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The Future of a Defeat

Julia Kristevaa& Arnaud Spire

aThe Universit de Paris VII

Published online: 03 Dec 2010.

To cite this article:Julia Kristeva & Arnaud Spire (2003) The Future of a Defeat, Parallax, 9:2, 21-26, DOI:10.1080/1353464032000064973

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parallax, 2003, vol. 9, no. 2, 2126

The Future of a Defeat1

Julia Kristeva Interviewed by Arnaud Spire

Arnaud Spire. Most of the people who have expressed their views in these columns

have shown that the desire for revolution is still ready to rise from its ashes. The

word counter-revolution, on the other hand, has virtually disappeared from

everyday language. Even the contemporary counter-revolution is described as a

conservative revolution! What do you think?

Julia Kristeva. Ever since the eighteenth century, the notion of revolution has been

wrongly defined as meaning destroying earlier political systems and social controls

in order to promote their renewal. More justice, more room for the excluded and

the underprivileged: this was the project of the French Revolution and the other

revolutions bourgeois and proletarian that punctuated the nineteenth century.

Even though it retained the cutting edge of the new, or even renaissance, revolution,

defined in this sense, thus acquired a restrictive meaning and, what is more, it led

to the Terror and, more seriously, to the totalitarianism that was born of the

proletarian revolution. The first thing we have to do is to expand the impact of this

logic of revolt by removing it from the strictly political sphere. Earlier periods spoke

of the revolution of the sun and the planets, in the sense of the movement of the

heavenly spheres or bodies. That meaning runs through the history of science. It

implies the idea of a return to something earlier, a change of temporality, of discovery

and revelation. That is the meaning of the Sanskrit root vel, which we also find in

the French word volume: reading and comprehension are underpinned by the

movement of turning pages, of moving from one sheet to another, of going from

past to future. Similarly, anamnesis like involuntary memory in Prousts A La

Recherche du temps perdu, or as we experience it on the psychoanalysts couch is arevolution. It allows the subject to find new resources in his or her sensorial

experiences or past traumas, and therefore to draw up a new psychic map by outlining

possible life changes. The modern age is over, and we now live in a planetary age

characterized by a number of technological components: old industries continue to

develop, but they are developing hand in hand with new technologies, thanks to the

expansion of the media, and the globalization of both transport and the professions;

in a word, the whole of humanity is being globalized. This new system of controls

is changing the social bond and modifying the meaning of the human.

Representations are becoming uniform. Dallasis watched all over the world. We are

witnessing an extinction of psychic space. I call this threat that hangs over our psyches

a new malady of the soul. Men and women have difficulty in representing their

parallaxISSN 1353-4645 print/ISSN 1460-700X online 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journalsDOI: 10.1080/1353464032000064973

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AS. In La Revolte intime, you were already describing revolt as both jouissance and

dispersal: What is more, this conflict gives rise to a jouissance that does not imply a

narcissistic or egotistical caprice on the part of the spoiled man of the consumer

society or the society of the spectacle. You make it clear that the modern age

which you date from the French Revolution valorized the negative aspect of this

retrospective return. What you do mean?

JK. Colette, who is one of my feminine geniuses, took a great interest in the

opening of plants and beings. This is a temporal dimension that we lack and which

we should graft on to the term revolution, using the time of rebirth and renewal

against revolutions time of death, vengeance and ressentiment. For me, that was thetemporality of the May 68 movement, which a certain press is now trying to

demonize, as though that movement were nothing more than the work of

paedophiles who had abolished all limits in the education of children, who liberated

themselves in outrageous manner from the morality of the day, and who now control

ministerial cabinets and the media. The only goal of this media manipulation is to

close the door on the psychic need to protest, which was vital not only for our

generation, which was defined by the tragedies of colonialism, but also for French

society, whose contemporary renewal was inspired by the shock of 68 and which,

even today, still finds it difficult to liberate itself from various practices of power

be it presidential or, more generally, administrative that still have strong medieval

and religious overtones. The upheaval of May 68 stimulated both the beginnings of

modern Frances social dialogue and its openness to Europe and the world. TheAmericans who do not like being demonized have marketed the term

conservative revolution. And yet no one sees them as revolutionaries. Talk of the

conservative revolution simply means that there is a groundswell ofressentiment, but

when we use that expression we completely forget that the word revolution also

means the revelation of new solidarities. Left-wing movements lack a culture of

staying with, of laborious thought and social renewal, which should be thought of

not as the culture of neo-liberalism and management, but as the culture of care and

modernization. Cant we find ways to modify globalization that do not worship the

rule of the market, but which take account of individuals, their creativity and which

help us to seek new ways of living together. The ball is in our court, but we dont

know how to play the game. Even though considerable progress has been made, it

seems to me that the French are still not ready to accept the new idea of European

sovereignty. The road we have to take does not lead to the romantic idea of

revolution, but to respect for revolt, protest, renewal and a change of temporality,

provided that we carefully see that need through to its optimal realization here and

now. Hence the importance, in this situation, of women, who are supposed to

experience desires that are difficult to express and understand: What do women

want? There is never an answer to that question: they simultaneously feel the need

to help the other and to find ways of living together. Recognition of the psychic need

for revolt alone will obviously not provide a political solution: there is still a long

way to go. Stressing the providential implications of the term revolution can give

rise to new illusions and lead us into new blind alleys. Who can predict the future

of a defeat? It is important not to confuse psychic need and aesthetic creativity with

political realism. We are moving towards democracies in which delegation will

develop continuously. There will of course be a need for a social class that devotes

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the brothers revolt against the tyranny of the primal father that turned barbarism

into a social pact which respected an authority. In contrast, the institution of

revolutionary violence as a political practice, the destruction of the thought of

economic rationality and even the social bond, which is potentially both renewable

and liberating, now seem to be inseparable from revolutionary ideology. The

planetary age is a post-revolutionary age: it invites us to imagine a social pact that

will lead neither to a rejection of the logic of the market nor to the calculation and

management of profits, but which can preserve intact the possibility of rebirth and

renewal, of personal and collective surprise. The point is to upset globalization with

the expression of our revolts whilst avoiding a romantic extremism which, in the

modern context, shuts the door on reform and justifies, a contrario, a managerialconservatism that most people see as the final bulwark against the disorder of archaic

revolutionaries. Rather than falling into that trap and failing once again, can the far

left contribute to the modernization of the planetary age in the sense in which the

French revolution understood modernization in its day: making modernity more

humane, more respectful of the poverty and creativity of all? This is much more

difficult than revolutionary flights of fancy, but it could mean a social and political

philosophy in the form of neighbourhood therapy. Hannah Arendt dreamed of a

politics based upon aesthetic judgement. I would say that the planetary age demands

of us a politics based upon therapeutic patience. If it is to remain true to the heritage

of solidarity you mention, the far lefts vocation might well be to repair the damage

done by revolution and globalization. Melanie Klein deduced from her patients that

all thought, all bonds and all creation is a result of the reparation made for violenceand destructiveness. So, is reparation the only solution?

AS. Having chosen three writers Aragon, Sartre and Barthes as concrete

illustrations of your concept of inner revolt, you began to write a trilogy of the

feminine genius: Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein and Colette. But dont all three

women rebel against any collective expression of their revolt? They therefore do not

have to ask themselves what the object of their desire might be if they were not in

revolt .

JK. I do not know if I am able to answer your question in overall terms. I am

currently writing the conclusion to Le Genie feminin. It is true that there are some

convergences between the three women, despite the proliferating and divergent

specifics that inspire them. All three are, for example, extremely attached to the

bond: the bond with the object, the bond of love, the bond with the child and the

social bond. Writing after the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt strove to save the social

bond, and she proposes a practice of philosophy that is inseparable from political

life, understood as a contract, based upon judgement, promise and pardon, between

individual and renascent beings. She rejects the egocentric and poetic isolation of

the melancholic philosopher and insists on narrative, a collective memory constructed

by free individuals within the bonds established by the polis. Melanie Klein thought

that even the new-born child is not narcissistic, but lives only through the bond with

the mother. When it loses that object, it replaces or repairs it through discourse.

And that is how the child enters the specifically human dimension of thought freedom,

and even creative solitude. Colette, who constantly experimented with love, even

though she also said that she was trapped by her experiments, writes this astonishing

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phrase: One of the great banalities of existence love withdraws from our memory:

when we emerge from that, we notice that everything else is gay, varied and exists

in the plural. She means that, beyond the eroticism of the couple, there lies her

infinite greed for being, and for literature. All three ladies are proposing a new

temporality, and it is not that ofressentimentbut that of opening, and this time is the

maternal time of birth as a loss of passion: there are times in the life of a woman at

which extreme eroticism is transformed into a distant caring that allows the other

the child to exist as an autonomous being, to speak and to accede to its own life.

The removal of passion from passion is a magnificent moment, which they succeed

in transforming into the bliss of thinking and writing. For Melanie Klein, it takes the

form of a therapy for thought. For Hannah Arendt, it is the freedom to breathewithin the social pact itself. For Colette, it is the wonderment inspired by the cosmic

renewal of the sexual bond in the French language. In all three cases, the accent is

on life rather than destructiveness. Can these three feminine figures help us always

to remember that humanitys great problems will be resolved only when we

understand the singularity of every life? Can politics hear what they are saying?

Translated by David Macey

Note

1 This paper was first published in French in

LHumanite(2nd July 2001).

Julia Kristeva is Professor at the Universite de Paris VII, and a practicing

psychoanalyst. She has written numerous critical essays and several novels. Her most

recent publications include Le Genie feminin, tome 3 : Colette (Fayard), Intimate Revolt

(Columbia University Press) and the interview Micropolitique(Editions de lAube).

Arnaud Spire is a philosopher and a regular contributor to LHumanite where he

was a member of the chief editorial staff(1985 1998). He is the author of many

books includingLa pensee-Prigogine(Desclee de Brouwer) and Marx, cet inconnu(Desclee

de Brouwer).

David Macey is a translator and the author ofFrantz Fanon: A Life(2000) and ThePenguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (2000). The latest of his numerous translations

from French is Abdelmalek Sayad: The suVerings of the immigrant (forthcoming for Polity

Press).

Spire

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the future of a defeat

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