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College Literature, 31.4, Fall 2004, pp. 188-202 (Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/lit.2004.0054

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Revolutionaries without
a Revolution:
The Case of Julia Kristeva
Nouri Gana

Nouri Gana teaches at the

University of Monteal. His work
has appeared in American

Hirtler, Kurt, Ola Stahl, and Ika Willis, eds.

2003. Mourning Revolution. Special issue of
Parallax 9.2, April-June 2003. New York:
Routledge. $100 electronic copy. 113 pp.

Imago, tudes Irlandaises,

Law and Literature, Theory
and Event, and Mosaic.

Kristeva, Julia. 2000. The Sense and NonSense of Revolt:The Powers and Limits of
Psychoanalysis.Trans. Jeanine Herman. New
York: Columbia University Press. $60.00 hc.
$19.50 sc. 288 pp.
Kristeva, Julia. 2002. Intimate Revolt:The
Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis.Trans.
Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia
University Press. $34.00 hc. $19.50 sc. 392
pp.
I tell you this in truth: this is not only the
end of this here but also and first of that
there, the end of history, the end of the
class struggle, the end of philosophy, the

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death of God, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and morals . . .the
end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of
Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse now, I tell you . . . the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and phallogocentrism, and I dont know what else? (Jacques Derrida,Of an Apocalyptic
Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy)
The Rhetoric of Ending and the Mourning to Come

ertainly Derridas inventory is far from being complete, but it recreates

with gripping poignancy the frenzy in which death certificates have
been meted out to all repositories of thought, of hope, and of life writ
large. By virtue of enumerating, enlisting, and discerning the far reaches of
the rhetoric of ending and of the apocalyptic imagination underpinning it,
Derridas account itself can be said to participate in what it seeks to outflank
in the first place. Yet, perhaps Derrida cannot be held accountable for the
hairsplitting entrapments of this discursive graveyard-whistling; perhaps this
is, after all, the crime (or logic) of philosophy itselfa discourse that cannot
help folding back or receding into a reflection on its genesis and, by implication, on its ending. More than anything else, perhaps philosophy is, as
Derrida himself intones, fond of quasimythical metadiscourses that can intransigently, irascibly, and in an overlordly way declare its dissolution or, to use
Derridas own word, its cadavrissement (literally, its reduction to a corpse).
Not infrequently, the philosophical rhetoric of ending has unwittingly
overlooked its implication in an indissoluble contradiction that, while contending that the ending has been reached, not only participates in it but also
lives through it, that is, in many respects survives it in order to announce it.
Who (or what) would announce the end were there nothing to be
announced? Of course, such a rhetorical question implies that, should there
be an end or an apocalypse, no one would survive it in order to report it: the
end would be the end of everything, period! For that is also, as Derrida
rightly conjectures,the end of the metalanguage concerning eschatological
language (81). I am not here suggesting that there is no hors texte, no outside, from which the end could be announced by a meta-being, only that
there is, practically, no ending whatsoever that humanity can pronounce or
announce, let alone ascertain. On the other hand, Who (or what) would
announce the end were there nothing to be announced? is a question that
also implies not only that the end (associated, for so long, with the end of the
millennium) proved not to be an endonly a mere illusion, which is exactly the position held by Jean Baudrillardbut also that nothing really will
ever end without leaving remains, without coming back under the banner of

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hauntology, a theme Derrida belabors in Specters of Marx. By and large,

whether we have missed the end or fallen prey to the returning ghosts of our
precursors, it is important to stress (1) that the rhetoric of ending is indissociable from the rhetoric of mourning, from the ethical impossibility of there
being such a thing as a successful mourning la freudienne any longer
(Derrida 1994), and (2) that while philosophy cannot, much perhaps to the
distress of Derrida and Kant before him, completely banish the apocalyptic
tone from its discourse, it can nonetheless invent its own contrapuntal rhetoric that would, parodying Shakespeares Edgar, remind us that, The end is
not/As long as we can say This is the end.
Yet, it would be unfair to restrict the obsession with the rhetoric of ending to the realm of philosophical discourse as sucha discourse that is
addicted to drawing attention to itself even at the risk of compromising its
very existence in the process. No one who has read and reflected upon the
many heterogeneous tendencies of (literary and critical) theory since the
1950s would fail to notice at least two things: (1) the hectic proliferation of
new theories, each of which purporting vociferously or reticently to effect
a Khunian paradigm shift (thus, academics, who have an unyielding strain for
order, are bewildered by the plethora of such shifts that they have grown
wary of classifying and opted instead for portmanteau prefixes as post- or
neo- to relieve themselves from the burden of differentiating such that we
are now going through a period of immense disarray given that we are practically past all the posts), and (2) the celebratory and intransigent tone
with which the death or ending of an age or a discursive practice and the
beginning of another is announced.
As they parade in theoretical discourses today, announcements of endings are more often than not masks of new beginnings, of the good news,
as it were, that awaits the puzzled and perturbed reader of Francis Fukuyamas
The End of History and the Last Man. The end of history is the proverbial
formula that Fukuyama makes use of in order to hammer home the more
contentious thesis of the triumph of liberal democracy. Likewise, Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri dress the obsolete word empire with the new
clothes of globalization, whose emergence as a new form of sovereignty is
materializing on the pyre of the sovereignty of nation-states. According to
Hardt and Negri, the end of imperialism, the decline of the nation-state, and
the emergence of what in their own parlance is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rulea kind of global space of sovereignty that has no
outsideprovide the conditions of possibility of a new form of counterEmpire, a new form of political subjectivity (much of which nevertheless
hinges on unlocatable and unmediated grains of resistance) that they call
in a strange admixture of bombast, Marxism, and messianismthe multitude.

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Unfortunately, the inimitable ability of the new Empire to manage dissent, if

not to warrant and sanction it, leaves little room for the multitude to make
significant, let alone revolutionary, changes.
Whether it has to do with the end of history or with the end of imperialism and the nation state or any of the items inventoried by Derrida in the
epigraph, the rhetoric of ending deployed by a variegated number of theorists today is in fact a function of the more encompassing rhetoric of seductive reasoning that these theorists make use of in order to persuade the reader of the necessity and validity of the alternative venue(s) of reflection which
they propose. This applies not only to Fukuyama and Hardt and Negri, but
also to, among many others, Arthur Donatos After the End of Art, Gianni
Vattimos The End of Modernity, Daniel Bells The End of Ideology, and, not surprisingly, to Julia Kristevas recent twin books, The Sense and Non-Sense of
Revolt and Intimate Revolt, in which she elaborates a theory of psychic revolt
on the pyre of socialist and political revolution. Of course, after the welter of
commentary and the plethora of books that followed the collapse of the
Soviet Empire, it hardly needs to be restated here that the promise of a possible socialist revolution, while crucially attenuated by such an event, has
continued to provoke disparate reactions. A recent special issue of Parallax
titled Mourning Revolution attempts to capture this disparity by bringing
together a variety of essays by Kristeva, Martin Jay, Alain Badiou, and
Benjamin Arditi, among others.
While Kristeva and Jay contend, as will become clear in due course, that
revolution is no longer a politically and socially useful concept, Benjamin
Arditi argues quite persuasively that revolution can still play a vital role in our
political life even in the face of its practical impossibility. Drawing extensively on Derridas thinking of the ethics of the impossible, Arditi was able to
conclude in his piece tiltled Talkin but a Revolution: The End of
Mourning that revolution is precisely what unfolds in the spacing or play
between the promise that entices us to demand the impossible and the continually deconstructible figures of possibility aiming to flesh out the promise (Kurt, Stahl, and Willis 2003, 85). For Arditi, we lose nothing by thinking the impossible, but we open up more roads into the possible. Adopting a
more versatile approach, Badiou declines to reflect on the possibility or
impossibility of revolution today but presents instead a reflection on the
whole question by means of an aporia:If you think that the world can and
must change absolutely, that there is neither a nature of things to be respected nor pre-formed subjects to be maintained, you thereby admit that the
individual can be sacrificed (73). In other words, the individual as suchas
a natural beinghas nothing intrinsic to his nature that merits preservation;
all claims for preserving the individual must therefore be claims about his

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essence rather than his naturehis unnaturalness (73). The remainder of

Badious contribution to Mourning Revolution consists of mapping variations
on this unnaturalness of the human subject. Implicitly, the demand for revolution is presented as an effect of this unnaturalness. Since the human subject as such, whether for Sartre or Lacan, is precisely that which lacks essence
and being, it is only by dissolving itself into a project which exceeds it that
it concretizes its essence (74). Ironically, striving for essence turns out to be,
in Badious analysis, no more than a twentieth-century obsession with a formality: demonstration. To demonstrate is to evacuate the empty and vacant
position of an existence without essence and to melt into the we-subject
that emerges out of the collection of otherwise isolated individuals (78). It
bears repeating here that after the collapse of the communist camp and the
triumph of capitalism, demonstrations have become, at least for Hardt and
Negri, new forms of militancy. While Badiou is reticent about the political
import of this new form of militancy which came to stamp the twentieth
century, Kristeva contends that the age of militancy is well behind us.
In her own autobiographical essay, My Memorys Hyperbole, which
first appeared in 1983 in Infini, the journal that replaced Tel Quel, Kristeva
dates her disenchantment with the Communist Party back to the late 1960s,
that is, to the early years of her affiliation with the Tel Quel group. Kristeva
explains that the Tel Quels belief in the permanent subversiveness of the
Communist Party ceased as soon as the latter began its campaign to institutionalize and appropriate, on behalf of the establishment, those currents of
thought and aesthetic creation that would have remained marginal without
it (15). She comments on the later visits of members of the Tel Quel (herself included) to China after the 1974 Cultural Revolution as amounting to
nothing more than an inauguration of the return to the only continent they
had never ceased to believe in: internal experience. The present two volumes,
with their insistence on the end of militancy and their call for a return to inti macy, can therefore aptly be seen as variations on a persistent theme.
Yet, if Kristeva could be seen to have withdrawn from any active engagement in politicsand from any belief in a socialist revolution, for that matterduring the early years of her involvement with Tel Quel, it is wrong to
conclude that she ceased thenceforth to reflect on the concept of revolution.
On the contrary, her whole oeuvre reveals her continually rediscovering the
same entelechy, the same impasse of political revolution, always trying to
inventory a new language of salvaging it, always trying to displace it into
other realms of experience, be they poetic (as she suggests in her very first
book of 1974, Revolution in Poetic Language) or psychic (as the present twin
volumes under review here attest). This seems to me to be Kristevas idiosyncratic way of working through the demise of socialist revolution, her way,

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in other words, of mourningin the Freudian sense of the withdrawal of

affective ties from a lost (ideal) object and of the establishment of new ties
with a new objectrevolution in its lost political sense: rediscovering and
reinventing it anew in poetic and psychic locales. But first, how does Kristeva
sort through the reasons that the task of situating revolt at the level of the
psyche is of a pressing urgency today?
Who Would Revolt We re There Nothing to Revolt Against?

Kristeva does not ask this question, but I ask it here in order to better
capture the fichue position (to borrow a Joycean expression from Ulysses) in
which she places the subject, the very focus of her reflections on the relevance of the concept of revolt in todays world. Who would revolt were
there nothing to revolt against? is formulated thus in order that it asks (1)
after the one who would be willing to revolt even against that which exceeds
ones capacity to revolt against, that powerful disembodied knitting machine
called global capital whose handiwork is manifest everywhere but whose origins are ghostly and impossible to pin down, let alone subvertthis is perhaps the case with Hardt and Negris multitude; (2) after the one who would
be willing to revolt but would find literally nothing to revolt against, no visible constellation of power to overturnthis is perhaps the case with
Fukuyamas liberal democrats who seem to have overcome the last frontier
after the collapse of communism; (3) and, strangely enough, after the (no)one
who would not be able to revolt and for whom there would be absolutely
nothing to revolt against anyway. Out of the three possible interpretations of
the question suggested above, only the last one is in piece with Kristevas
argument throughout her two volumes. In the eyes of Kristeva, not only is
there no one capable of revolt today, but there is also nothing to revolt against.
This is the qui and contre qui, the who and against whom, impasse in which
Kristeva suspends the political subject prior to rethinking its prospects for
another kind of revolt.
Kristeva expounds that revolt in its political sense is today mired not only
because the political landscape is becoming more and more homogenized as
dissimilarities between parties are waning, but especially because there is no
tangible structure of power against which to revolt, only a power vacuum,
and, gravely enough, no agent available to carry out the incumbent task of
revolt.The harbinger of social change has become nothing more than a patrimonial person (personne patrimoniale), a mere conglomerate of organs
(conglomrat dorganes) hardly capable of recognizing the power-technologies
infused in him, let alone able to neutralize their virulent and hamstringing
effects (2002, 4). The modern subject is, according to Kristeva, a person

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belonging to the patrimony, financially, genetically, and physiologically, a person barely free enough to use a remote control to choose his channel (4).
This picture of the modern subject Kristeva draws is even gloomier if we
are to consider it against the backdrop of Fukuyamas most recent book
whose title alone, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology
Revolution, chills the spine. For Fukuyama, George Orwells prophetic vision
of a world dominated by information technology and by hovering Big
Brother(s) has come true, and so has come as well Aldous Huxleys prescience
of a biotechnological world in which babies are no longer hatched in situ
(i.e. in wombs) but in vitro. Without getting entangled in the entrails of
Fukuyamas argument, I think that it draws a picture of the current world
that is in many respects similar to the one Kristeva draws. In very general
terms, there are, according to Kristeva and Fukuyama, two dystopias materializing before our eyes: (1) a virtual rather than real world in which the
media, undergirded by a complex network of information technology, fosters and promotes what Kristeva calls, after Guy Debord, the society of the
spectacle and the culture of entertainment rather than the culture of revolt,
and (2) a biotechnological world, in which the wedge is being slowly but
steadily opened for new technologies to take possession of the human body,
thus managing it at will. According to Fukuyama, this is humanitys most
frightening nightmare and literally the post human stage of mans existence, which would lead to what C. S. Lewis called the abolition of man,
that is, the negation of man in the process of technologically surpassing or
mastering it.
Unlike Fukuyama, a policy maker who goes on in his Our Posthuman
Future to suggest pragmatic solutions to containing this otherwise runaway
world in which the biotechnological revolution resulted, Kristeva is no policy maker but a thinker whose work traverses a wide array of philosophical,
literary, linguistic, and psychoanalytical interests and who is primarily concerned with the ways in which the velocity of the biotechnological revolution might be slowed, as well as the ways in which the hold of the culture
show might be dispelled.As such, she sets herself the task of pointing out the
way for a culture of revolt, a culture that would move us beyond the two
impasses where we are caught today: the failure of rebellious ideologies, on
the one hand, and the surge of consumer culture, on the other (2000, 7).
Kristeva thinks that it is incumbent upon us to resurrect a culture of revolt,
not because we can no longer aspire for political revolt but because happiness, as Freud demonstrated,exists only at the price of revolt (7).

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Intimacy Now; or, the Psychic Tropography of Revolt

In order to restore us to/to us this culture of revolt, Kristeva undertakes

to trace its writerly manifestation in the experiences of Sigmund Freud, JeanPaul Sartre, Louis Aragon, and Roland Barthes. Although the two volumes
deal with different texts by each of these above-mentioned writers, they
overlap, almost exquisitely, insofar as the argument of both is concerned. I
will not therefore alternate between each but will instead deal with both of
them simultaneously.
Attentive to the linguistic difficulties of the task at hand, to the automatic
association of the concept of revolt with the political and the ideological,
Kristeva undertakes first to wrest it, etymologically, from the overly narrow
political sense it has taken in our time in order to bring to light its richness, polyvalence, and plasticity and relate it thereof to the intimate
sphere of the psyche (2000, 3). In this respect, she contends that the term
revoltwhose Latin lineage (volvere) implies movement and return, as
well as reversal, detour, etc. (3)did not come to lose its initially celestial origins in favor of more overtly political and historical purchases until the
early beginning of the eighteenth century.
Kristeva complains that the word revolt has been repetitively used in
relation to the suspension of old values such that the new nihilistic values are
swallowed wholesale, rather than questioned in turn like the old ones. As
such, the pseudo-rebellious nihilist, far from being a man in revolt, is in fact
a man reconciled with the stability of new values (2002, 6). Kristeva goes
on to propound that the technological development, the desacralization of
Christianity, along with the abandonment of the Augustinian introspective
and self-questioning quest (se quaerere) in favor of the immutability of being,
have all combined among themselves in such a manner as to result in the
paralysis of the will, on which totalitarianism preys: 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 (6).
Kristeva begins both of her volumes by effectuating yet another return
to Freud, perhaps in competition with Lacan but certainly not la
Lacanienne. Indeed, her championing of Freuds models of language in
chapter three of her first volumeand her contention that the unconscious
cannot be mapped onto Saussures linguistics of signifier-signifiedtakes aim
at Lacan, who famously claimed that the unconscious is structured like a language. Of course, we are here treading on familiar Kristevian grounds: ever
since her early years of apprenticeship which culminated in the publication
of Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), Kristeva has adhered with fascinating
but predictable consistency to a cornerstone theoretical distinction between

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the symbolic and the semiotic, between what is purely linguistic or meaning
proper (the symbolic) and what is not strictly so or linguistic per se (the
semiotic) in that it encompasses the pre- or trans-linguistic organization and
discharge of bodily drives through rhythms, tones, and alliterations anterior
to signs and syntaxes. It is Kristevas unfaltering argument, throughout her
work, that signifiance or significance emerges in the dialectic between the
symbolic narrow reference and the semiotic broad horizon.
Much of what Kristeva means by poetic or psychic revolt, then and now,
hinges on the restitution of the semiotic functionality of language, that is, on
revalorizing the sensory experience, the antidote to technical hair-splitting
(2002, 5). In other words, much of Kr istevas sense and non-sense of
revolt rests squarely on whether or not we are to accept the conditions on
which her argument is predicated: Kristeva asserts that the semiotic is asymptotic and irreducible to language and intellect, only to contend in the final
analysis that nowhere else can we come closer to psychic revolt than in the
obstinate attempt to activate, articulate, and narrate the semioticthe depository of the unconscious, of sexual fantasies, of oedipal aggression, of incest,
of matricide, among other somatic instincts or drives. It is only at this stage
that we have perhaps to decide whether we can afford to follow Kristevas initially compelling argumentonly, that is, when psychic revolt comes to
mean slowly but overwhelmingly clinical analysis, at which time we realize
that Kristevas version of revolt is costly and therefore inaccessible to those
who lack the economic means and the educational knowledge necessary to
benefit from the luxury (of revolt) it promises to deliver.
This might not be the kind of that Hardt and Negris multitude asks for,
but it is certainly not the kind of revolt that such a multitude can afford.
While bearing this in mind, let us try to assess the extent to which Kristeva
reconciles between her version of revolt as an aspect of the clinical and analytical experience of transference (developed at length in the second volume)
and revolt as Freud presents it in Totem and Taboo: a facet of primitive culture
at the origin of religion (developed mainly in the first volume). In Intimate
Revolt, Kristeva revels in analyzing the virtues of the analytical experience of
transference and counter-transference whose alleged terminus is freedom. It
is not freedom in Sartres sense of condemnation to choice and responsibility but freedom from the guilt of being as such (Heidegger) and from the
vicissitudes of consciousness whose penchant for interiorizing the collective
realism of sin in individual responsibility is unquenchable (Freud). Here
Kri s t evas interp re t ive elaboration of the concept of forgiveness as re b i rth,
as suspension of judgment, as retrieval of the significance (i.e. semiotic
dimension) of the drive, and generally as the unconscious coming to consciousness in transfere n c e (2002, 19) might prove rewarding for those

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(Hegelians and Freudians alike) interested in the traps of consciousness in

the road to happiness.
It is, however, in The Scandal of the Timeless, chapter three of Intimate
Revolt, that Kristeva delivers a sustained and compelling philosophical argument on the concept of the timeless (lhors-temps/Zeitlos), on its role and
importance vis--vis the transferential experience of analysis. Kristeva argues
persuasively that while human existence is intrinsically linked to time, the
analytical experience reconciles us with this timelessness, which is that of the
drive, and more particularly the death drive (2002, 12)that which feeds
on what, according to Kristeva, Freud calls the symptom of being conscious (27).While one cannot here but admire Kristevas diligent construction of the different figures of the timelesswhich range from the memory trace and working through to interminable analysisone nonetheless wonders what has become of psychic revolt in the process. Is psychic
revolt here indissociable from the jouissance of psychic aggression at work in
the death drive that the Homo analyticus (the analyst) brings to the fore? This
question is of grave consequences as to the theoretical valences of Kristevas
concept of psychic revolt, all the more so if we are to consider it in relation
to two Freudian texts: Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through
and Totem and Taboo, both of which Kristeva quotes.
In Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, Freud insists that
the significance of the transferential experience of analysis lies in its ability to
bring forth a playground of psychic transferal and struggle (between the analyst and the analysand) whose success or failure depends on the analysts
capacity to dispel the hold of repetition compulsion into the more laborious
work of remembering. Specifically, what might amount to psychic revolt on
the part of the analysand and to analytical triumph on the part of the analyst
is nothing less than the moment of mastering the repetition compulsion and
the Zeitlos underpinning itof keep[ing] in the psychical sphere all the
impulses which the patient would like to direct into the motor sphere
(Freud 1968, 153). The clinical and analytical experience in Freud has the
merit of releasing the subject from the unconscious compulsions (of aggression, of the death drive) that he would readily act out in the outer-world,
rather than spell out and contain in the interior world of the psyche. Kristeva
is not perhaps unaware of this facet of psychic revolt (as a break out of the
mould of repetition compulsion), but she tends to stress a less finite aspect of
revolt which she associates with the experience of transference itself. The
bulk of Kristevas understanding of psychic revolt in Intimate Revolt is dedicated to insisting that, once analysis is over, the analysand will be opened up
to innumerable opportunities of identification, to the re-creation of the
transferential dynamic with other others (2002, 40). Like Freud, Kristeva

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does not think that analysis is terminable; unlike Freud, however, she reverses the interminability of analysis into a virtue: no longer inexorable but
open, this interminability will continue to inspire the analysand in his subsequent quest to bond with others.
The question that is left hanging is this: How can we reconcile this amicable version of psychic revolt with the other more political (and violent)
version that Kristeva analyzes, somewhat elegiacally, in Totem and Taboo? How
can we reconcile Kristevas reprisal of Freuds construction of the birth of
Homo religiosis on the pyre of the father of our ancestral historyand in the
wake of guilt and repentancewith the analytical version of revolt as containment of aggression (Freud) or as a license to love, as Kristeva herself contends in Intimate Revolt? My guess is that Kristeva has not been able to banish the political completely from the psychic tropography (the troping of revolt
in the geography of the psyche) in which she attempts to locate it. My guess
soon turns into certitude when Kristeva moves to illustrate what she means
by her version of psychic revolt in the works of the surrealist Aragon, the
existentialist Sartre, and the structuralist Barthes.
Getting the Political out of Revolt

Is the psychic revolt that Kristeva discerns and redeems in the literary
and philosophical texts of Aragon, Barthes, and Sartre separable from its
political import? Moreover, does writerly revolt, for these writers, hold the
same status as political engagement? While Kristeva is aware of the undecidability of the heterogeneous group of surrealists on this issue, all the more so
in the case of Aragon whose suspicion of the political dimension of the literary experience pressed him to join the Communist Party, she attempts to
convince us nonetheless that Aragon was unequivocally an alchemist of the
Word whose non-sense pursuit of ideological revolt (through the spectacle of adherence to the Communist Party) must not blind us to the irremovable sense of psychic revolt that ripples through his entire oeuvre.
Kristevas tone here is intransigent and irascible toward a culture that buries
writers and their works in the shadow of their political or institutional membership. On the other hand, her tone seems apologetic since much of what
she says about Aragon amounts perhaps, as the following confession implies,
to nothing less than a projection of her own non-sense of political revolt
at the time of Tel Quel:There may have been a crisis of love, values, meaning, men, women, history, but I am not going to Abyssinia, I do not belong
to the Communist Party, and if I venture to China or into structuralism, I
come back (2000, 113).
Her insistence on the non-sense of political revolt threatens to dilute,
when it comes to Sartre, the considerable risks he took in his political action,

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especially in Frances colonial war against Algeria. Moreover, while whoever

reads Sartres existentialist manifesto, Existentialism and Humanismwhose
emphasis on the moral responsibility involved in the condemnation to freedom cannot be overstatedwill not fail to note its consistency with his choice
not to accept the Nobel Prize, Kristeva reads it as an emblem of the sense
and non-sense of revolt (2000, 150). For Kristeva, Sartre wanted to set, on
the one hand, an example for writers who might want to dissociate their
continual revolt from honorific institutions. On the other hand, she claims
that his concern to detach himself from Western conformism had blinded
him, and he adhered completely, without the spirit of revolt demanded elsewhere, to a certain leftist propaganda of the time (152). Of course, Kristeva
misses here the portion of doom and condemnation involved in revolt, which
Sartre carefully elaborates in his writings and for which the Nobel Prize
affair is, in my view, a dazzling example. By and large, I think the power of
Kristevas analysis of Sartre, especially in Intimate Revolt, lies in the central
conceit of its polemic, which is to read Sartre not only against himself but
also against the backdrop of the present, in which the virtual is alienating us
with the foundational ngatits (by which Sartre means the copresence of
nothings and identity) at the heart of being.The thrust of Kristevas argument
points to the pertinence of Sartres work on the imagination to the necessity
of building psychic dams firm enough to counter the flood of images of the
society of the spectacleKristevas bte-noire throughout her two volumes.
Kristeva presses forward in her remapping of different types of texts
through the lenses of the theory of psychic or intimate revolt by turning her
probing gaze, in an admixture of mourning and melancholia, to her deceased
teacher: Barthes. Kristeva takes good care to steer Barthes clear of the terrorist charges foisted on him by his detractors who are in point of fact
alarmed by the subversiveness and negativity of his writing, a negativity that
works against the transparency of language and the symbolic function in
general (2000, 210-11). Kristeva shows the extent to which negativity is
central to Barthess desubstantifying project of writinga project that
undoes the plenary and hackneyed communicative thrust of language in the
service of the transformative, the unfamiliar, that is, the antilanguage
(Joyce) that is sacrificial (Bataille) that also bears witness to the social structure in upheaval (211). Barthes demystifies the latent ideological structure of
myth, which is otherwise veiled under the linguistic sign; in so doing, he
exercises an interpretive revolution in that his exercise is not neutral but clear
and lucid. For Kristeva, Barthes is a demystifier of social proprieties, norms,
trifles, and sweet nothings, as well as a decoder of intimacy: his writings
seductively move the reader from the sensorial realm of taste and fashion into
the more overtly political realm of ideology; his discursive wanderings do not

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halt without making a political incision (2002, 83), without crystaliz[ing]

an island of meaning in a sea of negativity (2000, 213).The reader will not
fail to notice the heart of a failed poet beating here and there in Kristevas
prose, but her reading of Barthes is lucid and rewarding.
In the fleshing out of her own concept of psychic revolt to the writings
of Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes, Kristeva finds herself overtly involved in the
specific historical and cultural circumstances that inform these texts.
Kristevas project would have been better served had she attempted to reconcile her pronouncement of the death of revolutionist ideologiesand of
the alleged necessity of pursuing a low form of revolt (une forme basse de la
rvolte), a form of tiny revolutions (r-volte infinitsimale), in order to preserve
the life of the mind and of the species (2002, 5)with the ways in which
she then proceeds to investigate a number of texts whose historical context
is traversed by the promise of socialist revolution, even if there is also in them
a fringe of open texture that warrants what Kristeva means by intimate
revolt. A good deal of what passes for psychic revolt in Kristevas reading of
Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes certainly does fall under the heading of the political, but the very idea that intimate revolt could somehow compensate for or
replace political revolt is in the final analysis self-defeating and impertinent
to these texts themselves: the sense of intimate revolt in Aragon, Sartre, and
Barthes is indissociable from the political and revolutionary horizon that
informs it; it is, moreover, within a hairs breadth of morphing into political
action. To the extent that her readings of these authors might bring them
(especially Aragon who is, according to Kristeva, hardly read today) back to
the attention of the candid reader, she performs a laudable task; to the extent
that she reads these authors to hammer home her vision of psychic revolt,
she has not perhaps convincingly delivered us from the political.This, however, must remain a methodological pro blem that threatens to attenuate the
premises of the thesis of psychic revolt writ large; by no means does it
undermine the many moments of insight that fill her separate readings of
each author.
There are, of course, other more general problems that arise in relation
to the broad strokes of Kristevas argument: first, if the subject is no longer
anything but a marketable collection of organs, how would it be reconciled
to the sensory? To the extent that such revalorization of the sensory, the
introspective, and the self-reflexive is possible, would it not present itself
under the guise of the culture show? With no fringe of free will, no penumbra of critical distance, and with no allowance that the subject can somewhat
exceed the power structures of which s/he is a product, there can hardly be
any possibility for revolt whatsoever, even the kind of revolt in miniature that
Kristeva elaborates in her two treatises. By emptying the subject of any polit-

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ical action, Kristeva can be said to deny the sensory prior to positing it as a
space where tiny coups could be mounted. Second, what would intimate
revolt amount to if not to sharpening the faculty of critique, of discerning
the contours of ideological apparatuses locally and globally, and of undertaking political action? Should not intimate revolt prepare us for the political
rather than deliver us from it?
In her recent contribution to Mourning Revolution, a special issue of
Parallax, Kristeva reiterates her position that political revolt is over. I cannot
help but remain slightly puzzled by Kristevas appropriation of the rhetoric
of endingnamely, the ending of the subjectin the service of a theory that
would not obtain without the subject. Is her elaboration of intimate revolt
an attempt to trope the subject back into existence? In Mourning a
Metaphor: The Revolution is Over, also a contribution to Mourning
Revolution, Jay points out that the word revolutionwhose astronomical
origins invoke celestial movement and circular or elliptical return to a former placeis nothing more than a mere metaphorical displacement. The
word was used, according to Jay, in the face of events whose violence and
unpredictability seemed impossible to comprehend, but it was not until the
late eighteenth century that it was used in the peculiar and, ever since, more
widespread sense of a utopian tomorrow. By 1989, however, the latter more
promissory meaning of revolution was crashed and we are, according to Jay,
no longer beholden to maximalist fantasies of redemption and epochal
transformation, fantasies whose defeat leaves us feeling impotent and lost
(Kurt, Stahl, and Willis 2003, 19-20). Jay argues, in other words, that there was
a time when we might have needed metaphors such as revolution to fashion
the world according to our own dreams, but that time is over, and we now
need to understand that metaphors are nothing more than metaphors. The
good news is that it may therefore be better to wander forever in the desert
of metaphorical displacement than set up our camp in an oasis that proves
only to be a mirage (20).
Perhaps no one has so far understood this lesson more than Kristeva
since her concept of intimate revolt can be seen as nothing more than a
metaphorical displacement, all the more so since she purports to effect a
return to the original meaning of revolt which is nothing other than
return itself.The original meaning itself is a metaphor: Kristevas return is
thus nothing but a remetaphorization.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. The Illusion of the End.Trans. Chris Turner. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.

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Bell, Daniel. 1988. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy.
Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Semeia 23: 63-97.
. 1994. Specters of Marx:The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International.Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.
Donato, Arthur. 1997. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1968. Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through. In The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. 5.12, trans.
James Strachey. 1914. Reprint. London:The Hogarth Press.
Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Avon
Books.
. 2002. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.
New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Kristeva, Julia. 2002. My Memorys Hyperbole. In The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly
Oliver. New York: Columbia University Press.
Shakespeare, William. 2000. King Lear, ed. Stanley Wells. Oxford: Oxford University
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Vattimo, Gianni. 1988. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in a Post-mod ern Culture. Oxford: Polity Press.