Absence and Revolt

The Recent Work of

Julia Kristeva

Sylvie Gambaudo

Les Nouvelles Maladies de l'aÃme

by Julia Kristeva
Paris: ArtheÁme Fayard, 1993

Sens et non-sens de la reÂvolte: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse I

by Julia Kristeva
Paris: ArtheÁme Fayard, 1996

La ReÂvolte intime: pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse II

by Julia Kristeva
Paris: ArtheÁme Fayard, 1997

I
N 1992, JULIA KRISTEVA painted a somewhat pessimistic picture of
contemporary society, saying that `the moment of militancy is over and
we are living in a therapeutic age in which we must face up to our
problems' (Kristeva, 1992: 20). In the ®ve years that followed, Kristeva
committed herself to offering a psychoanalytic diagnosis of these problems,
culminating in the publication of three texts: Les Nouvelles Maladies de
l'aÃme (1993), Sens et non-sens de la reÂvolte (1996) and La ReÂvolte intime
(1997). Her analysis is articulated around the two recurring themes of
absence and revolt. The failure (or absence) of the symbolic/paternal
function and the return to (or revolt of) archaic/maternal processes has
brought about a situation of crisis. Human beings are experiencing a
splitting of subjectivity, with a growing divide between two opposite poles.
On the one hand, men and women crave to become more ef®cient

& Theory, Culture & Society 2000 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),
Vol. 17(2): 105±120
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106 Theory, Culture & Society 17(2)

social performers with homogenized personal needs satis®ed by manufac-

tured sensations. This mass consumption has engendered schizoid social
subjects whose identity crises are reminiscent of the replicant problematic
explored in Blade Runner. On the other hand, the singularities of human
experience are displaced and transformed into social `diseases', sympto-
matic of repression and homogenization: the collapse of ideologies of revolt,
the fragmentation of the family unit, and the resurgence of fundamentalism
and extremism may be aetiologically linked to the spread of stress-related
illnesses. In turn, sufferers of these ®n de sieÁcle diseases ®nd fast and
ef®cient relief in pills, ready-made images or euphoric discourses of
damnation/salvation.
Kristeva presents us with no less than the future of the human race.
Throughout her recent work, she implies that we are now faced with a
choice: withdrawal from the human or reassessment and rehabilitation of the
possibility for revolt and survival.
Absence
Julia Kristeva's collection, Les Nouvelles Maladies de l'aÃme (1993) brings
together a set of essays which illuminate key aspects of her work through the
1980s and beyond. Divided into a clinical approach and a historical/
®ctional approach, these essays illustrate particularly her concern with the
symptoms of a society in transition, her attempt to de®ne the `new maladies
of the soul' and her belief in the importance of language in maintaining the
good health of civilization. Kristeva's analysis of our new `maladies'1 is
inspired by the contemporary dif®culty of translating and framing the space
of the psyche.
Freud considered that psychic life is `doubly determined ± by the
biological domain and by the symbolic domain' (Guberman, 1996: 85). In
`L'aÃme et l'image' (Kristeva, 1993: 9±47), Kristeva insists on the distinction
of body/soul, emphasizing that as far back as Antiquity, disciplines such as
medicine and philosophy have often conceived of the diseased body as
separate from biological fate,2 preferring to construct physical sickness as
symptomatic of psychic activity: a speaking body whose illnesses are at
once distinct from and similar to the illnesses of the soul. Modern psycho-
analysis acknowledges the presence of the body when it recognizes the
heterogeneity of symbolic representation and interprets the signifying pro-
cess in terms of a subjectivity incessantly questioned by the dualism of
body/psyche. Kristeva, however, further ®nds an impoverishment of psychi-
cal activity, symptomatic of which is the appearance of new diseases, new
maladies of the soul. We are witnessing a diminution of our ability to
represent personal experience, with scant compensation to be found in our
hyper-consumption of ready-made images. The proliferation of repetitious
media images, the increasing use of drugs and the renewed interest in
religious groups, all underline our predilection for fantasy over reality,
blurring the boundaries that separate them, and prosthetisizing our absent
desire. This can be conveyed in a diagram.
 Gambaudo ± Kristeva's Recent Work 107

Figure 1 Diagrammatic interpretation of language production according to Freud

Consider Freud's models of language (Figure 1). Kristeva argues that

the processes at play between systems PHI and PSY are no longer the
source of stimulation out of which we generate language. Instead, the
translation of charge Q from quantity into quality is being provided by
outside stimuli such as spectacularized images, consciousness-altering
drugs and the hypnotic discourses of fundamentalism. In other words, the
human subject no longer processes outside information from the top of the
diagram down but receives and is captivated by ready-made information
from the bottom of the diagram up. Thus the unconscious relationship
between body and mind is becoming increasingly poor and, if Kristeva is
right, we can imagine a future where the primary dynamics generating
subjective and collective meaning will have become obsolete. Instead, the
`human' subject will be the locus of technological implantation of know-
ledge, that is to say a new form of subjectivity and society which authors
such as William Gibson have already described. Thus, the human subject is
facing a new set of representations for the manufacture of desire, also
exempli®ed by the invasion of psychical space by the degenerating body in
the form of modern diseases such as insomnia, stress, anxiety, psychosis,
depression and relational problems. These are all examples of unconscious
processes which do not ®nd enough release in the `pressure valve' that is
language production.
For Kristeva, we have lost the ability to separate what belongs to the
real and what belongs to the domain of arti®cial pleasure, of dreams. In
other words, where stimuli followed their `normal' path, the process is
replaced and repositioned outside the body and mistaken for the real. In
this new condition of impotent discourse, drives and affects are not
108 Theory, Culture & Society 17(2)

represented, their inexpressibility leaving us with the impossibility of

verbalizing the body. In speaking a language which denies the body its
expression and its potency, we are left with a somatic body. The somatic
body is automatic, mindless and entirely imprintable, a diseased body from
which the ability to represent unconscious drives has been suppressed, and
which `produces' non-organic diseases as an alternative `language' to lan-
guage which no longer carries desire.
Kristeva observes and analyses the effects of modern living in clinical
cases: hysterical conversion, obsessional neurosis, autism. She sees a
dissociation between conscious representation and the expression of affects:
the affective charge has been repressed from conscious memory, producing
a discourse devoid of desire. Kristeva ®nds traces of this charge on semiotic
vectors such as the voice, gestures and the gaze. Her intuition of this
dissociation is transferred, through the analytic work performed with the
patient, into conciliative discourse. Faced with a worsening of the `maladies
of the soul', Kristeva reasserts her belief in the power of psychoanalysis to
link the somatic body and the psyche. Thus the analytic process offers the
possibility of ®nding and translating into language the lost desire of the
contemporary subject.
Kristeva envisages the interpretative discourse of the analyst as
twofold. On the one hand, psychoanalytic discourse is a system of repre-
sentation, that is to say a theoretical, normative construct of reality within
which psychical activity occurs and can be known. On the other hand, the
relationship between the analyst and the patient mobilizes the affect and
psychical representations of both protagonists and through the process of
transference and countertransference3 creates a space where the desire and
jouissance4 of the patient are respected and maintained. Throughout Les
Nouvelles Maladies de l'aÃme, Kristeva analyses the role of transference in
the psychoanalytic process, but also emphasizes the importance of the
`countertransferential mode of listening' (Guberman, 1996: 88) which is
required to understand these new maladies. She suggests that in dealing
with modern illnesses of the soul, psychoanalysts must acknowledge the
newness of these cases which call for re®nement of their methods. In order
to understand these new patients, analysts have to loosen their formerly
distant attitude and instead, within limits, manifest to their patients a more
invested identi®cation with their illnesses. That is to say, they must allow
and acknowledge, within the dynamic of counter-transference, the re-
actualization of their own unconscious wishes in response to the analysand's
transferential process. As a consequence of this two-way process, analysts
can better apprehend the new maladie and renew both the patient's and
their own psychical creativity. In this, Kristeva reinstates her belief in the
potential offered to all of us by poetic language, which both breaks and
renews the social contract. She gives the example of Paul (Kristeva, 1993:
157±70), a young child whose relationship with other speaking subjects was
traumatic. His refusal to move from the maternal semiotic space to the
socio-symbolic sphere meant that the analysis was resisted. However,
 Gambaudo ± Kristeva's Recent Work 109

Kristeva discovered that Paul was sensitive to the semiotic vector of music
and solved the problem of resistance to symbolic language by singing in the
sessions she had with Paul and his mother. In this example, her `operas'
were the locus where symbolic constraints were broken by poetic/musical
language and thus the child's relationship with another speaking subject
rendered possible. At the same time, the boy's relationship with the social
contract could be established, inaugurated by his entry into the discourse of
the analyst.
This double aspect of the psychoanalytic tool, normative and affective,
has crucial consequences and is in line with the spirit of Kristeva's úuvre;
she insists on the poiesis within the analytic process itself, and argues that
this transcends purely theoretical constructs. Psychoanalysis is therefore
able to offer the reality of authoritative discourse (symbolic) in balance with
transgressive elements (semiotic). This cohabitation is emblematic of Kris-
teva's concept of `revolution in poetic language' (Kristeva, 1974)5 as it
unsettles the social contract which rests on the killing of jouissance. This
`revolution' bears the promise of a renewal of the subject's capacity to
represent, and means a renewal of our signifying practice, of identity and of
society.
In the second part of Les Nouvelles Maladies de l'aÃme, Kristeva
considers language from a historical and ®ctional angle. Her analysis
follows a historical continuum, starting with the Bible, followed by the
romantic text and by a tribute to the analytic work of earlier writers,
psychoanalysts, theorists and artists, concluding with an essay on the
position of women and feminist texts. Moreover, beyond the linearity of the
historical/spatial frame, she highlights the recurrence of themes present in
those texts, the analysis of which has much to offer to a therapeutic under-
standing of our time of crisis. In each essay, Kristeva emphasizes the role
and importance of opening up the structure of language, which renews the
speaking subject's contract with the signifying process. Three themes are of
particular interest: the maternal as abomination, the dynamic of adolescent
writing and the relationship between woman and time.
In three of the essays (Kristeva, 1993: 173±89, 191±201, 229±34)
Kristeva concentrates on studying religious representations. She locates, in
the religious text, the space where subjectivity is both threatened and
represented. She interprets the Bible and religious art as a positioning of
the speaking subject at the limit of language and of identity.
On the one hand, she demonstrates that some biblical texts exemplify
the threat represented by the maternal which must be rejected so that the
subject can enter the symbolic sphere. In psychoanalytic terms, the mother
stands as the maternal locus which retains the child in the pre-linguistic
space. The child of whatever sex is faced with two `choices': either to ful®ll
its wish to remain in symbiosis with the mother, at the risk of being castrated
by the father or to reject/repress the mother and therefore forsake jouissance,
to become a social being and be rewarded by the paternal function and
social membership. Kristeva ®nds in the Bible the signs of a struggle against
110 Theory, Culture & Society 17(2)

maternal cults, historically anterior to the monotheistic cult of the Father,

and she interprets this rejection of matrilinearity in favour of patrilinearity
as emblematic of the struggle the speaking subject goes though in the
process of subjectivation. The exclusion of the mother, or the abomination
she comes to represent in the religious text, depicts the process of castration
of the pre-oedipal dyad. In order not to physically kill the mother, the sacred
text commands that she must be repressed in language. Hence, the actual
physical enactment of murder is transformed into a symbolic act of murder;
instead of killing the mother, the subject `kills' what she represents: the
maternal body and its jouissance. This symbolic murder occurs each time
the subject positions him/herself within symbolic language. Thus, Kristeva
posits language as a symbolic act of murder and murder in language as a
necessary condition for symbolization, as exempli®ed in the religious text.
On the other hand, Kristeva reiterates the subject's fascination with and
desire for a return to symbiosis with the maternal. She insists on the
importance of semiotic activity in its interaction with symbolic representa-
tion as that which enables a dynamic of renewal of both meaning and
identity. This interaction is also the place where the speaking subject
experiences jouissance.
Kristeva's analysis, that is to say psychoanalysis, deconstructs so-
ciety's faith and desire for the sacred. First, she exposes the authority of the
Other (the Father, God, the Law). Second, she explains how psychoanalysis
can show the fantasy of reunion with the Mother as a pitfall: should the
subject choose to remain in pre-linguistic maternal jouissance, s/he would
also be choosing to remain outside language, outside society (autism,
psychosis are examples of a failed entry into the social order). In this,
Kristeva emphasizes the double-bind of the speaking subject. On the one
hand, s/he desires to identify with authority ®gures (the father, God,
patriarchy), and therefore must embrace the linguistic illusion that meaning
is stable, despite the inaccessability of the signi®ed and the arbitrary
relation between words and reality; yet this stabilization of meaning pre-
cludes the possibility of the subject changing or renewing his/herself. On
the other hand, the subject desires to return to the maternal place of
jouissance. It is this double-bind that Kristeva ®nds inscribed in language,
and mirrored in and by the linguistic subject. Kristeva's strategy is to make
evident her positions within this double-bind: she uses her position as a
`sujet-en-proceÁs'6 (Kristeva, 1974) whose countertransferential interaction
with language (texts, the language of the other) enables her to re-actualize
unconscious contents and access the poetic, in both the other text and her
own. She also uses her knowledge of psycholinguistic processes which
enables her to interpret and consciously identify with the symbolic dis-
course of others. In other words, Kristeva's strategy is to follow the path
taken by the speaking subject from the symbolic (the other text) to the
maternal (countertransference) and back to the symbol (her own interpreta-
tive text). She ®nds the same strategy in `adolescent writing' (Kristeva,
1993: 204).
 Gambaudo ± Kristeva's Recent Work 111

Kristeva argues that for the artists whose textual identities she
analyses, and with the exception of James Joyce,7 writing is symptomatic
of the `return of the repressed' (Kristeva, 1993: 259). She describes `the
uncovering of intra-psychical identi®cation, in a literary text' (Kristeva,
1993: 259) as `adolescent writing' (Kristeva, 1993: 203±28, 279±95). For
her, adolescence represents a disposition of the speaking subject to ques-
tion previous identi®cations and therefore reorganize their relationship to
language. This disposition is strongly linked to the sexual development of
the subject. According to Freud, during sexual development, the subject
under the threat of castration gives up unconscious wishes for incest and
parricide. Here the oedipal phase is broken by a period of latency during
which the child learns to conform to the demands of the social. However, the
oedipal phase is resumed at puberty, when the adolescent, now sexually
mature, reorganizes his/her unresolved childhood con¯icts. For Kristeva, it
is highly signi®cant that this psychical space of adolescence is not yet
smothered by the pressures of adulthood. In psychoanalytic terms, the
adolescent presents a psychical structure open to repressed elements
because the control and blocking functions of the superego are momentarily
suspended: during that time, adolescents are better able to represent the
con¯icts between the ego and the ego-ideal into a form of writing which is
less censored. Their mythic predilection for writing, for contesting society's
values and for rebelling against authority ®gures symbolize the desire to
open up the limiting and even corrupting structures of symbolic language
and society. The con¯icts between the ego and the ego-ideal create a gap in
which new meanings and new identities can be formed. Kristeva ®nds in
adolescent production a poiesis which occurs through this opening up of
psychical structures enabling the subject to question previous identi®ca-
tions, break existing symbolic structures and form new identities.
However, Kristeva goes further by suggesting that adolescent writing
is not solely the privilege of an age group; on the contrary, she points out
that adolescent writing is retained in some artists. She mentions in particu-
lar the Romantics, Mme de StaeÈl and HeÂleÁne Deutsch. Their writing
displays the series of processes by which the speaking subject at once dies
(questions former identi®cations and breaks present representations) and
survives the refashioning of symbolic representation, exposing the illusions
of a stable symbolic order and a ®xed self, and renewing both symbolic
formations and identity with them. These processes of subjective metamor-
phosis reveal how the struggle for life is closely enmeshed with the desire
for death. The Passion of Christ could be considered in those terms:
symbolically Christ (not the `Holy Other', but wholly representative) must
die in order to resurrect. But this notion of death is more than symbolic. In
order to live, the subject must repress jouissance, which is to say the
af®rmation of life rests on the death of substance: transubstantiation in
Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, the process by which wine and
bread, while retaining their original appearance, change into blood and
¯esh. Death is therefore present at both a psychical and a physical level.
112 Theory, Culture & Society 17(2)

The importance of the death drive and its connection to negativity in

language production is something to which Kristeva will return.
In addition to the role of the death drive, Kristeva is also sensitive to
another dif®culty in the subject's constant struggle to exist. She believes
that contemporary society is facing what we could call a symbolic crisis. In a
®nal essay, `Le temps des femmes' (Kristeva, 1993: 297±331), Kristeva
stresses the importance of reconsidering the relationship between identity
and the notion of time/space. She analyses the move from national identity
to European identity and argues that, faced with a transcending of our
geographical frontiers, we are also transcending history. Identi®cation with
the Nation rested upon an identi®cation with its typical relations of produc-
tion; Kristeva postulates that our identities are now founded on modes of
reproduction, and this summons a common memory reminiscent of the time
when the survival of the species was prime, anterior to the notion of Nation
and its collapse. European identity exists doubly within a historical frame.
It is at once located in a linear present (productive, repetitive and symbolic)
and an identity lost in the reminiscence of a time anterior to it (reproductive,
eternal and maternal). She perceives the three waves (liberal, radical, third
wave) of feminism as symptomatic of this reverse transcendence of history.
Women are linked to and able to conceptualize both histories: time as
cursive (women as cyclical) and time as eternal (women as reproductive).
For Kristeva, the task of the third generation of `feminists' is to seek to
reconcile maternal/cyclical/monumental time and symbolic/linear time. She
stresses the multiplicity, the heterogeneity of women's expression and the
necessity of recognizing sexual difference by theorizing women's desire to
be mothers. It is only by internalizing language's dualism (man±woman,
victim±persecutor), that is to say, the foundations of the symbolic contract,
that our society in transition will re-write its own history, avoid the enact-
ment of con¯ictual dualism and renew the social contract beyond this time
of crisis.
It is interesting to make a parallel between individual history (life
time) and History. The latter indicates that patriarchy was born from the
destruction of a previous social order (the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization).
The genesis of subject formation as suggested by Freud, read as a historical
text, describes the struggle, inscribed on the body of the speaking subject,
between maternal space and paternal suprematism. The symbolic father and
his Law emerge triumphant and the Mother and her semiotic body are
abjected and repressed. Kristeva then, suggests that the loss of national
frontiers equates to the loss of symbolic supremacy and leads the Historic
subject to a time anterior to patriarchy, and the individual subject to a time
prior to the entry into language. In this, Kristeva sees women as privileged
as they are, biologically and psychically, closer to the archaic memory of
reproduction. The fact that, in spite of social crises, women still desire
motherhood, indicates that beyond the collapse of the socio-symbolic
contract, women carry the desire to reproduce their own species. Therefore,
Kristeva suggests that women have an important role to play in carrying the
 Gambaudo ± Kristeva's Recent Work 113

human race over the threshold of the death drive, into a renewed contract
with the social.
Perhaps this aspect of Kristeva's thought is the most puzzling. It
suggests that, avant-gardiste though she has undoubtedly been, the logic of
her position remains intrically connected to a form of biological determin-
ism. However, Kristeva is not suggesting a return to a division of labour
between the sexes, but calling contemporary thinkers to hear/represent the
silent voice of `woman' and its potential for the renewal and survival of
society as a whole.
Revolt
Having de®ned and analysed, in Les Nouvelles Maladies de l'aÃme, what
constitutes the new cultural maladies of individual and collective psychical
space, Kristeva then concentrates on the possibility of change in/of society.
Sens et non-sens de la reÂvolte (Kristeva, 1996) and La ReÂvolte intime8
(Kristeva, 1997), are the transcripts of lectures she delivered at the
Universite de Paris VII between November 1994 and May 1996. Her two
courses can be divided into two parts: in the ®rst part she proposes a
theoretical framework by questioning and de®ning the sense of `revolt' and
that of `intimacy', with the help of philosophical thought and in particular
Freudian theory; in the second part, she illustrates the powers and limits of
`revolt' and of psychoanalytic interpretation through the work of three
contemporary writers: Louis Aragon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes.
Kristeva's use of the idea of negativity is crucial. It is the basis of her
understanding of both signi®ance and revolt. It is from this basis that she is
led to imagine the end of culture and the advent of a society of robots.
Kristeva doubts the possibility of revolt in modern society. Following
Freud's (1912±13) argument on the processes at play in the foundation of
civilization, Kristeva recalls that in order for revolt to take place, any given
society requires the presence of a dominant uni®ed power; this can be in the
form of one person (a leader, an authority ®gure) or a group standing for the
One (a political party representing one unifying voice). This all-powerful
entity acts on two levels; on the one hand, it castrates the individual in his/
her9 desire to break the uniformity of one prescribed identity, to transgress
prohibition.10 On the other hand, the subject identi®es with the power of the
One and wants to appropriate this power. Kristeva argues that this potential
for revolt is now threatened by two factors: the absence of an Authority, the
laws of which could be transgressed, and the manner in which the individual
is apprehended as an amalgam of organs and images.
In the ®rst case, the `failure of ideologies of revolt' (Kristeva, 1996: 20)
such as Communism, has given way to a new world order resting between
banality and theatrical performance. In the absence of clearly de®ned
boundaries between what is and what is not (for Kristeva, we do not enforce
laws but take measures),11 the subject is normalized. Kristeva illustrates her
point by putting forward the ideology of `political correctness' which, by
demanding the recognition of ethnic and sexual differences, also suppresses
114 Theory, Culture & Society 17(2)

their singularity (Kristeva, 1997: 22). At the same time, the absence of a
clear de®nition of what represents the norm leads to the impossibility of
locating and encountering the abnormal.12 The subject then ®nds him/
herself incapable of revolt against the foundations of that `power' which
becomes corruptible instead of transgressable.
In the second case, it is the locus of revolt which is threatened; revolt
takes place on the uni®ed body of the individual, which it fragments and
renews, and which confers jouissance to the subject in revolt. But contem-
porary Western society views the subject in terms of `patrimonial entity'
(Kristeva, 1996: 56) whose value as an individual, once guaranteed by
human rights, has become a marketable, technological entity. Neuros-
ciences have gained recognition and value precisely because, in their
analysis, the subject's disease can be reduced to a biological process.
Similarly, cognitivism enables us to de®ne and know the logics and patterns
of human behaviour, and thus to change them (Kristeva, 1997: 22). Finally,
Kristeva suggests that philosophy tends to equate the organic with a pre-
verbal, pre-social animality (Kristeva, 1997: 81±5). We can then suggest
that control of the organic subject, de®ned, re®ned or transplanted, is in fact
a displaced attempt at controlling what threatens the unity of the symbolic
subject: the modi®cation of organs would lead to the modi®cation of ident-
ity, a manufactured identity strangely comparable to that of science-
®ctions's androids.
If the locus of revolt is now dispersed, Kristeva warns against the
danger of adopting a deconstructive approach to an already fragmented self:
`One does not deconstruct before having constructed' (Guberman, 1996:
56). For her, deconstruction is an operation upon already constructed
subjectivity, through the supplementary force of, for example, pre-linguistic
or extra-linguistic interruption, creating a space for jouissance. However,
when the sense of subjective and social unity has been dispersed, neither
the individual nor the collective can easily reassemble, even around the
deconstructive principle, so that the possibility of revolt and its jouissance is
zero.
It is for these reasons that Kristeva insists on the urgency of re-
thinking the idea of `the revolt-culture' (Kristeva, 1996: 19). Since it is the
very existence of culture which is threatened in the present crisis of power,
it has become urgent to theorize a form of culture where revolt has a space.
Kristeva envisages the re-actualization of revolt only in the psychoanalytic
space, as psychoanalysis offers the patient the possibility of recapturing his/
her memory not as a transgressive act but as an act of reconstruction of his/
her past (anamnesia). The process can work because the analyst functions as
the normative referent incarnating prohibition and boundaries against
which (and whom) the patient can re-assemble, and begin to articulate his/
her own boundaries.
Investigating the origins of the word `revolt', Kristeva ®nds that both
the etymology and the philosophy of `revolt' indicate a sense of `return'. In
other words, `revolt' is to be interpreted in its relation to movement: to the
 Gambaudo ± Kristeva's Recent Work 115

circularity of protection, envelopment and revolution, the plasticity of text,

the physicality of opposition and the deployment of troops. She further
emphasizes this apprehension of `revolt' as return by referring to Freud's
understanding of revolt as constancy in the subject's identity, rather than
the destabilization of identity. This vision of the movement of revolt as the
constant in the subject, locates the subject against a background of forces of
destabilization and division, through which the subject experiences mean-
ing. In other words, fragmented, con¯ictual `being' faces the existence of a
void and within that the possibility for change, for a transformation (re-
forming across or through the void) and reconduction13 of identity. Revolt
leads to the renunciation and dispersal of power: `revolt against exclusion is
resolved in the transmission of exclusion to the lower levels of the social
structure' (Kristeva, 1996: 53). The subject in revolt ®nds, in the place of
con¯ict, pleasure and jouissance: a return to and of the `intimate', `the
deepest and most singular of human experience' (Kristeva, 1997: 81).
Indeed, in Freud's work, Kristeva ®nds that revolt is also related to the
notion of return as re-collection: a return to and of memory or a retrospective
return experienced as a constant questioning of the self and its truth. In an
attempt to understand the formation of identity and map the processes and
exchanges at play in the subject, Freud proposed three models of language.
In his ®rst model, Freud notices a gap or maladjustment between the
biological and the symbolic. The human subject forms a biological reality
from birth and the symbolic self only arises with the recognition of modes of
mediation/reality construction (representation, language, the constitutive
dishonesties of the image). The body and the self are therefore out of phase
from the start and the organization of the psychical apparatus translates this
constantly frustrated imperative to ®ll the gap between the unspeakable
original being and its pale wordly expression as self-identity.
Freud's second model has language play an intermediate role between
conscious and unconscious, with the latter under the dominance of the
former. Language is then positioned in the pre-conscious zone and would
enable the speaking subject to have access to the unconscious, unlock the
unknown and subject the unconscious to the rules of language, even poss-
ibly ®lling the gap constitutive of the neurotic self. Kristeva sees a certain
`linguistic optimism' (Kristeva, 1996: 91) in Freud at this stage of his work.
As she puts it: `Freud tends to erase the irreducibile alterity of the un-
conscious in relation to the conscious' (Kristeva, 1996: 90) which is
`invested with [. . .] unconscious logics' (Kristeva, 1996: 90). This second
model of language enabled Freud to arrive at an understanding of language
as `a process of signi®ance founded on the negative' (Kristeva, 1996: 115),
while the dualism of conscious and unconscious present within the subject
could work to enable the subject to overcome amnesia, return to the original
trauma and cure neurosis.14 Later on, Freud distanced himself from his
second model. However, as we will see, it remains important in understand-
ing the role assigned to drive activity and the concept of heterogeneity in
Kristeva's work (Kristeva, 1974).
116 Theory, Culture & Society 17(2)

In the third model elicited by Kristeva, Freud ®nds two forms of trace
present in the psyche: those referring to irrepresentable acts (traumatic acts
in childhood) and those psychical representations deriving from key pro-
cesses: identi®cation of the subject with the paternal function, in more
general terms, the structuring of subjectivity. Between the two, signi®ance
takes place. Here Freud still uses the idea of language as an intermediary
between unconscious and conscious but no longer de®nes it in relation to
consciousness; instead, he envisages unconscious representations as refer-
ring to `material which remains unknown' (Kristeva, 1996: 105), whereas
pre-conscious representations `would be associated to verbal representa-
tion' (Kristeva, 1996: 105). In other words, conscious representation is
possible only if the material transformed exists as memory traces in the
unconscious, and in reverse, conscious representations can be internalized
and take the form of hallucination or error. Hence, language can no longer
be considered as a reliable bridge between conscious and unconscious, but
the impossibility of iteration allows it to become the place of symbolization,
meaning that error, resistance and hallucinations are at least partially
constitutive of the subject's symbolic universe. In parallel, Kristeva points
out that in the act of revolt, the revolter remains the subject of and subjected
to acts of language and to its errors. There appears to be no escape from the
place of signi®ance and therefore from negativity.
Kristeva argues that `signi®ance is made accessible to psychoanalytic
experience through three modalities [. . .] identi®cation, [. . .] idealisation,
[. . .] sublimation' (Kristeva, 1996: 115±16). Freud's concept of sublimation
is of particular interest here because it clari®es the way language takes
place within a process of negativity or rejection of drive activity. In
sublimation, the subject can become the object of the life drive (Eros)
through a process of identi®cation with the `father of individual prehis-
tory.'15 The object of Eros is the self; sublimation deals with a narcissistic
libido rather than a sexual libido; in this process, the death drive and the life
drive are disassociated:

the ego cuts itself off from erotic impulse. (Kristeva, 1996: 120). Such a
transformation [. . .] frees the death drive [. . .]: the death drive is thus, from
the start, inscribed in the process of subjectivation, or in the constitution of the
ego, as an initial and indispensable stage in the mutation of the drive into
signi®ance. (Kristeva, 1996: 120±1)

Under the threat of the death drive, the subject operates a transformation of
the quantitative charge of the drive (physical/body) into a qualitative charge
(psychical/mind), that is to say signi®ance. Because this process of rejection
of the drive activity repeats itself, it becomes a negation: negativity is at
once a positive assertion of the symbolic and a denial of the content of the
drive.
Kristeva links Freud's concept of sublimation with writing. In literary
and theoretical texts, she sees the object of narcissistic desire as being
 Gambaudo ± Kristeva's Recent Work 117

language itself. By positing negativity as the basis for signi®ance and

signi®ance as the space for change and transformation, Kristeva exposes
the contemporary de®nition of revolt as ¯awed. Two examples can be put
forward here: revolution as a non-sense of revolt and a certain type of
psychoanalytic practice which limits the power of revolt. In revolution,
Kristeva sees revolt as being reduced to an act contesting a given societal
and/or political order in the hope of replacing it with another society/
political order. In the psychoanalytic ®eld (in the USA in particular), she
also sees a trend towards understanding revolt as the expression of the
patient's unful®lled desires; the role of the psychoanalyst is then to help that
patient overcome frustration and attain his/her goal (career enhancement for
example). In both cases, the effect is to arrest the process of revolt; by
equating it with the wish for a better future and abandoning revolt once that
future has become reality. For Kristeva, this concept of revolt transforms
revolt into norm, even dogma. Her wish is not to arrest the process of
signi®ance and revolt, but on the contrary to question and open language to
signi®ance. Hence the role of negativity (as opposed to negation) which
opens a void, a `nothingness' and which she ®nds in the work of writers such
as Aragon, Sartre, Barthes and in her own intellectual work (Kristeva,
1991). Her book is a plea to re-think the very sense of revolt without which
this culture is in danger of becoming a culture for robots.

Notes
1. I would like to thank Roy Boyne and Tracy Davis for their help.
2. `Maladie': sickness/malady but also `mal aÁ dire' (cf. Lacan), the dif®cult to tell;
hence, what we ®nd dif®cult to represent in language is translated into a `mal', a
disease.
3. Illness is both physical, related to a given biological terrain, and a response to
the `mal aÁ dire', a `failed' translation of psychical activity. Stimuli are generated by
the body and biology (genetic make-up, sensory capabilities) determines how
outside information is perceived. Maladies, for Kristeva, are not so much biological
as `psychical representations of biology'.
4. The notions of `transference' and `countertransference' are to be understood in
the sense given by Laplanche and Pontalis (1973).
5. `Jouissance' (sensory/sexual enjoyment) is not `pleasure' in the sense that we
consciously give it. Jouissance belongs to the semiotic, unconscious space which,
according to Freud, knows no frontiers, and so no dualism: pain and pleasure are
both jouissance. It is only with language and socialization that we learn to
differentiate between `good' pleasure (a stroke) and `bad' pleasure (a slap). The
most powerful sources of jouissance are also the most powerful sources of abjection/
repression; these are, according to Kristeva, those events that remind us of the link
to our origin (the maternal: menstrual blood, the skin of milk), to our death (the
ageing, dying, decaying body) and to the frontier between biology and the psyche
(sweat, blood, etc., reminders that we are not hermetic wholes but fragmenting and
fragmented identities). The killing of jouissance does not mean that desire is lost but
that it is repressed. Desire remains in the unconscious as a constant.
118 Theory, Culture & Society 17(2)

6. By `poetic language', Kristeva refers to the subject's link with the pre-linguistic
sphere, the memory of a time when the baby apprehended the outside world, and
particularly its relationship with the maternal body, in symbiosis. Kristeva de®nes
this space as the `semiotic chora'. It is this dyadic unity baby/world that the
symbolic order castrates with language acquisition. The child's entry into the
linguistic sphere is marked by the repression of the semiotic into the unconscious.
However, repression is never perfect: the semiotic operates pressures on conscious
representations and breaks the homogeneity of symbolization with heterogeneous
contents which ®x themselves on semiotic vectors and in art form `the poetic'. This
`return of the repressed' (Freud), for Kristeva, is the key to breaking the uniformity
of identity (individual and collective) and the potential for a revolution. Revolution,
in this instance, is not to be understood as the simple overthrow of an outside
authority; rather, her revolution takes place from within the subject's psychical
space and allows the subject to return/renew his/her relationship with the body and
memory.
7. The notion of `sujet-en-proceÁs' refers to the speaking subject who is both in
process and on trial: the process of representing him/herself which is never perfect/
stable but always different and deferred and puts the subject on a never ending trial
of his/her identity.
8. Kristeva argues that James Joyce's work stands apart because he was aware,
possibly intuitively, of writing as symptom of `the return of the repressed'. Joyce
therefore reverses the move and rather than presenting writing as a symptom writes
the symptom as text; hence the polymorphic and polyphonic aspect of his writing,
intentionally using pre- or transverbal representation as genre.
9. The text deals with issues of revolt in relation to the subject's `interior'
(intimacy) and complements Sens et non-sens which dealt more with the subject
within a social context.
10. Totem and Taboo clearly identi®es the sons as the revolters and marginalizes
the women as mere objects of desire/repulsion; the symbolic pact rests not only on
the murder of the father but also on the rejection of the maternal: the brothers kill
and eat the father and, to avoid further murders, give up on possessing the women
who were at the source of their wish for parricide. Freud mentions this, but prefers
to concentrate on the murder of the father by the sons as founding the social
contract. Later in Sens et non-sens, Kristeva goes further and reinterprets sexual
identity in terms of masculine/feminine rather than male/female.
11. Transgression is a twofold process: on the one hand it is about the individual
questioning his/her identity and his/her position in relation to an illusory outside
social norm; on the other hand individual commitment to an identity has con-
sequences for the whole social edi®ce: to de®ne oneself as different and deferred
from that `norm' exposes it as illusory and unnatural; society is then threatened by
the precariousness of its existence. In Kristevan terms, the unnatural, illusory and
precarious aspects of existence are projected on to the individual in a process of
scapegoating the stranger to cultural norms. Hence, society displays a prohibitive
attitude towards certain cultural groups; in instances where the individual was
`born' into a given group, marginal to the social sphere, society tolerates him/her as
long as s/he conforms with the role assigned to him/her or copies the dominant
discourse.
12. Kristeva argues that Western democracies are becoming more and more
bureaucratic, with that bureaucratic set up being answerable to itself but not to
 Gambaudo ± Kristeva's Recent Work 119

the people it is supposed to serve. This for her is equivalent to a form of totali-
tarianism. See Le Vieil Homme et les loups (Kristeva, 1991).
13. The idea goes further than a mere 0/1 dualism. If we consider Figure 1 and
imagine a segment from ±1 to +1 with zero as the centre, the further the subject
moves into negative space, the less s/he can consciously `be', i.e. s/he is moving
into the upper part of the diagram (PHI/PSY), the space of the abnormal, of the
strange. Conversely, the further s/he moves into positive space, the more s/he is
able to acknowledge a conscious apprehension of the self, i.e. s/he is moving into
the lower part of the diagram (abstraction), the space where processes are stabilized
and normalized through discourse. However, point zero is not to be equated with the
middle zone. In the absence of an instance of authority to allow or prohibit the
movement from stimulus to representation, the positioning of subjective and
societal processes are neutralized to a void. In other words, our sense of positive
and negative is reduced to a point zero, translated into individual and social
impoverishment and apathy (see Guberman, 1996: 162±75).
14. In French, reconduction means both `renewal' and `continuation of'. Here, both
meaning and identity are `reconduits', renewed and continued.
15. Lacan's idea of the unconscious being structured like a language refers to this
second model. Kristeva points out that Lacanian and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis
does not recognize the importance of the drive. Lacanians consider that since the
drive can be known through language, any mention of `something' outside language
is a myth. Kristeva also points out that if the unconscious is under the control of the
conscious, then a `mathematization' of the unconscious is possible. This leads to a
cognitivist approach whereby the unconscious is considered in terms of automatic
acts. For this reason, Kristeva remains critical towards cognitivism and insists that
it offers an understanding of `unawareness' rather than of the unconscious.
16. The `father of individual prehistory' is a form of archaic father who is neither
the oedipal father nor the phallic mother but holds characteristics of both parents.
Freud imagines a stage in subject formation, anterior to the oedipal stage, when the
pre-linguistic infant starts detaching itself from the dyad mother±child and trans-
fers its desire to a third entity. This transfer would be a direct response to the
mother's desire for someone other than the baby: the child's father, her father, an
extra-familial other or a symbolic other. This process will be further developed by
Lacan and his concept of the `mirror stage'. For Freud, this `degree zero' of identity
± the infant goes through a primary identi®cation with an imaginary loving father ±
pre®gures and announces the future oedipal triangulation which will ®nalize the
process of subjectivation.

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Sylvie Gambaudo is a lecturer in European Studies at the University of

Durham, Stockton Campus. Her research focuses on issues of identity,
disembodiment and the work of Julia Kristeva. She is the author of
`Europeans: Foreigners in Their Own Land', in Susanne Fendler and Ruth
Wittlinger (eds) The Idea of Europe in Literature (London: Macmillan and
New York: St Martin's Press, 1999).