonies, Tutu noted, would find themselves in tears. In these poignant and powerful interchanges, those who were part of a TRC, including those witnessing on a stand and those witnessing as they listened to the radio, exemplify openness to otherness, openness in a way that destabilizes identity (“in the direction of its ‘desire-noise’ as well as its ‘memory-consciousness’” [Kristeva 1987, 15]) but also makes way for renewal. Time after time, observers have noted the cathartic power of testifying to trauma and the transformative effect this process has had upon political communities. I believe we can account for these outcomes both by drawing on Kristeva’s description of the analytic process and by attending to the ways in which political bodies (both citizens and communities) benefit from giving voice to trauma. In her reading of The Human Condition, Kristeva reads Arendt generously and avoids applying her own linguistic and psychoanalytic views to

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Arendt’s conception of narration. While she does not press Arendt, she does, almost in passing, raise a few concerns, which she seems to brush aside. Kristeva writes, We might fault Arendt for failing to grasp that the poetic language of a narrator—such as Proust—is a way to join the “thinking ego” and the “self as it appears and moves in the world.” . . . We might be worried by Arendt’s Lukács-style sociology that allows her to declare [in praise] of Kafka, a bit too hastily, that “style in any form, through its own magic, is a way of avoiding the truth. . . .” We might further regret that Arendt did not recognize the need for rebellion—an intrapsychic need but a historical one as well—that led the century’s avant-garde to an unprecedented reevaluation of narrative structures, of the word and the self. . . . Art, and in particular the art of narrative, has a history that does not repeat past problems [enjeux passés] and old solutions. Today’s narrative is more akin to clinical protocol than to moral judgment. It is up to us to discover the causes and the fate of this history, not to stigmatize it. (2001a, 92–93) “It is up to us,” Kristeva writes, but apparently not just yet, for in the very next moment she excuses herself from this task: “But that is not what really interests Arendt, who seeks the optimal solution to the ‘frailty of human affairs.’ Through this political lens, narrative art is subordinated to the just act that it may or may not illuminate” (93). But what if we decided not to subordinate narrative art—and instead saw narration as a way to heal and restore fractured communities? In political narrative, art cannot be subordinated, for the very meaning of the political act, which results from our decision about what that act means for us, can never be ascertained apart from the art of interpretation and narration. Arendt insists that political narratives may be about matters that are, supposedly, objectively true, but at the same time, they reveal something that is variable and uncertain, the “who,” the identity of the speakers and their relations with their fellows, in other words, “the in-between” (1958, 182). “Most action and speech is concerned with this in-between, which varies with each group of people, so that most words and deeds are about some worldly objective reality in addition to being a disclosure of the acting and speaking agent” (182). Now, even if we disagree about the objective truth of the world, we might agree with Arendt that narratives performatively create and reveal “the who” and the “in between.” Or we might go further, in the direction that Gadamer and Kristeva have, and say that speech is precisely not a performance of human agents. It is rather speech itself that performs something for human beings.6 Likewise, testimonies in the public sphere attend to the wounds in the polis, giving back to

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citizens their title as citizens and the to polity its public space of appearance in which people can come to be together.

Notes 1. See, for example, Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson, eds. (2000) and Alex Boraine (2000). 2. The words private and public are useful and well worth keeping. In fact, in this chapter I will draw out some rich meanings of the term public. The problem I see is with the polar opposition that has been set up between these terms such that public is founded on the exclusion of what is deemed private. It may even be founded on the abjection of the private, to the extent that the private is equated with bodily necessity. 3. My thanks to Harvey Cormier for bringing this issue to my attention. 4. The first volume of Kristeva’s Le génie féminin (published by Fayard in1999) is devoted to Arendt and is an essay she published in L’infini in the Spring of 1999, “Hannah Arendt, or Life is a Narrative.” In my essay here, references to Kristeva’s volume Hannah Arendt are to the volume published by Columbia University Press (2001a) not to the volume of lectures by the same name published by the University of Toronto Press (2001b). 5. For an in-depth description of the “unmaking of a world” through torture, see Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985). 6. My thanks to Paul Christopher Smith for bringing this point in Gadamer’s work to my attention (see Smith 1998).

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The human condition. 2nd Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 1998. Politics. Trans. C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Boraine, Alex. 2000. Truth and reconciliation in South Africa: The third way. Rotberg and Thompson 141–57. du Toit, André. 2000. The moral foundations of the South African TRC: Truth as acknowledgment and justice as recognition. Rotberg and Thompson 122–40. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in language. Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon Roudiez and edited by Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

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———. 1987. Tales of love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———-.1995. New maladies of the soul. New York: Columbia University Press. ———-. 2001a. Hannah Arendt. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2001b. Hannah Arendt: Life is a narrative. Trans. Frank Collins. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Minow, Martha. 2000. The hope for healing: What can truth commissions do? Rotberg and Thompson 235–60. Oliver, Kelly. 2001. Witnessing: Beyond recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rotberg, Robert I., and Dennis Thompson, eds. 2000. Truth v. justice: The morality of truth commissions. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Scarry, Elaine. (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. New York: Oxford University Press. Smith, P. Christopher. 1998. The hermeneutics of original argument. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Tutu, Desmond Mpilo. 1999. No future without forgiveness. New York: Image Doubleday.

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CHAPTER 7

Political Affections: Kristeva and Arendt on Violence and Gratitude

PEG BIRMINGHAM There remains so much for us to confront when raising questions such as how our civilization might surmount the deadly imperialism it continually secretes and how acquiring the sense for givenness (for the otherness of human beings, for the presence of things, and for the unfolding of time) might check the contempt for the weak, the devastation of nature, and the mad rush to overpower. —Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow of That Thought1

More than an interest in feminine genius draws Julia Kristeva to the work of Hannah Arendt. More urgent than genius is the abiding preoccupation both thinkers have with the event of natality. Indeed, if Kant is correct that genius is the capacity to articulate the previously unarticulated and unruly, or even that which is inherently incapable of rule, then the genius of each of these thinkers lies in her ability to articulate this event. For both Kristeva and Arendt, the event of natality is the arche in the double etymological sense of both origin and rule. Paradoxically, for both thinkers, natality is the unpredictable, anarchic origin that carries its rule or principle within it. And finally, for both thinkers, this archaic/anarchic event is the common origin and principle of the psychological and the political. On this last point, it is not accidental that Kristeva and Arendt each acknowledge a considerable debt to Montesquieu insofar as it is Montesquieu who insisted that two dimensions are always and inseparably at work in the political institutions and laws of a particular nation or regime. As is well known, Montesquieu argues in Spirit of the Laws that the form of a government is always animated by a spirit, the latter understood by him to be the 127

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“affection” that animates the political bond of a “we.” Thus, Montesquieu argues that a monarchy is animated by love of honor, a republic by love of virtue, and a tyranny by love of fear. The animating affection is the origin (arche) of action and as such carries its rule or principle with it. Most importantly, these principled affections are the common root of the dichotomy of the private and the public. As Arendt points out in her reading of Montesquieu, “There must be some underlying ground from which man as an individual and man as a citizen sprang. In other words, Montesquieu found that there is more to the dilemma of the personal and the public spheres than discrepancy and conflict, even though they might conflict” (1994, 335). In other words, these animating affections that carry their principles within them account for the peculiar unity of a culture with its public and private domains. Arendt further writes: The phenomenon of correspondence between the different spheres of life and the miracle of the unities of cultures and periods despite discrepancies and contingencies indicates that at the bottom of each cultural or historical entity lies a common ground which is both fundament and source, basis and origin. (1994, 335) Again, the common ground that provides unity between the private and the public lives of the citizenry is found in an animating affection that provides the inspiring source (arche) of action. In still other words, Montesquieu argues that the political/cultural bond of the we is found in an underlying animating affection. On this point, Kristeva and Arendt do not disagree; both Kristeva and Arendt find the animating affection in the archaic event of natality. Yet a chasm seems to open between these two thinkers on how each understands the animating affection of the political bond. The disagreement appears to be located in how each understands violence and its relation to the event of natality. This difference is most clearly seen in Kristeva’s critique of Arendt’s understanding of violence: “We should remember, however, that the refusal to contemplate the uniqueness of the body and the psyche is what drove Arendt to refuse to acknowledge the role played by sadomasochism in the experience of violence” (2001a, 180). Kristeva argues that while Arendt locates the cause of modern violence in the decline of the political, “which engenders coercion to compensate for its weakness and to gain strength,” nevertheless, “the psychological element—sadomasochism in particular— would have enriched her analysis with an important element that would help us grasp more effectively the conditions or the crystallization of the phenomenon she describes” (2001a, 180). In this reflection on violence and sadomasochism, Kristeva takes up the issue of the affection that animates the political bond. I quote the text at length:

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Arendt touches upon the theme of sadomasochism when she delves into the Christian concept of authority, particularly the fear of hell that is its basis. She correctly considers the interplay between rewards and punishments, as well as the arousing fear that stems from its being a substratum of faith, to be “the only political element in traditional religion.” And yet she concerns herself with neither the psychological foundation of this dynamic nor the indispensable support that it offers the political bond as such. Are perhaps all political bonds based on an arousing fear? Nor does Arendt analyze the specific fate of the alchemy between fear and authority that operates at the heart of the secularized modern world, which has clearly left the fear of hell behind but which has in no way diffused the sadomasochistic spirit of what Arendt cautiously refers to as the “frailty of human affairs.” (2001a, 180–81, emphasis added). Of importance here is Kristeva’s very Hobbesian suggestion that fear is the animating affection of the political bond and, furthermore, that fear has its basis in the sadomasochistic spirit at the heart of human affairs. Kristeva locates this sadomasochistic spirit in the uniqueness of the body and the psyche, arguing that Arendt refuses to consider this dimension of human affairs because she is interested at all costs “to preserve the freedom of the ‘who’ at the heart of an optimal political plurality and to avoid subjecting it to an unchecked unconscious. In so doing she runs the risk of depriving the ‘who of someone’ of its body, making it cumbersome, perhaps but also incredibly flexible” (2001a, 181). In what follows, I want to take up the issue of fear and violence in Kristeva and Arendt, specifically addressing how each thinker understands fear and violence in relation to the archaic event of natality. I will first argue that while Arendt does not develop this dimension of the event of natality, she does not altogether dismiss it. In Origins of Totalitarianism (1966), Arendt argues that the event of natality is always double; it is both the event of initium with its capacity to begin something new and the event of the given with its imperative of gratitude. Moreover, Arendt argues, violence first manifests itself when gratitude is replaced by resentment against this givenness, including the givenness of the body. In Arendt’s later thought, however, she splits the event of natality, a splitting that has disastrous consequences for her ability to incorporate gratitude for the given into the space of the political. The inability to incorporate gratitude politically leaves the Arendtian political space with an inherent violence. I will proceed to argue that Kristeva, through her analysis of Klein, shows how the violent splitting of the originary event of natality can be overcome, thereby allowing for a transformation of violence. In allowing for this transformation, Kristeva does not remain a

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quasi-Hobbesian in her understanding of the affection that animates the political bond of the “we.” In other words, her reading of Melanie Klein shows how the violence of sadomasochism, with its accompanying fear and attendant need for authority, can give way to the possibility of gratitude and reparation. Furthermore, Kristeva’s analysis of Klein illuminates the psychological conditions needed for two of Arendt’s key political categories: forgiveness and the “enlarged mentality.” In conclusion, I consider how, for both Arendt and Kristeva, gratitude for the given allows for a different understanding of the political bond of the “we” in a postreligious, secularized world.

Arendt: On Violence and Gratitude It is well known that Hannah Arendt’s political thought is deeply indebted to Augustine’s understanding of the event of natality: the original event that defines the human being as a beginner whose essential capacity is that of initiating something new. The final optimistic words of the otherwise deeply pessimistic Origins of Totalitarianism are those of Augustine’s. Quoting Augustine, Arendt says “ ‘Initium esse homo creatus est—That a beginning be made man was created.’ . . . This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man” (1966, 479). For Arendt, following Augustine, our capacity for beginning is the only promise left after the horrifying events of the twentieth century. Certainly, natality understood in terms of initium is at work throughout Arendt’s subsequent work, most notably, The Human Condition (1957), informing her key concepts of action, freedom, and power. These three notions have, as their ontological basis, the event of natality: our freedom and power to act is the result of our being born—initium. Still further, understanding the human being as a beginner allows Arendt to distinguish the public from the private, freedom from necessity, and action from labor. The insight, that human beings by virtue of birth equally have the capacity to begin something new, is the principle upon which Arendt separates the sphere of equality and persuasion that marks the bios politikos from zoe, where in embodied differences of all kinds necessarily hold sway and violence often rules the day. Certainly, Arendt’s emphasis on the human being as an initium supports Kristeva’s claim that Arendt understands the who in terms of its inherent flexibility and freedom at the expense of its embodiment. In Origins of Totalitarianism, however, there is an earlier reference to Augustine’s understanding of natality, a reference Arendt never fully develops but which points to another dimension of the event of natality; one that insists on the affirmation of all that Arendt subsequently seems to dismiss from the political space. In other words, this earlier reference to Augustine

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calls into question Arendt’s strict distinction between the public and the private or between the bios politikos and zoe. Moreover, this earlier reference calls into question what Kristeva sees as Arendt’s celebration of the inherent flexibility and freedom of the who. Still further, Arendt’s earlier reference to Augustine suggests that the very plurality Arendt understands as the conditio sine qua non of political life is infused with an ineradicable difference or alienness that must be taken into account politically if violence is not to erupt both within and without the borders of the public space. Arendt’s earlier reference to Augustine occurs in Part II of The Origins of Totalitarianism, at the conclusion of her analysis of imperialism, which ends with an examination of the decline of the nation-state and human rights. In the very last pages of this analysis, Arendt describes those stateless refugees (including herself) who, having lost their political status as citizens of a nation-state, also lost any and all recourse to human rights. What she and other refugees found was that in the very situation where the declaration of general human rights ought to have provided remedy, just the opposite occurred: “If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implications of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declarations of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case” (Arendt 1966, 300). It is in the context of the loss of human rights that Arendt refers to Augustine. The human being who has lost his place in a community, his political status in the struggle of his time, and the legal personality which makes his actions and part of his destiny a consistent whole, is left with those qualities which usually can become articulate only in the sphere of private life and must remain unqualified, mere existence in all matters of public concern. This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, “Volo ut sis (I want you to be),” without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation. (301) Here, Arendt points to another dimension of the event of natality seemingly at odds with her concluding reference to Augustine in Origins; rather than the emphasis on natality as the capacity for action and for beginning something new, Arendt points approvingly to the Augustinian insight that the event of natality is also about that which is given and which cannot be changed. This givenness includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds.

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In three subsequent places, Arendt elaborates on what she understands by the “given.” First, in The Human Condition, immediately after discussing the plurality that is the conditio per quam of all political life, she refers to the Book of Genesis: But in its elementary form, the human condition of action is implicit in Genesis (“Male and female created He them”), if we understand that this story of man’s creation is distinguished in principle from the one according to which God originally created Man (adam), “him” and not “them”, so that the multitude of human beings comes be the result of multiplication. (Arendt 1957, 8, emphasis added) Arendt underscores the point in a footnote to this passage: Thus it is highly characteristic of the difference between the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and of Paul that Jesus, discussing the relationship between man and wife, refers to Genesis 1:27, “Have ye not read that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female” (Matt 19.4), whereas Paul on a similar occasion insists that the woman was created “of the man” and hence “for the man” even though he then somewhat attenuates the dependence: “Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man.” (8 fn) Pointing out that Jesus of Nazareth links faith to action while Paul links it to salvation, Arendt suggests that at the very heart of plurality is the givenness of sexual difference, a difference intrinsic to the action that Arendt considers the essential characteristic of the political. Second, at the conclusion of her important essay, “Philosophy and Politics,” in which she argues that the origin of political philosophy lies in accepting in “speechless wonder the miracle of the universe, of man and of being,” Arendt again quotes Genesis 1:27, referring to “the miracle that God did not create Man, but ‘Male and female created He them.’ They would have to accept in something more than the resignation of human weakness the fact that “it is not good for man to be alone” (Arendt 1990, 103). Here again, Arendt calls for the political acceptance of the “miracle of givenness,” arguing that the acceptance of this difference is not cause for resignation but it is the condition for the very possibility of the human capacity for action. Third, in a letter to Gershom Scholom in which she responds to his charge that she has a cold heart towards her own Jewishness, Arendt writes:

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The truth is I have never pretended to be anything else or to be in any way other than I am, and I have never felt tempted in that direction. It would have been like saying that I was a man and not a woman—that is to say, kind of insane. . . . There is such a thing as a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is; for what has been given and was not, could not be, made; for things that are physei and not nomo.” (1978a, 246) For Arendt, therefore, embodiment, talents, and sexual difference are included in the “birth of the given.” These are physei, not nomo. To deny this givenness would be a form of insanity. At the same time, Arendt suggests that this givenness is at the very heart of human plurality and is the condition for human action. Finally, Arendt argues that this givenness carries with it the ethical demand of gratitude. Rather than thinking physis as nature, Arendt understands physis as arche or origin, an arche that gives human existence as singular, unique and unchangeable and at the same time infuses this existence with an ineradicable and originary givenness that is not subject to nomos.2 The event of natality is the arche of human existence. In her doctoral dissertation on Augustine, Arendt claims that the event of natality is the birth of “ . . . the decisive fact determining man as a conscious, remembering being is birth or ‘natality,’ that is the fact that we have entered the world through birth. The decisive fact determining man as a desiring being was death or mortality, the fact that we shall leave the world in death” (1996, 51–52). Out of these two experiences, natality and mortality, Arendt distinguishes two different affections that drive the human being. On the one hand, our mortality is accompanied by the fear and inadequacy that are springs of desire. Natality, on the other hand, is accompanied by gratitude, which is the source of memory; “In contrast, gratitude for life having been given at all is the wellspring of remembrance, for a life is cherished even in memory” (52). Our gratitude is for an origin that is the source of all remembrance but which is itself beyond memory. Moreover, our givenness and our gratitude for this given existence is the source or origin of our desiring and our questioning. On this point Arendt stands with Augustine and against Heidegger: Since our expectations and desires are prompted by what we remember and guided by a previous knowledge, it is memory and not expectation (for instance, the expectation of death as in Heidegger’s approach) that gives unity and wholeness to human existence. In making and holding present both past and future, that is memory and the expectation derived from it, it is the present in which they coincide that determines human expectation derived

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from it; it is the present in which they coincide that determines human existence.” (1996, 56–57) Gratitude for what has been given not only takes ontological priority over anxiety towards death, at the same time it points to the origin out of which desire, memory, and questioning emerge: Indeed the memory that tells us our dependence on something outside of ourselves arises out of finding ourselves in a world; this “finding” marks the givenness of human existence with an ineradicable estrangement that makes the world a desert for human beings. We are not the principle of our own being and at the same time we remain estranged from this principle. Moreover, being of the world precedes any explicit love of the world; it is what gives rise to desire and love. Still further, my gratitude at finding myself of the world is prior to any activity in the world. (Arendt 1996, 25) Memory, desire, and meaning are suffused with this generative origin that cannot itself be explicitly recalled or possessed. At the same, this generative origin that gives birth to all that is given and, further, is the condition of action, must itself be gratuitously affirmed. Reflecting on the birth of the given, Arendt argues that from its inception Western political tradition has had a profound distrust of this aspect of existence, all too quickly relegating it to the private sphere: Since the Greeks, we have known that highly developed political life breeds a deep-rooted suspicion of this private sphere, a deep resentment against the disturbing miracle contained in the fact that each of us is made as he is—single, unique, unchangeable. This whole sphere of the merely given, relegated to private life in civilized society, is a permanent threat to the public sphere, because the public sphere is as consistently based on the law of equality as the private sphere is based on the law of universal difference and differentiation. (1966, 301) Here, what is striking is Arendt’s suggestion that the given is relegated to the private sphere not because of its diminutive or privative status in comparison to the reality granted by the light of the public space, as she argues in The Human Condition, but because of a long-standing and deep-seated Western resentment toward the singular and the unique. Indeed, the given, understood as the single, unique, unchangeable, is viewed as a permanent threat to

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the public sphere, based as it is on the law of equality; it becomes the alien background of political life: The dark background of mere givenness, the background formed by our unchangeable and unique nature, breaks into the political scene as the alien which in its all too obvious difference reminds us of the limitations of human activity—which are identical with the limitations of human equality. (Arendt 1966, 301) The alien, Arendt goes on to argue, “is the frightening symbol of the fact of difference as such, of individuality as such, and indicates those realms in which man cannot change and cannot act and in which, therefore, he has a distinct tendency to destroy” (1951, 302). Here again, Arendt departs significantly from her subsequent argument in The Human Condition, wherein she argues that it is the political space, with its lawful borders, that holds violence at bay. In the passage cited above, it is the political space itself that has the tendency to destroy that which it cannot change or act upon: “The more highly developed a civilization, the more accomplished the world it has produced, the more at home men feel within the human artifice—the more they will resent everything they have not produced, everything that is merely and mysteriously given them” (Arendt 1966, 301). And, as we have seen above, for Arendt this political resentment and destruction includes the alien, or the foreign. Let us not forget that these remarks concerning the political destruction of the foreign come at the very conclusion of a long reflection on European imperialism, an analysis in which Arendt describes how the Enlightenment ideal of a universal humanity failed completely when European imperialists met with horror Africans whom they viewed as alien and other than themselves. This leads Arendt to conclude that the “scramble for Africa” reflected the dark and destructive heart of European politics itself, a darkness and destructiveness that was subsequently unleashed on Europe itself and those alien peoples in its midst. And let us also not forget that these remarks on the tendency of Western politics to destroy the disturbing miracle of the given (the alien/foreign) come at the very end of her analysis of the decline of the nation-state and the rights of man, suggesting that her earlier reference to the “subterranean stream of Western history [that] has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition” (Arendt 1966, ix) might very well be the stream of Western political thought that could not recognize the dignity of that which is other, alien, and different. In other words, Arendt suggests that it is the disregard of the givenness of human existence that fuels imperialism and, paradoxically, leads to the demise of the modern political space with its notion of human rights. Finally, let us not forget that Arendt

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arrives at the disturbing miracle of the given in her status as a refugee, an alien who is left with only her mere existence as a human being and who, as a consequence, must flee for her life. Again, it is strange that Arendt does not develop these earlier reflections on Augustine’s insight that the event of natality is also about the birth of the given, and further, his insistence that there must be a fundamental gratitude for the birth of this disturbing miracle: Amo: Volo ut sis. To repeat, she chooses instead to emphasize Augustine’s understanding of natality as the capacity to begin and to enact something new. As indicated above, this emphasis on natality as beginning informs her analysis of the private and the public in The Human Condition, in which she repeats the Western resentment and dismissal of the given. In other words, in her subsequent work, Arendt also relegates the given and the alien to the realm of the private, that is, the realm of necessity; she also removes it from the political space with its emphasis on freedom, action and the miracle of new beginnings. It is as if Arendt herself fell blindly into the very subterranean stream of Western history that in her preface to the first edition of the Origins she had admonished her readers not to do. As we saw earlier, Kristeva suggests that Arendt’s blindness, her inability to think the given with its ethical demand for gratitude, is due to her commitment to the freedom and flexibility of the who. However, it is not only Arendt’s commitment to the freedom of the who that causes her to dismiss the given and the alien from the political sphere; it is also her commitment to a notion of the political space as a common space that keeps violence at bay through persuasive speech and concerted action: Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity can worldly reality truly and reliably appear. Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not guaranteed primarily by the “common nature” of all men who constitute it, but rather by the fact that, differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object. (1957, 57–58) In Life of the Mind: Thinking (1978b), Arendt elaborates on the constitution of a common reality, claiming that our very sensation of reality is guaranteed by a “three-fold commonness” that is made up of a common object, a common context, and a common agreement as to the identity of the object (1978b, 50). Although Arendt argues that the common world is comprised of “diversity in sameness” (1957, 57), her understanding of the constitution of a common reality does not give any consideration to the alien or the foreign in

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its midst. Thus, Arendt splits the doubleness of the originary event: the miracle of beginning infuses the speech and action of the public space while the miracle of the given and the alien is relegated to the barbaric and violent space outside the city walls. The ethical demand for gratitude succumbs to a violence outside the law. However, as Arendt herself argues in her analysis of imperialism, the splitting of the origin and the expulsion of givenness from the political space marks the inherent violence of the Western political space—a violence against the foreign that will eventually erupt within the city walls.3 Kristeva, particularly in her analysis of Melanie Klein, offers insight on how the Arendtian splitting of the originary event might be healed and, thereby, how gratitude might be reintroduced into the heart of the city.

Kristeva: The Abject Status of Violence and Gratitude In Tales of Love, Kristeva notes that Melanie Klein “the bold theoretician of the death drive is also a theoretician of gratitude seen as ‘an important offshoot of the capacity for love,’ necessary for the acknowledgment of what is ‘good’ in others and in oneself” (1987, 27). Indeed, in the preface to her three volume work on feminine genius, Kristeva argues for the necessity of taking up Klein after the analysis of Arendt precisely because Klein offers a more complete account of both violence and gratitude than Arendt. Kristeva’s reading of Klein is important for two reasons. First, Klein’s analysis of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions significantly alters Kristeva’s understanding of abjection, specifically the operation of the semiotic drives which, in turn, allows Kristeva to revise her earlier understanding of the “pre-objectal and immemorial violence” (Kristeva 1982, 10) of the drives with their attendant need for the symbolic law of the authoritative father. This, in turn, allows Kristeva to rethink the nature of the political bond such that it is not necessarily animated by cruelty and fear with its accompanying need for authority. In other words, Kristeva’s analysis of Klein shows how gratitude for the given is possible—how it is possible for us, even while acknowledging the violence of the sadomasochistic drive to say, “Amo: Volo ut sis.” In Powers of Horror, Kristeva argues that abjection is “the result of a primary natality” which “preserves what existed in the archaism of a preobjectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be—maintaining that night in which the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out” (1982, 9–10). In her reading of Klein, however, Kristeva rethinks the pre-objectal nature of the immemorial violence which, she suggests, is the sadomasochistic or death drive. In other words, through Klein,

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she argues that the sadomasochistic, or death drive, is always already in a relation to an object: [Klein] was more receptive than were other analysts to the hypothesis of a death drive in the baby that responded to his fear of being destroyed. . . . And yet, by considering the drive to be more psychological than biological, Klein added that the death drive manifests itself only through its relation to an object. (2001b, 28–29) Contrary to Freud, (and this has tremendous significance for Kristeva’s understanding of abjection), Klein argues that the drives are not directionless, aimless psychic energy—from the beginning they bear the stain of language, “a rudimentary presence of symbolization at the level of drives is at work” (Kristeva 2001b, 158). Finally, insofar as the drives are already endowed with rudimentary symbolization, fantasy for Klein is borne by sensation and affect. This claim, Kristeva points out, distances Klein from Lacan: . . . the Kleinian phantasy includes elements that her followers would seek to conceptualize. Lacan, for his part, adopted a decidedly Greek approach by shifting psychic representation toward the appearance and toward the visibility of the eidos. Psychoanalysis today focuses on this clinical and conceptual exploration of the transverbal archaic realm that Melanie brought to our attention, a realm that belies the ideal of visual representation. (2001b, 141) While for Lacan, fantasy is a projection of the idea into the appearance of the drive, Klein claims that fantasy is “saturated with the reality of drives and with such primary ‘contained’ contents as greed and envy” (2001b, 141). Furthermore, while for Freud the object is the “object of an instinctual aim” (1975, 2). Klein argues that the object is always something more; it is an object-relation involving the fantasies and anxieties of the infant. Thus, from the beginning drives are always directed towards others—real or imaginary. Still further, and again contrary to Freud, Klein argues that the body is not the source of drives. In other words, drives do not originate as tensions within the body which affect the mind, and whose basic function is to meet the needs of the body by eliminating drive tensions and preserving a state of equilibrium; instead, Klein argues that the body is the means of the expression of drives. This insight is important to Kristeva, who points out that “Klein claimed the anamorphosis of the body into the mind, of sensations and affects into

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signs and vice versa.” Kristeva argues that Klein posited that “flesh-and-soul are forever linked in the heart of the human being,” and in so doing, she “revived flesh within the word, and she privileged the body of drives and passions within the imagery” (2001b, 148–49). Kristeva’s embrace of the Kleinian understanding of drives against both Freud and Lacan has tremendous significance for clarifying Kristeva’s notion of abjection which, she argues, must be understood at the level of the “translinguistic primary level of the drives” (2001, 156). This clarification challenges some of the dominant interpretations of abjection by Kristeva’s readers, which all too often read her notion of abjection through Lacan’s mirror stage. Elizabeth Grosz best illustrates this reading when she writes: . . . abjection attests to the perilous and provisional nature of the symbolic control over the dispersing impulses of the semiotic drives which strive to break down identity, order, and stability. Through abjection, bodily processes become enmeshed bit by bit in significatory processes in which images, perceptions, and sensations become linked to and represented by “ideational representatives” or signifiers. (Grosz 1990, 86) As we have just seen, in her reading of Klein, Kristeva explicitly disavows this view, arguing that the drives are already object-seeking and, imbued with rudimentary symbolization at the level of bodily process, they already have a relationship to reality. Neither the ego, nor the id, or any signifiers, are needed to give semiotic drives coherence or direction. From the start, the infant’s psychic universe is consumed with a primary symbolization in an affective reality but this symbolization, Kristeva argues, does not appear. This also means that Kristeva herself disagrees with her earlier claim that abjection preserves the archaism of the pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which the body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (1982, 9–10). Insofar as all drives are object seeking, there is no pre-objectal relationship. Again, Kristeva argues that “from the moment of birth, the drive engages in a binary expression: sensation/affect and the object both coexist, and the presentation of the object clings to sensation” (2001b, 142). Through her reading of Klein, Kristeva also rethinks “immemorial violence” as the sadistic fantasies of the archaic ego “directed against the inside of [the mother’s] body constituting the first and basic relation to the outside world and to reality” (2001b, 160). In still other words, rather than understanding abjection as the border conflict between the semiotic drives and symbolic processes, Kristeva’s reading of Klein relocates the border conflict of abjection in the conflict between the inherent destructiveness of the sadistic aim (the paranoidschizoid position) and reparative aim of gratitude (the depressive position).

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As we saw above, Kristeva follows Klein in arguing that the death drive in the infant is a response to the fear of being destroyed. Kristeva understands the death drive as an innate destructive impulse that is the natural response to frustration. Frustration is felt by the infant as total annihilation and is projected towards the object; it is a paranoid destructiveness insofar as the infant feels as if the attack is directed at him or her. Thus, aggression is split off from love and is experienced as paranoia. Moreover, the infant’s fear of death is fear of disintegration in the face of its own hatred. This persecutory anxiety is the infant’s fear of its own aggressive impulses arising from the death drive which is in conflict with the life drive. There is a redirecting of aggression towards an external object, initially the mother’s breast: Indeed, against this anxiety, the infant projects the death instinct outward. The sadism of the archaic ego prolongs original anxiety, which is the infant’s fear for its life and which has a strong oral desire to devour what threatens it: What is manifested at the very beginning of life, returns to the subject with the same content with a different target: it is not I who wishes to devour, for I am afraid of being poisoned by the bad breast in which I projected my bad teeth—such is the logic of the sadistic fantasy that corresponds to primary paranoid-schizoid anxiety.” (Kristeva 2001b, 86)4 Thus, sadism defends itself from its own destructiveness and envy through splitting the object into a good breast and a bad breast. As Jessica Benjamin points out in her analysis of the sadomasochistic drive, “aggression ends up doing outside what [it] would otherwise do inside: reducing the world, objectifying it, subjugating it” (Benjamin 1988, 67). Sadomasochism is always accompanied by envy, the outward manifestation of the death drive. Envy, from the Latin, “to cast an evil eye upon,” is to deprive or spoil the good object for someone else. Here, Kristeva points to Augustine for whom envy was the worst sin because it “opposes life itself” (2001b, 96). Envy attacks and destroys pleasure in the self and others and is the direct expression of the destructive impulses specifically directed against the source of life. The good object, usually first the mother’s breast, is resented and hated because it is endowed with life-giving qualities which the infant depends upon for its survival. But the good object is not always available. When this lack occurs, the infant attacks and spoils the good object which is now blamed for the deprivation. Envy is the destruction of what is other, foreign and strange; it is the hatred of what I cannot have and what is unobtainable. This is much different from jealousy where I love the object and fear losing it. Unlike jealousy which can be alleviated by a regained love, Kristeva argues that envy is never alleviated.

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At the same time, Kristeva points out that the death drive is always for the sake of the life drive. For Kristeva, the concern with the life drive, what is “full of birth” marks the proximity between Melanie Klein and Hannah Arendt: Though on the opposite side of the spectrum from Hannah Arendt, Melanie nevertheless appears to have shared Arendt’s concern for the sort of life that emerges through the revelation and accompaniment of that which threatens it. “Full of birth” as Arendt would put it, which Melanie showed herself to be through the therapeutic relentlessness that pervaded her incisive interpretations—and also through the privileged mode she assigns to the death drive, which is first described as a sadistic desire, as a type of envy, as she would later put it. In sum, the death drive is a condensation of love and hatred, otherwise known as paroxysmal desire. (2001b, 84–85) Kristeva’s reference to Arendt at this point in her analysis of Klein is significant. As maintained at the outset of this essay, all three thinkers—Arendt, Klein, and Kristeva—are preoccupied with the archaic event of natality, although we have seen that Arendt splits the doubleness of this arche and in doing so is not able to account politically for gratitude toward the given. Thus, the heart of Arendtian political space remains violent. While Arendt recognizes two drives at the heart of human existence, she does not see both as part of the event of natality. She specifies fear and anxiety as being toward death, while gratitude arises out of a primordial memory of the event of natality. Kristeva, following Klein, shows how both anxiety (associated with the death drive) and gratitude (which, like Arendt, she locates in memory and mourning) are part of the event of natality. For Kristeva, Klein is able to offer a way to repair this splitting, thereby offering an account of how the sadistic and destructive drive can be transformed into the reparative life drive, which manifests itself in gratitude towards the given.5 While always in a struggle with the death drive, Kristeva argues that the life drive manifests itself first in the depressive position wherein the infant retains memory of the good object and acquires a nostalgia for it. This memory is comparable to mourning: “But because this love is a love of devouring that is heavily laden with sadistic drives, the feeling of losing the good object is buttressed by a feeling of guilt over having destroyed it by assimilating it” (Kristeva 2001b, 76). This feeling of mourning or depression mobilizes the desire “to make reparation to objects” wherein the infant “imagines that he can undo the nefarious effects of his aggression through her love and care for him” (Kristeva 2001b, 79). This is the “wager of gratitude” which is the indispensable pre-condition

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for developing the capacity to make reparation that is “concomitant with the loss of the object in the depressive position” (Kristeva 2001b, 188). The fragmentation and splitting characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position is transformed into gratitude for the whole object whose ineradicable loss is now mourned. The transformation of the violence of the death drive into gratitude occurs through the mourning of the object, which remains forever foreign and alien in a primordial and irrecoverable separation.6 We now return to Kristeva’s question to Arendt, raised at the outset of this essay: “Are perhaps all political bonds based on an arousing fear?” Recall that Kristeva raises this Hobbesian question in the context of what she understands as a secularized modern world that has “clearly left the fear of hell behind but which has in no way diffused the sadomasochistic spirit of what Arendt cautiously refers to as the ‘frailty of human affairs’” (2001a, 181). Through her reading of Klein, however, Kristeva allows for another possibility of an archaic affection (arising out of the event of natality) that animates the political bond of the we, and which in turn, following Montesquieu, would be manifest in its laws and institutions. In other words, we have seen that Kristeva allows for the possibility of gratitude as that which diffuses (but does not replace completely) the sadomasochistic spirit of human affairs. Gratitude for the foreign and alien, for what is given as the wholly other and unobtainable, ought to be the animating archaic affection of the political bond in a secularized post-religious world. Indeed, Kristeva’s work can be read as offering an extensive argument for the ethical-political imperative of gratitude for the foreign, the alien, and the given in a world that has undergone the death of God. (And could we not read the violence of the twentieth century as the destructive fury of the paranoid-schizoid position which, having experienced the anxiety of this loss, refuses to mourn but instead furiously seeks to destroy what remains unobtainable or in a phobic fantasy constructs an imaginary, fascistic other who becomes the metaphor of its own aggression?) Thus, Kristeva argues in Strangers to Ourselves, “The issue of foreigners comes up for a people when, having gone through the spirit of religion, it again encounters an ethical concern. . . . The image of the foreigner comes in the place and instead of the death of God” (1991, 40). Rather than foreignness being the political facet of violence that is excluded, and thereby underlies the political space (as we saw in Arendt), it becomes a challenge or call for the gratuitous embrace of the alien: “Living with the other, the foreigner, confronts us with the possibility or not of being an other. It is not simply—humanistically—a matter of our being able to accept the other, but of being in his place, and this means to imagine and make oneself other for oneself” (Kristeva 1991, 11). While it is beyond the scope of this paper to develop this point fully, note that Kristeva’s analysis of the foreigner allows us to understand the psychological

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conditions for another of the key aspects of the Arendtian political space, the “enlarged mentality.”7 Thus, in her analysis of Klein, Kristeva is able to show how it is that the abject separation from the mother’s body is not marked solely by immemorial violence. At the same time, violence can give way to gratitude for what remains wholly other and alien. Moreover, rather than projecting the envy of the death drive outside, gratitude is able to mourn and make reparation to what is always foreign both outside and within. Contrary to Arendt, therefore, Kristeva shows how the archaic origin is always double but no longer dangerously split. While the violence of sadism is transformed into gratitude, it is not overcome. Gratitude, Kristeva argues, is the: . . . quieter side of Thanatos. Anxiety has not disappeared, as it is always present with Klein, but it chooses another domain: rather than splitting and fragmenting and rather than destroying and tearing into pieces, anxiety is tolerated as a source of pain relating to the Other and a source of guilt about having taken pleasure in hurting him. (2001, 89) Living with the foreign and the alien, therefore, involves the psychic discomfort of nostalgia and guilt, but no longer does it inspire resentment and violence. There is instead gratitude and a call for love—Amo: Volo ut sis.

Notes 1. This essay is dedicated to the memory of Dominique Janicaud who died unexpectedly on August 18, 2002. 2. For a detailed discussion of Arendt’s understanding of arche as physis, that is, an originary event that carries its own principle with it, see On Revolution (1963, 213). 3. Arendt’s analysis of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in Origins of Totalitarianism, is an extended reflection on how the exported violence of the European imperialism returns to haunt the dark heart of Europe itself. In Men in Dark Times, Arendt is even more explicit in how the expulsion of the violence at the very heart of Europe returns to the very center of its political space (see 1968, 82). 4. Kristeva’s analysis of sadism is the inversion of her analysis of phobia in Powers of Horror: In phobia, fear and aggressivity come back to me from the outside. Rather than the fantasy of devouring the mother, however, the phobic subject fantasizes that it is being devoured. 5. Arendt is not entirely unaware of the sadomasochistic or death drive, although she does not develop it. In On Violence, Arendt observes, “If we were to trust

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our own experiences in these matters, we should know that the instinct of submission, an ardent desire to obey and be ruled by some strong man, is at least as prominent in human psychology as the will to power, and, politically, perhaps more relevant” (1970, 39). 6. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, a complete account of gratitude and reparation would show how reparation works toward a translation of grief into an “exile into the symbolic.” 7. Kristeva’s analysis of Klein also shows how the “alchemy of fear and authority” could be transformed into a political bond animated by a nonrepressive dynamic of gratitude and friendship. This last is politically important as Kristeva asks how we confront the weakness of the law in a secularized, postreligious world without resorting to phobic fantasy.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 1957. The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1963. On revolution. New York: Penguin. ———. 1966 (1951). Origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1968. Men in dark times. New York: Harcourt Brace and World. ———. 1970. On violence. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1978a. The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age. Ed. Ron Feldman. New York: Grove Press. ———. 1978b. The life of the mind: Thinking. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1990. Philosophy and politics. Social Research 57, no. 1 (Spring): 73–104. ———. 1994. Essays on understanding. Ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Harcourt Brace. ———. 1996. Love and Saint Augustine. Ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The bonds of love. New York: Pantheon. Freud, Sigmund. 1975. Three essays on the theory of sexuality. Trans. and rev. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books. Grosz, Elizabeth. 1990. The body of signification. In Abjection, melancholia and love: The work of Julia Kristeva, ed. John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin. New York and London: Routledge. Janicaud, Dominique. 1996. The shadow of That thought. Trans. Michael Gendre. Chicago: Northwestern University Press.

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Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1987. Tales of love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1991. Strangers to ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2001a. Hannah Arendt: Life as birth and estrangement. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2001b. Melanie Klein. Trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press.

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PART III ABJECTION, FILM, AND MELANCHOLIA

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CHAPTER 8

The Exoticization and Universalization of the Fetish, and the Naturalization of the Phallus: Abject Objections

TINA CHANTER

The trajectory of this paper will move from Jacques Lacan to Julia Kristeva, via Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Sigmund Freud, and finally to a reading of Atom Egoyan’s Exotica. By returning to Marx, and using the moment at which he calls for a new symbolic to supplant the form of commodity fetishism, I suggest that phallic logic should be supplemented by a discourse on abjection, which does not privilege sexual difference over racial and class differences, as does the Oedipal, western narrative. My use of psychoanalysis is tempered by the belief that we cannot make do with traditional psychoanalytic formulations of the unconscious, which are themselves complicit with racist and sexist histories. My return to Marx is motivated by a belief that he offers us a way of thinking the difference between the symbolic formations of capitalism, and the possibility of forging new symbolics. If Marx’s own analysis failed both to analyze the surplus value arising from labor performed by women in housework and childcare, it also needs to be supplemented in order to take account of the racial dynamic of labor patterns. While neither Marx, nor Lacan shed light on women’s subordination, Kristeva’s notion of abjection helps to move in this direction, and can be applied beyond this reference to facilitate a thinking of the racialized other that feminist theory itself has help to reify. Like social contract theory, which also posits a kind of prehistory—a state of nature—psychoanalysis appeals to a mythic time that might, must, or could have existed, the characteristics of which are read, negatively, off current socio-symbolic forms, and then projected into a lost and inaccessible past, which is nonetheless incorporated into the symbolic, in a way that 149

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marks it off as differentiated from the symbolic. Psychoanalytic theory repeats the gesture of social contract theory by appealing to a mythical past, which is thereby marked as primitive, uncivilized, and outside culture, at the same time as being incorporated by culture in a way that either inscribes it as deviant, or requires it to conform to its own logic, as preparatory. Through an economy that is stipulated in terms of a series of oppositions that he associates with the mother-child dyad and the paternal metaphor, Lacan develops an account of the imaginary versus the symbolic. The alignment of the mother-child dyad with the imaginary and of the paternal metaphor with the symbolic is dependent upon the oppositions of presence to absence, immediacy to mediation, and mythical coherence or completion to division or splitting. The mother-child dyad thereby comes to represent a relation of immediacy, and comes to be posited as prior to symbolization or representation, while the phallus comes to represent splitting and division, and comes to be associated with the capacity for language. Lacan’s account is also dependent upon a retroactive logic that consigns the imaginary to a prehistory, which is designated after the fact, and within the terms of the symbolic, as pre-Oedipal. The way in which psychoanalysis establishes itself as a myth of origin that guarantees its claim to symbolic authority by enshrining the phallus as an uncontestable law has been remarked by feminist theory.1 Feminist responses to Lacan have also focused on the problematic of the phallus as transcendental signifier and its dependence upon constituting women’s bodies as lacking or castrated, such that a masculine morphology is presupposed in a way that makes its normativity unavailable for interrogation. They have pointed to the slippage in Lévi-Strauss and Lacan between a symbolic and the symbolic.2 But these insights have not been followed through to their logical conclusion by a rigorous questioning of the work that the trope of fetishism continues to accomplish, as it is exported from psychoanalytic theory to race theory and film theory and the field of cultural studies more generally. The extent to which psychoanalytic theory remains dependent on the logic of fetishism, and the consequences and ramifications of this for cultural theories who continue to draw on it as a resource, is in need of exploration. To say that the logic of fetishism has been exported from psychoanalytic to race theory is to describe only the most recent history of a complex and multilayered series of fetish discourses that can be traced from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century.3 While my focus here is restricted to Marx’s commodity fetishism and Freudian fetishism, I am interested in the ways in which discourses on the primitive that peripherally inhabit the texts of Marx and Freud have been suppressed by Marxist and psychoanalytic theorists, only to reemerge in race theory. This reemergence has in turn

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occurred in a way that tends to marginalize or repudiate the insights into class and sexuality that Marxist critics and feminist theorists had unearthed. It is as if the logic of disavowal at work in fetishism reinvents itself strategically, perpetuating a univocal meaning, suspending the multiplicity of its historical referents. Religion, race, imperialism, colonialism, sex, gender, class—all these terms surface as signifiers that articulate the discourse of fetishism at various historical epochs and locations and each of them do so in such a way as to elide the significance of the others.4 Lacan’s reliance on Lévi-Strauss has long been problematic for feminist theorists because the idea of exchange at the heart of Lévi-Strauss’s account appeals to women as the supreme object of exchange. By the end of his study of kinship, the exceptional status of women seems to have attained a logical necessity: The emergence of symbolic thought must have required that women, like words, should be things that were exchanged. . . . In the matrimonial dialogue of men, woman is never purely what is spoken about; for if women in general represent a certain category of signs, destined to a certain kind of communication, each woman preserves a particular value arising from her talent, before and after marriage, for taking her part in a duet. In contrast to words, which have wholly become signs, woman has remained at once a sign and a value. (1969, 25)5 The moment at which women began to serve as things that were exchanged is consigned to a prehistory, a kind of Rousseauian state of nature, which can only be posited as what must have occurred. Lévi-Strauss acknowledges that while women “in general represent a certain category of signs,” women also have a particular value, but it is unclear whether such particular values remain capable of representation. Like Marx’s commodities, women’s function in exchange usurps their status as particular, disguising their particularity and rendering it inaccessible to interrogation. The symbolic order now appears to be dependent on a particular social configuration—the signification of women as gifts to be exchanged in marriage. If the prohibition of incest is the link between the biological and the social, doesn’t the particular form it takes when it endows women with the status of supreme gift suffer a transposition into the realm of the natural by virtue of the necessity LéviStrauss confers on the exchange of women? The equivocation embedded in Lévi-Strauss’s account is one that gets carried over to Lacan, and transported into the function of women as facilitating the exchange of signs that constitutes communication, so that woman comes to be understood in terms of their function as sign, representation, or

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phallus. This equivocation is one that allows Lévi Strauss and Lacan to relegate women to their natural status as second-class citizens, whose role is to bear children, cement communities, and serve as conduits through which lines of inheritance can establish communal identities—all without noticing, or at least without acknowledging, that the move they employ is a naturalizing one. So long as there is no confrontation with women’s equivocal function as both the natural ground or constitutive outside of society, as the cement that glues society together, facilitating the flow of signification, and constituting meaning, it hardly matters whether the symbolic is construed as either ideal or contingent. Whether one defends the symbolic by insisting on its ideal status, thereby attempting to divorce it from any normative or social definition, or insists that the symbolic is precisely normative rather than natural, one ignores the double valence of the category of woman. The point is that woman as a concept that facilitates communication functions both as a guarantor of meaning within society, and is expelled outside the system, as if it could function unproblematically as a natural ground. To insist that the symbolic system is the only system of intelligibility that we have is a truism that avoids the salient question of how, in what ways, with what effects, and with what casualties, that system remains capable of challenge or transformation. Lacan says, “It is the world of words that creates the world of things—the things originally confused in the hic et nunc of the all in the process of coming-into-being. . . . Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man . . . the life of the natural groups that constitute the community is subjected to the rules of matrimonial alliance governing the exchange of women, and to the exchange of gifts determined by the marriage” (1977, 65–6). The question as to why it is women who serve as tokens of exchange, or how the status of women is conflated with the term natural in Lacan’s discourse, and how women therefore operate as placeholders for the presocial, is one that is never raised. The equivocal status of women as both prehistorical, pre-Oedipal bearers of material meaning, and as symbolic members of a society is therefore consigned to an unthinkable, imaginary past—the amorphous here and now of becoming. The value of women’s bodies as reproductive vessels is presupposed in an untheorized way, so that they perform the function of use-values in a way that immediately appears in a disguised form, namely in terms of their exchange value not just of a mode of production, but as the mode of production, as meaning itself (Lévi-Strauss 1969, 496).6 Since the system of exchange that women facilitate constitutes the very means by which signification is instituted, since their function as signs is what allows women to pass from one group to another in a move that is then identified as the founding moment of society, since there is an assimilation of meaning per se to the exchange or, in Gayle Rubin’s words “traffic in women,” it becomes very difficult—if not impossi-

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ble—to posit an alternative system of meaning (1975, 174).7 The patriarchal system appears to be the only one, but that is because it presents itself as naturalized. Just as Marx argued with regard to the categories of bourgeois economy, which came to appear implacable and fixed within the mode of commodity production, so the symbolic economy of psychoanalysis appears to be unassailable within a patriarchal organization of society. Jacqueline Rose (1986) suggests that Lacan’s later conception of language does not fall prey to the same objection as Lévi-Strauss, but her differentiation between the early and later work only succeeds in shifting the problematic to another level, not in dissipating it. Rose does not address the extent to which the Lacanian phallus is thoroughly implicated in a fetishistic discourse. Neither does she acknowledge that the imaginary, masculine morphology assumed by Freud prevents him from developing a theory of maternal identification. 8 While feminist theory has firmly established that the Freudian subject is modeled on male experience, and that this privilege is conflated with the universality of language, the implications of this insight has been applied inconsistently to one of the most dramatic examples of such an investment, namely Freud’s account of fetishism.9 Freud’s masculinist morphology is coupled with the failure of the male imagination to acknowledge sexual difference, a failure that nonetheless has done little to dislodge the transcendent status taken on by the myth of castration, a myth that is intimately tied to the logic of fetishism (see Freud 1953a). The value of the phallic economy sustains itself by imposing its measure of what constitutes pleasure on any body that does not immediately conform to masculine sexuality. Hence, the fact that women’s bodies lack a penis does not deter Freud from providing them with one, in one way or another, in a logic that conforms to the apparatus of fetishism. Freud thus manufactures for women the missing penis that nature is constructed as having failed to provide for women. It is not merely that nature is found wanting according to the masculinist imaginary that Freud refrained from questioning, but rather that even nature is made to confirm the expectation that women should have a penis. Freud finds that the “science of biology . . . justifies” the prejudice that “all human beings have the same (male) form of genital” in that it “has been obliged to recognize the female clitoris as the true substitute for the penis.” (1953a, 195). Science is thus constructed by Freud to conform to the expectations of the fetishist, and biology is understood to provide women with a substitute penis, a copy that provides a prototype for the phallic mother. It becomes clear that psychoanalysis has not effected a return to the body as such, but has merely elevated and idealized the experience of the masculine subject, abstracting from the bodily pleasures afforded by masturbation, and universalizing the value of these very specific, corporeal experiences into an

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economy of satisfaction that can be represented according to the measure of the phallus. Meanwhile, the specific bodily pleasures of female sexuality are neglected, and female anatomy appears either as a site of difference that would threaten the universal value of the phallic economy, or as a gap or hole in an economy that sustains the myth of the same by imposing its measure of what constitutes pleasure on any body that does not immediately conform to masculine sexuality. The missing part, the lack of the penis, must be compensated. Woman must be made whole, made to conform to the always already phallic male model. The clitoris is designated a penis-equivalent, which prevents Freud from having to bring into question his one-sex model, or from having to confront female sexuality as differing from male sexuality. The mother is represented as phallic, which keeps at bay the horror of the female genitals, or the fetishist invents for females the missing penis that they lack. Perhaps it will not have escaped notice that the various maneuvers that Freud employs to prevent women from interfering with the myth of the same replicate kettle logic (I didn’t borrow the kettle; it had a hole in it before I borrowed it; I gave it back without a hole).Women already have a penis, albeit an inferior copy or an inadequate version in comparison to men. Women don’t have a penis: they are always already castrated. Women always already have a penis: the phallic mother. The hidden agenda is the myth of the same. Instead of a lack, the phallic economy produces penis substitutes: clitoris-penis, phallic mother, fetish. The inability of boys to imagine that girls lack a penis, despite the evidence of their senses, and the proclivity to provide them with the missing penis that would otherwise figure as a lack, testify to the powerful assumption of the myth of sameness. The myth of the same fuels the masculine imaginary, which is grounded in an unthematized privileging of male anatomy. Not only does the myth of sameness infect psychoanalysis, in a way that makes unavailable for interrogation its masculine, white biases. The metaphysical prejudice of presence also informs castration theory. Girls are assumed to be wanting, given the evidence of the absence of a penis—a lack, however, that is based on the disparity between what is seen and the expectation that they should have a penis. The normative force of such an expectation resides in an attachment to the following unstated assumption: the basic similarity of all humans, where humanity is defined by default according to male traits (phallic activity for example). Once that similarity is found to be wanting, its lack is met only with the insistence on such similarity, and its production, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Taken together, the assumption of sameness and the fetishistic reaction to its empirical lack, reveal a more fundamental ideological commitment to an account of experience that is in fact based on pleasure derived from white, male anatomy, but which takes on an idealized and independent existence, precisely as imagi-

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nary. This imaginary achieves creative potential and becomes capable of grounding new ideas about subjectivity, ideas which proceed in ignorance and oblivion of their repudiation of their feminine and racialized others. In this way the discourse of disavowal has taken hold in both race theory and neo-Marxist theory which is able to proceed without paying any attention to the abject status of the feminine and racialized others that fetishism both produces and disavows. By focusing attention on the maternal relation as the locus of a primal mapping that is not yet symbolic or syntactic, but is on the cusp of the semiotic and symbolic, Kristeva’s notion of abjection offers a way of reworking the dominant psychoanalytic model (1982). Kristeva develops the notion of abjection as an alternative not only to denial (dénégation) and repudiation (forclusion), but also to the fetishistic logic of disavowal (déni/Verleugnung), with its “perverse dodges” (1982, 5). At the same time, abjection is “related to perversion” (1982, 15) in the sense that “it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition” (1982, 15). Concerned not merely with the “fetishized product” as “object of want [manque],” abjection is implicated in the more fundamental possibility of there being any object at all, with the “recognition of the want [manque] on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded” (1982, 5). As the revelation to the subject that “all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being” (1982, 5), abjection is related to the separation of the subject (who is not yet a subject) from the mother (who is not yet the mother). For we are dealing with a point at which there is as yet no “secure differentiation between subject and object” (1982, 7). Hence, ambiguity is a key feature of Kristeva’s notion of abjection. Abjection, says Kristeva, is, “above all, ambiguity” (1982, 7). It is ambiguous with regard to the self and other, with regard to passivity or activity, and with regard to the boundaries it sets up, which are permeable. Is abjection something that I do to the other or to myself? Is it an act I engage in, or is it a state I suffer? It is not clear who is being abjected by what, who is doing the abjection, and who is being affected by it. In emphasizing the ambiguity of abjection, Kristeva takes up the tension contained in the Freudian libido, the life and death struggle between Eros and Thanatos, or the need to think the compulsion of the drives as underwritten by the destructive force of death. Abjection concerns both the pleasurable and the fascinating, dangerous, or horrific—that which threatens. One can also say that central to Kristeva’s psychoanalytic understanding of desire is the suggestion that it assumes, rather than following, prohibition. The object of desire is desirable precisely as forbidden. At the same time, however, Kristeva is interested in the instability of the incest prohibition, and therefore in the ways in which the symbolic function that is set up in its wake is liable to revision and transformation. It is precisely

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because abjection does not operate at the level of desire, but rather constitutes the rejection that desire presupposes, that its relation to prohibition is not straightforward, but perverse. Kristeva brings into question what she sets up as the usual psychoanalytic account: in order for the desiring subject to develop, the infant must separate from the mother, which thereby becomes its first object, and identify with the law of the father, a process whereby the subject enters into the symbolic: When psychoanalysts speak of an object they speak of the object of desire as it is elaborated within the Oedipian triangle. According to that trope, the father is the mainstay of the law and the mother the prototype of the object. Toward the mother there is a convergence not only of survival needs but of the first mimetic yearnings. She is the other subject, an object that guarantees my being as subject. The mother is my first object—both desiring and signifiable. (1982, 32) According to this account, while the mother is the first object, it is the paternal metaphor that renders permanent the infant’s separation from the mother, rendering it signifiable through identification. Finding such a thesis indefensible, Kristeva seeks to modify it, when she asks: Do we not find, sooner . . . pre-objects, poles of attraction of a demand for air, food, and motion? Do we not also find, in the very process that constitutes the mother as other, a series of semi-objects that stake out the transition from a state of indifferentiation to one of discretion (subject/object)-semi-objects that are called precisely ‘transitional’ by Winnicott? Finally, do we not find a whole gradation within modalities of separation: a real deprivation of the breast, an imaginary frustration of the gift as maternal relation, and, to conclude, a symbolic castration inscribed in the Oedipus complex? (1982, 32–33) Maternal authority involves an ordering of the world in terms of the proper and the improper, or the inner and the outer, which in turn presents the infant with a means of organizing the world into self and other. This ordering, which is not yet fully symbolic (but borders on the symbolic), and does not presuppose the development of a superego, does not require the installation of paternal authority in the form of the law, although it does require a third—a loving, imaginary father, which Kristeva models on Freud’s father of individual prehistory (see 1987). The infant must, by means of rejection, distance itself from its source of sustenance and protection. It must abject the mother. Yet, since abjection is prior to the onset of sexual differ-

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ence, it is not quite accurate to speak of the mother, insofar as to do so assumes that the mother is gendered, and as such, differentiated from the father. In other words, to designate the first object as maternal, is already to assume the acquisition of language and acculturation from the standpoint of an Oedipalized and castrated subject. The abjection of the mother is bound up with the need to establish autonomy which is figured in terms of becoming a speaking subject (and perhaps what needs to be added to the psychoanalytic account is a subject that can be heard, since not all subjects are positioned in a relationship of authority to speech). To abject the mother is to move away from the (imaginary) immediacy of need and toward the (symbolic) mediation of desire. To separate from the mother is to inhabit the register of demand. Abjection is the initial and unstable site of differentiation for the infant, not yet of sexual differentiation, but in terms of separation from what comes to be designated, retrospectively, as the maternal body. Since that which is constituted as abject is already shaped by the masculine imaginary, the value of which is secured by a phallic economy that assures its predominance by reproducing fetishes, it becomes clear that the privilege attached to the maternal proceeds from the phallic psychoanalytic privileging of sexual difference. Perhaps, then, the paternal metaphor cedes its role as the organizing principle of discourse, in certain instances, to the economy of race. So long as the myth of castration continues to posit as ideal (even if unrealized for masculine subjects) the completed masculine corpus, a completion that is disavowed, the fragmentation of the female body continues to serve as the abjected feminine. Its status as incomplete, as a body in parts, lacks the organizing phallic principle, unless provided with one through the manufacture of fetishes. If the logic of castration is transferred to race, the trope of fetishism is recycled in a way that privileges whiteness as an alternate principle of completion, making the racialized other play the role of abjected other. The constitutive outside of a system that produces its contrary is displaced onto race, but the logic of the system remains unchallenged. Now the raced other is spat out of an unmarked economy of whiteness, but such a displacement merely transfers the cultural capital of fetishism to race, rather than altering the logic of displacement. The abjection of the feminine remains in place, but its place is no longer marked as such. The sexuality of women, and the racialization of bodies become unthinkable and impossible from the point of view of a white, patriarchal symbolic. Ejected from the system of equivalent and exchangable signs, they come to occupy the site of the real. At the same time she affirms the phallus, Kristeva introduces a mapping, or ordering of the world, a “first cartography of identity” that admits an authority that precedes the phallic order of castration, and subtends the symbolic, linguistic meaning it introduces (Clément and Kristeva

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2001, 95). This “maternal authority” is “warded off” by “sacred rites” (95), which designate certain substances as “dirty or contagious or dangers ‘in themselves’ only because they fall under the prohibition” (92) ordained by a “system of classification” (92). The “rules of separation or exclusion” (91) operate, according to Kristeva, in line with “two prototypes of filth (excrement and menses)” (95). Filth is “always related to the orifices or boundaries of the body, as so many landmarks constituting the corporeal territory” and it is either “excremental” or “menstrual” (94). “Excrement (and its equivalents: rot, infection, illness, cadaver, hair, and so on) represents the danger stemming from what is external to the ‘proper’ or to the ‘(logical) order’; conversely, menstrual blood threatens the relation between the two sexes and represents the danger stemming from within sexual and social identity” (95). The abject, then, is the always improperly excluded other, that which is expelled in an attempt to maintain the sanctity and integrity of the subject. In effect, Kristeva reworks the logic of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1953c by offering an interpretation of ritual, of forging distinctions between what is on the one hand, clean and proper and on the other hand, unclean and improper (see Kristeva 2000; Freud 1953c). Religious and sacred rituals perform divisions between the sacred and the profane, between the pure and the impure, by mapping the world into territories. This mapping is linked to the corporeal mapping that divides excrement from the body, the infant from the breast, the I from the not-I, and, ultimately, society from its outcasts. The abjection of the mother is a necessary and primordial process that divides the child from the mother, defining the boundaries of the self, and in doing so, designates what was previously conflated with the I as that which is to be rejected. Prior to the prohibition of the incest law, an originary process of discrimination takes place, a semiotic ordering, that is not yet the symbolization of language, but which gives rise to and shapes the symbolic. As social practices, rituals of division and separation already partake of the social structure, but they do so at a mythical, rather than a symbolically articulated level. Kristeva associates the semiotic with the Platonic chora for good reason: it is what gives rise to spatial differentiation, making possible the ordering of bodies that language will, retroactively, organize into codes. While the notion of abjection provides a useful interpretive device, unlike Kristeva, I do not think its scope should be restricted to a description of the infant’s rejection of the mother. On the contrary, I see abjection as inherently mobile, and as descriptive of a mechanism by which various others are stipulated as excluded, in particular, raced, classed, and sexually deviant others. Rather than seeing processes of constitutive differentiation as coterminous with socio-symbolic myths as Kristeva does, there is a need to reflect on their divergence from symbolic legitimations.

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While they stop short of identifying the Oedipus complex with original fantasy, Laplanche and Pontalis show how Freud eventually has recourse to a phylogenetic account of fantasy. In doing so they open up the question— without themselves pursuing it—of the racial connotations embedded in Freud’s account of the savage and its relation to prehistory (1963, 1). While this is not a theme that either Laplanche, Pontalis, or Kristeva pursue, the issue is signaled when Kristeva cites the same passage as Laplanche and Pontalis, whose discussion in The Language of Psycho-analysis (1973) provides the starting point of her consideration of fantasy and cinema (317).10 Kristeva agrees with Freud’s observation in his essay “The Unconscious,” that fantasies might be compared “with individuals of mixed race who, taken all round, resemble white men, but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other, and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges of white people” (see 1953d, 191).11 The question arises then, of how to think Freud’s notions of prehistory, of heredity, of “savages,” as somehow constituting the ground on which civilization is construed. How do these notions populate the unconscious of psychoanalysis? To untangle the theoretical complexity of the excluded other, marked by the maternal-feminine, is to confront the history by which psychoanalytic categories have converged around castration theory and the logic of fetishism. The mother comes to represent lack within an order of representation that operates retroactively to situate the mother’s body as a sign that is constitutive of a lost past. The closure of the system of signs that the maternal body effects erases its specificity at the same time as consigning it to a prehistory that is unintelligible strictly in terms of the system it facilitates. Materiality, lack, and the maternal thus become inscribed in a complex web that is both constitutive of the system of representation, and excluded as its unthought outside, its prehistorical other. Three strands of this problematic can be analytically isolated from one another. First, there is the temporal problematic of how the unconscious is constructed through a process of selective memory and repression. Second, there is the problem of abstraction from materiality, a process that invokes universality, idealization and homogenization, and that finds its ultimate expression in the birth or acquisition of language. Third, there is the historical circumstance by which the maternal body comes to be a privileged site of constitutive loss as a corollary of privileging the phallus. Each of these strands have been confounded with one another in a series of historical configurations that have produced various polemics at the intersection of film theory, psychoanalytic theory, and feminist theory. Here we focus on the second and third issues.12 Might it not be possible to use the lesson inscribed in Marx’s account of commodity fetishism not only to confront Lacanian assumptions about women’s status as representative of the phallus, but also the racist economy

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that is typically left in tact even by feminist revisions of psychoanalysis? In commodity fetishism, commodities take on, as Marx famously puts it, “a life of their own,” becoming the master of men (instead of vice versa) (1977, 165). The social/personal relations between men become obscured, as they are transposed into the commodity form. This process of mystification constitutes the riddle of commodity fetishism. Once the products of labor no longer serve as strict use-values, once they leave the level of pure need and enter into a cycle of production where they are produced not only to satisfy needs, but also for the purpose of exchange, something decisive has changed. Similarly, a displacement of the value of women’s bodies takes place, such that female bodies cannot be figured as valuable, except in symbolic terms, which are already marked as masculine/universal. Commodities are now produced for the express purpose of being exchanged, such that their nature as commodities is now figured into the production process. The abstraction that capital represents renders quantitatively equivalent the duration or magnitude of labor time that it takes for two different objects to be produced. In this process of abstraction, which already liquidates the specificity of workers by appealing to a notion of the average worker (thereby rendering irrelevant sex, race and sexuality), the particularity of the labor power, its qualitative features, and the materiality of the object are all rendered irrelevant. All that counts is that the amount of time it takes a worker to produce a loaf of bread can be calculated in units equivalent to the amount of time it takes another worker to produce a certain garment. Taken to its logical conclusion, this entails the replaceability, or substitutability, of one worker with another (along with all the aspects of alienation that follows the worker’s estrangement from his own creative process and which is exacerbated by the factory system.) Marx says, “If I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen because the latter is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident” (1977, 169). Yet, the same kind of absurdity is at work when producers use gold or silver as a universal equivalent by which to render the value of coats and boots. The “relation between their own private labour and the collective labor of society” appears to them as if it were fixed and implacable, when in fact the proportions dictating exchange are merely a result of “customary stability” and not at all the result of “the nature of the products” (167). Having established the absurdity of assuming that such stability resides in any natural facet of the product itself, Marx argues that: The categories of bourgeois economics . . . are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social

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production, i.e., commodity production. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production. (169) Could it be that Freud has made the mistake of naturalizing the phallus by taking it to provide the gold standard by which all pleasure is to be measured, such that he even finds confirmation in biology and science? (1953b, 217) Much as bourgeois categories of thought are taken by economists to be fixed, when in fact they only apply to the capitalist class, so the phallus is taken to be naturalized by Lacanians. The failure to situate the categories of psychoanalysis within a cultural context amounts to a refusal to admit that the very way in which the unconscious is figured might entail masculinist assumptions. Irigaray says, addressing Lacanians: You refuse to admit that the unconscious—your concept of the unconscious—did not spring fully armed from Freud’s head, that it was not produced ex nihilo at the end of the nineteenth century, emerging suddenly to reimpose its truth on the whole of history— world history, at that—past, present and future. The unconscious is revealed as such, heard as such, spoken as such and interpreted as such within a tradition. It has a place within, by and through a culture. (1991, 80) The purported universality of the symbolic order, Irigaray suggests, is in fact based on an imaginary configuration that prioritizes masculine morphology. “The symbolic, which you impose as a universal innocent of any empirical or historical contingency, is your imaginary transformed into an order, into the social” (94). What needs to be added is that the morphology that is prioritized is not only masculine, but also, by default, white. And that the discourse of fetishism elaborated by psychoanalytic theory not only owes a debt to Marx’s commodity fetishism, but also to a racialized interpretation of religion—with which Marx famously compares fetishism. The trope of race is erased by both Marx and Freud (and, by extension, by neo-Marxists and Lacan), appearing only in isolated pockets, in passages that line up savages with the primitive state of the feminine, such that women and raced others function at the level of an originary, mythical, excluded other, outside civilization, banished to the unconscious of psychoanalytic theory. Both Marx and Freud appeal to a notion of substitution in their theories of fetishism. In the case of Marx, what gets replaced is the sensuous, material, physical aspect of that which is produced as a use-value, including the variety of qualitatively different forms of labor that result in the production

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of manifold use-values through a division of labor. Considered as a commodity, as having value conferred upon it through exchange, this physical, sensuous dimension is abstracted from, such that a uniform equality now represents the total amount of labor expenditure that goes into the production of each product. The substitution of the sensuous dimension for the suprasensuous dimension is at the same time a transferal of the social dynamic between human beings to the abstract realm of quantitative determination, where all that counts is the duration or magnitude of labor, and not the quality of individual skills, talent, or originality. Thus the product itself seems to be endowed with a power that in fact derives from a personal relationship, but which now stands over against the worker, and confronts it as alien. Marx can therefore refer to value as a “social hieroglyphic” that is in need of deciphering (1977, 167), and of the “determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time” as “a secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities” (168). In the case of Freud, the meaning of the fetish is likewise obscured, but this time it is hidden not from the fetishist but only from other people (see1953e, 154). For Freud, in one sense the answer to the question “what is it that the fetish replaces?” is the female sexual organs. The material, physical, sensuous reality for which the fetish becomes a substitute is women’s genitals, and the symbolic status of fetishistic discourse universalizes sexuality, by abstracting from the unique sexuality of each woman and putting in its place fabricated fetishes that come to represent the productivity of the masculine imagination, and the strength of his prejudice. Freud says of the penis: . . . the boy’s estimate of its value is logically reflected in his inability to imagine a person like himself who is without this essential constituent. When a small boy sees his little sister’s genitals, what he says shows that his prejudice is already strong enough to falsify his perception. He does not comment on the absence of a penis but invariably says, as though by way of consolation and to put things right: ‘Her______’s still quite small. But when she gets bigger it’ll grow all right’” (1953b, 215–6). If in one sense what the fetish substitutes itself for is the female sex organs, in another what it substitutes is the pleasure the boy derives from his own penis. The failure of imagination, and the boy’s refusal to see the reality of the situation except in terms that mystify it, due to his assumption of likeness between the sexes, combine to attribute to the girl a penis that she does not in fact have. The boy only supposed its existence, and in his reluctance to give up the idea that the girl must have a penis—since he cannot imagine her not having one—he finds a substitute for it. It must be emphasized that,

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since the penis that the fetish replaces never existed, except as imaginary, in Freud’s account of fetishism, rather than the sensuous being replaced by the supra-sensuous—as in Marx’s commodity fetishism—the movement is the reverse. Here we have an imaginary penis being replaced by a stand in that does in fact have a real sensuous existence. Yet the value of the fetish lies not in its sensuous aspect, but precisely in the symbolic value that accrues to it by virtue of its substitution as equivalent to male morphology. The labor of the masculine imaginary that has produced the fetish by modeling it on the male penis was rendered invisible by its conversion into the symbolic economy of the phallus.13 Freud says “The meaning of the fetish is not known to other people, so the fetish is not withheld from him: it is easily accessible and he can readily obtain the sexual satisfaction attached to it. What other men have to woo and make exertions for can be had by the fetishist with no trouble at all” (1953e, 154). Two points are of particular interest. First, the fetish hereby takes on an exceptional status with regard to the circuit of meaning, such that its meaning is veiled from others and thus it seems to signify outside the symbolic, signifying in a way to which only the fetishist has private and privileged access. Secondly, access to the fetish appears to dispense with the necessity of effort. The fetishist expends no labor: he makes no exertions but obtains satisfaction without any trouble at all. While others have to work for satisfaction, the fetishist has an easy way of achieving it, one moreover that remains opaque to others. It is as if the fetish retains its hieroglyphic status for society in general, while the fetishist alone can decipher its secret. There is no need for social change, no need to unravel the mysterious nature of the fetish by confronting the form of its production with another mode. At one stroke, Freud seems to have safeguarded the fetish, exempting it from possible critique by privatizing its meaning. The fetish is both a universal strategy—Freud says that due to the “overvaluation of the sexual object, which inevitably extends to everything that is associated with it [a] certain degree of fetishism is . . . habitually present in normal love”—and yet retains its particular meaning for the individual because its significance is disguised from others (1953a, 154). Critiques of such phallic economies need to recall that the imaginary production that has fashioned fetishism has done so on the basis of an unarticulated abjection of the feminine and the racialized other. Atom Egoyan’s film, Exotica, to which I now turn, performs such a critique, by exploring the dynamic of fetishism in a context that restores the context of racialized, commodified, exploitative relationships within which it is enacted, but from which it is so often abstracted. I want to show both how Exotica follows the logic of fetishism, and how it undermines or interrogates that logic, at least as it functions within the narrowly defined sphere of psychoanalytic theory.

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Through his identification of Christina (Mia Kirshner) with his murdered daughter Lisa, Francis (Bruce Greenwood) sets up Christina as a fetishized memorial to his lost object.14 In doing so he preserves a melancholic attachment to his dead daughter, while at the same time reenacting the trauma of castration, confronting his failure to protect her, thereby trying to regain a sense of his identity as a father figure. His need to protect Christina, his desire to fetishize her, is also a failure to confront the death of Lisa. By displacing his paternal desire for Lisa onto Christina, he can continue to deny the loss of his daughter, and to enact the fantasy of completion and omnipotence that his fetishistic relationship to Christina facilitates. His melancholic and fetishistic denial of his lost object also finds expression in his relationship with another young girl, Tracey (Sarah Polley). Tracey is the daughter of Harold (Victor Garber), Francis’s brother, who was in the car accident that killed Francis’s wife. Tracey “babysits” for Francis while he visits Christina at club Exotica. The fact that there is no baby, that Lisa is dead, is one that Francis conveniently circumvents by maintaining the façade that Tracey is house-sitting, while at the same time having her practice the piano, thereby once again substituting for his daughter, who played the piano so well. As fetish, the piano covers over the actual loss of his daughter, and elides the difference between Tracey and Lisa, just as Christina’s schoolgirl uniform masks her castration and her identification with Lisa. That said, the fetishistic resemblance between Tracey, Christina, and Lisa will only take us so far—unless, of course, we take up the trope of fetishism (replete with its imaginary castration), and apply it not only to gender but also to race—as has indeed been done by film and race theorists. Francis’s daughter and wife were black, as we see from a photograph of Lisa, which depicts her in school uniform, with her mother. Unless we read over this racial differentiation, or assimilate it to fetishism, we must ask what it means for two white females to come to stand in for Francis’s loss of his daughter and wife. Both Tracey and Christina play the role of babysitters for Lisa, which also places them in the position of mother substitutes, stand-ins for Francis’s wife. As a stand-in for Francis’s wife, Tracey covers over her loss in more than one way. Francis’s brother and Tracey’s father, Harold, not only survived the crash, but allegedly had an affair with Francis’s wife. How, then, is Francis’s symbolic replacement of his daughter and wife with the white-skinned Tracey and Christina to be read? Is Francis compensating for his transgression of racial taboos? Is he masking the racial signifiers that mark his loss? Is he rewriting history as a concession to the fact that white middle-class society might not have been ready to tolerate racial diversity to the point of miscegenation? By installing Christina and Tracey in place of his daughter and wife, is Francis conforming to the racial boundaries that he had disrupted by marrying a black woman and giving birth to her child? Or has he himself come to iden-

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tify with the racialized other, having been accused of murdering his daughter, and finding himself on the wrong side of the law that, as a tax inspector, he is used to upholding in his role as overseer, ensuring that others comply with the law? Why was Lisa murdered, and why was Francis a suspect? Was he a suspect even before the murder was committed, due to his transgression of the racial law, was he a suspect waiting for a crime to happen, of which he could be accused? Had his racial transgression already put him on the wrong side of the law? Before the death of his daughter and wife Francis seemed to have the perfect middle class, heterosexual life. The fact that his marriage was interracial has been read as a product of Egoyan’s progressive, normalizing agenda.15 Even if Egoyan could be said to employ normalizing racial strategies, it still remains to ask: How are we to read Francis’s fetishistic and melancholic identification his black wife and daughter with two white girls? What does it mean to position a black woman as the object of desire of two white men? If Christina’s schoolgirl attire serves as a fetish for Francis, the transference of Francis’s paternal attention into a fetishizing sexuality serves to feed Christina’s need for the attention she so desired but was denied as a child. How does Lisa’s black skin play into this? Does Francis’s substitution of Christina for his racialized daughter provide Christina with added affirmation? Has Christina appropriated the exotic role of Lisa, by assuming the role of fetish? Does her exotic dancing reappropriate the fetish for white sexuality? The extent or nature of the abuse or neglect Christina suffered as a child is not clarified, but her deprivation is made evident in a flashback sequence, in which Francis drives home a young and awkward Christina, after babysitting. Christina, whose family life clearly falls short of Lisa’s, is envious of the pride Francis’ exhibits for his daughter. Unappreciated as a child, Christina dresses as a schoolgirl in adulthood, commanding the attention she was unable to attract as an actual schoolgirl, and allowing Francis to become a substitute paternal figure. In club Exotica, Christina is everybody’s object of desire. Zoe (Arsinée Khanjian), Eric (Elias Koteas) and Francis are all entranced by her schoolgirl attire. Her dance is one that embodies untouchable childlike innocence and at the same time figures the forbidden fruit of Eden. As we, the audience, watch Eric observing Francis, who in turn looks at Christina—and by doubling the voyeuristic relationship Egoyan also draws our attention to its structure—it becomes clear that if Christina’s relationship to Francis is circumscribed by the fetishistic structure that her appearance seems to endorse, it also provides her with something that is vital for her, a type of female agency that the Freudian/Lacanian account of fetishism neglects. Her schoolgirl uniform wins her the attention she craved but of which she was deprived as a schoolgirl. In this sense she is by no means a mere victim of the gaze. On the contrary, she solicits it, and is empowered by it, as it wins her the approval she

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missed as a child. At the same time she participates in a perhaps unconscious redirection of the gaze, away from the black skin of Lisa, restoring its proper path. Christina and Francis find in one another resources that help them survive their past, resources that implicate them in a legacy not only of women’s sexual objectification, but also in the hegemony of the white gaze. For Francis, Christina’s schoolgirl uniform operates as a fetish that allows him to deny the past, to mask his failure to protect Lisa, to erase his racial transgression, and to enact a fantasy of power, control and completion. For Christina, Francis’s fetishization of her combines the paternal attention she lacked as a child with the sexual approval her phallic substitution wins for her. She is thereby compensated for her neglect as a child, through her adoption of a stereotypical, fetishistic, relation to the voyeuristic gaze of the club, and affirmed in her whiteness as the proper object of the white male gaze. Adopting the role of the fetish serves Christina’s need for attention, but does nothing to contest either the phallic organization of the gaze or its racial signification. It maintains Christina as a sexualized object of the white male gaze, while facilitating Francis’s fetishistic disavowal of the past, which is also an abjection of his mixed race marriage. It is Tracey who facilitates a break with the past, when she expresses her wish to discontinue “babysitting” for Francis. Unlike Christina, Tracey is not dependent upon, or invested in, the fetishistic relationship Francis has with her, nor on the whiteness of his gaze. Coupled with Francis’ ejection from the club, which Eric orchestrates, and Zoe’s refusal to allow him back, Tracey’s refusal to adopt the role of the fetish allows Francis to move on. In order to successfully commodify sexuality, its presentation must be divorced from the context of life, personal histories, particular desires. What bothers Eric about Christina’s relationship with both Francis and Thomas is not its commodified sexuality, but precisely the fact that her connection with them is real, or rather that she seems to have a “thing” for Francis. Eric doesn’t use words like “real” or “authentic,” but rather the language of commodification, reification, as if he wants to hold on to what is liable to slip away. Christina’s connection to Francis might be articulated within a fetishistic structure but it also escapes the economic and artificial boundaries imposed by the club, in a way that Eric wants to rein in. His manipulation of Francis’s ejection from the club is accomplished by encouraging Francis to violate the rules, to touch Christina. In Eric’s mind, Francis has already violated the rules of the club, by establishing a meaningful connection with Christina that transgresses the commodified relations that alienates workers from their feelings. Thrown out of the club, Francis lies on the ground, in the rain, his face bloodied. The picture of abjection, Francis who has already lost everything— his wife, his daughter, his trust in his brother, his white prerogative—now

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loses his fetish, Christina in her schoolgirl uniform. And Christina, who never had very much to lose in the first place, loses her paternal figure of authority, whose gaze she realigns with whiteness. The breakdown of the symbolic system that coalesces around fetishism, in both Marx’s and Freud’s sense, allows both Christina and Francis to start anew, to create new meanings, to fashion a new symbolic. Eric’s forcible separation of Francis from Christina expresses his failure to tolerate the passionate connection between Francis and Christina, which exceeds the bounds of commodification, yet at the same time it provides them with an opportunity to abandon the structure of fetishism. There is, of course, a danger in abruptly breaking off the coping mechanisms—fetishistic or otherwise—that individuals have developed. Christina and Francis facilitate one another’s denial of the past, while providing one another with a lifeline that enables their psychic survival, providing a fantasmatic completion for one another, compensating for loss. Christina is made whole by Francis’s gaze, which sexualizes her as an object by reading over her castration with the means of a fetishistic strategy, while at the same time it provides her with the paternal attention she missed as a child, and reassuring him that he has not lost his daughter, that he is a capable father, that he is in control, that he is white, that he has phallic power. Christina’s schoolgirl uniform fulfils the condition of the fetish. Francis is made whole by fetishizing Christina, thereby obviating the threat that she would otherwise represent as a castrated female, a threat that also represents the desertion of his wife, the murder of his daughter, and his implication in the crime. He recovers his sense of completion by abjecting the racial contamination of this past. Deprived of their coping strategies, which take place within the fetishistic structure, whereby Christina offers Francis the opportunity of disavowal, both Christina and Francis encounter psychic crisis. The form that Francis’s psychic eruption takes is phallic and violent, predictably so, given the confirmation of his paternal role with which Christina provided him. He wants to murder Eric with a gun he finds in Thomas’s shop, he wants to eliminate the person who has severed his psychic lifeline. Equally predictable is the childlike character of Christina’s response to Francis’s ejection from the club. She exchanges the inaccessibility of her onstage persona, the captivating image that predominates throughout the film, for a childlike, abject, animal loss of control. All sense of boundaries or decorum desert her at she hits out at, Eric, the man who has manipulatively deprived her of her connection with Francis, in which she found validation. She reverts to the child she is dressed as in her schoolgirl outfit, exhibiting behaviour that sharply contrasts with how she will appear the following night, having regained her composure, doing her job as always, reverting to her sexual, fetishistic persona, in control of the gaze she elicits.

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The fragility of the solutions adopted by Francis and Christina consists, in part, in the fact that they attempt to extract a meaningful relationship with one another from a context that is designed for the production of profit, based on the controlled circulation of desire in the form of women’s commodified sexuality. Within this circuit of meaning, Christina adopts the position of the sexual object, by regressing to a childhood position. She plays out her Oedipal complex in relation to Francis by soliciting and sexualizing his attention as a father figure. Francis has lost everything: the daughter of whom he was so proud; his wife, whose relationship with Francis’s brother is never clarified; and his confidence in his ability as a father. Francis is able to deny his loss of power, his castration, by adopting the position of father figure in relation to Christina. The commodification of women’s sexuality in which club Exotica trades is informed by a series of assumptions that specify the scopophilic desires of its male clientelle. Far from being a space for the free expression of sexual desire, club Exotica enforces stringent codes of conduct that reflect the requirements of a capitalist, heteronormative economy, and appeal to the strict separation of pleasure from work. You can look, but you cannot touch. The gaze is authorized, but the material and emotional connection to sexuality is not. In order to successfully commercialize sexuality, its presentation must be divorced from the context of life. In order to take their place in the economy of exchange, to circulate as saleable goods, women’s bodies must be constructed according to desires that have already abstracted a certain interpretation of sexuality and race from their complex and differentiated existence. Emphasizing the extent to which the scopophillic practices of voyeurism and fetishism are governed by a series of culturally specific constraints, Egoyan draws attention not merely to the fact that desire is always already structured by the law, but also to the imaginary constructions that feed into the erection of the law. By framing it against the background of an alternative economy, Egoyan exposes the white, heteronormative assumptions of power and desire within the confines of which the fetishistic solution typically operates. From the opening scene, in which a black, gay customs officer is taught how to position himself in relation to the gaze by subjecting Thomas (Don McKellar), who will later become his lover, to scrutiny, the policing of borders is at issue. If international boundaries are at stake in Thomas’s smuggling operations, the boundaries between therapeutic institutions as opposed to the entertainment industry are at stake in club Exotica. When Eric tells Zoe that he finds it “therapeutic” to introduce Christina, Zoe’s response is to remind him of his contractual obligations: “that’s not what you are getting paid for,” just as she tells Francis that club Exotica is there for his “entertainment” and “amusement,” not for “healing.” “There are other places for that,” Zoe admonishes him, offering to “give him a list” of addresses where he can

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go for treatment, designating the proper domain of legitimate medicalized discourse as outside the business of entertainment that the exotic dancers of strip clubs provide. The question of whether one is performing the job one is being paid for, or whether one is consuming the product one is paying for, is thematized throughout the film. Thomas shares a taxi with a passenger who gives him opera tickets in exchange for paying his part of the fare, an exchange that that turns into something neither Thomas nor his taxi companion anticipates. It becomes an opportunity for Thomas to meet a man with whom he will have an erotic encounter, but one who will also disappear with the valuable Hyacinth Macaw eggs that Thomas has illegally imported. The question of whether or not payment is appropriate, and what is being paid for, recurs in Francis’s payment of Tracey for babysitting, and in Thomas’s payment of Christina for her exotic dancing. Tracey stops babysitting because she understands that what she is doing cannot accurately be described as babysitting, and that she is therefore participating in an activity that is being misnamed. Perhaps it would be better to call it therapy—and she is not a therapist, but rather a teenager. Christina is reluctant to accept money from the gay Thomas, whose true intentions are to elicit information from her on behalf of Francis, and not to voyeuristically gain pleasure from her sexuality. As Thomas says over the phone to the person who is working on his apartment, “You did the job, but it’s not the one I asked you to do.” Or, in a symbolic exchange that deals in legal abstraction and currency rather than monetary, as Eric says to Zoe, who is pregnant with his child, he has to be careful about his feelings—that’s why they have a contract. Leonard Cohen’s lyrics reflect the fact that everybody knows about Francis’s trauma. “And everybody knows that you’re in trouble. Everybody knows what you’ve been through. . . . Everybody knows it’s coming apart.” Francis’s fascination with Christina reenacts the fascination of the murderer who abducted and killed his daughter, for whom Francis himself was mistaken when the police arrested him on suspicion of her murder, only to release him after the real murderer is found. Francis falls under suspicion because police suggest a motive of revenge, after revealing an affair between his wife and brother, which they imply Francis believes might have resulted in the birth of his daughter. Appealing to a boundary that is established according to the commodification of bodies, sexuality and pleasure are separated by the procedures of capitalism, which in turn depends upon disciplinary practices that codify some forms of sexuality as acceptable and commercially viable, while other forms are classified as deviant or certifiable. Zoe’s pregnant body, for example, must be kept under wraps, since it is liable to make the clients uncomfortable. So long as desire at least appears to conform to the commodified

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and packaged form of sexuality to which the club caters, everything runs smoothly, but as soon as the conventions of commercial viability are openly flouted, and their contingency challenged, desire can no longer be appropriately channelled along the path of white, heteronormative, fetishistic desire. Like Eric’s, Francis’s attachment to Christina is too personal. It does not adhere to the convention that Zoe wants to maintain: that the club is a place of entertainment; a place of voyeurism; a place in which the dancers are there to be looked at for the pleasure of the clientele, who are there to enjoy a temporary respite from their hardworking lives. Francis and Christina have mixed up the categories of business and personal history, of pleasure and the psychic work of dealing with trauma, confusing the boundary that Zoe tries to reerect in the interests of maintaining the success of the business she inherited from her mother. The club is where the entrepreneurial business executive comes to relax after a long, hard day’s work, having earned the right to be entertained, the right to look but not to touch, the right to the anonymity of voyeurism. Eric exhorts the clientele to observe the boundaries between work and play as he entices them to treat themselves to what they deserve for just five dollars. Their just deserts are the reward of female spectacle, so long as they obey the rules, keeping intimacy, touch, physicality, and bodies at bay, even while they allow themselves to be seduced by the visual display of sexuality they have paid for. It is the job of the employees of the club to entertain the clientelle. As employees, their personal histories and desires should not enter into the realm of their work. Subverting the expectations of voyeurism and surveillance, where the power of the gaze is not usually associated with black males or with gay sexuality, Egoyan sets up a context in which the rules of voyeurism that structure club Exotica are brought into question (hooks 1996, 197–213). This interrogation of the white, male heterosexual gaze is continued as we follow Thomas through a series of gay encounters, and finally witness his discomfort in club Exotica, as Christina dances for him. Thomas has no sexual desire for Christina, and under his embarrassed gaze her commodified sexuality becomes superfluous, faintly ridiculous. For her part, Christina’s ability to communicate to Thomas is perhaps premised on the fact that he has no interest in her sexual commodification. As a substitute father figure, standing in for Francis, Thomas represents the possibility of Christina moving beyond the need to solicit sexual attention in the guise of a schoolgirl. His ability to nurture exotic birds, and to cross sexual boundaries, has been established through his smuggling operation of rare eggs. Throughout the film, a parallel is suggested between the exotic birds in Thomas’s pet shop and the dancers in club Exotica. The boundaries that sanction and are sanctioned by the power of the gaze, the pleasures of looking, and the mechanisms of surveillance are under

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interrogation in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica. Penalties are exacted for transgressing boundaries without respecting the law. The crossing of boundaries requires the observance of certain rules, the violation of which is liable to warrant investigation and punishment. Financial transactions are subject to international law, and the commodification of women’s bodies is structured by codes of sexuality, desire, and competition. Egoyan problematizes the mirror image that has been such a dominant trope for film theory, alluding to the regimes of power that structure the image of the subject in ways that escape the subject’s control (if not their knowledge).16 As Thomas gazes into what appears to be a mirror, he is in fact subjected to the gaze of customs officers, and as Christina dances in front of what appears to be a mirror, she is in fact observed by Zoe, whose mother built the one way window at the behest of a customer, telling the dancers that it was for their protection. When Francis opens the door to a young Christina, who has arrived to babysit Lisa, he holds a video camera, having been filming his wife and daughter at the piano.17 The scene that he has videotaped is one that haunts him, one that excludes Christina from the family embrace, and also one that asks the audience to explicitly confront the relation between Francis, the character, and Egoyan, the director, as the look of the male protagonist and that of the camera/director are made to coalesce.18 The fetishization of exotic birds, which appear everywhere in Exotica— the club, Thomas’s pet shop, the apartment that Tracey shares with her father—alludes to an illegitimate borrowing of, and disavowal of cultures marked as exotic. Thomas’s smuggling of Hyacinth Macaw eggs stands as a metaphor for the systematic cultural pillaging of far away places accomplished by Western capitalism, and reproduced in the décor of club Exotica. Egoyan thus draws attention to the colonial history of fetishism that Freud and Lacan suppress, but that has been well-documented by William Pietz and others. The following exchange between Francis and Thomas, ostensibly about the temperatures that can be endured by exotic birds, pertains both the exotic dancers, and to exotic, racialized others. “They’re a lot hardier than you’d think,” says Thomas, to which Francis replies “I wouldn’t think they are not hardy. Just because they are exotic, doesn’t mean they can’t endure extremes.” What imaginary ideals continue to inform both the privileging of fetishism, and the erasure of its racial history from the psychoanalytic corpus and from Marxist analyses? The continued need to marginalize others, in order to keep in place the fictional supremacy of the phallus, and the particular social order it legitimizes, rests on a dynamic of abjection that requires the abject to circulate among various dejects. The abjection of Francis and Christina, when they are deprived of their fetishistic coping mechanisms, is also an abjection by Egoyan of the capitalist system that cannot tolerate the

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expression of genuine emotion or affection in the commodified world of contracts. The club represents a refuge by inviting customers to come in from the cold, pay to have women conform to the ideal of sexual objects, pay to have the illusion of control over them. But this refuge is itself illusory, circumscribed by the rules of profit. Once the boundary is crossed, once Francis touches Christina, Eric—who incited the desire to touch— enforces the law, and the limitations that commodified desire imposes come to the fore. These limitations are constructed by the objectification, commercialization, and racialization of women’s sexuality along rigid lines of demarcation. The exotic atmosphere that Egoyan creates in club Exotica is a highly contrived one that borrows the lush vegetation of tropical climates, just as it soothes its customers with the strains of Middle-Eastern music. Egoyan is critically presenting the norms of capitalism, at the same time as commenting on the illegitimate borrowing from cultures that softens the hard edges of commodity culture, while maintaining the balance of power in its favor. For Marx, one only has to compare the form of commodity production to other social forms of labor organization, and the mystical quality whereby values appear to be fixed, and whereby men appear to be governed by commodities that seem to be endowed with transcendent powers, vanishes. Similarly, until and unless new forms of symbolic production—those created by feminist imaginaries for example—not only circulate but gain a certain legitimacy, the mystery of the phallus, and the natural status it confers on its particular version of the symbolic, will not be exposed in its particularity. The problem is that the process of gaining legitimacy tends to proceed by way of spawning new abjects, so that the very practices through which new symbolics are generated and sustained as meaningful are liable to operate to the detriment and invisibility of those not specifically articulated as subjects in need of legitimation. Hence, the production of feminist symbolics, unless they proceed with the specific intent of correcting racial biases, will reproduce them, in much the same way that Freud’s theory of fetishism rests upon an abjection of homosexuality.

Notes 1. Recall the exasperated claim that Judith Butler associates with Lacanians: “But it is the law!”—an utterance that performatively attributes the very force to the law that the law itself is said to exercise. . . . Thus the status given to the law is precisely the status given to the phallus, the symbolic place of the father, the indisputable and incontestable” (2000, 21).

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2. See Rubin 1975, 157–210; Irigaray 1985,170–91; De Lauretis 1984, 20; Rose 1986, 69; Cowie 1997, 20–26; Butler 2000, 15–20. 3. William Pietz traces the development of the Latin facticius, to the Portugeuse feitiço and the pidgin fetisso, as precedents for the word fétichisme, coined by Charles de Brosses in 1757, in a text that Marx read, Du Culte des dieux fétiches, ou parallele de l’ancienne religion de l’Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie (Geneva, 1760). Pietz argues that “the fetish, as an idea and a problem . . . originated in the cross-cultural spaces of the coast of West Africa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” He goes on to trace the roots of the “initial application of feitiço on the African coast.” The “Portuguese word feitiço . . . in the late Middle Ages meant ‘magical practice’ or ‘witchcraft’ performed, often innocently, by the simple, ignorant classes. Feitiço, in turn, derives from the Latin adjective facticius, which originally meant ‘manufactured.’” (1985, 5). Pietz locates the “emergence of the distinct notion of the fetish” in the “intercultural spaces along the West African coast” which “were triangulated among Christian feudal, African lineage, and merchant capitalist social systems” and suggests that “the fetish must be viewed as proper to no historical field other than that of the history of the word itself, and to no discrete society or culture, but to a crosscultural situation formed by the ongoing encounter of the value codes of radically different social orders,” (6–11). Emily Apter notes that the concept of fetish has also been related to “fatum, signifying both fate and charm” while Giorgio Agamben “deduced from the Latin facere neither charm nor beauty but rather the degraded simulacrum or false representation of things sacred, beautiful, or enchanting” (1991, 4; 1981, 69–71.) Apter is quoting Agamben. 4. For a related argument, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (1995). McClintock argues, and I agree, that “race, gender and class are not distinct realms of experience,” rather “they come into existence in and through relation to each other—if in contradictory and conflictual ways” (5). Like McClintock, I also “wish to avoid privileging one category over the others as the organizing trope” (8), but my focus is less on refusing the theoretical reduction of the trope of fetishism to the phallic scene of castration (see 67), and more on using abjection strategically as a way of detailing the tendency of fetishism to reinvent itself in a way that is complicit with a univocal assertion of valence. Whereas McClintock’s focus is on multiplying the signification of fetishes beyond their phallic reference (see 183), I am interested in the ways in which phallic discourse tends to close down the proliferating references of fetishism. While McClintock discusses abjection to some extent, she does not clarify its theoretical status in relation to castration and fetishism. By doing so, I hope to establish the sense in which discourses of race, gender, and class, precisely because of the tendency of discourses towards reification, can in turn come to abject one another. 5. Commenting on the ambiguous status of the incest prohibition, Lévi-Strauss says it is “the link between” the biological and the social: “Before it, culture is still non-existent; with it, nature’s sovereignty over man is ended. The prohibition of

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incest is where nature transcends itself. . . . It brings about and is in itself the advent of a new order” (1969, 25). 6. As De Lauretis says: Lévi-Strauss overlooks or does not see a contradiction that lies at the base of his model: for women to have (or to be) exchange value, a previous symbolization of biological sexual difference must have taken place. . . . The assimilation of the notion of sign (which Lévi-Strauss takes from Saussure and transposes to the ethnological domain) with the notion of exchange (which he takes from Marx, collapsing use-value and exchange-value) is not a chance one . . . the universalizing project of Lévi-Strauss—to collapse the economic and the semiotic orders into a unified theory of culture—depends on his positing woman as the functional opposite of subject (man), which logically excludes the possibility—the theoretical possibility—of women ever being subjects and producers of culture. . . . It is in his theory, in his conceptualization of the social, in the very terms of his discourse that women are doubly negated as subjects: first, because they are defined as vehicles of men’s communication—signs of their language, carriers of their children; second, because women’s sexuality is reduced to the ‘natural’ function of childbearing, somewhere in between the fertility of nature and the productivity of a machine. Desire, like symbolization, is a property of men, property in both senses of the word: something men own, possess, and something that inheres in men, like a quality. (1984, 20) Or as Elizabeth Cowie puts it: The image/meaning of woman in social discourse, in representation, is explained by reference to a structure—here exchange in kinship—which is itself dependent on appropriating pre-given terms, woman, as a value already recognised in the society. This original ‘valuing’ has, however, remained unexamined. This contradiction is at the heart of Lévi-Strauss’s own arguments, for he assumes woman as the valuable available and waiting in kinship exchange while at the same time he argues that kinship structures inaugurate social relations, in which case there can be no prior social valuing of women. The contradiction arises from the way Lévi-Strauss uses the notion of ‘sign’ which he draws from structural linguistics. . . . In drawing upon the prestige of Lévi-Strauss’s account of kinship to support his concept of the symbolic law, Lacan has also introduced the contradictions of Lévi— Strauss’s theory of woman as sign. . . . ‘Woman’ is not given, biologically or pscyhologically, but is a category produced in signifiying practices. These practices, whether kinship structures, or the processes of signification in the unconscious, or the signifying systems of public and published forms of representation, do not produce a unified identity equivalent to biological women. . . . The power of images is not that they ‘dupe’ us, but that they are encountered at both a cognitive level as significations and at the level of identification in all its complex forms. (1997, 20–26)

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7. Gayle Rubin says: If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the woman being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it. . . . If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage. The relations of such a system are such that women are in no position to realize the benefits of their own circulation. As long as the relations specify that men exchange women, it is men who are the beneficiaries of the product of such exchanges—social organization” (1975, 174). 8. Rose’s argument hinges on a shift in Lacan such that the fantasy of completion is no longer located in the imaginary but is now assigned to the symbolic: “there is no longer imaginary ‘unity’ and then symbolic difference or exchange, but rather an indictment of the symbolic for the imaginary unity which its most persistent myths continue to promote” (1986, 71). For Rose, if Lacan’s early work is open to the same charge as Lévi-Strauss, namely, that to define women as objects of exchange is to presuppose “the subordination which it is intended to explain” (69), Lacan moves away from the idea of women as objects of exchange in his later work. Woman is now “a category within language” (71), “constructed as an absolute category (excluded and elevated at one and the same time)” (71), but this status “as an absolute category and guarantor of fantasy . . . is false” (72). For Rose, a crucial shift takes place in Lacan’s conception of language, such that language is no longer thought as mediation, but in terms of “its fundamental division” (69), a division which is however “persistently disavowed” (70). The mechanism of disavowal is the “sexual relation” itself, which sets up a “unity” that disavows unconscious division in favor of “oneness” and “completion” (70). The persistent disavowal that Rose invokes already operates within language, and as such it assumes the moment of symbolization, or mediation. Woman, as the site of loss, remains the absence that stabilizes language as a system, represented within the system as division, splitting, or the unconscious. One could make the same point about Lacan’s view of language as division that Rose herself makes in relation to Kristeva, when she says, “even the one who plays with language through writing has of course come through to the other side: ‘The writer: a phobic who succeeds at metaphor so as not to die of fear but to resuscitate through signs” (162). Rose is quoting Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, (1982, 38) in a modified translation. It is striking that Rose employs the language of disavowal, thereby implicitly invoking a discourse of fetishism, in accounting for the role that woman plays in Lacan’s later texts: “As the place onto which lack is projected, and through which it is simultaneously disavowed, woman is a ‘symptom’ for the man” (72). This raises the question of how far Lacan has in fact moved away from the naturalizing imaginary that posits women’s value as both somehow outside discourse, and as guaranteeing a phallic fantasy of completion, albeit false. Women’s use-value as reproductive vessels remains determinative of their status as objects of exchange in a way that is not theorized by the system of signs that they legitimate. To emphasize that the status of the father is “normative,” rather than given, in Lacan’s psychoanalysis (63) does nothing to address the fact that women continue to

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play the role of a constitutive outside. To do this the series of questions Rose poses to Metz and Comolli, prompted by the question of disavowal, would have to be followed through (211). One would have to address in detail Rose’s reading of narcissism (174–79) and identification (180–84) to show what I suspect to be a problematic appeal to a fetishistic splitting of the ego (see 194) that remains dependent on castration theory, confirming Freud and Lacan’s relegation of women to the constitutive outside, as enabling of discourse, yet excluded from its creativity. 9. Rather than questioning the conceptual foundations of fetishism as such, the move that is often made is to accept the logic of fetishism and expand its reference. See for example, Anne McClintock’s argument, “that female fetishism dislodges the centrality of the phallus and parades the presence and legitimacy of a multiplicity of pleasures, needs and contradictions that cannot be reduced to the ‘desire to preserve the phallus’” (1995, 183). McClintock is quoting Lacan, Feminine Sexuality (1983, 96). See also most of the essays in Emily Apter and William Pietz, ed., Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (1993). For a notable exception see the essay by Charles Bernheimer in the same volume, “Fetishism and Decadence: Salome’s Severed Heads” (62–83). 10. Cowie refers to the same passage in Freud, but again does not take up the issues of race that it raises. 11. See Freud’s “The Unconscious” (1953d) quoted by Laplanche and Pontalis (1973, 317), to which Kristeva refers in Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, 2 (2002): 66. 12. For a more detailed discussion of these issues, see my Abjection: Film and the Constitutive Nature of Difference, Indiana University Press, forthcoming. 13. Freud says, “the normal prototype of fetishes is a man’s penis,” (1953e, 157). 14. As Amanda Lipman puts it, “Francis turns his mourning for his dead daughter into a fetishistic, psychosexual relationship through Christina’s striptease character” (1995, 45). 15. bell hooks reads the film as putting forward an inclusive agenda (1996, 27–33). Following this logic it could be added that Egoyan not only presents an inclusive analysis of gender, race, and class, but also a positive representation of disability or differently abled bodies, in the figure of Harold (Victor Garber) who is wheelchair bound. At the same time, Egoyan could be read as playing with the idea of disability as fetish. 16. That Christina knows the window was built for voyeuristic purposes, that she knows its history, does not prevent its voyeuristic use, but neither does it put her in the position of a hapless victim, as might be suggested by Laura Mulvey’s celebrated analysis of fetishism and voyeurism. hooks is by no means the only one to bring into question Mulvey’s analysis. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism (1990, 28–40). See also Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (1982).

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17. hooks comments on the protective gesture that Lisa makes in holding up her hand to block the camera, a gesture that takes on a peculiar pertinence in relation to the voyeuristic and murderous events thematized in the film, Reel to Real, (1996, 27–33). 18. The role of film as capable of documenting history is one that Egoyan revisits in Ararat, a film about the making of a documentary about the Turkish genocide of Armenians (1915–1918). Given the disputed status of the genocide, and the fact that it took place without any video archive, the status of such a documentary as establishing the reality of the genocide is of particular interest. Like Exotica, Ararat is also concerned with the issue of crossing international boundaries. The narrative is structured around the interrogation of Raffi (David Alpay) by customs officer David (Christopher Plummer), who suspects that the film cans Raffi carries contains drugs.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. 1981. Stanze. Trans. Yves Hersant. Paris: Christian Bourgeois. Apter, Emily. 1991. Feminizing the fetish: Psychoanalysis and narrative obsession in the turn-of-the-century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Apter, Emily, and William Pietz, eds. 1993. Fetishism as cultural discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bernheimer, Charles. 1993. Fetishism and decadence: Salome’s severed heads. In Fetishism as cultural discourse. 62–83. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Butler Judith. 2000. Antigone’s claim: Kinship between life and death. Columbia University Press. Chanter, Tina. Abjection: Film and the constitutive nature of difference. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, forthcoming. Clément, Catherine, and Julia Kristeva. 2001. The feminine and the sacred. Trans. Jane Marie Todd. New York: Columbia University Press. Cowie, Elizabeth. 1997. Representing the woman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Lauretis, Teresa. 1984. Alice doesn’t: Feminism, semiotics, cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Exotica. (Canada, 1994). Atom Egoyan, 103 min. Foucault, M. 1973. Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1953a. Three essays on the theory of sexuality. In Standard edition of the complete psychological works. Vol. 7, trans. James Strachey, 135–243. London: Hogarth Press.

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———. 1953b. On the sexual theories of children. SE 9, 209–26. ———. 1953c. Totem and taboo. SE 13, 1–161. ———. 1953d. The unconscious. SE 14, 166–204. ———. 1953e. Fetishism. SE 21, 152–57. hooks, bell. 1996. Exotica: Breaking down to break through. In Reel to real: Race, sex and class at the movies. New York: Routledge. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Women on the market. In This sex which is not one. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1991. The poverty of psychoanalysis. Trans. David Macey. In The Irigaray reader, ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Kristeva, Julia, 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1984. Revolution in poetic language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1987. Tales of love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. The sense and non-sense of revolt. The powers and limits of psychoanalysis. Vol. 1. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2000. Sense and non-sense of revolt: The powers and limits of psychoanalysis. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. Intimate revolt: The powers and limits of psychoanalysis. Vol. 2, trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. Revolt she said. Trans. Brian O’Keeffe. New York: Semiotext(e). Lacan, J. 1977. Function and field of speech in psychoanalysis. In Écrits: a selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, 30–113. London: Tavistock Publications. ———. 1983. Feminine sexuality. Ed. Juliette Mitchel and Jacqueline Rose. New York: W. W. Norton. Laplanche, Jean, and J. B. Pontalis. 1963. Fantasy and the origins of sexuality. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49: 1–11. ———. 1973. The language of psychoanalysis. Trans. Donald NicholsonSmith. New York: W. W. Norton. Lévi-Strauss 1969. The elementary structures of kinship. Trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press. Lipman, Amanda. 1995. Exotica. In Sight and Sound. n. s. 5 (May): 45.

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McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest. New York: Routledge. Marx, Karl. 1977. Capital: A critique of political economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books. Metz, Christian. 1982. The imaginary signifier: Psychoanalysis and the cinema. Trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mulvey. Laura. 1990. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In Issues in feminist film criticism, ed. Patricia Erens, 28–40. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pietz, William. 1985. The problem of the fetish, I. Res. 9: 5–17. Rose, Jacqueline. 1986. Sexuality in the field of vision. London: Verso. Rubin, Gayle. 1975. The traffic in women: notes on the “political economy” of sex. In Toward an anthropology of women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press.

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CHAPTER 9

On the Border between Abjection and the Third: The (Re)Birth of Narcissus in the Works of Julia Kristeva

PLESHETTE DEARMITT Tiresias was famous: far and near, through all Boeotian towns, they asked the seer for counsel; none could fault his prophecies. The first to test him was Liriope, a nymph the river-god Cephisus had caught in his coils; within his waves he snared the azure nymph—and had his way. And when her time had come, that lovely nymph gave birth to one so handsome that, just born, he was already worthy of much love: Narcissus was the name she gave her son. And when she asked the augur if her boy would live to see old age, Tiresias replied: “Yes, if he never knows himself.” For many years his words seemed meaningless; but then what happened in the end confirmed their truth: the death Narcissus met when he was stricken with a strange, singular frenzy.

And with these words, so captivatingly written by Ovid in the Third Book of the Metamorphoses, Narcissus appeared on the Western scene for the very first time. Ever since, the figure of Narcissus has repeatedly flourished and faded in the Western imagination, as the myth of Narcissus has died out and been reborn so many times, in so many configurations. Nonetheless, our Western fascination with the figure of Narcissus has been an ambivalent one, to say the least, a true love-hate relationship. From Ovid and Plotinus to Freud and Levinas, there has been both an attraction to, and a harsh repudiation of, this 181

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shimmering figure for his infatuation with mere images and shadowy doubles. Narcissus is condemned not only for loving appearances instead of reality, but also for shutting himself off from any outside, from any other. In doing so, Narcissus has been sharply criticized for refusing any alterity, remaining morbidly enclosed in a structure that remains self-same. Hence, Narcissus has been repeatedly faulted by his critics for two errors—one epistemological, the other ethical. First, Narcissus mistakes images for reality, that is to say, he confuses seeming with being. Second, he refuses to turn toward the other, to invest himself in this other, and thus fails to truly love. Despite two centuries of harsh condemnation of Narcissus and his peculiar brand of love, Julia Kristeva claims in many of her texts, in particular in Tales of Love and in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, that Narcissus remains a necessary, even a critical, figure for the modern individual.1 In Tales of Love, Kristeva charges that there is a crisis in contemporary love and, by extension, a crisis for the psychic life of the modern individual. In this text, she analyzes and diagnoses these crises by reading and interpreting the stories of and about love that we Westerners have told ourselves since the time of Plato. In her analyses, one figure reappears, time and again, in various incarnations—Narcissus—as lover, child, artist, pervert, and psychotic. However, it is our contemporary Narcissus that concerns Kristeva. “Today,” she declares, “Narcissus is an exile, deprived of his psychic space, an extraterrestrial with a prehistory bearing, wanting for love. An easy child, all scratched up, somewhat disgusting, without a precise body or image, having lost his specificity, an alien in a world of desire and power, he longs to reinvent love” (1987, 383). Kristeva claims that the drama of Ovid’s Narcissus “appeals to us, [because] he is essential as a source of western subjectivism” (1987, 115). This “first modern anti-hero, the non-god par excellence” is quite close to his contemporary incarnation in “the banality of his person (there is nothing heroic about the youth from Thespiae)” (376, 115). Kristeva writes Narcissus is “neither Dionysus nor Christ but tragic and immortal through floral metamorphosis, that lover of himself is strangely close to us in his everyday childishness” (115). Our modern Narcissus also mirrors his Ovidian predecessor in “the insanity of his adventure,” the novitas furoris which “turn[s] him into a borderline case indeed, but also a common one” (115). Hence, Narcissus and his new form of madness have been and continue to be crucial in the formation of the Western psyche or self. Kristeva argues that it is “interesting today to stress the originality of the narcissistic figure and the entirely singular (toute singulaire) place it occupies, in the history of Western subjectivity on the one hand, and on the other, taking its morbidity into account, in the critical symptoms of that subjectivity” (1987, 105, translation modified). She suggests that the critical, yet all too banal, symptom of

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the modern Narcissus is an incapacity to find a discourse for love, or, in other words, to speak and exist within the boundaries of a lover’s discourse. This failure to set up the codes and parameters of a lover’s language, or more precisely, to articulate language as love, as identification, as transference, ironically “reveals our inability to respond to narcissism” (381). What Kristeva calls our contemporary “crises in love,” which results in the “abolition of psychic space,” is paradoxically not predicated upon our having too much narcissism, but rather is a consequence of our not having enough narcissism. In the opening pages of Tales of Love, Kristeva declares that “all love discourses have dealt with narcissism and have set themselves up as codes of positive, ideal values” (1987, 7). Later, in the same text, she adds that “amatory experience rests on narcissism and on its aura of emptiness, seeming and impossibility, which underlies any idealization equally and essentially in love” (267). Therefore, for Kristeva, a discourse about love, a lover’s discourse, necessitates a coming to terms with the figure of Narcissus and with a reelaboration of the psychoanalytic notion of narcissism.

The Narcissistic Supplement In order to make sense of the complicated relationship between Eros and Narcissus, this paper traces Kristeva’s return to Freud in which she unfolds and reworks his controversial notion of primary narcissism. Her reading reveals that, in his texts, Freud reconfigures Narcissus and “surreptitiously rehabilitate[s] narcissism” (1987, 123). Freud not only reveals that in the beginning there was self-love, but also demonstrates that “the Ego Ideal that emerges out of any love relationship is taken over from primary narcissism” (123). Kristeva goes so far as to claim that in Freud’s corpus there is “an omnipresence of narcissism which permeates the other realms to the point that one finds it again in the object (where it is reflected)” (22). “Freud,” she elaborates, “as we know, binds the state of loving to narcissism; the choice of the love object, be it ‘narcissistic’ or ‘anaclitic,’ proves satisfying in any case if and only if that object relates to the subject’s narcissism in one of two ways: either through personal narcissistic reward (where Narcissus is the subject), or narcissistic delegation ([where] Narcissus is the other; for Freud, the woman)” (21). A “narcissistic destiny” would then be presupposed in all our loves, object choices, and investments. Thus, Kristeva contends, that in Freud’s texts, it is not Eros, but rather Narcissus who “sparks and perhaps dominates psychic life” (21). Despite the ubiquity of the notion of narcissism in Freud’s writings, Kristeva correctly notes that Freud, adopting a tone so common in the history of Western metaphysics, retreats from this narcissistic destiny that he

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has so convincingly sketched out “in favor of a ‘true’ object choice” (21). “And yet,” Kristeva points out, “on closer examination even the Ego-ideal, which insures the transference of our claims and desires toward a true object laden with all the pomp of good and beauty as defined by parental and social codes, is a revival of narcissism, its abeyance, its conciliation, its consolation” (21–22). The ubiquity of narcissism in the works of Freud indicates to Kristeva that narcissism is not originary, but rather is supplementary. She takes note of the fact that Freud, in his 1914 essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” describes primary narcissism as a “new psychical action” that is added onto autoeroticism and yet precedes the triangulations of the Oedipus Complex. For Kristeva, primary narcissism functions as “a third realm supplementing the autoeroticism of the mother-child dyad” (1987, 22). The apparent fullness of the mother-child dyad requires a supplement, a third, for there to be any narcissism and, consequently, any identity. Narcissism, unlike autoeroticism which lacks an other and hence an image, is neither a dyadic structure nor a symbiotic state (35). Instead, in Kristeva’s reading of Freud, narcissism necessarily involves a third term or pole, an other, an outside, which prevents psychotic fusion between mother and child and permits individuation. Kristeva thus recasts narcissism as: a “whole complex structuration” that is comprised of “an already ternary structure with a different articulation from the Ego-object-Other triangle that is put together in the shadow of the Oedipus complex” (22–23).

An Insecure Narcissus Narcissus, therefore, emerges out of a pre-Oedipal ternary structure, which is made up of the child or, as Kristeva often refers to him, the “narcissistic subject,” the mother, who is “abject” for the child, and a “third,” which appears as an archaic figure of a loving father. Narcissus is born from the tenuous border between these two poles, that is, between the “abject-mother” and the “third party.” Yet, this border is neither pre-established nor permanent; the border itself is given birth to due to Narcissus’s separation from his mother and his fledgling identification with the third party. Kristeva’s reading stresses the instability and fragility of the Freudian Narcissus, especially as he is portrayed by Freud in his 1914 text. Kristeva declares in The Sense and NonSense of Revolt that “the Freudian Narcissus does not know who he is at all and only invests in his image because he is not sure of his identity” (2000 46). Thus, Kristeva contends that Narcissus is actually not narcissistic, at least, in the conventional understanding of the term. Rather, “the current use of term ‘narcissism’ is naïve and erroneous,” as it conceives of Narcissus as too certain of himself, his identity and his borders (46).

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Let us turn to Kristeva’s Powers of Horror, where she sketches the violent and visceral movements of Narcissus in his struggle for separation from the maternal, in order to follow the unstable fault line from which he will attempt to open up a space, a space that will be essential for his identity and singularity. Narcissus’ mother, who is neither a subject nor object for him, appears to him as abject—as “a magnet of desire and hatred, fascination and disgust” (1987, 374). Abjection of the maternal, in all its ambiguity, is, according to Kristeva, a necessary precondition for any narcissism; that is, in order for the “I” to be like, to identify with a loving third party, it must also “separate, reject, ab-ject” (1982, 13). Although abjection makes narcissism possible in so far as it gives narcissism its power by allowing it to be classified as “seeming,” it also renders narcissism impossible in that its heterogeneous drives threaten the silvery surface of Narcissus’ looking glass. Therefore, Kristeva writes, “narcissism never is the wrinkleless image of the Greek youth in a quiet fountain. The conflicts of drives muddle its bed, cloud its water, and bring forth everything that, by not being integrated with a given system of signs, is abjection for it” (1982,14). In separating from the maternal, the narcissistic subject gravitates toward the third, which is not an object of desire, but rather is a loving pole that pulls the child toward itself. Kristeva casts this third pole or party as an archaic appearance of the paternal function, a father that precedes the Name, the Law, and the Symbolic. Kristeva borrows from Freud this strange figure of “the father of individual prehistory,” which will play a pivotal role in the birth of Narcissus and, consequently, in the formation of his Ego-ideal. As Freud explains in Part Three of The Ego and the Id, behind the Ego-ideal “there lies hidden an individual’s first and most important identification, his identification with the father in his own personal prehistory” (1962, 21). At first glance, it appears that Freud is suggesting that Narcissus’s first identification is not with his mother, but exclusively with his father. Freud, however, adds a crucial footnote to clarify, or perhaps to complicate, the status of this “father of individual prehistory.” He elaborates that in terms of this primordial identification “it would be safer to say ‘with the parents’; for before a child has arrived at definite knowledge between the sexes . . . it does not distinguish in value between its father and mother” (21, 1n). This archaic father is indeed, as Kristeva emphasizes, a strange and ambiguous figure, for “he” is a combination of the characteristics of each parent and is thus “endowed with the sexual attributes of both parents, and by that very token a totalizing, phallic figure” (1982, 33) Although this third is a “totalizing, phallic figure,” Kristeva warns in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, it is not to be confused with either the phallic mother or “with the subsequent father who forbids, the oedipal father, the father of the law” (2000, 52–53). Instead, Kristeva proposes that it is the

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mother’s desire for another, someone other than the child, which brings the third into play. It is precisely the mother’s desire for, and love of, a third party, an Other, beyond and outside of the mother-child dyad, that will introduce a supplement, that is, the “father of individual prehistory.” Further, Kristeva argues that “this primary thirdness allows a space between mother and child; [and] perhaps prevents osmosis as well as the merciless war where self-destruction alternates with the destruction of the other” (54). The loving mother is, in Kristeva’s estimation, different from the caring and clinging mother, because she has an object of desire and has a relation with this Other with whom the child will serve as a go-between. Therefore, “she will love her child with respect to that Other, and it is through a discourse aimed at that Third Party that the child will be set up as ‘loved’ for the mother” (1987, 34). In introducing the third or the “father of individual prehistory,” Kristeva is, however, not attempting to depict the figure of primary identification as an empirical father or even as an exclusively masculine figure. She scoffs at such an archeology of origins: “The problem is not to find an answer to the enigma: who might be the object of primary identification, daddy or mummy? Such an attempt would open an impossible quest for the absolute origin of the capacity for love as a psychic and symbolic capacity” (1987, 28). In Reading Krisetva: Unraveling the Double-bind, Kelly Oliver interprets Kristeva’s deployment of Freud’s “father of individual prehistory” not as a strengthening of the paternal function to the detriment of the maternal, but rather as an undermining or deconstructing of “the maternal/paternal dualism” (1993, 69). This ideal Other, which is designated by Kristeva with a series of substitutable terms—the third or third party [le Tiers], primary thirdness [tiercité primaire], the third pole [le pôle tiers], the father of individual prehistory [le père de la préhistoire individuelle], the Imaginary Father [le Père Imaginaire] and the Other [l’Autre]—does not, in her account, possess any identifiable features, and, therefore, can not be determined as clearly male or female, father or mother. Rather, she simply describes the ideal, toward which Narcissus is drawn, as “a blinding, nonrepresentable power—sun or ghost” (1987, 36). Therefore, the third in Kristeva should not be interpreted as an empirical father or even as masculine, but rather read as “a ghost, a symbolic formation beyond the mirror” which serves as “a magnet for identification because [it] is neither an object of need nor one of desire” (35-36).2

Identifying Kristeva’s Narcissus as Echo Kristeva’s theory of narcissism details how primary identification with the third ultimately establishes narcissism’s power. The origins of this archaic

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identification are, however, no clearer than those of the object of this identification. All one can safely say is that Freud describes this primary identification with the father in prehistory as “immediate,” “direct,” and “previous to any concentration on any object whatsoever” Freud’s ( 1987, 26). Kristeva echoes Freud’s words when she writes of the archaic father: “we are dealing less with a partial object than with a nonobject” (29). This pole or “magnet of identification constitutive of identity and condition for that unification, which insures the advent of a subject for an object,” is not to be confused with an object of desire, but rather should be thought of as a metaphorical object, that is, if metaphor is understood here “as movement toward the discernable, a journey toward the visible” (29–30). Kristeva’s fledgling Narcissus comes into being in so far as he identifies with and belongs to this other, this non-object. More precisely, in primary identification, the narcissistic subject, a “not-yet-identity,” “is transferred or rather displaced to the site of an Other” (1987, 41), “to the very place from which he is seen and heard” (36). This identification or transference to the place of the other will, as we shall see, make possible all distinction, differentiation, and hence all signification. Thus, primary identification will serve as a lining of the visual and will set up the conditions for speculation, but not without a detour through speech, or should we say, through a certain echolalia. Kristeva points out that “empirically, the first affections, the first imitations, and the first vocalizations . . . are directed toward the mother” (1987, 27). Yet, she maintains that primary identification is aimed at the third, at the father of individual prehistory. This position “is tenable only if one conceives of identification as being always already within the symbolic orbit, under the sway of language” (27). Narcissus exists inasmuch as he identifies “with an ideal other who is the speaking other, the other insofar as he speaks” (36). Kristeva remarks that prior to discovering his image in a silvery pool, Ovid’s “Narcissus encounters a prefiguration of his doubling in a watery reflection in the person of the nymph Echo” (1987, 103). Let us listen to a passage from the Metamorphoses in which Ovid describes Echo’s unique condition: One day, as he was driving frightened deer into his nets, Narcissus met a nymph: resounding Echo, one whose speech was so strange; for when she heard the words of others, she could not keep silent, yet she could not be the first to speak. Though she still had a body—she was not just a voice as she still uses it: of the many words her ears have caught, she just repeats the final part of what she has heard. (1993, 91) A few lines further, Ovid repeats these words: “But she cannot begin to speak: her nature has forbidden this; and so she waits for what her state

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permits: to catch the sounds that she can then give back with her own voice” (92, my emphasis). In archaic or primary identification, one finds a dominance of the oral— of the mouth, the lips, the tongue. Primary identification involves the full pleasures of the oral phase—“the joys of chewing, swallowing, nourishing oneself . . . with words” (1987, 26). The narcissistic subject catches the words, or simply the sounds, of the Other and delights in repeating, reproducing, and sending back the music that her ears have caught. This primordial echoing is not categorized by Kristeva as imitation, but rather as “an archaic reduplication” (25). She likens this archaic reduplication to “the internal, recursive, redundant logic of discourse, which is accessible with the ‘afterspeech’ (dire-après); it is an identification that sets up love, the sign, and repetition at the heart of the psyche” (25). Kristeva so poetically gives voice to the rhythmic utterances, the “after-speech” characteristic of Echo, that set up love, when she writes: “that sound on the fringe of my being, which transfers me to the place of the Other, astray, beyond meaning, out of sight” (37). In receiving and repeating the other’s words, in chewing on and swallowing these sounds, Echo binds herself to the third in identification and communion. Like “the eye,” Kristeva writes, “the mouth is the main organ of amorous longing” (1987, 104). With her mouth, Echo will “oralize” the third, and I repeat Kristeva’s words, by “endow[ing] it with the entire secret and intense weight of anal modeling in order to cleanse it of abstract ideality and load it with the jubilatory latencies of an archaic, maternal tongue. Echolalic, vocalizing, lilting, gestural, muscular, rhythmical” (126). Primary identification succeeds to the extent that the Other is incorporated, but not the Other as a whole or as an object, but rather the rhythmic words of the Other, the sounds and signs of the other. The speech of the other is not to be conceived of as an object, but as a model or pattern with which Echo identifies repeatedly, endlessly. As Echo nourishes herself on the words of the Other, her desire to devour the Other must “be deferred and displaced to a level one may well call ‘psychic’” (26). No matter how primitive and archaic the repression is at work here, Kristeva maintains that the narcissistic subject’s libido must undergo some restraint, some displacement, some mediation, for identification and, hence, for love to be possible. In identifying with the third, in taking in by incorporating and introjecting, but also in returning, the words, sounds, and signs of the Other, Echo becomes like the Other, she becomes singular. Thus, through this loving identification, where having has shifted over to being, the narcissistic subject becomes like the Other—“One. A subject of enunciation” (26).

Images of Narcissus How, then, does Kristeva’s Narcissus, who doubles as Echo, develop a selfimage, an ego ideal, through speech alone? How does it happen that this

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echolalia passes over into imagination? How does sound shift into sight? Kristeva demonstrates in Tales of Love that the space opened up by Echo’s endless wordplay is already imaginary—imaginary not in the sense of makebelieve, although it is that as well, but in the sense of the production of images. The domain of images, she suggests, is not made up solely of the visual, but also of the auditory. “As for the image making up this ‘imagination,’” Kristeva contends, “it should not be conceived as simply visual but as . . . corresponding to the entire gamut of perceptions, especially sonorous ones” (1987, 40). Let us look once again to Ovid’s “Echo and Narcissus,” where we find a linguistic parallel drawn between two forms of reflection, one auditory and one visual. In this text, Ovid not only designates the reflection that Narcissus sees in the water with the word “imago,” but also uses the locution “imago vocis” to depict the auditory reflection or echo that returns to Narcissus. Despite the structural and historical similarity between these two forms of the image, Kristeva clearly gives primacy to sound and speech over sight in the advent of the narcissistic subject. She believes that these infinite echoes of the other’s words, which reverberate between mouths and ears in the language of lovers, “in the final analysis, shape the visible, [and] hence fantasy” (37). In primary identification, the play of sonorous images, “in the dizziness of rebounds, reveals itself as a screen over emptiness” (1987, 23). Drawing on the work of the French psychoanalyst, André Green, Kristeva envisions a void or an emptiness that opens up as Narcissus separates from the abject-maternal and is transferred to the place of the third.3 This emptiness is nothing more than a space hollowed out by “the first separation between what is not yet an Ego and what is not yet an object” (24). It is precisely “in the uncertainty of this disengagement [that] an imaginary space is sketched out” (2000, 53). We find, then, emptiness and narcissism involved in a strange solidarity, where one supports the other, makes the other possible, and hence “constitutes the zero degree of imagination” (1987, 24). On the one hand, narcissism “protects emptiness, causes it to exist, and thus, as the lining of that emptiness, insures an elementary separation” (24). On the other hand, Narcissus is threatened by and attempts to exorcise the same emptiness that permits him to hear and see himself (as other, as ideal). Through his “whole contrivance of imagery, representations, identifications, and projections,” Narcissus transforms this frightening, yet indispensable, void into a source for self-identity (42). Without this paradoxical play between emptiness and narcissism, Kristeva claims, “chaos would sweep away any possibility of distinction, trace, and symbolization,” and with it any possibility of singularity, identity, and love (24). Kristeva concludes that Narcissus has only one true object; this object is nothing other than psychic space, the space of imagination, where seeming is not opposed to being, but rather seeming is being. This “narcissistic seeming,”

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which deploys all types of images—visual, sonorous, tactile—is the site where Narcissus and his Ego-ideal are born (1987, 126). Returning to Freud once again, Kristeva writes, it is Freud who first “sets up self-deception at the basis of one’s relationship to reality. Such a perpetual [and indispensable] illusion . . . finds itself rehabilitated, neutralized, normalized, at the bosom of my loving reality” (21). Unlike Ovid, and the other inheritors of the Platonic tradition, Kristeva locates image, illusion, and “mere seeming” at the core of the truth of self-identity. Kristeva’s journey to “one’s own,” to the “proper or particular without property” [propre sans propriété], therefore, requires a rearticulation and restoration of the figure of Narcissus (1987, 7). As it has been shown, Kristeva’s Narcissus differs greatly from the Narcissus of the tradition, who perished because of his naïve belief in mere images, but also because he was too self-certain, too self-satisfied, and, hence, closed off from all alterity. Rather, Kristeva’s Narcissus, as she tells Françoise Collin in an interview entitled “The Ethics and Practice of Love,” is dependent upon the love of the Other, who makes possible Narcissus’ ability to hear and see himself as singular (1996, 65). For, it is only in and through identification with the Other, the loving third party, that Narcissus will begin to love himself, will begin to become a self, that is to say, a narcissist.

Notes 1. Kristeva’s most thorough treatment of narcissism, as both structure and symptom, is found in Tales of Love. In addition, Kristeva offers further insights into and analyses of the nature of narcissism in The Sense and Non-Sense of the Revolt (cf. 2000, 46–47, 52–54), Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (cf. 1982, 13–15, 43–44, 59–61), Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (cf. 1989, 12–13, 17, 48–50), and Nations Without Nationalism (cf. 1993, 52). 2. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva also depicts the third party or the archaic father as a kind of specter that insists upon and remains with the child: “Perhaps a father, existing but unsettled, loving but unsteady, merely an apparition but an apparition that remains” (1982, 6). 3. André Green’s (2001) remarkable reworking of the Freudian notion of narcissism in the light of Freud’s final theory of dual drives is laid out in his text entitled Life Narcissism Death Narcissism. Green’s ideas clearly have had a profound influence on Kristeva’s own interpretation of narcissism.

Works Cited Freud, Sigmund. 1914. On narcissism: An introduction. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 14. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth. Repr. 1957.

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———. 1962. The ego and the id. Trans. Joan Riviere. Ed. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton. Green, André. 2001. Life narcissism death narcissism. Trans. Andrew Weller. New York: Free Association Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1987. Tales of love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1989. Black sun: Depression and melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1993. Nations without nationalism. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. “The ethics and practice of love.” In Julia Kristeva interviews. Ed. Ross Michael Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2000. The sense and non-sense of revolt: The powers and limits of psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. Oliver, Kelly. 1993. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the double-bind. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ovid. 1993. Narcissus and Echo. In The Metamorphosis of Ovid. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Harcourt Brace.

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CHAPTER 10

Black and Blue: Kieslowski’s Melancholia

FRANCES L. RESTUCCIA I tend to attribute importance to staring death straight in the face, as opposed to the belief that neither the sun nor death can be looked at directly. Those who do look at them directly are either depressive cases or philosophers. —Julia Kristeva, Julia Kristeva: Interviews

In The Fragile Absolute, Slavoj Zˇizˇek explicates Pauline love or agape as entirely distinct from “love within the confines of the Law.” The “true agape,” Zˇizˇek informs us, is “closer to the modest dispensing of spontaneous goodness” (2000, 100); and it is cinematically given its ultimate expression, in Zˇizˇek’s mind, in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue (1993)—the first film in Kieslowski’s exquisite Three Colours Trilogy (1993–1994). To convey this idea of agape or the dispensing of spontaneous goodness in Blue, Zˇizˇek seizes on the final scene of the film in which the camera presents four figures who played intimate roles in Julie’s life in various settings: Antoine, the boy who witnessed the fatal car crash in which her husband and children [sic] died; Julie’s mother, sitting silent in her room in an old people’s home; Lucille, her young striptease dancer friend, at work on the stage in a nightclub; Sandrine, her dead husband’s mistress, touching her naked belly in the last phase of pregnancy, bearing the unborn child of her deceased lover. . . . The continuous drift from one set to another (they are separated only by a dark blurred background across which the camera pans) creates the effect of mysterious synchronicity. (2000, 101) 193

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Zˇizˇek takes his cue on how to read Blue’s final scene from an earlier shot, of Julie in her hospital bed after the traumatic car accident that kills her husband and five-year-old daughter. Atavistically frozen in shock, Julie lends her eye to the camera in a close-up that allows us to observe “objects in the hospital room reflected in this eye as derealized spectral apparitions.” Encapsulated in this shot, according to Zˇizˇek, is Hegel’s “night of the world,” especially given that Hegel wrote that “one catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful” (102). In Lacanian terms, Julie’s eye may be read as indicating Julie’s symbolic death, her withdrawal from her symbolic bearings. ˇizˇek In a move that is too black and white rather than black and blue, Z contrasts this night of symbolic death with the final scene of what is to him symbolic daylight: “the final shot stands for the reassertion of life” (2000, 102). Zˇizˇek even reads the second or final drifting of camera shots (despite the “dark blurred background”) as characterized by “ethereal lightness” (103). But does Blue veer in this way from night to day? I read the film, instead, as a meditation on a black sun that refuses, all the way to the end, to be sunny, that resists losing contact with the rich darkness of depression. This stress on pervasive blueness turns out to be, moreover, a reading with political implications that Kristeva’s new book Crisis of the European Subject (2000), as well as Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience (1996), and Ewa Ziarek’s An Ethics of Dissensus (2001) can help us to flesh out.

Melancholic Sublimation: Indexing the Real In this endless mourning, in which language and the body revive in the heartbeat of a grafted French, I examine the still warm corpse of my maternal memory . . . what I say is ‘maternal,’ because at the outer edge of words set to music and of unnamable urges, in the neighborhood of the senses and the biology that my imagination has the good fortune to bring into existence in French—suffering comes back to me, Bulgaria, my suffering. —Julia Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject

Zˇizˇek proceeds to interpret the opening (night) and closing (day) shots (as he sees them) in Blue as staging “the two opposed aspects of freedom: the ‘abstract’ freedom of pure self-relating negativity, withdrawal-into-self, cutting of the links with reality; and the ‘concrete’ freedom of the loving acceptance of others, of experiencing oneself as free, as finding full realization in relating to others.” In The Fragile Absolute, Julie swings from Schelling’s “egotistic contraction to boundless expansion” (Zˇizˇek, 2000, 103).

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In Crisis of the European Subject, Kristeva outlines her own sense of two dominant modes of freedom. The former lies within the European tradition of philosophy, religion, and democracy, a subjective freedom that she mainly associates with Kant’s “absolute autoactivity, a spontaneity and a power of man to determine himself on his own” (Kristeva 2000, 119). Kristeva sees “the Western valorization of questioning,” from Plato’s dialogues to Augustine’s sense of the ego as a “putting in question,” as culminating “in the Kantian affirmation of a spontaneous, sovereign, and in this sense liberatory understanding.” This notion of freedom foregrounds the “power of autocommencement on the part of universal Reason” (120). And it is this conception of freedom that, unfortunately to Kristeva, has deteriorated into our current preoccupation with production, with the power to mass produce objects of desire and consumption. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Kant’s freedom of “autoactive understanding” or the Western glorification of questioning and critique, the latter idea of freedom that Kristeva identifies is that of Orthodoxy. It exalts “an ineffable religious inwardness” as well as “the ecclesiastical community in which it flourishes,” in other words, mysticism (2000, 134). Kristeva mainly derives her sense of such a freedom from her interpretation of the Orthodox Trinity. Here the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son rather than (as in Catholicism) from the Father and the Son. As Kristeva writes, “the Orthodox ‘through’ suggests a delicious but deadly annihilation of the Son and of the believer”; “the Son (and with him the believer) is caught in an exquisite logic of submission and exaltation that offers him the joys and sorrows intrinsic to the master-slave dialectic” (139). Man is thereby called to unite freely with God. Pleasure in pain is to be explored; masochism and the depressive position are eroticized. Kristeva celebrates the “sublinguistic, suboedipal, and supersensory adoration” of the Orthodox faith, tying it to a freedom to exceed the boundary, to inhabit a subjectivity that does not shut out passion, lament, or death. Herein are endless delights: silence, tenderness, love of beauty, a feeling of an inaccessible God; “thick sensory texture” that accompanies an “overabundance of soul” (148, 150, 151). ˇizˇek’s Hegelian Kristeva’s Orthodox freedom seems to be more akin to Z sense of symbolic death than to his notion of Pauline agape, even though Zˇizˇek refers to the latter as mysticism. In other words, what Julie starts out from in Blue might be seen as a form of freedom that Kristeva would hope ˇizˇek’s interpretation of the film has Julie Julie would not lose altogether. Yet Z moving to an exclamatory affirmation, “a Yes! to life in its mysterious synchronic multitude” (2000, 103), that surpasses sadness and pain. The work of mourning that Julie accomplishes, in Zˇizˇek’s non-Hegelian eyes, leaves melancholia behind. However, in Blue, Kieslowski participates in the spirit of Kristeva’s masochistic brand of Orthodox freedom by sustaining the blueness

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of melancholia from start to finish. In fact, in Kieslowski on Kieslowski, we read: “Blue is liberty . . . the film Blue is about liberty, the imperfections of human liberty. How far are we really free?” (Stok 1993, 212). Julie is utterly traumatized, catapulted into a depression, whose roots extend back to her missed relation with her mother. She attempts initially to shut it all out but eventually collects all the pieces of her past she can accumulate to stay as close to her past as possible. Blue, that is, seems to insist on melancholia, on a return to the maternal Thing. But before we consider how the film effects such a return, we need to explore how it is grounded in melancholia in the first place. In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Kristeva identifies certain triggers of such despair: “A betrayal, a fatal illness, some accident or handicap that abruptly wrests me away from what seemed to me the normal category of normal people . . . ” (1989, 3–4). The force of the events that produce depression, Kristeva elaborates, is apt to be “out of proportion to the disaster that overwhelms” the subject (4). An old trauma is disturbed. A current breakdown hits harder because of an earlier loss of someone once loved: The disappearance of that essential being continues to deprive me of what is most worthwhile in me; . . . my grief is but the deferment of the hatred or desire for ascendency that I nurture with respect to the one who betrayed or abandoned me. My depression points to my not knowing how to lose—I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for the loss? It follows that any loss entails the loss of my being—and of Being itself. (5) In Blue, this pattern can be discerned. The film offers a more elemental explanation (than what we have touched on above) of Julie’s psychic trouble: her ruptured relation with her mother, now institutionalized in a home apparently for Alzheimer’s patients. It is as though Kieslowski uses Alzheimer’s disease as a metaphor for a lost maternal object, as a literalization of the malfunctional mother-daughter relation, which activated in the first place Julie’s “impossible mourning for the maternal object” (Kristeva 1989, 9). Julie’s painful visit to her institutionalized mother—during which her mother clings to memories that exclude Julie, addresses her more than once as Marie-France (the mother’s dead sister), and is mainly transfixed by some bungee-jumping on television—conveys Kristeva’s idea that depression is based on a non-loving but loved, and therefore hated, mother. “According to classic psychoanalytic theory (Abraham, Freud, Melanie Klein), depression,” Kristeva theorizes, conceals an aggressiveness toward the lost object, thus revealing the ambivalence of the depressed person with respect to the object of

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mourning. “I love that object,” is what that person seems to say about the lost object, “but even more so I hate it; because I love it and in order not to lose it, I imbed it in myself; but because I hate it, that other within myself is a bad self, I am bad, I am non-existent, I shall kill myself.” (1989, 11) The complaint against oneself is exposed as a complaint against the other, “and putting oneself to death but a tragic disguise for massacring an other” (Kristeva 1989, 11). Having missed out on a reciprocal originary bond, the film suggests retrospectively, Julie attempts suicide at the beginning, cuts her knuckles on a wall so that they bleed, and in general deprives herself of comfort and desire. Suicide is, for the melancholic, a “merging with sadness and, beyond it, with that impossible love, never reached, always elsewhere, such as the promises of nothingness, of death” (12–13). Likewise, Julie cannot access her desire, as no erotic object can replace the preobject, the maternal lost, yet not lost object confining Julie’s libido. She exhibits desire neither for Olivier nor for her dead husband, Patrice—being unspeakably wounded much more by the death of her daughter, Anna. (Had Julie desired her husband even before his death, she certainly would have sensed his lengthy love affair with Sandrine.) “The melancholy Thing interrupts desiring metonymy, just as it prevents working out the loss within the psyche” (14). Depressives cannot bear Eros; they prefer proximity to the Thing, “up to the limit of negative narcissism leading them to Thanatos” (20). On the surface, however, Julie’s melancholic cannibalism seems to involve her daughter (rather than mother). “Better fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested . . . than lost,” writes Kristeva. “The melancholy cannibalistic imagination is a repudiation of the loss’s reality and of death as well. It manifests the anguish of losing the other through the survival of self, surely a deserted self but not separated from what still and ever nourishes it and becomes transformed into the self—which also resuscitates—through such a devouring” (Kristeva, 1989, 12). Finding one of Anna’s blue-wrapped lollipops in her purse, Julie chews it up almost viciously, taking (like an animal) quick, hard little bites, devouring it, as if in an effort to consume her daughter, to incorporate her so as not to lose her, to repossess her. Julie’s own status as a mother appears to have served as some sort of substitute for her lost, yet clung to maternal Thing, as if to become a mother is both to identify better with the maternal Thing and to produce an object to be in its place. Julie’s most apparent unbearable loss in the film is Anna. After the accident, “Anna?” is the first word that Julie utters. News of Anna’s death (rather than that of Patrice) at the beginning of Blue causes Julie to wince in unspeakable pain. It is also Anna that the ubiquitous melancholic color blue associates with: mainly through the fetishistic blue beads that Julie tears off a blue lamp

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in Anna’s “blue room” and carries with her throughout the film. And, as if to reunite thereby with her daughter, Anna, Julie attaches at the end of the film to Patrice’s unborn baby, in Sandrine’s womb. Not only through her psychic attachment to Anna does Julie simultaneously fend off and cultivate her melancholia, but she also clings to the maternal Thing via “melody, rhythm, semantic polyvalency . . . poetic form” in the guise of classical music. It is pretty clearly Julie who has composed her famous musician husband’s concerto. This is the “writing” that Julie produces to bear “witness to the hiatus, blank, or spacing that constitutes death for the [depressive’s] unconscious” (Kristeva 1989, 26). And while it is true that Julie eventually works on this musical piece with Olivier and completes it, I don’t think we are compelled to read her artistic activity as culminating in completed mourning. Julie’s return to music only underscores her immersion in the semiotic of melancholia. While clearly she has moved beyond the asymbolia that we might say is the opaque cavern of the melancholic in her purest state, Julie’s turn to music for solace secures for her, as art according to Kristeva secures for the artist and connoisseur, “a sublimatory hold over the lost Thing” (1989, 97). Through art (as through Anna), Julie accesses the Real of her losses in a way that keeps them from disappearing. This is not merely a proper channeling of psychic energy into a culturally celebrated form (i.e., an instance of what is at least taken to be Freudian sublimation) but a way, through beauty, “the admirable face of loss,” of transforming loss “in order to make it live” (99). Julie’s composing, with its ecstatic quality— appropriating the death drive that fuels it—enables Julie to grieve in a style that refuses to relinquish loss. Although in The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory ˇizˇek reads Julie at the end as forging a link between subliand Post-Theory, Z mation and the death drive, his further emphasis on a “reconstitution of the fantasy that allows us access to reality” as well as his sense that through such a fantasy Julie tames the “raw Real” (2001, 176) misses the function and meaning of Julie’s melancholic sublimation: that it enables her not to avoid the Thing but to be inhabited by it. Julie’s concerto for the Unification of Europe, with its lines on Pauline love from Corinthians, partakes of the Real rather than protects against it. At the end blueness saturates Blue. After Julie confronts Patrice’s mistress, Sandrine, in the bathroom of the Court House, she plunges into a sharply blue pool, swimming under water for a long time, as if to drown herself. Later, Julie writes her musical notes in blue ink, with a blue pen, in a blue jacket and shirt. And before she leaves for Olivier’s place, Anna’s dazzling blue beads fill the screen, as if to color their subsequent love making. As the images of major figures in Julie’s life drift by, we see Sandrine’s fetus via ultrasound in the same brightish blue color; and when Julie cries near the very end, blue color creeps up around her face. Next the screen turns

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totally blue like an abstract expressionist painting, as the concerto rises up, so that we are overpowered finally by music and blueness, sucked into a semiotic space, in an act of melancholic sublimation that indexes the Real. Julie’s grief is not overcome but presented; her loss accessed. In 1996, before he died Kieslowski commented on ways in which structures of bereavement define human beings. He thought that people have a fundamental need to imagine that those they have loved and lost somehow still surround them: they exist within us as somebody who judges us . . . we take their opinions into account even though they’re not there any more, even though they’re dead. I very often have the feeling that my father is somewhere near by. It doesn’t matter if he’s actually there or not, but I wonder what he’d say about what I’ve done or want to do, that means he’s there. My mother, too. . . . It’s some sort of ethical system which exists somewhere within. (Stok 1993, 134–35) We can expect from this statement about psychic incorporation that Kieslowski’s art would avoid neutralizing grief, even in some form of aesthetic redemption. Kieslowski’s stress, instead, falls on the finality of loss that doesn’t disappear, that cannot be surpassed. And so he bestows upon the abandoned, grief-stricken victim a fetish, a remainder, a reminder of the lost love—epitomized in Blue by Anna’s sparkling blue beads—some material trace. Julie hangs onto her mother through Anna, onto both of them through music, and onto Anna, her best substitute for the maternal Thing, through in particular this fetish. Blue prefigures its dedication to nonassuagement—its sustained illustration of Kristeva’s idea that “the Thing” is “a waste with which, in [her] sadness” the melancholic merges (1989, 15)—from the outset when Julie extends her finger to touch Anna’s miniature coffin, underscoring the palpable nature of her loss. Blue overflows with tangible remainders/reminders that seem unable to vanish. Featured eerily as an emblem of disaster at the beginning of the film, as Anna holds it flapping in the wind outside the window of the ill-fated car, the wrapper of Anna’s lollipop gets reincarnated when Julie finds another one in her purse, a piece of silver-blue foil/trash. The single leftover piece of furniture in Julie’s home, a mattress on which she and Olivier make love, is retained by Olivier, even though Julie had requested that it be discarded along with everything else in the house. Much is made in the film of an old, hunched over woman, dressed in a blue coat, stuffing a bottle into a recycling bin. And Julie throws “Patrice’s” concerto into the teeth of a garbage truck, watches it get chewed up, but copies seem magically to surface: a street musician appears easily to have been able to

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acquire one. The deliberately trashed music of the concerto of course cradles the entire film. Blue is structured according to one piece of undisposed garbage after another. The punchline of the vulgar joke that Patrice was telling to Anna and Julie before and after the accident—about a coughing woman whose doctor prescribes a laxative and then says to her, “Now try coughing”—conjures up an image of withheld waste. Rather than kill the newborn, pink mice in her apartment, Julie borrows a cat to do the nasty job, which becomes another consumption rather than a clean sweep. And even Anna seems to revive and multiply in an excruciating scene in which a gang of boisterous girls shimmering with gaiety plunges into the blue pool, next to Julie. “You always gotta hold onto something” are the words of wisdom that the street flute player imparts to Julie. But actually that something is the nothing that must be encountered and preserved. “Nothing” fills a space in this film. When the man who rents Julie her apartment asks her, “What do you do?” she answers, “Nothing. Nothing at all.” Julie asserts to Antoine that “Nothing’s important.” And she mentions to her mother that she has one thing now to do—nothing. Julie gives up on her attempt at freedom from loss, her erasure of her past, her act of throwing it all away; she cannot forcibly achieve a spontaneous, liberatory understanding, founded on reason—the cold reason of shutting out her multiple losses. Blue reveals that this is a mere impasse to freedom. She comes around, instead, to embrace a life enriched by the trash that throughout the film can only be recycled, refusing disposal. Making love to Olivier at the end, Julie looks as fetal as she had looked earlier in the film when she was curled up in the bright blue swimming pool. Her face swollen, she appears fishlike, floating behind glass. She seems to parallel Sandrine’s unaborted fetus, itself floating in the amniotic fluid of Sandrine’s womb, on display in a blue ultrasound image. Julie cries at the end as she cried at the beginning. She has cycled back to her beginning, having given up on fleeing from it. When Julie rolls up the musical score to take it over to Olivier’s flat, Anna’s blue beads and their reflection fill the screen. The musical composition is not a compensation for the loss of Anna; it is colored by it; the music that haunts Julie as well as the film, and through the film the spectator, only testifies to loss’s profound persistence. Julie, the film, and in turn the spectator—now all stare loss/death straight in the face. What is especially strange and intriguing, though, is that the very music employed to keep the film awash in melancholia, the music that fills the ellipses of the film signifying the impossibility of representing loss, is the concerto commissioned by the European Council to celebrate the unification of Europe—to Kristeva, “a global civilizing effort” (2000, 114). Why is this music, with such a globally weighty purpose, not more conventionally cele-

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bratory rather than so overpoweringly sad? Kieslowski would seem to be making Kristeva’s point about the virtues of the melancholic position on the international level as well. Is the concerto, then, as he presents it, not Kieslowski’s way of expressing Kristeva’s notion that “the Orthodox experience of subjectivity and freedom might, even given its own downside, complete, stimulate, and enrich Western experience” (Kristeva 2000, 117)? In Crisis of the European Subject, Kristeva sings the praises of depressivity, the nonperformative sensibility, and the lack of capacity for critical reason. Their positive side is “the value placed on dependence, participation, and the bond,” an “invisible mystery scotomized by the economy of the image” (Kristeva 2000, 155). Relinquishing the image, Kieslowski expresses this profound mystery by punctuating his film with a gaze-like infusion of blackouts accompanied by Julie’s concerto—a combination that has the power to offer the spectator the experience of Kristeva’s Orthodox believer. S/he is pulled into the “exquisite logic of submission and exaltation that offers him[her] the joys and sorrows” of sadomasochistic melancholia (139), shaping a passionate subjectivity founded on death.

The Politics of Melancholic Sublimation [I]t is here, in the equally widespread and bewildering encounter with trauma . . . that we can begin to recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential. . . . Through the notion of trauma . . . we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not. —Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience

In The Fright of Real Tears, Zˇizˇek explains that it was “a fidelity to the Real that compelled Kieslowski to abandon documentary realism.” Kieslowski, he proposes, encountered “something more Real than reality itself.” Faced with the gap between a drab social atmosphere and “the optimistic, bright image which pervaded the heavily censored official media,” Kieslowski’s first response was to represent Poland more adequately in all the ambiguity of its ˇizˇek dullness. Kieslowski took “an authentic documentary approach”; Z quotes Kieslowski to this effect: There was a necessity, a need—which was very exciting for us—to describe the world. The Communist world had described how it

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should be and not how it really was. . . . If something hasn’t been described, then it doesn’t officially exist. So that if we start describˇizˇek 2001, 71; Stok 1993, 54–55) ing it, we bring it to life. (Z But, according to Zˇizˇek, eventually the invasive quality of documentary, the obscenity of “unwarranted probing into the other’s intimacy” took its toll on Kieslowski. He felt the “fright of real tears,” now preferring glycerine to make tears. Worried about exceeding bounds of privacy, Kieslowski entered a “domain of fantasmatic intimacy . . . marked by a ‘No trespass!’ sign” that “should be approached only via fiction, . . . to avoid pornographic obscenity” (2001, 72). While Zˇizˇek’s idea of Kieslowski’s depiction of his characters’ lives is by no means pornographic, it ends up dovetailing with a Communist vision of dancers gliding in a circle, the kind of image sketched in the fiction of Milan Kundera to convey an uninterrupted joy. Zˇizˇek observes Kieslowski’s retreat ˇizˇek says Kieslowski relinquishes to access from documentary realism, which Z something more “Real,” only to bring Kieslowski back to an “optimistic, bright image” like that “which pervaded the heavily censored official [Polish] media” (2001, 71). The affirmation of life, the “Yes!” (despite its Christian source) that Zˇizˇek attributes to Julie, has a way of seeming disturbingly simiˇizˇek himself acknowledges lar to the supposed Communist euphoria that Z Kieslowski was rejecting. The alternative may be to realize the function of Kieslowski’s sustained melancholia as a political antidote to such lightness of being, as well as to Zˇizˇek’s sense of Kieslowski’s utopian promise of sunny social reconciliation. Melancholy would seem, then, to have the potential to counter both Communism and Western consumerism. As we have seen, Blue inserts a concerto celebrating the unification of Europe into the dark space of trauma, where it becomes saturated with the meaning of melancholia. And it is the melancholic nature of Orthodoxy that enables Kristeva to argue the indispensability of Eastern European values to globalization. Kristeva recommends that the process of globalization incorporate Orthodoxy’s “mysticism of contact,” its “sublinguistic,” “suboedipal,” “supersensory” qualities, its “subverbal sensuality.” Kristeva laments the surrender “to the new world order that wants to see only a single head—no, a single computer” (2000, 175). To Kristeva, God is, regrettably, dead in the world of advanced capitalism. To view Kieslowski ˇizˇek does, as celebrating a triumphant mourn(another Eastern European), as Z ing even at the end of Blue is to put him in Kristeva’s category of those who give up on the delicious and deadly annihilation of the Son and the believer, as the Holy Spirit proceeds in the Orthodox faith from the Father through the Son. While the seduction of eroticism in the West has been banalized and commercialized, collapsed in a permissive society, its vitality is preserved in the

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Orthodox Church as the Son in the Orthodox Trinity engages in a masterslave dialectic with the Father and as the believer is called on, as a result, to participate in “an unprecedented exploration of pleasure in pain”—an eroticization of masochism and the depressive position (Kristeva 2000, 139). The intensification of vision and feeling at the conclusion of Blue is by no means that of a light Christian joy but much more of a mystical recognition of painful interrelations. Herein may lie a form of redemption; but depressive jouissance is not sacrificed. All is still blue, as we have seen. Kieslowski is incapable of ending with a vision that would rob us—or his film—of density; he would seem to be as anxious about forgetting as Kristeva. Just as Hannah Arendt did not share Adorno’s view that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric because for Arendt the imagination is alone able to “think” horror, Kieslowski produces an ending, in Blue, that “thinks” the trauma that Julie has undergone, one whose pain gets woven into the concerto for the Unification of Europe. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), Cathy Caruth offers a similar reading of the Resnais / Duras film Hiroshima mon amour (1959). As in Blue, trauma here goes untranslated and untranscended, and as a result imperfectly mourned. The Japanese man and the French woman “communicate” “through what they do not directly comprehend.” Their encounter relies on “what they do not fully know in their own traumatic pasts.” In turn, Caruth proposes, the spectator him/herself is offered “a new mode of seeing and listening . . . from the site of trauma,” just as in Blue, as soon as we are made to peer through Julie’s eyes at her doctor, Olivier coming to visit, and the funeral televised on a miniature TV, from that moment on, our outlook emanates from the locus of trauma. A witnessing of trauma is able to take place only through incomprehension and “our departure from sense and understanding” (Caruth 1996, 56); to Caruth, such immediacy is “inextricably tied up with the belatedness and incomprehensibility that remain at the heart of [a] repetitive seeing” (92). Likewise, the father in the famous burning corpse dream in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams can only face the knowledge of his child’s death as he is asleep—dreaming. The dream itself wakes the sleeper, paradoxically, so that “the dream confronts the reality of a death from which he cannot turn away.” With such an “awakening,” of course, there is no “simple movement of knowledge or perception” (Caruth 1996, 99). The dream shows the necessity and impossibility of confronting death. Like Lacan and Freud, then, along with Kristeva, Kieslowski also focuses on the parent-child bond—on Julie’s similar awakening to a reality of her child’s death from which she cannot turn away—to make the point of the inextricability of trauma and survival. Of course, Caruth is not just referring to individual catastrophes; she conceives of history itself as predicated on trauma:

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As a paradigm for the human experience that governs history, then, traumatic disorder is indeed the apparent struggle to die. The postulation of a drive to death, which Freud ultimately introduces in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, would seem only to recognize the reality of the destructive force that the violence of history imposes on the human psyche, the formation of history as the endless repetition of previous violence. (1996, 63) We can take this idea of the constitutive traumatic nature of history to a more practical level by engaging Ewa Ziarek’s chapter on Kristeva, “The Libidinal Economy of Power, Democracy, and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis.” Ziarek can assist us in understanding more specifically what it means—and what it more ideally might mean—to carry the death drive (expressed in Blue as the passion to incorporate the dead child) to the political or civic sphere. Ziarek seems completely Kristevan in her concern with “an infinite responsibility for the Other.” She ushers this concern into the political arena of democratic struggles, hoping that its ethics can serve as a supplement to hegemonic politics. Ziarek rethinks antagonisms constitutive of subjectivity in relation to the sociosymbolic order, taking into full consideration “the libidinal economy of drive” that subtends it. She brings to political theory, and mainly to the question of democracy, the issue of “the irreducible negativity within the subject at odds with its social positionality” (Ziarek 2001, 118). Borrowing from both Levinas and Kristeva, Ziarek proposes that a shift take place, a relocating of imaginary Others—for example, Jews, blacks, women—who serve as a metaphor of a subject’s own aggression. Instead, Ziarek would like to see “the acknowledgment of the internal alterity and antagonism within the subject be a condition of responsibility in intersubjective relations” (2001, 127). Through the interplay of three psychoanalytic processes—traversal of fantasy; an encounter with the abject as one’s own intimate yet inassimilable alterity; and sublimation of the death drive—the subject can come to terms with “the inassimilable otherness within herself and the exorbitant alterity of the Other,” so that instead of violence (propelled by the death drive) toward the Other, the symbolic order may be restructured (129). Ziarek looks to sublimation for a deflection of the aggressivity of the death drive, for satisfaction elsewhere. Instead of murderous destruction of the Other, here we have symbolic transformation, as a result of an infusion of the symbolic with jouissance. Confrontation with the drive, in all its “inassimilable negativity” (134), can lead to ethical social relations. And this is for Ziarek the heart of a feminist politics of radical democracy. While Caruth posits the traumatic nature of history, Ziarek explains that it is a mischanneling of the subject’s constitutive antagonism that has been, at least partly, responsible for such an outcome. And this is the very reason

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why the structure of society and the method by which it is governed ought to take death into account. That is, history would seem to need to acknowledge the traumatic nature of existence and subjectivity themselves. It would be wise to incorporate passion, lament, and death, to reconfigure itself as it evolves in relation to loss—in order to keep from producing specific traumatized victims. By recognizing the “foreigner” within ourselves, as Kristeva asserts on the first page of Strangers to Ourselves, “we are spared detesting him in himself” (1991, 1). The trauma underlying history must stop being caused by racism and social conflict—by being articulated as Being itself, from which all existence, including that of history, necessarily forms in relation to and to which melancholia keeps the subject tied. The process of globalization devoid of a melancholic dimension that maintains rather than denies loss and death—by (to be precise) allowing access to the inaccessibility of loss and death—will only sustain a demeaning, destructive, racist conception of the Other. A melancholic encounter with trauma, like Julie’s in Blue, with one’s inassimilable intimate alterity, das Ding, maternal Thing, leading to a semioticization of the Symbolic, will cut down on social division, instead spreading jouissance, affect, and the drive democratically across the social, global arena.

Conclusion I want to conclude on two notes. First: the effort of Blue is not to progress from trauma to a kind, humanitarian gesture of reaching out, or to a fantasy screen that offers protection from the trauma, or to compensatory aesthetics that serves that same purpose. The film’s effort is instead to tap into the trauma, to make as real as possible the Real of that trauma, to allow the viewer to swim in Julie’s bright blue pool, to pull the viewer even occasionally into blackness through the four blackouts, to bring the viewer to and leave him/her in disarray. Speaking of the power of the ellipses, Richard Simpson (in an unpublished paper) writes that the spectator is forced into Julie’s place and consequently “lost for a time.” Conventional representation is blocked: “we are more likely to experience some part of our subjectivity as if it were upon the screen” (Simpson 2002, unpublished paper). In enabling the spectator to locate his/her constitutive lack in the film, Blue invites the viewer to experience Caruth’s potentially baffling point about survival’s dependency on trauma. Pieced together through objects, objets a, heavily invested in presenting remainders (as I have illlustrated), in “Nothing,” Blue demonstrates the inassimilable wound or trauma at the heart of existence. What the spectator is meant just barely to grasp, identifying him/herself with Julie or the film, is the missing of his/her trauma. The trauma is of course

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untranslatable, and so to translate it would be necessarily to miss its untranslatability, or to miss it. In Hiroshima mon amour, it is especially the voice of the Japanese actor, Okado—who does not know French but, in a phonetic feat, nevertheless articulates it emptily—as well as the untranslated Japanese speech spoken near the end at the airport by an older Japanese woman (apparently a stranger) in conversation with a Japanese man, that bears witness to the irreducibility of loss. The untranslated Greek lyrics of the music in Blue operate similarly. As Richard Simpson has written in his unpublished paper on Blue, the Greek text sung during the final scenes of the film suggests a “profound integration of the layers of visual and auditory experience given to us here by Kieslowski,” leading to the thought that “the gaze is operating on the level not only of the visual perspective.” Second: we might consider that Kristeva wants globalization to assume a form cognizant of Caruth’s sense of history, to take trauma into account, by promoting a subjectivity that maintains, and is even willing to descend into, a memory of death, thus avoiding the (un)ethical pitfalls that Ziarek points to. Kristeva wishes to see a traumatic/mystical dimension added to the modern psyche, which will only come about once freedom is no longer confused with “the search for the best causes producing the best effects,” “the unbridled pursuit of objects of desire,” the media, production, atomization (2000, 151, 160). The subject instead needs to realize that s/he requires dependence— bonds—to be free, to have the opportunity of submission and exaltation, to exceed the boundary of conventional subjectivity that shuts out Kristeva’s “endless delights.” And one bond Kristeva clearly promotes is that between Eastern Europe and its values and the West. Kieslowski articulates Kristeva’s sense of the need for a counterforce to this new world order of the accumulation of capital goods by featuring a profoundly sad concerto to “celebrate” a major step of the process of globalization—European unification. It is this politicized classical music being the only thing remaining in Kieslowski’s Blue during the evacuating gaps in the film’s visual continuity—the blackouts— that keeps the incomprehensibility of trauma alive.

Works Cited Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Guberman, Ross Mitchell, Ed. 1996. Julia Kristeva: Interviews. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1989. Black sun: Depression and melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

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———. 1991. Strangers to ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2000. Crisis of the European subject. Trans. Susan Fairfield. New York: Other Press. Simpson, Richard B. 2002. The power of Kieslowski’s Blue: A psychoanalytic appreciation. Unpublished essay. Stok, Danusia, ed. 1993. Kieslowski on Kieslowski. London: Faber and Faber. Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. 2001. An ethics of dissensus: Postmodernity, feminism, and the politics of radical democracy. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Zˇizˇek, Slavoj. 2000. The fragile absolute: Or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? London: Verso. ———. 2001. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski between theory and post-theory. London: British Film Institute.

Filmography Trois Couleurs: Bleu (Blue), 1993. 98 minutes. French with English subtitles. Miramax Films. Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski; Screenplay: Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz; Cinematography: Slawomir Idziak; Editor: Jacques Witta; Music: Zbigniew Preisner; Producer: Marin Karmitz. Starring: Juliette Binoche (Julie) and Benoit Regent (Olivier).

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Contributors

Sara Ahmed is Reader in Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her previous publications include three monographs: Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcolonaility (2000); and The Cultural of Politics of Emotion (2004), as well as three co-edited volumes of essays: Transformations: Thinking through Feminism (2000); Thinking through the Skin (2001); and Uprootings / Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (2003). She is currently working on two books provisionally entitled, Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology and Doing Diversity: Racism and Educated Subjects. Sara Beardsworth is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her book, Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity (State University of New York Press, 2004), situates Kristeva’s thought in relation to problems and ideas in philosophical modernism. A second book, Kristeva: A Critical Introduction, is in progress. She has published and has forthcoming articles on feminism, psychoanalysis, continental ethics, and the question of technology. Peg Birmingham is Chair of Philosophy at DePaul University. Her book “The Right to Have Rights:” Hannah Arendt and the Predicament of Common Responsibility is forthcoming with Indiana University Press. She has written numerous articles on Heidegger, phenomenology, politics, and social philosophy. Joan Brandt teaches French at Claremont McKenna College. Her publications include Geopoetics: The Politics of Mimesis in Postructuralist French Poetry and Theory (Stanford University Press, 1997) and articles on twentieth century French literature and critical theory. She has recently edited a special issue of L’Esprit Createur on the legacy of May ’68 in France. Tina Chanter is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She is author of Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (Routledge, 1995), 209

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Time, Death and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger, Stanford University Press, 2001, and Abjection: Film and the Constitutive Nature of Difference, forthcoming with Indiana University Press. She is editor of Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, Rereading the Canon series, Pennsylvania State Press, 2001, and of the Gender Theory series for the State University of New York Press. Pleshette DeArmitt a Visiting Instructor of Philosophy at Villanova University, researches in the areas of 20th Century French philosophy, feminist thought, and psychoanalysis. She has published articles on Kristeva, Kofman, and Derrida in journals such as Philosophy Today and The Southern Journal of Philosophy. She is co-editing a book with Tina Chanter entitled Reading Sarah Kofman’s Corpus, forthcoming with State University of New York Press. She is guest editing a memorial issue of Epoché on Jacques Derrida with Kas Saghafi. Noëlle McAfee is Deputy Director of the Center for Social Media in the School of Communication at American University. She is the author of Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Cornell University Press, 2000) and Julia Kristeva (Routledge, 2003) and the editor (with James Veninga) of Standing with the Public: The Humanities and Democratic Practice (Kettering Foundation Press, 1997). She is also the Associate Editor of the journal of political thought, the Kettering Review. Kelly Oliver is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of The Colonization of Psychic Space (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), Noir Anxiety: Race, Sex and Maternity in Film Noir (with Trigo, University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Subjectivity Without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998); Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture (Routledge, 1997); Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy’s Relation to “the Feminine” (Routledge, 1995); and Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind (Indiana University Press, 1993). She has edited several books, including Ethics, Politics and Difference in Kristeva’s Writings (Routledge, 1995), The Portable Kristeva (Columbia University Press, 1997), and French Feminism Reader (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). Frances L. Restuccia is a Professor in the English Department at Boston College. She teaches modernism as well as contemporary literary and cultural theory. She is the author of James Joyce and the Law of the Father (Yale University Press, 1989) and Melancholics in Love (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). She has published numerous articles in journals including Raritan,

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Genders, literature and psychology, Genre, Novel, JPCS, Contemporary Literature, American Imago, and Lacanian Ink. Her newest book, Amorous Acts: Lacanian Ethics in Modernism, Film, and Queer Theory, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press. She is also an editor of the contemporary theory series for The Other Press and co-chair of a seminar titled “Psychoanalytic Practices” at The Humanities Center at Harvard University. Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is the Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature of the Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she teaches feminist theory, modernism, continental philosophy, ethics, and critical theory. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (State University of New York Press, 1995); An Ethics of Dissensus; Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford, 2001); an editor of Gombrowicz’s Grimaces; Modernism, Gender, Nationality (State University of New York Press, 1998); and a co-editor of Intermedialities: Philosophy, Art Politics (forthcoming). She has published numerous articles on Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Fanon, and literary modernism. Currently she is working on a book devoted to feminist aesthetics.

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Index

abject, 78, mother, 10 abjection: in relation to Melanie Klein, 12; and negativity, 81; and racism, 11; and signification, 47; and the symbolic, 32–33; in relation to violence and gratitude, 137; and the maternal body, 7, 85, 87, 155–58; and narcissism, 45, 82 Abraham, Karl, 196 Adorno, Theodor, 60, 203 affect, affectivity, 1, 7, 10, 11, 42, 47, 49, 88–90, 95–111, 138–39 Africa, 135 agape, 193, 195 agora, 117 Althusser, Louis, 27 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 42 Arche, 127–28, 133 Arendt, Hannah, 4–5, 11–12, 87, 113–25, 127–65, 203 Aristotle, 11–12, 114, 118 Augustine, Saint, 130–31, 133, 195 autoeroticism, 184 avant–garde, 42, writers, 23, 34 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 22 Barthes, Roland, 22, 72 Bataille, Georges, 42 Benjamin, Jesica, 140 Bhabha, Homi, 60 bios politicos, 130–31 bisexuality, 72 Beckett, Samuel, 46 Blanchot, Maurice, 51

Blumenberg, Hans, 62 body, 98, 101, 105, 129, 138; black, 63, 103, 106–7; collective, 95, 106; colonized, 9; maternal, 7, 81, 83–88, 91, 157, 159; racialized, 1, 4; white, 103, 105–6 Boraine, Alex, 116 Butler, Judith, 1, 101, 172n1 capitalism, 6, 29, 38; ideology, 27; system, 25, 33, 171–72 Caruth, Cathy, 194, 201, 203–4, 206 castration, 6, 7, 39, 45–46, 52, 69, 71, 80, 154, 159, 167; anxiety, 13 catharsis, 5 Céline, Louis Ferdinand, 54 chora, 39, 45, 120, 158 class, 151, struggle, 30, 64 Clément, Catherine, 157–58 Cohen, Leonard, 169 Collin, Françoise, 190 Colonialism, 5, post-, 109, 151; history, 171 Commodity culture, 172; commodities, 151; commodification, 171 communism, 49, 201; Communist Party, French (PCF), 28–30 community, 4, 104–7, 114 condensation, 6, 39 Conrad, Joseph, 143n3 Cowie, Elizabeth, 174n6 Darwin, Charles, 103 Debord, Guy, 1, 115

213

214

Index

demand, 10 depression 3, 47, 50–51, 98; depressive position, 137, 139, 141–42, 203. See also melancholia Derrida, Jacques, 22, 25 dialectic, 57–62, 195; of prohibition, 5. See also dialectical materialism Dionysus, 182 dirt, 103–5 disavowal, fetishistic, 68, 151, 166 disgust, 1, 96, 102–4, 106–7, 185 displacement, 6, 39 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 87 Douglas, Mary, 103, 105 drive, 7, 41, 49, 50, 78, 81 86, 138; aggressivity of, 9, 63; death, 73 Du Toit, André, 116 Duras, Marguerite, 15, 56 dyad, mother-child, 7, 150, 184, 188, 190 Echo, 188 ego, 4, 42, 43, 46, 82, 100, ego ideal, 10, 85, 98, 184, 188, 190; ideal ego, 85; superego, 52, 66–67, 79, 84–85, 98, 156 Egoyan, Atom, 13, 149, 165, 170–71 emotion, 100, 104–8 emptiness. See under loss. Enlightenment, 68, 135 Eros, 197 envy, 140, 143 Euridice, 58, 65 Europe, 135, 200, 202 evil, 63 exchange, 99, 160, 168–69; of commodities, 26; of women as object of, 151–52 Exotica, 13, 149, 163–72 Fanon, Frantz, 5, 57–75 fantasy, 1, 159 father: dead, 52, 66, 70; of individual prehistory, 7, 32, 34, 156, 185–86; Oedipal, 34. See also imaginary father; loving third.

femininity, 4, 9, 14, 67, 70 feminism, 55; Kristeva’s reception, 21 fetish, 165, 199; fetishism, 13, 150–51, 153–54, 157, 159, 161, 167, 197; commodity, 159–63; fetishized, notion of literature, 23; fetishistic defense, 74; fetishization, 171; of the product, 26; re-, 42 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 41 film, 5, 13, film theory, 1, 150 foreigner, 33, 142 Forest, Philippe, 22, 27 forgiveness, 4, 10, 90–91 Foucault, Michel, 3, 22 freedom, 3, 136 Freud, Sigmund: and the castration complex, 13; and dreams, 203; and drives, 52, 138; and the ego, 100; and fetishism, 150, 159, 162, 171; and identification, 107–8, 185; and libido, 26; and materialism, 29–31; and narcissism, 15, 181, 183, 185; Oedipal theory, 66–67; sexuality, 52, 67; subject, 26, 42. See also revolt; sublimation. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 123 Gates Jr., Henry Louis, 60 gaze, 20, 165–68; heterosexual, 170–71; racial, 166; white, 166–67 Genesis, 132 Gibson, Nigel, 60 gratitude, 127–45 Green, André, 189 Grosz, Elizabeth, 139 hate, 105–8 Havel, Vaclav, 120 Hegel, G.W.F., 3, 29, 31, 40, 60, 114–16, 194–95 hegemony, 9; hegemonization of the universal, 9 Heidegger, Martin, 90, 118, 133 Hiroshima mon amour, 203, 206 Hitchcock, Alfred, 5 Hobbes, Thomas, 54, 129–30 homo faber, 11, 117 humanism, new, 58–59, 64

Index idealization, primary, 45, 48 identification, 2, 43, 45, 88, 90, 107–8, 153; imaginary, 9; primary, 34, 45, 48, 88, 89, 186–87 imagination, 115–16 imaginary, 47, 51, 150, 153–55, 161; democratic, 63; ideals, 171; loving third, 85, 88–90; racial, 14; rebellious, 34; father, 2, 10, 34, 46, 81–88, 90–91. See also father. imago, 189 immigration, 97 imperialism, 135, 137, 151 Irigaray, Luce, 51, 70 irony, 4, 9, 69, 74 Jakobson, Roman, 22 Janicaud, Dominique, 127 Jouissance, 44, 54, 66, 68–69, 73, 82–83, 92, 204–6 Joyce, James, 42 Kafka, Franz, 12, 120–23, 127 Kant, Immanuel, 195 Kieslowski, Krzysztof, 15, 193, 193–206 King, Martin Luther, 120 Klein, Melanie, 12, 113, 129–30, 137–43, 197 Kundera, Milan, 15, 202 labor, 17, 130, 160, 162–63; time, 26 Lacan, Jacques, 13, 14, 67, 113, 138, 149–52, 203 Laclau, Ernesto, 9, 61, 64, 68 Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Baptiste Pontalis, 159 law, 4, 41, 49–50, 52, 84; paternal, 6–7, 10, 50–55; phallocentric, 38. See also symbolic. Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 31 Levinas, Emmanuel, 15, 204 Lévi–Strauss, Claude, 14, 149–52 Lorde, Audre, 104–6 loss, 8 love, 7, 15, 84, 91, 107–8 Lucretius, 29 Lukács, Georg, 60, 123

215

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 28, 29 Manicheanism, 61, 64 Mao, Tse-Tung, 27–31, 41; Maoism, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30 Marx, Karl, 14, 23, 26, 27, 31, 60, 117, 149–51, 153, 159–63; Marxism, 22, 113; Marxist–Leninist, 24, 27; theory, 25 Materialism, dialectical, 26–27, 29, 43 maternal, 7, 10, 45; authority, 7, 51; thing, 196, 199, 205 materialism, dialectical, 26–27, 29, 43 matricide, 87 McClintock, Anne, 176n9 melancholia, 7, 12, 80, 193, 196–98; political function of, 15 melancholy, 1, 77, 88, 91 metaphor, 10, 82, 95, 102, 106; paternal, 150, 156 metonymy, 10, 46, 95–96, 99–100, 104, 106 Minow, Martha, 116–17 mirror stage (Mirror phase), 13, 39 Montesquieu, Charles–Louis de Secondat, 12, 127–28, 142; esprit general, 97, 108 mother, 32, 34, 38, 46, 156; phallic, 45, 85, 154. See also dyad. Mulvey, Laura, 13, 176n16 Narcissus, 14–15, 181–90; –ism, 1, 2, 42–43, 44, 46, 107, 183, 185, 189; narcissistic crisis, 85; primary, 7, 14, 15, 89 narrative, 1, 4, 11, 119, 123 natality, 12, 127–28, 133 nation, 1, 4, 5, 95–99, 107, 113; French, 33, nationalism, 96; state, 1 negation, 80–81, 106–7 negativity, 1, 38, 50, 42, 73, 80–81, 85–86, 204 Negritude, 9, 58, 60 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 113 nihilism, 44–45, 47 nomos, 133 objet a, 205

216 Oedipus, 13, 67; Oedipus I, 69–71; Oedipus II, 71; Oedipal, 2; Oedipal complex, 2, 13, 156, 168; father, 34; prohibition, 34; rebellion, 9; triangle, 38, 156 oikos, 117 Oliver, Kelly, 114–16, 121 Orpheus, Black, 58 Ovid, 14, 181–82, 187, 189–90 pain, 100–1, 109 paranoid–schizoid, 12, 137, 139–40, 142 pardon, 89 parricide, 66, 70, 51 patricide, 4 Pericles, 4, 119 Phallus, 9, 14, 55, 67, 69–70, 71, 74, 150, 152, 161, 171 Pietz, William, 171, 173n Plato, 182, 195 Pleynet, Marcelin, 25, 31 Plotinus, 15, 181 phronesis, 12, 118 physis, 133 poiesis, 11, 117, 119 polis, 2, 113–25 praxis, 119 primary processes, 6, 39, 53. See also condensation; displacement. private. See under public. Proust, Marcel, 123 proximity, 100, 107 psychoanalysis, 37, 38, 44, 48, 55, Lacanian, 26 public, distinction from private, 1, 2, 113–14, 117, 124n2, 134 race, 1, 4, 9, 58, 157, 161 racism, 4, 11, 114, 205 real, 8, 14, 63, 198, 205 recognition, 114–15 Red, 16 repression, 6 revolt, 3, 4, 8–9, 32, 34, 38, 57; as forgiveness, 10, 77–92; culture of, 1, 2, 52; dialectical model of, 33, 35;

Index Freud’s model of, 3, 33–34; Hegel’s model of, 3; intimate, 77; negativity of, 2; political, 77 revolution, 10, 30, 37–55; rhetoric of, 59; cultural (China); 23, 28, 44, French, 49, 52–54; in poetic language, 34, 38; of May 1968, 3, 6, 21, 24; Marxist-Leninist, 30; violent, 23 revolutionary, 3, 5, 21, 26, 29, 32, 33, 37; dialectical concept of, 58; counter, 24; process of decolonization, 8; imaginary, 7; politics, 6; practice, 9; project, 21, 24; violence, 57–75 Roche, Dennis, 25, 31 Rose, Jacqueline, 153, 175n8 Roudiez, Leon, 12 Rousseau, Jean–Jacques, 54, 151 Rubin, Gayle, 152, 175n7 sadomasochism, 128, 137–38, 140 Said, Edward, 60 Sartre, Jean–Paul, 9, 57–61, 65, 100; Sartrean engagement, 24 Scholom, Gershom, 132–33 Sekyi-Otu, Ato, 60 semiotic, 7, 34, 43–47, 50–55, 83–90, 158; and forgiveness, 88; and narcissism, 45; and sensation, 89; distinction from symbolic, 7–8, 31, 40, 83, 90; ordering, 158; reconnection to the symbolic, 46; revolutionary potential of, 6, 8, 25, 35. See also symbolic. Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 57 sexual difference, 5, 8, 12, 14, 39, 52, 58, 132 signifiance, 2, 3, 40, 44, 120 signification, 6, 85 Signifier, and signified, 6, 39 signs, 151 Simpson, Richard, 205–6 skin, 4, 9, surface of, 8, 11; of the community, 4, 95–111 social contract theory, 14, 149 Sollers, Philippe, 21, 25, 27, 29, 30 Sophia, 12, 118 Stalin, Joseph, tactics, 28

Index stranger, 1, 95–99; strangerness, 10 subject, 23, 33, 41–44, 47–48, 99, 101–4, 107, 158; Hegelian, 53; in process, 43 subjectivity, 1, 47, 51, 77, 90–91, 114–15; black, 73; racial, 58 sublimation, 81, 85–55, 90; Freudian, 198 symbolic: and fetishism, 167; and the real, 9, 12; and the return of repressed, 78; and revolt, 80; and women, 152; entry into the, 156; fragility of, 49; in relation to the imaginary father, 82–85; Lévi–Strauss’ notion of, 38; order, 39, 40, 45, 66, 85, 151, 204; process, 139; socio–, 42, 172. See also semiotic. Tel Quel, 3, 5–6, 21–35 testimony, 1, 4, 113, 121 thetic, 6, 40–41, 52 thing, 81–82. See also maternal. third (party), 2, 82, 84, 184–86 torture, 115 transference, 87–90, metaphorical, 84 trauma, 79, 87, 114, 117, 121–22, 196, 203, 205

217

Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 113, 116, 121 Tutu, Desmond, 122 unconscious, 32, 38, 50, 89, 95, 161; depressive’s, 198; Freudian, 33 universal, 59; hegemonization of, 9, 64; ironization of, 58; universalism, 97–99; universalism of class, 58 Valéry, Paul, 42 veil, 10, 97–99, 108 violence, 9, 12, 52, 63, 96, 107, 127, 204 White, 16 Winnicott, D.W., 156 witnessing, 113 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 113 women, white, 106; Muslim, 10, 96–99 Ziarek, Ewa, 204, 206 Zˇ izˇek, Slavoj, 15, 65, 73, 193–95, 198, 201–2 zoe, 131 Zupancˇicˇ, Alenka, 63

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