The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis

by Julia Kristeva

-- Paul Wessels, The Cape Times

Linguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist, Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential and prolific thinkers of our time. Her writings have broken new ground in the study of the self, the mind, and the ways in which we communicate through language. Her work is unique in that it skillfully brings together psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, literature, linguistics, and philosophy.

In her latest book on the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, Kristeva focuses on an intriguing new dilemma. Freud and psychoanalysis taught us that rebellion is what guarantees our independence and our creative abilities. But in our contemporary "entertainment" culture, is rebellion still a viable option? Is it still possible to build and embrace a counterculture? For whom -- and against what -- and under what forms?

Kristeva illustrates the advances and impasses of rebel culture through the experiences of three twentieth-century writers: the existentialist John Paul Sartre, the surrealist Louis Aragon, and the theorist Roland Barthes. For Kristeva the rebellions championed by these figures -- especially the political and seemingly dogmatic political commitments of Aragon and Sartre -- strike the post-Cold War reader with a mixture of fascination and rejection. These theorists, according to Kristeva, are involved in a revolution against accepted notions of identity -- of one's relation to others. Kristeva places their accomplishments in the context of other revolutionary movements in art, literature, and politics. The book also offers an illuminating discussion of Freud's groundbreaking work on rebellion, focusing on the symbolic function of patricide in his Totem and Taboo and discussing his often neglected vision of language, and underscoring its complex connection to the revolutionary drive.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII and author of many acclaimed works. Her Columbia University Press books include Hatred and Forgiveness (2012); The Severed Head: Capital Visions (2014); and, with Philippe Sollers, Marriage as a Fine Art (2016).

Reviews

[Peter Mathews · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've always thought that Julia Kristeva's books only hang together in the most tenuous way. Tales of Love, for instance, has no genuine coherence, only a common theme. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, her best and most famous book, only coheres in parts - the first three chapters outlining her theory of abjection, for instance, veer off without much justification into a consideration of religious purity, and then, following a tenuous link, turns into an analysis of the fiction of Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

This method of throwing together ideas and authors that seem like they are vaguely in the same ballpark continues in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, but because "revolt" is such a nebulous topic, there is never any sense of a tangible thread that develops between her different examples and concepts.

Kristeva begins by outlining how the words "revolt" and "revolution" have changed etymologically over time, only taking on their political meanings in more modern times. She then complains about how modern culture has nonetheless made revolt impossible, that we are locked into a world of compliant entertainment. Kristeva asserts that we "need" a new attitude of revolt, but as to what why we would require such a thing, or what its effectiveness might be, she never reveals. Like so many critics before her, she seems to accept uncritically that revolution in itself is an inherently good thing.

The middle chapters of the book are a long meditation on Oedipus as a "rebel" figure, albeit a failed one, and how this fits into the larger picture of psychoanalysis. Kristeva breaks no new ground here, simply restating the same tired parameters of a discourse she has been repeating for decades.

The last three chapters of the book look at three historical "rebels": Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes. The full breadth of Kristeva's erudition is on display on these chapters - she has certainly read and studied a lot, and knows her material well - but none of these examples adequately prove her point. Indeed, Aragon started out as the most rebellious of them all, a key members of the Surrealists, and later became a Stalinist! It's hardly a good case in support of rebellion. As usual, Kristeva simply plonks each chapter on these authors next to each other without any writerly sense as to how they might be connected - that is supposed to be obvious, even though it's not.

I haven't read much of Kristeva's recent work, but this book gives me the sense that she is stuck in a repetitive rut, going over the same tired ideas, stuck in a psychoanalytic orthodoxy, that sadly betrays the potential of her earlier works.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This ambivalent war against the feminine is to be understood in counterpoint to the war that the subject wages with himself: with his superego and paternal identity. In order to protect himself from the abjection of the other (starting with the other sex) and the other itself, the woman is made sacred.”

“Consider this, from The War Diaries: "For example, from the outset I undoubtedly had a morality without a God-without sin but not without evil." This evil is not even the lesser evil one would use against absolute evil. Instead it is the necessity of evil assumed in total lucidity, the latter being the only thing capable of limiting it and engaging it in the violence of freedom. The other evil, on the contrary, is more pernicious: the kind that stops pointing out evil, evil that suspends the evil that it is, the arrest of the negative. That Sartre did not take this rigor, which he nevertheless posited, to the end could be held against him in hindsight. But who is in a position to do so?“

"Suddenly, out of the blue, freedom crashed down on me and swept me off my feet. Nature sprang back.... And there was nothing left in heaven, no right or wrong, nor anyone to give me orders", asserts the rebellious hero doomed to freedom. Perhaps now this line from The War Diaries will be clearer; it absolutizes the freedom of language rid of clichés and stereotypes-that is, it praises the freedom of literature-at the price of matricide (unless matricide is the price to pay for literature):
*I would condemn someone definitively for a linguistic mannerism, but not because I'd seen him murder his mother.'
In many of Sartre's plays we find the theme of freedom that entails evil, an evil that is no longer experienced as an evil and even less as a culpable and culpabilizing evil. And yet it is not the "banal-ization of evil" that Hannah Arendt deplored when she denounced the Nazis' inaptitude for judgment and freedom. It is the recognition of the necessity of violence, but, more profoundly still, a recognition of the death drive and the jouissance henceforth called sadistic that Freud taught us to detect at the boundaries of the psyche and that Sartre accords a sociological and moral argument.”

“Sartre constructed his conception of the intellectual as one who refuses origins and naturalism and of subjectivity as a permanent conquest of freedom. Thus, for example, through betrayal, deception, and evil, Jean Genet would become "saint" and "martyr." Illegitimacy, games, and the actor would be markers in the asceticism of the intellectual such as Sartre perceived it. "Do you understand that I want to weigh with my real weight in the world?" Kean asks in a series of monologues that highlight his conception of the actor as a synthesis, a trompe l'oeil virtuality; he thus reveals not his presumed outlaw perversion but the secret and essential character of all consciousness that negativizes facts, acts, and objects and that, by reconstructing them in the imagination, is asserted as fatally free. True revolt-that of Kean the bastard and that other bastard artist, the writer Genet-does not reside therefore in a particular act targeting a particular object. It lies in the repeated representation of this act, which extracts it from its reality and confers on it the imaginary power of a re-creation. It draws its ultimately political value from its nullity, its impersonal nothingness, the actor's paradox that thwarts the presentation of identity and opens the way to projections and multiple interpretations…By thwarting the trap of identity, by praising the inauthenticity of the impostor who asserts himself as such in order to unmask the good and bad faith of pretenders to conventional authenticity, Sartre had already launched a message that continues to incite fear: namely, that there is no possible exit from the spectacle, except by traversing it in full awareness and therefore only by thwarting it, surely not by ignoring it or playing it naively or cynically.”

“Of the liberation of the self-also to be understood this way: how does one liberate oneself from the self?— that is part and parcel of the annihilation of the self. Read Sartre in this perspective, for apart from him and a few rare psychoanalysts, who today will present you with the annihilation that is the condition for all psychical and practical renewal and resurrection? Transpose Mathieu's scene to Kean and Genet, and you will understand that this game of masks, which is imaginary freedom, is indissociable from violence against the identity of the self and others and that the risk of this violence may certainly be replastered with the cynicism of imposture but it returns to us beyond this risk as a critical requirement without which humanity loses the sense of its adventure. To return to the complicity among the bastard, actor, and intel-lectual, the bastard's temptation, in Sartre's language, is to conquer his being, which is refused him because he has no identity, but to conquer it in evil; that is, he must continue to do evil to others and to himself in order to rise to the level of this being that is refused him and that he will nevertheless reconquer through the negativity of his consciousness. This leads the subject, who is indissolubly bastard/actor/intellectual, to struggle against the morality of others as well as the plenitude of being. Sartrean negativity is doubly ori-ented: toward others and toward being. Mathieu shoots the Ger-mans, "self-righteousness," and, more fundamentally, serenity of being itself. Yet the morality of the other and of being recaptures him relentlessly and mercilessly. It cannot be escaped. And this is where Sartre's existentialist drama is played out. The Sartrean subject-this antihero-cannot not struggle against the other and being, but neither can he escape them. The other and being always recapture us, in a way. They mystify us as they mystify the Sartrean hero just when he thinks he is free to despise them. Pure being does not exist: no one can identify with being and the other, thinking they can master them. To want to be pure (not a bastard, not an actor, not an intellectual) is a new trap of being and of the other as authentic self, as natural identity, as untouchable entity.”

“To make theater is certainly a political act: it is a question of acting on the public, mobilizing the presence of living bodies, which the book cannot do. But let us not be too quick to say that the theater of an intellectual like Sartre anticipates the desire to establish his party or media popularity, as it would later be known. To such intentions, which are always possible and more or less unconscious, I would add the challenge represented by the very type of representation Sartre brings into play in his theater. Take the characters, these intellectuals/actors/traitors/bastards. What we see here is a philosophical option embodied in a rhetoric of the spokesperson, which is surprising in itself, for the bourgeois and homogeneous theatrical audience did not recognize in this the psychological density of the realistic characters it was used to applauding. In Sartre, the characters are the spokespeople of a situation that is the true subject; it was a small step from this to the accusation that his
theater was "too intellectual." No doubt aware of this criticism, Sartre himself offered if not a justification than at least an explanation in What Is Literature?:
The theater was formerly a theater of "characters." More or less complex, but complete, figures appeared on the stage, and the situation had no other function but to put these characters into conflict and to show how each of them was modified by the action of the others. I have elsewhere shown how important changes have taken place in this domain; many authors are returning to the theater of situation. Sartre was not alone in bringing about this change, which was also occurring in modern theater in the works of Pirandello and Brecht.] No more characters; the heroes are freedoms caught in a trap like all of us. [They are disembodied in order to show the inconsistency of the pretension to identity, History, and being.] What are the issues? Each character will be nothing but the choice of an issue and will equal no more than the chosen issue. [Also, the absence of psychological density is itself a revolt against the lie of a global, social, or metaphysical solution.] In a sense, each situation is a trap— there are walls everywhere. [And in this trap a path will emerge, necessarily forced but the only one.] I've expressed myself poorly: there are no issues to choose. An issue is invented.
And each one, by inventing his own issue, invents himself. Man must be invented each day. This forced path and this rage of permanent invention that may appear schematic are signs-within the dramatic construction itself--of the philosophical and political necessity of ceaselessly inventing freedom.
Sartre's plays come after Nausea chronologically, but I thought it wise to begin with the theater, for it seems to me to introduce more directly- more dramatically and more schematically in the sense I have just mentioned - what is addressed in Naused, this novel whose thunderous impact has yet to be fully measured.”

“Thus to decipher at the very moment that meaning was being lost seemed to Barthes the last revolt remaining when ideologies revealed their lethal stupidity (well before the fall of the Berlin Wall). We have to understand that the interpretive adventure that semiology is had already taken into account the collapse of ideologies. Most of those who engaged in it then were dubious, critical, or else disappointed by the great ideologies, particularly Marxism. This assertion may seem paradoxical to those who see easy comparisons between structuralism and disengagement or even between structuralism and dog-matism. In reality, we tried —Barthes before others-not to adhere to Marxist dictates but to exist side by side with movements of the left-Hegelo-Marxism, Brechtianism, leftism, Maoism-as so many critical ways to divert bureaucracy and seek a national renewal of socialist generosity.
At this point, we would do well to recall the fate of those interested in semiology and interpretation in Eastern totalitarian coun-tries, a fate curiously ignored by mass-media detractors of so-called
"structuralist terrorism": they were dissidents of Marxism, thinkers who did not accept the Marxist doxa of meaning as a superstructure subordinate to economy, who dissolved Communist certainties with the help of structural analysis. The Stalinist regime took note of this, seized them, prevented them from studying and teaching, and persecuted them. I do not wish to go into the political and social history of that period here, but I do want to underscore that the semiological adventure did in fact constitute a revolt against the utter dejection of the supposedly rebellious discourse that issued from the Communist revolution, as well as against its symmetrical double, bourgeois mor-alism, whose hypocrisy the West has endured.”

“This is what "resonates" with Barthes's search for a detour through writing that leads individual disarray toward a formula tha is impersonal and divisible: "formal truth," "equation," "necessity" indeed, "law": "The man is put on show and delivered up by his lan-guage, betrayed by a formal reality which is beyond the reach of his lies, whether they are inspired by self-interest or generosity. "If the writing is really neutral, and if language, instead of being a cumbersome and recalcitrant act, reaches the state of a pure equation, which is no more tangible than an algebra when it confronts the innermost part of man, then Literature is vanquished."
…if all these modes of writing imply an opacity of form and presuppose a problematic of language and society, thus establishing speech as an object which must receive treatment at the hands of a craftsman, a magician of a scriptor, then neutral writing in fact rediscovers the primary condition of classical art: instrumentality."

“Entire pages of the Soviet Encyclopedia would be destroyed because, when a certain personage had fallen from grace, the "writing" required that they disappear, purely and simply, from History. The litotes here became a deliberate act of murder, at once symbolic and real. In a similar way, under the pretext of scientific method, silence was imposed on discourse. From then on, so-called Marxist writing appeared as a series of dry algebraic signs liable to lead to the death of language through the extinction of polyvalent meaning. Yet this "scientific" meaning was far from neutral: bloodless to start with (unlike that of the French Revolution), Stalinist writing ultimately charged each word with a value and thus imposed a mandate that was at once knowledge and ideology. The result was a strange situation where language did not construct values but carried prefabricated values within it: it cut itself off from its function of producing values and was content to convey them. Thus "cosmopolitanism" bore within it a negative value that exempted the speaker positive. And so forth. The language of Communist writing was emptied of its meaning because it was weighed down by "values." And Barthes concluded that this writing was a perfect tautology: it was defined by itself; there was no alternative to the meaning it indicated because it prohibited any alternative. This was the dogmatic closure of language in which no other gap, no other space, slipped between
"naming" and "judging": the named was already judged; there was no use elaborating on it.”

“If this position has a marked affinity with the structuralist approach, where Barthes willingly ranked himself, his project differs radically: to be a structure, myth is only intelligible as historical produc-tion; its laws will therefore be found in history and not in phonology:
"One can conceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history" (emphasis mine). Contrary to a structuralism that sought in myth "the permanent structures of the human mind," Barthes targeted, through the discursive phenome-non, the question of social and historical overdetermination.
I hope I have shown how his position differs from structuralism and especially how distant from it his point of departure is: history, for Barthes, is inseparable from a deep unfolding of the signifying subject through which it is readable: "History, then, confronts the writer with a necessary option between several moral attitudes connected with language; it forces him to signify Literature in terms of possibilities outside his control. This obligatory but uncontrollable necessity that commands signifying is delivered to us by a privileged experience: "esthetics." "Structuralism does not withdraw history from the world: it seeks to link to history not only certain contents (this has been done a thousand times) but also certain forms, not only the material but also the intelligible, not only the ideological but also the esthetic."
…In writing, negativity acts on the unity of language and on the agent of this unity: it literally pulverizes the subject as well as its individual representations, which are contingent and superficial, making them "clouds, a passing vapor, the savors of meanings, a dust haze of elements, of fragments: "Today, there is no language site outside bourgeois ideology. Ihe only possible rejoinder is neither confrontation nor destruction, but only theft: fragment the old text of culture, science, literature, and change its features according to formulae of disguise... [Writing) exceed|s the laws that a society, an ideology, a philosophy establish for themselves in order to agree among themselves in a fine surge of historic intelligibility."
Precisely because it operates in the language of the subject, this negativity exists alongside a positivity. The materiality of the language that obeys strict rules, bearers of the concrete body and history, blocks the movement of absolute negativity that could only support itself as such in the excess of ideas and through a negative theology. Keep this in mind: writing formulates the negative. At the heart of the national language, negativity organizes itself as a new signifi-ance: language is remodeled in a writing whose novelty, seen at first as scandalous, ultimately emerges as revelatory of a universal, international, and transhistorical logic. Barthes chose authors who are classifiers, inventors of codes and languages, topologists, logothetes, architects of new languages who list, enumerate, synthesize, artic-ulate, formulate. And we read our aberrations there as if they were laws, scriptures. At least this is the axis that Barthes sought in them— from Writing Degree Zero to Sade, Fourier, Loyola, by way of S/Z-making his way through the "flesh" of their writings in order to find new syntheses of new languages.”

“Why was it radical? Because it assumed the legacy of the predecessors: the exhaustion of beautiful language, the desire to irradiate "universal journalistic style" (Mallarmé), storytelling, literature as distraction. But, in addition, it compared this experience more specifically with the history of philosophy, religion, and psychoanalysis. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Freud-as well as Saint Augustine, Saint Bernard, Saint Thomas, Duns Scot, and others-became favored references in the same way as Joyce, Proust, Mallarmé, Artaud, and Céline. Tel Quel was perceived as a laboratory of reading and interpretation. Academics! some cried. Terrorists! others accused, recoiling. The aim of the comparisons with these philosophers, theologians, and writers was to see how far literature could go as a journey to the end of the night, the end of the night as limit of the absolute, limit of meaning, limit of (conscious/ unconscious) being, limit of seduction and delirium. And all without the romantic hope of once again establishing a community extolling the cult of ancient Greece, for example, or the cult of cathedrals, or of "singing tomorrows" and instead confronting today's men and women with their solitude and disillusions, perhaps never before suffered to such an extent in human history.
The paradox-hence the accusation of terrorism-was that this confrontation with the impossible was not cloaked in complacent despair but took the form of irony and vitality. Because it was beyond the impossible, the imaginary was rehabilitated and asserted, wheres before it had been put aside, rejected, particularly by certain currents of surrealism and existentialism. A book such as Philippe Soller's Femmes (Gallimard, 1983) is proof of this assertion of the imaginary beyond the analysis of its imposture, offering the condensation of ironic lucidity and philosophical concern, as well as the paradise of poetry and the affirmation of an imaginary romantic vein. There may have been a crisis of love, values, meaning, men, women, history, but I am not going to Abyssinia, I do not belong to the Communist Party, and if I venture to China or into structuralism, I come back. I pursue the journey to the end of the night. This might be called thought-as-writing. It isn't much, but without it, there is perhaps nothing. This is the path of the samurais.”

[Bill Benton · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was excited to get around to reading this volume, which—initially—seemed to promise a provocative and insightful treatment of the subject. Yet, after noting a respectable definition of revolt/revolution, I found myself facing what seemed to be exceptionally paltry substance, expressed in a dauntingly pretentious, obscurantist, arcane, and quasi-intellectual style which is extraordinarily off-putting (worthy of a German Metaphysician, Karl Marx …or the author of “Ulysses,” James Joyce). Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” is only marginally better (only with regard to its difficult style, not the tale itself).

In a word, I found EXCEPTIONALLY little of value here—spread over hundreds of tortuous pages—AND found myself COMPLETELY baffled. Now, I may be unusual in that I consider that a primary purpose of most all writings is COMMUNICATION, rather than mystification, but--regardless--Dr. Kristeva UNDISPUTEDLY falls in the latter category. And--no--we NEVER do learn about the "sense and non-sense" of revolt, nor the "powers and limits of Psychoanalysis" (except perhaps in the sense that the book--itself--suggests the SERIOUS limits of the Psychoanalytic tradition!!). ; )

As it happens, this kind of peculiar book is not TOO TERRIBLY unusual, particularly in the worlds of academia and psychoanalysis, but this does not excuse the production of something of such marginal value. After a few painful attempts to digest something like this, the reader may well opt for throwing it into the kindling box…to, at least, get SOME value out of it.

The only “saving grace” (for me) was that I managed to negotiate this $ 30 book down to a buck (related to underlining), and—on that basis—I consider that it was worth every penny (if merely as the subject of an intellectual exercise). This is an abominable book (with a difficult style and MASSIVE amount of clap-trap content), and I am stumped by the large number of people appear-ing on this page who have (without providing an actual review) awarded it three or more stars. Were you “asleep at the switch” (or simply haven’t yet read it...and just guessed?)? Or possibly, as a fellow psychoanalyst, felt you had to support one of your colleagues?!!