Julia Kristeva 1966–96: Aesthetics politics ethics (Parallax, Issue 8 July–September 1998)

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parallax Issue 8 July–September 1998

julia kristeva 1966–96: aesthetics.politics.ethics

guest editor:

Griselda Pollock

Introduction Griselda Pollock

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Dialogue with Julia Kristeva

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De L’étrangeté du Phallus ou le Féminin Entre Illusion et Désillusion Julia Kristeva

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Experiencing the Phallus as Extraneous, or Women’s Twofold Oedipus Complex Julia Kristeva

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Strangers in Analysis: Nationalism and the Talking Cure John Mowitt

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Three Images for Kristeva: From Bellini to Proust Stephen Bann

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To Inscribe in the Feminine: A Kristevan Impossibility? or Femininity, Melancholy and Sublimation Griselda Pollock

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Transcendence, Fixation and Belief in the Vicissitudes of the Imaginary John Lechte

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Julia Kristeva and her histories Adrian Rifkin

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Book Reviews Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (eds), The Spivak Reader Sara Ahmed

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Judith Butler, Excitable Speech Lynn Turner

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Christina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria Marq Smith

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Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vols I and II Joanne Morra

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Francesca Hughes (ed.), The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice Rob Stone

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Nadir Lahiji and D.S.Friedman, Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture Stephen Walker

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Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition John Protevi

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Conference Report Politics, Friendship and ‘democracy to come’; Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship Paul Bowman

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parallax, 1998, vol. 4, no. 3, 1–4

Introduction Griselda Pollock

In June 1996, the Centre for Cultural Studies hosted a conference entitled Aesthetics. Politics. Ethics: Julia Kristeva 1966–96. It was held at the Leeds City Art Gallery whose monumental neighbour is the equally nineteenth century structure of Cuthbert Broderick’s Town Hall: the proximities of, and the tensions between the state and culture are often the very topics of Cultural Studies. This conference could have been hosted by one of several subgroups within the University of Leeds and the Department of Fine Art in particular. As an art historian, I could have planned this event to consider the contributions of Julia Kristeva to ways of thinking about the aesthetic, the image, and the larger historical frameworks within which certain themes have been obsessively pursued. As a feminist theorist I could have arranged this event to consider Julia Kristeva’s significant interventions in the political and cultural theories of femininity, sexual difference and revolution. As a critic of modern and contemporary art, I could have invited her to focus analysis on questions of modernity and post modernity in literature, film and the visual arts. As a director of the Centre for Cultural Studies I might have thought we needed to take time to assess the whole political and cultural climate of our moment of extreme tensions between left and right, the outbreaks of neotribalism, xenophobia and racism, the questions of globalisation in contemporary capitalism and the impact of media massification and the information society on the status of singularity and subjectivity. Julia Kristeva has credentials for being called upon to assist in all such reflections. In the end, we opted for organising this event through the Centre for Cultural Studies since it would be within that fictional space that all of the above could be brought into play. Our aim was to touch on the complex relations between politics, aesthetics, and ethics. According to Jürgen Habermas, these domains were structurally severed at the beginning of the era of modernity and their segregation functioned as the defining feature of, if not the condition for the development of modernity. In the era of so-called postmodernity the contradictions inhering in modernity’s fantasies of order and progress, rationality and science, have come home to roost, presenting us with a deeply depressing contemporary scenario that is only temporarily lightened by fantasmatic, and to my mind, fantastically misplaced, utopian hopes lodged in one or other of these divided realms: art, new technology, philosophy. In the Centre and its larger institutional partner at the University of Leeds, the Department of Fine Art, we have been reputed for a blockheaded pertinacity in our interest in and commitment to historical

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materialism, addling our graduates’ brains in week one of most core courses with their sudden immersion in Chapter I of Volume I of Das Kapital and the Introduction to the Grundrisse. Justified not so much on political as intellectual grounds, this training in the masterful transformations of Hegelian philosophy by their application to the fundamental structures of the political economy of capitalism already exposes students to the complex intellectual hybridism that is necessary in order to encompass either the social production of art or the analysis of contemporary culture. The problem for us all at the end of this century is to accept the historical failures of the very structures and theories in which the moderns placed their hope while not succumbing to the despair and disillusionment that must attend the attenuation of all religions or dogmas, the so-called grand narratives, including those of modernity or communism. Julia Kristeva has herself stated that: Our civilisation is going through a depression…We intellectuals must seek out the causes of this discontent. This is not a time for advice. It is the moment for diagnosis—a negative one…I would not give an optimistic prognosis. I believe the moment of militancy is over and we are living in a therapeutic age in which which we must face up to our problems.1 Within these few words are the seeds of this conference: a desire to bring intellectuals together for a kind of ‘facing up to the problems’ rather than a rash of overconfident prediction or prescriptions for action. For such an event not to be merely another piece of academic self-promotion and scholarly competition, it must have both a political and an ethical commitment—or rather show a historical self-understanding of the intellectual’s function and limitations. The role of the intellectual, as David Macey has shown, so involved with a history of modern France, has shifted dramatically from the political engagement of Zola’s mighty ‘J’accuse’.2 As Zygmunt Bauman has argued, the intellectual has lost the role of legislator or even legislator’s conscience, to become localised, partisan, a mere interpreter of ever dividing subcultures and their particular languages and interests.3 I think a conference focussing upon the work of Julia Kristeva that takes place both in her presence and with her active participation offers us another model: a model committed to the political, ethical and philosophically rigorous role of the intellectual in the social totality. One new aspect of the concept of the intellectual she has offered us comes from her conjugation in both theoretical and professional work of scholar/ thinker/teacher and analyst. In my own work, a double formation within conflicting strands of intellectual and political activism has forged a continuing concern to push the limits of the productive relations and tensions between Marxism and psychoanalysis in the belief that to address the intricate imbrications of class, sexual and cultural difference, we need simultaneously theories of the social and productive totalities, theories of the ideological and the cultural, theories of the text and the sign, and theories of the subject and of difference. I would like to take this space once again to thank Julia Kristeva for her participation in the event of which this publication is the monument. Her graciousness in responding so positively to our request for dialogue and a lecture was truly appreciated because any person of her stature must always run the risk of being consumed by the need of others to have ‘direct access’ to the star. In order to minimise that dreadful aspect of the commodification of intellectual life I arranged this conference to begin with a dialogue between Julia Kristeva and the very considerable number of graduate students in the audience. I did hope to attract several hundreds of people all paying full rate so that my academic adventures would also win me brownie points on the now accountancy-led scales of university assessment where how much money I attract can be counted, while how much academic value I generate cannot. But I am more pleased to report

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that the take up for this conference has largely been amongst graduates students in this and other universities. I am sure that as apprentices to the academic world graduate students attend many conferences as silent witnesses to the performance of a David Lodge-like internet where academics, well known to each other from a hundred other conferences, veil their well honed competitiveness behind publicly claimed familiarities. To minimise this traditional format, we shall start with a forum for public discussion of the issues raised by the now considerable work of Julia Kristeva. I want to comment briefly on the time frame established for the conference. Julia Kristeva arrived in Paris as a graduate student in 1966—the date if any that can be used for the beginning of the post-structuralist revision—Ecrits, Of Grammatology—you name it, the works that still constitute an intellectual frame were first delivered in the mid 1960s. Julia Kristeva both joined and transformed the intellectual scene she entered in 1966 with a series of major books that culminate with the most recent Sens et Non Sens de la Révolte.4 She is still one of the most significant, provocative and compelling intellectuals of her generation and our time. This conference was organised to offer some acknowledgement of the pleasure and stimulation of this remarkable body of work that dares to reach to the most advanced limits of linguistic philosophy while plumbing the affective depths of the social and personal psyches of the human subject, not only writing about love, death, horror, depression and maternity, but providing the means to think about such domains of social practice and cultural investigation without romanticism or mysticism. For thirty years, the years that bridge the historical period in European history from the revolts of 1968 through the ratification of the new right’s hegemony in Western economies, from the new social movements in the West of the 1960s to the end of Eastern European Communism, from the Beatles to Bosnia, from the aftermath of the Algerian war to contemporary Muslim fundamentalism, from the television era to the internet, Julia Kristeva’s works follow an elliptical traverse across a historical territory whose current contours we may hardly be equipped to map. But let me close with a quote from her paper on a ‘New Type of intellectual: The Dissident’: For true dissidence today is perhaps what it has always been: thought. Now that Reason has been absorbed by technology, thought is only tenable as an ‘analytical position’ that affirms dissolution and works through differences. It is an analytic position in the face of subjective, sexual and linguistic identity. From this, modern philosophy only retains either the notion of a position in order to offer a specialist or totalizing point of view (as in Marxism, Freudianism, Phenomenology and various forms of empiricism); or else it retains only the notions of analysis as dissolution, and writes in a style similar to that of an outmoded avant-garde such as symbolism. Torn between being the guardian of the law and that instance which disavows the law, hasn’t philosophy turned away from thought? Julia Kristeva sees the displacement of Reason and Right and the Death of Man by the ‘sudden surge of women and children in discourse’ which renders both myths of resurrection and renaissance improbable and untenable: But through the efforts of thought in language, or precisely through the excesses of language whose very multitude is the only sign of life, one can attempt to bring about the multiple sublations of the unnameable, the unrepresentable, the void. This is the real cutting edge of dissidence.5

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Julia Kristeva quoted in, Talking Liberties, Jonathan Rée (ed.) (London: Channel 4, 1992), pp.19–20. David Macey, ‘Michel Foucault: J’Accuse,’ New Formations, 25 (Summer 1995), pp.5–13. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986). Julia Kristeva, Sens et Non Sens de la Révolte (Paris: Fayard, 1996). Julia Kristeva, ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’, Seán Hand (trans.), in The Kristeva Reader, Toril Moi (ed.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p.300.

parallax, 1998, vol. 4, no. 3, 5–16

Dialogue with Julia Kristeva

Professor Griselda Pollock (Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Leeds). The aim of this session was to open the conference with what is typically left to the end: a conversation between participants and the major speaker. All participants were invited to prepare questions; some sent them in advance. The intention was to allow an overview, an assessment and a critical engagement with Julia Kristeva’s sustained theoretical, political and analytical project that has spanned thirty years of this century—the period from the uprisings of the 1960s with its new social movements, through the retrenchment of the new right and the decline of Eurocommunism, as well as the end of the Eastern Bloc’s isolation within totalitarian regimes. The period also covers the cultural shifts marked by the terms postmodernity and postmodernism while equally involving major realignments through postcoloniality in which issues of racism, difference, migration and diaspora have become major foci. Throughout this same period, the question of women and the questions posed by women, questions of sex, sexuality and the epochs of reproduction have been addressed with varying degrees of political activism and theoretical complexity. Throughout this period Julia Kristeva has produced a series of major contributions to these debates, while her work has both set and interrogated the very terms of our enquiries. How do we acknowledge the role of intellectual work on politics, ethics and aesthetics in the postmodern moment? What is it to be a woman intellectual—given the terms of Julia Kristeva’s own views on phallic identification and the lost maternal? What are the relations between polis and psyche, Marxism and psychoanalysis? What are the legacies of the structuralisms in our work on texts, images, sounds in cultural forms and aesthetic practices? Can art be part of the ethical or is it revolutionary? What is revolution and revolt?

Julia Kristeva’s work has been an often shocking questioning of social assumptions, philosophical données, and theoretical shibboleths. This opening dialogue will open the spaces of that huge but coherent project to discussion, marking the thirty years since Julia Kristeva arrived in Paris as a graduate student in linguistics by inviting current graduate students to pose questions. *

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Professor Susan Siegfried (Department of Fine Art, University of Leeds) In the 1970s there was a project to bring together semiotic and psychological theories of the subject within a materialist analysis of history, coming out of the Marxist tradition. You produced a number of essays informed by that project, including several which addressed the visual arts. In ‘Giotto’s Joy’, for example, you talked about the ‘fundamental problem […] of including a subjective signifying economy within a social context’ and argued for the importance of integrating a theory of the subject with an analysis of the economic and ideological foundations of artistic production. Would you agree that that particular configuration is no longer viable today and, if so, how do you think it should be rethought? Julia Kristeva I would first like to thank Griselda Pollock who is responsible for this event and to thank all those who are present despite this lovely day when you have chosen to come and have a dialogue with me. I am very moved—as you can imagine. The fact of being an intellectual and more especially a woman intellectual is a form of monstrosity that creates a certain kind of isolation and solitariness. To realize that there are sympathetic people, who enjoy the sunshine, but still chose to enter a dialogue about my work gives me the desire to continue. I thank you. I would like to add one other general remark by way of opening. I spoke of intellectual women. In reviewing my own intellectual trajectory thanks to the occasion of this conference, I discerned that there was a common factor that unified my different interventions. I identified life with thought, or perhaps with thinking [la pensée]. One cannot live without thought. I consider thought not just as calculation or logical argument. As I argue in my recent seminar and book on La Révolte, I understand the term revolt etymologically. It means not only political revolution, for we also speak of the earth’s revolution around the sun, which implies a sense of return, a sense of displacement. In the etymological analysis of the root of the word itself there is also the dimension of unveiling. The root of this word revolt is to be found daily before our eyes: in the logo of the VOLVO car—meaning something which goes around. But it is also, like the omelette which is flipped over, to be found in the unexpected term vaudeville, which sends us back to the errors one can commit in revolting [se revoltant]. I understand it also in the Proustian sense of a search for the past—time, anamnesis, a moment when thought is that language which returns to the past, in order to displace us towards progress. It is the past which prepares a renaissance, a rebirth. Thought as revolt will necessarily drive us towards theory, towards theories of language and semiology, with which I began my intellectual work. But it will also direct us inevitably towards psychoanalysis, as the return of memory and as a practice of subjective rebirth. But above all it leads us to writing, and I do not just mean writing as an object: I have myself focussed on writers as different as Mallarmé, Lautréamont and Céline. In addition, I also mean writing as a personal practice, as in novel writing. That is why I have recently become interested in a kind of novel writing that might surprise you, but one which participates in this idea of revolt: detective fiction. This is because, just as Lacan said the unconscious may perhaps be structured like a language, I think that it is above all structured as a carnage. We have possibilities of violence and aggressivity—the famous death drive of Freud—which find themselves in our technological media universe of the image, more and more repressed and not thought through. They erupt in brutality and vandalism, localised warfare, crime. It is to be found at the political level, in the compromises of our politicians. Thus I wanted to maintain this zero degree of questioning, of thought as a mode of inquiry to be found in the story as investigation for which the detective forms a current example. This model keeps open the possibilities of posing questions and producing some kind of understanding.

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Griselda Pollock quoted my comments about our society witnessing a period of depression. Detective fiction is a way of remaining optimistic within this depressive moment for it keeps open the possibility of knowledge. There is carnage; there is crime. Yet we can understand it. I think it is one of the aims of the intellectual who thinks to maintain curiosity as a critical value. Perhaps this is the only value of the intellectual at the moment. The values of good and evil are no longer the focus since these values have been so fundamentally questioned. What remains is curiosity as our current intellectual value. To return now to Professor Siegfried’s question. In one of my first areas of research I was concerned with the plastic arts and especially in the masters of the early Italian Renaissance, like Giotto. It was there that I formulated as a fundamental question the possibility of linking the psychic economy of the subject with a social context. I think this is a continuing necessity, and even more important in the contemporary era which is more and more a world of the image; it is, in a well known phrase, a society of the spectacle. We must go on examining both the psychic economy of the subject—for example what are its pleasures, especially in the society of the image—and interrogating the nature of the social and economic determinations. Let us take the example of detective fiction. It is a mis-en-scène of violence. Violence is projected onto our screens. In the society of the spectacle we have violence in varying forms. Either violence is extremely sanitised, for instance on the governmental stage of the European community, or in dress design, or it explodes across our media in the news reports of murders, accidents and violent movies. We should then ask if what is shown, which the public seems to enjoy and uses to unwind after a hard day’s work, is not carnage made visible. We no longer speak of or about it; it is shown to us, rather as in Marx’s phrase, as the opium of the people. Aggressive and perverse drives are cathartically exhausted in entertainment. But we are not encouraged to question them, or to think them through. Here lies one of the vocations of the intellectual, critic or artist, to introduce a disquiet into our consumption of the image, and especially the image of violence. Let me say this in another way. The question I continue to pose to myself is this: what are the subjective benefits which accrue to the spectator or the artist in descending into hell, and making visible in the image the most dramatic drives towards the dissolution of identity which burst forth in an image of the corpse, or the images of mutilation so widely visible both on our screens and in contemporary art? Here are a few more observations on this vast question which I cannot fully answer. In the contemporary image, whether it is on television or in a museum of contemporary art, we witness an exposure of a phenomenon that is both psychological and political: the pulverisation of identity. This occurs through violence and carnage, as I have just suggested. But it is also evident in the kinds of objects we find in our museums of current art. Instead of the images of a kind which produce totality, created by art practices aspiring to a kind of completion, as we find in the art of the nineteenth century, for example, in our times, we notice a cult of the fetish, of kitsch, of ugliness, of installation. These all function as forms of fragmentation which belong to a logic of non-identity which concerns us all when we see it. When we encounter such things in the museum, they are not mere provocation. They touch parts of our personalities which are themselves already pulverised and dissolving. This work of dis-identification, and pulverisation of identity is not without risks. What happens—which is the situation of the individual in the twentieth century—is that there is a counterforce to this pulverisation that longs for some kind of anchorage and stable connection. Where will this anchorage be found? Against the dissolution of being, arises the desire to belong. As Proust remarked, instead of being, one tries to belong. This shift from being as the foundation of identity to belonging forces a desire to adhere to a group, to an ideology, to a sect—because religions are in crisis.

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In this situation, analytic thought—in its largest sense—as interrogation can become a form of vigilance, or protection. Instead of seeking to achieve dogmatic certainties or to become dogmatically attached to beliefs or groups, belonging itself must be questioned. A final sentence to conclude my remarks about the problem of the image. I was recently rereading St. Augustine’s De Trinitate, which includes a book titled ‘On Images’. In this section on images, that is very central to Western thought about the image, St. Augustine quotes a verse from a psalm which roughly says: although man walks in the image, he makes himself anxious in vain. Augustine inverts this to read: although man makes himself anxious in vain, he walks in the image. He means thereby to argue that in relation to anxiety or anguish, the image can solace and reassure us. We have, I suggest, come to a point in our civilisation where we use images to solace ourselves. Thus when I am tired, I turn on the television and fall asleep. Here is the role of criticism and contemporary art. We would then rephrase Augustine: although we walk in the image, we walk no more. We ask questions about the image. We have a critical attitude towards the image, and that is what a museum of contemporary art should show us, or what art criticism should reveal. Kathleen O’Grady (Trinity College, Cambridge) 1. Though your work has included linguistic and semiotic studies, literature and psychoanalytic analyses, your writings have been consistently framed by the Johanine quotation, ‘In the beginning was the Word’. You adopted Céline’s revision in Powers of Horror: ‘No! In the beginning was emotion. The Word came next to replace emotion as the trot replaces the gallop’. In Tales of Love you sum up your understanding of Freud with the statement: ‘In the beginning was hatred’. Your text on the relation of psychoanalysis and faith is titled, In the Beginning Was Love. And more recently your work on Proust has reformulated this statement once again: ‘In the beginning was suffering’. This continual transformation of the New Testament invocation (‘In the beginning…’) begs the question: which of your semiotic, psychoanalytic, or Catholic proclivities generates this perpetual revisionism, this persistent desire for tracking and tracing a beginning? Kristeva You are all posing some very searching questions and not treating me gently here. I will answer the question in two parts: one is the interest in origins, and the other the place of Christian tradition. Origins are one of the fundamental questions of metaphysics that cannot be entirely avoided in linguistics or psychoanalysis. Let me take the psychoanalytical point of view. In anamnesis we have the possibility of entering as far as possible into the investigation of infantile memory to discover the most distant memories of our childhood. These are so often traumatic memories. In this journey, a strange transmutation occurs in our language. In speaking, in traversing the universe of signs, we arrive at emotions, at sensations, at drives, at affects and even at what Freud named the ‘umbilicus of the dream’. This is something unnameable, which becomes, none the less, the source of our investigation. The heteronomy of our psyche has always preoccupied my investigations. I am interested in language [langage], and in the other side of language which is filtered inevitably by language and yet is not language. I have named this heterogeneity variously. I have sought it out in the experience of love, of abjection, of horror. I have called it the semiotic in relation to the symbolic. But it is the doubling of language [la langue] that seems, at the moment, to be of more interest to women than to men. What the other side of language as metaphysics thinks of as origin, is not an origin. Rather it is heterogeneity vis-à-vis language. I suggest that this is a fundamental point of psychoanalytical theory. Freud frequently reclaimed what he called his dualism: the death drive versus the life instincts. For Freud the psychic apparatus is composed of two distinct economies or logics—the logic of the drives and the logic of

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language. These logics are interdependent but not identical. By this we can see that the intervention made by Jacques Lacan, which was very significant and sane, was, none the less, reductive because he appeared to reduce everything to the logic of language. He thus simplified this fundamental dichotomy and repressed the heterogeneity on the side of the drives. English analysts like Bion, an analyst who followed Melanie Klein, talked of alpha and beta functions. Bion was perhaps closer to what I name the heteronomy of the psychic apparatus conceived by Freud which I have tried to translate by talking of the semiotic, or by stressing that body of sensation and feeling irreducible to language. Then there is the second aspect of the question that mentioned that my supposed ‘Catholic proclivity’ generates perpetual revisionism. People are puzzled by my interest in religious traditions and especially those of Catholicism. There is much to be said on this matter. Firstly, to continue with the thread of memory: we do not have a choice but to put into practice a history of religion as a demystification. We have to rid ourselves of the history of religion. We have to say what it spoke of, otherwise. The return to the theological texts or the texts of art that precede us is indispensable. With Freud as well as other theoreticians and philosophers, we find such an appropriation of traditions as a part of their revolution, their revolt. We must, therefore, not allow ourselves to remain ignorant of this heritage. Instead, as before, we have to question it; as it were, to extract the rational kernels from the mystical shell, as Marx suggested visà-vis Hegel. The phrase, ‘In the beginning was love’, used in my book Tales of Love, returns us to the fact that the speaking being speaks in relation to an other. What is this relation? Is it from that point that we can begin to interrogate? Is it a relation of love? Is it also a relation of hatred? Freud discerns in the relation to the other a rejection of the other. But we are still within the frame of the Bible and Gospels which poses the necessity of thinking of the Other as indispensable to the horizon of language. Thus a tradition, stretching back two thousand years since its founding texts is still in debt to these texts and as such it cannot be abandoned or dissolved before we have interrogated it, lucidly and without complacency. Kathleen O’Grady 2. Your psychoanalytical writings have exhibited a preoccupation with religious texts and writers, as well as a detailed investigation of Jewish and Christian concepts and religious figures. What brought about this interest? And can analysis supplant religion? Become our ‘modern religion’ as you call it in ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’? Kristeva I will try and give a more concrete response to this question. I am interested, both for practical analytical reasons as well as for easily comprehended social ones, in two questions: the question of the stranger, and the question of narcissism. I was struck by the two facts that in religious traditions and the major texts of the past, like the Bible and, in a different way in the Gospels, that these two questions are addressed. The Bible and the Gospels represent a line of thought about alterity and the place of the other, the stranger. In relation to other religious traditions these questions are considered in the most intense and radical ways. Buddhism and Daoism are refined bodies of thought about the relation of the man to the cosmos, concerning his polyvalence, his polymorphism, his hypersexuality, his femininity. But the question of alterity and of the stranger are most clearly and most radically considered in the Bible and the Gospels. We have to take up these traditions, as we find in Freud, and in our times, in the writings of Levinas, whose ideas resonate with them. There are significant dimensions which rational, secular thought owes to these traditions. In my book Strangers to Ourselves, I use the example of Ruth the Moabite. The book of Ruth is a magisterial reflection on the alterity and strangeness of woman which one finds nowhere else. Ruth is a foreigner and yet she is

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the ancestor of the royal house of David. Thus, at the heart of sovereignty there is an inscription of a foreign femininity. Institutionalised Judaism does not recognize this, yet it is part of a tradition of generosity towards the other that is at the heart of Jewish monotheism. In the Song of Songs the amorous relation is figured as a relation between a man and a woman who are strangers, travellers, destined to lose each other. Separation is thus placed at the heart of the relation of one to the other in the Bible. With regards to my interest in narcissism, you will recall the Biblical and Gospel verse on which Thomas Aquinas comments: Love your neighbour as yourself. It can be interpreted narrowly as the legitimation of egotism and individualism. But in my book, Tales of Love, I interpreted it as the necessity of structuring narcissism. To become capable of loving our neighbour as ourself, we have first of all to heal a wounded narcissism. We must reconstitute narcissistic identity to be able to extend a hand to the other. Thus what is needed is a reassurance or reconstruction of both narcissism, personality and, of course, the subject for there to be a relation to the other. To put this into its practical social context, let me recall the enthusiasm with which many of us of the generation of ‘68 launched ourselves into social activism, and put our selves and our comforts at risk. We struggled to find some meaning in the destruction. We occupied factories; I myself took part in this to find meaning in life. But while reading as usual, and in particular at that moment, these texts, the Bible, the Gospels and Thomas Aquinas, I began to argue that it was important to act on this social plane by moving into the factories, but perhaps it was necessary to be installed within ourselves first of all. This seems to be the primary message of Thomas Aquinas: love the other as oneself, but by being settled within oneself, by delighting in oneself. Thus: heal your inner wounds which, as a result will render you then capable of effective social action, or intervention in the social plane with the other. Therefore, I would argue that we must heal our shattered narcissism before formulating higher objectives. Professor Jonathan Freedberg (University of Michigan) To what extent are the particular twists you give your argument in the chapter of the Proust book devoted to Jews, i.e. the warning against particularisms, nationalities, group formulations of identity, and, in particular, the specific mechanisms of exclusion constitutive of the French literary canon, caught up in a kind of othering, a reification of Jewish difference as a stable and unified project that has historically been a part of anti-semitism? In other words, to what extent are you ignoring the highly contested and charged debates within European Jewish thought about precisely these questions of group identity and its use, particularly under signs of, or at the moment of Emancipation, and the ways in which these debates were shaped by and responded to pressures within and without the Jewish community, compromises, accommodations and hybridities, and the quite justified—in many cases—fears that such accommodations would lead not only to the extinction of Judaism and Jewishness, but at moments of resurgent anti-semitism, to the extinction of Jews? I don’t quarrel with your reading of Proust’s Jewishness, which is excellent and extraordinary,just with the weight it is made to carry. Kristeva I shall have to say a few words about my book on Proust. The question concerns a work devoted to Proust which commenced with a series of lectures that I gave at the University of Kent, under the aegis of Stephen Bann. Part of the course was dedicated to Proust and the question of identity, national identity, religious identity, sexual identity. The book was published in two versions: Proust and the Sense of Time (Faber & Faber, 1995) and Time and Sense (Columbia University Press, 1996) and the question of identity appeared in the second volume. The question of the Judaicity of Proust is a very complex issue and I cannot go into it in detail here. I looked at it from a particular angle, provided by the work of Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher,

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friend of Heidegger and of the State of Israel. Arendt wrote several things on this topic of which the most relevant was her excellent book, which is a major contribution to contemporary thought, her book on AntiSemitism. A very important element of that book relies on Proust. It may be a surprise to realize that Arendt was a Proustian. In her archives there are to be found her copious notes on her reading of Proust, more extensive than those which appear in her book. She uses Proust to situate the Jews in the nineteenth and the beginning of twentieth century European society. In substance she argues this: The Jews have transformed the question of their identity of being—[de l’être]—into a question of belonging—[en l’être]. Thus instead of interrogating themselves about religious identity, of maintaining it or questioning it, that is to say remaining within Judaism, they transformed it into the secular question of Judaicity—Jewishness, thus a psychological particularity. Working with this particularity, they hoped to de-religionise themselves and thus be integrated either into aristocratic or bourgeois society, as we see in the character of Swann and his Salon, or with Bloch—both from Proust’s book. This continues until some dramatic affair like the Panama affair, or business scandals demands a scapegoat. At that moment, the society that appears to accept them, while their Jewishness is regarded as their virtue or their vice, now uses it against them and rejects them as a scapegoat, and that was the Dreyfus Affair. In her text, even though in later work her ideas follow a different and more complex trajectory, Hannah Arendt here argues that one must return to origins. Jewishness is an error and leads consciously and unconsciously to the Holocaust. Thus, what must one do? One must return to a pure identity—religious— and found a state on the basis of that religious identity. This is just one answer to the problem. There are other responses that she provides which include finding other political responses—that is where her book on Rachel Varharnegan provides some food for thought—to the question of identity. The political solution may be the formation of a state; but there are other political answers that are more open and do not yet have a conclusion. That represents the position of Hannah Arendt, as it appears to me, and I suggest that it is a position that appears reasonable, comprehending the impossibility of living in history, containing the untenable elements of history. In relation to the history of persecution, Hannah Arendt is correct. The solution, on the other hand, of the aesthetic, the position adopted by Proust, is completely different. I want to make clear that the case for Judaism against Jewishness in the arguments of Hannah Arendt, that is to say arguing for belonging, seems to be entirely justified on the political plane. Proust, however, never chose this route. He chose the road of Jewishness and went further into the dissolution of identity. Why? For Proust, the character of the Jew in the context of Western culture is comparable to others. The character of the writer, the artist, and the homosexual are identical with that of ‘the Jew’: they are all marginal. This is a position of witnessing. To what do the writer, the artist, the homosexual and the ‘Jew’ bear witness: to the impossibility of identity itself. Identity is constituted in moments of passion, for instance love or jealousy. Society, however, makes identity untenable because it excludes the impassioned individual, the passionately engaged individual whether engaged politically or personally. In society there is a kind of constitution of sado-masochistic bonds where the marginal, the individual, the impassioned become a scapegoat in relation to which the others tie the bonds of fascination and hatred. Thus the position of the ‘Jew’, the writer, the homosexual and the artist are allowed to act as witnesses to the violence of the group, since the group is formed to exclude the singular and the particular. As a result of this position, the writer dons the role not of constituting a viable and calm society, the objective that a philosopher like Hannah Arendt rightly pursues, but the writers speak the horror of all society. Beauty must pay this price. This presupposes both marginality and the possibility of entering into the sado masochistic logic of society to unveil its violence. The logic of aesthetic creation is not necessarily the logic of choosing identity. It is rather the logic of the borderline.

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In his book, Proust not only reveals that every society is excluding and rejecting. He also shows how each and every identity is derisory. Anyone who takes him/herself as being someone, assuming an identity and putting him/herself on a pedestal, invites ridicule. If I, for instance, deluded myself that ‘I am Julia Kristeva’, I would make myself ridiculous. Thus, for Proust, a Jewish person who declares him/herself to be a Jew, is ridiculous. A homosexual who claims this identity is to be derided. It is the pulverisation and shattering of all pretensions to given or fixed identity that forms the irony characteristic of Proust’s position, a position that shares something with what we now call postmodernism while also being linked to the tradition of word-play and irony we find in Madame de Sévigny and Saint-Simon. The fact that beauty is allied with irony marks this project’s difference from the logic of the group and identity. I know that what I am saying, and I am convinced by my reading of his work that this is Proust’s position, may shock those who suffer from exclusion and want to claim identity as a means of counteracting it. Perhaps the questioner is interested in those strategies adopted by the culturally and socially marginal who feel the need to forge a strategic ideal of identity within the conditions of social resistance. This is well within the logic of the social game. None the less, it is necessary to remain vigilant about the assumption of identity in order not to allow ourselves to be ensnared by a new form of dogmatism. Omayra Cruz (Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Leeds) 1. Both Richard Rorty and Jean Baudrillard appear heavily influenced by your work. For example, both locate responsible action within the realm of poetic production. Both maintain the vitality of irony. Do you feel in turn any affinity with their work, or has this shared pseudo-existential emphasis on the contingency and commitment integral to intellectual/artistic production developed independently on all counts? 2. Various theorists, particularly Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, and Deleuze and Guattari, have recently maintained that psychoanalysis creates the pathologies its purports to soothe by insisting on the requisite segregation of otherness within an ‘individual’. Must the pathology of non-difference be upheld? Or to what extent might one negotiate subjectivities which escape the dichotomy of madness and sanity by allowing the strategic play of the psychically indistinct (e.g. Lichtenberg Ettinger’s matrixial bordercrossing, Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages) without sacrificing the social and psychological benefits of individuals? In short, need we preserve the long-standing bias of Western thought which insists on the subject-as-one and no other? Kristeva In reply to the first question, there is certainly a relation of sympathy and complicity but there is no question of influence. There are many aspects to the second question. The first is the idea that psychoanalysis generates pathology. This appears to put psychoanalysis on trial. But I think that such an accusation is indefensible. Yet I take it seriously because psychoanalysis no longer seems ‘à la mode’. Indeed it is widely attacked. For instance, an exhibition about Freud which was being planned by the New York Public Library was rescinded after pressure from a variety of anti-psychoanalytic groups who attacked Freud as a seducer of his patients, or for not having been sufficiently seductive. Thus we witness a conjunction of conflicting positions which lead as it were to a ‘deconsideration’ of psychoanalysis. Thus I take this question very seriously in order to defend psychoanalysis. Within the psychoanalytical process there is something happening which we no longer find in the modern world. I return to the question of memory that we discussed earlier. Our civilisation has revealed something significant under the term ‘retour retrospective’. What does this mean? Since the era of Socrates and Plato, and through to the

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theology of Augustine in the Christian period, it has been argued that ‘man’ can learn to know the truth of ‘himself’, his being, by turning inward upon himself, by turning a gaze upon himself, by looking back into himself. This return, anamnesis and self-interrogation, takes the form of two practices: Prayer and Reading, the latter being the secular form of the former. Meditation with the self, concentration upon the self takes place through the book. In my experience, many patients enter analysis with a completely modern and singular pathology. They can no longer read. It is not a matter of illiteracy or a neurological dysfunction. It is because their interior dwelling, the camera obscura of their inner life, has been destroyed. Depression, anxiety, stress can destroy it. They say they can no longer concentrate on themselves, or that they cannot recall what they have just read. Nothing writes itself within. The psychic domain of the inner world is destroyed. In our tradition, by subjective self-interrogation through prayer or reading, we have managed to build an extraordinary dimension in Western culture, a strong interior, a psychic life. Now this psychic life is threatened by violence, by drugs, by neuroleptics. There is certainly a case for drug treatments of depression. But it functions to allow you precisely to function, to return to work and continue your daily life, robotically. The price you pay is that you cease to ask questions, to question yourself. It seems to make you better, but are you really OK? You can be re-established as a functioning social member by anti-depressants, but you evacuate the interrogation of the psychic spaces. Psychoanalysis does not follow this route. It takes the path of the ‘retour retrospective’ and thus favours a permanent interrogation of the subject. This is not easy. Certainly in the process it may come about that the patient becomes depressed. It is not the analysis that causes the depression. Rather the process reactivates the past within the frame of the psychoanalytic session and in the return to that past, uncovers repressed materials that appear in the form of symptoms that the analysis has not caused, but provoked into a re-appearance in a space where they can be worked through. Of course there are failed analyses where the patient has left the process before the symptoms are fully worked through and continues to exhibit the symptoms. But the aim of analysis is to reactivate and then work through the material that appears as symptom. Thus I have tried to establish a correspondence between psychoanalysis and an older tradition of retrospective introspection. Now I must indicate important differences. The aim of the traditional modes was a form of reconciliation—in religious terms, with God. The result or aim was grace and a sense of happiness. This is not the aim or end in analysis. Such states, where they occur, in the form of idealisation of the analyst or the Other, are transitional states. In contrast to the tradition I have outlined, analysis reveals that reconciliation is not possible because the permanent condition is that of conflict. Reconciliation is provisional. To use a metaphor, analysis is intellectual Trotskyism: the revolution is permanent. So what is the solution to this permanent condition of conflict? Creativity. In analysis, a certain element of conflict will be relieved, soothed, pacified. But there is always a remnant. The best outcome of analysis is not the adaptive normalization which does occur in some schools of analysis, in the United States and France, for instance. The best outcome is a recognition of permanent conflictuality. For me, even while having been in analysis, there is a remaining area of conflictedness that comes out in my writing detective fiction, taking place outside the frame of analysis. Thus the ideal result is that you are enabled to transform what cannot be analysed into some form of creativity. It could be maternity, friendship, teaching. It could be writing. Aaron Koerner (Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Leeds) In your text, ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’, you suggest that the intellectual has inherited the unproductive discourses, formerly the Humanities. The intellectual’s task is then to assert their political

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value. Given this, would it be accurate to suggest that the intellectual must also attain a moral position which imperatively rejects political indifference? Kristeva I can hardly do other than agree completely. Yet at this moment it is hard to discern the lines of demarcation within political differences which are so blurred in our bi-partisan Western system. The vocation of the intellectual is certainly to adopt an ethical position. In France, in recent years, we have seen intellectuals engaged with questions of immigration and foreigners. This is indeed a political question, but it is also a moral matter. There has also been the important question of feminism and the situation of women, which deals with a social issue that is indirectly political. I would like, however, to interrogate the word ‘unproductive’. Perhaps we need to revalorize this dimension of intellectual work. In my book Sens et Non-Sens de la Révolte, I underline the fact that the Surrealists understood, long before consumer society, that homo sapiens is not only homo faber. Value does not only reside in production. Of course, we must all be fed, clothed and kept warm and material considerations are vital. But there is an unproductive but important dimension: the intellectual. The Surrealists mocked productive society, ridiculing the bourgeois for his preoccupation with work and advancement. We have become unaware of the unreasonable nature of this demand for productivism. Of course, we must work for social justice for those excluded from it. We must not neglect the project of integration. Neither must we abandon the values of the mind. Thus the intellectual’s function is also to promote in addition less easily discerned values: questions. In the past, the intellectual acquired a kind of leadership or mastery through condemning the evils of the bourgeoisie and championing the good of the proletariat. But we can no longer indulge in such simple certainties. The moral value of the intellectual lies in disturbing them: in a persistent disquietude. I am reminded of a comment by Georges Bataille, who tried to legitimate the poet as a minor voice as opposed to a master figure. Perhaps we should think the intellectual in such a minor role, trying to think through the absence of certainty. Indeed our role may be less than minor; it may be minuscule. The point of departure is giving value to what is most fragile in humanity. David Bate (West Sussex Institute and University of Leeds) How far is your work on melancholia derived from clinical experience? What could we learn from that work on melancholia about ‘avant-garde’ art practices? Kristeva Depression and melancholia have been at the centre of my clinical practice for some time during which I have worked at the hospital of the Cité Universitaire and at the Salpêtrière, in fact with pharmacologists. There are structures of melancholia and depressive conditions which respond to a double treatment in which one has recourse to both some form of drug therapy and analysis or psychotherapy. It was as a result of these mixed cures that I wrote my book Black Sun. My major disagreement with Freud in this field lies in the attention that I pay to language. In certain cases, the discourse of the melancholic is so impoverished that one wonders on what could one base an analysis. The depressive feels that it is not worth talking for the connection between the subject and the other has been virtually severed. The depressive feels that one can only weep or fall silent. The first task of the cure, therefore, is to reestablish the bond with language. This takes me back to what I said earlier, quoting Thomas Aquinas, about healing the narcissistic wound in order to restore confidence in the self and in the other sufficiently to reinvest in language.

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The language of the depressed person is not psychotic. But it rests upon a denial of the signifier which results from the dissociation of the affect from language. It speaks, but it does not touch me. Affect remains in suffering, so all I can do is weep. The work of the analysis is to reconnect language and affect. This is where the work of art takes its place. As Walter Benjamin has argued in relation to German Tragedy, a point that could be generalised to cover aesthetic processes in general, at the base of art is a depression which manifests itself in a devalorization of the self and/or the ordinary signs of everyday language. This can be countered in a resurrectionary move that finds itself in a supplementary signification, which seeks to renew the relations between signs and affects that have been formerly severed through a play, a modification or transformation of signs. The poet does not use everyday expressions but invents elaborate metaphors, mots-valise, glossolalia. The plastic and visual arts work by a kind of violent reforming of signs; by trying to reopen the cavern of suffering.

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Introduction

Griselda Pollock In the introduction to her book Reading Kristeva, Kelly Oliver annotates some of the extreme responses registered to the thought and writing of Julia Kristeva: Some see Kristeva’s theory as offering an essentialist view of women and the feminine while others propose the exact opposite; some critique her for an over privileging of maternity while others see her concept of maternity as double and indeterminate; some suggest she promotes anarchy; others see conservative and even fascist tendencies; some see her promoting possibilities for change; others closing them down. Yet more commentators accuse the work of a lack of historical awareness while others argue that she roots her arguments in history; some claim Kristeva as useful for feminism; others argue that she has nothing to say to feminism.1

This confusion indicates nothing so well as the density and complexity of an oeuvre that is continuing to challenge, provoke and touch on the key problematics of thinking feminism and femininity in our historical moment. Since these are in no way simple problematics, and since Julia Kristeva’s contributions offer no comfort to those for whom a clear cut political line, a theoretical orthodoxy, a monoistic belief system are a necessity or a hope, it is necessary that we forge analyses that are themselves complex and dialectical. But then, to follow my own argument, we cannot look to any one theorist for the answers, even if the shape of their thinking matches the pattern of what our assessment declares to be the contemporary social case. The function of the intellectual is to challenge. Neither preacher nor legislator, the new type Julia Kristeva envisages is the dissident. In her recent book, we are allowed to see Julia Kristeva at work. In Sens et Non Sens de la Révolte: Pouvoirs et Limites de la Psychanalyse Vol 1, we have the publication of her seminars and lectures given to her own students in Paris. Revolt is what guarantees our independence and our creativity, according to psychoanalysis. But is it still possible? Who can revolt against whom? In what forms? Confronted with media and the information society, the society of the spectacle, of show and entertainment, what would a counter culture and a revolt look like? The legacies of the engaged intellectual

1353–4645/98 $12·00 © 1998 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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and the utopian hopes of total change are no longer adequate. So Julia Kristeva is re-examining the texts of twentieth century revolt and its thinkers to consider a Proustian sense of révolte—as unveiling, returning with displacement, a reconstruction of the past which formed us, a reworking of memory and thus of meaning. Here follows both the original French language version and the English translation of one of these lectures: on a topic that touches both psychoanalysis and questions of femininity which we are slowly realising to be, if not the heart of the matter, certainly one of the cores of any prospective revolt, revolution, change. Note 1 Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p.1.

*

De L’étrangeté du Phallus ou le Féminin Entre Illusion et Désillusion Julia Kristeva

la bisexualité est bien plus accentuée chez la femme que chez l’homme. Sigmund Freud, ‘Sur la sexualité féminine’, 1931 Le Kairos Phallique Tandis que certains pratiquent et parlent la psychanalyse comme une transaction d’organes et de pulsions, tandis que d’autres en font un mathème de signifiant ou une théorie de ‘l’esprit’ quand ce n’est pas une cognition, il paraît nécessaire de soutenir que l’originalité de la découverte freudienne réside en ceci: la psychanalyse est une clinique et une théorie de la coprésence entre le développement de la pensée et de la sexualité. Cette écoute biface (pensée-sexualité) du parlêtre que je décèle au coeur de l’expérience analytique, est une variante originale du dualisme antique et, loin de ‘biologiser l’essence de l’homme’, elle centre l’étude de l’appareil psychique, de son déploiement ou de ses entraves dans la dépendance biunivoque pensée-sexualité/sexualité-pensée. Le langage étant le domaine de cette interaction, on comprend que c’est en lui que Freud ait creusé l’ “autre scène”, celle de l’inconscient, avec ses composantes (représentants pulsionnels) et sa logique (processus primaires) irréductibles à la communication linguistique consciente. Si je définis ma pratique de la psychanalyse comme une recherche de la coprésence entre sexualité-etpensée, ce n’est pas seulement pour me dissocier de deux courants qui se disputent l’actualité (le courant fantasmatique-organiciste et le courant cognitiviste); c’est pour vous indiquer sur quelle base j’essaierai de dégager la bisexualité psychique féminine, car tel est le propos de cet exposé qui vous présentera la bisexualité féminine sous l’angle du rapport spécifique de la femme au phallus. Quel est le rapport du sujet femme au phallus?—telle sera la question. Le ‘monisme phallique’ nous est sans cesse imposé par l’expérience clinique. Je souhaiterais vous en donner dès maintenant quelques exemples paroxystique chez la femme, qui témoignent de la dramatique adhésion au phallique chez certaines—une adhésion qui les structure, en effet, mais au prix d’une souffrance souvent traumatique. L’insoutenable et le mystère Armelle exerce de hautes fonctions dans une organisation internationales. Mère de famille, épouse, maîtresse, auteur—rien ne lui manque. Si ce n’est une satisfaction personnelle, ‘pas sexuelle, insiste-t-elle, je ne suis pas frigide’, qu’accompagne le sentiment d’être une petite fille jamais prise au sérieux, toujours en retard, à côté, en dessous de ses véritables aptitudes. Et de se charger de toutes les tâches, corvées,

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obligations possibles et impossibles. Armelle est fixée à cette scène charnière, que je situe entre son Œdipe prime et son Œdipe bis1: elle s’était fabriquée une planche à clous, se couchait sur la surface hérissée de clous, et y appuyait son dos ou son ventre jusqu’au sang. La martyrologie des saintes, transmise par la tradition familiale, s’ajoute ici à la jouissance structurale de ‘On bat un enfant’: on bat Armelle, Armelle bat Armelle, Armelle troue Armelle jusqu’au sang; tout le corps est un pénis-phallus qui jouit dans le sadomasochisme, pour se punir du plaisir clitoridien et pour éviter de s’avouer corps troué-castré. Armelle aura acquis son excellence professionnelle, son phallicisme dans l’ordre symbolique, au prix du déni de sa bisexualité: elle veut être toute phallus. Sa jouissance perverse se paie de l’épuisement physique et mental de la superwoman. Dominique a le corps gracile d’un garçon et le discours allusif, lacunaire, secret. Sa maîtrise de l’informatique ne suffit pas à expliquer cette discrétion. J’apprends difficilement qu’elle a des relations érotiques avec des femmes, mais qu’elle privilégie un homme dont elle est la partenaire masochiste; Dominique lâchera beaucoup plus tard que cet homme est son supérieur hiérarchique, et plus tard encore, qu’il est noir. Dominique a vécu en admiration devant son frère aîné d’un an, en double-jumeaux avant une petite soeur venue cinq ans après Dominique. L’idylle de Dominique-garçon s’est achevée à l’adolescence: son frère a été fauché par une voiture. ‘Je ne crois pas que les femmes ont un sexe. Je me suis aperçu à la mort de mon frère que j’étais lisse entre les jambes, comme une poupée en Celluloï.’ Sans pénis, sans clitoris, sans vagin, Dominique vit l’échec de sa bisexualité psychique en offrant son anus comme un pénis en creux à son partenaire sadique. Autre figure du ‘monisme phallique’. Florence fait alterner anorexie et boulimie en essayant de vomir une mère abandonnée et abandonnique qu’elle protège, et pour laquelle elle souffre de tout son corps. Florence a remplacé trop tôt son père divorce auprès d’une mère aimée-haïe. Ces règlements de compte maternels nous conduisent à…la roulette russe. Rêve: ‘Je joue à la roulette russe qui est en fait une roulette belge—à tous les coups on perd, c’est-à-dire on gagne la mort. Il n’y a pas de trou vide de cartouche. Vous ne me croirez pas mais j’ai tiré et j’ai gagné une sorte de gros phallus, seulement ça voulait dire que j’étais morte. Rêve absurde, le jeu ne m’intéresse pas, c’est mon frère qui est un joueur désastreux, un cas pathologique, en train de ruiner sa famille’. Florence avale-vomit le pénis (du frère, du père), elle gagne son gros phallus de la sorte, mais ces performances d’écrivain qui signalent son gain se paient d’une mise à mort du corps entier devenu phallus imaginaire et qu’elle préfère ériger et/ou abolir dans l’anorexie, plutôt que de payer le prix du manque par la reconnaissance de la bisexualité. Je reviendrai plus loin sur cet insoutenable du phallicisme chez la femme. Pour le moment, je voudrais réinsister sur l’universalité de la référence phallique qui se manifeste dans les deux sexes, quoique de manière différente, bien avant la phase phallique et l’Œdipe qu’elle annonce. Du fait du langage, de la fonction paternelle, et du désir maternel pour le père (le sien propre et celui de l’enfant), la trace du phallus (Lacan dit: ‘un phallus sans incarnation’2) organise toujours déjà la psychosexualité du sujet. L’identification primaire, le narcissisme, la sublimation, l’idéalisation, l’imposition de l’Idéal du Moi et du Surmoi n’en sont que quelques étapes bien connues. J’insisterai sur ce que Freud appelle le ‘stade phallique’ et qui, structuralement, est l’organisateur central de ce que j’ai appelé la coprésence sexualité-pensée chez les deux sexes. Beaucoup d’auteurs ont relevé les particularités qui destinent le pénis à être investi par les deux sexes et à devenir le phallus, c’est-à-dire le signifiant de privation, de manque à être, ou de désir et, en conséquence, le signifiant de la Loi symbolique. Visible, et narcissiquement reconnu; érectile et investi de sensibilité érogène; détachable, donc ‘coupable’, susceptible de perte, il est par conséquent apte à devenir le support de la différence, l’acteur privilégié du binarisme 0/1 qui fonde tout système de sens, le facteur organique (donc réel et imaginaire) de notre ordinateur psychosexuel. Saluons au passage ce Kairos3, cette rencontre subtile et en ce sens miraculeuse,

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entre le désir et le sens au cours de la phase phallique, qui—bien que préparée d’avance—noue désormais le destin de l’être humain comme être désirant en même temps que parlant. Le sujet, qu’il soit anatomiquement homme ou femme, est formé par ce Kairos phallique—voilà ce que nous dévoile la psychanalyse, après les mystères, et l’essentiel de notre destin psychique consiste à porter les conséquences, il faut bien le dire, dramatiques, de ce mystère. Car ainsi structuré et sous la menace de la castration, le phallicisme des deux sexes va succomber à la latence et au refoulement. Le primat du phallique ne reste qu’une ‘organisation génitale infantile’ car c’est précisément ce primat phallique qui différencie la génitalité infantile de la génitalité adulte, laquelle reconnaît, en principe, les deux sexes.4 Un seul sexe (le pénis), une seule libido (mâle), un seul symbole pour l’activité de pensée (phallus): cette expérience phallique commune aux deux sexes demeurera une donnée de base inconsciente (pour les deux sexes). La sexualité adulte s’en dissociera en accédant à la découverte du deuxième sexe, dans l’hypothèse optimale. Le monisme phallique serait une illusion infantile qui demeure une réalité inconsciente organisatrice du psychisme. L’illusion devenu une réalité inconsciente: n’est-ce pas une illusion promise à un avenir certain? Nous sommes ici au fondement de ce que Freud appellera ailleurs ‘l’avenir d’une illusion’, tant il est vrai que toute religion se ressource au culte phallique. Notons au passage que selon cette théorie freudienne que la clinique confirme, il résulte deux conséquences insuffisamment méditées. Premièrement, le Kairos phallique est propre à la génitalité infantile, ce qui veut dire que le monisme phallique est une survivance de ce phallocentrisme infantile conditionnant l’Œdipe. Deuxièmement, puisque ce phallicisme est refoulé et devient inconscient, l’inconscient est phallique. En d’autres termes, l’inconscient est dépourvue de génitalité au sens d’une reconnaissance de la différence sexuelle: l’inconscient ignore la génitalité au sens de la différence sexuelle ou, pour le dire plus brutalement, il n’y a pas de génitalité psychique inconsciente (il y aurait l’instinct biologique de procréation et l’advenue pubertaire d’un désir pour l’autre sexe, mais rien dans la théorie freudienne ne laisse entendre qu’il existe un représentant psychique inconscient de l’autre sexe comme tel). Rappelons aussi que l’homme subit une ‘catastrophe du complexe d’Œdipe’ lequel est conditionné par le Kairos phallique: cette catastrophe prend l’aspect d’un détournement de l’inceste et du meurtre, et s’achève par l’instauration de la conscience et de la morale, que Freud interprète comme une ‘victoire de la race sur l’individu’.5 Les instances de l’appareil psychiques (Ça/Moi/Surmoi) remplacent les investissements libidinaux par le biais de la désexualisation et de la sublimation, et seule la névrose trahit une ‘rebellion’ du moi contre ‘les prétentions de la fonction sexuelle’. Que penser de cette autre forme de ‘rébellion’ que représente pour le sujet non plus la névrose mais la création de pensée ou de langage—souvent parallèle à la névrose, voire à la psychose, mais irréductible à elle? Notre interrogation de la bisexualité nous permettra peut-être d’esquisser une réponse à cette question que Freud ne se pose pas. On peut résumer ainsi le destin que le fondateur de la psychanalyse assigne au primat du phallique: il est l’organisateur central de l’inconscient (au même titre que l’Œdipe); il est illusoire (propre à l’organisation phallique infantile); il vole en éclat sous la menace de la castration et lorsque l’individu s’efface au profit de la race. On connaît la revanche et le surinvestissement du phallique auxquels va se livrer Lacan pour réhabiliter la fonction du père et du langage dans le parlêtre: un phallique ‘manquant’, ‘évanescent’, lieu commun de l’angoisse et pour cela même symbole princeps, qui détermine la sexuation. ‘L’homme n’est pas sans l’avoir, la femme est sans l’avoir.’6 Je voudrais faire résonner cette formule avec la proposition de Winnicott sur un ‘maternel a-pulsionnel’, qui ‘est’ tout simplement (le soi est le sein, le sein est le soi) et ne ‘fait’ pas.7. Être, avoir, faire: les différences sont-elles aussi nettes? Je propose ce qui suit en prolongement et en contrepoint de ces deux propositions de Lacan et Winnicott.

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L’Œdipe biface de la fille Chez la petite fille aussi une rencontre décisive soude son être de sujet pensant et désirant: la rencontre (Kairos) entre la maîtrise des signes (abstractions froides, évanescentes frustrations, mais tous autant sources de nouveaux bénéfices et pouvoirs), et l’excitation sexuelle génitale (non plus orale ou anale). Que le vagin soit ou non perçu, c’est essentiellement le clitoris qui concentre cette assomption phallique, à la fois éprouvée (réelle), imaginaire (fantasmée dans le battement puissance/impuissance) et symbolique (investissement et essor de la pensée). Masturbation, désir incestueux pour la mère: voilà le premier versant de l’Œdipe (je l’appellerai Œdipe prime) qui structuralement définit la fille autant que le garçon, avant qu’elle n’arrive à l’Œdipe bis qui la fait changer d’objet (le père au lieu de la mère). Pourtant, dès cette structuration-là (Œdipe prime), des différences s’imposent entre le phallicisme de la fille et du garçon qui n’ont peut-être pas été assez soulignées. Sensible versus signifiant. L’étrangeté du phallus. L’illusoire L’insistance, pourtant si judicieuse, mise sur le langage comme organisateur de la vie psychique nous a trop souvent empêchés d’apprécier à sa juste valeur l’expérience sensible (prélangagière ou translangagière). Or, la sensorialité, fortement stimulée chez la petite fille dans les phases préoedipiennes par le lien symbiotique à la mère (par l’homosexualité primaire), la rend capable d’apprécier aussi bien la différence des performances organiques sexuelles du garçon que le surinvestissement narcissique dont il est l’objet. Bien entendu, les variations individuelles dans l’excitation ou dans le plaisir clitoridien d’une part, et d’autre part les variantes singulières dans la valorisation de la fille par le père influent considérablement sur les modulations du phallicisme féminin: une petite fille peut être autant sinon plus satisfaite ou valorisée qu’un petit garçon dans la phase phallique. Il n’en reste pas moins qu’une dissociation est structralement inscrite dans le phallicisme de la fille entre le sensible et le signifiant.8 Le phallus en tant que signifiant du manque ainsi que de la Loi, supporté dans l’imaginaire par le pénis, est d’emblée perçu-pensé par la fille comme étranger: radicalement autre. Invisible et quasiment irrepérable, le support réel et imaginaire du plaisir phallique chez la fille (j’ai nommé le clitoris), dissocie d’emblée le sujet femme du phallus au sens d’un signifiant privilégié dans cette conjonction Logos/Désir que j’ai appelé un Kairos phallique et à laquelle la fille accède cependant avec non moins—sinon plus—d’aisance que le garçon. Une aisance symbolique (de pensée) que cependant l’expérience sensorielle (distincte de la pulsion phallique) n’accompagne pas, déçue comme elle est de se percevoir moins visible et moins remarquable, moins appréciée, quoique pas nécessairement moins intensément éprouvée en tant que plaisir. S’installe dès lors, avec cette dissociation sensible/signifiant, la croyance que l’ordre phallique-symbolique est un ordre illusoire. La perception actuelle, défavorable par rapport à la fille (elle n’a pas de pénis remarquable, elle n’est pas le phallus), réactive l’hallucination d’expériences antérieures (satisfaction et/ou frustration dans la reduplication fille-mère, dans la mêmeté minoémycénienne9 qui furent des expériences sensorielles précédant l’apparition du langage ou soustraite à celui-ci. Dès lors, et depuis ce décalage entre perception actuelle dominée par le Kairos phallique et perception/hallucination antérieures, le monisme phallique référé à l’autre (à l’homme) que ‘je ne suis pas’ frappe d’emblée l’être du sujet-femme d’une négation (‘je ne suis pas ce qui est’, ‘je suis quand même, à force de ne pas’). L’étrangeté ou l’illusoire du phallus peuvent être l’autre nom de cette négativité redoublée du ‘quand même’ et du ‘ne pas’. Ce n’est pas un délire qui cicatrise le décalage perception/hallucination chez la femme, mais précisément la croyance que le phallus, au même titre que le langage et l’ordre symbolique, sont illusoires et néanmoins indispensables. En revanche, on peut interpréter comme une forme de délire le refus d’accepter la différence et l’illusoire du phallus qu’elle entraîne, ainsi que les tentatives du sujet-femme de maintenir

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désespérément, au prix du sadomasochisme, l’égalité avec le phallicisme du garçon (Cf. les trois exemples citées plus haut). J’entends par ‘croyance’ l’adhésion consciente et inconsciente, sans preuve, à une évidence: ici l’évidence que le phallus, du fait de la dissociation perception/signifiance, s’impose toujours déjà à la femme comme illusoire. Illusoire (de ‘illudere’ = se jouer de) voudrait dire, au fond, que cette loi, ce plaisir, cette puissance phallique, et simultanément leur manque, auquel j’accède par le phallus—celui de l’étranger—c’est du jeu. Ce n’est pas que ce n’est rien, mais ce n’est pas tout non plus, fut-ce un tout voilé comme l’avouent les mystères phalliques. Non, le phallus que j’investis est qui fait de moi un sujet du langage et de la loi, j’en suis. Pourtant, il demeure autre chose, un je ne sais quoi…passons, car j’entre tout de même dans le jeu, j’en veux moi aussi, on joue le jeu. Ce n’est qu’un jeu, ce n’est qu’un ‘je’, on fait semblant, on joue le jeu, et c’est bien ça, pour le sujet femme, la soi-disant ‘vérité’ du signifiant ou du parlêtre. Je ne veux pas dire par là que les femmes sont forcément joueuses (ludiques), encore que cela peut arriver. Mais quand elles ne sont pas illusionnées, elle sont désillusionnées. L’apparent ‘réalisme’ des femmes se soutient de cet illusoire: les femmes ne cessent de faire, et de tout faire, parce qu’elles n’y croient pas, elles croient que c’est une illusion. Cette croyance dans l’illusoire du phallus peut comporter des bénéfices. Par exemple, je cultive une sensorialité secrète, peut-être sournoise, mais qui m’épargne la dure épreuve du garçon de faire coïncider mon plaisir érotique avec ma performance symbolique. Une telle dissociation peut avoir l’avantage de soulager et de faciliter chez la fille ses compétences logiques ainsi ‘étrangères’ à l’érotisme, favorisant par là même les réussites intellectuelles bien connues des petites filles: des ‘petites génies’ précoces aux petites pimbêches ou péronnelles, capables de tout bien faire parce qu’elle font bien n’importe quoi. Toutefois et au contraire, cette expérience de l’étrangeté du phallus comporte son envers, qui est l’envers de la facilité, et qui peut pousser la fille dans une ambition phallique paroxystique voisine de la martyrologie, comme le montrent les exemples cliniques suggérés au début. On comprend que l’étrangeté du phallus chez la femme peut alimenter un aspect de ce qu’on appelle trop sommairement le masochisme féminin, nommément la compétition phallique sadomasochique non compensée par l’Œdipe bis ni par la réconciliation avec la féminité préoedipienne. En luttant contre l’étrangeté du phallus et/ou contre sa bisexualité, la fille phallique—qui veut ‘l’avoir’ de la même façon elle aussi—se fait plus catholique que le pape, sainte, martyre et militante d’un signifiant dont toutes les zones érogènes sont mobilisées pour dénier l’illusoire, et auquel elle veut se persuader qu’elle croit dur(e) comme fer. Je reviens à cette croyance du phallus comme illusoire car elle me paraît être, d’entrée de jeu, un indice de la bisexualité psychique féminine dans la mesure où l’illusoire (ou l’étrangeté) s’appuie sur la déhiscence entre sensible et signifiable qui résulte d’une adhérence toujours présente, chez la fille, à l’osmose préœdipienne fille-mère (que Freud compare à ‘la civilisation minoémycénienne derrière celle des Grecs’10), et au code dans lequel se réalise cette osmose: échanges sensoriels et prélangage (modalité ‘sémiotique’ dans ma terminologie—rythmes, allitérations, antérieurs au signes et à la syntaxe). L’abandon de cette modalité sémiotique de la signifiance au profit des signes linguistiques lors de la position dépressive caractérise aussi bien le garçon que la fille, là aussi probablement avec des différences peu explorées entre les deux sexes. Ultérieurement, la structuration phallique du sujet qui s’ajoute à l’acquisition du langage et le consolide. Mais en raison de l’expérience de l’étrangeté du phallus chez la petite fille, le Kairos phallique réactive la position dépressive et accentue de ce fait la croyance dans l’illusoire du phallus, en même temps que du langage, chez la femme. Une mise au point qui est aussi une mise en garde s’impose: la particularité que je suis en train de mettre en évidence est une manifestation de la bisexualité psychique de la femme, et ne débouche pas nécessairement sur des personnalités ‘comme si’ ou des ‘faux selfs’, dont l’étiologie nécessite des clivages

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traumatiques. Je n’ai pas parlé de ‘clivage’, mais de ‘jeu’, ‘étrangeté’, ‘illusoire’. Je pense que le phallique illusoire chez la femme peut la conduire à s’inscrire dans l’ordre social avec une efficacité distante: c’est ce que Hegel appelait ‘la femme, éternelle ironie de la communauté’. Par ailleurs, cette position illusoire du phallus peut aussi favoriser les régressions dépressives de la femme, lorsque l’attraction de ‘l’ombre de l’objet’ préœdipien (de la mère minoémycénienne) se fait inexorable, et que le sujet femme abandonne l’étrangeté du symbolique au profit d’une sensorialité innommable, boudeuse, suicidaire. En revanche, on peut voir dans l’investissement maniaque de ce phallicisme illusoire la logique de la parade, qui mobilise la belle séductrice, inlassablement parée, maquillée, habillée, bichonnée et provocatrice, et tout aussi inlassablement ‘pas dupe’ et déçue. Nous sommes ici devant une figure bien connue de la femme illusionniste et qui se sait telle—de cette ‘girl-phallus’, dont parlaient Fenichel, et Lacan après lui: mais nous le savons toutes, et nous en jouons. A l’envers, le déni de cette bisexualité psychique qui, je répète, impose chez la femme la croyance dans l’illusoire du phallus, se présente comme un déni de l’illusoire. Un tel déni implique l’identification au phallus tel quel, ce qui revient à une identification avec la position phallique de l’homme et à la scotomisation du lien sémiotique primaire avec la mère (que certains appellent l’homosexualité primaire). Il en résulte la paranoïaque—la chef, la directrice, etc. ou l’homosexuelle virile—suppôts du pouvoir sous toutes ses formes plus ou moins dictatoriales. Œdipe Bis Mais l’illusoire du phallus n’épuise pas la complexité de cette figure complexe qu’est la bisexualité féminine. Il a suffi à Freud de poser l’Œdipe pour s’apercevoir que la fille ne s’y conforme pas. ‘Nous avons l’impression que tout ce que nous avons dit du complexe d’Œdipe se rapporte strictement à l’enfant du sexe masculin.’11 Vous avez déjà noté que je ne suis pas de ceux qui, forts de cette remarque de Freud, rejettent le monisme phallique et donc la structuration phallique du sujet fille. J’ajoute cependant à l’Œdipe prime (indispensable pour le garçon et pour la fille et qu’amorce le phallicisme) un Œdipe bis, et je propose ainsi de penser une dyade oedipienne chez la femme. Je m’explique.—Sous l’effet des menace de castration, auxquelles j’ajouterai l’épreuve de ce que je viens d’appeler l’étrangeté du phallus, la petite fille renonce à la masturbation clitoridienne, s’en dégoûte, la rejette et se détourne de son phallicisme réel (de la croyance ‘J’ai l’organe’), ainsi qu’imaginaire (de la croyance: ‘Je suis la puissance/l’impuissance mâle’). Tout en cultivant sa place de sujet du signifiant phallique, du sujet du symbolique (avec la variante d’étrangeté et d’illusoire qu’elle y imprime), la fille de l’Œdipe bis change d’objet. Elle commence par haïr la mère qui fut l’objet de son désir phallique, et devient hostile à cette mère responsable de la castration, ainsi que de l’illusion, dans ce qu’une illusion comporte de déception. La fille s’identifie cependant, et par delà cette haine, toujours à la même mère qui fut l’objet de son désir phallique du temps de l’Œdipe prime et, mieux encore, elle s’identifie à la mère préœdipienne des ‘paradis parfumés’, ‘minoémycéniens’. C’est de ce lieu-là, d’identification par delà la haine, qu’elle change d’objet et qu’elle désire désormais, non plus la mère, mais ce que cette mère desire: l’amour du père. Plus exactement, la fille désire que le père lui donne son pénis/phallus à lui, sous la forme d’enfants, que la fille aura comme si elle était…la mère. La reconduction de l’aspiration phallique continue donc dans cet ‘Œdipe bis’—autant dire interminable—et on comprend Freud, qui postule que contrairement au garçon dont l’Œdipe sombre sous l’effet du complexe de castration, l’Œdipe de la fille—ce que j’appelle l’Œdipe Bis— non seulement ne sombre pas mais ne fait que commencer spécifiquement parlant, en tant qu’Œdipe féminin. Il est ‘introduit’ par le complexe de castration.12

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L’intégration de cette position féminine vis-à-vis du père n’est pas exempte d’ambiguïtés. D’une part, elle résulte d’une identification avec la mère castratrice/castrée, d’abord abhorrée, ensuite acceptée, qu’accompagne ‘un abaissement des motions sexuelles actives’, un ‘refoulement de la masculinité’, ‘une bonne partie de ses tendances sexuelles en général est endommagée de façon permanente’.13 A l’illusoire succèderait la passivation? Toutefois et parallèlement à cette passivation, si ce n’est pas à une dépression, l’envie de pénis persiste comme variante du phallicisme—ce qui prouverait que les tendances sexuelles actives sont loin d’être abolies, et ceci soit comme une revendication masculine comportementale ou professionnelle, soit plus ‘naturellement’ dans le désir d’enfant et dans la maternité. Ici cesse, peut-être, le monde comme monde illusoire pour la femme, pour que s’ouvre celui de la présence réelle. Présence réelle du phallus, l’enfant est alors investi par sa mère tout autrement que ne peut l’être aucun signe ou symbole, fut-il phallique. C’est ce qu’a visiblement compris la dernière religion, la chrétienne, lorsqu’elle a fait son dieu d’un enfant, et qu’elle s’est attachée ainsi définitivement les femmes, pourtant toujours susceptibles de désillusion, autant dire si incrédules quand on leur présente un idéal ou un Surmoi désincarné, que Freud même en a été frappé au point de se livrer à des critiques fort sévères quand à l’inaptitude des femmes à la morale. S’il est vrai donc que l’enfant incarne la dernière révolte phallique dans l’Œdipe bis, donc interminable, de la femme (‘Je veux un pénis=présence réelle’), c’est dire qu’elle y retrouve ainsi une autre variante de sa bisexualité. Pourquoi? Parce que l’enfant est son pénis—elle ne renonce pas à la masculinité. Mais en même temps, et toujours par l’enfant, elle accède à la qualité d’être l’autre de l’homme, c’est-à-dire une femme qui a donné son enfant, s’en est vidée, s’en est séparée. Pourtant, ce n’est pas comme un déséquilibre de l’identité, encore moins comme une structure ouverte, qu’est le plus souvent perçue ou vécue la maternité, mais comme une complétude à laquelle conviendrait mieux le terme d’‘androgyne’ que celui de ‘bisexualité’. Il est vrai que lorsque l’ordre symbolique s’incarne en présence réelle (l’enfant-phallus), la femme y trouve la conjonction de son essence symbolique (sujet pensant phallique) et de son essence charnelle (sensualité préœdipienne, dualité sensuelle mère-fille, réduplication des génitrices). De ce fait, et en accomplissant sa bisexualité en une androgynie dans un Œdipe jamais achevé, toujours reconduit, la femme mère peut apparaître comme la garante et de l’ordre social et de la continuité de l’espèce. Ce constat, auquel Freud était arrivé, de la femme comme être social,14 culmine dans la toute puissance maternelle qui, en droite ligne de la mère garante du social et du biologique, ambitionne aujourd’hui, avec l’aide du gynécologue et du généticien, de réparer la présence réelle: la femme materne, servie par la science et la technique, elle a le fantasme de pouvoir tout faire, et souvent s’épuise à tout faire, pour faire exister mais aussi pour améliorer à travers son enfant la présence réelle du phallus. Pourtant, ce tableau d’une féminité hypersociale, ultrabiologique et férocement réparatrice, pour ne pas être faux, me paraît ne pas tenir compte de deux fragilités. La première, c’est la permanence de l’illusion/ désillusion à l’égard de tout signifiant, loi ou désir. L’autre, c’est la vulnérabilité de celle qui délègue sa présence réelle à celle de son enfant (à un autre), et qui, à chaque atteinte de l’intégrité de celui-ci, revit les affres de la castration, quand ce n’est pas d’une catastrophe identitaire brutale. Ce qu’on appelle le sadomasochisme féminin est peut-être l’expérience de cette étrangeté structurale du phallus sous ces deux formes: quand elle est désillusion (basée sur l’Œdipe prime), ou quand elle est une atteinte à la présence réelle relayée par l’autre de soi—l’enfant—(basée sur l’Œdipe bis). Si elle ne se fixe pas dans la toute-puissance, la bisexualité féminine se prête aux épreuves du sadomasochisme. Alors, toujours ‘estrangée’ dans son désir latent d’avoir le phallus ou de l’être (désir qui la soutient pourtant dans son être de sujet), la femme se détourne de l’assomption désirante et phallique, la femme renonce à sa bisexualité psychique et se complaît dans une sensorialité doloriste, qui est l’onde

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porteuse de la dépressivité hystérique avant que celle-ci ne bascule dans la mélancolie. A l’inverse, l’indifférence hystérique peut trahir une option pour le phallus seul mais érigé en Surmoi, dégoûté du plaisir clitoridien et privé de toute réminiscence éventuelle du lien à la mère préœdipienne. Ces quelques figures de la bisexualité psychique féminines parmi d’autres, apparaissent en somme comme des variantes de la position du sujet femme eu égard au monisme phallique. Les difficultés structurales de ce positionnement—plus que les conditions historiques, qui ne manquent pas de s’y ajouter, expliquent peut-être le pénible destin des femmes tout au long de l’histoire. Rappelons-nous maintenant l’adhésion phallique chez Armelle, Dominique et Florence que j’ai évoquée au début de ma réflexion, et dont la souffrance nous apparaît désormais comme un déni de la bisexualité au profit d’un fantasme de totalité androgynique. Je vous ai donné ces flashes sur quelques aspects dramatiques de la ‘pénible condition féminine’ pour mieux faire ressortir que c’est en s’épargnant ces impasses,— combien fréquentes! que rayonne ce qu’on appelle en contrepoint, le ‘mystère’ de la bisexualité féminine. Comme toutes les réussites, la bisexualité psychique féminine est certainement un fantasme. Elle suppose l’inscription du sujet femme dans l’ordre phallique-signifiant avec son cortège de plaisir et de gratifications symboliques (Œdipe prime) que procure cet ordre étranger et illusoire; elle suppose aussi le déplacement de la castration, de la dépression et de l’abaissement sexuel dans une revalorisation du rôle maternel et en conséquence féminin, qui passe par une réconciliation avec l’homosexualité primaire; elle implique enfin l’investissement de la présence réelle du phallus-enfant, épreuve de gloire et de castration enfin moins illusoire, encore que toujours déjà quelque peu estrangée. Dans ce véritable vortex d’adhésion et de désadhésion au phallus (au signifiant, au désir), la bisexualité féminine—si elle existait—ne serait ni plus ni moins qu’une expérience du sens et de sa gestation, du langage et son érosion, de l’être et de sa réserve. J’ai nommé là le véritable enjeu de l’expérience…esthétique, cette variante contemporaine et lucide du sacré. J’ouvre ainsi une porte pour vous laisser méditer sur la raison pour laquelle, en cherchant le temps perdu, c’est la bisexualité de la gomorrhéenne Albertine que Proust a placée en point de mire du fantasme du narrateur. La bisexualité féminine serait-elle l’objet par excellence de la littérature et de l’art? Mais Albertine est morte d’une chute de cheval, à moins qu’elle ne se soit suicidée. Et, par delà l’inconfortable condition féminine que nous sommes nombreuses à connaître, la bisexualité psychique de la femme reste une terre promise qu’il nous revient d’atteindre. Notamment en psychanalyse, en incurvant le plaisir que nous donne nos réalisations professionnelles, cliniques et théoriques évidemment phalliques, vers la peu dicible et fortement sensible contrée de nos mères muettes. Transphallique, et en ce sens non pas moins phalliques mais plus-que-phallique, cette jouissance bisexuelle serait alors à proprement parler mystérieuse (du grec muo = caché, clos; du sanscrit mukham = bouche, trou, fermeture; ce qui a donné dans les langues slaves muka = douleur, mystère). Le mystère ultime serait-il la douleur? S’il y a une résolution du masochisme féminin, elle passe peut-être par la résolution de ce que j’ai appelé l’Œdipe bis: assomption du phallique et sa traversée dans la présence réelle de l’enfant, et réconciliation avec l’antéphallique irreprésentable du maternel préoedipien ainsi que du prélangage. On mesure l’immense travail psychique que nécessite un tel parcours et qui, bien que jamais entièrement accompli, confère souvent à certaines femmes cet air étrange, désillusionnée et cependant vif, fiable. J’ai la conviction qu’avec cette bisexualité, ainsi comprise comme résolution du masochisme féminin, nous touchons le ressort psychique de l’athéisme, s’il était donné à l’être parlant d’y accéder sans contreinvestissement militant antireligieux. Car, on l’aura compris, j’entrevois dans la bisexualité psychique de la femme, non pas un culte du phallus, ni un au-delà, encore moins un en deça de lui, mais un maintien et un estrangement de l’illusion comme illusion. Avenir d’une illusion? Nécessairement! Quoiqu’on en dise, le rationaliste Freud a raison, tout le monde veut sa part d’illusion et s’obstine à ne pas savoir que c’en est une. Une femme pourtant est structuralement mieux placée que quiconque pour faire le tour de l’illusion. Et je ne

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suis pas sûre qu’il puisse y avoir d’autre signification à l’‘athéisme’, que de s’en tenir à l’Autre et d’en faire le tour. Quelques lueurs laissées par des femmes françaises du siècle, et peut-être quelques autres ici-même à Toulouse, au temps des cathares, pourrons nous guider un jour dans cette direction, vers l’athéisme et les femmes—dont l’actualité mondiale nous persuade qu’elle risque d’être fort périlleuse. Mais ce sera pour une autre fois. Pour aujourd’hui, je vous laisse devant l’incommensurable effort psychique que nécessite cet être psychiquement bisexuel qu’est une femme, autant dire un être qui n’adhère jamais à l’illusion d’être, pas plus qu’à l’être de cette illusion elle-même. Et j’admets que ce que je vous ai dit n’est peut-être qu’une illusion. Notes 1 Retenez ces termes, j’y reviendrai. 2 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre VIII, Le Transfert (Paris: Seuil, 1991). 3 En grec, le terme Kairos désigne le point juste qui touche au but, l’à-propos, la convenance, le point critique dangereux, l’avantage, le bon moment; ce qui est à-propos, convenable; en grec moderne, temps, époque. On cherche l’étymologie dans ‘rencontre’ ou dans ‘couper’. 4 Sigmund Freud, ‘L’organisation génitale infantile’, 1923, Standard Edition, trans. in, La vie sexuelle (Paris: PUF, n.d.). 5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Quelques conséquences psychiques de la différence anatomique entre les sexes’, (1925), Standard Edition, 19, trans. in, La vie sexuelle (Paris: PUF, n.d.). p.131. 6 Lacan, Le Transfert, p.274. 7 D.W.Winnicott, Conversation ordinaire, 1960. 8 Les récentes découvertes concernant une participation plus importante de l’hémisphère droit chez les femmes que chez les hommes dans l’exercice du langage, peuvent être mises en résonance avec ces observations. Plus latéralisé, le cerveau masculin traiterait le langage davantage comme un système logique; tandis que, l’hémisphère droit étant plus impliqué dans la perception-sensation, l’exercice du langage chez la femme serait plus associé à la sensorialité. Toutefois, la fragilité des découvertes biologiques ainsi que l’organisation interhémisphérique du cerveau comme l’interconnectivité des neurones imposent la plus grande circonspection dans l’interprétation de ces informations. 9 Sigmund Freud, ‘Sur la sexualité féminine’, trans. in, La vie sexuelle (Paris: PUF, n.d.), p.140. 10 Freud, ‘Sur la sexualité féminine’, p.140. 11 Freud, ‘Sur la sexualité féminine’, p.142. 12 Sigmund Freud, ‘Quelques conséquences de la différence anatomique entre les sexes’, trans. in, La vie sexuelle (Paris: PUF, n.d.), p.130. 13 Freud, ‘Sur la sexualité féminine’, p.151. 14 Freud, ‘Sur la sexualité féminine’, p.143. ‘On ne se trompé probablemen pas en disant que cette différence […] donne au caractère féminin son empreinte comme être social’. (Nous soulignons.)

Julia Kristeva is Professor at the Université de Paris VII, and at Columbia University, and author of critical essay and novels. Her most recent publications include the novel Possession (Fayard), the essay Sens et Non-Sens de la Révolte (Fayard), and Le temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire (Gallimard), which has been translated into English under the title Time and Sense.

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Experiencing the Phallus as Extraneous, or Women’s Twofold Oedipus Complex Julia Kristeva

bisexuality […] comes to the fore much more clearly in women than in men’. Sigmund Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, 1931 The Phallic Kairos At a time when many practitioners and theorists view psychoanalysis as a transaction of organs and drives, while others make of it a mathematical formula of the signifier or a theory of ‘mind’, or yet again a cognition, it seems necessary to me to uphold that the originality of Freud’s discovery lies in discerning a co-presence between the development of thought and that of sexuality. It is an attentiveness to this twofold expression (thought-sexuality) of speaking-being that forms the very core of the analytical experience and which therefore, far from representing human essence in biological terms, centers the study of the psychical apparatus, its operations and its blockages, in the bi-univocal dependence of thought-sexuality/sexualitythought. Such an interaction takes place within language and accordingly, it is in this medium that Freud was to explore that ‘other scene’, the unconscious, whose contents (representatives of the drive) and logic (primary process) nevertheless fundamentally differ from conscious linguistic communication. In defining my psychoanalytical approach and practice as the study of the co-presence between sexuality-and-thought, my aim is not simply to dissociate myself from the two trends currently in favour (the cognitivist and the phantasmatic-organicist approaches). It is also to indicate at the outset of my talk the basis on which the following remarks, concerning female psychical bisexuality as viewed from the perspective of the relationship of women to the phallus, are founded. The question to which I shall therefore address myself is that of the relationship of the female subject to the phallus. As a certain ‘phallic monism’ is constantly drawn to our attention in clinical experience, I would first of all like to present a couple of particularly acute examples of the kind of adherence to the phallus that characterizes certain women: an adherence that effectively structures them, but at the price of often traumatic suffering. Mystery And The Unbearable Armelle occupies a high-ranking post in an international organization. Mother, wife, mistress and author, she would seem to lack nothing, unless it be a personal satisfaction which, she insists, is not of a sexual nature: ‘I am not frigid’, she specifies. This dissatisfaction is accompanied by the feeling of being like a little girl whom no-one takes seriously and who never realises her true capacities. Additionally, Armelle is led to take on all sorts of tasks and chores, even the most tiring and thankless, as though setting herself superhuman

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goals. A veritable martyr, Armelle has made for herself a bed of nails upon which to lie and impale the flesh of her back and stomach. The martyrology of saints that her family background has handed down to her is superimposed here upon the structural jouissance, or complex pleasure, of the Freudian phantasy, ‘A child is being beaten’: Armelle is being beaten, Armelle beats Armelle, Armelle pierces Armelle, ‘til the blood flows; her entire body is a phallus-penis finding its pleasure in sado-masochism by way of punishment for clitoral pleasure and to avoid recognition as a pierced-castrated body. Armelle is fixated at the pivotal point situated between what I term Oedipus-1 and Oedipus-2.1 Her professional success, her phallicism in the symbolic order, has been acquired at the price of denying her bisexuality: she aspires to be all phallus. Her perverse pleasure is at the expense of the physical and mental exhaustion of the superwoman. Dominique is characterized by a slender, boyish body and by a way of talking marked by allusion, secrecy and omission. Her computer skills do not sufficiently account for such a discreet manner. It is with difficulty that I find out that she has sexual relationships with women but that the relationship to which she gives most importance is with a man, with whom she adopts a masochistic role. Much later, Dominique will reveal that this man is her immediate superior at her place of work and, even later yet, that he is black. Dominique had greatly admired her brother who was a year older than herself and with whom she had lived a mirror-relationship, as though doubles or twins, before the arrival of a baby-sister, born five years after Dominique. The idyll lived by Dominique, in her role as boy-double, came to an end at adolescence when her brother was killed by a car. ‘I don’t believe women have sex. When my brother died, it became apparent to me that the area between my legs was smooth, like a plastic doll.’ Without a penis, without a clitoris, without a vagina: Dominique lives the failure of her psychical bisexuality by offering her anus as a hollowed-out penis to her sadistic partner. Another variant of phallic monism. I shall come back later to what these examples have shown us of phallicism’s unbearable nature for women. For the moment, I would like to insist upon the universality of the phallic reference which makes its appearance in both sexes, although in a somewhat different way, well before the phallic phase and the Oedipus complex that this phase announces. As a result of language, of the paternal function and of the mother’s desire for the father (for her own as well as for that of her child), the trace of the phallus (what Lacan terms ‘a phallus without incarnation’2) always-already organizes the subject’s psychosexuality. Primary identification, narcissism, sublimation, idealisation, the setting-up of the ego-ideal and of the superego are but some of the well-known stages that mark this organization. It is necessary to underline the importance of what Freud calls the phallic phase which, structurally, plays the major role in organizing, in both sexes, the co-presence of sexuality-thought of which I have spoken. Many authors have called attention to the particular characteristics that determine the penis’ being cathected (or invested libidinally) by the two sexes and becoming the phallus, that signifier of lack—of lack-in-being, or of desire, and, in consequence, signifier of the symbolic law. Its visibility and ability of erection, the narcissistic gratification and erotogenic sensations that it offers, as well as its ‘detachability’ and, therefore, ‘severability’: all permit the penis to become the mark of difference, functioning as the pivot of the binary distinction, 0/1, upon which all meaning is based, and, in this sense, operate as the organic (i.e. real and imaginary) element of our psychosexual computer. The Greek term Kairos (‘propitious moment or encounter’3) might well seem a fitting designation to give to this eminently subtle and, in this sense, mysterious encounter of meaning and desire that, effectuated during the phallic phase—all in being prepared for in advance—therein shapes the destiny of the human being qua speaking-cum-desiring being. The subject—whether anatomically male or female—is formed by this phallic Kairos: such is the revelation that psychoanalysis, long after the Greek mysteries, announces. Our psychical destiny is, essentially, to bear the consequences—that can aptly be qualified as tragic—of this mystery.

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A veiled mystery indeed. For, given its very structure and under the threat of castration, the phallicism of both sexes succumbs to repression and is succeeded by the latency period. Phallic primacy is for this reason the hallmark of ‘infantile genital organization’: i.e. it is precisely the factor differentiating infantile genitality from adult genitality, which in principle recognizes the existence of two sexes.4 And yet, phallic monism—with its recognition of one sex alone (the penis), of one libido alone (the masculine) and of a sole symbol for the activity of thought (the phallus)—remains, for the two sexes, a fundamental datum of the unconscious. As such, phallic monism can be understood as an infantile illusion that subsists as an unconscious reality serving to structure the psyche. The transformation of an illusion into an unconscious reality: is this not a case of an illusion destined to a fine future? Indeed, we are confronted here with the basis of what Freud, in one of his later works, would name ‘the future of an illusion’, inasmuch as every religion truly draws upon the cult of the phallus. This fact that phallic monism is a residue of the infantile phallocentrism conditioning the Oedipus complex is an aspect of the Freudian theory of sexuality that has received insufficient attention. Nor, in a similar manner, has it been sufficiently grasped that, as a consequence of the repression of this phallicism into the unconscious, the unconscious as such is phallic. This means that the unconscious lacks ‘genitality’ in the sense of an acknowledgement of sexual difference. Or, to put it more abruptly, there is no unconscious psychical genitality: while one can speak of a biological instinct of procreation and of the advent, at puberty, of a desire for the other sex, nothing in Freudian theory indicates that there exists an unconscious psychical representative of the other sex as such. To these first two aspects of phallic primacy (i.e. its central role in the organization of the unconscious and its character as an infantile illusion), a third must be added. Namely, in the case of male sexual development, the Oedipus complex, determined by the phallic Kairos, is subject to a veritable ‘catastrophe’, which takes the form of the boy’s turning away from incest and murder and culminates in the institution of conscience and morality, in which Freud saw ‘a victory of the race over the individual’.5 Through the mechanisms of de-sexualization and sublimation, the early object-cathexes are replaced by the agencies of the psychical apparatus (the id, the ego and the superego), and neurosis alone betrays a ‘struggle’ on the behalf of the ego against ‘the demands of the sexual function’. One might well wonder here as to that other form of ‘struggle’ represented by the subject’s creative use of thought or language, which, even though showing a proximity to neurosis, or indeed to psychosis, cannot nevertheless be reduced to these. Our examination of bisexuality may perhaps allow us a certain insight into this form of ‘struggle’ that Freud, for his part, did not query in these terms. As is well known, phallic primacy was to be taken up and invested with a particular value by Lacan in his rehabilitation of the function of the father and of language in speaking-being [‘parlêtre’: which can also be translated as the ‘subject of speech’]. Attributing to the phallus the values of ‘seeming’ and ‘evanescence’, Lacan positions it as the locus of lack and source of anxiety, and it is for this very reason that it can function as the primary symbol determining the process of sexual identification. ‘The man is not without having it, the woman is without having it.’6 It seems to me interesting to compare this formula with the proposition made by Winnicott concerning the maternal element which he specifies, moreover, as having nothing to do with the drives: the maternal element, he states, simply ‘is’ (the self is the breast, the breast is the self) and does not ‘do’ anything (the breast is a symbol of being, not of doing).7 Being, having, doing: are the distinctions really as clear-cut as this? The remarks that follow may be understood as both an elaboration and an inflection of these two propositions of Lacan and Winnicott.

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The sensible versus the signifier. The extraneousness of the phallus. The illusory. In girls, the Kairos—that decisive encounter between the mastery of signs and genital excitation that forges the subject as a speaking-cum-desiring being—takes a particular form in that it is the clitoris that assumes the phallic function. This function is, simultaneously, real (experienced), imaginary (phantasized in the oscillation of activity-passivity) and symbolic (as regards the cathexis and development of thought-processes). Infantile masturbation and incestuous desire for the mother characterize this first aspect of the Oedipus complex (that I name Oedipus-1) by which girls—as much as boys—are structurally defined before they reach Oedipus-2, which causes them to change object, with the father taking the place that was previously the mother’s. However, even in this first structuring of the subject (Oedipus-1) there are differences between the phallicism of girls and boys that have perhaps not been sufficiently remarked. The attention given to the role played by language in organizing psychical life, however judicious it may be, has too often prevented us from appreciating the importance of the role played by sensuous—that is, prelinguistic or translinguistic—experience. And yet, it is precisely the girl’s sensuousness, so strongly stimulated by the symbiotic bond with the mother during the pre-Oedipal phase (phase of primary homosexuality), that enables her to evaluate as much the different capacities of the boy’s sexual organ as the excessive narcissistic cathexes of which the boy is the object. Indeed, whatever may be the degree of organic satisfaction and paternal valorisation experienced by the girl—and nothing, for instance, prevents the girl from being just as satisfied and valorised as the boy—her phallicism must be understood as displaying a structural dissociation between the sensible and the signifier.8 For the phallus, in its capacity as signifier of lack as well as of the law, is figured in the imaginary by the penis and is, therefore, perceived/ conceived by the girl as something extraneous, and as radically heterogeneous. In other words, inasmuch as the girl’s phallic pleasure finds both its real and imaginary ‘support’ in the clitoris, that more inconspicuous organ, she is, at once, dissociated from the phallus, understood as a privileged signifier in that conjunction of Logos/Desire that I have named the phallic Kairos. This is not to say that this conjunction is less marked in girls than it is in boys. On the contrary, girls often display a greater facility in the (symbolic) register of thought. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the girl’s symbolic—in the sense of intellectual—facility is at variance with her sensuous experience; however much pleasure the girl may experience, she is nevertheless deceived by the fact of perceiving her organ as less visible, less striking and less appreciated. Consequently, the dissociation between the signifier and the sensuous is accompanied by the belief that the symbolicphallic order is illusory. The deception felt by the girl at perceiving herself as disadvantaged (she does not have a conspicuous penis, she is not the phallus) reactivates the hallucination of past experiences related to the satisfaction and/ or frustration characterizing the girl-mother dyad, that moment of Minoan-Mycenaean fusion.9 As such, the experiences reactivated in this manner consist of sensuous experiences that either preceded the acquisition of language or that took place outside of language. This being the case, the discrepancy between what is perceived in the present, under the sway of the phallic Kairos, and the hallucination of past perceptions, entails that the phallic monism that is assigned to the other (the man) that ‘I am not’ thereby marks the being of the female subject with a negation: ‘I am not what is’, ‘I am, nonetheless, if only by sheer force of not’. The extraneous or illusory character of the phallus is perhaps another way of designating this double negation of ‘nonetheless’ and ‘not’. This stated, it is precisely the belief that the phallus, and consequently language and the symbolic order, are illusory, all in being indispensable, that closes the gap between perception and hallucination. By ‘belief’, I refer here to the fact that the illusory nature of the phallus is, both consciously and unconsciously, adhered to by women as something that is evident, without any need for proof. This qualification of ‘illusory’ (derived from the Latin ludere = ‘to play’, and hence illudere, ‘to make fun of’ or ‘to mock’)

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refers to the fact that everything the phallus gives the female subject access to (namely: the law, power, and a certain pleasure—as too, the possibility of their lack) is ultimately, for her, but a game. It’s not entirely nothing, but it’s not the be-all, either, even were this to be veiled, as the Phallic mysteries claim it to be. But simply, there is something else…an undefinable, ineffable something else; and as to the phallus, well, by cathecting the phallus, I become a subject of language and of the law; which is what I am. So I play the game: I want my part of the action too. But, it is just a game, just a role that ‘I’ play; a case of play-acting, of make-believe, which, indeed, for the female-subject, is all the so-called truth of the signifier or of the subjectof-speech boils down to. In stating this, I do not mean that women necessarily have a playful (ludic) attitude to life, although this is the case for some. However when they are not under an illusion, they are disillusioned; which is to say that the seeming ‘realism’ of women is based on this illusion: women are able to keep on going, to do all that needs to be done, because they don’t believe in it, they believe it’s an illusion. There are advantages to this belief in the illusory nature of the phallus. Girls can, for example, cultivate a secret sensuousness that, if furtive at times, nevertheless spares them for the exacting task that boys must confront of making their erotic pleasure coincide with their symbolic performance. Such a dissociation between sensuousness and the signifier can favor girls’ intellectual development, for the two spheres of logical competency and eroticism are, in being extraneous from one another, kept distinct; and, indeed, the scholastic superiority of young girls is well known. On the other hand, however, this experiencing of the phallus as extraneous has its reverse side, where, far from rendering things easier, it can, for example, give rise to an acute phallic ambition bordering on the sado-masochistic martyrdom that was highlighted by the clinical examples outlined at the start of this paper. Comprising one aspect of what is named, in too cursory a fashion, feminine masochism, this sadomasochistic phallic competitiveness can be interpreted as a form of ‘delirium’ inasmuch as it entails the denial (or disavowal) of the difference of the phallus and, thereby, of its illusory status. Such a disavowal, implying an identification with the phallus as such, amounts to an identification with the phallic position of the man and to the scotomization (or non-recognition) of the primary pre-Oedipal bond with the mother, often qualified as ‘primary homosexuality’. In refusing to accept the extraneous position of the phallus and/ or her psychical bisexuality, the phallic girl—who wants to ‘have it’ too—shows the fervour of a zealot: becoming the saint, martyr and militant of a signifier, she ‘organizes’ her erotogenic zones in such a way as to deny the illusoriness of the phallus, as though all the better to convince herself that her belief rests upon firm foundations. The result of such a quest for equality with male phallicism is exemplified in the figures of the female paranoiac—the boss, the business woman, etc.—or the virile lesbian: partisans of power in all of its more or less dictatorial forms. It is evident from what I’ve just said that the belief in the illusory or extraneous character of the phallus seems to me to be an index of female psychical bisexuality. The reason for this follows from the fact that the dissociation between sensuousness and the signifier which underpins the illusoriness of the phallus is, as we have seen based on the girl’s persistent attachment to the pre-Oedipal fusion with the mother. This attachment is equally an attachment to the code by which this fusion was given expression: this consists as much of sensory interaction as of prelinguistic phenomena, such as rhythms and alliteration, that, preceding the acquisition of signs and syntax, form what I have named the ‘semiotic modality’. The abandonment of this semiotic modality, in favour of linguistic signs, occurs in both girls and boys during the depressive position although, here again, there are probably differences between the sexes that have up to now been insufficiently explored. Later on, the phallic structuring of the subject will complement and reinforce language acquisition while at the same time causing, in girls, what can now be characterized as the

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reactivation of the depressive position and, thereby, an accentuation of the girl’s belief in the illusory character of the phallus and language. It follows from this that the illusory position that women attribute to the phallus can favorise the onset of depressive regressions when, in succumbing to the shadowy attraction of the pre-Oedipal object, the girl forsakes the extraneous symbolic order and gives herself up to an ineffable, sullen and suicidal sensuousness. Some women, on the other hand, display a maniacal investment (cathexis) in illusory phallicism, adhering, in this respect, to a veritable logic of exhibition, such as that exemplified by the alluring seductress, always immaculately made-up, dressed-up, prettified and provocative. In this figure of the female ‘illusionist’ who is completely conscious of the masquerade she employs, we can recognize the ‘girl-phallus’ of which Fenichel and, subsequently, Lacan were to speak. But all women know this figure and all of us play on it. As a final—and precautionary—remark concerning the phallus’ illusory character, I would specify that the particular phenomenon that I am describing should be firmly understood as a manifestation of female psychical bisexuality and not be confused with the clinical figures of ‘the false self’ or the ‘as if personality’, whose aetiology always entails a severe splitting of the psychical activity. I have not spoken of ‘splitting’ but of ‘play’, ‘extraneousness’, and ‘illusoriness’. Women’s adherence to the illusory character of the phallus does not impede them from functioning in the social order, where they display a certain detached efficiency. Is this not what Hegel referred to in speaking of women as ‘the everlasting irony in the life of the community’? The Girl’s Twofold Oedipus Complex The illusory character of the phallus is however but one component of the complex configuration of female bisexuality. As is well known, Freud was to alter his initial conception of the Oedipus complex in the light of the realization that it was inadequate to describe the complexity of the girl’s development. ‘We have the impression here that what we have said about the Oedipus complex applies with complete strictness to the male child only […]’.10 While certain theorists have been encouraged by this remark to reject phallic monism and, therefore, the phallic structuring of the female subject, it is obvious that I am not of their opinion. I do however propose that the girl’s development be seen to entail a twofold Oedipus complex, by which I mean that what I have called Oedipus-1 (that structuring of the subject inaugurated by the phallic phase and indispensable for both sexes) must be understood as being complemented, in the girl’s case, by an Oedipus-2, in the sense of a ‘re-working’ or repetition of the Oedipal organization that, for this very reason, is open-ended or ‘interminable’. The mechanism of this Oedipus-2 can best be grasped by first recalling a certain number of factors. As we have suggested, it is not only under the threat of castration but also due to the experience of the extraneousness of the phallus that the little girl rejects her clitoral masturbation, renounces it and turns away from both her real phallicism (from the belief ‘I have the phallus’) and her imaginary phallicism (the belief ‘I am masculine potency/impotency). While cultivating her position as a subject of the phallic signifier (with the particular stamp of otherness and illusoriness that she gives it), the little girl, in this phase of Oedipus-2, changes object. She starts by hating the mother who had previously been the object of her phallic desire but who is now viewed with hostility as responsible for her castration, as well as for the illusion, with all that this implies of deception. Despite this hatred however, the girl still identifies with the mother and, even more, she remains identified with the pre-Oedipal mother with whom she had shared the Minoan-Mycenaean paradise. It’s from this position of an identification that exists in spite of, and beyond, the hatred for the mother that the girl changes object and desires from then on, not the mother, but what the

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mother desires: namely, the father’s love. More precisely, the girl desires that the father make her the gift of his penis/phallus in the form of baby that the girl will have just as if she were…the mother. The girl’s phallic aspiration takes therefore a new form and continues during this phase of Oedipus-2, and one can understand that Freud postulated that, in opposition to what happens in the case of the boy where the Oedipus complex is demolished under the influence of the castration complex, the girl’s Oedipus complex— what I call Oedipus-2—is not only not demolished but in fact only really commences with the castration complex. In other words, it is ‘made possible’ and ‘led up to’ by the castration complex.11 The taking-up of this feminine position towards the father is not without its ambiguities. On the one hand, given that it results from an identification with the castrated/ castrating mother, at first abhorred and then accepted, it is accompanied by a ‘marked lowering of the active sexual impulses’ and ‘a repression of her previous masculinity’, with the concomitant effect that ‘a considerable portion of her sexual trends in general is permanently injured too’.12 Does this mean that the ‘illusoriness’ is supplanted by a passivation? And yet, parallel to this rise of passive trends (or, in some cases, to a depression), the desire of having the penis (penis-envy) persists as a variant of phallicism: which proves that active sexual trends are far from having been abolished. This penis-envy can take the form of either a masculine protest, manifested in the woman’s behaviour or professional pursuits, or, alternatively and more ‘naturally’, in a desire for a child and motherhood. It is at this point perhaps that the world as an illusory world for women comes to an end and that there opens up the world of real presence. Representing the real presence of the phallus, the child becomes the object of a cathexis on the part of the mother in a way that no sign or symbol—even if these were phallic—can be. This was evidently understood by the last religion, Christianity, when it made a child its god and, in this way, definitively won women over to its cause in spite of their profound tendency to disillusionment, which, indeed, amounts to so strong an incredulity when faced with ideals and disincarnated superegos that Freud was led severely to criticize women’s poorly developed sense of morality. The child may therefore be seen to incarnate, in the case of women, the final phallic revolt marking that open-ended, and therefore interminable, phase of Oedipus-2 (‘I want a penis’=real presence) and, in this way, the woman finds in the child another expression of her bisexuality for, quite simply, the child is her penis and thus she does not renounce her masculinity. At the same time, however, it is via the child that the woman acquires the quality of being ‘other’ than the man: that is, woman who has given her child, who has emptied herself of it, separated herself from it. This does not mean that motherhood is lived or perceived as a disequilibrium of the identity or, even less, as an open structure; on the contrary, it is most often lived and perceived as a state of completeness, for which the term of ‘androgyny’ is finally more fitting than that of ‘bisexuality’. Moreover, with the incarnation of the symbolic order in the child-phallus, the woman is presented with the conjunction of her symbolic essence (qua phallic thinking subject) and of her corporeal essence (encompassing her pre-Oedipal sensuality and the sensual mother-daughter dyad, as well as the reduplication of mother and daughter in the maternal function). For this reason, and given continuation of her bisexuality in the androgyny marking her ever-renewed Oedipus-2, the woman-mother can be seen as the guardian of both the social order and the continuity of the species. Women’s character as social beings, remarked upon by Freud, culminates in the figure of maternal omnipotence. Today, this figure would seem to find a new vigour in its relaying of the function attributed to the mother as the guarantee of the social and biological order. For modern genetics and gynaecology contribute to what may be understood as the mother’s aspiration to repair real presence; abetted by science and technology, the mothering woman phantasizes that she is capable of doing all that is necessary, and

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often exhausts herself in her efforts, to not only bring into existence but equally to improve by means of her child the real presence of the phallus. And yet, this image of a hypersocial, ultrabiological and avowedly restorative femininity, while not entirely false, seems to me to overlook two sources of fragility. The first consists of the permanence, in women, of the structure of illusion/disillusionment as regards each and every signifier, law or desire. The second concerns the vulnerability that necessarily characterizes the woman-mother inasmuch as, in delegating her real presence to that of her child (to an other), she accordingly relives the terrors of castration or, worse, undergoes a violent crisis of identity each time that her child’s well-being is threatened. In this way, we find once again that what is commonly called feminine sado-masochism is perhaps precisely the experience of the structural extraneousness of the phallus; for these two sources of fragility affecting the structuring of the female subject are indeed the expression of two forms of this experience and are based respectively on Oedipus-1 (as regards the disillusionment) and on Oedipus-2 (as regards the threat to the woman’s real presence as delegated to her ‘other’, the child). It would indeed seem that when female bisexuality is not securely anchored in the belief in omnipotence, it falls prey to such ordeals of sado-masochism. Which is, of course, but to say that the various figures of female bisexuality that we have outlined are to be understood as so many variants of the position of the female subject in relation to phallic monism. It is perhaps the structural difficulties of this positioning, more than the historical conditions as such—although these are, of course, an added factor—that finally explain the tribulations that have been women’s lot throughout history. Thinking back to the phallic adherence demonstrated in the examples of Armelle and Dominique evoked at the start of this paper, their suffering can now be understood as a denial of bisexuality in favour of the phantasm of androgynous completion. In presenting you with these flashes of certain striking aspects of the ‘tribulations of the feminine condition’, my aim was to highlight that it is only by avoiding such impasses— which are, alas, only too frequent—that what we might well call, by way of contrast, the ‘mystery’ of female bisexuality can be realized. Inasmuch as the experience—and the ‘jouissance’, or pleasure—of bisexuality is properly ‘transphallic’, in the sense not of being less phallic but of being more-than-phallic, it may be described as ‘mysterious’, in the strict sense of this term (which derives from the Greek muo = ‘hidden’, ‘enclosed’; from the Sanskrit mukham = ‘mouth’, ‘hole’, ‘enclosure’, which has given in Slavonic languages muka = ‘pain’, ‘mystery’). Rather than wanting to conclude that pain would be the ultimate mystery, what I am suggesting is that, if there is a resolution to feminine masochism, then it may perhaps precisely be by way of the achievement of female bisexuality. Certainly, as with all instances of success, female psychical bisexuality is a phantasm, or—if you prefer— a promised land that we have yet to attain. For not only does it presuppose the positioning of the female subject in the phallic signifying order (Oedipus-1), with all the accompanying pleasures and symbolic gratifications that this extraneous and illusory order procures, but it requires additionally that, via a reconciliation with primary homosexuality, a transformation of castration, of depression and of sexual devalorisation takes place, with a consequent revalorisation of the maternal role and, thereby, of the woman’s role. And yet this is not all. For, finally, it implies a cathexis of the real presence of the phalluschild; this constituting an experience both of achievement and of castration which, while less illusory, still remains somewhat ‘estranged’. One can gauge the enormous amount of psychical effort required by such a process, which, although never entirely accomplished, explains the strange, disillusioned and yet lively and reliable air that characterizes certain women. Correspondingly, a re-cathecting of orality and anality takes place in women by way of a regressive counterbalance to phallic deception. Language can then itself become cathected in the oral and anal register as a narcissistic pleasure, in distinction to its cathexis in the register of phallic competitiveness. It should be

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noted that this dynamic can lead to a greater importance of ‘tender’ or ‘affective’ tendencies, in opposition to ‘phallic-erotic’ tendencies. The discovery of the vagina as an ‘interiority’ and ‘unrepresentable volume’, that is ‘other’ than the phallus, is probably also to be situated on this line of development, with the vagina thereby becoming that enigmatic ‘dark continent’ that as much challenges phallic power as it stimulates the imaginary. Consisting of a veritable vortex of adherence and non-adherence to the phallus (the the signifier, to desire), female bisexuality—were this indeed to exist—would be no less, and no more, than an experience of meaning and its gestation, of language and its erosion, of being and its concealment. But in other words, I have just named what is truly at stake in the…aesthetic…experience, our contemporary and lucid version of the sacred. In this way, I would like to suggest one way of considering why it is the bisexuality of the Gomorrhean Albertine that Proust, in his search for things past, situates as the focal point of the narrator’s phantasms. Might female bisexuality not indeed be the object par excellence of literature and art? At the same time the structural relation that I am indicating between female bisexuality and aesthetical experience can also be seen to open up another avenue of exploration that I would like to briefly examine by way of conclusion. For it is my conviction that female psychical bisexuality allows us to glimpse the psychical mechanism underpinning atheism, at least inasmuch as we can talk of an atheism that does not entail, on the part of the subject, a militant anti-religious cathexis. This follows from what we have seen of female psychical bisexuality’s position in relation to phallic monism: for, far from constituting a cult of the phallus, far from going beyond or, even less, falling short of such a cult, this bisexuality, in its very estrangement, maintains the illusion as an illusion. Am I positing in this manner the ‘future of an illusion’? But of course. Whatever one might say, Freud, that inveterate rationalist, was quite right in stating that everyone wants his/her part of illusion, even while obstinately refusing to recognize it for what it is. Women are, however, structurally better placed than are men when it comes to exploring the possibilities opened up by illusion. And I am not sure that atheism can ever mean anything else than leaving the Other its place and exploring all its different facets, all its possibilities, and putting these into perspective. This stated, it is upon the mainspring of such an atheism that I would like to insist one last time. For the psychical effort required to produce a subject of speech that no more adheres to the illusion of being than to the being of illusion is extraordinary. Such is the effort that is required of that psychically bisexual being that is a woman. And thereupon, I must acknowledge that what I have said to you today is perhaps but an illusion. Translated by Louise Burchill Notes 1 I shall come back to these terms later on. 2 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre VIII: Le Transfert (Paris: Seuil, 1991). 3 More specifically, this term signifies what comes at the right moment or touches its goal; that which is timely, advantageous, or appropriate; the dangerous critical point. In modern Greek, it means ‘time’ or ‘epoch’. While its etymology is uncertain, it is thought to derive from ‘encounter’ or ‘to cut’. 4 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Infantile Genital Organization’, (1923), The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7, James Strachey (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1977) 5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’, (1925), The Pelican Library, vol. 7, James Strachey (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p.341. 6 Lacan, Le Transfert, p.274. 7 See for example, D.W.Winnicott, Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, C.Winnicott (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986); and Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 (1982)) p.95

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8 These remarks may be into relation with recent discoveries suggesting that the right hemisphere plays a greater role in the exercise of language in women than in men. In being more lateralised, men’s brains would therefore treat language in a more logical manner, as though dealing with a logical system, whereas, given that the right hemisphere is more implicated in perception-sensation, language-use in women would be more associated with sensuousness. It is necessary however to interpret such data with the greatest circumspection, given not only the interconnection of neurones but the fact that biological discoveries are always open to revision. 9 Sigmund Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, (1931), The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7, James Strachey (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p.372. 10 Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, p.375. 11 Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences’, p.341. 12 Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, p.387. Q&A

Toril Moi (Duke University) The question is a very simple one. I have listened to this talk, and read the text as well. I know that a question that many women will want to ask immediately after listening to this is this: what would you say to women who do not want to experience maternity, or do not or cannot have children? Your talk sounds as if you are saying there has to be the physical, psychological and phenomenological experience of maternity for any woman to get the chance of even acquiring this marvellous full sense of bisexuality. Is that the case or not? Julia Kristeva I wanted to fill in a void in feminist theory around maternity. I will respond to this provocation by firstly situating my reply. Since the moment of Simone de Beauvoir and her circle, there has been an insistence on the necessity of women to claim their sexual freedom, which often involved a refusal of motherhood. During this time, medical techniques developed in contraception and abortion to guarantee the independence of women through the control of their fertility. This trend, however, suspended many critical issues. For instance, we were unable to rethink the working norms of civilisation and culture around motherhood, for it seemed as if the pleasures and desires as well as the social regulations figured by the concept of the mother in the home—la mère au foyer—were null and without future significance. For this reason, the vast majority of women were unmoved by the feminist movement. On the other hand, as an analyst, I have come across many women who were involved in the women’s movement, who in their late thirties, began to use medical advances such as artificial insemination, to have a baby, rediscovering the profound desire of femininity for a child. This revealed to me that although we have a dominant discourse on rights, we have no discourse on the necessity for the human race to guarantee its transmission, on reproduction. Thus we have a discourse on rights, but no discourse on history. I am currently thinking about a question posed by Hannah Arendt in her work stemming from her thesis on St. Augustine which appeared in her posthumous book the Life of the Mind. The argument is not a central theme, but like a filigree that plays through her thinking. What is the meaning of life, that is to say, what is life? At present, in our societies, we no longer have organised forms of value formed for us by communism or a dominant ideology. Our ruling value is life. Is that, however, life as life—that would be an idealism—or is life, something which must have meaning given to it? There are two means to give life a meaning. The first route, as I have been suggesting, lies in the opening up of permanent interrogation, of maintaining critical

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thought, that continues to question the impasses of living. The second route is to give life. Why give life? Who gives life? How is it possible to correlate the claim for rights and the experience of jouissance in the promulgation of life? In this second orientation of the question of the value and meaning of life, the role of women is of extraordinary significance. I shall talk about this through the body of the mother—why, I shall shortly explain. The maternal body is in a position to transform the violence of eroticism—which in the process of sexual liberation women now know for themselves—into tenderness. The maternal body is the frontier for that translation that permits a human being to live, to not become psychotic, to not die of solitude, but to live. This gives to women an enormous role, namely the destiny of humanity is in the hands of women. This is complex. Women must, at the same time, claim the freedom to experience their own eroticism, while affirming themselves in the phallic competitiveness I have just outlined, while guaranteeing the future of the species. This must be stated frankly and with the greatest of seriousness for it is a matter of such gravity. The women’s movement has an enormous responsibility, which until this moment, has largely been avoided, except for one or two groups which have tried to address it, that is, to know how women can secure the future of humanity without sacrificing themselves. This involves a dialectic which we have to think through that we have yet to discover. It is in this broad philosophical perspective that I am trying to reflect upon the question of maternity. It is a fundamental logic that we must pursue and, unless we manage it, we will simply be dragged along by roboticisation of reproduction and end up as breeding machines, making babies like a cat its litter. To move back to the question about women who do not want to become mothers, let me emphasise that once again my definition of a particular position, a borderline situation in which the violence of eroticism is transmuted through tenderness into sensitivity and language. In psychoanalytical groups in France at the moment, we are discussing this situation, where it is not the actual maternal function that is in question, but other social functions, such as that of the analyst, where a similar process takes place. As we know, Lacan defined the analyst as ‘the subject-supposed-to know’, thus identifying the analyst with the paternal function of the Law. But there is also a maternal function in analysis, namely the translation of eroticism into tenderness. There can be no effective interpretation if the analyst cannot assist in this translation, this sublimation. Thus alongside the paternal function, there is also a maternal function of transmutation. Every woman will not be able to, or desire to enter into this maternal function for herself. But there are many social roles in which this attitude towards the other may be enacted on the edge where the sado-masochism that characterises the phallic competitiveness of the technocratic society is muted by generosity, by the favour of the self extended towards the other, as in the mother’s experience of the child. This position as mediator is possible for the ‘professor’— the university teacher. We do not always achieve this, but optimally this is the ideal. Some aspects of social work perform this function of translation, as Proust defined the work of writing, where art translates the passions into signs. This process has been compared to giving birth and becoming a mother. But I want to go beyond a purely metaphorical level to try and show how such positions are not merely identified with a biological maternity underpinning a position towards the other.

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Question I am sympathetic with your position. But I want to turn it on its head, so to speak. If women have access to this bisexuality in a way that the masculine construction of identity does not, how is female bisexuality as you say the subject par excellence of art, if most artists have been male? Kristeva I suggest that this role of transposition and translation has been captured more often than not and contained within maternity. The destiny of the species has monopolised women within the translation that is maternity. But with the technical developments around birth control, abortion and artificially assisted childbearing, and with the concurrent development of ideas about liberation and autonomy, women may at last permit themselves both processes; both the translation that is involved in maternity itself, and the translation that takes place through artistic language. With the advent of the second millennium, there may be a new possibility that women may arrive at integrating both these functions. But we should consider with care, at the same time, the enormous overload that such a double role involves. We cannot minimise the profound difficulties and great efforts involved in the realisation and accomplishment of such a resolution. The questioner replied, further stressing the contradiction between women’s supposed access to the bisexuality that engenders creativity and their default as artists. Because of the concrete social constraints on women, they have not in the past generally had access to the same freedoms as men. They have been more systematically confined to their role within maternity or deflected into mystical paths. With the transformations at the social level of control over fertility and increased social rights, women may more generally experience what men have enjoyed. With regard to artists who are men, they have had access to both their masculinity and to either a homosexuality or a bisexuality that is active or sublimated. Question Given that woman’s desire seems to be coordinated to an object that perhaps participates more fully in the real than that of the male subject, if I have interpreted your paper correctly, I was wondering if you could speak about how that then structures the woman as an ethical subject, and specifically in relation to the other in such configurations of expatriation, exile and the like. Kristeva First of all, I want to stress there are many figures of femininity and I do not think that there is one single femininity. The content of this particular relation to the real presence of the child, in the optimal case, is this attitude I call generosity but also that of irony, which has entreated the social structure towards itself. One sees this in the case of women in politics—although Mrs. Thatcher may be an exception—who seem more and more able to achieve success while bringing to bear this attitude of irony towards the community which permits a wider attention towards the other, and less toughness in social life. But this is very provisional and ephemeral because we also note that those who approach politics with this ethical perspective of more gentleness and compassion towards the other are often rapidly ejected from it or sacrificed. This ethical approach which women introduce, which appears to involve a broader recognition of the strangeness or foreignness of the other, is a light within contemporary political life, and those who take this route encounter many obstacles and find themselves marginalised. Speaking of my own world, in the

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university and in psychoanalysis as well as politics in general, one sees the ones who succeed are those who are often most phallicised and those extending the luminosity of this ethical position are pushed to the margins. Question I would like to know if you also make the connection I see between your interest in ethical responsibility and your interest in violence. At the very beginning of the session, we were discussing this. There is a need to accept violence rather than to mitigate violence. Can we think these two things together? Kristeva Yes we must. But I do not want to be misinterpreted as calling for the reclamation of a sentimental femininity or femininity as sensibility. I am talking about feminine beings who have not yet been—with the possible exception of one or two cases such as Madame de Sévigny or Georges Sand. There may have been a tiny minority but never has the majority of women taken part in this double strategy. On the one hand, there is what I call the phallic position in which violence is confronted. On the social plane, women reclaim an identity through struggle. And on the level of a still phallic jouissance, this position involves an exploration of even sadomasochism in sexuality and in the sexual relation to the other. At the same time, the counter position involves what I call the filtering of feeling into sublimation. Thus again at the level of the social, this involves safekeeping the dimension of tenderness. Perhaps an image, that of the black and white keys of the piano allows us to imagine the new objective at which many women will aim in trying to conjoin the double position, to dialecticise its oppositions. This novelty is not the old opposition of the militant feminist virago who terrifies men in the war of the sexes and the mother in the home dedicated to raising her children. It is the possibility of existing simultaneously on different levels, and orchestrating the diverse notes of the keyboard that will deliver to us the new bi-cephalic and bi-sexual being.

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Strangers in Analysis: Nationalism and the Talking Cure John Mowitt

Temper Temper I hope I may be forgiven for beginning by raising the dead. Specifically, I wish to invoke the memory of the late John Belushi and a character he developed while working as a cast member on the American late night variety show, Saturday Night Live. The character in question was that of a samurai swordsman trapped, either by fate or the contemporary vicissitudes of emigration, in a variety of incongruous professions—my personal favorite was that of an optometrist—and confronted by unsuspecting but demanding American customers seeking his services. At the core of every skit was the transcultural trauma of misrecognition; a trauma that eventually prompted Belushi’s character to succumb to frantic swordplay, as if hysterical— though certainly professional—acting out were one’s only recourse when faced with such a trauma. What prompted one’s laughter, however, was not merely the absurdity of Belushi’s overreaction, but that fact that his customers appeared to leave both bewildered and oddly satisfied. What could they have wanted? If I begin here it is not primarily because I suspect that Julia Kristeva may well be familiar with this character, having spent considerable time in New York City (where SNL is taped) over the past decades. Rather, I begin here because this paper will seek to address itself to the transcultural trauma of, if not misrecognition, then certainly estrangement, that Kristeva has linked—on an insistently autobiographical level-not only to the figure of the samurai, but to the problem of nationalism. I hasten to add, however, that there is a sharp difference between her approach to the samurai and that of Belushi. Specifically, Kristeva moves to occupy the site of estrangement and deflect, if not defer, the acting out that consumes him. In effect, she recognizes and exploits the transferential character of the transactions that torment him, and in this way her situation matches that of Yamamoto (a character in The Samurai) who, instead of passing to the act of—in his case, suicide—writes. My interest in this trauma—quite apart from the theme of the writing warrior—derives from two sources: 1. the heightened xenophobic nationalism that is currently legislating itself in the United States where, in the same spirit that feminists used to say, ‘pornography is the theory, rape is the practice’, now one might well add, ‘Proposition 187 is the theory, the vicious beating of so-called “illegals” is the practice’, and 2. the

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contentious debate among the partisans of postcolonial studies about the theoretical and ultimately political viability of the concept of the nation. Since I especially want to pressure this debate with Kristeva’s meditation on the foreigner, indulge me as I briefly sketch its contours. Those who have been following the postcolonial debate, joined now—if we are to believe Aijaz Ahmad— for some 20 years, know that the very concept of the ‘postcolonial’ is fraught with a certain ambivalence. Predictably, this ambivalence concentrates itself in the prefix ‘post’, and though the literature articulating this ambivalence is vast and growing, I will not attempt to summarize its intricate rigor here. Suffice it to say, that if there is something that, in spite of this ambivalence, seems to warrant the persistent invocation of the postcolonial, it would appear to be the various national projects that either spurred or, in some sense, resulted from, the struggle against colonialism. Since already in 1955 Aimé Césaire had baptized the nation a quintessentially European and ultimately bourgeois concept, it has been important—particularly in postcolonial scholarship—to associate the break signalled by the prefix ‘post’ with articulations, at once local and specific, of distinctively non-Western national projects. Thus, perhaps the singular achievement of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is that, through its appeal to the dynamics of creolization, it was able to locate the concept of the nation outside Europe, in fact, in the very struggle against it.1 In such a context nationalism emerged as progressive political strategy, as pertinent to the Palestinians as to the New Yoricans in the fight against annihilation and assimilation respectively. Of course, latent within Césaire’s repudiation of the nation is the tradition of Left internationalism, a tradition which—at least at the level of its logic—situates the nation in virtually the same place held by the Jews in Marx’s infamous ‘On the Jewish Question’. From within this tradition nationalism is seen as a backward, anti-cosmopolitan traditionalism that, in the final analysis, seeks to reverse the course of history. However, with the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (not to mention the events it interprets) the Left critique of nationalism has been deeply shaken; not primarily because his ‘thymotic’ celebration of the death of communism was terribly convincing—many, including Jacques Derrida, saw through that—but rather, because he made it painfully clear that transnational capitalism and the so called global marketplace were at once recontextualizing and utterly redefining contemporary appeals to internationalism. Under such circumstances only the most vulgar, not to say diehard, dialectical materialists were likely to be comforted by the prospect of an emergent international insurgency arising out of what could only be characterized as global alienation. In the precincts of postcolonial studies this has prompted Gayatri Spivak, among others, to at once sharpen and displace the attack on nationalism, insisting —as she has—that transnational capital flows have obliterated the nation-state paradigm without however resolving the political needs expressed in nationalism. Indeed, were it not for such needs Spivak might well have counseled us to abandon reference to the nation altogether. Thus, put bluntly, the issue is to what extent should the organized Left—however defined—defend the politics of nationalism, especially now that internationalism has been so thoroughly appropriated by the capitalism of multinational corporations? And if so, on what terms? Frankly speaking, it is indeed the matter of ‘terms’ that most concerns me, for if I find Kristeva’s writings on the nation pertinent here it is not only because of the considerable theoretical rigor they deploy in approaching these issues. It is also because of the insistent, and ultimately instructive, way that psychoanalysis sets both the ‘terms’ and the ‘technique’ of her analysis. Since I am especially concerned here to draw out the political implications of the strategic link between psychoanalysis and the nation, I hope I may be forgiven for placing Kristeva’s discussion in dialogue with the work of Jürgen Habermas and, to a lesser degree Slavoj Žižek, both of whom have—from very different points of departure—been pursuing like matters for some time.

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Wai guo ren, wai guo ren Though she has been criticized for a variety of sins, I don’t think anyone has yet complained that Julia Kristeva’s work is ‘unprovocative’. The reason for this is certainly underscored in the relatively recent Strangers to Ourselves. In this text Kristeva composes an analytical framework within which it becomes possible to claim that less separates, say, a Bulgarian student in France from a Mexican migrant laborer in Texas than one might immediately think. Ultimately, both are foreigners. More importantly though, both are foreigners in the same way, that is, they are both strangers to themselves. What accentuates the provocation of this argument is the fact that Kristeva intends her text as an intervention within contemporary political debates in France concerning the political status of foreigners. In fact, much of her appeal within Strangers to the ‘inner cosmopolitanism’ of Montesquieu and Freud was repeated in her extended exchange with the spokesperson of SOS Racisme, Harlem Désir, that coincided with the French publication of Strangers and which is now available in English as Nations Without Nationalism. Nevertheless, Kristeva’s arguments, while tempered by this immediate socio-historical context, are meant to bear on any and all contemporary situations in which ‘foreigners’ have become political forces and/or targets; situations such as those evoked earlier in my allusion to Proposition 187. This itself is sufficient reason to consider carefully both the argument and the ‘technique’ of Kristeva’s text, for the matters she raises are urgent. And, if I insist here on the importance of technique this is because it both plays a decisive role in Strangers (as we shall see) while also prompting us to reflect carefully upon the analytical significance of the medium of her interaction with M.Désir, that is, the ‘open letter’. Those familiar with Kristeva’s career, or—for that matter—her novel The Samurai from 1992, know that my earlier evocation of the ‘Bulgarian student in France’ was not fortuitous. If I begin my reading of Strangers here it is because of the special kinship between the text’s general concerns and the personal history of the woman who wrote it. Many readers have remarked upon the increasingly ‘autobiographical’ character of Kristeva’s work (beginning, perhaps, with ‘Stabat Mater’ in 1977), but this tendency reaches its apogee here in a rather complex way. While I too welcome the modulation of voice that attends this development, I prefer to situate the issue in terms of the vexed theoretical problem of the antagonistic relation between the personal and the political, or, if you prefer, between Freud and Marx. Kristeva has always articulated this relation in a distinctive manner. So much so, in fact, that when Semeiotiké was reviewed by her mentor, Roland Barthes, he was moved to emphasize the specifically ‘foreign mark’2 left on French debate by her work; work which insisted upon an approach to literary production that comprehended the unsettled historicity of the speaking subject Initially, the turn to Freud was profoundly tempered by her prior training as a linguist and her lived relation to the ideology of historical and dialectical materialism in the East bloc. But unlike many who, in the wake of the political defeats of the sixties, simply sought refuge in ‘the personal’, Kristeva moved to extend her problematization of subjectivity by deepening her dialogue with psychoanalysis, leading during the eighties to her entering into analytic training. In what might qualify as an exemplary ‘irony of history’ her becoming, what in an earlier period was called an ‘alienist’, developed out of, and might appear to resolve, her status as an alien; a foreigner. This is perhaps why psychoanalysis plays such a pivotal role in Strangers; pivotal not only because her analysis hangs upon it, but because it embodies the practice wherein Kristeva herself has labored to rearticulate—if not reconceptualize—the personal and the political.3 The argument of Strangers proceeds along two lines: one historical, the other theoretical. Needless to say, the two lines depend on one another, and though I will not have the opportunity to trace their interaction in detail, suffice it to say that what I have called her ‘technique’ derives from the compositional logic the interaction of these lines embody. The historical line seeks to clarify how ‘foreigners’ (étrangers) were differently constructed during the course of Western history beginning with the Greeks, and

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culminating with Freud. While in many respects this is the most satisfying and sustained historical research Kristeva has conducted to date (we learn, e.g. about the relationship between pilgrimage and passports, the early link between women and foreigners, the origins of the notion of barbarism, and the symptomatically ‘foreign’ character of travel literature), it resonates dissonantly with the theoretical line. I would argue that this is due to the fact that Kristeva’s theoretical material includes a meditation on the problem of the foreigner’s entry into the writing process; a problem she evokes quietly in the trope of the journey, if not, in fact, the journal. Coupled with the culminating historical role of psychoanalysis (Freud is both powerfully and provocatively situated within the general framework of the West’s encounter with foreigners), this meditation makes the reflexivity of Kristeva’s text strain under a significant burden. The theme of the foreigner’s entry into the writing process is where the line of theoretical reflection in Kristeva’s text engages the problem of reflexivity. Thus we have the problem of a text, written by an erstwhile foreigner, addressing itself to foreigners, about foreigners, and seeking to do so in a ‘foreign’ manner (a problem both intensified and acknowledged by the otherwise accomplished English translation). In the virtuosic opening chapter, ‘Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner’, these issues are addressed straightforwardly. Specifically, Kristeva rehearses the theoretical issues that caution against either rushing ahead to speak breathlessly on behalf of (and therefore, in the place of) others, or demurring to the point of complicity with their de facto oppression. In approaching the foreigner Kristeva argues that one ought to ‘merely touch it, brush by it, without giving it a permanent structure’, thus avoiding the twin disasters of demurral or preemption.4 Those familiar with the musical notion of the toccata will recognize that Kristeva is here both justifying what I have called her ‘technique’ as well as her chapter title. A toccata is a piece written (more often than not for keyboard) to be played with a characteristically rapid and light touch. Clearly, her aim is to present the way she has selected and organized the subsequent historical materials as warranted by the theoretical convictions animating her approach itself. Those who might otherwise condemn her for her ‘selectivity’ and lack of ‘detail’, are thus implicitly challenged to elaborate and defend their own theoretical convictions about the relation between analytical discourse and politics. Reflexivity is thus made here to at once involve, and implicate, the reader. The second musical term evoked in Kristeva’s chapter title is that of the fugue. It is vital here because it serves as the figural matrix out of which she forges the link between her technique and the two lines which define her argument: the historical and the theoretical. Pivotal to this link is the reflexive trope of ‘the journey’, evoked earlier. What such a figure has to do with the fugue can be clarified if we begin by recalling that a fugue is structured musically like a chase (hence the term, from Latin, fuga). Typically, what constitutes the dynamics of the chase is the interaction between two distinct melodic lines: one typically identified as the Subject and the other as the Answer. Since the fugue is partially defined by its allegiance to the logic of tonality, the melodic material introduced initially in the Tonic key undergoes a development which drives it away from, and then back to, its point of departure. In this sense the chase between the Subject and the Answer is formally organized like a circuitous journey, or perhaps more to the point, a homecoming where harmonic resolution provides the aesthetic gratification we in the West often confuse with ontological wellbeing or comfort in general. Obviously, this complements Kristeva’s notion of the toccata in significant ways. It allows her to incorporate the twisted topography of the speaking subject into the register of technique so that her writing about the foreigner is already an engagement with the foreigner. Moreover, the foreigner thus engaged is at once the answer, the interlocutor, and the disquieting plurality that courses through Kristeva’s own discourse, a coursing that touches without grabbing the reader. In fact, it is here, as a quintessentially technical effect, that the Freudian uncanny, the stranger within us, first lodges itself in the argument of

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Strangers. We are not therefore surprised when in chapter eight, at the culmination of the historical presentation, Kristeva characterizes psychoanalysis itself as ‘a journey into the strangeness of the other and oneself’.5 In effect, the journey the reader has taken from sixth century Athens to nineteenth century Vienna, from the encounter with the Danaïdes to the return of the repressed, is here being resolved in accordance with the logic of the fugal form itself. We have, thereby, rejoined the subject of the journey as a trope for the unfolding of her analysis, from the vantage point of the answer, that is, the journey seen as the theoretical warrant for that very unfolding. What complicates and perhaps even compromises this technical achievement is the fact that it occurs in the thematic context of the uncanny; the home which is strangely unhomey, familiarly unfamiliar. Thus, to continue the musical analysis, resolution does indeed take place within the Tonic (the ‘home’ key), but in the theoretical register of her meditation the Tonic has been relieved of its function. As I have indicated, the Freudian breakthrough is situated at the end of the historical ‘long march’ of the foreigner. What was glimpsed in Rabelais, namely, the presence of the exotic outside within the neurotic inside, is given rigorous theoretical elaboration by Freud. In this sense psychoanalysis, which inherits the Enlightenment contradiction between the rights of Man (sic) and the rights of citizens—a contradiction which discloses the irreducibly constructed character of the foreigner (someone who is a ‘man’, but not a citizen)—reframes this contradiction by locating the differences of family and nation (sites of ‘belonging’) within the structure of what makes us human. Each one of us, as human beings, is structured by a differentiating dynamic which at once bonds us to, and separates us from, others and ourselves. From Kristeva’s point of view Freud’s achievement was to recognize that the West’s investment in its ‘others’ sprang directly from its repressed relation to an ‘otherness’ that defined its relation to itself; a point she has been making in various ways since her studies on abjection and the ultimate alien—ET. Through a terse and audacious reading of Freud’s ‘The “Uncanny”’, Kristeva shows how Freud’s discovery of the antithetical meanings of the term unheimlich leads him to anticipate the insights of Civilization and its Discontents, namely, that the constitutional production of Oedipal guilt leaves us forever ill at ease in our cultural homeland. Though she does not walk us through the psychoanalytic model in detail, Kristeva makes it clear that the unfamiliar or strange, is strangely familiar because, as speaking beings, we are constitutionally marked by the repressed familial origins that buckle us to the maternal/feminine body, the drives and death. In other words, what haunts the house of our identity is the personal history of its construction; a history which our independent—and therefore unstable—identities require that we commemorate, that is, bury and revere. Though Habermas would be loathe to admit it, Kristeva’s analysis resonates with aspects of his formulations concerning the ethico-political status of communicative behavior, in that her reading of ‘The “Uncanny”’ is designed to secure a transcendental foothold for the cosmopolitanism of Montesquieu, that is, the perspective which linked, as a matter of principle, universal homelessness with a commitment to humanity as such. Instead of locating this homelessness in the geopolitical world where ‘the homeless’ hustle homeowners and renters alike, or, for that matter, in Lukács’s post-epical novel, Kristeva draws on Freud to locate it within the very nature of the speaking being. Thus, her political stance implies that only by recognizing the extent to which we are all estranged from ourselves, that is, foreigners, can we begin to resist the nationalism which, like the Lacanian ego, provokes us to locate the foreign outside or around us; a provocation which, under present social conditions, manifests itself as virulent xenophobia and racism. Here psychoanalysis is deployed, if not to institute then certainly to disclose, the democracy of transnational self-alienation. This, of course, is the theoretical perspective that would permit Kristeva to equate herself with a migrant laborer—which, of course, she does not explicitly do. It is not that the two are identical since neither has a secure identity, but that at the most fundamental level she and the laborer are alike in lacking such an

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identity and are therefore capable of reciprocal recognition and compassion, in effect, she and the laborer are capable of affirming national identifications without appealing to nationalism. However, this bold and innovative attempt to identify a non-essentialist basis for what we in the US call ‘identity politics’, threatens to fold under the strain of its own execution. This becomes most apparent in relation to the obviously personal theme of France, the place where Kristeva first lived her own national construction as a foreigner. When France enters the thematic register of the text, Kristeva, in a troubled ironic voice, moves discreetly to objectify—and therefore legitimate—her own case by arguing that since in France nationalism still confuses itself with civilization as such, no one is ever more a foreigner than in France. In other words, her experience reaches below the merely accidental (and therefore didactically compromised) to the necessary. While she is clearly critical of French national identity, when she later reprises this theme in chapter seven, her critique is decidedly softened. Here, she challenges the equation between France and culture by problematizing it in precisely the manner she later affirms in her subsequent discussion of Freud. In fact, in her savaging of the ideological function of the French national media she argues that in France, ‘[t]he romantic or terroristic seriousness of strangeness in itself becomes dissolved in this glittering of polymorphic culture that returns everyone to his or her otherness or foreign status’6 a rebuke which resonates dissonantly with the positive assertion in chapter eight that ‘[b]y recognizing our uncanny strangeness we shall neither suffer from it nor enjoy it from the outside. The foreigner is within me, hence we are all foreigners. If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners.’7 The difference between being returned to one’s otherness and recognizing one’s uncanny strangeness—an experience also, as we have seen, structured by a return—is exceedingly difficult to discern. In fact, one might well argue that these two propositions collapse into one another, and with them a considerable portion of the critical project of Strangers. For, if it is true that the French national public sphere, dominated as it is by the centralized mass media, condemns every attempt to pose the radicality of strangeness in itself (whatever that is) to spectacular irrelevance, then Kristeva’s intellectual intervention—her authenticity as an immigrant notwithstanding—is likewise compromised. Instead of brushing past the foreigner, Kristeva seems condemned to brush him/her off, in the guise, perhaps, of self-effacement. What goes awry here is that Kristeva’s otherwise ingenious integration of technique and argument turns against her. This is why her return to the Tonic ought to be uncanny, but is not. In order for the homecoming required by the logic of tonality to work, the musical material unfolded during the journey must sustain the differences that give it harmonic power. What happens in Kristeva’s performance is that due to the collapse noted above—a collapse which could be uncharitably reformulated as a mere superimposition of the political and the personal—she exhausts the harmonic resources of her material, and instead of there being a sustained tension between the Subject and the Answer that might allow for an uncanny repetition of the Tonic, all her ‘voices’ are singing in unison. In other words, the force of her compositional form ends up exerting itself in a way that pressures her argument to build the very house it will return to; a place which her argument has otherwise moved to dislodge.8 In an effort to implicate myself in the strategy of my own reading, let us then turn back to the beginning and revisit the question of Left internationalism. As framed earlier, this question would oblige us to conclude that, in her embrace of an uncanny cosmopolitanism, Kristeva is prepared to side with the internationalist repudiation of national ambitions; a position which places her in the surprising—and no doubt unwelcomed—company of Ted Turner (certainly no Leftist), who not long ago boasted in an interview with David Frost, ‘I was an internationalist before anyone else was’. This reappropriation of one of the cherished values of both Marxism and modernism by the multinational, corporate Right must give pause even to those intellectuals who—like Kristeva—have distanced themselves from the Communist Left, and this despite the fact that her excoriation of the ‘myth of national origins’, in ‘What of Tomorrow’s

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Nation?’ is compelling indeed. Quite apart from the conundra glimpsed here however, it seems pertinent to consider—albeit perfunctorily—the possibility that Kristeva’s repudiation of nationalism aligns her with neither Lenin nor Turner, and further, that her nonaligned status is premised upon a perspective on psychoanalytic politics she herself has yet fully to disclose; a perspective that—I will propose—derives from psychoanalysis’s persistent reflection upon the problem of technique. It is useful to recall at this juncture that the book which followed Strangers was titled, Nations Without Nationalism, where a clear distinction is drawn between something like a geopolitical phenomenon and an ideology. True, Kristeva herself never titled the essays collected here in this manner—though I find it hard to believe that M.Roudiez did not confer with her about the English title—this is a distinction that is indeed theorized in the book’s contents. If I emphasize this, it is because here one can see that Kristeva is prepared to retain, at least provisionally, the concept of the nation—and in this sense distance herself from a certain internationalism—while letting nationalism, internationalism’s evil twin, go. While this invites us to recognize that her perspective is more nuanced than it might otherwise appear, precisely what it enables us to think—about either nationalism or internationalism—cannot be clarified without coming to terms with the status of the nation within psychoanalysis. I must confess that my interest here lies less in the articulation of a long-overdue genealogy of psychoanalysis than in a truncated symptomatic reading of the appeal to the concept of nation within psychoanalysis. Though it would be tempting to regard Ernst Renan’s observation that, ‘the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and that they have also forgotten many things’,9 as the origin of the encounter evoked above, clearly Freud is, as always, the innovator. In ‘Reflections Upon War and Death’ from 1915 he writes: Within each of these nations [“the great world-dominating nations of the white race”] high norms of moral conduct were laid down for the individual, to which his manner of life was bound to conform if he desired to be part of a civilized community. These ordinances, often too stringent, demanded a great deal of him, much self-restraint, much renunciation of instinctual satisfaction.10 It is striking, of course, that the nation—though mentioned in an introductory section (and adumbrated at the close of ‘On Narcissism’)—does not otherwise figure in the discussion of Le Bon’s The Crowd that opens, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, and this despite Le Bon’s virulent ethnocentrism which the preceding citation might lead one to believe represented the source of Freud’s interest in The Crowd. Instead, ‘Group Psychology’ concentrates on what Freud calls ‘artificial groups’, as if the nation is to be kept apart from such things as the army or the church. This is noteworthy, I believe, because it prompts us to search for a motivation for Freud’s interest in the nation other than that of his desire to confirm the hermeneutic power of psychoanalysis. In other words, unlike the army or the church—forms of collective identification that the psychoanalytic hermeneutic is deemed uniquely capable of illuminating— the nation assumes the properly metapsychological burden of bridging the distance between the individual and the collective. The point is not simply that the nation-state achieves super-egoic status—perversely enjoying the jouissance it denies the subject—but that it provides psychoanalysis with a veritable base camp on the climb from phylogeny to ontogeny. As we have seen, this style of argument is manifest in Kristeva’s discussion in Strangers, where the dynamic of the uncanny subtends both individual and specifically national identifications. It invites us to consider then, that what is redeemable in the nation—as opposed to nationalism—is precisely this function, that is, the metapsychological establishment of a Moebian node where psychoanalysis addresses itself to the subject and the nation at one and the same time. Is the nation the

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only such concept? No. But as is clear from Freud’s cagey invocation of Left internationalism in ‘Why War?’ from 1932, the nation is the one clearly politicized instance of such a function. But what then of nationalism? Consulting the essays and letters gathered in Nations, one is prompted to see that, in spite of its various national inflections, nationalism operates as a ‘myth of origins’. By this she does not mean that nationalism represents a simple investment in territorial derivation. Nationalism is, instead, the logic that links such an investment to its opposite, that is, the repudiation (Renan might even say, forgetting) of territorial derivation; a repudiation which, more often than not, returns as the repressed, or—as Mathieu Kassovitz might say—la haine. It is significant that in thus characterizing nationalism, Kristeva slips psychoanalysis into the discussion as a way to, as she says, ‘transcend’ the myth of origin; a formulation which sounds untempered coming from the mouth of someone long affiliated with poststructuralism. However, transcendence is deployed here to designate the possibility of working through an impasse once it is clear that all sides, and all techniques of analysis, are equally compromised. Thus, the signal virtue of psychoanalysis is that it presupposes this compromise and seeks to give it methodological proportions, in other words, it is the very emptiness of the origin that fills it with psychoanalytical meaning. Recognizing this obviously complicates what I have otherwise characterized as Kristeva’s repudiation of nationalism. In other words, if psychoanalysis differs from nationalism primarily in the way it shares the latter’s relation to the ‘myth of origins’, then psychoanalysis can no more repudiate nationalism than it can repudiate itself. Which is, I suppose, the point: psychoanalysis can and must repudiate itself, while nationalism remains trapped in a desperate and ultimately mythic binary. Obviously, this places a special premium on the way, or as I prefer, the technique, psychoanalysis deploys in negotiating its unique compromise with the myth of origins. In particular, Kristeva’s perspective prompts us to consider carefully how a recognition of psychoanalysis’s investment in a myth of origins—an investment which links a clinical practice and scientific institution to a broad based ideological formation—articulates itself in a metapsychological protocol that, as it were, makes a difference. That is, that prevents psychoanalysis from simply collapsing into nationalism. Though such concerns might urge that we preoccupy ourselves with the politics involved in the emergence of ‘national traditions’ within psychoanalysis, or even with the distinctly international dynamics of the emergence of psychoanalysis—two themes elaborated with provocative rigor by Elisabeth Roudinesco in her timely history of psychoanalysis in France—instead, I want to linger on the issue of technique and revisit, for a moment, Kristeva’s analysis of the foreigner. Strange though it may seem, I want to effect this return by invoking the theme of touch. Let us therefore call up the parallel between Kristeva’s unabashedly psychoanalytical approach to the foreigner and the relation between psychoanalysis and nationalism, the myth of origins. In the former—as exemplified in her musical allusion to the toccata—touch enters as a way to reflect upon the delicacy of speaking to and for others. Lightness sets the tone. As concerns the relation between psychoanalysis and the myth of origins, though touch does not enter the conversation, technique does, at least insofar as technique designates the locus of what differentiates psychoanalysis’s mythic compromise from that of nationalism. Thus, one might say that psychoanalysis—precisely to the extent that it transcends nationalism—does so by touching the myth of origin’s differently; perhaps, in fact, by doing so in the reflexive domain of technique rather than in the domain of doxa. However, a further consequence of this particular line of development, is that the collapse traced in Strangers between the fugal subjects, that is, between being returned to one’s own strangeness by the mass media and discovering the stranger one is, repeats itself in the pas de deux of psychoanalysis and nationalism. As such an outcome manifestly bodes ill for the maintenance of a distinction between nationalism and the nation—a distinction that, to my mind, is crucial to Kristeva’s rejection of both Lenin and Turner—it will require consideration.

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Before, however, turning away from the theme of technique and its avatar, touch, let us secure what is to be gained from stating the obvious. I am thinking here of essentially two things: first, that as Kristeva reflects upon her approach to foreigners or nationalism, she is involving psychoanalysis in self-reflection, that is, she is obliging it to touch (upon) itself as she draws upon it to consider how one might touch others; and second, she—in associating self-reflection and technique—is reminding us that psychoanalytical technique is, at least optimally, curative. That is, the capacity for self-reflection and the capacity for healing are indissociably linked. Thus, insofar as her investment in the nation is destined to participate in the healing that will allow nations to transcend nationalism, she is implicitly conceptualizing psychoanalysis as a mode of what Foucault once called ‘pastoral power’. How, under circumstances such as these, are we to conceptualize not simply the role, but the resources, of technique? This, ultimately, is my question. To sharpen the terms of my response I turn at this juncture to the work of Habermas who has thought carefully about two things that matter in the present context, namely, psychoanalysis and the public sphere. If one consults the analysis of psychoanalysis that transpires on the pages of Knowledge and Human Interests (1968) s/he discovers that it is subsumed under a sustained preoccupation with ‘self-reflection’. On the one hand, psychoanalysis is characterized as mired in self-misunderstanding with regard to its theoretical comprehension of the relation between its knowledge and the social interests that condition its production. In this, Habermas is reiterating the Frankfurt School’s fidelity to Lukács. On the other hand, and here he is sublating Adorno and Benjamin’s more enlightened engagement with Freud, Habermas sees psychoanalysis as committed to a form of radical self-reflection-a form that countenanced the necessity of, as Ricoeur might have said, self-suspicion. In fact, in the chapter devoted to ‘Psychoanalysis and Social Theory’, Habermas argues that it is precisely this quality of psychoanalysis that recommends it as a model for turning knowledge back on itself in an effort to comprehend its own capacity for self-delusion. While it is clear that in displacing desire with interests Habermas avoids the epistemological consequences of the unconscious, this should not obscure the fact that he does indeed recognize psychoanalysis’s decisive role in the domain of ideology; an insight now consummately embodied in the work of Žižek. Though Habermas himself does not establish the link between this account of psychoanalysis and his earlier discussion of the public sphere, it is a link that is, as it were, there for the making. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) Habermas finesses the problem of the public sphere’s virtuality, that is, the fact that strictly speaking it never existed, by insisting upon its role during the bourgeois period in instantiating what he regards as its principles: accessibility, tolerance, consensus. To the extent that this sphere served to articulate the emergent interests of the bourgeoisie, and did so in conformity with its principles, would it not then follow that psychoanalysis—as the definitive guard against self-delusion in the domain of interests—is theorized as bearing political responsibility for monitoring the observance, by participants, of the principles of the public sphere? In effect, psychoanalysis is conceived as the means by which the public sphere labors to overcome its own virtuality. Perhaps because Freud’s discovery arose in the context of the public sphere’s disintegration—a matter I have treated elsewhere—Habermas avoids taking up the technical question of how psychoanalytical knowledge is to enter the public sphere. One can only assume that, when push came to shove, he would appeal either to the notion of public intellectuals— presumably themselves products of analysis—or, to citizens already capable of sufficient self-reflection that they would recognize the indispensable role of psychoanalysis in protecting the principles organizing their collective interaction. In sum, Habermas is long on principle, short on technique. As I believe is well known, the problems of difference and privilege are what Habermas has been chastised for overlooking in his articulation of the principles of publicness, and while Kristeva does not appeal directly to his notion of the public sphere, her focus on foreigners within the national context raises these problems directly. Even in his current efforts to find ways to protect Gastarbeiten and former East

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Germans within a constitutional framework, Habermas emphasizes the importance of downplaying differences, and, perhaps most tellingly, has altogether abandoned any substantive reference to psychoanalysis. Clearly, his devotion to the liberal democratic project of legitimating democracy by grounding it within rationalism has itself passed through desire to principle. If, however, we pressure Kristeva’s discussion with the concept of the public sphere—whether virtual or not—then we will be in position to assess what indeed is at stake in her emphasis on technique in the domain of critical selfreflection. Since I have already drawn attention to Kristeva’s orthodox commitment to the curative aims of psychoanalytic technique, it is no doubt necessary here to at least acknowledge an ancillary matter that I can no more resolve than avoid. I am thinking, of course, of what in the French context goes by the name of ‘ethnopsychoanalysis’; a perspective associated with the analyst George Devereux. What is at issue here can be efficiently called up by recalling that when Albert Memmi reviewed Geismar’s and Caute’s books on Fanon in 1971, he attacked ‘the voice of the African revolution’, as an analyst who could not speak a word of Arabic: ‘[N]either in Algeria nor in Tunisia did he understand the language, so he like other foreign doctors, had to hold consultations with his patients through an interpreter’.11 Memmi’s point was that, in spite of Fanon’s impressive credentials as a critic of colonialism, his own analytical practice was nevertheless implicated in the former because the ‘talking cure’ perforce had to transpire in the colonial tongue. The less charitable of Fanon’s critics have even suggested that this is why his therapeutic innovations, such as they were, took the form of forming football squads among the residents at BlidaJoinville. Of course, Kristeva encounters this problem on a different terrain. Foreigners, and let us assume that those among the postcolonial middle and upper classes number among her clients, expect to be addressed in French, because they are in Paris. But, precisely because she is attentive to the profound link between psychoanalysis and strangers, one can only imagine that Fanon’s dilemma haunts her own practice as well: can one, just to construct an example from the analysand’s perspective, freely associate with an unveiled infidel who cannot understand your maternal tongue? While it is certainly true that psychoanalysis has consistently struggled with the problem of so-called foreign languages—one, no doubt, thinks here of the Wolf Man or, for that matter, Louis Wolfson—it is only since the mid-twentieth century that this struggle has been openly waged upon the ethnically and nationalistically charged terrain of the postcolonial condition. However, as important as these matters are, pursuing them further here will commit me to a discussion of technique that, in this context, would only serve as a digression. The Open Session To my mind the more urgent question bears on the relation between the discursive practice of psychoanalysis and the public sphere. If I stress here the issue of technique it is precisely because I want to avoid the pitfalls of Habermas’s approach to this question—where, as I have indicated—he seeks to delimit principles which, presumably in accordance with the Hegelian logic of ‘the concept’, simply establish themselves in the deep structure of dialogic practices. To the extent that these principles might be brought to bear on the critique of nationalism, they would appear do so only as a component of rational self-reflection in which the antagonism between nationalism and ‘the ideal speech situation’ would already have to be established. What I find so provocative about Kristeva’s touch, despite the difficulties noted earlier (to which I will return), is that precisely in her formal attentiveness to the technique of analysis she obliges us to consider the means by which a psychoanalytic critique of nationalism might enter something like a public sphere. In other words, when she writes of ‘brushing by the foreigner’, she is not merely characterizing how psychoanalysis might think the foreign, but—precisely to the extent that she remains committed to the

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curative force of psychoanalysis—she is offering up a technique for approaching the foreigner as a position, or ensemble of positions, within the public sphere, perhaps even a public sphere convulsed by debates over the link between citizenship and national origins. In her appeal to the fugue Kristeva nuances this further. She does this first by associating the technique of analysis with the stratagems of Western musical composition—itself a pointed rerouting of self-reflection though aesthetics rather than reason—and then, in a subsequent maneuver, she links an aestheticized analytical technique to a public critique of nationalism. This is as astonishing as it is enigmatic: astonishing, because who would have thought that analysis— precisely in order to engage the foreigner in/and ourselves with curative force—would have to articulate itself as a composition; enigmatic, because in spite of the structural rhyme that binds psychoanalysis to nationalism, it remains difficult to conceptualize the form through which such an analytical technique might participate in the public sphere without thereby losing everything that marks it as distinctive. Put differently, can we imagine a form of technical intervention within the debate about homelands that does not undercut the dissonant logic of the uncanny? At the risk of invoking a cliche, this would appear to be the moment to effect yet another return to Freud. Specifically, in turning to ‘Why War?’—perhaps the only other explicit discussion of nationalism in the Freudian corpus—one discovers what I take to be a significant detail in the present context. I am referring to the fact that the title actually has come to designate an exchange of letters, in fact ‘open letters’, between Albert Einstein (who initiated the correspondence) and Freud. Given what we have come to know about the ‘talking cure’, one cannot help but be struck by the fact that Freud responds to Einstein by saying, ‘well, of course, you’ve already said everything that can be said, but since you asked…’ In effect, Freud proceeds to ‘analyze’ Einstein, not by telling him what his question, ‘Why War?’, really means, but by repeating Einstein’s own discourse with a difference—that difference being the frame of the psychoanalytical hermeneutic itself—a frame which Freud introduces in what are clearly pedagogical gestures: ‘Will you allow me to take this opportunity of putting before you a portion of the theory of the instincts…’12 I emphasize this for two reasons. First, it suggests that Freud to some degree recognized the ‘transposability’ of his own analytical technique from the consulting room to the postal system; and second, these observations direct us immediately to the second chapter of Nations where we find what is titled, ‘An Open Letter to Harlem Désir’. Though there are many things about this letter that deserve comment, I will restrict myself to raising three issues: 1. the distinction drawn there between the nation and l’ésprit général; 2. the stress placed upon education both formal and informal (notably through the media); and 3. of course, the formal technique of the intervention itself, that is, the open letter. Since the letter opens by grounding its categories in the analysis of foreigners in Strangers, its propositions can be interpreted either as elaborations or repetitions of the earlier text. This includes, of course, the matter of technique that I have so belabored. Unlike Freud’s letter to Einstein however, Kristeva does not appear to analyze Harlem Désir, although when she insists in the letter that immigrant communities have an obligation to answer the question, ‘what to they expect from [the] national spirit’, she clearly verges on broaching the Lacanian ‘che vuoi?’ Instead, she presents herself as clarifying a misunderstanding of her own making. The open letter thus becomes a way to place before the public—in fact, details of this exchange circulated on the pages of Libération—an exchange in which the ‘subject supposed to know’ is made subject to the other’s demand. Though this position might well be construed as an analytical one indeed, it more typically comes at the end, not at the beginning of analysis. This is not then a short session, but nor is it a quick fix. Kristeva has, in effect, rushed—perhaps even brushed—past the foreigner: the one who has touched her and the one she wishes to touch. As if to render this effect as conspicuous as possible, Kristeva pointedly drops psychoanalysis early on saying, ‘we have no choice here

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but to abandon psychoanalytic references and turn to political sociology’.13 While at one level this clearly motivates her turn to Montesquieu, at another it draws attention to the sequence and rate of technical modulations that define the letter; modulations which culminate with the form of the open letter giving way to official graffiti: ‘I should like to suggest that the following statement be engraved on the walls of all schools and political institutions; commented and elaborated upon, it could become a touchstone for anyone wishing to participate in the French nation understood as an ésprit général’.14 She then proceeds to quote from Montesquieu’s Mes Pensées. Before coming back to articulate what this permits us to conclude about Kristeva’s perception of the relation between psychoanalysis and the public sphere, let us first attend to the themes of education and l’ésprit général. In my discussion of Habermas I suggested that Kristeva did not share his convictions about the broadly pedagogical function of self-reflection. In the open letter this would appear to be contradicted by her numerous invocations of the importance of education to the process of transcending nationalist racism. Indeed, I have perhaps overstated the distinction here. However, it is important to acknowledge that the references to education take place after psychoanalysis has given way to political sociology, and—more to the point—Kristeva remains more concerned about the means of educating than does Habermas. This is not say that she is unconcerned with principles and ends. On the contrary. For in the preceding citation, she makes an understanding of l’ésprit général the clear aim of public education. What is striking though is how she links this understanding with the technical modulations traced, in effect, performed by the open letter; modulations that eventually include the commentaries and elaborations that embroider Montesquieu’s ‘thoughts’. The associating of these registers—writing within psychoanalysis, writing within political sociology, writing on walls—is the realization of l’ésprit général. This suggests that in spite of the announced withdrawal of psychoanalysis, its unique attentiveness to the technique of engaging foreigners survives—if nowhere else—in the very form of the open letter; a letter which, much like an official graffiti, is posted where others can write on it. Strangers like me. But what—despite Kristeva’s explicit evocation of Strangers in the opening of the open letter—is to be made of the fading out of music here? To respond by insisting upon the constraining brevity of a letter will not do, because, after all, the fugue, when compared to a symphony, is itself a short piece. Instead, let us recall the function of the nation within psychoanalysis sketched earlier. My point was that beyond the issue of susceptibility, that is, beyond psychoanalysis’ confidence in its ability to comprehend (hence affect) national identifications, the nation functions at the metapsychological level to ground the analysis of the ego in collectivity; to, in effect, provide psychoanalysis with ‘public access’. In my citation from the open letter what one sees is a deft displacement of the nation by l’ésprit général. This displacement is motivated within the letter by Kristeva’s recognition that, in the long run, the nation too—however strategically important it may remain at present—will go the way of all flesh. In anticipation of this she introduces Montesquieu’s concept, and does so by openly ‘abandoning’ psychoanalysis. While, at one level, this can be read as a confirmation of the metapsychological status of the nation for psychoanalysis, it must also be understood to bear upon the musical question. That is, if psychoanalysis, the nation and the formal technique of composing all drop out together, then perhaps we are to conclude that music is in some way essential to a specifically psychoanalytical intervention in and on the national problematic. And indeed, I believe it is. For, as I have already argued, composing has everything to do with the matter of touch, that is, how one compromises with the myth of origins, at once respecting and rejecting the drive to belong, to be somewhere, or, as Heidegger might have said, to dwell. Thus, if music drops out it is perhaps because psychoanalysis itself is understood to be at risk in the critique of nationalism; an insight which might well guide us in our assessment of the technical strategy embodied in the open letter. Where to turn?

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In Nations one finds an interview with Kristeva in which she is asked to comment upon ‘her shift to fiction’. Her response contains two interesting observations: 1. that France is plunged into a ‘national depression’ which has manifested itself in the opening of a chasm between intellectuals and the masses; and 2. that in order to write fiction (as opposed to theory) she needed to gain ‘sufficient distance from [her]self’. The rhetoric here is unmistakable. Not only is this a psychoanalytical explanation of the shift to fiction, but it is an acknowledgement of the political urgency motivating such a shift. The volatility of this insight repeats in many ways a point made ten years earlier about psychoanalytic interpretation in ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’, where it is characterized as giving expression to the insight that ‘desire and the desire to know are not strangers to each other’.15 If I emphasize the theme of volatility here it is with an eye toward stressing the degree to which the status of psychoanalysis and the political status of the talking cure are not only caught up in a reflection upon the idioms and genres of technique (theory vs fiction), but are so in a manner that registers a profound ambivalence. The question here is not whether one should write novels or counsel patients, but rather whether psychoanalysis can, strictly speaking, touch the public discourse within which the nation’s depression is inscribed? Can it abandon itself and yet cure the affliction of nationalism? Ultimately, is it through the open letter—presumably a no longer psychoanalytical but not yet fictional technique—that psychoanalysis touches the nation; a nation already therefore becoming l’ésprit général? If Kristeva’s thought hesitates here—where music and literature, nations and nationalism, hang in the balance—it may well be due to the fact that though the open letter clearly invites one to reconceptualize the clinical dimension of analytical technique, the consequences for both psychoanalysis and the national public sphere of what I wish to designate ‘an open session’, that is, a manipulation of ‘consultation’ that is decidedly less temporal than spatial, are unfathomable. One thing, however, is clear. Like the open letter, the open session would necessarily be uncanny—it would have no final destination, no home—qualities that might account for the dislodging of musical technique which, in Kristeva’s hands, seemed bent upon constructing the familiar destiny that the analysis was otherwise dispossessing. No doubt, one’s reservations here (and I will admit to sharing them) are partly spurred by the initiatives taken by the likes of Žižek who, in reconceptualizing the conditions of analytic training, has been driven to regard the cinema—and specifically the oeuvre of Alfred Hitchcock—as the as yet unrecognized purveyor of Lacan’s teachings; a state of affairs that—in spite of all that Žižek himself has taught us about nationalism and the phantasmatic theft of jouissance—might well lead the less charitable among us to conclude that he was analyzed by Ménie Grégoire instead of Jacques Alain-Miller.16 Obviously, the problem of the institutions and technologies of the mass media, particularly as these bear upon the organization—or as Habermas might insist, ‘disintegration’—of the public sphere is a pressing one indeed. The analysis in Strangers is eloquent about the menace they represent. Nevertheless, if something like an ‘open session’ is to be possible it will perforce engage the space wherein nationalism circulates not simply as a mythic fantasy, but as an ensemble of institutions like, for example, Radio France, or, for that matter, NBC. The question, to my mind, is not whether psychoanalysis should touch this space—its curative ambitions leave it no alternative—rather, the question is how will psychoanalysis touch this space, how will it brush past its strangeness, or, to invoke a formulation of Walter Benjamin’s, how will psychoanalysis brush this space against its grain? Regardless of whether the conceit of ‘an open session’ is helpful as a way to pose and begin exploring such matters, it strikes me that, at some point, academic intellectuals will nevertheless have to decide where to stand on the postcolonial question: nationalism versus internationalism. Kristeva herself—as she separates nations from nationalism only to later displace nations with l’ésprit général—seems inclined to preserve the nation chiefly for strategic purposes. It represents both a historico-political reality and a metapsychological function that makes possible the transcendence of nationalism. Does this commit her,

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and implicitly those of us touched by her analysis, to an internationalism that is fast becoming indistinguishable from multinational capitalism? I think not, but given that psychoanalysis continues—in spite of all her metacritical precautions—to set the terms of her engagement with these issues, and given that l’ésprit général is conceived as displacing the very concept—the nation—that had otherwise functioned to separate psychoanalysis from nationalism while nonetheless providing psychoanalysis with its broad healing powers, perhaps it would be wise to remain open to the alternative glimpsed in the uncanny slogan: nationalism without nations. Frankly speaking, it sounds strange, but isn’t it supposed to? Notes 1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991). 2 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, Richard Howard (trans.) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p.171. 3 In what might reasonably be characterized as a tightening of her autobiographical turn, Kristeva has begun speaking and writing about her identity as a Bulgarian exile. In ‘Bulgarie, ma souffrance’ from the fall 1995 issue of L’Infini (pp.42–52) she broaches the issue of her strangeness by exploring her relation to her two tongues: Bulgarian and French. One is not therefore surprised when—in characterizing the twisted tongue that emerges from these ‘communicating vessels’ (her citation)—she not only characterizes it as ‘une parole étrange’ but she explicitly cites her own prior discussion of the foreigner (in French, Etrangers à nous-mêmes) by adding, ‘étangère à elle-même’. (Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, Leon Roudiez (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p.43) Though it anticipates my argument, this text is also rife with musical allusions, notably one where, in delineating what is at stake in her category of maternal memory (explicitly contrasted to Proust’s voluntary and involuntary memories), she encrypts the mother’s body in her own and then figures their relation as one ‘qui vibre à l’unisson’ (p.44); an effect which—I will argue—plays itself out discordantly in Strangers. On this theme one might also consult the interview Kristeva gave to Magazine Littéraire concerning the publication of Sens et non-sens de la révolte. (‘Julia Kristeva: L’Urgence de la révolte’, Magazine littéraire 344 (June 1996), pp.104–110.) Concerning the general problematic of the foreigner and subjectivity see also the interview with Suzanne Clark and Kathleen Hulley, ‘Cultural Strangeness and the Subject in Crisis’, now reprinted in Julia Kristeva: Interviews, Ross Mitchell Guberman (ed.) (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996). 4 Kristeva, Strangers, p.3. It is worth recalling here that many of those opposed to the racist initiatives that prompted the formation of S.O.S Racisme sported buttons that read ‘Ne touches pas à mon pote’ (Don’t touch— in the sense of hassle or bug—my buddy); buttons which thus drew attention to the way foreigners were being singled out and harrassed, notably by the police and immigration. In insisting that the foreigner be touched, Kristeva’s position might be interpreted as aligning itself with the confused and defensive policies of the Mitterand regime. Though, as we shall see, there is an ambivalence to Kristeva’s position, I would argue that here—the discerning reader of Louis Dumont—is seeking to distance herself both from those for whom the foreigner is the ‘untouchable’, and from those who, when push came to shove, would no doubt insist, ‘Some of my best friends are Arabs!’ 5 Kristeva, Strangers, p.182. 6 Kristeva, Strangers, p.182. 7 Kristeva, Strangers, p.192. 8 Earlier I drew attention to the function of ‘unison’ in Kristeva’s articulation of the maternal memory. Though the uncanny remains unthematized in ‘Bulgarie, ma souffrance’, the encrypted mother returns here in national guise. I am thinking, obviously, of the pun that unsettles her title, where Bulgaria is both where she suffers a delay, a site of pain, but also her beneath or under France. Bulgaria is thus memory itself, that is, something that comes-toone-from-below (souvenir). In the fantasy of bearing her own mother, Kristeva returns us to the gestational scene of ‘Stabat Mater’ which is now reversed. 9 Homi Bhabha, Homi (ed.), Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p.11.

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10 Sigmund Freud, ‘Reflections Upon War and Death’, Standard Editions of the Complete Psychoanalytical Works, vol. 14 James Strachey (ed.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p.276. 11 Albert Memmi, New York Times Book Review (14 March, 1971), pp.5 and 20. 12 Sigmund Freud, ‘Why War?’, Standard Editions of the Complete Psychoanalytical Works, vol. 22, James Strachey (ed.) (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), p.209. 13 Julia Kristeva, Nations Without Nationalism, Leon Roudiez (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p.53. 14 Kristeva, Nations, p.63. 15 Julia Kristeva, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’, in The Kristeva Reader, Toril Moi (ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p.308. (my emphasis). 16 Ménie Grégoire, in addition to being an author of numerous ‘popular’ psychoanalytical studies (for example, Les Cris de la vie) was the long time host of a radio show where callers could be ‘analyzed’ on the air. The general issue of the relation between psychoanalysis and popular culture has been discussed, albeit without much theoretical sophistication, in Sherry Turkle’s Psychoanalytic Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1981). Of course, Kristeva herself has ‘appeared’ on numerous radio talk shows (in fact, one of Lacan’s more provocative statements, ‘Radiophonie’ was conceived to be delivered ‘on the air’), and though my disparagement of Ms. Grégoire might lead one to assume that I have some principled beef against radio, I do not. In fact, a more thorough fleshing out of the ‘open session’ would be obliged to revist the early investments of Brecht and Benjamin in the pedagogical potential of radio technology.

John Mowitt is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Text: Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (Duke) and numerous other articles on theory and cultural politics. His second book, Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking, is forthcoming, also from Duke. Q&A

Julia Kristeva I am moved by John Mowitt’s presentation because when you work in solitude you are never quite sure that any of your ideas will get transported to others with a precision and rigour that would allow for them to be seriously understood. And I am grateful for the precise exactitude with which John has studied and read my work, and at the same time undertaken a development of it, which is both rigorous and extremely innovative and which takes things in directions which I have not thought of in relation to the particular issues I have raised. I would like to pick up on three of these points. I am very grateful to John for being so sensitive to the idea of my ‘foreigness’, of being a stranger in France. It is both a great opportunity and in some senses a burden to live in France since there is no place, as I have said in my book Strangers to Ourselves, where you are more foreign, or in a better position to be a stranger than in France. On the one hand, France is a country which is in some ways very closed within its strong sense of national identity. On the other hand, because of the legacies of the French Revolution there is the opportunity for debate and discussion particularly amongst the intellectuals. One must also remember that France is both the country produced out of the proclamation of the Rights of Man in the Revolutionary period, and the country in which The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the famous anti-semitic libels were published, written and circulated. I am very touched by the way in which John has been developing the question of strangeness. There are a number of ideas surrounding the notion of strangeness. There is the strangeness of the unconscious as he

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has pointed out, and the stranger in the social sphere. This conjunction brings together two ideas of strangeness, the psychic, and the civic or social, When my book, Strangers to Ourselves was published in France, it was frequently understood or misunderstood as suggesting that there was some way of eliminating this problematic, of resolving this question of xenophobia by having the entire National Front enter analysis. This is, of course, completely inconceivable and impossible. The reflection which I was trying to pursue is a more complex one, and works on two dimensions. It incorporates looking at the question of what is strange within us, and also at how to join the personal and the political. The notion of what is strange in us, what makes us strangers to ourselves, is fundamentally what Freud enables us to study. This would be the study of the kind of bizarre psychological character where some of us are hysterics, or obsessionals, or we don’t know if we are men or women. In some sense then, Freud has given us an anatomy or an archaeology of the psychological strangeness which allows us to recognise the other in ourselves. While Sartre said, ‘Hell is the other’, I would suggest that, ‘Hell is the other within oneself’. And there is a certain Freudian technique which allows us to understand this, which leads to my second point with regards to John’s paper. I was deeply impressed by John’s emphasis on the question of technique and particularly the insistence and the elaboration of these ideas through the figures of the toccata and the fugue. Psychoanalysis is often understood as an ideology but it is essentially a technique, and I think that this is the only way to present the psychoanalytic experience. It is quite rare to find this in academic circles, but I think that it is a wonderful approach. Here I would like to make a point which concerns the ways in which the personal becomes public. I would like to suggest that this occurs through national language and national memory. There are a lot of things which can be said about these deep layers in individual psychic life which are joined with layers of cultural archaeology. That, for instance, since here we are involved in cultural studies and art history, we might undertake studies of those parts of a national language and its memories, such as the Middle Ages, or other areas which concern strangeness, like the study of Latin. Here I would like to remind you that in the novel The Old Man and the Wolves, one of the main characters is made a Professor of Latin who is undertaking through this means and metaphor to construct an archaeology of his own civilisation which leads to an understanding of this interplay between the social and psychic life. This means that he is interested in the archaeological aspects of his own culture, its past and its strangeness which is not recognised by the public, political and other official representations of the nation. But at the same time that he is aware of this archaic national culture, he is also aware of the violence against the human being, he is aware of what dogmatism and totalitarianism is, and he becomes a sort of hero and a rejected person in his national frame. The last point I would like to pick up on is the very interesting development that John made on both the idea of the nation in psychoanalysis through a reading of Freud’s texts on war, and also the matter of the psychological comprehension of my notion of nation against nationalism as a sort of transition between the individual and the public. And here I would like to suggest something which I have not developed yet. We have to re-consider the notion of the public sphere in light of ‘l’esprit générale’. Perhaps if we were to understand that human beings are subjects analysed or touched by psychoanalysis in an eternal selfinterrogation on the one hand, and at the same time that those individuals belong to l’esprit générale, we must ask, what will be the result for the public sphere? I think that the public sphere will not be the same. People who are analysed do not have the same approach to the public sphere, as if they were not. A public

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sphere built by people who are analysed or who have some approach to psychoanalysis and have some exigency for self-interrogation will not build the, same public sphere. It will be a different public sphere. I am very interested in what this public sphere will be. What kind of a new society will have to be built which will neither exclude foreigners nor exclude our own foreigness? It should be something which recognises solitude and also makes it possible to establish links. And we do not only have to recognise and acknowledge what Habermas and others have said about the public sphere but have to ask ourselves another question: What kind of public sphere? But this is an open question which John has put on stage for us, and this is also a wonderful question. Thank you.

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Three Images for Kristeva: From Bellini to Proust Stephen Bann

I think it is a particular privilege to speak on the topic of Julia Kristeva’s work and, as other speakers have said, to speak in the presence of the subject of the paper. This, of course, confers a particular responsibility. I can well remember a few years ago hearing a friend of mine give a talk about Madame de Stael in the presence of a redoubtable descendant and editor of her work, the Countess Jean de Pange, née princesse de Broglie, and each time he referred to Madame de Stael’s writing, or to her doing something, the editor would sit up and say, ‘Yes, she did that’ or ‘Yes, she said that’, and in the end he had to say, ‘Yes, she said and did all of these things’. Now clearly, a writer who has the good grace and the temerity to attend a colloquium concerning her writings past and present is eventually, to a certain extent, in a similar situation. She is in a position of authenticating the reality of their discourse through a situation of potential redundance, representing the enoncé in terms of an ever potential act of enonciation, and indeed of the very possibility of contradiction which is always open as well. My way of reacting to and dealing with this situation is to change slightly the emphasis of the paper which I had originally intended to give in always that doesn’t significantly change the subject matter. Instead of ‘From Giotto to Proust’, it will be to ‘From Bellini to Proust’. Proust still remains the termination point. And, more concretely, instead of the rather inappropriate spatialization implicit in the term ‘The image in Kristeva’, I’ve decided to think of it as ‘Three images for Julia Kristeva’. These are images, which Kristeva may or not have seen; images which it seems to me are closely involved with the discourse on the image which she has been developing right from the time of the collection Desire in Language1: the English edition of her work from the late seventies which was originally published in French collections such as Polylogue. The process of this development, in the scope that I am going to give it, will certainly extend as far as her recent writings, for example, to the works on Proust. These form the centre of what I shall aim towards, including the two books which she has made a present of to this conference: Sens et Non Sens de la Révolte2 and, the novel Possession.3 I would also like to make a very small bibliographic point at the beginning of my talk, and say that quite a number of the insights that I have received from Julia Kristeva, and that I would like to share with you, come from the remarkable essays which she publishes from time to time in L’Infini, which is of course the successor to Tel Quel and in my view, no way its inferior. So that, if there is one thing that I would like for you to take away from my talk, it

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is to read L’Infini. Read it for the interviews, for the advance articles which will put you in touch with the thoughts of Julia Kristeva, not to mention those of many other French writers. There are three images then that I will deal with here. They are all images that I have encountered over the past year and have struck me in particular ways. They were sited physically in Atlanta, Georgia, in Liverpool, and in Lisbon. I hope that these will allow me to move through, and in terms of, some of the key concepts of Kristeva’s work with the image, while attempting to crystallise some of the issues which have been played and re-played, extended and developed, over a period of at least twenty years. I All of you I’m sure will know the splendid essay ‘Motherhood According to Bellini’ which forms part of the English collection Desire in Language. Probably not many of you will know that one of the central characters in the newly published novel Possession is called Bellini. Hester Bellini. I am not going to give much away except to say that to somebody who begins to read the novel, she is a potential suspect, but then you know that everyone is a potential suspect at the beginning of a good detective novel. I would also like to point out that at one point she is defined in terms of her own self-image as a nostalgic Madonna under her apron, as a Madonna nostalgique. However, Hester Bellini’s connection to this talk is peripheral. The essay in Desire in Language seems to me to be a kind of powerful alternative fable, a counter-fable. Not in the sense that it repudiates, rather in the sense that it complements and extends the well known and also, in many ways, contested essay by Freud on Leonardo.4 Kristeva’s paper doesn’t challenge this essay either implicitly or explicitly, but it does create a powerful alternative model for a notion of psychoanalytic development which is also a model for artistic or painterly achievement. It also, incidentally, sets on a completely new and illuminating level the old Berensonian cliché about the fundamental differences between the Florentine and Venetian schools of painting. Freud shows us a Leonardo who is incapable of transcending his narcissistic persona as a result of his early nurture, the circumstances of his being put out with a wet nurse, and so on, which leads Leonardo ceaselessly to record his self-image confused with the maternal image. Leonardo does so first in terms of the laughing heads which Vasari talks about, and then in his Madonnas, and of course, in his bisexual image of John the Baptist. Kristeva does something which, one might say, follows the Leonardo essay in its every development and theoretical input, while at the same time allowing for the specific biographical situation as well as the works themselves to form an alternative reading. Bellini’s specific biography is shown to involve the possibility of an absence of the mother rather than the all too suffocating presence of the peasant mother, Caterina. This leads on to Bellini’s need to come to terms with the problematic and threatening relationship of the absence of the mother, which is represented for Kristeva in the remarkable succession of his paintings of the Madonna and Child. These are, incidentally, works which extend through a large part of Giovanni Bellini’s very long life. What Kristeva uses to actually fix upon the specificity of the alternative approaches of Leonardo (as testified by Freud) and Bellini in her own essay, is the point at which the Bellini Madonna learns to distance herself, from the Child. I say, learns to distance herself in that the representation of the Madonna forms an index of learning to distance oneself, stage by stage. From the point at which the relationship is a troubled one, at which the Madonna seems to have an obscure aggression towards the Child, and thus seems to be tangled with up with the Child’s body, we progress to the point of autonomy being granted to the Christ Child. At the same time, and this is the crucial point which Kristeva outlines, there is a painterly move towards the possibility of jouissance, our possibility of enjoyment is displaced onto the colour and space of the draperies, and the landscape vistas as we see them here, at first sight, in the Atlanta work.

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Figure 1. Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, c. 1512 (Samuel H.Kress Collection, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia).

One of the points at which Kristeva pauses in her analysis is with the St Francis in Ecstasy, from the 1480s, now in the Frick collection in New York. Here, the body of St Francis is turned to our viewing angle and we see the whole surface of the picture, which is also that of the phenomenal world, irradiated by sunlight. The whole surface glows in the blissful vision of the Saint as it is transferred to ours as the receiving subject. In this particular Madonna and Child (and why I show it as the beginning of my sequence of three) there is certainly as with the late Madonnas—and if this is 1512 as it is dated by the Atlanta museum, is actually a very late Madonna—using Kristeva’s splendid phrase, the Mother ‘dreaming of an

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unsignifiable experience’, with the Child ‘parallel and close to her body’ but ‘appearing more easily separable’. Light, as she puts it, ‘inundates the canvas’. At the same time, one has to say that with this particular work, there is a new note which comes into play. The landscape bounded by a blood red sunset under storm clouds. The clouds which you see are scumbled by the painter and form a rare plastic incident in Bellini’s otherwise very beautifully smooth facture. Beneath those storm clouds is a withered tree. You can probably just see that a withered tree with two branches stands in that landscape on a curious zigzag path which winds its way towards the distant hills. The Christ Child looks out to the left. His attention is fixed upon something that we cannot see and about which we can only speculate. I suggest that this may be one of those pictures which, coming at the end of Bellini’s life, might indicate a motif which is certainly not unfamiliar in other Italian Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child. It might be described simultaneously as a recognition and disavowal of the destiny to which the Christ Child is owed, which is that of the Crucifixion. The Mother in her internalised state of mind disavows what the Child again does not see, but which we see through looking precisely in the direction in which the Christ Child cannot look. Now I partly quote this gloss on the particular Bellini picture in order to make the point that in immediately contemporary art theory, the actuality of this particular analysis that Kristeva gave in ‘Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini’ is undoubted.5 If one looks in the edition of the Art Bulletin from March 1996 (and there are also very good reasons to look in that because next to the piece I am going to be talking about is an excellent piece by Griselda Pollock) there is an article by Christopher Wood6 who, looking at the different potential creative approaches animating contemporary art history and theory, refers to these early essays by Kristeva, the ‘Bellini’ essay and ‘Giotto’s Joy’,7 as attempting (as he puts it) to ‘burst the boundaries of semiotics’. I use the quotation not because it necessarily sums up all that there is to be said about the essays, but because it shows how the Bellini essay can be positioned in relation to a spectrum of possibilities still animating art historical research at the moment. He writes, ‘Another line of interpretation is that which tries to burst the bounds of semiotics and so appeals to many who still believe in the ‘truth’ of the work of art, is the psychoanalytic…’ Kristeva goes on to argue that ‘colour in Western painting, at the moment when painting was extricating itself from the Medieval system, became the locus of the self’s reconstitution against the coded nomothetic Christian narrative of transcendence’.8 Now what I want to suggest is not only that this formulation of the point, made in an essay which is now more than twenty years old, is still a valid and significant one, but also that there is a sense in which the kinds of intuitions that Kristeva developed there have been precisely integrated in the understanding and appreciation of immediately contemporary art. This relates very much to the question that Susan Siegfried raised yesterday, about the degree to which this remarkable analysis of the conjuncture of a particular historical moment, and the bursting of semiotics, or the nomothetic Christian narrative, could be simultaneously entertained. I think that it is a testament to Julia Kristeva, not only to the demand for her insights and intuitions, but also to her valiantness in responding to such requests that she served on the jury of the Venice Biennale in 1993. And indeed, in the opening sections of La Révolte, there are several very astute commentaries on aspects of immediately contemporary art as she observed in the Venice Biennale: for example, on the question of the installation. The whole notion of the installation has become a fetish, perhaps something that we don’t necessarily inquire into. We see it simply as something that artists do. I’ve rarely seen a better explanation of what an installation is than in those opening sections of La Révolte. I will just quote, and translate the passage, In an installation it is the body in its entirety which is asked to participate through its sensations, through vision obviously, but also hearing, touch, on occasions smell. As if these artists, in the place of an “object” sought to place us in a space at the limits of the sacred, and asked us not to contemplate

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images but to communicate with beings. I had the impression that [the artists working in this particular area at Venice] were communicating this: that the ultimate aim of art is perhaps what was formerly celebrated under the term of incarnation. I mean by that a wish to make us feel, through the abstractions, the forms, the colours, the volumes, the sensations, a real experience.9 I was interested to note a few days ago, when a certain ceremony was performed for me, how appropriate that reading is to explain aspects of contemporary installation art. Recently, I have been writing an article about the early work of Antony Gormley, the sculptor. Very generously, he re-made for me, in my presence, Bread Line, which is an installation in which taking several loaves of bread, he bites off pieces and places them in a line following the line of the bite, never losing a crumb up to the point where this long line has been established. The logic of ‘incarnation’ in that particular work and especially in those privileged circumstances where the artist is actually recreating it, seems to me to sound exactly the right note. Now I would like to continue to invoke Kristeva as a critic of immediately contemporary art, as a kind of complement or second fold of the diptych, and moving beyond her marvellous work on Bellini. This is in relation to the Venice Biennale again, because what the insight of that passage on the installation was leading up to was a further one which demonstrates, in a remarkable way, the connection which I see as being the major structuring principle of my paper: the connection between the image in the plastic context, the image of the work of art, and the image in the literary context, at least the literary context as it acquires significance in the work of Proust. Kristeva refers specifically, when talking about the Venice Biennale, to two works which attracted a great deal of attention (the first one I think actually won one of the major prizes): these are the works of Hans Haacke and Robert Wilson—Memory Lost. She talks about them in relation to the fact that they were installations of a special kind. They both involved, ‘l’effondrement de la fondation’, ‘the collapsing of foundations’, ‘the breaking of foundations’. She goes on to write in La Révolte: ‘For me these artistic expressions resonate very far in our culture, with the Bible. Notably with Psalm 98 in which it is stated that the builders have rejected a stone and that this stone has become “the headstone of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes”’. (My Biblical quote is as it appears in the Book of Common Prayer, in a slightly transformed version). And this particular passage from the Psalms is followed, as Kristeva notes, by the lines which are set to music in that extraordinary anthem by Mozart, the ‘Exultate Jubilate’. Jubilation follows this mention of the headstone of the corner, which has become the headstone after being a rejected stone. This conjunction of themes could be the material for a whole paper, and it is hard for me to cut it down to size in a way which will be sufficiently resonant to you. René Girard, in his book, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World,10 picks up and uses the fact that in the Gospel of St. Luke, Christ quotes this verse precisely. For Girard, ‘The entire edifice of culture rests on the cornerstone, that is the stone the builders rejected. Christ is that stone in visible form’. Now this is what one might call the fundamental text for Girard, in his demystification of the notion of the scapegoat, and the role of the scapegoat in society. And when I make that point, I am very much aware of the fact that it was through reading Julia Kristeva’s review of René Girard’s work in the 1970s, immediately after it was published, that I was led to it, and ultimately to undertaking the English translation of Girard’s Des Choses cachées, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. What I think Kristeva has done in her commentary on the Venice installation of Haacke and Wilson is to introduce a reference, picking up the notion which Girard draws from that exact quotation as it is repeated in the New Testament, which subsumes the identification with Christ but in a way stresses the particular strength and also the weakness of the contemporary artist at the limit of the sacred. As she puts it,

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we cannot exult and jubilate on our foundations. […] Art is no longer sure of being the cornerstone. A great artist close to our own times, Marcel Proust, was able to celebrate the cornerstone in the image of the paving stones of St. Mark’s Venice, to extract from it a metaphor of art being remade on the basis of the vestiges of these traditions.11 Now I am sure that everybody who has read Proustian criticism knows how that notion of the unconscious memory (born of the experience of the conjunction between the paving stones of St. Mark’s, and the courtyard offering access to the Salon of the Hotel de Guermantes) has become fetishized and in a way deprived of any meaning that it might have had. And I think that it would be hard to overestimate the centrality within Kristeva’s present writing of the work of Proust. The work of Proust stands not simply as that of a great novelist but effectively as the major artist of the present century, when that term covers image makers as well as producers of texts. Only he is capable of showing us the building up from foundations of a discourse which is capable of sustaining psychic life at the same time as the reality of experience. And why is it that Proust has this particular property? The Proust who in her daring comparison is the person whose paving stone is also the headstone of the corner in relation to the Old Testament and the New Testament is distinguished by his radical ability to distinguish between appearance and reality within the culture of images, within the culture of the spectacle in which we all live. The section in Proust and the Sense of Time,12 which I find most interesting in terms of its title is, ‘The Essence of the World Crumbles into Images’. It is a section which titles a particular phase in the Proustian analysis, and a constellation of ideas come into one’s head there: the madeleine, the bread of the sacrament, and the ‘crumbling into images’ puts the creative artist into a particular situation which Proust resolves, in Kristeva’s analysis, by his experience of and analysis of depth. The image for Proust, in other words, is not the surface image or not the media image. Proust is (to use the privileged metaphors which he chooses himself for the novelist) an x-ray operator, a surgeon who probes beneath what Kristeva calls, ‘the apparent copiable charm of things and people’. Proust is therefore, precisely, a kind of critic of images, as well as somebody understanding the profound derivation of images, who will enable us to understand how to go beyond the doxa médiatique. And of course, it’s not the values of the Faubourg St. Germain, that preoccupy and concern us today, but the values of the contemporary mass media upon which that x-ray vision can be operated. It is interesting that in Julia Kristeva’s recent interview on the Proust study, part of her discussion of Madame Verdurin is devoted to hypothesizing that we might see Madame Verdurin in terms of a contemporary media person, a kind of Esther Rantzen, or Anthea Turner. But, as with the analogy between St. Mark’s paving stones and the cornerstone, this role inevitably puts the artist, in a certain sense, in the tradition of the Imitation of Christ. I think that Kristeva recognises this, particularly when she quotes and extends Mauriac’s remarkable comment on the spectacle of the dying Proust which she uses in the very fine interview in L’Infini, in Spring 1996. ‘Mauriac’, she says, describes the writer dying in his sheets spattered with ink, giving his body to literature as a sort of new Christ, but without grace. Aware of the Proustian sarcasm, Mauriac is no doubt right: if grace is a wager with the infinite and comes from there, there is no grace in Proust. And yet this way of going beyond images, this ceaseless shimmering of identities is perhaps the last truth, the last element of the sacred which still remains with us and is Proust’s legacy. The finale of A la recherche insists with a sarcastic grace on this ultimate form of grace and reserves it precisely for literature and reading: if you know how to read, as I have written, says the narrator in ‘Substance’, you will be able to preserve your psychic space alive. This means that monstrous images will be able to dwell in you.13

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Figure 2. Portrait of Queen Elizabeth, attributed to Nicholas Hilliard, c. 1574 (National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside).

II Thinking of monstrous images moves me to my second image. Most of you will recognise one of the celebrated portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, now in Liverpool, and attributed to Nicholas Hilliard. I suppose we are often accustomed to thinking, particularly after following the analyses of Louis Marin in his writing on Louis XIV, that the French pioneered the representation of monarchical power in iconic form in the premodern age. But I was once struck when talking over this issue with Louis Marin to find that, in his view, it was the English sovereigns who actually predated the French and initiated the tradition of iconic expressions of majesty in the post- Reformation age. Probably the important point is that the monarchs who dispensed with the particular ideological support which the Catholic Church could provide were for that

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particular reason, and for reasons of stressing their legitimacy, all the more preoccupied with creating images of this kind. The famous series of portraits of Queen Elizabeth I are icons of royal power elaborated in a coherent program of representing those figures whom the Reformation had left as the heads of the Church as well as the heads of the State. This one I choose particularly because it is a portrait which includes something which you can just see, on the bodice, linking the two strands of pearls. It is the Pelican Jewel. The Pelican shown here adorning Elizabeth’s costume is an emblem of Christ, the emblem of Christ in so far as this bird in mythic terms feeds its children with its own blood. Nothing can be more foreign, I think, to the sublime disengagement of the Bellini Madonna, with its jouissance of time and space, than this image. Of course, it is not a Madonna. It is Elizabeth as sovereign, who bears as emblem of her role the imitation of the sacrifice of Christ. It is interesting here, something that I do not have time to go into, the question of the adoption of gender roles in this particular case. It reminds me of the resonant commentary that Elizabeth made on her position as monarch, when addressing her troops at Tilbury: how she said, ‘Although I have the weak and feeble body of the woman, I have the heart of a King, and of a King of England too’. This also puts me in mind of the way in which Michelet talked about France as being ‘born of the heart of a woman’, the heart being, I suppose, in the way that he refers to it, not organic but symbolic. It is precisely the access to the symbolic, the monarch as monarch. In choosing this particular image I am not simply glossing the image of Proust shedding his ink, spattering his sheets, as he dies for our salvation. But I am also touching on the more difficult question, which is central to this conference, of Kristeva’s own position, as Proust’s commentator certainly, but also as a person inevitably placed today in a kind of exemplary role—I am saying this with a grain of irony, but perhaps it is something to think about—not entirely unlike the role of a Protestant queen in a post-Reformation society. If you doubt this you have only to read the extremely moving and remarkable article published in L’Infini, entitled ‘Bulgarie ma souffrance’.14 This text is addressed to Bulgaria, ‘Bulgaria my suffering’, and originally appeared in Bulgarian in 1995. It was published there and forms for that reason an address to a very special audience, the society that she had left, essentially, in the 1960s to become a resident exile in France. And of course, a society which has subsequently, in a momentous and troubling way, experienced the tentative beginnings of a post-communist society. The advice that is given would I think appear strange if it were not so closely related to that advice which has been offered to us through the medium of her writing on Proust. And I will quote from the last section of this long and fascinating article addressed to Bulgaria which is also, in the strict sense, excruciating, an article which communicates the extreme difficulty, the torture if you like, of being in the position from where it has to be written. Julia Kristeva writes: You can begin with very simple things. For example start to read, to decipher texts, the Greeks, the Bible and the Gospels, the philosophers and the writers, comment, discuss, understand. You can also pay attention to yourself, tend your own being, desires, dignity, enter psycho analysis or psychotherapy. Try some religious experience, the asceticism of the Protestants, the jouissance of the Catholics, and others, why not? Return to orthodoxy, the orthodox faith, work against its pitfalls, make its effects in the community more concrete and more significant. Find a sense of values again, speak of them, transform them, leave them open, do not cease to innovate with them…It will be a long process Bulgarie ma souffrance.15 III I am going to end my talk with a third image, which I am not going to try and overload with commentary. It is one which I see as being remarkably consistent with this advice and indeed with the values which Julia

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Figure 3. St. Augustine, Piero della Francesca (Museum of Antique Art, Lisbon).

Kristeva has invested in the image, from Bellini to Proust, from Venetian painting in the fifteenth century to contemporary installations by Hans Haacke and Robert Wilson, and it is also a reference to a figure whose name came up several times yesterday. This is St. Augustine portrayed by Piero della Francesca in the Museum of Antique Art in Lisbon where it accompanies another supreme work of art, that very different expression of the Northern religious spirit, Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony. Piero’s grave manner brings us face to face, at the same time, it seems to me in an extraordinary way, with the opacity of the body, its weight, and its density. Note for example that the crozier which is the mark of the Bishop’s

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office is transparent. It effaces itself in front of that volume constituted by the Bishop in his ceremonial gear. Now in a work like the Madonna del Parto, in the small chapel near Borgo S.Sepolcro, which has been dealt with by so many art historians, this sheer impression of volume is used to a very brilliant but very different effect as a sacred theatre for the incarnation of Christ. The Madonna del Parto, the pregnant Madonna, the Virgin indicates the presence of the Christ Child at the cleft in her robe. Michael Baxandall has undertaken a delightfully iconoclastic analysis which shows how the skill in showing the tent of the baldacchino around the Virgin is analogous to the skill learned by Piero and his contemporaries of gauging the volume of a barrel of wine. Well, here there is no question of the pregnancy of the Madonna, but if you note the heavy, magnificent robe which hangs on the Saint’s shoulders, you see that it effaces the body but also it blazons forth the sacred narrative of the life of Christ. Starting on the left shoulder, the Annunciation, then the Nativity, the Flight into Egypt, the Presentation in the Temple, Christ on the Mount of Olives, and proceeding to the right shoulder, the Flagellation, the Crucifixion and then (signified by just a corner of the blue sky which emerges from the fold of the garment) the Empty Tomb. The absence of the image in the fold of the garment is the point at which the narrative suddenly cuts off and disappears, but we know the stages that must follow it. St. Augustine’s role in preserving these stories as a vehicle for continuous and fruitful commentary, his view of pagan letters in relation to Christian literature which he called, wonderfully, a leafy orchard, is perhaps, being celebrated here by the quattrocento painter. But I think we can also associate this image with the point that Kristeva makes in relation to the Biennale in Venice, with her own example, the marvellous example touching upon Proust of the St. Mark’s paving stone. If the ultimate aim of art is incarnation as she puts it, it is at the same time through the act of narration that the images both order themselves and entrench themselves, concretize themselves within our own experience. That is certainly the message of Proust as Kristeva interprets him. And perhaps it is one of the most important messages of Julia Kristeva herself. Notes 1 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art and Literature, Louis Roudiez (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). 2 Julia Kristeva, Sens et Non Sens de la Révolte (Paris: Fayard, 1996). 3 Julia Kristeva, Possession (Paris: Fayard, 1996). 4 Sigmund Freud, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’, (1910) Art and Literature, Vol. 14, James Strachey (trans.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp.151–231. 5 Julia Kristeva, ‘Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini’, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art and Literature, Louis Roudiez (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp.237–70. 6 Christopher Wood, ‘Theories of Reference’, Art Bulletin LXXVIII/1 (March 1996), pp.22–5. 7 Julia Kristeva, ‘Giotto’s Joy’, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Art and Literature, Louis Roudiez (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), pp.210–36. 8 Wood, ‘Theories of Reference’, p.24. 9 Julia Kristeva, Sens et Non Sens, pp.27–8. 10 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (trans.) (London: Athlone, 1987). 11 Kristeva, Sens et Non Sens, pp.27–8. 12 Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time (London: FaberandFaber, 1993), p.69 13 Julia Kristeva, ‘L’expérience littéraire est-elle encore possible?’, interview with Danièle Sallenave, L’Infini 53 (Spring 1996), p.30. 14 Julia Kristeva, ‘Bulgarie ma souffrance’, L’Infini 51 (Autumn 1995), pp.42–52.

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15 Kristeva, ‘Bulgarie ma souffrance’, p.52.

Stephen Bann is Professor of Modern Cultural Studies at the University of Kent, and author of numerous publications about conteporary art and culture. Among his most recent publications are an essay on the sculpture of Stephen Cox and an article on Marcelin Pleynet. He has also translated and introduced Julia Kristeva’s Proust and the Sense of Time. Q&A

Julia Kristeva I cannot say how touched I am, how moved I am by this lecture. We have talked a lot about theory these past few days and here we have real information. The real literary and history of painting that makes our conference and perhaps the presentation of my work more concrete and closer to my real intentions. I have had in these last hours the experience of too many abstractions and theories, and this marvellous exposé brings a new contribution to widen our scope and to make it more concrete. I was very struck by your ability to read so concretely, to be so close to what I have written, and to be so personal with your interpretation. This is a great piece of critique which you have produced today. I am aware of the first image of Bellini’s Madonna, and am really impressed by it as I am of paintings of the Madonna, but the second and third images were real revelations for me. The problems of the corner stone and the lost foundations are very important to me and I am grateful that you have noted this. Also, the appearance of Hester Bellini in the novel, you are a marvellous reader, is so interesting. I would like to just add the fact that the article ‘Bulgaria My Suffering’ has been published in English, a very good translation by Robert Gray, in the very interesting Swedish review entitled Artist which is actually the publication of the Royal Academy. You have made the most important connections possible, with artists here, at this place, the Leeds City Art Gallery. You have talked a lot about modern art and installations and in this place of modern art, it is particularly necessary and perhaps some artists here have some comments on this aspect of your lecture. Adrian Rifkin (Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Leeds) Stephen’s talk raises a central question, that of Julia Kristeva’s interventions into the history of the theory of art history, and the Bellini article and the Giotto article are ones which we as art historians turn to again and rethink, and read very carefully and as such, are very important to the practice of art and to that of art history. One very important point that comes out of your talk is precisely the subject of art history and what are the appropriate materials. As you rightly point out, Julia Kristeva shifts us from the hermeneutic reading that Freud does of Leonardo, to a psychoanalytic reading of the social which I don’t think Freud’s work is thought of as being. And I wondered if you would like to address yourself to the question of what is art history after Julia Kristeva and have we yet assimilated the lessons that her work offers? Kristeva In this respect,your interest in details and metaphysics is interesting. It seems to me that art history is always attached to details and we give them a deep interpretation which is always attached to narrative, from a literary point of view, to cultural history, and its narrative as religion which is what I call its metaphysical dimension. Perhaps you could tell us something about your own work right now on the crossroads of details and metaphysical interpretation.

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Stephen Bann This is quite a difficult agenda. But I think that it is certainly true that what I tried to do in juxtaposing the Bellini Madonna with Queen Elizabeth I is in one sense going back to the way in which Freud analyses Leonardo, the way of a fetishized image. But, on the other hand, it seems to me that the detail, the way in which the brooch is problematic and in relation to the notion of the symbolic construct of sovereignty and of the Imitatio Christi as appropriate to the sovereign superimposes another reading. All of the interest of psychoanalytic method, and all that I have learnt from your work in this domain is that the detail is not simply the fetish, it is not only a way of losing anything but the detail. Like the cornerstone, it can activate a whole tissue of relations and extensions which effectively reconstitute the discourse of the speaking subject. Kristeva Details make us see in another way. Bann Yes. And I am glad I was able to bring St. Augustine as a novelty to you because it is so extraordinary. I have never seen an image in which he is shown in that way. It is in a sense also a coding of Piero himself into the picture because these are often religious subjects which he has already tackled, although the Flagellation is not the same image as Piero’s Flagellation. There is a sense of the self-inscription of the painter, but at the same time there is the marvellous moment of the ellipse of the Empty Tomb in which the body is no longer there to be seen and is not seen either. Rifkin The question of the other which is in oneself, as the other within, marks at the same time that it is not Piero’s Flagellation, and that it is his Flagellation because he has painted it and it is his. Kristeva It is also an allusion to the metalanguage. We talk about other talks, we paint about paintings, as St. Augustine, as a theologian talks about and produces a metadiscourse on Christ. We represent this activity of St. Augustine, in this activity which is a philosophical activity the painter makes a superimposition of the images over the image in a near logic of the metadiscourse, it is represented in the painting, through the painting of the painting. Tamar Garb (History of Art, University College London) This is a point in relation to the fold of St. Augustine’s robe. I was wondering whether at that point the narrative seems to collapse, at that point the sequential narrative no longer exists and this is symbolised by a fold in the robe, do you think that that is the point of the feminine? Is that fold, that folding in, the point at which the feminine is inscribed? Bann I think it is an appropriate reading. I think that Piero is remarkable in the Madonna del Parto in drawing attention again to the lips of precisely the place of engendering. But of course it is also true to say that the Madonna inscribes the feminine in the whole of the Gospel story.

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Griselda Pollock (Department of Fine Art, University of Leeds) One of the strange things about the conference is the overlap, and I suddenly sat up when you mentioned the Madonna del Parto because that is one of the images that I was going to use in my talk later and it is such a wonderful serendipity to find out that our thoughts are converging. I just wanted to ask a profoundly theological question. The drift of your talk was towards a Christian theology, the idea of the image as incarnation. What I am planning to say starts with the notion of absence. I am interested in this tension, in the point Tamar Garb has just raised. On the one hand, the whole idea of Christianity moves towards the concept that you can somehow undo the separation that exists between two different kinds of orders, so that the incarnation, consubstantiation are the cornerstones within Christianity which leads to a certain relationship with the image which is potentially idolatrous. St. Augustine and others have struggled a great deal with this. When do you cross the line from using images as a support for the contemplation of the ineffable and mistaking them for the very representation and therefore worshipping them? On the other hand, a Jewish construction proposes that it is not that you shouldn’t use representational art, but that it has no relationship—this mistaken for an imitation -to the question of creation. Rather, it is an addition, an activity, an expression of human capacity which is not directed towards that very absence at the heart of Jewish temple when Pompey goes in and cannot believe that there is nothing there because there is nothing to see. This is the moment that I am interested in, the point in which the return of the nothing, whether it be death or the feminine, becomes the sublime. And I wondered if you had any thoughts on the fact that your presentation replicated that Christian version around incarnation, and that that is where the image becomes a problem. But, we have inherited this, we can’t pretend that Western art is not shaped by Christianity and that therefore modern art might be seen as either the realisation of Jewish iconoclasm or the final collapse of Christianity. Bann I think that that is a very interesting question. I would like to say a few words about it. I was very much aware when I was talking about the installation as you have spoken about it and of course the wonderful passage about Proust being effectively without grace, but then the quotation carries on to say, ‘and yet, the terms of identity…’ in other words there is the ‘and yet’ position that is there with Proust which is not the annulment of incarnation, or not the annulment of grace, but is a kind of supplement perhaps. Alex Potts (History of Art, University of Reading) I just wanted to follow up on that point. Stephen, you came up with this wonderful phrase ‘crumbling of the world into images’ and what Griselda Pollock highlighted for me, which I would like to pose the other way around. I would like to take it away from the duality of the incarnation and iconoclasm, and to actually see that sometimes in Julia Kristeva’s writing the high point in the analysis comes at the moment when the incarnation produces the crumbling. I think that it is the incarnation that produces the absence. It’s that kind of knife edge on which, as it is for your analysis of Holbein’s Death of Christ, for example, that the paradox is pushed to a kind of extreme, that here you have a body that is absolutely before you and signifies and embodies a complete absence, a complete death. It’s the same moment in the Bellini images when you have all of the details and then all of the details disappear in that moment when the image of the Virgin blends into the play of colour, and so on and so forth. Of course, that is itself a very modern move in painting, and that is what I find so fascinating, that kind of death between those two where the actual act of incarnation is almost an act of dis-incarnation and that seems to me where the interest in your analysis lies.

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Bann What we end up with is the place where the image disappears into the fold, so that what you’ve got is the build up of narrative, the focus on the details, but the real moment comes when all of that disappears. John Mowitt (Department of Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Minnesota) As I suspect you are aware, there is another reading of Proust which is that by Walter Benjamin. One of the things that matters so much to Benjamin is in fact, the fissure or the break between the image prior to what he calls the ‘era of technological reproducibility’ and the image after. And it would seem that that relation is something that is at stake in comparing the painterly image with the literary image and especially the Proustian literary image, an image which Benjamin and to some extent de Man thinks about as falling after this divide, where the grip of this painterly image has been diminished by its scattering, its crumbling, its dissemination. Is this some kind of aspect of the problem of the image, especially as it traverses between literature and painting, that matters to you as an art historian? Bann I find it difficult to respond to that question in the way in which it has been posed. I have long thought that the Benjaminian notion of ‘aura’, although an extraordinarily important and fascinating one, is more to be seen as an index of resistance than as a statement of what is the case. And it seems to me demonstrably not the case that the before and after structure that he sets up explains or relates to the culture of the image as we have them today. However, I would like to thank you for raising that point.

parallax, 1998, vol. 4, no. 3, 81–117

To Inscribe in the Feminine: A Kristevan Impossibility? or Femininity, Melancholy and Sublimation Griselda Pollock

Certain contemporary thinkers consider, as it is well known, that modernity is characterised as the first epoch in human history in which human beings attempt to live without religion. In its present form, is not feminism in the process of becoming one? ‘Women’s Time’, Julia Kristeva1

The belief that ‘one is a woman’ is almost as absurd and obscurantist as the belief that ‘one is a man.’ I say almost because there are still many goals which women can achieve: freedom for abortion and contraception, day-care centres for children, equality on the job, etc…. Therefore, we must use ‘we are women’ as an advertisement or slogan for our demands. On a deeper level, however, a woman cannot ‘be’; it is something which does not even belong to the category of being. It follows that a feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already exists so that we may say ‘that’s not it.’ and ‘that’s still not it.’ ‘La femme ce n’est jamais ça’, Julia Kristeva2 Preface In the course of the conference, several related questions emerged about femininity, aesthetic practices and religious culture within the thought of Julia Kristeva. One of the questions raised by speakers from the floor addressed the gendering of sublimation, while another questioned the tortured relations of feminine possibility and women’s historical participation as artists in the aesthetic project of art in general, and more recently, the avant-garde. Yet another questioner asked to understand better the role of rethinking religious thought and art within the context of a secular intellectual tradition. As the last speaker, I was relieved to recognise these shared concerns with the paper I was preparing to deliver on women, artistic practice, and Julia Kristeva’s writings on the historic function of the avant-garde in relation to the unholy trinity of State, Family and Church. My question, like that of a member of the audience, was aimed at the contradiction

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between Julia Kristeva’s theoretical attention to femininity and the absence of consistent analysis of aesthetic practices by women. My method, however, was not to assume an unbridgeable disagreement between feminist interests in art made by women and Kristevan statements on feminism or on femininity as a positionality within the linguistic function. What would it be like to take seriously Kristeva’s political heresy not only that woman cannot ‘be’ but that the ‘woman artist’ equally is not on the plane of being? Put another way, can we escape the phallocentric constructions of the feminine through creativity, rather than remaining within them, a predicament signified precisely by the internal contradiction of the neologism: woman artist. The term artist is not neutral and if we wish to enable ourselves as feminists to sustain the revolutionary potential of the feminist revolt we cannot hide in the pseudo-religious comfort of the signifier Woman, linked as it has been by Lacan to the beyond of all thought and meaning, with Jouissance, Other and Thing. As of this moment, some of the peculiarities of psychoanalytical discourse offer a provisional means to think through and with the necessity of this exile. Part I Let me approach this question through a short story and a painting. In a convent high in the hills above fields blue with the flowers of flax seeded from the Holy Land, nuns spin and weave linen for the nuptial beds of royalty and nobility. Treasured in the same convent are small cuttings from these noble sheets, each bearing the stains of virginity-proving blood, each framed under its armorial bearings and mounted beneath a dynastic name. A slow procession of elderly, mantilla-clad women make regular pilgrimage to this ‘museum’ of ‘women’s art’, to read upon each blooded page stories of marriages, intrigues, children, alliances, the rise and fall of famous houses, the memories of disappeared girlhoods. But one canvas merits special notice, attracts more gazes, incites the most profound contemplation. ‘The frame is as fine as any, and as proudly carries the golden plate with the royal crown. But on this plate no name is inscribed and the linen within the frame is snow-white from corner to corner— a blank page.’3 The story can be read in many ways. One view would see the bodily signatures of royal princesses framed within the narratives of patriarchal society: sexes used and claimed as objects of dynastic exchange and the social power of men. The blood is both the ink with which the contract between men is signed and the trace of women’s only entry into culture: bleeding into art, painting with their wounded bodies as Susan Gubar argues.4 Within such a gallery, what does not enter signification ‘in blood’ via circuits of woman as o (a)bject, appears blank. Yet it is by the unswerving loyalty to that ‘truth’, as the storyteller calls what silence reveals, that visitors are moved to the greatest contemplation of other stories—that might be traced upon an only apparently uninscribed surface, that might be projected upon its always open screen. It is in that radical moment of what offers no representation to vision that another kind of gaze peeps through, to touch, move and surprise rather than capture the viewer, in an uncanny exchange with the unknown and unknowable, unnamed other, whose non-presence is not exactly absence, although through the still unmarked bed sheet, this other ‘she’ is not part of a unitary, phallic order of meaning production that can only make sense through either/or, present/absent, used/virginal, self/other, mark/no mark. Perceived inside the visible emptiness, ‘it’—an inscription in/of and from the feminine—impinges across the threshold of viewing, and affectively reconnects with the once lived subjectivities that are thereby called into co-emergence with the empty page at this momentary opened borderline of being/ non-being and meaning/non-meaning. The feminine, signalled here by the problematic of the blank page, but not metaphorically represented by it, is somewhere beyond the object, the framed ‘painting’ that stands for art as an achieved statement, yet it is

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Figure 1. The Salt Box, Avis Newman, 1989 (Lisson Gallery, London).

folded into the visible: and rather than positivist dreams of representation of women’s meanings, I want to track this paradox of inscriptions in the feminine. The Blank Page, for this is the title of the short story by Izak Dinesen, celebrates neither silence nor bleeding as a female cultural virtue and it does not offer either as the basis for an oppositional feminine aesthetic. It brilliantly creates a multiple image, hinged both to the blankness that veils the dissidence of the feminine in the phallocentric text and to the possibility of meanings ‘otherwise’ that press from behind that screen upon its heterogeneous surface to reach out and lure another kind of awed, shocked, wondering, uncanny looking and knowing that we might hypothesise contacts what the artist and analytical theorist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger has proposed as a non-visible, non-phallic, matrixial stratum of subjectivity.5 Both solacing in the annulment of a mastering, Oedipalising gaze, and disturbing in its encounter at another level with what is not seen optically but affectively, this non-image displaces the scopic regime of the West which—with its hitherto exclusively phallic psychoanalytical theories—projects as the only way to define sexual difference. The ‘blank page’ turned back through the prism of some recent art made by women reconnects painting to the materiality of its practice as a mark of a bodily reference to the invisible specificity of a feminine body that leaps from materiality—what Bracha Lichtenberg calls corpo-reality—to the Symbolic without the disfiguring fantasy of the image—‘of Woman’. On the blank page, there is no figurative or indexical representation, however minimal, no fetishising icon to commemorate masculine dread of (his own) lack. The blank page is without the bloodied sign of what patriarchal logic defines as woman’s wounded, castrated and thus castrating condition. Some theorists suggest that the sacralisation of the blood of virginity is, at one level, a cultural relic of the matricide necessary for the heterosexual man to separate, individuate and eroticise the very corporeal domain from which he once emerged. As Julia Kristeva has argued in Powers of Horror, the masculine subject undergoes a crisis because of the loss of the union with the maternal body.

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This crisis produces an inarticulate rage against any identification with what breaks the fixed borderlines upon which ‘his’ subjectivity will be then structured: inside/outside.6 That is to say, any transgression such as is represented by the abject—death, blood, disease, degeneration—appears to threaten a de-structuring of the boundaries defining and containing subjectivity and will be phobically resisted. Woman, however, as a fantasy, and in her erotic and reproductive life cannot be limited to such a clean division of inside and outside. Thus Woman seems to present to phallocentric thought the impossible problem of a human figure for whom such boundaries do not apply, a division which, none the less, is the basis of phallic subjectivity and, apparently, meaning itself. At the much later, Oedipal level, the archaic conflict around this division takes the fantastic, imaginary form of rage against the mother—now sexually defined—who represents a compromise to masculinity’s separation and to a narcissistic grasp of ego identity. As the once inside, expelled waste of a maternal body, how can a man come to love the very ‘hole’ represented by and representing the mother. The rituals of virginal defloration—often performed by an elder or socially privileged male—and the ceremonial display of the virgin’s blood raise to the cultural level of a sign the condensation of both the dread of the abjected maternal body and the sadistic mastery of that fear folded into heterosexuality.7 So, to return to the blank sheet, what might the representation of the absence of such blood be, when imagined by a text ‘in the feminine’? Kelly Oliver comments: ‘In Powers of Horror Kristeva describes how the child, there always the male child, must split his mother in order to take up his socially prescribed sexual identity. The mother is split in two: the abject and the sublime’.8 Thus I discern two potential, related routes that inscribe masculinity’s troubled but constitutive relation to the maternal. They leave us with the question of the feminine relation to abjection and sublimation. Lacan’s Sublimation Might the blank page—imagined as the transgressive presence in the patriarchal museum that, none the less, attracts and solaces our gaze—be an image, if not of, but calling forth, the spectre of a feminine sublimation with its inevitable but shifted traces of the never completely lost but still distancing maternal? Might it be one that in its historic and poetic moment—the early twentieth century—and in its authorship— a Danish woman modernist Karen Blixen, using a male pseudonym—manages both to acknowledge and to displace the feminine object that marks the emptiness that, for Lacan, veiled the Thing that is the core of (masculine) sublimation. For Freud, sublimation referred to a kind of transposition of an excess of the sexual into socially valorised activities: artistic creation and intellectual enquiry. Following Klein, this displacement/transposition would also involve sadistic and destructive drives against the mother’s body being countered and inverted into restorative and reparative activities. Lacan, however, raises sublimation to the basis of ethics. Thus, the most general formula that I can give you of sublimation is the following: it raises the object—and I don’t mind the suggestion on the play of words in the term that I use—to the dignity of the Thing.9 In analysis the object is a point of imaginary fixation which gives satisfaction to a drive in any register whatsoever.10 The object is elevated to the dignity of the Thing as we define it in our Freudian topology, insofar as it is not slipped into but surrounded by a network of Ziele (aims).11

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Lacan uses the image of a vase to elucidate his complex thought about sublimation and the Thing; the Thing is always veiled and can only be moved around; the object is made ‘to represent the existence of the emptiness that is at the centre of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presents itself as a nihil, as a nothing’. Creation, says Lacan starts with a hole. The object, however, is therefore, always a refound object which fantasises about an original loss that the existence of an object alone allows to enter into our field of experience or affect: The object is by nature a refound object. That it was lost is a consequence of that—but after the fact. It is thus refound without our knowing, except through the refinding that it was ever lost.12 We come again upon a fundamental structure, which allows us to articulate the fact that the Thing in question is, by virtue of its structure, open to being represented by what I called earlier, in connection with boredom and prayer, the Other thing. And that is the second characteristic of the Thing as veiled; it is by nature, in the refinding of the object, represented by something else.13 Uncertainly, I draw from these enigmatic statements some threads that connect vaguely with my short story: a creation of some kind of sense of a provisional and retrospective meaning around an absence that is rather an ab-sense; meaning derived somehow from the unsignified that none the less impinges into the field of visibility, but by an intimation of an almost-encounter rather than by sight. I also surmise something about representation never being of anything, that is, a given reference; it is always part of an economy, encircled by the aims of the drive, but never a direct hit. In cultural studies, we have generally focussed on one of the pathways within this economy between the real that is unsignifiable and the means of an absence functioning as the condition of our being signified as a subject: that is, fetishism as substitution and disavowal. Fetishism places all our analyses, however, within the field of Oedipus and its binary ordering of sexual difference by the phallus, the signifier of castration. Fetishism keeps us within the law of castration. Under the pressure of the still open question of femininity, and of feminine subjectivity, we have, however, been driven theoretically not only behind, but beyond and beneath this Oedipal screen to excavate more than what Freud allegorised as the Minoan civilisation of the mind that lay behind Mycenean patriarchy. It is not sufficient to revalorize the pre-Oedipal alone, for that inevitably nestles within the Oedipal which retrospectively defines its merely preliminary character. But if the non-Oedipal is to be anything more than an idealising move that only appears to suspend the Oedipal by appealing to a general structure of nondifferentiations and non-sexualising separations and rifts, that are, of course and none the less, phallic, we need to take up the challenge of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger to theorise a modifying undercurrent, a parallel substratum of subjectivity that will allow us to imagine not the feminine as always and already within phallic sexual difference, but a sexual difference from the feminine.14 This point is critical. The desire to escape the logic of Oedipal sexual difference in order to be able to articulate sexuality and subjectivity beyond its heterosexual paradigm by imagining non-sexuating experiences of division and separation, as proposed by Laplanche for example with his theory of seduction, still renders it impossible to theorize the feminine. On the other hand, to suggest, as does Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, that there might be a sexual difference from the feminine, rather than the feminine being the negative cipher of phallocentric sexual difference, leads us to imagine a way of thinking subjectivities and sexualities beyond the Oedipal/ pre-Oedipal pairing. It has come to my attention, belatedly, that going by way of interest in both an archaic moment of the subject’s process and a supplementary ordering of subjectivity, sublimation offers another pathway that touches on issues of politics, aesthetics, ethics and femininity.

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Part II Vermeer’s Sublimity First of all, I have to admit that I do not really understand the concept of the sublime in art but it keeps cropping up a lot. I had an experience of it and I want to share it with you. I was shocked with myself. Standing before a painting—a real one; it was by Vermeer—I spontaneously said to myself: this is sublime. I want to know what I meant, and if it has a relation to sublimation. In 1996, a month before the conference, in a fit of professional self-consciousness as a ‘supposed to be an art historian’, I felt that I had to see the Vermeer exhibition (National Gallery of Washington D.C. and the Mauritshuis, the Hague). In conditions akin to an early morning squeeze on London Transport’s busiest line, I joined a pilgrimage which must have left most of Paris and Berlin empty that Sunday morning. In rooms designed for a quiet game of royal cards, big enough to hang one painting on each wall, compressed by incredible numbers of bodies, I shuffled and struggled, craned and peered, to get near enough to see Vermeer’s paintings. The whole thing was made worse by the fact that these visitors did not conform to the normal habits of the art loving public: they did not spend a maximum of 2.2 minutes before each painting here. No, each work collected around it a crowd of spellbound gazes, drawn in to what after all are often quite minimal, even empty paintings—or shall we say paintings that dare to represent absence and emptiness. Not a lot goes on and what you see is enigmatic. What were they all looking at—or rather looking for? Or rather what were they finding, these modern followers of the troubadours, to invoke Lacan once again? These paintings are at some level about love, which is as we have seen about sublimation.15 Lacan quotes Picasso: ‘“I do not see, I find.” What is found is sought but sought in the paths of the signifier.’16 What relation did the kind of luring of these looks at Vermeer paintings have to what was and was not being seen through the paths of the signifiers—all the details of plot and iconography and interpretation art historians traditionally talk about? Perhaps you might get a hint if I again mention the words veiled Thing—emptiness—represented by something else—object=point of imaginary fixation. Lacan’s question: how can the relation of man to the signifier…put him in relationship to an object that represents the Thing? Is the Thing always the maternal Thing? Or is the maternal the object that represents a Thing that then is undoing/suspending sexual difference? The point of these questions and the analytical vocabulary is to stress that psychoanalysis as an element of cultural analysis is an analytical theory about structures, signifying possibilities and subjective positionalities, not a cheap explainer of secrets about Vermeer’s mummy and daddy. Not all Vermeers are minimal. Some are very busy and full of visual incident, narrative in structure, theatrical almost, anecdotal perhaps, the lure for the contemporary art historian of Dutch art whose Bible is Jacob Katz. The version of ‘Vermeer’ on show in 1996 was very selective: on view were those objects that inscribed in the exhibitionary space a particular fantasy sustained by certain works, masquerading as a scholarly display of significant historical artifacts. It was not the discourse of history—seventeenth century Holland—that we witnessed but a historical discourse of the present that, in its own symptomology, opened up the space to read a possibility in those texts called ‘Vermeer’: that kind of reading is my debt to Julia Kristeva whose readings of paintings by Giotto, Bellini and Holbein articulate the Marxist semiotician’s attentiveness to historical possibility while using psychoanalysis hinged to semiotics to decipher a history of subjectivity articulated through the spaces and signifying systems of culture: the realm of aesthetic practice harnessed to those doubled and shifting histories of the social and of subjectivity. What was I seeing? Part of a room, a table, a painting on the wall, and a woman doing something like playing the virginals, making some lace, pouring some milk, or holding an empty balance.

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I make notes when I do these art history trips. Usually to cover over my perplexity before the complexity of the actual objects about which I am supposed to know. ‘It is large or small, square or rectangular, dark or light.’ ‘The colours are very bright.’ ‘Lots of blue and yellow.’—that sort of thing. Starting somewhere, however trivial, is always a simple way to get into the bizarre event that is a painting and the process of viewing not ‘it’ but what else ‘it’—the vase/object/signifier—frames. I attended, notated, studied and I was shocked. They were pretty good. They were beautiful. In fact they were stunning, these paintings. They were really satisfying. And they were a gift for a feminist art historian running a seminar on Julia Kristeva. They cried out for a Kristevan reading à la Bellini crossed with Giotto. If blue was Giotto’s joy, how much more jouissance was there in Vermeer’s extended variations on blue that allow us to trace that other level, a chromatic level, which intimates a jouissance beyond the identification, object, narrative meaning of a work in the paintings of Vermeer? Julia Kristeva writes: A possible hypothesis, following André Broca’s paradox, would be that the perception of blue entails not identifying the object; that blue is, precisely, on this side or beyond the object’s fixed form; that it is the zone where phenomenal identity vanishes.17 After pointing out that blue is probably the earliest colour a baby can perceive Julia Kristeva writes: Thus all colours, but blue in particular, would have a non-centred and decentring effect lessening both object identification and phenomenal fixation. They thereby return the subject to the archaic moment of its dialectic, that is, before the fixed, specular ‘I,’ but while in the process of becoming this ‘I’ by breaking away from instinctual, biological (and maternal) dependence.18 Blue thus performs a dual task. Suffusing the imaginary space of the painting or as particular body, blue allows a dissolution of boundaries, the subject-object opposition, the positions of identity. Yet it also recedes, maintaining or creating a sense of distance that stretches out a tenuous coloured mist of longing and barely articulated desire. Julia Kristeva also calls colour ‘Giotto’s joy’ and his use of it is indicative of the beginning of a long campaign waged in western art against theology. Appearing to serve religion, painting, she argues, gradually betrayed it. Firstly, painting abandoned religious themes in the Renaissance, or rather diluted and transformed them in secular and profane garb, and, secondly, only painting abandoned religion’s necessary norms, representation. Colour introduces a joyous element bursting through the confinements of order and discourse represented in painting by perspective and architectonically calculated illusions of space secured to narratives by figuration and illusionism. In pre-modern painting, colour battled with such order. In modernism, it finally escaped all bounds and began to imagine a painting practice around itself. Julia Kristeva, as others before her, excavates an elliptical genealogy that runs from the still subordinated chromatism of Giotto and Bellini to its self-conscious display in Cézanne, Matisse, Rothko and, for my money, Helen Frankenthaler. Finally, in a parenthesis, Julia Kristeva reminds us of the fact that the Giotto cycles were painted under the aegis of the Order of Merry Knights commemorating the Virgin (sublimated jouissance found its basis in the forbidden mother, next to the Name of the Father) The Solace of Repetition After a while in the exhibition, I began to recognise a repetitive structure in Vermeer’s paintings that rang the bells of the crude Freudian in me. Repetition has meaning other than lack of creative imagination, other

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than iconographic consistency, generic elaboration, historical belonging. Repetition, within the artistic field, Jacqueline Rose reminds us, represents a psychic knot, ‘an insistence, that is, the constant pressure of something hidden but not forgotten’, a place of recurrent return from which there is no release, in which the anxiety generated in the belated recognition of loss can be disguised through the surplus of aesthetic pleasure.19 But Lacan specifically makes a distinction between the return of the repressed—neurotic symptoms and sublimation: Sublimation, Freud tells us, involves a certain form of satisfaction of the Triebe (drives and drifts) so as to mark the fact that the Trieb is deflected from its Ziel, its aim. Sublimation is represented as distinct from that economy of substitution in which the repressed drive is usually satisfied. A symptom is the return by means of a signifying substitution of that which is at the end of the drive in the form of its aim. It is there that the signifier takes on its full meaning, for it is impossible without reference to that function to distinguish the return of the repressed from sublimation as a potential mode of satisfaction of the drive…. The fact is that idealisation involves an identification of the subject with the object, whereas sublimation is something quite different.20 Now the art historical traditions that encase Vermeer are of several kinds: those that cut the whole lot up to find its meanings somewhere else in the so-called primary source material called iconologies and emblem books: these argue for a massively allegorical interpretation of every spoon, shoe, and smile. Others take the whole thing as the beginning of bourgeois realism and most of them ooh and aah over the paintings, and, in smooth appreciative and connoisseurial tones, offer up the writer’s pleasure in the aesthetic surplus offered by such luminous paintings; these disguise the unashamed identification with the artist who is figured by all the signs of his genius thus discovered and declared. The genius artist becomes a means of both enjoying and disavowing whatever pleasures and screened anxieties the actual canvases as material and semiotic events provide. Neatly named, figuration in the form of the textually manufactured artist figure ‘Vermeer’ packages within an anthropomorphic and typically masculine image whatever the painting actually touched upon and, through chromatic decentring and desiring distanciation, ecstatically/sufferingly ‘enjoyed’. (I use this poor English word to echo Kristeva’s suggestion that the artist identifies with the mother’s jouissance, which, she adds, has nothing pleasurable about it.) Art history is then a neurotic activity: idealising, identifying, trapped in the return of the repressed, using the painting as substitution and screen. So let me look again, without that apparatus, at my sense of recurring familiarity: is it insistence, the painting as neurotic symptom, or can I track a process of sublimation, a kind of circling and conversion that deflects the drive and its object so as to trace the hole around the Thing—and what would it have to do with this myth of artistic genius—the male artist? Let me run through a series of Vermeers and see the struggle to get it right. Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (1664–65). A woman in a house, near a window, behind her part of a map, held down by a large blue black knob. She stands behind a table that is partially represented. We are blocked off from the actual space of the woman by the table—here I would wish for a rapid stream of images that visually remarked the presence of tables in Vermeer’s painting, the occurrence of chairs empty and filled, of boxes opened and closed, letters read or written, jugs held or poured. This oblique and untutored reading would reassemble the fragments as indexes of a scattered body haunting these paintings, a ghostly absence that lends its uncanny presence to the manipulation of socially and artistically conventional signs. Nothing we see in Vermeer’s paintings of such objects or scenes was untypical if seen through the spectacles of the art historian of seventeenth century Dutch art. A concurrent exhibition in Vermeer’s

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hometown Delft itself, aiming to complement the one-man display of ‘Vermeer’ in the Hague, revealed exactly how much Johannes Vermeer (1632–75) worked within the vocabulary of his exact historical time and place. But this should not surprise us. Julia Kristeva’s readings of paintings by Giotto and Bellini underscored her subtlety precisely by attending so carefully to the necessity for precise attention to the social, historical and ideological context of their practice. Citing Matisse: Our senses have an age of development which does not come from immediate surroundings, but from a moment in civilisation. We are born with the sensibility of a given period of civilisation…One can’t just do anything. A talented artist cannot do just as he likes. If he used only his talents, he would not exist. We are not master of what we produce. It is imposed on us.21 Kristeva later concludes: A signifying economy within an artistic practice, therefore, not only operates through the individual (biographical subject) who carries it out, but it also recasts him as a historical subject—causing the signifying process that the subject undergoes to match the ideological and political expectations of his age’s rising classes.22 There is no doubt that in the 1640s–60s an artistic vocabulary was emerging for Vermeer which was possible because of the relations between the signifying systems of the culture and the subjectivity of the painter or the painter as subject, that is, the artist as someone subject to a psychic economy partially related to, yet never autonomous from, the cultural and political economy of the lived historical moment. So in the exhibition in Delft itself on the Delft Masters who were Vermeer’s contemporaries, the many topographies and topics of his paintings are repeatedly found in other workings. These revealed a historical and ideological investment in the domestic space and the gestures of women within them, as Nanette Salomon has shown in her analyses of the issues of sexuality, national identity and the questions of space in seventeenth century Dutch genre painting culminating with Vermeer’s distinctive strategies.23 I am not, however, setting this up in order to come out again with the idea of genius that makes Vermeer the best of this normative lot of seventeenth century Dutch contemporaries. But it is clear from any comparative viewing, that something in some of the paintings of the name ‘Vermeer’, are marked by a quality of distillation that raises the domestic accessories of the bourgeois home of seventeenth century Holland and their possible allegorical role in a new Protestant language of moral instruction and political ideology to a level that touches on something beyond the very conditions of their semiotic existence and cultural circulation. It might be this which the historian, attuned by a sense of the history of both the subject/ subjectivity, and of culture as the finding of that historical contingency of subjectivity and its psychic forms, might address through the figures that are ‘Vermeer’: Thoré’s in the 1860s, Arthur Wheelock’s in the 1990s or a feminist’s at a conference on the intersection of aesthetics, ethics and politics in 1996. Julia Kristeva concluded her essay on Giotto with citations from both Friedrich Antal and Walter Benjamin, the latter serving to explain my elliptical purposes in this paper. ‘It is not a question of presenting works…in correlation to their own times, but rather, within the framework of the time of their birth, to present them to the time that knows them, that is, our own.’24 Thus there is a fold in historical understanding that is always the refinding of the lost object which art history fetishistically disavows by continuing to imagine the past as a once real, and then lost, plenitude. If we imagine these paintings to be knowable in another way through the conditions—historically delivered— of our present, including feminism, what might such knowing yield?

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Reading Vermeer The ‘Vermeer’ on show in 1996 was largely paintings of women. Very few men were allowed into these rooms in the Mauritshuis to disturb the contemplative access to the single female figure in her quiet enclosure. There were very few scenes of men and women together—Christ in the House of the Two Marys at the beginning and one or two later scenes of music lessons. Mostly I was gazing at women who did not look at me. Woman with a Water Pitcher (1664–5). I see a woman, she does not look at me. She looks elsewhere. This makes me watch her seeing elsewhere. To compensate for the lack of reciprocity—so strikingly explored in Vermeer’s painting: The Girl with the Red Hat (1665) the viewer looks her over. Her face becomes an object to be considered as a painted image, her body a comportment for the intricate costume contrasting deep blues and subtle lemon yellows that are too busily interstriped while covered by too large and independent a collar and cap. This is a fine Vermeer but it does not cut the bacon. Let us try Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1664). A woman looks at herself in a mirror we cannot see as she puts on a necklace. Our pathway to her space is massively blocked by the empty chair and large ominous black carpet cleared from the table and bunched on its edge. An extraordinary expanse of wall is left uninhabited. Technical examination of the painting by X-ray has revealed that originally a map was to be shown on the wall similar to the one that recurs in many of Vermeer’s paintings. In addition there was a lute on the chair and these combined to ensure a pretty standard iconographical reading of the image in terms of the figure of Vrouw Wereld: the map refers to the physical world, the lute to sensual love, the pearls and the mirror to earthly vanities; all produce a negative moral in which woman is both captured for and made the figuration of the dangers of the earthy delights. Arthur Wheelock writes in the catalogue: ‘By removing the map and lute he [Vermeer] transformed the character of the image into a poetic one evolving the ideals of a life lived with purity and truth’.25 This is the limit of such interpretation. See what I mean about either iconographic reductionism or poetic mystification. Formally, we are left with a blank space of inordinate pictorial proportions strung across which is the gaze of the woman, made into a force that is absorbed, however, into a tiny rectangle that consumes light rather than reflecting it. The mirror is a hole into which the gaze of the woman disappears, a perpetual present tense underlined by the active looking registered on the woman’s face which is different from the paradoxical look of self contemplation in which the other at which one looks, which is oneself, is in the place of the other looking back. This same model with her elaborate bows and smart citron coloured, fur-trimmed morning jacket appears in A Lady Writing (1665). A picture looms over her head. She is seated on the chair. Her pearls lie on the table and she stops her writing to look directly at the viewer. Have we gained by capturing her attention at last? The look does not do a lot for us. For there is still too much around it, so it remains a representation of a woman who was writing, looking up at the imagined spectator. I am bored with that story, or else I know that in that story, I am not being addressed by whatever her look is meant to signify. Whatever the deep drives this project is about have been too deeply encased in the very generic conventions of a new kind of bourgeois art that would allow them, none the less, one day, to reach a perfect balance and take us through representation to ‘the object raised to the level of the Thing’. All of these rather inelegant descriptions of Vermeer’s paintings of single women are preambles for the one painting that hit me between the eyeballs, if I can be so crude. Everything about it is different from the others in their genre even though the art historian could easily place it in the same category. This painting’s difference from the rest of its class are not just diversities: they mark the spot of a difference that is perhaps, Lacan’s sublimation.

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Figure 2. Johannes Vermeer, Woman Holding a Balance, 1664 (National Gallery of Art, Washington).

Woman Holding a Balance (1664). Instead of a luminous interior, the room is partially shuttered allowing a limited light to fall directly on the face, and bodice of the woman, glinting a moment in the empty balances that were once thought to contain gold because of that reflected gleam. The box is open and the pearls are strewn. The table carpet/cloth is not a dark menacing shape but a subtly folded mass of— when the light catches it—dematerialising blue. The oddest and most incongruous thing is the shadow on the side of her head—uncannily taking the shape of a huge hand spreading its fingers to embrace it. The space behind the woman’s head is partly filled with a religious painting in the Italianate, almost Düreresque, manner of a Last Judgment. In the blankness to its left is the nail and nail hole with which Mieke Bal begins her book on Reading Rembrandt.26 The woman is pregnant. Such a heretical thought was first proposed in 1971 by Carstensen and Putscher and was developed by feminist art historian Nanette Salomon who linked her condition with a contemporary theological debate about the moment a soul receives grace and salvation.27 In the 1996 catalogue, Arthur Wheelock dismisses the whole idea because a ‘bulky silhouette is common in numerous paintings of the period’ and a ‘forward-thrusting stomach’ was

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evidently a desirable one.28 So through a classic piece of positivist denial, the whole issue of sexuality, pregnancy, maternity, and desire is swept aside along with theology. Indeed it was the mid-seventeenth century fashion to wear such jackets but careful fashion-conscious looking at a range of women in paintings of this period reveals that these jackets were generally worn belted. Besides pregnancy must have been a much more regular condition of women. For me, there can be no doubt that this is a pregnant woman, the jacket parting in a more than suggestive manner to expose her brown skirt highlighted by the sunshine to a vivid orange streak that no Freudian can refuse to suggest breaches the literal to evoke the sexuality of woman, the opened interior of parturition: that borderline I mentioned earlier that might elicit either an abjecting or sublimating response. There is a precedent, probably entirely unknown to Vermeer so I am not playing iconography hunter here. The precedent is Piero della Francesca’s Pregnant Madonna Madonna del Parto (c. 1460, Monterchi Arezzo, Capello del Cimitero). Here there is the doubled sense of opening as the curtains are swept aside by angels to reveal the gravid form of the inward-looking Madonna, her hand caressing both her pregnant form and pointing, in a gesture that refers to, but undoes the Pudica Venus’s famous hand, to the slit that allows us momentarily to imagine, without abjection, the female body as borderline, inside and outside. Just as the thought of this image sprang into my head, so too did Mary Jacobus’ essay on ‘Dora’, Kristeva and maternity. Jacobus also illustrates this fresco to contrast it with the Dresden Madonna by Raphael that appeared in ‘Dora’s’ famous dream. Raphael’s late formulation of mother and child created a single entity out of two figures, making itself a fetishising emblem of that resumed unity, while Piero’s vision creates an emblem of division—‘figuring the condition of maternity not as symbiosis, or as completion by divine desire, but as internal separation.’29 What does the mother give birth to, asks Jacobus? ‘Surely…at once to herself and to an other, in a movement of differentiation imaging the movement which gives birth to meaning. To figure maternity as division is to acknowledge the process of separation which gives rise both to the subject and to language’.30 If Raphael’s Madonna services the fantasy of wholeness that underpins a masculine representational and sexual economy, so Jacobus imagines an alternative feminine economy in which the divided mother might be an emblem of the subject’s difference from itself through language and the unconscious. But that feminine economy seems only accessible to masculine artists. So via a Kristevan rethinking of the fantasy of the mother as imagined for us through its cultural moment of fixated representation: Catholic art of the early Renaissance—we understand ‘the discourse of maternity as another name for the movement of parturition which (re)produces the subject in and of representation’.31 But, you will be saying, what has this to do with Vermeer and his Dutch realism, bourgeois life, admittedly made allegorical. Can his painting of a middle class pregnant woman really be of the Madonna of the Catholic West—the icon that secures Christianity’s deep affectivity through its promise of the refound and eternal mother? If the invocation of motherhood as separation were not clearly enough suggested by the condensation in Vermeer’s painting of both annunciation—light falling on the gestational womb—and parturition with the exposed streak of colour, turn your attention now to the face. The woman is looking at her balance, but her eyes are downcast, almost closed, creating a quietude upon that face that without entirely closing it allows it to hover between a gaze outward, that is contained by its object of vision, and the inner gaze that forever excludes me as that gaze signifies a desire of which I am not a part. In my notes I wrote: ‘This is the face of the sublime. This is an extraordinary moment in visual representation. Vermeer has finally made a face that while signifying maternal feminine inwardness, and feminine maternal desire turned back within her self does not create a sense of anguish on the part of the bystanding spectator’. As object of contemplation, it was exquisitely satisfying for it held whatever of the maternal hitherto encoded in the female body and face at just the distance that intimated loss but returned it to me as aesthetic perfection. Yet I am seeing nothing.

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Her face is not an object like the woman with the pitcher for I am not distracted either by its ‘realism’ nor by its painterliness as in the woman in the red hat looking directly at me. Yet it is not a mirror for me. Neither does it contain the rejecting force of Bellini’s distracted Madonnas. Something has been calibrated to perfection in this image: and what that is, is not genius or greatness or great art. It is a relation between a psychic and an aesthetic economy for which the iconographic centre of the painting stands as a momentary clue: balance. There is nothing being weighed but there is a balance being created. Or rather a threshold achieved in which the elements of the social economy of the sign—meaning, representation, social and cultural conventions which mark the historical moment of its production—meet with and provide a form for pressures, possibilities, anxieties and pleasures that march to another temporality, or even to none at all. For they come from the other scene that has come from the Thing via the object to the representation from which it then perpetually escapes, being the nothing that the whole object merely allows us to refind in the experience of being with the image. I want to suggest a reading of the painting that can map art history onto feminist cultural studies and into the beyond of a not-yet area of analysis. The Vermeer painting appears as a moment in which the Catholic image of the Virgin, which for centuries had been elaborated to carry into culture, in the service of Christianity, the face of the lost Mother, permitted the transformation of her uncontained bodyliness into a sign, and produced a painful sublimation of the Mother, allowing the sign to signify the maternal jouissance, that, directed elsewhere, is, according to Kristeva, necessary for us to experience the mother symbolically as love and aesthetically as Beauty. The subject must consent to forego the closeness of the mother’s body so as to (re)find her (as) love—the doing of both is the condition of being able to pass into signifying subjectivity via the abjection of the maternal body and the creation of a symbol to replace the lost maternal body in the symbolic notion of maternal love. It was this transport that enabled the flowering of a certain kind of heterosexual masculine creativity both identified with and experiencing itself passively loved by the Mother that found a form of sublimation which we call Christian art during the fourteenth-sixteenth centuries. Vermeer was, however, a Catholic in a newly Protestant country and, according to certain paintings, he was a devout one. At the biographical, historical and sociological level Johannes Vermeer is a credible agent for this further ‘sublimation’ of the iconography of Catholicism within bourgeois Protestant prosaic representationalism. I am sure the art historians are right to assume that part of the aim and success of the painting was its match with the public discourses of theological debate which would provide the satisfaction for the sublimation in the form of socially validated achievement of cultural intelligibility. But in the field which feminism has made its own and our necessity to consider: sexual difference and its psychic and semiotic economies, this image achieves both such prosaic notions of sublimation and deeper ones through that filter it opens between the languages of seventeenth century Dutch genre painting and what had hitherto nestled in grandiose forms of Catholic Marian imagery; the maternal Thing. Vermeer’s paintings of emptiness, and spaces filled by this register of the maternal function as the vacuole around which representation allows the object to rise to the level of the Thing. Part III A Turn to the Feminine: Kristeva’s ‘Heresy’ Now you will clearly see my problem. The feminist art historian finds herself once again validating the great male artist—with a fancy new script to be sure. But what does it mean? And can I fill these empty balances with something that will conflict less with my own amour propre as a feminist in art history/cultural studies interested in women and aesthetic practices? The answer is no. Or perhaps, I should say, not yet.

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Maybe I am finally acknowledging Linda Nochlin’s wisdom in 1971 when she roundly stated that there are no female equivalents to Michelangelo or, I might add Vermeer. In fact, I think that we are daring to understand what that might mean as part of the transition in feminist theory from utopian opposition: let’s find our own heroines, to a critical understanding of that which blocks, represses and forecludes the feminine from those of us designated, signified as women in phallocentric cultures. I want to risk following the Kristevan heresy that our dream of ‘women in art’ is misdirected. If woman cannot ‘be’, can ‘women artists’ exist? Herein lies one of the major resentments feminists repeatedly express against Kristeva’s work. She does not write about the literature or art of women. Her heroes are all men: Joyce, Mallarmé, Lautréamont, Céline, Proust.32 Admittedly she has latterly written about maternity, sexual difference and the feminine but without the positive endorsement of women’s creative participation in the great moments of cultural rupture to which she has turned our attention. Where is the Kristevan reading of Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt, Lee Krasner or Helen Frankenthaler to match her studies of Proust or Pollock? Defining femininity as the negativity that conditions the newness of any practice, she seems to find this structural force for revolution only in the writings of men who, as avant-garde artists and writers, could access this negativity because, I suggest, creativity ‘in the masculine’ which is the only form we as yet theoretically grasp involves a sublimation that is the elimination of the feminine, its introjection so as to inscribe himself as the master of his own creation. What if Julia Kristeva is right? Women cannot be artists. I say this as one person who has dedicated my professional life to the demand that women be fully recognised as artists. I do not want to be misunderstood. Of course women are and have always been artists and there is still an enormous task to produce the writing that ensures their acknowledgement and effectivity within our cultural narratives. Women make art sure enough, but as artists are they necessarily ‘women’—in the sense of the feminine position in the psychic economy of phallocentric sexual difference? Is contemporary artistic practice with its complex legacies and transformations of the avant-garde project in the post-modern moment the possible space for the inscription of/from/in another sexual difference in the feminine that is necessarily unknown even to the feminine subject? The problem lies in the confusion of terms we use with the varied politics competing on this ambiguous theoretical terrain. There is the confusion between real women, here, Sojourner Truth style, revealing breasts and claiming wombs and dreading too much excess flesh on the hips kind of women, and the psychic structures of masculinity and femininity that imperfectly match the corporeal accidents and geographies of physical morphologies of which we are the complex, contradictory, unstable and always perverse embodiments and psychic agents. For Julia Kristeva, femininity has always remained rigorously a linguistic or psychic position, abstracted to a degree that frustrates our, my, feminist longings for somewhere to feel at home, a body, an identity, a signifier, that would turn concrete and real and allow us to know who or even what we are when we speak or act, make love, give birth, or give a lecture. (A passing homage to Joan Riviere and all other intellectual hysterics.) But we must resist this longing because it can only be the desire for an identification which is as impossible as it is destructive: identification with the only place there can be: the Mother, or rather the maternal body or her idealisation in pseudo-religious terms, as the Great Goddess. Both these figurations of the Maternal are inherently phallic since this configuration is premised on the severed dialectic of subject/(m)Other. In Julia Kristeva’s work the distinction is crucial. Feminism, with its dangerous proclivities towards religion might become a new cult of the Mother, but without abjection or sublimation, the Mother will be either idealised, leaving us trapped in archaic formations around primary narcissism and ego constitution or she will be sadistically disavowed, leading feminism to be unable to function historically for we will not be able to tolerate older women, their success, or status. I am wondering if the relations between femininity and creativity are caught, therefore, in an

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impossible contradiction—which women persons have, none the less, negotiated, probably via hysteria, in order to be as creative as they have been: but it is not as ‘women’ that the feminist art historian should unproblematically claim them. Neither as our prosaic ‘you know what I mean when I say women’ nor in the rigorously theorised positionality ‘Woman’. As Julia Kristeva has argued, Woman is not…. Woman is not an ontological entity, something one can be or relate to via the statement ‘I am….’ She has argued for the feminine as a structural negativity, dissidence itself, the basis then of the revolution of sexual difference. For women persons to claim that they are or have this womanhood (remember that other illusion: to have or be the phallus) is to permit that revolutionary possibility to be always already coopted within the existing order, the phallically structured Symbolic—big S—a socio-economic-politico-cultural complex in historical time, which returns the feminine to a phallic concept: the Mother as the site of separation and division, or its dangerous, transgressive corruption that leads back to psychosis. According to a Kristevan analysis, the cultural terms on offer for the production of art have been structurally shaped by history in the possibilities and difficulties of the mother/son axis. The parallel for the feminine subject would have then to be a daughter/father axis which is the basis of so much of mediaeval feminine mysticism: a kind of holy incest practised by women mystics like Hildegard of Bingen, who called herself ‘a feather on the breath of God’.33 That axis involves the identification of the daughter with the Father and with order, law, the symbolic, in relation to which ‘she’, the submissive daughter, smuggles in her feminine jouissance as mystic masochism. In modern times, this option has not been available for perverse negotiation. Thus the nineteenth century models of feminism were so often driven by daughters excluded from the realm of their fathers wanting their political place in the bourgeois polis along with their brothers. A later, Marxist and Freudian generation of feminism, revolted by such alignment with the bourgeois State and its limited Imaginary of class and race power, resists its Symbolic absolutely in the name of a radical difference, that draws its Imaginary force from our denied pleasures in the inevitable homosexual desire for the Mother. Either way we are still playing out the Oedipal story. Thus woman/ femininity is collapsed back into the maternal, where, it always was for the phallocentric order: i.e. maternity as abject or sublime lost object and borderline is the only form of femininity’s representation under patriarchy, the only form we know of it, always structured as either the whole/hole of reassimilation of the cut/wound of division. Can there be a means of revolutionising sexual difference to deliver to us ‘on the side of the feminine’ a signification of the feminine that is not synonymous with this concept of the maternal and not signified by sexual dimorphism and the visible body but creates another means of sublimation, which Freud so often identified with creative and intellectual activity that is socially valorised and thus valorising of its producers? Studying art’s histories allows us to map the relations between the stories culture tells and the forms for their telling. Through both we can discern the shapes of those aspects of the unconscious, that pass through the filters of signification, reciprocally to constitute the known territories of the subject, and the accepted social domains of subjectivity. Art can be seen now as an analytically interesting field for the study of the histories of subjectivity, but it is also a creative space where forms may emerge to imagine and thus shift the alignments and possibilities of the psychic that will then have social and political effects at both the level of the social and political collectivity, and at that of the Symbolic. Aesthetic practices, framed by a historically sensitive psychoanalysis, is seen then as productive not reflective; symbologenic in Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s phrase.34 Giotto and Bellini, and potentially Vermeer, represent artistic practices that were at once legible within the cultural frameworks they themselves articulated while their interest lies in the intimations, in their work, of directions and possibilities not adopted, authorised, validated or officially sanctioned at the time of their own production. The direction culture took after them followed other tracks, leaving their work partially intelligible as its forerunner and yet derelict as its other, abandoned potentiality.

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These artistic practices were elements of emergent structures of feeling and formal dispositions that awaited a more complete revolt against the holy trinity: State, Church and Family to be once again caught up and knitted into a more culturally prevailing, realigning pattern. This brings me to Julia Kristeva’s thesis on the avant-garde at the end of the nineteenth century. Modernism represented a break with the Catholic Christian hegemony that had solicited and produced most of Western art since the fall of Rome. But rerouted through its interest in the republican and Protestant seventeenth century Dutch, modernism also inherited a surreptitious assimilation of that earlier psychic baggage to a realist, proto-modernist and later secular paradigm. In the hands of many artists, who obsessively signed their passports to the avant-garde on their fantastic figurations of classed, raced or prostitutionalised bodies of women, modernism ironically allowed the leakage of even more archaic, socalled pagan, some called it ‘primitive’, elements of phallocentric fantasies of the maternal, producing the oppositions Carol Duncan so cannily read in the text that is the Cathedral/Temple story the Museum of Modern Art: woman as either monstrously dangerous or monstrously fertile.35 Let me quote Julia Kristeva from her essay, ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’ published in Tel Quel in 1977, Under these conditions, female ‘creation’ cannot be taken for granted. It can be said that artistic creation always feeds on an identification, or rivalry, with what is presumed to be the mother’s jouissance (which has nothing agreeable about it). That is why one of the most accurate representations of creation, that is, of artistic practice, is the series of paintings by De Kooning entitled Woman: savage, explosive, funny and inaccessible creatures in spite of the fact that they have been massacred by the artist.36 De Kooning exemplifies artistic creativity that enacts the modernist matricide. Julia Kristeva then poses the terrible question: what if these paintings, Woman, had been created by a woman? ‘Obviously she would have had to deal with her own mother, and therefore, herself, which is a lot less funny. That is why there is not a lot of female laughter to be found.’37 In my recent analyses of Lee Krasner’s negotiation with the cultures of art and sexual difference in the 1950s, Killing Men and Dying Women, I tried to challenge Kristeva’s assumption by exploring the possibilities of ‘inscriptions in the feminine’ on the unprimed canvases of Abstract Expressionism.38 Mapping the public discourses on masculinity and femininity in the 1950s via the twin icons of high art and popular culture, Jackson Pollock and Marilyn Monroe, I pondered on the predicament of painters such as Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler and found within a completely differencing economy of the gesture in painting that, none the less, relates to the things Pollock and de Kooning were making possible, jouissant, humorous but not murderous allusions to the co-emerging maternal, for instance Lee Krasner Sun Woman I 1957. My argument was that during the 1950s, painting was relieved, through the possibilities of this new kind of painting as process, as enactment of the semiotic, of the tendency towards fetishism inherent in representation. Painting seemed to be rerouted towards a different psychic disposition: neurosis in the form of hysteria, a condition in which the relations to language and to sexual difference are rendered the site of unanswerable questioning and creative ambisexualism. The male artist as hysterical achieves a cross identification with the maternal necessary for his creativity. The creative woman too is relieved of the burden of her cultural and psychic feminisation as the image, lure of the look, and passive sexuality, and can imagine another place from which to identify with, and rival the creativity of the maternal—not via the Father, but through the place of the imaginary son culturally signified as the artist.39 Hysteria offers that model of

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shifting identifications which are psychically indifferent to physical morphologies and socially determined gender identities. Feminism’s Exile Had I read the article a bit more carefully, I would have found Julia Kristeva retreating from her own adamancy. She writes: In any case far from contradicting creativity (as the existentialist myth would still have us believe) maternity as such can favour a certain kind of female creation provided the economic constraints are not too heavy, at least in so far as its lifts fixations, and circulates passion between life and death, self and other, culture and nature, singularity and ethics, narcissism and self-denial. Maternity may well be called Penelope’s tapestry or Leibniz’s network, depending on whether one follows the logic of gestures or of thought, but it always succeeds in connecting up heterogeneous sites.40 But here Kristeva is not just talking about the relation of the daughter to the Mother, i.e. the problematic site for our exploring what we might make of or as the feminine. She is raising maternity, woman’s perplexing and as yet unarticulated experience of maternity, which escapes the discourses of science and religion to threaten the woman herself with a psychotic loss of subjectivity, of which nothing can be signified, to the level of a theoretical/philosophical position which is another side of that issue: separation, severality in which the child becomes the means of delivering the woman into subjectivity through the necessary passages of splitting and separation that allow of the kind of loss that sublimation realises in another place. Let me try again: While feminism continues to mistake its own sulking isolation for political protest or even dissidence, real female innovation (in whatever social field) will only come about when maternity, female creation and the link between them are better understood. But for that to happen we must stop making feminism into a new religion, undertaking or sect, and begin the work of specific and detailed analysis which will take us beyond romantic melodrama and beyond complacency. You will have understood that I am speaking the language of exile…. Our present age is one of exile. How can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one’s own country, language, sex and identity? Writing is impossible without some kind of exile.41 My current take on this passage is the necessity for two different kinds of exile: the feminist’s self-imposed exile from ‘feminism’—the accumulating politics of identity and celebratory positivism—in order to insist on a non-religious use of feminism’s provocation to thought: ‘For true dissidence today is perhaps simply what it has always been: thought. Now that reason has become absorbed by technology, thought is only tenable as an “analytical position” that affirms dissolution and works through differences’.42 The second kind of exile is that of the creative woman from what culture proposes and languages posits as the place of Woman. The artist who is a woman is not then engaged in the reflexive confirmation of that phallocentric fantasy she is required to perform, the masquerade. Instead, she is exploring loss, exile and desire from beyond the blank page. This means rethinking the relation of femininity, maternity, and creativity from what Lacan called, ‘the ladies’ side’. Julia Kristeva concludes her argument by suggesting that the emergence of women and children into discourse—one of the major signs of modernity and its contradictions, an emergence that might be

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artistically signalled by a trajectory that runs from Mary Cassatt to Mary Kelly—poses insoluble questions for those structures that form the history of the West and end with the Death of Man and God at the same time as the liberation of Women. Some will try again for Christianity which once solved the problem via a sublation of Death and offered Resurrection: what beyond, Kristeva asks however, do we imagine now except through madness? Some could try for a Renaissance—the secular humanist solution focussed on a political rather than a religious leader; but the prince now works for the politburo or the corporation; capitalism, which the absolutist prince heralded, now owns us all. What is left is the excesses of language— ah I hear some sigh, the typical postmodernist, apolitical cop out; art will save us. ‘Its all in the text.’ ‘What happened to real politics?’ ‘Art never changed anything.’ But the point is that it is no longer a matter of salvation in any form, or the one-off revolutionary moment. If the twentieth century has taught us anything, it must be that we have to go for permanent, critical, and ethical notions of dialectical and multi-levelled change. Perhaps Julia Kristeva is saying that in the historical conjuncture shaped by the destructive forces of capitalism and a defunct totalitarianism we must face the real revolutionary test: the restructuring of the psycho-symbolic order of the West by finally breaching its Eurocentric homophobic, sexist, racist norm. What feminism has to do with that depends, in part, on its own self-denial—a displacement of that generation that aimed for integration into the fictions of State, Nation, Polis. While feminism launches women and children onto the historical stage of politics, it can be betrayed, as indeed socialism has been, historically and theoretically, by complacence, by collusion with or acceptance of the limits of the current order, by lack of imagination to grasp what is at stake and where the stake is in the belated and unfinished business of the modernisation of sexual difference. Julia Kristeva’s interest in the avant-garde moment is in no sense apolitical except in so far as she wants semiotics and psychoanalysis to be allowed radically to redefine what the political is by its articulation with the ethical and aesthetic. These have become necessities since the political is rimmed by a statist Imaginary. Where did I finally find what I needed to read about sublimation—but in Lacan’s seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis? Feminism, Signifying Practices and the History of the Avant-Garde The essay I want to consider finally is Julia Kristeva’s introduction to La Traversée des Signes, published in 1975, titled ‘Signifying Practice and Mode of Production’. It is a condensation of the main arguments of her doctoral thesis: The Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) in which she argued that the avant-garde breached the religious imaginary that had hitherto provided a managed space for the strangely interconnected trio: otherness, feminine jouissance and the divine. Julia Kristeva begins with the assertion of the inevitable interrelation between the organisation of the social ensemble and the signifying means by which it is known, and by which it stabilises and perpetuates itself. The structures we live are known to us through their representation, which in effect then determine our being. Her move is to insert into sociological and economic analysis of social formations the role of the Symbolic: language. The crossing point of the two is the speaking subject. To understand her argument I must add one other building block. Julia Kristeva distinguishes between what she calls the unity—the organisation of a social ensemble and its meaning systems; and what she calls process, the resources in the body, the drives and fantasy, that precede and exceed the unity that tries to organise and define them. Thus we have a model of a fluid range of as yet undefined but predisposed and predisposing possibilities for meanings—she names this the semiotic—which a system of meaning tries to fix, precariously building an order—named the symbolic—on a radically heterogeneous non-yet-order/beyond-order that it tries to contain but which is excessive to it, offering thereby the prospect of renovation and sometimes revolution. This is the dialectic opposite to functionalist or hierarchical theories of the social. There is a relation

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between any order and its other, its excess. This can be a creative relation or, if damned up and overly repressed, it may become a psychotic or paranoid relation producing madness, terrorism or fascism. The institutions of social and sexual order are the State and the Family which ‘hold together a certain type of relation between the unity and process in the economy of the speaking subject, at the same time, being consolidated as a result of this relation’. The State tries to manage the forces and relations of production; the Family ensures unity in the face of the process of drives and pleasure, associated with sexuality and reproduction. Hence the function of religion: This unity, of state and family, is achieved at the price of a murder and a sacrifice—that of the soma, the drive and the process. This is recognised by religion, which thus arrogates to itself the privilege of representing and of speaking the infinite element the ensemble oppresses and yet demands to be spoken. Religion is here that discourse that knows, as far as is possible, what is at stake in the relation between socio-symbolic homogeneity and the heterogeneity of the drives at work within and upon the homogeneity. Complicit with the state and the family to the extent that it restores their other to them, this religious discourse appears not only as the speculative (and often specular) forms of what is unrepresentable in orgasmic pleasure (jouissance) and of what is uncapitalisable in expenditure of productive forces.43 Religion is the theoretical space where it is possible to think about language and communication: being neither social order nor social arrangement, it has a certain self-reflexivity because it knows not of that which it speaks to the social order, but speaks about trying to speak the unspeakable. Religion is, none the less, a monitor of the edge or boundary, between order and process, system and excess, and works on behalf of the unity to canalise some of the process, the imaginary and corporeal fantasies. The complicity of State, Family and Religion far from crumbling with the coming of modernity, is, according to Julia Kristeva, consolidated by the triumph of the bourgeois revolution in the later nineteenth century. This is her striking novelty—not to see secularisation as the dissolution of an age of Christianity, but to grasp the nineteenth century as the contradictory moment of its social sublimation. This moment of a religiosity that manages the excess not allowed into representation in the tightening economies of production and reproduction: Victorian values, if you will—is however simultaneously contested by a new formation: art, which had been progressively seeking its independence from the very discourses and institutions upon which it was founded. I should be more precise. We are talking about a radical rupture: the avant-garde, a breach with what had been hitherto an overt or subliminal religious art. This complicity of family, state and religious discourse appears for the first time in the second half of the 19th century, following the triumph of the bourgeois revolution, the consolidation of capitalism, and the accompanying fulfilment of the Christian religion. At the same time, there also appears the subversive function of ‘art’—subversive because of the way it cuts through and reworks the frontiers of the socio-symbolic ensembles.44 Avant-garde culture, according to Julia Kristeva, is not just the latest chapter in the continuous narrative of the history of art. What happened in art, literature and music, as well as the many related intellectual trends like psychoanalysis, with the coming of the avant-garde, constituted a break with fundamental concepts of what these practices were. I could be so bold and grossly state that Western art since the Renaissance had an intimacy with Christianity which shaped not just the content but the very plastic and aesthetic character of

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its representational ideologies and practices. The theology of the Incarnation and the relation between a word made visible and made flesh provides the deepest drive towards the conquest of mimetic representation based on the pictorial narrativisation of human figure compositions and the development of gesture and pose to incite the appropriate affective reception of these theological propositions through imaginary identifications with an anthropomorphic illusionism. Leo Steinberg has explored the problem to which this gave rise in the central representation of Incarnation theology: the Madonna and Child.45 Steinberg was the first to pay real attention to the remarkable feature of so many of these representations: the prominent display of the young child’s sex organs. If the word becomes flesh, that becoming flesh, becoming human involved the accession to the postlapsarian fate: sexuality and thus to the figuration of sexual difference. God does not just become Man; God is shown to become a man and that requires the signs of human mortality—his sex. What theology veils in metaphoric language, the painter grapples with only at the point at which the artist’s plastic resources achieve the means to provide a mimetic visual correlate for the theology. Theological incarnation becomes artistic representation. In the tension between the two, between theological metaphorics and a kind of visual picturing that works iconically—that is by reference to something that looks like something you can imagine—the seeds of the avant-garde revolt against religion can be traced. Religion is a metaphoric discourse in so far as it must accept that it is speaking in linguistic terms of that which defies those terms, while yet can only be imaginable within them—that is except for the excess which religious practice, ritual and experience allows into, but manages on behalf of the socio-symbolic ensemble, the social order: affectivity, intensity, mysticism, (dis)possession of the self. In defying, not as Greenberg argued, its servitude to literature, but its function as the representational screen for religion, the avant-garde tries to accept the fact that art is art, that representation is a signifying system. The project of the avant-garde is to deal with the irreparable dislocation between signifier and referent where the latter term itself has lost the transcendent meaning guaranteed by the religious viewpoint. Modernism reminds us endlessly that what is there is but signifiers and their subjectivising effects. Even in its semiotic nakedness, the play of signifiers affects us, touching something beyond the signifying system that tries to harness it. But in coming to know that, art lost its faith in its ability as well as its need to provide the visualisation of an incarnation. Avant-garde art is, structurally, if never ideologically, atheist. Instead of trying to provide the representation of God as a Body, it searched for the means to register the sacrificed soma, the drives and pleasures of the subject. Ironically, but inevitably this took the avant-garde in its predominantly masculinist character back to the lost Maternal body and her jouissance. Hegel prophesied the death of art, and indeed that containing function was displaced by modernism’s dissolution of the identity between sign and its referent, its dissolution of the coherence of narrative, its embrace of play and the self-conscious manipulation of medium, its move towards the process dimension (pleasure, evocations of the body, rhythm) rather than the unity of a realised aesthetic totality. When you contemplate a painting by Rothko, for example, a vast and palpating coloured field, and find nothing referred to, you are not without anything to see. The visual delivers you to the vibrations of the veils of superimposed and bleeding colour. The system of painting creates a rhythm or a pulse that animates the surface. The scale of the work in relation to the viewer’s body creates sensations of immensity and the erosion of boundaries, while its own diligent quoting of the frames that its colour seems to undermine restores an armature sufficient for the simultaneous acknowledgement of jouissance and an ordering of its otherness. At once sublime in its effects via scale and colour, and the self-assertiveness of its made objecthood, the work has a presence that undoes the fixing of meaning and thus the identity and unity of the subject. The signifiers float and thus does the viewer experience a release, a jouissance that could be said to

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echo but displace into the real of the painting practice, the mystic experience hitherto permitted only within and contained by the discourses of religious authority. Art has not, however, taken over from religion, becoming a subliminal or secular religiosity—though there are many amongst the connoisseurs and art historians who try to make it so, as Sarah Kofman has so clearly revealed in her reading of Freud’s theories of the aesthetic.46 Art—in its historically novel dispensation as avant-garde art, in fact, contests religion. Let me bring in Julia Kristeva again: All religious discourse is hinged on the unique event, the solitary ‘thetic’ event which puts an end to violence by an act of violence of its own and creates a system or structure of exchange and communication, hence of signification.47 The binding of Isaac, misnamed by Christian theology as the sacrifice of Isaac, from the Book of Genesis, provides a good example of the way in which the potential act of sacrifice of Isaac stands to put an end to the offering of the first born to the deity. In lieu of the actual literal death of the first life, the ram is introduced as the symbolic substitute, introducing the means of symbolic signification for the obligations between God and Man while allowing a symbolic sacrifice to continue as the means of their ensured communication. But there is more in this story, which the Christian theology of the sacrifice of God’s ‘only begotten son’ rehearsed, even while undoing its symbolism in order to introduce a new, incarnated, literalised covenant that draws into the Abraham story the burden of sin from the older myth of Eve. (I am slowly getting us back to women.) Old Testament discourse gets closer [writes Kristeva] to the reality of this event when it suggests that it is to be attributed to the father, the symbolic founder of family and communal genealogy. Judaism thus makes the paternal function the support, along with the subject, of sociality and symbolism, while at the same time, through its emphasis on procreation, it casts light on sexuality and eroticism both at the level of their social necessity (community of men around their father) and at that of the transgressive flowering (woman—the other race, the silent support of the symbolic function, permanent appeal to a forbidden incest, object of anguished masculine identification).48 In the twin legacies of Judaism and Christianity—and in their divergent routes—Julia Kristeva, none the less, sees the recognition of the Father—the paternal function—as paramount in the establishing of unity, the social order, which is justly termed phallocentric. The irony is that the final achievement of the united front of State, Family and Religion occurring in the nineteenth century gave rise to the means of relativising the hegemony of all three, because they become susceptible to self-analysis, and thus to the speaking of that which they structurally made unspeakable—the feminine, rather than the fantasised maternal incorporated via the figure of the Madonna. Modernity—the legacy of seventeenth century Protestant rationalism and capitalism—with its newly secularised social forms of domesticity and idealised motherhood, desublimated the maternal other and made the social woman literally perform a metaphorical overfeminisation, the enactment of a sexual othering integral to the bourgeois order’s self definition. The cult of domesticity and the determination to contain women within the roles of motherhood and homemaker curbed the representation—not the signification— of maternal desire—that lost look, that look at something somewhere else whose painful necessity manufactures the very resistance by means of which the child can abject the maternal body—the real of a corporality that beckons back to psychosis and by means of which gap it can start on the journey to a subjectivity sustained by the possibility of the mother’s symbolic love. For motherhood to function as a

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productive relation for the subject, I would contend the mother must be shown to desire elsewhere—her own sexual gratifications or her own intellectual and creative work. Modern ideologies have damned us all through the attempt to bind the look of the mother, signifier of her desire to the child who is then entwined in a threatening envelope of maternal investment which only abjection in is most extreme forms can explode: the horrific or monstrous feminine. Modernism as a culture, as I have argued elsewhere, is the revolt against that bourgeois overfeminisation that threatened to swamp masculine creativity: the violence of its formal revolts marked the intensity of the threat. In the blank page of as yet unwritten possibilities created historically by the later nineteenth century avant-garde, women joined in the modernist project with some relief, hoping to escape the overfeminisation that had, none the less, held some potentialities registered in the considerable flowering of a self consciously feminine culture in the nineteenth century, a culture that could make femininity a topic, as we see in the work of Berthe Morisot or Mary Cassatt.49 According to Julia Kristeva’s diagnosis, political modernism challenged the state and produced the political rebel. The writer or artist challenged the social ensemble through a contest with language. A modernisation of sexual difference: feminism, challenged the Family. Feminism in all its awkward and compromised ways, has been the attempt ‘to introduce into the heart of symbolism and sociality the echo of woman’s unsaid; the rhythm that cannot be named, music of the semiotically traversed body, not yet, not enough, sign and society, vertigo of structures’.50 Finally, psychological modernism in the form of psychoanalysis challenged the self-evidence of religion. Why? Because psychoanalysis transposed to another discursive and theoretical space the relations between sacrifice, limit and excess that Judaism and Christianity had respectively formulated on the plane of religious thought and dispersed to cultural formations of subjectivity. As fellow dissidents, feminism and psychoanalysis made us responsible for our own imaginaries. In the twentieth century we are then faced with twin prospects: a dissident intellectual self-consciousness and the awareness of the unconscious and beyond that mediates what we are and what think: thus there is no absolute truth, faith, transcendental guarantee, whatever we believe for our own good or peace of mind. On the other hand, the threat of fascism which already once overwhelmed Europe and utterly rewrote its history and identity remains constant. Fascism is the parodic and grotesque longing for the totalisation of the ordered alliance of State, Family and (anti)Religion, in the perverse name of the phallic son who will not accept the submission of the drives and their sublimation into socially determined forms, under the productive law of the Father. In place of the disappointing Father, the Hero is erected and adored as charismatic site of identification for the damaged ego. Fascism is a political enactment, therefore, of an anti-religion, inverting both the way Judaism and Christianity narrate the logic of subjectivity to us. Refusing the socially acceptable sublimation of violence, fascist and fundamentalist regimes canalise the unfettered drives into a paranoid ‘acting out’ that was, and is, murderous as the boundaries offered by the law erode and are imaginatively, fantasmatically rewritten. Sacrifice replaced by a murderous excess of killing becomes the order of the day—directed symbolically as well as literally at the other who must die absolutely: especially the other that is ‘father’ to the son, as Judaism was represented in Western Christianity. There can be no religion in fascism since it allows for no dialectic and no tension. In fascism, furthermore, we recognise the absolute revolt of the phallic son against the revolutionary daughter, for fascism was also the modern antithesis to feminism and the avant-garde: both its joint targets, while the vital remnant of another order, Judaism was also to be extirpated. The religion of the unengraved Other, avant-garde textuality and dissident femininity find themselves unexpectedly historical allies in the late twentieth century.

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Femininity and Alterity What we now call the other, in social and anthropological terms, can be considered under this psychoanalytical rubric as structurally connected with the problem of the feminine, which at the end of the nineteenth century emerged in sociopolitical and aesthetico-ideological forms. If the symbolic system relies upon the paternal function, it operates to define and repress the maternal as its structuring other. Sublimation is then the mark of that substitution or erasure of Woman by Beauty. This allows the fantasy of the Mother as lost plenitude or castrating other to obscure the total foreclusion of the feminine from the realms of sense, meaning and subjectivity. Religious thought and art in its direct or oblique modes has managed that repression through the metaphoric figuration of those elements of the feminine that, rarefied by their passage through phallocentric thought, come to function as the internal support of the paternal identified as order. The Virgin is that affective acknowledgement of the maternal feminine and yet she is structurally placed as the ‘holy vessel’, the bearer of the father’s son who never knows her own interiority, sexuality or desire. She is the spoken for and the spoken ‘feminine’ that negates feminine difference and renders her ever more complicit in support of the paternal function. Any revolt of the feminine from these designated roles cannot be contemplated any more than it makes any logical sense to struggle for women’s equality—how can you be equal with that to which you are opposed as the structuring other, that which must be kept out of the Temple in order for there to be order at all. So we are forced to contemplate not the equality of women as struggled for in the nineteenth century, and not the feminist return to religion as a revival of Neolithic goddess cults. Feminism searches for something that acknowledges what religion signified on society’s behalf —and which can be otherwise stated: allegorised in different, and differencing, revolutionary terms. Thus we might turn to Emmanuel Levinas, a postmodern reading of Judaism which never offered that inclusive negation of the feminine and a different feminist theorisation of the feminine. The moment of human ethical responsibility that arises with the coming of difference must be recognised to lie in the realisation of the feminine not as the difference: 0/ 1, but as a difference that from its own potentiality holds out the possibilities of realigning both human subjectivity and sociality. In a conversation with the artist and theorist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Emmanuel Levinas was asked about his sense of the feminine as the foundation of the ethical—which is where the religious question has migrated. Let me quote a conversation, in 1992. BLE: I’d like to ask you a question about the alterity of the feminine. At one point you spoke of the feminine as a flight before the light. EL: In other words: not to show oneself. A flight before demonstration. BLE: I took it as a metaphor for a kind of movement of disappearance. Not to be fixated by the look. For me, in the Matrix, a kind of withdrawing/contracting (rétirance) before the light of consciousness leads to meeting with an unknown other. Is there an interiority that is not the passage of the infinitely exterior? What would Eurydice say? Can the subject-woman have a privileged access to the feminine? EL: I think that the heart of the heart, the deepest of the feminine is dying in giving life, in bringing life into the world. I am not emphasizing dying, but, on the contrary, future.51 The feminine signifies a situation of subject/other that is not presumed to lie in the ‘après-coup’, the aftereffect of phallic, Oedipal narratives where the feminine is the blank all from which the subject distinguishes himself by separations that culminate in the castration that recasts them all as sexuating cuts and splits. For Levinas the feminine is that principle in which the future is imagined as the contemplation of responsibility towards an other in your eventual absence.

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Woman is the category of the future, the ecstasy of the future. It is that human possibility which consists in saying that the life of another human being is more important than my own, that the Other comes before me, that the value of the Other is asserted before my own. In the future, there is what might happen to me. And there is also my death.52 As usual these statements need to be read with considerable precaution and Levinas’ interlocutor, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, draws out from the philosopher’s suggestion the possibility of imagining ‘the feminine as a symbolic principle of creation, an ethical space…Where are we going to look for the feminine, if not in the relationship to the unknown aspects of the other, or in the relation to the other unknown because of its place in space and time?’53 What possible relation could we then imagine between the realms of representation and signification and this concept of the feminine as a principle of a sexual difference from itself—a subjectivising organisation of subjectivity’s relations to its others that is unassimilable to the model of subjectivity defined by castration, the cut, the division, the 0/1? If, as Levinas suggests the feminine holds up to us the possibility of ‘that difference […] by which it is affirmed that without me the world has a meaning,’ will we have to search both beyond representation (Vermeer: pure sublimation of Woman as Beauty) and beyond abstraction, in some new kind of aesthetic practice? In this, the beginning of history, the moment of the unfulfilled and continuous avant-garde we can finally pose the question: what access might women have creatively, through the aesthetic, to the feminine forecluded by a phallic Symbolic? How would we and our societies be changed by such realignment? What would the mechanisms of such change, such work be if not what Julia Kristeva’s Marxist semanalysis names ‘aesthetic practices’? Can her theorisations even let us imagine these questions? One of the few places where women’s specific psychic condition and cultural texts are considered by Julia Kristeva is the book Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, where Kristeva provides some case studies of feminine melancholia and writes about Marguérite Duras. Depression, abjection/horror, love form the threesome of affects, which were the focus of Kristeva’s related studies in the 1980s. The problematic of femininity is explored in all three; but here the stakes are revealed for the task for women to manage to become non-suicidal, non-rigid subjects seems enormous. Julia Kristeva writes: For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to being autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine qua non condition of our individuation, provided that it take place under optimal circumstances and can be eroticised—whether the lost object is recovered as erotic object (male hetero- and female homosexual) or it is transposed by means of an unbelievable symbolic effort, the advent of which one can only admire which eroticises the other, or transforms cultural objects into a ‘sublime’ erotic object.54 If none of these are achieved, a state akin to depression develops in which the maternal object is introjected and the matricidal drive is turned against the subject—putting the self to death instead of the imaginary mother. Defence against this produces an image of the mother as death-bearing. She is then attacked, harassed, represented. But, argues Kristeva, women cannot effect that inversion so easily because of a specular identification with the mother as well as an introjection of the maternal body as the basis of an imaginary body schema of female sexuality and desire. So the hatred is locked up inside, creating no violence but ‘an implosive mood that kills me slowly and secretly, through bouts of sadness, permanent bitterness, silence, and maybe sleeping pills that I take in smaller or greater quantities in the dark hope of meeting…’55

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Depression must surely be then the other face of sublimation for women; it is its predestined failure and within the phallic regime our continuing predicament. Manic defences against depression produce all sorts of signs of active life and social or intellectual productivity but they leave a problem: the inability to lose the maternal Thing, the preference at heart for the corpse locked inside her, the possession of sadness itself. Kelly Oliver explains this: For women matricide does not ward off suicide. For women matricide is a form of suicide. A woman cannot properly mourn the lost object. She cannot get rid of the maternal body. Kristeva woefully claims that she carries the maternal Thing locked like a corpse in the crypt of her psyche. Thus what is at stake in the loss of the object is the loss of herself, the loss of desire. ‘It is a question of becoming lack.’56 Julia Kristeva offers a pathway out of this predicament: analysis which she names a counterdepressant by revealing the secret ‘of the depressive course that causes the melancholy person to live with death’. It allows loss to become signifiable as well as erotogenic. To achieve this women must be allowed symbolically as well as literally access to the homosexual facet, the access to the original loves and pleasures so that they be imagined as lost, refound in objects that can supply the space of representation to the Thing. Yet within the Freudian-Lacanian paradigm as we inherit it through Julia Kristeva, the price for the feminine subject is still a kind of hysteria. She either remains melancholic in her refusal to lose the maternal Thing or must become hysterical by identification with the masculine process of loss which alone allows the sublimation of the mother and access to a creativity that is built upon that substitution. There where she once was, comes the sublimated representation; as Sigrid Weigel writes, the myth of the creative subject is structurally masculine because it has always been defined through the ‘exploitation and killing of the feminine’.57 A Sublimation from the Feminine: A Matrixial Shift Having dared to follow Kristeva in her heresy in order to take seriously what, in the current phallocentric arrangements of subjectivity, impedes women’s access to the feminine that is the very condition of revolution and change, we can return with a quite different formulation about what it might mean to become a woman and an artist, what relations might be possible between creativity and the non-Oedipal feminine, what the revolution in aesthetic practices might bring inside the visible. Far from trying to find an equivalent to Vermeer to counter the idealised figuration of masculine self gratification which is Beauty in art history, I want to risk for a moment, accepting the heretical idea that such is the nature of the patriarchy, the phallocentric order, that women’s relation to the feminine as the organising object for creativity has been structurally blocked by the melancholic’s problematic of the retained dead mother or of the overwhelmingly present mother of semi-religious identification. Thus woman is offered melancholic a-symbolia or idealising narcissistic regression as the grounds for her aesthetic inscriptions and we have seen these played out in art by women in the feminist era. It is necessary to rid feminism of the need to be driven by the refound object—old mistresses—and to focus instead on the post-religious, the avant-garde potentiality created precisely by feminism as a social movement and a theoretical revolution at the psycho-symbolic level that makes possible the re-finding of a different difference, a sexual difference from the feminine, and thus a shifted relation of the feminine to women as creative subjects. That project can only make sense if we see it in the terms proposed by Julia Kristeva, following Lacan, that Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger resumes, with a difference: that the feminine is not synonymous with women. What it is, is as still unknown to women as it

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Figure 3. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Autist Work 1, 1993.

is to the core mystery for patriarchy. But it can be glimpsed peeping through the screen of the blank page, if we begin to read aesthetic practices made by women for inscriptions in/of and from the feminine, rather than for representations of the phallocentric encoding of its negated, sublimated maternal facets. Melancholia, femininity and sublimation thus require a theorisation beyond the phallus, which has been intimated in a painting practice that, like that of Vermeer or Bellini, is lodged in both the historical semiotics and the psychic histories of its moment: after Auschwitz, after the pervasive trauma of loss, death and unrecovered memory. I want to conclude with the juxtaposition of a theoretical elaboration and an aesthetic practice in which the relations between the feminine, loss and the sublime are otherwise imagined and thought. The key concept is that of the Matrix, which is, like the Phallus, a signifier, that enlarges and shifts the Symbolic in alignment with a matrixial Imaginary to allow the forecluded unsignified feminine into signification and thus into thought and affect.

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Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger writes: In the phallic stratum, sublimation keeps Woman in a love relationship at the price of her constitution at the level of the Thing. But in a matrixial stratum, the passageway back and forth between exterior and interior, between Thing and Other, is open; the matrixial subjectivity—situated at the borderlines —is a prisoner of neither one. The Woman is both Subject and Other on the borderline of the Thing. The feminine non-equivalence marks the emergence of relations-without-relating between the sexes. Woman’s incarnation in the art work is metramorphic.58 The Matrix is not a symbol of women, but a signifier for a feminine dimension of plurality and the difference of the several in a joint or shared subjectivity. A matrixial stratum of subjectivisation allows for a network of relations-without-relating leading to an awareness-becoming-recognition of presence in absence, while the phallic stratum of subjectivisation allows for distinct alternations between subject and Other, relations and non-relations, presence and absence.59 Such a model of ‘subjective recordings in joint borderspaces’ with recurrent redistributions at the borderlinks based on the real of, and the fantasies incited by, some very late prenatal moments allows us radically to rethink all the constitutive elements of typical psychoanalytical narratives and categories including those of sublimation and melancholia at whose heart psychoanalysis places the loss of the maternal. In his late seminars, Lacan dared to imagine the ‘infant’s relating to the mother’s body as an interior/exterior envelope’, ‘a lost enveloping sphere of continuity’ between the two. The theory of the Matrix gleans these theoretical seeds to cultivate their insights in a feminist theory that suggests that we can otherwise imagine and inscribe both the jointness and the inevitable losses within which subjectivity is constituted, but not through the paradigm of castration, substitution and thus sublimation. Lacan’s later theory posited the objet a as the ‘borderline mental inscription of the residues of the separation from the partial object’ of our archaic beginnings as a subject. It is the verso to the recto that is the subject and must disappear for the subject to be. The phallic objet a is marked as a loss of the object related to an organ (mother’s breast, voice, gaze) by way of castration, the paradigm of absence/presence. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger proposes a matrixial objet a, ‘not based on the loss of the object related to the organ by way of castration, but on a loss by way of the transformations of the relations-without-relating into either relations or non-relations’.60 Thus from the matrixial point of view, ‘being together with the unknown precedes being alone, and therefore, as a sexual difference pertaining to the feminine, the matrixial object is a figure of borderline absence.’61 Links are lost, refound, circulated or shared. A matrixial encounter affecting instances of space-time-body in a minimal diffuse fashion engenders joint (even though not the same) traumas and phantasies which seep into higher psychic levels. Thus, expelled from the symbolic, a stain in the imaginary, and a ‘hole’ in the real, the matrix, as well as Woman, is not destined or doomed to foreclosure. Pre-Oedipal and non-Oedipal sublimation of the matrixial co-emergence and of the feminine-becoming-maternal instances participate in ‘becoming woman’ for both masculine and feminine subjects.62 Another sublimation conceived from the feminine suggests a totally different structure of sublimation which is not about socio-cultural adaptation that allows the loss of the maternal to be signified in art as Beauty. Going

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by way of Kant’s other concept, the Sublime, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger draws out another aspect: ‘objectidealisation linked to the drives…where no imaginary representation can correspond to ideas and visible representation in art can only hint at the unrepresentable’. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s prolonged artistic encounter with the traces of feminine subjects encountering death in the hell of fascist genocide return us to the issues of repetition, art and solace that I first introduced in the discussion of Vermeer’s Woman with a Balance. In this work of trauerarbeit, the viewer, with the painter whose presence is evoked by the rhythm of the brushstrokes that repeatedly touch the transient moment of passage between presence and absence, here and there, now and then, I and non-I, life and death, is a witness to an event without a witness, who now becomes a witness without an event.63 The image rephrases a photograph whose original conditions of existence would make us its viewers both witness and colluder in the genocidal gaze of the murderers.64 The image—index of a lost moment before a death—is passed through a photocopier whose photocopic dust, evoking the Jewish ashes of this catastrophe, almost traces the loss that is, and is represented in, the photograph. The anguish of loss is not in the image itself, but in the practice of its restaged encounter where to look is to feel, to become unable to bear the trauma that, none the less, is transmitted to a viewer through the aesthetic process of metramorphic painting. The charged affect of the painting, in which modernist colour is allowed now to carry its subjectivising freight with subtle references knowingly included to Rothko and to Raphael, works at the borderspace between the coming into and fading out of visibility that produces what Christine BuciGlucksman has named ‘images of absence’. Not the uncanny blankness of the blank page nor the sublime realisation of Vermeer, this practice creates an unforeseen aesthetic experience dissolving this binary. Traces, then, a theatre of memory, where images of words and images of things intersect in the pure disappearance of the visual. To the point where non-places and borderline situations replace the classical ‘places’ of remembrance. Copying, effacing, veiling, covering by layers and superimposing, emptying and suspending—the whole art of quivering that inhabits Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s work ends up by creating what I would call images of absence, distributed by the intentional haphazardness of signs.65 Christine Buci-Glucksman suggests that this painting becomes a lure, making us confront loss and pain, while puzzling about love that is, none the less, incited in relation to the unknown and unknowable other. Beyond the Lacanian knot of the phallocentric unconscious: Woman, Other, Thing, this painting touches the Thing through an annulled gaze. This gaze is not nothing, even if it shatters our amnesia into images of absence. Could this annulled, unfinished, pre-human gaze be the gaze of projection-disjunctions of image-making from a lost, forgotten almost unattainable world? This place, this loss, this destitution of a Being-in-distress, Infans or lost, leads us back to the ‘I -non-I’ of which Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger speaks in her writings. Constitutive heteronomy of the intimate-anonymous, heteronomy of memory itself, where the material is mourning for the thing.66 Thus from the aesthetic practice hinged between melancholia and sublimation—between sadness and creativity can be derived a theorisation that pushes beyond the phallic blockage that Julia Kristeva’s work so intensely reiterates. As feminine subjects, we twist and turn to adjust and negotiate the confusing pathways phallocentrism offers us. From the moment of modernism in which Joan Riviere, in the 1920s, diagnosed the travail of the woman intellectual and her defence in the masquerade as she tried to negotiate her creative

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Figure 4. Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Autist Work 7, 1993/4.

agency and rivalry, to the high point of structuralism in the 1970s when Julia Kristeva aligned semiotics and psychoanalysis to identify the negativity of femininity and its inaccessibility for women, to the 1990s, when Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger daringly pursues grains of late Lacanian thought through to a radical theorization of the feminine, the twentieth century provides a long history of feminist thought as revolution in just the careful and necessary terms of Julia Kristeva’s most recent work on ‘la révolte’. It is in the necessity of acknowledging a genealogy of feminist thought, that I have wanted to work through and with her enormous intellectual contribution to feminism to its limits, and to a beyond that is, logically, to be found in that overdetermined covenant between the aesthetic practice of ‘painting after painting’ in ‘history after history’ and post-Freudian, post-Lacanian psychoanalysis, where aesthetics, ethics and politics convene.67 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s theories and practice perceive a matrixial shift in sublimation that can be quoted as a conclusion, and in anticipation of part of a future issue of parallax:

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The art-work extricates the trauma of the matrixial other out of “pure absence” or “pure sensibility”, out of its timelessness into lines of time, and the effect of beauty is to allow wit(h)nessing with nonvisible events of encounter to emerge inside the field of vision and affect you.68 Notes 1 Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, The Kristeva Reader, Toril Moi (ed.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p.208. 2 Julia Kristeva, ‘La femme, ce n’est jamais ça’, in New French Feminisms, Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (ed. and trans.) (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981 (Tel Quel, 1974)), p.137. 3 Izak Dinesen [Karen Blixen], ‘The Blank Page’, Last Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986 (1957)), p. 104. The original Danish writes blank as unwritten. 4 Susan Gubar, ‘“The Blank Page” and Issues of Female Creativity’, in New Feminist Criticism, Elaine Showalter (ed.) (London: Virago Press, 1986), p.292–313. 5 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, ‘Matrix and Metramorphosis’, Differences 4/3 (1992) and The Matrixial Gaze (Leeds: Feminist Arts and Histories Network at the University of Leeds, 1995). 6 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Honor: An Essay on Abjection, Louis Roudiez (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 7 See Sigmund Freud ‘On the Taboo of Virginity’, On Sexuality (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), pp.261– 83; Mary Jacobus, ‘Judith, Holofernes, and the Phallic Woman’, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (London: Methuen, 1987), pp.110–36. 8 Kelly Oliver, ‘The Abject Mother’, Reading Kristeva Unravelling the Double Bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p.61. Here Freud’s thesis on the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love is rearticulated via a developed analytical framework. 9 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60, Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.) (London, Tavistock and Routledge, 1992), p.112. 10 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p.113. 11 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p.112. 12 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p.118. 13 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p.118. 14 Again I am drawing on the theorizations of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, see ‘With-in-Visible Screen’, in Inside the Visible, Catherine de Zegher (ed.) (Boston: MIT Press, 1996). 15 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p.118. 16 ‘If the pleasure regulates human speculation with the law of the lure right through the immense discourse that isn’t to simply made up of what it articulates but also of its action—insofar as it is dominated by that search which leads it to find things in signifiers—how then can the relations of man to the signifier to the extent he can manipulate it, put him in relationship with an object that represents the Thing? We thus come to the question of what a man does when he makes a signifier.’ Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p.119. 17 Julia Kristeva, ‘Giotto’s Joy’, Desire in Language Leon Roudiez (ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p.225. 18 Kristeva, ‘Giotto’s Joy’, p.225. 19 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Sexuality in the Field of Vision’, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso Books, 1986), p.228. 20 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, pp. 110–11. 21 Kristeva, ‘Giotto’s Joy’, p.219. 22 Kristeva, ‘Giotto’s Joy’, p.232. 23 Nanette Salomon, ‘From Sexuality to Civility: Vermeer’s Women,’ in Vermeer Studies, Ivan Gaskell (ed.) (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1998) and ‘Vermeer’s Women: Changing Paradigms in Mid-Career,’ in The Practice of Cultural Analysis, Mieke Bal (ed.) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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24 Kristeva, Giotto’s Joy’, p.234. 25 Arthur Wheelock, Johannes Vermeer (Zwolle: Waanders Publishers, 1996), p.154. 26 Mieke Bal, Reading Rembrandt: Beyond the Word Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 27 Nanette Salomon, ‘Vermeer and the Balance of Destiny’, in Essays in Northern European Art Presented to Egbert Haverkamp-Begeman on his Sixtieth Birthday (Doornspijk, 1983), pp.216–21. 28 Wheelock, Johannes Vermeer, p.144. 29 Mary Jacobus, ‘Dora and the Pregnant Madonna’, Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism (London: Methuen, 1986), p.147. 30 Jacobus, ‘Dora and the Pregnant Madonna’, p.147. 31 Jacobus, ‘Dora and the Pregnant Madonna’, p.147. 32 This is less true in the later 1990s as Julia Kristeva has written about Marguérite Duras and is working on a series of studies of women intellectuals in the twentieth century. But that it has taken so long serves only to confirm the justness of her analysis of the difficulties of finding the frameworks and terms within which to be able to articulate our understanding of femininity, intellectuality and creativity. 33 Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Luce Irigaray, ‘Plato’s Hystera’, Speculum of the Other Woman, G.Gill (trans.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 34 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, ‘Woman-OtherThing’, Matrixial Borderlines (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1992). 35 Carol Duncan, ‘The MoMA’s Hot Momas’, in Aesthetics and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 189–210. 36 Julia Kristeva, ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’, The Kristeva Reader, Toril Moi (ed.) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p.297. 37 Kristeva, ‘A New Type of Intellectual’, pp.297–98. 38 Griselda Pollock, Killing Men and Dying Women, in Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). 39 The suggestion of the artist as hysteric derives from Clare Pajaczkowska’s reading of Guy Rosalato’s work Essais sur le Symbolique (Paris: Gallimard, 1969) in her ‘Structure and Pleasure,’ Block 9 (1983) (reprinted in The Block Reader in Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1996)). ‘If authorship means paternity, being “an artist” is a compromise identity forged by the adult ego as a way of mediating his fantasy of being a woman and of creating, and “art” is a male hysteria institutionalised and contained within social structures of representation’, p. 43. 40 Kristeva, ‘A New Type of Intellectual’, p.298. 41 Kristeva, ‘A New Type of Intellectual’, p.298. 42 Kristeva, ‘A New Type of Intellectual’, p.299. 43 Julia Kristeva, ‘Signifying Practice and Mode of Production’, Geoffrey Nowell Smith (trans.), Edinburgh Magazine, 1 (1976), p.65. 44 Kristeva, ‘Signifying Practice and Mode of Production’, p.65. 45 Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 (2nd edition)). 46 Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics, Winifred Woodhull (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 47 Kristeva, ‘Signifying Practice and Mode of Production’, p.66. 48 Kristeva, ‘Signifying Practice and Mode of Production’, p.66. 49 See Griselda Pollock, Mary Cassatt—Painter of Modern Women (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998) and my Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999). 50 Kristeva, ‘Signifying Practice and Mode of Production’, p.67.

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51 Time is the Breath of the Spirit: Emmanuel Levinas in conversation with Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1993), p.11. 52 Levinas and Lichtenberg Ettinger, Time is the Breath of the Spirit, p.11. 53 Time is the Breath of the Spirit, p.11. 54 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Leon Roudiez (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p.28. 55 Kristeva, Black Sun, p.29. 56 Oliver, Reading Kristeva, p.63. 57 Sigrid Weigel, Topographie der Geschlechter (1990), cited by Rosi Huhn, ‘Moving Omissions and Hollow Spots into the Field of Vision’, in Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Matrix-Borderlines (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1993), p.9. 58 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Matrix: A Shift Beyond the Phallus (first given as a lecture at The Point of Theory, conference at the Belle van Zuylen Institute of the University of Amsterdam, 1993) (Paris: BLE Atelier, 1993 (limited edition)), p.71. 59 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Matrix, p.71. 60 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Matrix, p.61. 61 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Matrix, p.62. 62 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Matrix, p.62. 63 The formulation of an event without a witness is from Dori Laub, ‘An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival’, in Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge,1992). Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger has shifted this in her work to suggest that as gleaners of history after ‘the event’, we are witnesses without the event. 64 I have developed this argument in my essay, ‘Abandoned at the Mouth of Hell: Painting as Second Look which Does not Kill’, in Doctor and Patient/Memory and Amnesia, Marketta Seppälä (ed.) (Pori, Finland: Taidemuseo, 1997). 65 Christine Buci-Glucksman, ‘Images of Absence’, in Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger Matrixial Borderline, Les Cahiers des Regards, 5/13 (1993). 66 Buci-Glucksman, ‘Images of Absence’, p.16. For a fuller analysis of this gaze, see Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, The Matrixial Gaze (Leeds: Feminist Arts and Histories Network Press, c/o Department of Fine Art, 1995). 67 These terms developed in my paper ‘Gleaning in History’, in Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings, Griselda Pollock (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1996) are part of an analysis of the tactical significance of a return to painting after modernism in the light of a historical plane that is ‘after Auschwitz’ which catastrophically transformed the possibilities of the representation of the body and landscape in Western art. 68 Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, ‘Transgressing with-in-to the feminine’, paper presented to the symposium, Leonardo’s Glimlach (Leonardo’s Smile), University of Ghent, 16 December 1997, to appear as ‘Traumatic Wit (h)ness-Thing and Matrixial Co/in Habit(u)ation’, parallax, 10–5/1 (January 1999).

Griselda Pollock is Professor of the Social and Critical Histories of Art, and Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She has recently edited Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings (Routledge, 1996) and, with Fred Orton, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester University Press, 1996). The appearance of Mary Cassatt—Painter of Modern Women (Thames and Hudson,. 1998) and Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (Routledge, 1999) are imminent.

parallax, 1998, vol. 4, no. 3, 119–133

Transcendence, Fixation and Belief in the Vicissitudes of the Imaginary John Lechte

This is a story, inspired by Julia Kristeva,1 of the trials of the Imaginary in the age of the spectacle. Of course, whether we are, or are not, in an age of the spectacle is a matter of debate. The assumption for the moment is that the spectacle reigns supreme. And, in light of this, we are concerned to plot the vicissitudes of the Imaginary as it does unequal battle with the uncanniest of adversaries. After investigating aspects of the relationship between narcissism and the Imaginary, we will return to Husserl and the notion of the transcendental Ego—the same transcendental Ego in relation to which Julia Kristeva initially developed her concept of the semiotic. Now we shall see that a certain kind of transcendence (that established by the phenomenological epoché) maybe necessary if the Imaginary is to be essential and more than a mode of the contingent self. We shall also see that the modern, mathematical theory of infinity completes our understanding of the Imaginary by granting it theoretical substance. For, despite what common sense says on the matter, the infinite is not an endless, open-ended empirical phenomenon, but a transcendental limit, and even the basis of a certain kind of belief. The Ghost of the Father, the Society of the Spectacle—Death of the Mother In Julia Kristeva’s New Maladies of the Soul, Didier’s Imaginary has broken down.2 Didier makes works of art of a high order, but he cannot interpret what he has done; or rather, he can produce any number of interpretations, but they do not ‘mean’ anything to him: he cannot put himself into his work, nor can he feel a strong connection with it as an artist. With what can we compare this breakdown? Might it be compared to Diderot’s stage actor who can imitate feelings, but who himself has no feelings.3 Here is an actor who can assume a variety of personas but who has no identity of his own, who is a pure spectacle: masks all the way down. It is in this sense of lacking a stable self—an imaginary self—that Didier is entirely dead as an author: he could well be the ‘death of the author’ personified. And the Dead Author, we know, gives birth to the ‘Real Reader […] who understands that the secret of a text is its emptiness’.4 Didier, then, seems to embody the discovery of the moment, namely, that there is (only) infinite semiosis. The death of the author, in short, gives rise to the ‘birth’ of (empty) textuality.

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Did any of us know that this death was also the death of the Imaginary? Did we know that in being simultaneously avant-garde and an effect of language—in opposing the ‘American way of life’ as emblematised by a certain dominance of the ego and by valorising the notion of the unconscious as ‘structured like a language’—we would, at the same time, end up being complicit in another kind of murder: the murder of the mother. Put another way: we may also have witnessed the death of Narcissus. Sociologically, Kristeva speaks of Didier (but, today, he is all of us!) as an actor in, and as a consumer of, the ‘society of the spectacle’.5 The society of the spectacle kills the Imaginary. Kristeva is sure of this. With the spectacle, we all risk being dead as authors of our own fantasies as these are objectified in art, as we also risk becoming perpetual actors unable to participate in our own or others’ feelings. In short, we are no longer assured of an innocent, naive, loving engagement with life. The dead Father comes back to haunt our every night and day. The job of the Father, after all, is to haunt us, to keep us from our narcissistic sleep where images and fantasies become (equivalent to) reality. Hamlet: he who never sleeps in the Imaginary (until he goes mad); he who is an insomniac, always wakened by the Symbolic, as this (unanswerable) question ceaselessly affirms: ‘To be, or not to be: that is the question…’ How incredibly heedful must one be to pose such a question? And again: ‘To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub…’ [Act III Scene 1] Hamlet: he who cannot dream. For, despite appearances, the return of the Father is no nightmare. It is the return of the Symbolic in its ghostly form—a return which ensures that, at best, we can sleep but fitfully…in a quasi-paranoid mode: What was that? Did you hear a movement? Is there someone there? Isn’t that a light at the end of the passage? Someone reading, perhaps? Who can say? Who can be sure about anything…? Got to keep alert, on watch, ever ready. Now we are all guided by the spectacle, and by the spectacle of the spectacle…Repetition is the secret law. Writing is the secret script. There is ‘x’. We all wear masks. Beneath the mask, another mask…only masks, masks hiding a secret, always alluded to, but never revealed. Ophelia is dead, and it will be so with Gertrude soon. They can never come back to haunt us. There are no female ghosts. Are we, then, more or less Hamlets in modern guise? Was Hamlet at the origin of modernity because he inaugurated an analytic mode that is far-reaching in its potential consequences? No one can be sure—and there’s the rub! The profound uncertainty. Maybe the basis of an answer emerges in Kristeva’s commentary on language and borderline states where she takes over the terms ‘actor’ and ‘impresario’ from the early semanticist, Michel Bréal,6 in order to describe the subject’s condition in language. As actors we are (relatively) naive speakers/writers of language; we are not aware of acting as such; we are not (usually) Diderot’s stage-actor; we are instead engaged in action. As impresarios, we are, by contrast, potential observers and analysts of the linguistic process itself. The difference between actor and impresario is equivalent to a split in the subject, one roughly equivalent to the difference between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. As a borderline case, Hamlet slides between the two positions. Or rather, Hamlet slides into the position of actor in his ensuing madness, a madness he put everything into resisting. Lucid Hamlet, therefore, is the impresario, the linguist who is in fact a meta-linguist. Mad Hamlet is the actor, the one who becomes so immersed in the scene (of language) that he is unable to struggle back to assume the ‘sanity’ of the impresario. What does this imply if not that the Symbolic can never be a place of madness? The father as dead is thus (necessarily) quite comprehensible; it is the belief that the father is alive that is the worry (although this is the condition of the Imaginary). Is this not to say, though, that the Symbolic can kill the Imaginary?—that the (dead) Father kills the Mother?—that Hamlet really wants Queen Gertrude, his mother, dead? As textual analysts, how can we deny it? For we, too, as readers/critics, are impresarios—which is to say that our place is the same as that of the Hamlet who is yet to go mad. It could be said, too, in light of what we shall later explore in Husserl, that the impresario position is one of (a kind of) transcendence.

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Seen in this light, is it possible that the ‘society of the spectacle’ is borne along by the text—privileged vehicle of the Symbolic? The ‘scorched earth’ tenor of parts of the first chapter of Kristeva’s Sens et nonsens de la révolte, seems to support the notion. For there it is said that a new venture is to be introduced, [a] venture which consists in going beyond the notion of text [Kristeva’s emphasis], the elaboration of which I have contributed to with so many others and which has become a kind of dogma in the best French universities, without speaking of those in the United States and others still more exotic.7 From this perspective, we are all haunted by the ‘society of the spectacle’, haunted by a structuralist past which has turned out to be the spectacle’s greatest fillip. The spectacle and an all-consuming Symbolic as the Code go hand in hand. The terrible conclusion drawn from all this is that the spectacle/Symbolic milks us of any affect, leaves us cold (like death), in the position of the depressive who perceives the arbitrariness of language as absurd, and who lives language as essentially arbitrary: ‘The depressed speak of nothing, they have nothing to speak of: glued to the Thing (Res), they are without objects. That total and unsignifiable Thing is insignificant—it is a mere Nothing, their Nothing, Death’.8 Certainly, a happy identification with a Father will overcome depression; but it has to be an identification with an ‘imaginary father’—the father who loves as well as interdicts, the one who overflows with, and is the focus of, affect— of agapê love—the one who comes to us before we know, and who is not an empty and life-less shell, the basis of the arbitrary status of the sign: death of the Imaginary. Truly to appreciate what is at stake here, we must now re-visit Narcissus and his reflection in order to established what is lost when the Symbolic as the spectacle rules. Narcissus—Fixated Narcissus In the story, Narcissus is supposed to be in love with himself. Narcissus: he who takes himself as a love object. Narcissus: the one who is fixated on the reflection because, at one level, this reflection is transparent. Narcissus: a being deceived by the image before him—these are the traits of the figure who brings the Imaginary into view. As commentators often remind us,9 the (perceived) deception in narcissism has been a key element in its condemnation. It is almost as if the narcissism of Narcissus were not quite as heinous as the deceiving image. Narcissus, we imagine, took that image for a living entity, and it failed him. It is not that, in the history of Western morality, Narcissus should have known that the image was only an image (of himself to boot), but that the image is deceptive, geared to lead astray those who become caught in its web. And we can remind ourselves that in the society of the spectacle as outlined by Guy Debord, the spectacle is supposed to be ‘a social relation among people mediated by images’.10 These are images which have exchange value but no use value. Paradoxically, perhaps, nobody really consumes images: communication never really takes place. The spectacle is equivalent to a great emptiness. We must look again at the figure before the pool if the logic of the situation and its implications would yet become apparent, implications which will highlight the youth’s emblematic status as revealer of the condition of the Imaginary in this fin de siècle. Indeed, it is more than likely that Narcissus is the one who is unable to reach the position of impresario. Narcissus is before the reflection, which is an exemplar of an indexical sign. Index, indeed, provides a way of grasping the image as the primary vehicle of the Imaginary. Like a shadow, a reflection is attached to its referent. Narcissus, however, cannot grasp this. For him, the reflection is autonomous, attached to nothing but its own being, something which has led psychoanalysts and philosophers to raise the question of whether or not Narcissus’s demeanour is pathological. And this because the tragic figure is entirely locked

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up in his own projection without any insight into the fact. Narcissus is thus quite unable to treat the reflection as a trompe-l’oeil. Confronted by the latter, the impresario subject (not fixated) knows that the very realism of the image is a sign of its representational status. Unable to assume this ambivalence—or, for that matter, any kind of ambivalence—Narcissus instead embraces the reality of himself which he takes to be a real other. Realism and otherness now to go together: as myself, I am nothing (I do not even know that ‘I’ exists); only the other is real. If Narcissus is effectively unable to move out of the mirror-stage and is locked in the putative madness of the Imaginary, how can he be the Imaginary’s exemplary figure? Surely Narcissus shows us the danger of living exclusively in the Imaginary. Or, if we were to acknowledge that, despite its limitations, the Imaginary is necessary, it is, nevertheless, only by moving beyond it that we can fully appreciate its qualities. The fixated ego must be transcended and be open to continual transcendence. We must arrive at the impresario’s position. Two things should be noted here. Firstly, as the Imaginary in psychoanalysis is constituted prior to reason and the use of language, it can, in a sense, only be transcended; it cannot be modified from within. This is clear when we recall that, for Lacan, the Imaginary emerges, as an imago—in animal as well as in human experience—and is the foundation of the masquerade in both animal and human life. And even in Kristeva’s less dogmatic approach, the Imaginary is linked inexorably to the ‘father of individual pre-history’—as Freud termed it—or to the Imaginary Father, as Kristeva prefers. Modelled on agapê love, this figure comes before the formation of the subject-ego (unlike Lacan, Kristeva does not make a firm distinction between the subject and the ego). Like the imago in Lacan’s theory, the Imaginary Father is a formative element, constitutive of, rather than constituted by, the ego- self. Like the imago, too, the Imaginary Father is an entity which one can only grow out of, or transcend; it cannot, under normal circumstances, be circumvented. In a way, agapê love and the imago make up, according to psychoanalysis, the ‘dumb’ stage of human development. Moreover, in considering the notion of identification, Kristeva speaks of an experience which is not a simple comparison, but which is formative of the subject: I am not saying that the subject models him- or herself on the other, which would be a characteristic of the formal plastic uncertainty of mere comparison. On the contrary, transferred to the Other, in identification, I becomes One with the Other throughout the whole range of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real.11 Hence, in conjunction with the imago and agapê, identification bridges the gap between the subject and its other, so that the subject becomes its other. Although the Imaginary as we have outlined is characterised by a reduction of the gap between a subject and its other—a reduction often thought to be made possible by a charge of affect—it is still open to debate as to whether this is a sufficient basis for understanding the Imaginary. Indeed, to reiterate the point made above in a slightly different way, the series of terms that emerge in relation to the Imaginary—namely, delirium, conviction, certainty, imago, agapê, identification, and affect—all present the spectre of an imprisonment in the circumscribed world of a fixated ego.12 Delirium becomes a kind of amalgam of the Symbolic and the semiotic; for although it brings distortions with it, it also imitates the desire present in every search for knowledge. While one must acknowledge that the Imaginary cannot be fully understood outside the formative aspect of the ego, to leave things there, on the other hand, is also inadequate.

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‘Line of Flight’ Against Fixation One of the strengths of the work of Deleuze and Guattari, as far as their treatment of psychoanalytic themes is concerned, is the imaginary ‘line of flight’ that leads away from an Imaginary as essentially the seat of fixations. Through the ‘line of flight’, the Imaginary becomes a creative force which breaks free of the alternative: imaginary fixation or symbolic alienation. Oppositions make points. Music consists entirely of lines, of continual movements which change through modulation, not by jumping from one point to another. Interestingly, neither Freud nor Lacan were musically inclined. The Kristevan semiotic, as a musicalisation of language, thus links up with this line of flight. In fact, it is interesting that her view of the Imaginary (as with the Imaginary Father) as an internalised, pre-verbal entity leading to a certain captivation, emerges as a way of introducing a symbolic dimension into the Imaginary, where previously there had been only semiotic motility. The problem lies in becoming caught in the fixed alternative of: the Symbolic or the Imaginary. The Imaginary, as musical, opens the way of escape from this straight jacket. As rhythm, the affective charge sets the Imaginary in movement. Narcissism as a fixation thus ceases to be the paradigm instance of the Imaginary, and the voice of Echo, as a refrain, as music in its repetition, becomes a real possibility for a line of flight. The Imaginary, then, is this combination of fixation and flight. Of course, the ‘line of flight’ is also a settling of scores with Oedipus and with the Lacanian Symbolic. It is thus not as open as it might be to an Imaginary which is neither symbolic nor imaginary in the psychoanalytic sense. Furthermore, the essential does not sit easily in the vocabulary of the authors of A Thousand Plateaus.13 And this is precisely what interests us here. The Essential (and the) Imaginary We are interested, then, not just in the fact that the subject-ego is fundamentally Imaginary in its constitution, but also in the question of the essence of the Imaginary—in the possibility of the question of the Imaginary being conceived as a question; this opens up the question of the way the Imaginary participates in Being. In this regard, Kristeva explains the dilemma of Narcissus by saying that the figure fixated on his image lacks a real object (the Mother?). Due to this lack, the subject fails to develop, for there can be no subject, the analyst tells us, without an object.14 The best that Narcissus can do is become his own object. But this ‘object’ is an illusory exteriority because, in fact, it is absent. It is thus a sign of madness: ‘Here, insanity comes from the absence of object’. Indeed the claim is that Narcissus is not located in the objectal or sexual dimension. He does not love youths of either sex, he loves neither men nor women. He Loves, he loves Himself—active and passive, subject and object. Actually, Narcissus is not completely without object. The object of Narcissus is psychic space; it is representation itself, fantasy. But he does not know it, and he dies.15 If he had known that he was in love with a fantasm, if he had, in effect, been able to transcend the initial period of the mirror-stage, Narcissus could have become an artist, an intellectual, or a psychoanalyst—an impresario. True narcissism derives from an encounter with the representation of a real object; this is why intellectual activity is, in a certain sense, narcissistic, as love is narcissistic. This is why, according to the psychoanalyst, we need love. The love-object is a quasi-ideal entity (image) in which we can believe; for it (seemingly) returns the love given. Everything is thus centred on the ego and its vicissitudes. Is this ego also the Imaginary? Is the ego, as an imaginary entity, the Imaginary incarnate? Psychoanalysis tells us that it is. In so doing, it turns the

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existence of the ego into the Being of the Imaginary. The Imaginary will be destroyed if the ego-subject is destroyed. The difference between two key tendencies (between Kristeva and Lacan) in psychoanalysis does not change this. While Lacan describes the Imaginary as a stage that must be transcended through the assumption of subjectivity in the Symbolic, Kristeva sees the Imaginary as an affective and narcissistic experience, as something that needs to be cultivated in the Symbolic. In effect, the Imaginary would give the Symbolic its content—its body. The later Lacan will try to give this status to the symptom. The true emptiness of the Symbolic (its non-being) is at issue in both psychoanalytic tendencies. It is simply a question of emphasis. The issue we raise, however, is whether or not the ego is the Imaginary par excellence? If the ego is the Imaginary, the question still remains as to what the Imaginary is; and if the ego is a human ego, as we have implied throughout, we need to know what the human is. In one phase of his work Lacan pushed things to the point where the subject and language were interchangeable. Thus if language is a system of signifiers, not only is the unconscious ‘structured like a language’, but the signifier ‘is what represents the subject for another signifier’, and the phallus is the signifier without a signified: the signifier of signification. The phallus, in effect, would be the ‘incarnation’ of the language system. We need to know not only the extent to which this aspect is still present in Lacan’s later work, but also, and more importantly, the extent to which we are really dealing with a non-humanist framework rather than a re-definition of the human, a redefinition, like that of the earlier Sartrian version, where man is the point of reference of all deliberations (know the human—know everything psychic and cultural). Now, perhaps, man has become ‘non-being’ (désêtre), where once he was ‘flesh and blood’. Heidegger’s concern with Being, as distinguished from beings (dasein), seems infinitely more open on this point. For to focus on Being deflects the tendency, characteristic of subjectivism, to grasp every phenomenon as the product of a given subject. Before we look again at Heidegger as a way of solidifying our notion of the Imaginary, let us return to Husserl’s notion of the transcendental Ego, in relation to which Julia Kristeva developed her theory of the semiotic. The Transcendental Ego Despite his legendary and frustrating shifts in language and meaning—shifts which can mislead the reader into thinking that Husserlian phenomenology is a pure subjective idealism—Husserl always returns to the insight that ‘consciousness taken universally must be accepted as a proper region of being’.16 Within the sphere of consciousness as the focus of eidetic (i.e. essential) analysis, ‘intentionality’ is the key aspect. Consciousness, we remind ourselves, is always consciousness of something. In the detached language of Husserl’s study—a language which, despite its inelegance, tends to repel subjectivism—intentionality is the relation between ‘noesis’ (the intentional act of thought) and its ‘noema’ (the intentional correlate of the intentional act). Although Husserl says that the noesis is to be understood as being distinct from the noema, the very force of intentionality as a notion means that the noema is always the noema of a noesis, and that, correlatively, a noesis always has its noema. Thus the principle is clear, even if Husserl’s application of it has led many to throw up their hands in frustration.17 The act of perception (noema) is thus inseparable from the ‘perceived as perceived’.18 The relation of noema to noesis is not equivalent to the relation between thought and the factual world. And this because it is always possible that the world, in a given form, does not exist. This is why the factual world is disconnected in the epoché (phenomenological reduction). What cannot be doubted, however—because it has the status of an eidetic principle—is the being of the noesis and the noema.

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With the transcendental Ego—largely taken over from Kant—Husserl strives to provide an irreducible basis for consciousness. The Ego is thus not, as it came to be for Sartre, an entity in the world and as such subject to the epoché. Rather, the Ego as such, is ‘something essentially necessary; and, as something absolutely identical throughout every actual or possible change in mental processes, it cannot in any sense be a really inherent part or moment of the mental processes themselves’.19 Let us say, in Husserl’s favour, that the transcendental Ego is the place (position) from which the question of consciousness is posed. Indeed, this is the place from which Sartre can argue that consciousness is its own transcendence.20 Or, to put it into terms invoked earlier: consciousness is its own impresario. Thus viewed, consciousness cannot become a narcissistic fixation, while yet being a basis for deepening the notion of the Imaginary. The transcendental Ego, however, may be a pure product of classical German idealist philosophy, which implies that it may simply be an empty abstraction related only to itself—a kind of transcendental correlate of the immanent ego of psychoanalysis. For her part, Kristeva has another kind of difficulty in accepting the philosophical claim of the transcendental Ego as a pure positing; and this has to do with the notion that the transcendental Ego has an object. So understood, it would form part of, and even (re)constitute, a classical ‘subject-object’ opposition: ‘Hence what we call the semiotic [le sémiotique] is not Husserlian Meaning. The latter is constituted by the bracketing (Einklamerung) of the real object so that “intentional experience” with its “intentional object [Objekt]” may be formed for the Ego’.21 The punctual Ego that is posited—the transcendental Ego at the origin of positing—is pertinent to grasping the working of language and subjectivity because it is essentially symbolic. Indeed, this is why the transcendental Ego has an object—despite Husserl’s reticence on the matter. Post-Freudian theory, Kristeva continues, is now able to make a new vista available: that of the production of the Ego itself. In effect, the transcendental Ego is not original, as Husserl believed: ‘only since Freud have we been able to raise the question not of the origin of this thesis but rather of the process of its production’.22 The punctual, positional status of the Ego, will give way to the productive flows of the Kristevan semiotic. The Ego will become ‘musicalised’, and ‘rhythmed’. But to appreciate all aspects (the negative as well as the positive) of the semiotic, we need to recall certain features of the transcendental Ego. To begin, it is not certain that the Ego has an object. While Husserl is equivocal at certain points, the force of the transcendental status of the Ego entails that there is nothing ‘beyond’ it, as would be entailed if an object were at issue. The Ego, on the contrary, can barely be theorised because it is the ground of all thinking acts: it is not the product of a specific, contingent act. ‘The phenomenological Ego’, says Husserl, ‘establishes himself as a “disinterested onlooker”, above the naïvely interested Ego’.23 This positing is thus a paradoxical positing. Indeed, Husserl writes that: ‘The pure Ego can withdraw wholly from the positing; it releases the positional correlate from its “grip” “adverting to another theme”’.24 Thus, the posited thesisEgo is, in a sense, not present in the noetic-noematic interrelation. And, certainly, the relation between noesis and noema is not at all an expression of the transcendental Ego. What cannot be denied, however, is that the transcendental Ego in itself is the paradigm instance of symbolic purity, even if certain affective experiences also arise within its purview. Kristeva wants to temper the extreme transcendentalism of the Ego with the immanence of the semiotic. Indeed, with the possible exception of Lacan’s theory of the Symbolic, psychoanalysis would be the discourse which has brought immanent human experience into the light as few others have. Thus, through psychoanalysis a knowledge of desire is revealed to be implicated in a desire for knowledge. Kristeva proceeds within this tradition and radicalises it. This means that every transcendence (impresario position) will have its immanent (actor position) dimension. Were this not so, transcendence would not mean anything. For meaning entails belief, and belief is immanent. The Imaginary is also immanent in this sense. But does immanence entail subjectivism? Does the Imaginary similarly entail subjectivism—where everything would be reduced to the tribulations of a given subject? These

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questions must always be in the background of an investigation concerned with the essential nature of the Imaginary. Is the Imaginary inevitably lodged in a humanist framework—one entailing that it be reduced to a place in the human psyche, if it is not made identical with that psyche itself ? It is quite possible that if Husserl errs too much on the side of the transcendental, aspects of psychoanalysis lean too far in the other direction, in the direction of immanence. Or, if there is an attempt to balance both sides, as there is with Kristeva’s version of psychoanalytic theory, it is easy to feel, like the border-line case, that one is always being pushed from one side to the other (from impresario to actor), unable to find psychic equilibrium. In fact, the semiotic is only meaningful as a theory of subjectivity. There is no semiotic in itself. Subjectivity, then, is the quasi-metaphysical realm of Kristevan psychoanalysis. Now, a theory of subjectivity is one thing; a theory of subjectivity as the ontological basis of thought is another. We are aiming to bring subjectivism within the scope of critical reflection. Generally speaking, if psychoanalysis is a subjectivism, it is also a humanism. As such, the human becomes the unshakeable point of reference for thought as a whole. Even the Lacanian principle that the subject as formed in and through language only gains its momentum from the insight into the nature of the ubject that it gives. We are not really any closer here to thinking the essence of language. A telling point in this regard is the way Lacan, and thus contemporary psychoanalytic theory, appropriated the linguistic terms, ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonymy’, as these were elaborated by Jakobson.25 As is well known, Lacan took these key terms in the theory of language, and then applied Jakobson’s insight to Freud’s ‘condensation’ and ‘displacement’, linking these, respectively, to metaphor and metonymy. In his middle period, Lacan also equated metaphor and metonymy with, respectively, ‘symptom’ and ‘desire’. Key concepts in the theory of language thus became the basis of a theory (albeit structuralist) of subjectivity. To avoid the fall-back into humanism—something also promoted by the productivist metaphor underpinning Kristeva’s ‘subject-in-process’—an encounter with the Heideggerian notion of Being is necessary. To arrive there, however, it is worth considering a Husserlian response to the semiotic. To do this, we need to bring the semiotic into the sphere of the epoché. The Epoché and the Semiotic If the chora as (a version of) the impossible is subject to the phenomenological reduction, that same reduction has the following important aspect: it opens up ‘the realm of pure possibility (pure imaginableness)’.26 Let us not say that the semiotic closes the door on possibility and ‘imaginableness’; but let us acknowledge that the combination of radical contingency and impossibility do not, as such, increase the chances of these flowering either. The phenomenological focus on ‘possibility’, and, in the case of Heidegger’s view of time, on the ‘future’, becomes a brilliant stroke, combining the epoché with the Imaginary, and possibility with ‘pure imaginableness’. We now see that ‘future’, ‘possibility’ and ‘imagination’ have only a limited place in the psychoanalytic edifice. Increasingly, psychoanalysis marks itself out as a social science, and thus as an area ripe for the phenomenological reduction. Consequently, we note in passing the emphasis psychoanalysis places on the past and its reconstruction—on memory and its interpretation. Psychoanalytically speaking, the ‘future’ is not a serious field of investigation. The ‘future’, the ‘possible’, the ‘imaginable’ connect with the eidos (the essential) as something universal. Or, again: ‘The eidos itself is a beheld or beholdable universal, one that is pure, “unconditioned”— that is to say: […] a universal not conditioned by any fact’.27 ‘Not conditioned’ also means: not contingent. What is ideally possible (the ideal is the possible) is possible universally. In effect, what is thinkable, imaginable, is not here determined by individual, contingent differences. Indeed, the possible is no longer the contingently, or pragmatically possible. The Imaginary itself sets the limit in this context, not the

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subjects who imagine. Here the Imaginary assumes its full, objective status and ceases to be reducible to an expression of contingent subjects, or egos. In other words, the eidos makes the Ego imaginable. One could no doubt propose that the eidetic and essential Ego is a figure that excludes difference, that it homogenises and orders thought in a certain way, and that it is therefore ‘normalising’. Such a view, however, can only be sustained if we remain attached to a finite and empirically-based view which ignores the full complexity of possibility. It is much more likely that the conclusions about the empirical ego reached inductively will be normalising. In other words, as Foucault has shown, a social science (criminology) which deals with facts and contingency can very well be normalising. In working with finitude, social science rules out possibility. Or rather, possibility can only be established pragmatically through what already exists. And existence is finite—that is, factual. Transcendentally speaking, possibility includes difference within itself. This is because difference turns possibility into the infinite. Even though Husserl at times struggles with the notion of otherness in relation to the transcendental Ego as the point of departure for phenomenology, otherness is no greater problem for this approach than is a lucid grasp of the Ego. The Ego which grasps itself as Ego, must do so transcendentally, and objectively, that is, independently of the self-contained nature of the Ego as my Ego. In short, the insight into the nature of the Ego is not an Ego position in any simple sense. Again, the key to the transcendental Ego’s relation to the other, and to difference, is the notion of possibility as infinity. We shall now look briefly at the infinite in order to clarify what is at stake here. The Infinite as the Transcendental Aspect of the Imaginary In addressing the question of the infinite we are clearly leaving behind the immediate concerns that Husserl himself had regarding the Ego. Our prime interest is in thinking the relationship between possibility and the Imaginary. A condition for fully appreciating the consequences of the infinite as understood in its modern guise is a return to elements of Georg Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers.28 The key point here is that the notion of finite numbers—or indeed, of the finite in general—can never give rise to the infinite—by definition. The issue is thus as much logical as real, if the latter term can be used without contradiction. Although common sense and the history of thought since Aristotle has held to the contrary, it is not only impossible to arrive at the end the series of finite natural numbers (1, 2, 3,…n), but no series of numbers, however large, and no series, however small, could ever give access to the infinite because the finite and the infinite are discontinuous with each other. In short, it is impossible to arrive at the infinite via the route of actual counting. Consequently, computers which work at ever greater speeds, completing billions of finite operations per second, will, in principle, never reach the infinite. As Houdebine explains, the infinite is brought into view by a break (‘coupure’), ‘a break which is, at the same time, a nomination’.29 The act of naming the infinite, is the break which gives rise to the infinite as such. As Heidegger might say: to name the infinite is to bring it into the clearing of illumination. Understood in this way, the infinite is, paradoxically, constituted through a limit. The finite, by contrast, is what remains unlimited; this is why the infinite does not dwell in it. Although Cantor treats finite numbers mathematically, it is possible to extrapolate from his theory and give things a phenomenological edge. And here we see that the finite corresponds to contingent nature as brought within the phenomenological reduction. Would the infinite then correspond to the transcendental realm? It is not possible here to pursue a mathematical approach to this question. Suffice to say that Cantor’s theory opens up a range of insights, amongst which we would cite the following: the possible and the impossible are no longer continuous with one another but constitute different logical universes; the impossible is not there simply waiting to become possible. The fundamental question to be directed at Husserlian phenomenology is not the question of whether or not this philosophy neglects the

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material world and thus becomes an idealism, but whether or not it can demonstrate that the transcendental realm is essentially discontinuous with the material, or contingent realm, even though the contingent may, in a certain sense, appear in the transcendental. Finally, the difference between the infinite and the finite echoes the difference between ‘beings’ and ‘Being’ as put forward by Heidegger. In fact this difference, Heidegger says, is difference, quintessentially speaking.30 The transcendental Ego can now be seen to belong in the realm of the infinite. Would it not, however, still be a single entity—a solus ipse, as Husserl speculated—and thus solipsistic? As the infinite, the transcendental Ego has the power of every Ego, even within its limit. This is because, drawing on Cantor’s set theory, the part is equal to the whole. To name the part, to constitute an actual limit by the name, is to make the part equal to the whole. The part is, as it were, equivalent to Cantor’s transfinite number. Without this modification, the paradoxes of the set of all sets remain inexplicable. The same issue is raised in Husserl’s consideration of the transcendental Ego and other egos. With Husserl the question turns around whether the transcendental Ego is just another ego with all other egos—in which case, Husserl’s becomes a thesis of solipsism—or whether it has the power of, or is equivalent to, the totality of all other egos. We know that Husserl’s approach claimed for the transcendental Ego a unique qualitative status, a status that is clarified by the notion of the infinite. With the Cretan liar,31 we see that without a notion of the infinite, it is impossible to explain how the speaker can be included in the population of Cretans. In fact, the statement, ‘I am a liar’, can be one in a set of statements (in which case it might be false), and it can be equivalent to the set itself (in which case it sets up the universe within which truth and falsity have meaning). In other words, there can be a statement which is a single statement, and yet a one which is equivalent to a totality, or to a universe. It is the infinite, therefore, which makes possible the impresario’s position. It is the infinite that is also equivalent to a line of flight out of a condition of complete fixation (=pathological narcissism: narcissism of death). The infinite, then, illuminates possibility and the Imaginary. Just as the infinite is not a continuation of the finite by other means, so possibility is not a continuation of the finite, contingent world. Consequently, possibility can only be, transcendentally speaking, universal. For the notion of what is possible for me is an entirely contingent issue. And we know that the possible is not the sum of what is pragmatically and contingently possible. Thus what is possible for me can never illuminate the ‘possible’ tout court. In this way, the possible is like the infinite in that it is the set of all possibilities. The infinite as the set of all possibilities is also what is imaginable. Again, the significance of this statement cannot be grasped if the imaginable is thought in terms of what is imaginable for a given, contingent being. What is imaginable is what is imaginable tout court. And the individual can only appreciate this notion via the Imaginary itself. Seen in these terms, the Imaginary is the passage that leads the subject beyond a simple, pragmatic notion of individuality. In effect, only by belonging to the transcendent Imaginary established by way of the infinite can the individual truly have a singular Imaginary, one that is equivalent to the power of the whole. Through a Husserlerian philosophical prism, the Imaginary comes to participate in the infinite. Understood in Lacanian terms, the infinite is linked almost exclusively to castration, desire, objet a, and the paternal function (the dead Father), the key elements of the Symbolic. But this to say that the infinite is essentially empty—which is to imply that the infinite is effectively, inessential.32 My argument is just the opposite. The infinite is the essential and participates in the Imaginary, before it is symbolic in any analytical sense. The Infinite as the Basis of Poetic Language For her part, Kristeva has related the infinite, as a ‘real infinity’, to poetic language. And this raises a real dilemma for the Husserlian notion of the transcendental realm, given that the validity of the transcendental

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Ego, pertains, for the phenomenologist, to whether the proposition which posits it is true or false. The true-false dichotomy, Kristeva shows, is what forms the basis of the descriptive logic of positivist science. And Husserl does not help matters by insisting that the epoché is the precondition of an eidetic science. In contra-distinction to what his thought inspires, there is still a residue of the correspondence theory of truth remaining in Husserlian phenomenology. In her early essay on poetic language,33 Kristeva shows that the logic of science, based on the correspondence theory of truth, and symbolised by 0–1, is the logic of potential, not of the ‘real’ infinity that Cantor had discovered. Here, Kristeva affirms that potential infinity—as the hypothetical collection of all finite entities—is at the basis of empirical science and its object, the very object that falls under the Husserlian epoché. By contrast, poetic language is a real infinity, located within and, at the same time, is discontinuous with, descriptive language: ‘Semiotics[…] could, in its reasoning, introduce the notion of poetic language as a real infinity: something unrepresentable’.34 Quite literally, poetic language is of a higher power than descriptive language based on the true-false logic of science, a logic that is rooted in epistemology. We could say that the poetic level is, in this sense, transcendent, opening onto ontology, and has something of the impresario’s position about it. Poetic language will be a set in which a single utterance has the power of the whole. In other words, poetic language does not accumulate statements that provide knowledge about the world; it rather functions as an event—which means that it has value in its being uttered. It can thus be simultaneously true and false. In this, it has about it the aspect of the actor’s position. A Transcendent Imaginary? In light of ideas inspired by Kristeva’s work, therefore, it becomes restrictive to view the Imaginary simply in relation to imagination and, in particular, in relation to what does, or does not, exist. For the Imaginary is not there to fill the void of a potential infinity which can never be realised. But equally, the Imaginary is not to be grasped as the domain inaugurating illusion. For illusion is tied to empirical contingency, and thus to the potential infinity of the sum of the finite (which never arrives). Rather, the Imaginary, in its own right, is closer to a ‘real’ infinity, even as it gives rise to fiction. At least this is so when fiction is grasped not only as verisimilitude, but also as an event in its own right—which means: as something transcendent. After noting Kristeva’s disquiet over the negative effect on the Imaginary of the society of the spectacle, our discussion focused on Narcissus before his pool—Narcissus entirely captivated by his own image. Were the Imaginary entirely reducible to this captivation it would be an interiority pure and simple—even if this interiority is implicated in identification. In identification, ‘I’ am the other; the other is ‘me’. Put thus, we have a psychologistic view of the Imaginary. On the other hand, the intrusion of uncertainty into the equation, and the sense that the other, qua other is only accessible from the outside, externally, in terms of signs, symbols and all kinds of evidence, and that such an other can only exist for others in a community constituted by a system of relations—this entirely external view given in the Symbolic—puts the Imaginary under threat. The capacity for identification is radically reduced. Husserl’s philosophy, on the other hand, offers the possibility that one can identify with the transcendental Ego. Because the Symbolic and the Imaginary come together in a single figure, the potential of both domains remains open. The Imaginary ceases to be a limit to the Symbolic. The notion of the infinite as seen in relation to Husserl’s philosophy also brought this out. The Imaginary is enriched as a result. As well as elaborating on the infinite in poetic language, Kristeva walks a fine line between presenting the Imaginary as exclusively concerned with identification, and the Imaginary as involving both identification and the Symbolic. The figure which comes closest to the transcendental Ego, in this respect, and which escapes subjectivism is the Imaginary Father, the bearer of agapê love and an amalgam of both

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mother and father. The Imaginary Father, then, would be equivalent to the Imaginary in the Symbolic: a Father who is both actor and impresario. Notes 1 The key texts here are: Julia Kristeva, Le Nouvelles maladies de l’âme (Paris: Fayard, 1993), New Maladies of the Soul, Ross Guberman (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); and Julia Kristeva, Sens et NonSens de la Révolte. Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse, vol I (Paris: Fayard, 1996). 2 ‘il est en panne d’imaginaire’, Julia Kristeva, Les Nouvelles maladies de l’âme, p.20. Guberman’s translation of this phrase as someone who ‘has run out of imagination’ (New Maladies of the Soul, p.10) is not accurate, or is at least not sufficient to bring out the point that to me seems crucial. For it is the break-down of a capacity (the Imaginary) at a structural level which is at issue, and not a momentary lapse—which few of us could deny—of creative powers (imagination). As we shall see, it is meaning itself which is at stake. 3 Compare, Denis Diderot, ‘Paradox sur le comédien’, Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1951), pp.1010–1011. 4 Umberto Eco, ‘Interpretation and History’, in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Stefan Collini (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.40. 5 See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle ([n.p.]: Rebel Press, AMI, 1987). 6 See Julia Kristeva, ‘Name of Death or of Life’, in Writing and Psychoanalysis, John Lechte (ed.) (London: Arnold, 1996), p.106. 7 Kristeva, Sens et Non-Sens, p.22. 8 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Leon S.Roudiez (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p.51. 9 Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, Leon R.Roudiez (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 116–7. 10 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, para.4. 11 Julia Kristeva, ‘Identification and the Real’, Literary Theory Today, Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (eds.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.168. 12 See Julia Kristeva, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’, The Kristeva Reader, Toril Moi (ed.), Margaret Waller (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp.302–20. 13 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi (trans.) (London: Athlone Press, 1988). 14 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p.116. 15 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p.116. 16 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, F. Kersten (trans.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1982), para.28, p.307. 17 Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach, An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, trans. of Edmund Husserl: Darstellung seines Denkens (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p.98. 18 Husserl, Ideas, para.88, p.214. 19 Husserl, Ideas, para.57, p.132. 20 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego. An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (trans.) (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973 (Eighteenth Printing)), p.38. 21 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, Margaret Waller (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p.33. 22 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p.44. 23 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977 (6th ed.)), p.35. Husserl’s emphasis. 24 Husserl, Ideas, para. 122, p.292. Husserl’s emphasis.

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25 Roman Jakobson, On Language, Linda R.Wright and Monique Monville-Burston (trans.) (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1995 (2nd printing)), pp. 132–33. 26 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, p.28. 27 Husserl, Cartesian Mediations, p.71. 28 Jean-Louis Houdebine, whom I shall rely upon here, has drawn attention to the importance of the infinite in his article, ‘L’expérience de Cantor’, L’Infini, 4 (Autumn 1983), pp.87–110. 29 Houdebine, ‘L’expérience de Cantor’, p.99. 30 Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, Joan Stambaugh (trans.) (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p.62. 31 For instance, in the Cretan liar scenario (the paradigm case of the relation between actor and impresario positions), it becomes impossible to evaluate the status of the statement, spoken by a Cretan, that: ‘All Cretans are liars’. Does ‘All’ include the one who makes the statement? What is the relationship of the part (speaker) to the whole? Is the whole made up of the sum of its parts? Or is the whole another entity separate from its parts? While the statement of all statements cannot be another statement, nor a whole a part that absorbs all parts, the act of naming the statement of statements, or the whole, brings them, on the model of the infinite, into Being. 32 See Daniel Sibony, ‘L’infni et la castration’, Scilicet, 4 (1973), pp.75–133. Sibony writes: ‘Desire is inscribed in the order of the infinite, for it brings into play breaks, derivations, repetitions, from whence are detached the effect of the imaginary, of the symbolic; and without the potentially infinite character of this repetition such detachments cannot happen’. (p.88) At this point, Sibony adds: ‘And the effect a, ‘objet a’, would be a pure mystery to university casuistry’. (ftnt. 3) As desire, separation, repetition and objet a constitute the essential elements of the Symbolic, a clear link is hereby made between the infinite and the Lacanian Symbolic. However, this risks being a different infinity from the one attaching to the Imaginary. Indeed, the issue is one of the difference between attachment (imaginary) and detachment (symbolic). 33 Julia Kristeva, ‘Pour une sémiologie des paragrammes’, in Séméiotiké (Paris: Seuil, ‘Points’, 1969), pp.113–46. 34 Kristeva, ‘Pour une sémiologie des paragrammes’, p.119.

John Lechte is Senior Lecturer in Social Theory at Macquaire University, Australia. He has published widely in the fields of psychoanalysis and contemporary theory. His works include Julia Kristeva (1990), Fifty Contemporary Thinkers from Poststructuralism to Postmodernism (1994), and he has edited a collection entitled Writing and Psychoanalysis (1996).

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Julia Kristeva and her histories Adrian Rifkin

We are now in a position to define the spéculaire as the final and most effective depository of aggressions and anxieties, and as the masterly provider-seducer. Julia Kristeva, La révolte intime

I dream of an impossible film: Don Juan by Eisenstein and Hitchcock, with music by Schönberg. This latter, you will remember looked for a solution to the debate, that he himself qualified as false, between his Moses and his Aron; between the gaiety of the idolatrous, seduced by the ‘golden calf’ (the devotees of the image?), and the divine menace which explodes in thunder without image. After all the problem of the spéculaire pensé is just that: how to remain in idolatry (phantasms) all the while manifesting symbolic truth (the divine thunder without image)…Imagine the result! Invisible. Empty cinema. But what a ceremony of dread, of seduction and of lucidity. Julia Kristeva, La révolte intime Sens et Non-Sens de la Révolte: Pouvoirs et Limites de la Psychanalyse, and La Révolte Intime: Pouvoirs et Limites de la Psychanalyse1 are the transcripts of seminars given by Julia Kristeva at the University of Paris 7, Denis Diderot, during the two academic sessions of 1994–1996. They are addressed to the reader in the direct speech of the classroom, and thus represent a departure from Kristeva’s usual exposition of her thought with its complex and detailed argumentation and comprehensive scholarly apparatus in one of its modes, or self-consciously high-fictional or essayistic prose in another. The text is, then, probably the most informal and intimate of her writings to date, and is full of surprises in the way in which she diverts our attention between the different levels and directions of her argument as the depository of three decades of work. The quotations that head this review serve, I hope, to give some indication of their intoxications as she works her way through the fantastic convolutions of contemporary consciousness, not least of the subtle passion of her attachment to her problematics. For me it is all a welcome change from her most recent magnum opus devoted to Proust, Le temps sensible (1996). This study, despite the typical richness of her

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reflection and some important philosophical innovations, seemed rather dried out and pedantic in its mode of literary exegesis. There her discussion of the ways in which, for example, Proust produces sado-masochism as text itself seemed somehow less vital than the reworking of some of the same materials in La Révolte, and the book felt more like a duty than a delectation to read. On the contrary, these books are quite ravishing, charged as they are with the affect of a presence. The presence of a voice, an affect that becomes the medium of a perverse transference when it is the analyst who alone speaks, and yet does so out of the utmost urgency of her desire—to cure us, of what she sees as our cultural sickness. It is her address to these matters and their significance for the future of western culture that gives her discourse its political purpose and its gravity, and which makes of these seminars the continuation of the project of Etrangers à nous mémes (1988) and Les nouvelles maladies de l’âme (1993). At the same time both volumes follow the pattern established by La révolution du langage poétique (1974) and Pouvoirs de l’horreur of a lengthy and complex theoretical (i.e. psychoanalytic) introduction which makes up nearly half of Sens and over one third of La Révolte. These are then followed by a dense exploration of specific theoretical and literary texts that they have been developed to make possible. Now Lautréaumont, Mallarmé and Céline are succeeded by Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Aragon as exemplary materials for Kristeva’s inquiries. The portraits of these three men adorn the cover of each volume. On the first grouped side by side beneath the oversize face of the aged Freud; on the second their heads are one above the other like a totem, their eyes avoiding the magnificent, full bust of the young Freud. Only Sartre and Freud, and then only on volume 1, attempt to meet the reader’s eyes. Anyway, these symptoms of textual intricacy and plenitude apart, it is to be hoped that if and when these courses are translated that this will be done in full, without repeating the massacre inflicted on Révolution, that stripped it of its historical density. And, moreover, that they will be read in full, rather than to pillage them for conveniently sized ‘bleeding chunks’ of theory, as is the fate suffered by the much abused concept of abjection from Pouvoirs as if these had been dreamed up in and for themselves. Indeed if anecdotal evidence of the partial reading of her work is needed then, at the conference that this number of parallax records, Kristeva informed me that some of her interlocutors actually believe the Céline of Pouvoirs to be the Parisian saddler and shoemaker! The accessible nature of the seminar form might encourage a more pleasurable and extended reading of this recent instalment of what amounts to one of the greatest achievements of late twentieth-century philosophy in its most generous synthesis. That said, my own account of it will scarcely do justice to the magnitude of its reflections, and I will settle for a brief summary of the structure accompanied by a selective attempt to position and problematise some aspects of its project. Volume 1 is prefixed by a detailed etymological account of the word révolte based upon the findings of Alain Rey in his Révolution, histoire d’un mot (1989), which Kristeva uses to present révolte as a word of space and time. Between the countless, subtle inflections of turning back, turning around or turning against and its uncanny presence in other, quite unlikely words, révolte articulates a mode of cultural being in critique of and dialogue with itself, with its location and with its past. It is the modern, political sense of révolte as disclosed within this history of meaning that allows Kristeva to pose the question of the nature of revolt today, in relation to the crisis of modern society that she has already trenchantly outlined in one of the constituent essays of Nouvelles maladies:

[this] interior, built up in the West since Plotinus, and which, at the beginning of the Christian era, had transformed the double face of Narcissus into the joining of hands in prayer, then consolidated as much by the carnival as the spiritual itinerary of the middle ages, expounded in the fragile I of

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Montaigne, the passions of Diderot and the meditations of Hegel or Kant, ends up in the psychic drama, in the psycho-drama. Plotinus has degenerated to Dallas. (pb. edition, pp.41–42) This is, of course, a vision of the society of the spectacle as it was perceived and theorised by Guy Debord whom she often cites and which was, according to Kristeva, well understood by Sartre many years before. At one point in Sens et Non-Sens she turns from analysing Sartre to warn her students directly of the potential role of their own work in the reproduction of such a society. With the words that ‘existence is that which resists representation, which hides from it’, (p.360) she subtly imbricates their project with her own. But this society is also, though Kristeva never refers to their work, the world of Adorno’s culture industries, of Kracauer’s mass ornament or Marcuse’s repressive sublimation. So while she reiterates her anxiety with the effects of robotisation on the one hand and what, on the other we can crudely call a generalised permissiveness, on the capacity for revolt, her political perspective is hardly new. If it takes off from these writers to coincide with a generalised, post-communist progressivism, then this must be understood as a condition of her thinking as well as its object. For instance her discussion of the great 1995 strike in France as a generalised attempt to rediscover the self and its dignity reads as kindly, banal and even politically sentimental. The more so as her analytic thinking develops such an astonishing profundity. Neither is her disgust with the flatness of mass culture new, or her desire to locate some kind of a solution to our problems in the reading of canonical art and literature. In some respects the entire work would be better if it were more generously framed in respect of these questions, and if she were to acknowledge some valid belief in the potential for affect of modern, mass culture. And I may as well record right now that one element that really grates is an occasional tone of Parisian, bien-pensant, self congratulation that conjugates ill with Kristeva’s own sense of strangeness. However, what is new is the systematic reworking of her own theoretical discoveries and the ways in which she puts this to work on her materials. If in the work on Proust, Kristeva opened up an important vein of philosophical and political speculation around the figure of Merleau-Ponty, in turning her attention to the three familiar heroes of French twentieth century literature that are Barthes, Aragon and Sartre, she renders them an uncanny canon as figures for her concept of revolt. And, as she maps this territory at once canonical in French culture and new within her oeuvre, she also presents us with a history of herself that is an elemental integument of this process of revolt. That is to say the seminars present us with a process of contemplation on the evolution, formulation and efficacy of her theoretical trajectory as a means of political and cultural analysis and reflection. In this they offer a striking and radical rebuttal of those amongst her critics who have read her revolution of textual poetics as politically wishful thinking. The lines cited in my epigraphs again indicate something of the dimensions and location of her thought in the great space spun out between Bakhtin and Freud. Her deep attachment to modernity is inscribed in the linking of the names Eisenstein, Hitchcock and Schönberg as both practitioners and theoreticians on the extreme edges of irony and self-reflection at many levels of cultural production. Her invocation of Don Juan places them within the cultural heritage of Mozart and Molière. Not only as a matter of musical or literary forms, but also through their role in the transmission of myth, of the relation between art and the sacred that is in gap between Don Juan and the book of Exodus. Her own phantasm of an ideal movie weaves together reason and seduction, clarity and obscurity, desire and impossibility in a recreation of the affect of Mallarméan prosody that reminds us that jouissance or pleasure, a going-beyond, is indeed text’s very purpose. So, in her theory of revolt, the political and the cultural are to be identified with each other as a turning over, back, round or against experience and thought as an articulation of profound and deeply needed structures of mental experience. And these will be mapped through an endless rereading and rethinking of Freud himself.

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Thus in Sens et Non-Sens, following on from her presentation of Alain Rey, Kristeva discusses first some logics of the sacred and of revolt. This puts in place a reading of Totem and Taboo that distinguished between the symbolic logic of revolt and the absence of its object in modern societies. Second she elaborates the Freudian model of language, carefully marking its turning points and changes in emphasis, and culminating with a reflection on sexuality and thought that passes through the notions of empathy and sublimation. Amongst the many threads of this exposition and critique is a crucial restating of the significance of such concepts as the death drive and denegation, that is to say the work of the negative, which is itself both revolt and a need of the mind be beyond the verbal. So, for example, on page 102 she insists on Freud’s statement of 1915 that the subject is not the subject of language but of the drives. An exploration of the metaphorics and psychic structures of what we call Oedipus follow this. Again this is dense and difficult material. I will extract two typical but especially significant passages in order to suggest something of the structures of Kristeva’s thinking. The first concludes an exposition of the different resolution of the Oedipal moment for the boy and the girl. Kristeva has pointed out that for the boy to become a symbolic subject and a desiring subject are one and the same thing. For the girl a gap opens up suggesting a space of homosexuality: [Which is] material to make one think about what precisely is structural in certain aspects of feminine homosexuality. Add to this structural homosexuality the archaic link daughter/mother; a link that we will call primary homosexuality. We thus have a sort of endemic and ineluctable feminine homosexuality that underlies feminine heterosexuality, and that never ceases to mobilise feminists in a more or less dramatic manner. And, in a more lucid fashion, the great literature of research/revolt, such as that of Proust with Albertine, for example. (p.171) The second goes a little further, pushing beyond the model as she interrogates it: The Freudian tradition has the advantage of having shown up the structuring role of Oedipus and the phallus. But it perhaps has the disadvantage of having done it without pointing up the forms of modification, of transgression, of revolt—to use the term that interests me this year—that are to be set against this order. Be that as it may it is unthinkable to speak of revolt without redefining the axis against which it organises itself and elaborates itself in the space of the speaking subject. (p.186) This is significant not just because of Kristeva’s tone of commitment to unravelling the political in the psychic. But because it is one crucial index or link on track to the final element in this extraordinary introduction, made up as it is of so many orders of complex speculation. This is a chapter entitled On the strangeness of the phallus or the feminine between illusion and disillusion. If I were to risk an aphoristic summary of this section, it would be to call it a re-volt of the revolution of poetic language. Beginning with women’s words, accounts of case histories of Kristeva’s clients, it concludes by reiterating the space of the feminine as the space of disillusion and irony. Yet in doing so, it finally sets the stage for the reading of Barthes, Sartre and Aragon, who will put their words to paper precisely in this space. For if it is women who live out a disabused relation between signification and their life, then: [I] am convinced that, with our understanding this bisexuality as the resolution of feminine masochism, we are touching the psychic spring of atheism, were it given to the speaking being to accede to it without a counter-cathexis to a militant anti-religiosity. Because, you will have

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understood, what I glimpse in the psychic bisexuality of woman is not a cult of the phallus, nor a beyond it, even less a within it, but a support and an “estrangement” of the illusion as illusion. (p.222) Let me leap forward to the second volume, Le Révolte Intime, to underline this point, even though I do so at the risk of a certain reduction. And even though I do not take you through what Kristeva has to say about Jean-Luc Godard and the cinema as spéculaire pensé, or Heidegger, or Nietzsche. After an astonishing discussion of Barthes’ work on photography and on Saint Ignatius—surely one of the most marvellous passages to be found in these books, Kristeva turns to his Fragments d’un discours amoureux. In resuming the ways in which Barthes’ revolt is articulated through writing—that is to say through writing, how his ‘semiological ascesis[…] which had taught him to discern “forms” from “content” was transmuted into this auscultation of the state of loving’, (p.214) she shifts to an almost sentimental account of his being read by mothers or lovers in the Luxemburg gardens. This is one of those moments that irritates a little, but then this follows—Kristeva quoting Barthes: Yet this absent you, which nullifies me, this absence which makes the loving I suffer includes the trick of[…] posing it the better: “I, ever present, only constitute myself when facing you, forever absent.” Sovereignty due to absence[…] a feminine sovereignty, then. “It follows then, that in every man who speaks the absence of the other, something of the feminine declares itself.” (p.218) Or again, in her discussion of Aragon’s Blanche, ou l’oubli: Once the aggression of the drive has been put off, the imaginary meets up with, inside the intimacy that has been thus pulverised, an ultimate threshold of contemplation; the feminine. Is this a final trap? And if this “feminine” (mine or another’s) were nothing other than a final hedge against madness […] in order that the bond might still be possible? (p.340) This is not, she argues, a question of setting up some ‘cult of the other’, but a matter of recognising the possibility of ‘thinking and loving the other, recognised at last as impossible, forgettable, unnameable and not to be found’. (p.341) What Kristeva will try to demonstrate in Aragon is ‘an affirmation of a care to bond [these] differences beyond the néantisation which operates intrinsically in “vision” and in “words” and which makes us what we are, beings of forgetfulness, strangers, stranglers’. In the end, what she recognises in her three heroes is precisely this. Their capacity to write into or through this néantisation, this menace of unbeing and its acceptance, which is in turn precisely the affect denied to us by the society of the spectacle and its idiotic offer of a phony plenitude. If this offers a step beyond Adorno or Debord, a step beyond the all-corroding commodity fatigue of Minima Moralia, for instance, to a renewal of the much desired and desirable link between psychoanalytic revolution and social theory, then it does so at a price. A price, that is to say, for the current configuration of what we call cultural studies which, if it finds itself a grounding of some kind, then does so in an absolute recognition of and procedure from radical particularity and the vernacular. After all Kristeva is discussing three writers, two of whom were gay men and one troubled in his sexuality, and all of whom address questions of the most philosophical density, such as Barthes on Ignatius Loyola. And she does so almost as if this were of no interest, except as the epiphenomenon of what she calls the feminine, or as an access to the feminine in the terms she has pointed to it. For gay studies, for feminism and for the study of so-called ‘post’ colonial identity, this concept of a critical other or an outside that is so wholly within the thinking of the Western subject offers little comfort. Were this thought of as merely an essence, we could summarily

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reject it on principle, or buy into it as a matter of tactics or masquerade. But it is not an essence. It is, rather, an effect of the practice of her theory even as she discovers it powers and discloses its postponements in moving between that which we can hardly name and that which we must. So, the gayness of a Barthes or an Aragon is not here a matter of generating a gay-cathected studies. Rather is may be a signifiant of the uncanny conjunctures of a historicity in which the borderlines and links of history and thought, or history as thought, or thought as history, or all of these taking the word text in the place of thought or history, are never really drawn. There is absolutely no essence, and probably, then, there are no categories either. That Kristeva calls this the ‘feminine’ may nonetheless be of the essence of her histories, as she has written them and lived them. Someone else may find another word, taking another route towards a critical and atheistic signifier, and, indeed, I feel sure that this is necessary. But if there is some essence of the matter, then it is that Kristeva belongs to a culture that I would above all call post-Kantian. That is to say, the culture against which cultural studies has constructed its own labyrinth of defensive discourse. A culture, above all, of the sharp desire for synthesis, in which category teeters on the edge of irrational sublimity, and where knowledge is driven by something one might call love, in spite of the threat of our unbeing. I am inclined to think that this is a history of our thinking that we have hardly explored enough, and that these books challenge us to do so. Oddly, in Kristeva’s néantisation I seem myself to restage the excitement and confusion of my own first readings of Tel Quel as a turning point I failed to notice or tried to hide from some time in 1968. But, alas, in this light, and we have to face its glare, what we call cultural studies, in all its alluring diversities, begins to look dangerously like the society of the spectacle. Tutto e tormento il resto e tutto e servitu? Note 1 Julia Kristeva, Sens et Non-Sens de la Révolte: Pouvoirs et Limites de la Psychanalyse, vol. I (Paris: Fayard, 1996) and La Révolte Intime: Pouvoirs et Limites de la Psychanalyse, vol. II (Paris: Fayard, 1997).

Adrian Rifkin is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Leeds. His most recent book is Street Noises: Parisian Pleasures 1900–1940 (Manchester University Press, 1993).

Book Reviews

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parallax, 1998, vol. 4, no. 3, 143–158

Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (eds.) The Spivak Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1996)

Reviewing The Spivak Reader is no easy task. How to review a text whose project is to bring together the writings of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—but which also introduces those writings by the gesture of naming Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as ‘this collection of texts’1 (p.2)—is a question that demands an entry into the very status of the signature, and its relation to the field of writing. Whose text are we reading in reading The Spivak Reader? Does the collecting of the work of Spivak create, in itself, a work which has an independent existence, which remains irreducible to the signature revealed and concealed by the title? If such a Reader works as a work, then does it also foreclose the possibility of other work, other ways of reading Spivak? Or is the task of The Reader to provide the collecting together of the work, without letting such a collection act to foreclose that work? In order to collect without foreclosure, The Reader must first pose the very question of reading, of what it might mean to read the work of Spivak in the absence of any final word. This Reader is one which enables the gathering together of the work of an author, at the same time as it invites us to question the very possibility of such a gathering, drawing our attention, as readers, to the very necessity of thinking through how Spivak’s work will always remain to be read. Hence, symptomatically, we move from the title of the book, The Spivak Reader,

to the title of the introduction, ‘Reading Spivak’. The question of reading moves here—from the status of the book as a commodity-object (and we must remember that to have a Reader dedicated to an author’s work constitutes a form of recognition in which that work is assumed to be already central) to the very event in which we begin to engage with the writing. I can only begin this review by drawing attention to the very difficulties of having The Spivak Reader in light of the kinds of questions raised by Spivak’s work, in which the possibilities of reading are related to the deconstructability of the opposition between centre and margin. The question of reading —and indeed, of reading Spivak—raised by the Reader may force us to acknowledge the following. First, as the editors make clear, Spivak’s work rigorously pays attention to the occasion in which speaking/writing takes place. There is always a relation of address at stake. For example, in Chapter 2, Spivak discusses the relation between the centre and margin that is determined by the structures of academic address whereby a certain few who are marginal are allowed into the centre under the sign of humanism. Hence, she is chastised for drawing attention to her difference in her address:

1353–4645/98 $12·00 © 1998 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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in offering me their perplexity, my colleagues on the panel were acting out the scenario of tokenism: you are as good as we are (I was less learned than most of them, but never mind), why do you insist on emphasising your difference? The putative centre welcomes selective inhabitants of the margin in order to better exclude the margin[…] By pointing attention to a feminist marginality, I have been attempting, not to win the centre for ourselves, but to point at the irreducibility of the margin in all explanations. (pp.34–5) Here, the operations of the margin in the centre serves to dramatise the reversal and displacement of the centre and margin: the event of Spivak speaking ceases to be contained within the staging of the human (‘we are all the same really’), by disrupting that staging from within (the human requires the margin if it is ‘to appear’). Second, Spivak also draws our attention to the politics of reading. Her readings of texts at once operate within the arena of practical politics— recognising the over-determination of questions of meaning by the violent intersection of sexual, class and colonial regimes—as it operates through the opening out of the text to the constitutive possibility of difference. She demonstrates how the deconstructive attention to iterability—to the impossibility of pure repetition or the structural possibility of differences in signification—leads to a politics which is practical, but which resists dogmatism. That is, deconstruction allows Spivak to trace, both how the meaning of signifiers such as ‘woman’ and ‘subaltern’ comes to be determined as such, and how this process of determination is not total, and hence does not fully command the play of the signifier. Third, Spivak’s work also reminds us of the importance of the reader in terms of the shifting nature of audiences. We ask ourselves, who is her work addressed to? It is a question raised by the introduction, in terms of the multiple audiences of Spivak’s work—both within elitist academic institutions, and amongst political activists and

workers. The editors’ note, for example, how the shift in Spivak’s work towards a more substantive concern with the intersection between the international and gendered division of labour, has led to her being read-less by those within the academy who are concerned with the ethical relation of self to other. (p.9) Fourth, we might also note the importance of writing/reading or speaking/hearing in terms of the dialogical dimension of Spivak’s work where she concerns herself with the very conditions of possibility for any dialogue (who can and cannot be heard). The number of interviews she has given (and this Reader contains two interviews, including one interview with the editors), reflects how the questions she raises take place in a context in which there is always more than one subject in question. The importance of the ‘more than one’ of such encounters opens out the ethical dimension of the questions posed by reading. So the question of reading posed in Spivak’s writing—involving the questions of occasion, politics, audience and ethics— must be asked, if she is to be read. Importantly, the gathering of Spivak’s work into a Reader enables us to trace different trajectories in her work, without assuming (through chronology— which the editors avoid) a progressive story. Indeed, the editors characterise her work as a journey in think-ing, and refuse to reduce her work by assuming weak homologies between its different objects and figures. (p.7) The Reader includes her engagements with Marxism, feminism, postcoloniality, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. There is no single encounter at stake here, but the opening out of different ways of figuring the complex intersections between relations of power and signification. Indeed, the status of figuration in Spivak’s political work is of significance. She uses, for example, the figure or ‘shorthand’ of the clitoris to discuss women’s excess in all areas of practice and production, (p.60) as she has used clitorodectomy to discuss the effacement of women’s sexual difference in phallogocentrism. She also discusses how a politics of figuration moves through and against an

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episteme which assumes that the language of the political is a labouring towards the truth: ‘We must strive moment by moment to practice a taxonomy of different forms of understanding, different forms of change, dependant upon resemblance and seeming substitutability—figuration—rather than a selfidentical category of truth’. (p.6) Self-consciously working with the ambiguities and uncertainties of language—Spivak’s politics becomes one of the necessity and impossibility of figuring the other. Such figures always fail to secure a referent: they hence work within the field of the political, but do not contain or foreclose the political within the fetishised form of true-speech. The chapter I find most engaging in The Spivak Reader is the Preface and Afterword to her translation of Mahasweta Devi’s work reproduced from Imaginary Maps. Here, Spivak’s concern is with the ethical relation between the self and other. Such a concern positions her against cultural relativism (p.274)—against, the discursive relation which takes the alterity of the other as an impetus to silence (which, the editors note, Spivak has named a perverse politics—a politics which must be refused by unlearning privilege as loss (p.5)). Rather, in Spivak’s work the concern is with the necessity and impossibility of a different relation to the other. The question becomes—if the subaltern woman cannot be heard by the First World feminist, then how to challenge the condition of subalternity itself? How to love that which one cannot not translate? Here, translation (and reading as translation) involves forms of proximity to the other. Getting closer to the other’s text does not constitute the merging of one with the other. The idea of translation simply as proximity to the other, implies that in engagement (or mutuality) the subject and the other merge, becoming one. While the line between the translator and the text becomes unstable in proximity, it also constitutes the limits of translation and the violence of the difference that cannot simply move across. Hence, in the context of Spivak’s work, translation and reading as forms of engagement do not involve the rendering present of the subaltern woman. Rather, there is something

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which does not get across, something which is necessarily secret. It is the ‘secret’ that constitutes the ethical dimension of Spivak’s work. Ethics becomes for Spivak, ‘the experience of the impossible’. (p.270) Spivak suggests that any collective and political struggle must be supplemented ‘by the impossibility of full ethical engagement’. It is only through such an ethical engagement that we can account for its impossibility (the irreducible secret that demands both responsibility and accountability). In the Afterword, the secret encounter—the encounter which necessarily reveals and conceals— becomes the scene of global justice. Spivak writes, I have, perhaps foolishly, attempted to open the structure of an impossible social justice glimpsed through secret encounters with singular figures; to bear witness to the specificity of language, theme, and history as well as to supplement hegemonic notions of a hybrid global culture with the experience of the impossible global justice. (p.274) Here, social justice is traced as an encounter between the singular subaltern woman and the global —between the singularity of her embodiment and the international division of labour in which she is positioned as producer and native informant. Spivak’s work suggests the necessity of collective political struggle—but a struggle which must begin with secret encounters if it is to avoid the (violence of) speaking for the subaltern woman, or the perversion of joining hands through silence. Quite clearly, I am moved by Spivak’s work and the very difficulties of reading a work in which the question of reading is always staged as constitutive of the violence which is at stake in relations of othering. I welcome this gathering of her work into a Reader, and commend the editors for their brave and careful introductions to her work. They certainly take their lead from Spivak—they write ‘like Spivak introducing Derrida, we shall have to assume that some introduction to Spivak is in order’. (p.1, emphasis mine) Perhaps, my only criticism, is the

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question of whether taking one’s lead from Spivak is the only possible way of ethically engaging with her work. So, in the interview with the editors, Spivak discusses the negative responses to her piece, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ (which is not reproduced in the Reader as it is being revised for Spivak’s forthcoming book), as examples of failed readings, readings which did not get close enough. (pp.288–89) Is it possible, then, to get closer to her texts, but not simply affirm their movement? Is a close reader always only an affirmative one? Or can one read in her work a different ethical demand: that you must criticise that which you love? What would loving Spivak perform, as a way of reading, other than following her lead by not following her lead? I end this review with these questions as ways of opening out other possibilities for reading Spivak and reading The Spivak Reader. Notes 1 Of course, this follows Spivak’s own gesture of naming Jacques Derrida as ‘also this collection of texts’ in her ‘Preface’ to Of Grammatology.

Sara Ahmed Lancaster University

Judith Butler Excitable Speech (London: Routledge 1997)

Judith Butler has herself generated a great deal of excitable speech: Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter1 brought forth critical reactions ranging from the ‘bad reader’2 who felt thereby authorised to reduce gender to a choice, to the critics who denounced the density of her work as politically useless.3 Now she has published a book of that name. Excitable Speech revisits the contingent ground of performativity through the work of J.L.Austin, and thereby functions somewhat as an archaeology of her previous works. Here Butler is driven to a greater degree of explication of her theoretical debts and methodology in an effort perhaps to halt further misappropriation, which is faintly ironic given the emphasis of her work on the necessity of re-signification. At the level of both content and form, however, she is anxious to ratify the political use value of performativity as her subtitle prominently declares. This ratification is specifically signalled by the location of her analysis: recent legal case histories in America all of which involve a disputation regarding the status of certain speech acts or acts understood as speech. Where, after all, could ‘mere’ words have further consequence? It is the issue of consequence that allows Butler to dissect specific cases via performative speech acts without the former functioning only as an illustration of theory. Theory however lends precision to the analysis. The notional difference between the constative utterance which claims only to report truth or falsehood, and the performative which brings about that which it names, and also the temporal difference between ‘illocutionary’ speech

which itself performs an action, and ‘perlocutionary’4 which produces a subsequent effect, are all marshalled to address the interested nature of legal outcomes. The question of interest manifests in the inconsistent application of these categories through the legal distinction between ‘speech’ and ‘conduct’, where the former is analogous to a constative utterance and the latter to a performative. Significantly, where speech is legally considered conduct then it may be subject to prosecution, whereas ‘pure’ speech is awarded the protection of the First Amendment. Butler’s central examples question the United States Supreme Court’s pronouncement that the placing of a burning cross in front of a black family’s house by a white man was opinion alone; Catherine MacKinnon’s charge that pornographic depictions produce that which they depict; and the US military’s construal of the homosexual self-declaration of its members as homosexual activity. In legal contexts, it is the speech of the judiciary that is socially authorised to enact that which it says. However this sovereignty over speech is displaced, by recent attempts in America to legislate ‘hate speech’, from the representatives of the law onto the speech of citizens, while that of the courtroom is reframed as constative, that is, as neutral. If citizens, such as MacKinnon, call upon the law to arbitrate an incidence of hate speech, two problems arise for Butler; the discursive power of the state to designate hate speech is augmented, and the collapse of speech into action supports state intervention as opposed to other methods. Where she would potentially support the regulation of hate speech it would be curtailed

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within the domain of the perlocutionary, where the ensuing effects of the speech act must be demonstrated. It is not that Butler denies that hate speech can injure its recipient, on the contrary she frames it as a kind of interpellation, but that she insists on its potential failure. This is derived from the quality of speech as citation that enables the prospect of the resignification of the formerly hateful speech act. This structural rather than contextual aspect of the speech act is drawn from Derrida’s reading of Austin. Whereas for Austin the failure of a performative is due to infelicitous circumstance, for Derrida it is a structurally necessary possibility. Without this possibility, the sign has no future. In the last chapter, Butler appears to install occurrence for possibility, allowing her to accuse Derrida of evacuating any analysis of the social, an accusation that has previously been levelled at Butler herself. Yet ultimately, she cannot dismiss iterability because it includes this future transformation of the sign, and, of course, this is a condition intrinsic to her argument here as well as her earlier work in the form of ‘subversive repetition’. Iterability also allows for a notion of agency that is not bound to a sovereign model. By the same token that iterability here allows for hate speech to signify otherwise Catherine MacKinnon has appropriated a certain use of Austin in her work against pornography, demonstrating that speech act theory per se cannot be obliged to produce radical politics. MacKinnon contends that pornography effects an illocutionary contradiction in that it represents women’s ‘consent’ in a way that converts any real refusal into a similar ‘consent’ and thereby dispossesses them of their imagined sovereignty over speech. Given that she uses the court testimony of Anita Hill to evidence this assertion, Butler criticises her for ignoring the deployment of racist figures in the transformation of Hill into a sexualised spectacle. If speech—broadly understood here—is figured as always sovereign by MacKinnon, then the performative is collapsed into intention, disavowing as Butler says the ‘vulnerability[…] proper to democratic process in

the sense that one cannot know in advance the meaning that the other will assign to one’s utterance’. (p.87) Butler further cautions that any legislation introduced supporting MacKinnon’s view on the performative functioning of pornography sets a precedent for further legal action, against the work of lesbian and gay artists for example. Although she here differentiates between the categories ‘pornography’ and ‘art’, there remains an unhelpful degree of ambiguity in Butler’s views on the former. This is because she concentrates on critiquing MacKinnon’s assertion that ‘pornography’ functions performatively without citing her definition of that term and yet also indicating that she finds MacKinnon’s arguments compelling in some unspecified sense. For Butler, the US military’s refusal to permit its members to name themselves homosexual is the action of a paranoid sovereign power performatively displacing its own power onto those in its service. Moreover, their complicity with recent homophobic discourse associating homosexuality and disease, figures the phrase ‘I am a homosexual’ as a contagious illocution. The noun ‘homosexual’ becomes the vehicle wherein prohibited desire becomes unfettered from the function of prohibition and acquires that of contagion, infecting through a surrogate orifice—the ear. In the permitted instances where homosexuality is admitted only to be immediately renunciated, she argues that this provides a means of a kind of preservation through repression where repression is understood psychoanalytically as itself a libidinal activity. While ‘coming out’ may also have a desired performative effect for the aims of queer activists in terms of the politics of visibility, Butler differentiates it from that imagined by the military via the latter’s insistence upon its negative, aggressive character. However, in the interests of keeping the signifier open to what she calls here ‘democratic re-articulation’, she also asserts the impossibility for any self-declaration of homosexuality to fully or definitively materialise its referent, a condition which supports such rearticulation.

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As a way of thinking both the narration of speech and the place of the threat of action informing a performative speech act, Butler introduces the body via the work of Shoshana Felman. Useful as it may be to problematise speech through the body that generates it, in a legal context, for example, where accountability is at stake, I wonder whether Butler’s interests might have been further developed had she considered a third term, voice. Voice is only called upon briefly in the introduction, in the context of interpellation, where it is effectively swallowed by speech. While she demonstrates that the voice of interpellation derives its authority from its figuration as divine, she does not embark on any discussion of either the mechanism of voice in its guise as the privileged trope of subjectivity, or as that which may derail that very trope. This derailment might have been arrived at through using the ‘excitable’ to evoke the material quality of speech. However, in so far as Butler does invoke this excitability to extend ‘excitable speech’ beyond its legal confines,5 to consider it as always in part in excess of the control of its speaker, this ‘excess’ is formulated only in relation to ‘the body’. What would the relation between speech and body become when I hear a voice on a tape-recording? In what way might it ventriloquise a body or bodies? To the extent, then, that voices do not matter for Butler, her argument regarding the body as ‘rhetorical instrument of expression’ is restricted. If this recommendation is slightly reserved, it is with regard to readers specifically interested in Butler’s work to which this volume does not dramatically add. For myself, I am interested, but not perhaps excited by Excitable Speech. Yet I do think that this lucidly written book’s explication and application of performativity will prove valuable in the classroom as a teaching text. In particular it will advance debates on language and representation without them becoming suffocated in the fatuous arguments that the term ‘political correctness’ now invokes.

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Notes 1 Both pubished by Routledge, 1990 and 1993 respectively. 2 As discussed, for example, in parallax 1, (September 1995), p.144. However, I have some reservations about framing the voluntarist thus as it risks collapsing foolishness with Butler’s own trope of ‘trouble’ and the pleasure thereof. 3 As writers such as Caroline Gouda, Book review, Journal of Gender Studies, 4/2 (1995), p.237; and Susan Bordo, ‘Review essay: Post-modern subjects, Post-modern bodies’, Feminist Studies, 18/ 1 (1992), p.174, attest. 4 As elaborated in J.L.Austin, How to do things with words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 5 Where it refers to that which is produced under duress and hence disqualified as evidence.

Lynn Turner University of Leeds

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Pathologising Gone Awry Christina Mazzoni Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996) A couple of years ago in Critical Inquiry, Caroline Bynum began an article by asking what appeared to be a relatively straightforward question: ‘Why All the Fuss about the Body?’ Her question was directed at the plethora of recent texts devoted to the body and produced by the discourses of feminism, new historicism, gender studies, the history, sociology and philosophy of medicine and the natural and social sciences, and historians of the body. In fact, Bynum suggests, the body may well be the wrong topic for them altogether. In part against this recent enthusiasm for the body, and in a refusal to contribute further to these discussions of the body which rarely go beyond matters of gender, medicine and sexuality rather than, for instance, eschatology or soteriology, Bynum turns to history. But she doesn’t so much discuss, as one might expect, the historical parallels between the modern and the middle ages, as she contributes to an understanding of how the relationship of figures to contexts in different historical moments can contribute to a better understanding of the situated historical specificities and singularities of a body. For Bynum, there is nothing new about the content of these recent discussions of body. In fact, if anything, they have vacated the body of content. They have almost made the lived body itself, the embodied body, disappear, dissolve, be subsumed or replaced by theory: a flight from the body, the flesh or decay. Bynum suggests that desirous premodern narratives are not simply about desire for bodies. The middle ages offers bodies which are already mutable, volatile, polymorphous, staggering under the weight of their meaty materiality and fleshy

desires. They concern a desire that is always lodged in bodies, a desire that is submerged in them. It is something like this lived body that Christina Mazzoni attempts to resurrect in her Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture. Mazzoni’s exciting book responds to a call from Roy Porter and G.S.Rousseau to produce a book about the oft-mentioned, but-only-in-passing, relations between religion and medicine, hysteria and possession. To this end, Mazzoni centres on madness and Christianity, demonic possession and divine ecstasy, and mysticism as the unconscious of Catholicism, on mysticism as the repressed of nineteenth century positivist scientific discourses of hysteria: from witch or saint to patient, from the stake to the hospital. The task of Saint Hysteria is to bring about a return of this repressed. Allowing this leitmotif to run throughout her text, Mazzoni continues to unearth examples which expose the always already implicit presence of mysticism within the discourses of hysteria. But this is not so much an exercise in a return of the repressed as it is a picking up and grafting together of incidences which have been made subordinate by recent criticism itself. Nineteenth century discourses of literature and medicine could never really hide their debt to mysticism in their writing of hysteria. But it is the case that much dry contemporary history and thought is a direct descendant of this perceived rationalist and positivist impetus. And it has been their primary desire to keep hidden the embarrassment of their inheritance: to hide the work of the decadents, the naturalists, the symbolists and that romantic heritage—later continued by Breton

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and Aragon, and Clément and Cixous—so maligned by both pragmatic nineteenth and twentieth century history writing about hysteria. Against this tedium, Mazzoni embraces a collection of romanticised terms such as transgression, abjection and jouissance to loosen the ties that bind. And unlike the sloppy ways in which these figures are usually, and more often than not incorrectly employed, she reads them through and out of the specific contexts of their relations to religious history and story. In doing this Mazzoni gives them a material, fleshlike necessity. (Although it must be said, yet again, that contemporary travels through jouissance must begin not from hearing the mimetic, if deeply resonant, voices of Lacan, Barthes or Kristeva, but rather the acidic throat of Bataille. And here we have a different experience of mysticism altogether.) Mazzoni’s first chapter explores the different interests that Charcot, Lombroso, Krafft-Ebing, Freud and Breuer, and Lacan have in the apparently unscientific structures of the supernatural, the occult, and in faith healing. Chapter two offers sustained readings of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt’s novel Madame Gervaisais and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s short story ‘La vergine Orsola’ as texts which explore the links between mysticism, nervous illness and a pathologising of the human body. Her thesis is that a repressed and dematerialised mysticism returns through the unconscious of these texts, returning the religious at the very point where the authors attempt to eliminate it through a disgust elicited by the body-as-flesh. The following chapter presents readings of Nordau’s mysticism as degeneration, D’Annunzio’s hagiography of Saint Sebastian, Antonio Fogazzaro’s Il Santo, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Sainte Lydwine de Schiedam, and the importance of Italian decadent literary production and the links that all of these texts make between female or feminine sexuality, hysteria, eroticism and mysticism. Significantly, chapter four chooses as its topic of discussion Saint Gemma Galgani of Lucca—rather than her better known almost-contemporary Saint Thérèse of Lisieux or stigmatics from the Salpêtrière

like Louise Lateau and Maria de Moerl—and includes rewarding sections on the medieval mystic Angela of Foligno and a comparative analysis of Saint Teresa and Elisabeth von. R. With all this talk of witches, demonic possession, stigmata and the confessional talking cure, we are deeply embedded in the realm of the nineteenth century’s reconstruction of the medieval in its own image. Freud himself bases his structure of hysteria on the medieval architecture of Nürnberg. But it should be remembered that it is Freud’s (mis) understanding of the Catholic middle ages as a period of blanket political, religious and sexual repression in particular which allows him to ‘free’ the downtrodden subject through psychoanalysis. Mazzoni’s desire to maintain this pattern of repression, in her efforts to let the mystical escape, must now also be considered with suspicion if we are willing to believe Foucault’s blistering critique of the repressive hypothesis. For Mazzoni, the words of the mystic are not nonlinguistic. Rather they emanate from the junction of body and language—speaking flesh—and sit precariously on the necessity that is the limit (of) experience. Unfortunately, in her proper refusal to allow the voice of the female mystics’ experience to be comfortably appropriated into the language of neurosis, this sometimes leads her to privilege mysticism and pathologise its other, the hysteric or the neurotic experience. In her conclusion in particular, Mazzoni allows the mystical experience to hold a degree of miraculous autonomy and it is only really here that her arguments become unnecessarily weak and whimsical. In speaking out against the masochistic flagellation and selfmutilating annihilation of mystical experience, she settles on the pursuit of an empowering model of fluffy universal justice. In offering to speak for the inarticulate—the pain of the hysteric, the jouissance of the mystic and the ‘afflicted’ in general—and giving them the power to speak for themselves, Mazzoni does everyone, including herself, a grave disservice. At the end of every chapter is a peculiar, and I think often unnecessary, postscript. Each is

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uncomfortably tagged on as though someone, a blind referee perhaps, had told Mazzoni that sections on de Beauvoir, Kristeva, Irigaray, and Freud and Teresa of Avila would contribute to a greater theoretical density. Instead they detract from the flourishing pleasures of reading and leave things rather lopsided. As do the times in Saint Hysteria, particularly in chapters two and three, when it seems as though there is a sense in which we are being offered little more than what used to be called textual analysis. But what begins as little more than interpretation gradually unfolds into a performance, a play, a dance, in which the telling of the words themselves become more and more a part of a meeting with the content and style of the hysterical texts. Along with her significant engagements with mysticism, perhaps because of it, Mazzoni’s most important contribution to recent studies on hysteria is her attention to Italy. She allows a conversation to open out between the urban spiritual homes of modern hysteria—Paris and Vienna—and the ‘provincialism’ of Italy in general and Sicily in particular. In fact, Mazzoni spends considerable time and energy in these other locations, recalling stories of mass ‘epidemic’ hysteria not just in Loudun (1632–1640) but also from the Savoy community of Morzine (1857–1873). This important pivoting of the centre of hysteria’s history, displayed in her choice of medical men, saints and happenings, demands a recognition of how either pro or anti-Christianity forms a backbone to debates on hysteria and of how considering religious practices that are not strictly Christian such as superstition, the supernatural and paganism can lead to different understandings of the Sacred. Mazzoni’s book is a thoroughly engaging and distinctive contribution to recent debates on hysteria congregating around the European fin-desiècle. What it doesn’t do, and there’s no reason why it should, is begin a much needed, sustained reengagement with the premodern history of hysteria. This is obviously not a criticism of Saint Hysteria. Rather it is a comment on the need by many New Hysterians (Elaine Showalter’s glib

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characterisation of all those working on matters hysterical) to continuously prove Ilza Veith’s Hysteria: The History of a Disease wrong, again, to insipidly show the confluence of medical and literary texts at the turn of the century, or simply to read still more books. A move to the premodern might allow for different ways of engaging with, for instance, the late nineteenth century through the terms of the late twentieth. Bynum’s suggestions offer many inroads. Mazzoni’s do to, particularly her discussion of the figures of the heart, disgust, the ineffable, and flower iconography. As do Georges Didi-Huberman’s, Elisabeth Bronfen’s, Janet Beizer’s, and others’. Helen King, with a bit of exceptional scholarship in her work on the corpus hippocraticum, has similarly demanded new thinking, forcing a radical reconsideration of the discourses of hysteria over at least the last hundred and fifty years. Perhaps it is time for the rest of us to follow these leads, if not directly, and go to other specific moments in the history of hysteria to show how an intimacy with these singular events can affect a reworking of the late nineteenth century and thus also the terms of contemporary criticism. Perhaps a refamiliarisation with, for example, the soma, the humours and the vapours, materiality and corporeality, flesh, skin and hysterogenic zones, a voluntary masochism even, might begin a more productive reengagement with the history of hysteria. It might even be interesting to begin to think about what hysteria, wrestled away from psychoanalysis, would look like without sexuality. Marq Smith University or Leeds

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Adrian Piper Out of Order, Out of Sight Volume I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992, and Volume II: Selected Writings in Art Criticism 1967–1992 (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1996). Out of Order, Out of Sight these are the ‘vestiges of history’. (V.I, p.91) The historical traces mapped by these two weighty tomes constitute but a fragment of Adrian Piper’s artistic and philosophical autobiography. Spanning over twenty years, this complex, critical, and self-conscious archive is an achievement to be reckoned with. Contrary to its title, Out of Order, Out of Sight, demands justice, classification, and reviewing. With such a solicitation, it seems impossible to do anything more here, than touch upon a few of its struggles, its passions, its becomings. I would like to focus then, on the notion of autobiography, as both volumes enact and complicate the conceptual framework of writing one’s own life. Volume I is a collection of Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992. As Piper informs us in the ‘Very FORWARD Remarks’ of her ‘Introduction’, to both volumes, meta-art is ‘a kind of writing an artist may do about her work that examines its processes and clarifies its sociopolitical context and conceptual presuppositions from the first-person perspective’. (V.I&II, p.xxix) As such, these texts are metadiscursive engagements—often critical and/or exploratory—which Piper enacts on her own art practice as an artist, philosopher and/or critic. Volume II brings together Selected Writings in Art Criticism 1967–1992. These works are both ‘grounded’ and ‘extrapolate’ from Piper’s art practice while simultaneously producing a ‘generalized but politically self-aware art criticism informed by an understanding of one’s own cultural

and sociopolitical role in relation to the object of one’s criticism’. (V.I&II, p.xxix) In both cases, autobiography functions as a precondition for Piper’s artistic practice and philosophical and critical reassessments. In order to re-view these texts and practices through the lens of autobiography, I would like to begin by defining my own terms. Autobiography has been critically analysed by Jacques Derrida as a process which inscribes two bodies: the body of a life or a subject; and the corpus of the work, the texts duly signed by the author. The divisibility of these two bodies is unclean. Each one seeps and inscribes itself in the other. The intermingled reciprocity between the subject and its textual corpus is closely related to Derrida’s understanding of the two bodies of representation. On the one hand, representation concerns the body of a subject, the physical, material body that constitutes the subject by and as representation. On the other hand, representation is a body of work or discourse produced by an author, the corpus of texts. In relation to autobiography then, the body that writes, also inscribes itself, and is constituted through that writing as representation. This is the linguistic and graphic inscription of the subject and its texts. These interdependent boundaries of autobiography are duly traversed in Out of Order, Out of Sight. Piper’s early work is informed by her training as a conceptual artist and belies her interests in the notions of time, space, form, and language in relation to the art object and analytic philosophy. As a means of disentangling the ties between object and

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context, Piper transfers this problematic onto her own body, and begins to use it as the object of her art practice and her writings in meta-art and art criticism. The struggle between self as object, and subject, is thus initiated within her performance art, and in her critical writings. As autobiography, this shift ensures that the body is the corpus of representation: the artist’s body as the performative art object is that which is represented as art, it is also the object which will form the subject of Piper’s textual corpus. And in both instances, Piper’s body figures as the site of its own production through and as representation. To track this process through meta-art and critical writings is to produce what might be called a documentary autobiography. The documentary autobiography that I read in Piper’s work is a result of my understanding of the tenets which she suggests are fundamental to her work in the early seventies. However, I think that it is possible to see these concerns played out throughout her career. In ‘About A.-A’ (V.I, pp.141– 46), written in 1974, Piper enumerates four issues around which her work revolves: 1. ‘Confrontation between the Self and the Other’, where the Other begins as her audience and becomes Piper as ‘critical and self-conscious observer of [her] own objecthood’ (V.I, p.141); 2. ‘Self-consciousness’, or the awareness of how she ‘appears to “Others”’ and the ways in which their responses affect her ‘sense of self’ (V.I, p.141); 3. ‘Solipsism’ or ‘The realization that my ability to be self-consciously critical is at all times circumscribed by the subjective limits of my individual consciousness’ (V.I, p.141); and 4. ‘SelfTranscendence’ which is Piper’s attempt to overcome subjective limits and reinscribe past events onto an alter-ego. (V.I, p.141) Piper’s reliance on analytic philosophy, with its leanings towards clarity and classification, is a perfect tool for unpacking this complicated performative art practice. Throughout her career, this philosophical and artistic combination remains at the base of her role as artist, philosopher and critic. Beginning with a desire to obtain self-hood and a heightened transcendental consciousness she works through a complex understanding of subject

formation informed by a critical and reflexive understanding of the technologies of the self and the power systems which constitute them, and the culture in which she lives. In these terms, Volume II professionalises and institutionalises Piper’s art practice and her writings in meta-art. It is concerned with the theoretical abstractions of conceptual art, the workings of the art world and art market, the power relations therein, and their fetishization of the art object. Later, analytic philosophy forms a means of accessing the cultural negation of ‘coloured’ women artists, (V.I, p.305) and the formation and function of the stereotype as a means and form of degradation. (See also, ‘The Triple Negation of Colored Women Artists’ (1990), V.II, pp.161–74.) In 1971, Piper ‘spent the summer doing nothing else but studying and writing a paper on [Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason] practising yoga, and fasting’. (V.I, p.55) She writes of this time that, ‘Often, the effects of Kant’s ideas were so strong that[…] I would have to stop reading[…] and go to a mirror to peer at myself to make sure I was still there’. (V.I, p.55) This loss of embodied reality was ‘anchored in the physical world’ by a series of photographs entitled ‘Food for the Spirit’. The ‘obsession’ with Kantian thought was made manifest by a desire to enter ‘into a transcendent reality of disembodied self-consciousness’. (V.I, p. 55) Within the framework of autobiography, the transcendental task of reaching a disembodied selfconsciousness while self-reflexively producing a photographic archive of this self-analysis seems to me to form a slight tear in the fabric of the body’s representation. The fear of obtaining a disembodied self-consciousness, of absenting the body, questions the necessity of the body of autobiography. Piper’s photographs and her writings on this moment, albeit the latter are produced ten years later, inscribe the dissolution of her embodiment as autobiography. Piper’s positions as art object and author of criticism ensures that she is both the body and corpus of the text. This reminds me of the criticism that was levelled at Althusser’s theory of ideology. Like Althusser, Piper as critic is never outside of the system she creates. Situated within this formation,

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the process of reading these texts is both fascinating and often painful as I witness the artist/ author struggle to objectify a performance which is wholly dependent on her position within it. The alienation necessary for this artistic and theoretical practice to take place effects a distanciation in the reader who is often jolted by the objective position that the subject attempts to assume and inscribe. As documentary autobiography, certain boundaries are implicitly and explicitly crossed, as Piper negotiates her positions as the object, subject and author of the corpus— which is her own. Striving to reach a disembodied self-consciousness which critically inscribes itself objectively is but an illusion. At times, the erasure of the boundaries of autobiography becomes a necessary illusion, The late seventies, eighties and nineties sees Piper’s concern for transcendental selfconsciousness take on a gendered and racial discursive motivation. Autobiographically, this move allows Piper to work through the ways in which race and gender constitute herself and her culture. Facing squarely the issues of stereotyping and xenophobia, Piper’s art practice become an even more provocative gesture at unresting the audience. Working through the overtly political within art practice, Piper produces a series of installations and performance pieces which provokes the audience into questioning and analysing their own relationship to the social constructions of gender and racial stereotypes and their reliance on misapprehension, denial and hatred. In 1980, Piper exhibits ‘Four Intruders plus Alarm Systems’. (V.I, pp.181–86) The piece consisted of cylindrical room painted black, with four projected images of a black man, facing the the room and four headsets are available beneath audience. The song Night People by War invades each image from which the audience can listen to four responses—from the ‘liberal’ view to the ‘redneck’—concerning racist stereotyping of black men. (V.I, p.181) The installation was an opportunity for audiences to consider and reassess their understanding of stereotypes within a racial and often racist discursive framework. However, although the

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monologues epitomise certain views on race and racism in a powerful way, they also ironically enact a series of stereotypes themselves—the ‘liberal’, the ‘redneck’. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the audiences’ responses are mixed between those that understand the monologues as ‘objects of ridicule, scrutiny, and self-examination’ and those that ‘thanked me [Piper] for expressíng their views so eloquently, because in fact they did have many black friends, but of course wouldn’t recommend that their daughter marry one because society made it so difficult’. (V.I, p.185) Negotiating these reactions and the power of stereotypes, Piper employs the apparatus of analytic philosophy to disarticulate, stage by stage, the construction of racism in American culture. ‘Two Kinds of Discrimination’, written in 1992 and published in 1993, is an intensive and subtle unbinding of the logics of racism. (V.II, pp.215–59) Working through the notions of cognitive and political discrimination on an abstract analytic and cultural level, this text demands to be read, closely, rigorously and autobiographically. And perhaps the best way to do so, is to place it in relation to what I would consider its companion piece ‘Passing for Black, Passing for White’. (V.I, pp.275–307) Published in 1992, the struggle for recognition as an artist, critic and philosopher; as a black woman artist, critic and philosopher caught between racial prejudices—she is often mistaken as white—is movingly captured in this piece of ancestral autobiography. This narrative recounts Piper’s personal and political history, a history filled with the vestiges of shame, harassment, rage, understanding, forgiveness. In the end, this documentary autobiography testifies to the reader as witness, the long road taken: ‘So no matter what I do or do not do about my racial identity, someone is bound to feel uncomfortable. But I have resolved that it is no longer going to be me’. (V.II, p.306) Joanne Morra University of Leeds

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Hush and Hemiola: 2700 m2 of hope shelter and home Francesca Hughes (ed.) The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997) This is a very good book, I should be very clear from the very outset. Francesca Hughes has curated as it were, between boards, a peculiarly successful assemblage of contemporary vantages which, in their varied ways, exercise the profound investigative potential of dwelling on a tropology of what the notion of feminine may be able to effect in the circumstances of architectural practice, architectural theory and architectural history. The authors have been obviously well-briefed and the result is a concerted, arresting, poetically and intellectually creative reappraisal of a number of chestnuts concerning the broadly-thought relations between women and construction. More, there are too a number of unexpected, novel, perhaps previously inarticulable, previously unrecognisable questions issued about the differing morphologies of feminism as ways of thinking architecturally. This is a book which evades expectation and simultaneously presumes and confounds convention. It’s interests lie in overrunning the ambitions of more used-to architectural writing; dating, provenance and attribution, crude historicist evaluation and assertive formal interpretation. Christine Hawley, as an example in this, avoids in her essay the vulgar condescension of phonetically spelling out the social and political backgrounds to architecture in detached theoretical characters. Her concentration on the implications of the cognitive role of drawing in architecture parallels in many ways recent similar work for instance by Catherine Ingraham (a contributor here) and, elsewhere and otherwise, by Molly Nesbit. This engagement with architecture’s own figural richness as a means of

intimating what architecture can concern achieves several things. One of them is the salvaging of buildings from their pristine historical removal from social processes. In Hawley’s essay, architecture and its rendering is returned to its status precisely as a physical and poetic social process. Another is to rescue architectural writing from its recent historical leanings on other intellectual figures; figures that were borrowed from architecture in the first place. Reliances on, for instance, Martin Heidegger’s coarse sense of home as a symptomatically selfderogating failure of confidence and the otherplaced-ness of much leading architectural thought, are carefully re-played to take architectural study back to its own importances. This is simply one of the common loci of the book. Another shared act of self-possession lies in the stern, implicit chiding of the theoretically widely accepted impossibility of an urban, intellectual professional flâneuserie, a derisively poised contempt for the notion that any relationship between women and architecture may usefully proceed without it. The adopting of this stance seems to be one necessary theoretical condition of women’s ability to even practically work architecturally, unaccompanied by masculine architectural escorts. It is a strong work, but this said, there are anxieties that need signalling about The Architect, anxieties that needn’t be too complacently allayed. This book remains difficult to talk about and its contributors make no attempt to coddle around the difficulties they themselves precipitate in their writing. One of these difficulties lies in just this area of the forms of accompaniment required to produce

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architecture. These accompaniments as it were precede any assessment of the significance of this book, that is to say these accompaniments go before any meaningful degree of felicity between the hopes mentioned in The Architect and the physical and intellectual environments of women architects can be pointed to. Even the promotional outillage of the book, the clipped selection of favourable reviews by Richard Rogers, Mark Wigley and Elizabeth Grosz are telling in this regard. The choice of these three is a neat demonstration of MIT’s ability to cover all disciplinary bases. The reviews, like others of their kind, are more to do with the attachment of a reputable bodyguard to the work than any intellectual involvement with the work. Professionally concerned very much with the health and well-being of architecture and its associated disciplines, Richard Rogers and Mark Wigley are unconditional in their optimistic enthusiasm for The Architect. There may be doubts though in thinking that either has ever made a point of making any usefully feminist statement in the entirety of their careers. Elizabeth Grosz on the other hand has made many such statements. But, and this is the problem, she is not an architect and her reputation seems relatively intellectually unconcerned by the practice, theorisation and history of architecture. That’s not a fault on her part in any way, but this necessary contracting-in of outside intellectual celebrity seems particularly saddening in the context of the publication of a book which should otherwise be joyfully heralded as a convinced marking of noticeable change. Beatriz Colomina has written a superbly inventive essay for this book on the relationship between Eileen Gray’s designs for a house, for Jean Badovici and herself, and Le Corbusier’s panoptical lesbian pornographies. She hints at the Laugian qualities of the garden shed that Le Corbusier managed to site overlooking the plot, a plot deliberately chosen for its seclusion. She highlights his insistence in accompanying Badovici and Gray into the intimacy of their domesticity in a commentary on his unbidden yet executed erotic murals. In short she exposes the policing

intrusiveness of Corbusian modernism and does it through recourse to a partial uncovering of an array of architectural secrets d’atelier. But, she also does it as if she were involved in a simple elucidation of prevailing conditions rather than in the bidding of a farewell to them. This is an important character of several of the texts collected here. There needs to be some contextualisation and something might be said of design history as an array of emergent disciplines. Palpable institutional changes, in Britain at least, shaped the conception and formation of a specifically mannered discipline with the addressal of gender written into its founding moments. When, for instance, Pat Kirkham and Judy Attfield edited A View From the Interior: Women, Feminism and Design in the very late 1980s it was in a context when important essays by Lynn Walker and Anthea Callen meant something in the gendered terms of the culture of the practical, theoretical and historiological elements of a discipline. There seems to have been a like shift in the founding of some art history. The same kind of thing cannot be said of architectural history. There is no evidence of such change here and I can still vividly remember the pompous, sterterous machismo of the delivery of architectural history lectures. I still see it. What I mean is that there might be still reason for those involved in the feminisation of architecture generally to quietly consolidate. This is bound to draw derision and it is badly pessimistic to feel compelled to say this sort of thing, but perhaps the open celebration of the achievement of The Architect is premature. There is the possibility still of giving the game away, of others being given the opportunity to jump the gun and plan contingently against subversion. Nasrine Seraji-Borzogzad implies as much in her essay here when she describes the competition brief for civic buildings which were, it seems, intended also to to allow for the outside congregation and shelter of the urban homeless. Urbanism’s ambition to effect the atomisation of the immiserated needs to be brought to mind. What is the reason for this thought about the potential generosity of architectural planning

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being made so municipally public? How was the solution structurally made unrealistic by the framing of the rubric itself? I don’t think Nasrine SerajiBorzogzad is paranoid in posing these questions. The feminisation of architecture is perhaps something that will go on most effectively elsewhere at present. Irit Rogoff has made a useful attempt in a recent-ish essay (1994) identifying the kind of pornographic troubles faced by German museology when attempting to reconstruct the meaning of the shattered cellars of the Gestapo’s Berlin H.Q. Carol Duncan is noted particularly for her commentaries on the ritual function of museums of modern art. Their analyses share a common devolvement on the cold, silencing facticity of architectural remnants and edifices. Buildings remain occasions to articulate concerns, architecturally unchaperoned. But again, like Elizabeth Grosz, Rogoff and Duncan are not directly involved in the institutions of architectural study. The Architect acknowledges this other-placedness too. Elizabeth Diller appears to have borrowed from the visual poetics and devices of artist Mary Kelly in her piece on domesticity. Her ruffling and confusion of a shirt is more about a dissident rather than an imprisonedly hysterical disarrangement of clothing, but the acknowledging gesture seems clear. The Architect could be thought more pessimistically than it seems to have been to date. The effect of its timeliness might be a phenomenal by-product of the varied rhythmic interferences of noises-off, something precipitated as a temporary focus by other disciplinary cadres. As a reaching-in to architecture by women from more secured disciplines it should be welcomed, but welcomed as that and not as a technically effected hallucination of movement and progress within architectural studies. There is no need to kid. This remains an important and challenging collection and perhaps it shouldn’t be so miserably regarded from the point of

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view of the disciplinary condition of architecture. But what would be the point of that? Would too much be left cheerily unsaid? Rob Stone University of Newcastle

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Nadir Lahiji and D.S.Friedman Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture (London: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997)

If modern architecture has an image in the popular imagination, it is one that conjures up an aesthetic of clean lines and machine-like construction. The International Style, whose image this is, represents the output of such architects as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Adolf Loos. The clean white lines of this particular architectural style, irrespective of the colours of the various political regimes it was made to serve, were a cipher for a deeper belief held amongst its architects, and those encouraging or commissioning them, that Modernism was able to improve peoples’ lives. It promised better health, jobs, more leisure time…cleaner, safer, more productive, happier… The changes this architecture was to herald went hand in hand with broader changes in public codes relating to health and hygiene, efficient production, leisure, dress, etc. which were all underwritten by a quasi-scientific rationale. So why Plumbing? The initial impression would be that this is a book that addresses the relationship between Modernism and the accompanying regime of hygiene, or that explores the relationship between Modernism and the possibility (or otherwise) of ‘plumbing’ the depths of the unknown. However, it soon becomes apparent (if only in the momentary clarity of Ignasi de Solà-Morales’ Preface) that this collection is motivated by an attempt to recover the body in architectural discourse, a body that has been lost in the poststructuralist fall-out of architectural criticism and (architectural) Postmodernism. ‘[The] primordial attention to the body forms the basis of an

architecture closer to clothing, to wrapping, to a mise en scène—this is the hypothesis advanced by this collection of texts.’ (p.5) The theme of plumbing, whether as sanitary installation or as epistemology, does intermittently flush through these texts. Indeed, the editors’ Introduction sets out to establish a link between the topics that flow from the potential ambiguities of the term plumbing. ‘Hygiene is the modern project’s supreme act […] for us Plumbing is the post-modern critique of a modernity that aggressively proceeds toward ever greater purity, always already alienated by its ambiguous itinerary.’ (p.7) Thus an agenda is drawn up for transposing the work of certain thinkers onto the discourse of Modernism in order to highlight its aporia and blind spots: the editors give strong hints that Verticality will be exposed, that the ‘whole’ human body will be revealed as a mere construct, that the purity sought by Modernism could only ever provide a temporary guard against an inevitable decay…The tone of the introduction raises the reader’s expectations that a constellation of thinkers including Nietzsche, Bataille, and Deleuze/ Guattari, will be brought into play against such Modernists as Loos and Le Corbusier. Once through the introduction, however, these promises dissipate, and each of these figures appear implicitly or explicitly only once during the remainder of the texts. Marcel Duchamp, who might have acted as a bearer for these ideas, fares only slightly better. The collection is fronted by two documents, there to represent the Modernist doctrine; one by Adolf

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Loos, Plumbers (1898), the other by CharlesEdouard Jeanneret [aka. Le Corbusier] and Amédée Ozenfant, The Right Angle (c.1920). These serve to reinforce the ambiguities of the term ‘plumbing,’ with Loos identifying the sophistication of English and American sanitary installations as the secret of their world domination, while Ozenfant/Jeanneret make a case for universal order (taking in happiness, Standard Objects, geometry and verticality en route). As the subject matter might indicate, these two documents adopt very different tones, from the seriousness of Ozenfant/Jeanneret: ‘…it is time to re-establish the axis around which [the] sinusoidal variables are but nuances; we have every right to believe in the homogeneity of man.’ (p.21), or: ‘It seems we create out of a necessity for making order.’ (p. 23) to the slightly mischievous Plumbers: ‘…only the nation that approaches the English in water usage can keep pace with them economically; only the nation that exceeds the English in water usage is chosen to overtake them in world dominance.’ (p.18) The essays that follow this historical flashback (clearly identified on contrasting paper à la parallax) on the whole adopt the serious tone of The Right Angle. It is only Harry Francis Malgrave’s close reading of Loos (Adolf Loos: Ornament and Sentimentality) that comes anywhere near the engaging mixture of wit and polemic displayed in Loos’ text. Intellectuals obviously still struggle with toilet humour. Nearly half of the essays in the book take up the opportunities that a close reading of plumbing can offer (whether in the domestic setting or as representative of broader concerns); in addition, several authors explore aspects of current architectural practice, and a couple offer more theoretical essays on aesthetics.

Among those in the first ‘category’ is the editors’ own contribution, At the Sink: Architecture in Abjection, which attempts to deconstruct the hygienic camp epitomised in the work of Le Corbusier (via several psychoanalytic detours to establish a hygienic super-ego) before setting it up against a little dust and dirt from Bataille. The essay doesn’t stray very far from familiar territory in any of the disciplines it draws upon, although several of the points raised in passing have plenty of mileage in them should anyone wish to pursue them. Not far from the sink is Marco Frascari’s contribution, The Pneumatic Bathroom. Frascari’s essay reaches a sensory overload that is compatible with the demands he makes on the bathroom as the last iconostases. As camp as any Bachelard, this essay indulges the ‘wonderful reader’ to a verbose ‘macaroni’ that tours through a eulogy to the powers of the bathroom as the Last Chance Saloon of salvation-by-architecture. This preparation culminates with Frascari’s account of one of his own projects, which is seductively drawn but fails to embody the ars macaronica of his writings. One of the most interesting ‘essays’ in the book is Margaret Morgan’s Too Much Leverage is Dangerous: A parataxis of texts and images that manages to side-step the dialectic set up in the editorial policy, these poetic shorts and images work as successfully as the best of the long essays, investigating the gaps in the Modernist conceptions of cleanliness, place, and the gendered implications of these conceptions. Helen Molesworth’s essay, Bathrooms and Kitchens: Cleaning House with Duchamp, is another thorough piece. Her reading of domestic space is undertaken in the belief that it can shed light on a whole panoply of current occurrences of ‘contemporary machine-body marriages’. (p.78) Analysing capitalist production and Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades alongside developments in the structure of work carried out in the home, Molesworth argues that domestic space and work were always-already fragmented and radically incomplete; thus they can provide a useful paradigm

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for the broader relationships between humans, machines and architecture. Of the essays that deal with notions of architectural practice, Mallgrave’s witty and illuminating reading of Loos has already been mentioned. Xavier Costa’s Ground Level is one of the more pedestrian inclusions. Architects’ Bellies: Reflections on the Plumbing of Masculine Conceptions is Claudio Sgarbi’s polemic attacking the current situation in architecture, which he sees producing ‘neutral things from a neutral, consumerised professionalism’. (p.197) It starts with an account of the representation of architecture as a female body through history, before going on to discuss Greenaway’s Belly of an Architect and a popular tale from eastern Europe The Ballad of the Walled-up Wife. Sgarbi is a better historian than he is a theorist, and the later sections of his essay fail to match the quality of its beginning. The last essay in the book is by William W. Braham, Siegfried Giedion and the Fascination of the Tub, which sets up a parallel reading between the text and the illustrations in Giedion’s Mechanisation Takes Command. Braham’s essay moves quickly and covers much ground, highlighting a tension between notions of hygiene (as public duty) and regeneration (as individual indulgence) that lies at the heart of Giedion’s book. Ending with a nod to the changes that have taken place in public notions of human health during the last decade, Braham suggests that the health-led public codes are still there to be complemented by the dreams of regeneration they may offer. The two strongest theoretical essays pursue broadly similar concerns, examining the boundary between body and world: Poché by Donald Kunze and Victor Burgin’s well known essay The City in Pieces (reprinted here from Burgin’s own book In/ Different Spaces) complement each other well. Burgin draws from a wide frame of reference to outline an understanding of space where ‘it is not simply that the boundaries are “porous,” but that the subject itself is soluble’. (p.116) The production of space and the production of ourselves has to be undertaken anew at every moment.

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Kunze’s essay, via very different vehicles, moves in a similar direction: while explicitly exploring the workings of the relationship that pertains when a viewer observes an architectural presentation drawing, the essay also hints at the broader consequences of these moves. As with Burgin, Kunze argues that neither the representation nor the viewer are unilaterally porous, but rather there is a demand for some sort of ‘production’ on both sides. Without citing Merleau-Ponty directly, one of the recurring concerns in Kunze’s essay is with the intertwining of the visible and the invisible. In effect, he draws out Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the chiasmic relationship in aesthetic experience, elaborating it in explicitly architectural terms. Kunze draws on diverse work, though within the constraints of the length of the essay the key moves of the fairly obscure theorists that he deploys cannot be expounded: the reader then has to take these on trust, which dilutes the rigour of the overall movement of this piece. Kunze’s is not the only essay that would have benefited from more space. Several of the contributions gain momentum rapidly, only to get beached. Had they been permitted a larger outlet, they would have been able to dispatch much more in the reader’s direction. The editorial plumbing remains broadly representative of the tenets of modernism: continuous, dry, and rather clean, pursuing the belief that some sanitary outcome is actually ‘achievable’ through this scholarly project. ‘In [this] collection of essays […] we present the dialectic of cleanliness and uncleanliness […]’. (p.8) It appears the outflow of this dialectic wants to provide a cleaner, healthier synthesis, rather than blocking the dialectic or blowing it apart. Nevertheless, the good essays— and there are many—manage to leak out. Stephen Walker Nottingham Trent University

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Keith Ansell Pearson Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition (London: Routledge, 1997)

Keith Ansell Pearson’s new Viroid Life is an excellent book, foregrounding Nietzsche in an exciting look at the evolution—the past and future— of ‘the human’ in its twin registers of biology and technology. No mere exegete, Ansell Pearson critically examines extremely important issues with the help of contemporary French philosophy as well as so-called complexity theory. Prominent in Viroid Life one finds: 1. a critical interrogation of Nietzsche’s relation to Darwin as well as an explication of his challenge to neo-Darwinism; 2. an exploration of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the human and the transhuman in terms of his subtle interweaving of past and future; 3. a constant reference to Deleuze (principally Nietzsche and Philosophy and Difference and Repetition) and Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus) on the machinic nature of evolution and technology; 4. a critique of current techno-imperialist writings that celebrate (or bemoan) the ‘machines as the last stage of evolution’ trope. Throughout, Ansell Pearson’s wide reading is in evidence, as in addition to the above names, Viroid Life scatters incisive readings of Freud, Heidegger, Hegel, Bergson, and a wide range of current biologists and philosophers (Margulis, Gould, Dawkins, Goodwin, Kauffman, Maturana and Varela, Csanyi, Kampis, Dennett, Lyotard, Baudrillard). Viroid Life turns on two major insights, one from Nietzsche, the other from Deleuze and Guattari. First, Ansell Pearson insists, with Nietzsche, that the human and transhuman, the past and the future, have always been immanent to each other. We are thus forbidden the tempting thought of a linear

understanding of the transhuman—be it named ‘overman’ or ‘cyborg’—as the next stage in a smooth progression. Rather, humans are the temporal and futural animal par excellence, a thought which, far from assuring us of our superiority, makes us face Nietzsche’s insight that humans are the sick animal. Ansell Pearson’s first chapters provide an excellent reading of Nietzsche on this point, showing how the Genealogy of Morals is perhaps the most important of Nietzsche’s writings. Ansell Pearson shows how the transhuman is implicated in the human in all the famous analyses of the Genealogy: the breeding of the animal with a right to make promises, the slave revolt in morality, the creation of ressentiment, and so on. The second major insight of Viroid Life is that the evolution of the (trans)human must be considered as not merely biological, but as also technological. Now this stance is fruitful only because the biological is itself technical, through and through: bio-tech evolution must be thought as the ‘Mechanosphere’, to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term from A Thousand Plateaus. In some of the most exciting passages of Viroid Life, Ansell Pearson’s Chapter 5 shows how this interweaving of biology and technology means that not only are physical processes of self-organizing matter in embryology important endogenous factors that dethrone the contemporary synthesis of natural selection and genetic mutation (a synthesis that puts exogenous factors at the forefront of change), but also that symbiosis has shown that sex is not the only medium of genetic transfer. Thus contaminating—technical

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—‘transverse communication’ is possible across family lines: in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms once again, ‘alliance, not filiation’ is the slogan for biotech evolution. With this thought of the contamination of biology and technology, any linearity of evolution must be given up. Darwin’s startling de-anthropomorphization must be faced in Gould’s non-linear fashion: life is not a tree, but a swamp (rhizome). But this means that machines cannot merely replace mankind as the summit of an evolution that supposedly aims at more complexity, for neither complexity nor anything else is the ‘goal’ of evolution. After this synoptic overview, a chapter-bychapter tour will demonstrate Viroid Life’s richness. Chapter 1, ‘Loving the Poison’, highlights Nietzsche’s insistence in the Genealogy that only priestly ressentiment allows humans to become ‘interesting’. The futurity introduced by priestly weakness is of course also a function of memory, which Ansell Pearson explores in reading Deleuze on Freud, Proust, and Bergson as well as Nietzsche. Ansell Pearson succeeds in these pages in bringing out Deleuze’s notion of an active futural memory, a memory whose interpretation of the past opens it, and us, to new becomings. Chapter 2, ‘Towards the Overhuman’, examines Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche’s eternal return as a ‘selection’, a thought that Ansell Pearson suggests Nietzsche is unwilling to face, preferring ‘to be only a yea-sayer’. (p.47) Following a brief contrast of Rousseau and Nietzsche, Ansell Pearson ends with a consideration of the paradox of gay science and ascetic ideals that reiterates the necessity of taking the priestly contribution to the human and transhuman seriously: ‘Great health […] entails […] an affirmation of sickness and of the ideals it inspires’. (p.53, italics in original) Chapter 3, ‘Dead or Alive’, reads Nietzsche alongside Deleuze and Freud on death and repetition —including that grandest repetition, the eternal return. Following Blanchot, Deleuze distin guishes two deaths in Difference and Repetition: the personal death of the ego, the entropic model for Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and the

impersonal death of disguise and creation, the kind implicated in the eternal return. Ansell Pearson is careful to note that Deleuze and Guattari return to the notion of death in A Thousand Plateaus in writing of the line of flight and the suicidal state of the Nazis, pages which complicate any simple opposition between the two deaths. Nonetheless, freed of its ties to the whole, the person, or the organism, the death invoked in the doctrine of eternal return in Zarathustra, is then, Ansell Pearson claims, ‘a teaching of the fragment, of fragmentary death and fragmentary life’. (p.81) Chapters 4 and 5 form the heart of Viroid Life, the point of greatest intensity of Ansell Pearson’s thought. In Chapter 4, ‘Nietzsche contra Darwin’, Ansell Pearson engages at length Nietzsche’s Auseinandersetzung with Darwin, showing the strengths and limitations, the dead ends and promising leads of both thinkers. Despite what one might have expected, Ansell Pearson shows that ‘Nietzsche’s position “contra” Darwin is flawed […] what is decisive is the critical perspective Darwin’s thinking on natural selection brings to bear on Nietzsche’s Lebensphilosophie, [which] rests on an untenable anthropomorphization of nature, life, and evolution’. (p.86) Along the way Ansell Pearson’s most impressive range of reading is in evidence, as he marshals evidence not only from philosophy, such as Deleuze/Guattari and Heidegger, but also from the history of biology— and there not only Darwin and Lamarck, but also Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Roux, Carl von Naegli, Jacob von Uexkull, and others. In his main focus, Ansell Pearson shows that Nietzsche’s contribution to biological thought should come from his emphasis on endogenous, ‘form-creating’ forces, an emphasis—taken up in contemporary complexity theory—which counters Darwinism’s overestimation of utility in meeting the survival challenge of exogenous forces. Nietzsche falters in his desire to avoid anthropomorphism, however, Ansell Pearson charges, in his biologizing formulation of will-to-power as a ‘basic organic function’ (Beyond Good and Evil), which is then used, in Ansell Pearson’s phrase, ‘to legitimize an

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aristocratic radicalism’. (p.106) This move of Nietzsche amounts to nothing more and nothing less than that for which he criticizes the Darwinians: projecting social forces onto nature, and then reading back off of that ‘nature’ a social and political philosophy! The key remedy, Ansell Pearson states, is to produce a non-anthropomorphic reading of will-topower so as to ‘map non-human becomings of life’. (p.109) Ansell Pearson approaches this task first through a critique of Heidegger’s readings of Nietzsche that seek to outlaw reflection on Nietzsche’s biology, and then with a call for a ‘technics of excess, in which the inventiveness of evolution would be seen to exceed a utilitarian calculation, so making possible the becoming of more complex, non-linear, and “machinic” models of evolution’. (p.114) Once again, in searching for this new thought, Heidegger is the foil, this time in his lecture course of 1929–30, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Deleuze is the resource on which Ansell Pearson relies to counter Heidegger’s ‘phenomenological bias in favor of the molar and the organismic over the molecular and the machinic’. (p.116) The Deleuzo-Guattarian notion is that of ‘involution,’ of ‘experimental evolution’ on a plane of immanence of self-organizing matter. (pp. 119–20) In concluding the chapter, Ansell Pearson finds hints of this type of thought in Nietzsche’s writings on art, which he glosses as: ‘the primary artistic force is […] a kind of readiness for excitation and harmonization of heterogenous forces’, a force that is a ‘function of the transversal becoming of life’. (p.121) Chapter 5, ‘Viroid Life,’ focuses on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘Mechanosphere’, which implies that, in Ansell Pearson’s words, ‘all systems from the “biological” to the “social” and economic are made up of machinic assemblages, complex foldings, and movements of deterritorialization that serve to cut across and derange their stratification’. (p.125) Here Ansell Pearson brings together the emphasis on endogenous forces of material selforganization in complexity theory and on transversal contamination in symbiosis to show the

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current scientific work that demonstrates the prescience of Deleuze and Guattari’s attacks on the exclusive focus on the whole, the organism, the molar. The preference for the molecular and the rhizome underpins Ansell Pearson’s reading of Maturana and Varela on ‘autopoiesis’, in which he diagnoses ‘a whole conservative metaphysics of living systems [which] presupposes a paranoid machine’. (p.142) To the thought of autopoiesis, Ansell Pearson prefers that of ‘machinic heterogenesis’, (p.146) a term of Guattari’s. But this thought concerning technology must follow the trail of social machines, and hence, for us, capitalism, as Deleuze and Guattari insist. The only explicit political message of Viroid Life occurs in this context, as Ansell Pearson announces what for him is the ‘critical task of an alien thought-praxis […] decoding and deterritorializing the prevailing administrative and regulatory machines […] that have defined and restricted the present by despotically blocking the free flow of energy and knowledge throughout the social machine’. (p.148) Here I must register what is virtually my only complaint about Viroid Life, for the liberation of a ‘free flow’ seems to me to be at odds with the insistence on machinism: Deleuze and Guattari insist, contra the interpretation that would saddle them with a romantic naturalism with regard to desire, that ‘all desire is machined’, that it never flows freely, but always only flows when constructed, that is, channelled. Everything turns, of course, on the type of channels constructed: molar or molecular, etc. Thus a decoding and deterritorializing is always a recoding and reterritorializing, but this is never given in advance: experimenting with codings and territories is precisely the object of schizoanalytic or rhizomatic practice. This remark aside, Chapter 5 concludes with a withering attack on the ‘ridiculous anthropomorphism’ (p.149) of Kevin Kelly’s writings on techno-evolution, an attack continued in the final chapter, ‘Timely Meditations on the Transhuman Condition’. Here Ansell Pearson takes

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the reader on a tour of twentieth century writings on technology, from Junger to Heidegger to Vaneigem to Debord to Debray to Blanchot to Blackburn to Lyotard to Ellul, again, as always, with illuminating reference to Nietzsche and Deleuze. The main point here is to ‘divorce a speculative comprehension of capital from conventional fascist-paranoid images of it’, (p.174) images Ansell Pearson finds all too often in his readings. The antidote here is an appreciation of the machinic assemblage of capital, which ‘neither controls nor steers machinic evolution’. (p. 175) Ansell Pearson achieves this perspective with Deleuze/Guattari, Wallerstein, Prigogine and Csanyi, once again showing not only his facility with complexity theory, but also its philosophical relevance. Perhaps this unholy marriage of philosophy and science should have the last word. Viroid Life breaks new ground in continental philosophy in its turn to science, particularly the life sciences studied as complex systems. Previously, continental philosophers, particularly those of the HeideggerDerrida lineage, had eschewed negotiations with science, while analytic philosophers had largely focused on physics as the paradigm science for philosophical reflection. In the breakthrough that is Viroid Life, Ansell Pearson has thus given us not only a thought-provoking meditation on the future of the thought of the future, but also in its monstrous transversal communication between complexity theory and continental philosophy, an example of an inventive future, a creative becoming—indeed, if others have the skill and strength to follow and branch off, one of the very futures of philosophy itself. John Protevi Louisiana State University

Conference Report

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parallax, 1998, vol. 4, no. 3, 159–161

Politics, Friendship and ‘democracy to come’: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship Conference organised in association with Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 29–30th November 1997). Including: Richard Beardsworth on the future; Catherine Belsey on Hamlet’s ethical decision; Andrew Benjamin on chora, finitude and irrelation; Geoffrey Bennington on philosophical friendship; Simon Critchley on ethics and politics; Jacques Derrida on friendship; Alexander Garcia-Duttman on the “always already relationship”; Bonnie Honig on foreigners and foundations; Ernesto Laclau on undecidability and power; Chantal Mouffe on impossibility and positivity; and Aletta Norval on deconstruction and destiny; with Jonathan Ree and Howard Caygill. What we have to invent is the best perjury possible…or, the least bad. Jacques Derrida, 30th November, 1997 Which ever way I write a report on such a conference, it will certainly be insufficient. But necessary. I have already tried several different openings, and every one, including this one, hammers home the irritating truth of the phrase, ‘necessary but insufficient’. This is nothing new to those of a deconstructive bent, so I will not dwell on it here, except merely to state that, in writing the opening sentence of this report, I have decided, chosen, or been compelled to omit at least one of several key words from the sentence. But the problem belied by these words, however absent, remains. Because the opening is, as they say, constitutively split, I was forced to do something I

did not want to do in order to open the narrative. That is to say, I deliberated on the options as they occurred to me, considered the political implications of a variety of rhetorical strategies and narrative modes, before telling myself that I had decided to efface the problem of what Bonnie Honig called the place ‘Where The Begining Divides’. I did not write: ‘Which ever way I choose to…’ or ‘Which ever way I decide to write a report on such a conference, it will certainly be insufficient’. But I felt compelled to include the word ‘certainly’, and I certainly had to go ahead and just write. So I am writing. Just. Even though the writing already feels unjust. But this is not the place for me to have a conversation with myself, in the many voices which seem to make up the communities of me. This is the place, rather, to write a synthetic description of a conference hosted by the ICA to mark the English publication of Jacques Derrida’s most recent book, Politics of Friendship. It also marked the departure from the ICA of Eleanor Reckitt, and we were invited to consider this event both sentimentally (by Chantal Mouffe) and also in terms of its potential significance/s for the future of the ICA as a political space wherein the work of philosophical discussion of the political can be performed (by Reckitt herself).

1353–4645/98 $12·00 © 1998 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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Indeed, the ‘case’ of Reckitt serves analagously and actually as a good way of encapsulating the pragmatics required by the political theory of the coorganisers, Laclau and Mouffe. Reckitt urged us to be vigilant, and to make our voices heard should the future powers-that-be within the ICA fail to deliver the goods, so to speak. Although she felt sure her (at that time unknown) successor/s would perform admirably and ‘responsibly’, in the ‘spirit’ of the ICA; on reflection her point seems to be a litotes rendition of a point made in Of Grammatology: ‘The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as sort of monstrosity’. I must confess, I have here lifted this quotation not from Of Grammatology, but from Richard Beardsworth’s book, Derrida & the political, where it occurs epigraphically. But this is no crime, as this ‘danger’ was addressed again by Beardsworth at the conference. For just as Reckitt urged us not to be complacent if standards fell, so Beardsworth explained his opinion that deconstructionist theory must now move on from, or reorient its fixation on ‘radical undecidability’, so that ‘conditions of impossibility’ henceforth be considered very thoroughly as the ‘positive’ (Mouffe’s word) ‘conditions of possibility’ of invention. Consequently, Beardsworth asks, how can we control the future? How can we prepare for the future? For, ‘one cannot not determine the other’ and ‘no decision cannot not interrupt the perhaps’. Perhaps. But in posing a problem which Laclau would call that of the decision in an undecidable terrain, Beardsworth introduced the question of ‘invention’, asking specifically how we are to invent political temporality in space. Simon Critchley asked him: is decision an invention? And later, when Derrida intervened, he did not want to say as much, but he also did not want to not-say as much, because, among a variety of reasons, it’s undecidable: any decision can be referred to a causal chain, thereby demonstrating that the decision was not one. But the fact of the possibility of an infinity of causalities, of genealogies, at once makes all narratives suspect,

including that of the decision. This reinstates it in an undecidable terrain. Simple, really. But Derrida also sought to foreground ‘undecidability’, a term which he suggested Laclau might have theorized in too ‘concrete’ or ‘selfapparent’ a manner at times. So as to warn against the dangers of bandying the term around, Derrida pointed out that undecidability never appears as such. ‘You cannot not hide undecidability.’ This led into a heated debate about the category “subject”. For Laclau had interpreted a certain section of Politics of Friendship (p.68) as indicating Derrida’s abandonment of this category. This reading arose from contemplating an enigmatic assertion made by Derrida: that the event of the decision has nothing to do with the subject. But Derrida, by way of disagreement and elucidation, re-opened the problematic of the subject by complexifying the already contradictory conceptual constraints of this category: from the sovereign Cartesian subject to the subject ‘at war with itself’, the subject of performative constitution, and a variety of other conceptions. He said, ‘I am the same at the end of the sentence [whose utterance is the result of a decision as well as being a movement in performative elaboration or invention] as I was at the begining’. There is stability, which hides undecidability. He said, ‘Try to talk to politicians about undecidability. I would be curious to know what [even the most brilliant politician] would think about the conversations we have here’. But perhaps I should attempt to render an account of who spoke, in what order, and try to indicate, fleetingly, reductively, and surely biasedly, the thematic content of their papers. (The conference proceedings will undoubtedly be published, either by Routledge, Verso, or ICA.) Chantal Mouffe’s introduction criticized utilitarian and Habermasian conceptions of democracy, which rely on some notion of the ‘ideal speech act’ and ‘perfectibility’, which constitutes a self-refuting idea—drawing a democracy which would cease to be so at the very moment of its realization. The concept of perfection, in friendship as in democracy, is the very moment of termination.

PARALLAX

Geoffrey Bennington asked, ‘What is philosophical friendship?’ and discussed its conceptual possibility and political dynamics by interrogating the question of what it means to think ‘my voice’ when talking of, with, about or against a philosophical friend. Bonnie Honig addressed the chicken and egg question of origins with reference to Rousseau’s ruminations on citizenship and the law, Aristotle’s pronouncements on friendship (virtue, pleasure, use), Derrida’s Freud’s ‘Father’, Moses, and Clint Eastwood, in a reading of the Book of Ruth. The problem, in a nut- or egg-shell, is that the moment of systemic constitution is necessarily one of external intervention, producing an inside which must thereafter efface its outside in order to maintain its identity. The constituted system or structure derives internal systematicity only through exclusion. But, if there is an exterior to the structure, then the entirety of the structure is placed in jeopardy as it is already subverted, constitutively split, traversed by an alterity it must efface in order to survive—which is a problem if that structure has universalizing aims or a self-affirmed universal scope and legitimacy. Honig demonstrated that ‘historically’ the problem of the constitutive outside has ben solved by the death or departure of the originary force: the Father of the primal horde is more powerful structurally after death; Moses, an Egyptian, dies in sight of (but not in) the chosen people’s promised land, conveniently allowing the identity of the chosen people to proceed as ostensibly pure from the origin and thereafter; and Clint Eastwood’s restorative violence, a violence incompatible with the peace it allows, requires that he must not remain in the town he has redeemed, as, strictly speaking, such violence must be rejected from this new peaceful system (Later, Andrew Benjamin made his own points using the logic of the chora: ‘whatever generates x cannot be subject to the same laws as x’). But Ruth comes from outside, spiritually refounds, and yet insists on staying. And she’s female. Hm.

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The round-table which followed included Alex Duttman discussing friendship: a ‘repeated unconditional decision’, an ‘always already relationship’—a limitless conversation without origin or point. Aletta Norval asked ‘Is democracy the manifest destiny of deconstruction?’ And Richard Beardsworth tackled political temporality, space and invention. Sunday saw another lively round-table, with Critchley, Catherine Belsey and Andrew Benjamin dealing with the relation between politics and ethics, Hamlet’s ethico-political choice, and how something other than finitude would show itself. Laclau’s ‘Undecidability and Power’, which followed, has already exerted enough influence on this report, I think, at least in my (ab)use of terminology. Consequently, I choose to move swiftly on to perhaps the most enigmatic event of the weekend: Derrida’s compulsion to recount a dream he had while sleeping on Saturday night/Sunday morning ‘at about four am’. The dream, and especially its telling, was simultaneously bizarre, amusing and tragic. But these three judgements, however true (as these were the intermingled effects of its telling), are of course the work of interpretation. And Derrida himself made a point of not interpreting it. He merely wanted to share it with us, but when it came to be time for questions you can be sure that there were questions and interpretations galore. But the dream itself was not bizarre or amusing: we all have far more weird or inarticulable dreams as a matter of course. And the tragedy only really came to be perceived when Derrida confided that he had actually lost two brothers, one before he was born and one when he was about ten years old. He didn’t interpet it, and he didn’t invite interpretation, but interpretation certainly occurred. He just recounted the dream and told us to do with it whatever we chose. I want to do a couple of things with it (or maybe not a couple of things: the questions of number and effect featured in the conference). All are, perhaps, entirely inappropriate. The first is to quote from elsewhere; the second is to quote twice from

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Derrida; and the third is to quote from what feels like me. The words Derrida spoke are two statements about one thing, and one about another; spoken in moments of happy animation in an ambience of friendship imbued with not a little awe. 1. ‘Belbo looked out of the corner of his eyes. “You want to know if I dreamed about the trumpet again?” “I want to know,” I said, “what the Object of Desire was.” “Ah,” he said, turning back to his manuscript. “You see? You’re obsessed by the object of desire, too. But it’s not all that simple…. Suppose I had taken the trumpet. Would I have been truly happy then? What do you think, Casaubon?” “I think you would have dreamed about the clarinet.” “I got the clarinet,” he concluded sharply, “but I never played it.” “Never played it? Or never dreamed it?” “Played it,” he said, underlining his words, and for some reason I felt like a fool.’1 2. ‘This was not a text…This was really a dream.’ ‘To say ‘I take the responsibility’ is a structural lie.’2 3. In conclusion then (inconclusion), three things. First, the conference was, to my mind, exceptional. Second, if anyone took a pink leaflet from a stranger because they thought that it contained information relating to the conference, only to discover that it was a parallax subscription form, I would like to say sorry, you were deliberatley misled. And finally, I wonder if the version of the conference which is to be published will include an account of Derrida’s dream. Notes 1 Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum (London: Picador, 1990), p.61. 2 Jacques Derrida, ICA, 30th November 1997.

Paul Bowman University of Leeds

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parallax Issue 9 October–December 1998 neo-pragmatisms & new romanticisms guest editors: Omayra Cruz & Ray Guins

Editor’s Acknowledgments Omayra Cruz & Ray Guins neo-pragmatism & new romanticisms Kathleen M.Wheeler Classicism, Romanticism, and Pragmatism: The Sublime Irony of Oppositions Adam Carter ‘Self-Creation and Self-Destruction’: Irony Ideology, and Politics in Richard Rorty and Friedrich Schlegel Erin Ferris Consequences of Irony Andrzej Warminski Man and Self-consciousness: Koiève, Romantic lronist Kevin Newmark ‘Practically Impossible: Jean Paulhan and Post-Romantic Irony’ Marjorie Perloff The Poetics of Description: Wittgenstein on the Aesthetic Russell B.Goodman Wittgenstein and Pragmatism David Hall Love at Second Site: The Re-Engagement of Confucianism and Pragmatism Victor J.Vitanza The Hermeneutics of Abandonment Paul Bow-man Book Discussion: deconstruction and pragmatism