Intimate Revolt (European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought & Cultural Criticism (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: Intellectual exile therapy: reading
Review: I have read several books by Julia Kristeva, but I have difficulty recalling the points that each signifies, so it was a relief to me, when I started this book, that it stated an outlook on modern society which I share wholeheartedly. For people who are growing older, reading seems to be an activity that offers fewer rewards than ever, and it becomes difficult to find any indication that authors have been gaining anything by being aware of philosophy, to pick a topic that has reached modernity with as little certainty as the physics of subatomic particles. The multiplicity of approaches and observations diminishes the opportunity for any point to be important in a system which only understands certain kinds of schemes:

" . . . European culture--a culture fashioned by doubt and critique--is losing its moral and aesthetic impact. This moral and aesthetic dimension finds itself marginalized and exists only as a decorative alibi tolerated by the society of the spectacle, when it is not simply submerged, made impossible by entertainment culture, performance culture, and show culture." (p. 4).

My review of Kristeva's book on Hannah Arendt attempted to demonstrate, by counting the footnotes in that book, how much it was merely providing a reading of the volumes of THE LIFE OF THE MIND on THINKING and WILLING. The notes for INTIMATE REVOLT show much wider interests, but this book is Volume 2 of THE POWERS AND LIMITS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS and continues reading as in the previous volume. "I will explore new texts among the works of the three major authors examined in volume 1, Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes, each an integral part of the revolt of the twentieth century, and emphasize the paradoxical logic by which this experience of revolt is accomplished." (p. 3).

For those who are not concerned so much with reading, there is a chance to skip ahead to Part II, The Future of Revolt, which has its own Preface, Chapter 13, Psychoanalysis and Freedom; Chapter 14, The Love of Another Language; and Chapter 15, Europhilia-Europhobia. I had always pictured Julia Kristeva as an exclusively French feminist psychoanalyst, but Chapter 14 reveals that she is an exile whose native tongue was Bulgarian. If she could only adopt "the tradition of offhandedness--when not nationalism--toward any remedy for our century," she might actually seem French. "I have so shifted into this other language, which I have spoken for fifty years, that I am almost ready to believe the Americans who see me as a French intellectual and writer." (p. 246).

So INTIMATE REVOLT turns into a book which is ultimately about issues of self, and Julia Kristeva becomes an example of someone who is trying to fit in as an intellectual because none of the other ultra modern cultures appeals to her sense of self. Revolt is a theme which ties philosophy to literature in a quest for new values that seeks to go further. "The nihilist is not a man in revolt in the sense that I investigated in volume I. The pseudorebellious nihilist is in fact a man reconciled with the stability of new values. And this stability, which is illusory, is revealed to be deadly, totalitarian. I can never sufficiently emphasize the fact that totalitarianism is the result of a certain fixation of revolt in what is precisely its betrayal, namely, the suspension of retrospective return, which amounts to a suspension of thought. Hannah Arendt has brilliantly developed this elsewhere." (p. 6).

In addition to the authors previously mentioned, this book frequently delves into Christianity, Freud, and Heidegger. The intellectual method owes a lot to the subject matter: "In making a narrative out of free association in transference, the subject at once confronts what is . . ." in a way that "constitutes himself in himself for the other and in this sense reveals himself--in the strongest sense of the word, liberates himself." (p. 236). Analytical discourse approaches "the endless refraction that constitutes psychical splitting." (p. 236).

Kristeva has also written a novel, POSSESSIONS, a detective story, which she considers a low form of revolt that keeps the possibility of questioning alive. Combining "a police investigation is still possible" (p. 4) with her concern that "the arrival of women at the forefront of the social and ethical scene has had the result of revalorizing the sensory experience, the antidote to technical hair-splitting" (p. 5) she attempts to question the past in a way that produces freedom for us, as "In his reading of Kant, Heidegger reconnected with another version of freedom, anchored in pre-Socratic thought before the establishment of logical categories or values." (p. 236).