The ideas interview: Julia Kristeva

Why is a great critic ashamed of being fashionable? By John Sutherland

The Guardian, Tuesday March 14, 2006

To her admirers, Julia Kristeva is one of the heroic band of French critics who injected "theory" into the sluggish Anglo-Saxon cultural bloodstream. To diehards on the other side, she is a prime exponent of impenetrable and unnecessary critical complexities. One colleague, to whom I mentioned her name replied with the single word "bonkers". Another suggested she should get a Nobel prize.

She is particularly associated with three concepts, which she now seems to wish to disown. Le semiotique is the idea that speech works as much through sub-verbal codes as by what is actually said. The real work of signification is done in the "cleavage between words and meanings". This fascination with the sub- or pre-verbal is something that, looking back, Kristeva now associates with the liturgy of the Orthodox Church: "All my childhood was bathed in this," she says.


The second of Kristeva's hallmark ideas is what she calls "abjection". Why, Kristeva inquires, are we fascinated by things that disgust and horrify us? As she put it in her essay on the subject: "There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced."

Most famously, Kristeva is associated with the concept of "intertextuality" - the idea that all literature is constantly in conversation with all other literature, undetachable, as a single unit, from the textual mass. Having patented these influential ideas, Kristeva is now acutely uneasy at being chained to her own thought, or confined within her own thinking. "I am very proud of the widespread use of my ideas," she says, "and at the same time very much ashamed because they have become so fashionable. Everybody thinks and talks about 'intertextuality', everybody thinks and talks about 'abjection'. The ideas become politically correct everywhere in the world and I hate it because I think when people repeat what you have done and said, they can no longer recognise you yourself. You are denied. It's a kind of decay of this moment when the idea burst out of your mind. Now the idea is consumerised."

Kristeva applies one term to her project - "synthetic". She likes to join things, mix them fluidly. It is, perhaps, something that links with her background. She came to France in 1965, aged 24, as a refugee from communist Bulgaria. She says she now thinks in French. But clearly, as her latest writing indicates, she still feels Bulgarian.

In recent years, restless as ever, Kristeva has utilised fiction as her principal mode of expression. Her latest detective novel, Murder in Byzantium, revisits the Greek Orthodox Christianity of her childhood and incorporates religious conspiracies and Thomas Harris-style serial killers. What does she see as the connection between Kristeva the critic and Kristeva the novelist? "There is a continuation", she replies. "As you know, I belong to the tendency, or school, in French philosophy which developed in the 60s, in which conceptual work is deeply involved with the personal and in which notions, or ideas, are sutured by style. There is a lot of imagination, rhetorical figures, subjective expressions and so on that that often bother the so-called Anglo-Saxon reader because they consider this French 'stuff' - theory - to be somehow indigestible."

Why is her latest novel so concerned with religion? Is she attracted by the Church? Or merely fascinated by it? "I am not a believer, I believe in words. There is only one resurrection for me - and that is in words. My novel is a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code. I'm not Catholic by background. My father was a very great believer, but in the Orthodox Church, in Bulgaria. As a young woman my Oedipus conflict was in a perpetual fight with that." She laughs. "Afterwards I tried to understand what Christianity is and my approach became more intellectual. On the one side, I'm very much interested in religion. On the other hand, I don't make any kind of spiritual - how shall I say - extrapolation or message. My idea is to link religion with politics and see how in both of them there were, and will be, a lot of crimes and human folly."

Why the detective novel format? "It is necessary to revisit the starting point of my writing detective stories. I date it as some months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when my father was assassinated in a Bulgarian hospital. It was a very, very difficult experience for me. When I arrived, after he was dead, the family was not informed of the cause of his death.

We could make no inquiry as to who was the criminal who had done it. And finally he was, without our permission, cremated, which was wholly contrary to his religious belief. It was very, very difficult for me to recover from this grief - to mourn. In this situation the detective story imposed itself on me, without any voluntary act on my part."

Since then, Kristeva has written a string of detective novels. Is it an entirely separate exericise from the academic work?" No. This is why I made the point about the 60s, and the French theoretical 'stuff'. There have always been some personal implications in my essays. But now it's a jump because I think that writing novels is a sort of process I like to call transubstantiation. There is, as I see it, a very strong linkage between words and flesh in writing fiction. It's not merely a mental activity. The whole personality is in it. You have psychology, you have belief, you have love affairs, you have sexuality, you also have a connection to language. When I'm writing novels, I am making a voyage around, or into, myself. I do it also, of course, in my essays. But my essays are a defence of my self-voyaging. In the novel, I take all the risks of the traveller, or the explorer. And I get all the pleasures as well"

· Murder in Byzantium is published by Columbia University Press, priced £19.50

Shattering Language

Julia Kristeva is interested in the subversive effects of language---discourse that confronts language and thinks it against itself, discourse (like the language of carnival) that absorbs concepts within relationships and works toward harmony all the while implying the idea of rupture as a way of transforming or breaking the code "to shatter language. . .to find specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnameable repressed by the social contract. . ." (1259-60). We asked the students in our ENG 980 "Studies in Rhetoric" course to take a Kristevan look at the following passage from the Bible (Revised Standard Edition):

1Timothy2:11-15 Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.

We told them to think of language as Kristeva does, making it a productive structure by fracturing not only its meaning, but also its grammar and syntax which attempts to manage the voice of the other, thereby contributing to the "phenomenology of the lie," and by demystifying "the community of language as a universal and unifying tool." Each of three groups devised a different treatment of this passage from the Bible.

One group offered the following creation. Note the "moebius strip" in the upper left corner composed of "Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness," a continuous circuit---a closed system like the symbolic order itself. Note also the reordering of the text, the highlighting of certain words and the deletion of others. This group reworded and added new text, elevating and projecting significant sections. The text is multi-dimensional, fragmented, and non-linear. So, the "official" meaning and usual syntax are disrupted in the attempt to produce new meaning.

Another group approached the task by cutting words and phrases from the original text and placing them in quite a different order. In this order the text may be read in several different ways, depending on how the reader holds it. Some phrases will be upside-down no matter how the reader views them, some will draw the eye around the rectangle of the text, and some will remain in the usual syntactic position. In the upper left corner a significant section of the text runs diagonally across the page and off of it. The effect is to produce mutiple readings of the same text, depending on the reader and the various ways the reader chooses to view the text---very much on the order of hypertext. Also, it's difficult to distinguish nouns from verbs from prepositions in this arrangement, thus interrupting the order suggested by the lexicon. Again this group has chosen to produce new meanings by fracturing and reordering the original text and literally turning it on itself.

The third group approached the task differently. They broke the text apart and presented it in an oral performance. The female voices in the group were interwoven with a single male voice, producing a representation that reinforced the new meaning created by the group's rearrangement of the text and the layering of the voices. Click here to listen to the group's performance.

Each group worked within the patrilinear framework of the language but disrupted the usual patterns of useage to subvert the "official" meaning.

The Woman's Bible

Elizabeth Cady Stanton offered another reading of this same scripture in The Woman's Bible. She wrote this book with a committee of other women to revise the texts and chapters of the Bible which directly refer to women and .those in which women are prominently excluded because in her view, "The canon and civil law; church and state; priests and legislators; all political parties and religious denominations have alike taught that woman was made after man, of man, and for man, an inferior being, subject to man. Creeds, codes, Scriptures and statutes, are all based on this idea. The fashions, forms, ceremonies and customs of society, church ordinances and discipline all grow out of this idea" (7). Her thought was that although Bible historians claim special inspiration for the Old and New Testaments, the records are contradictory in that the miracles and events oppose all known laws, ". . .of customs that degrade the female sex of all human and animal life, stated in most questionable language. . .and call this 'The Word of God' ." Stanton's work differs from eclesiastical teaching in her interpretation only in that she does not "believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, [she does] not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible" (12). She sees her task as one of working within existing scripture but bases her re-interpretations on the idea that the texts were written by men who are fallible. What follows, then, is a reading of 1Timothy2:11-15 which like those above offers an alternative:

Jesus is not recorded as having uttered any similar claim that woman should be subject to man, or that in teaching she would be a usurper. The dominion of woman over man or of man over woman makes no part of the sayings of the Nazarene. He spoke so the individual soul, not recognizing sex as a quality of spiritual life, or as determining the sphere of action of either man or woman.

Stevens, in his "Pauline Theology," says: "Paul has been read as if he had written in the nineteenth century, or, more commonly, as if he had written in the fifth or seventeenth, as if his writings had no peculiarities arising from his own time, education and mental constitution." Down these nineteen centuries in a portion of the Christian Church the contempt for woman which Paul projected into Christianity has been perpetuated. The Protestant Evangelical Church still refuses to place her on an equality with man.

Although Paul said: "Neither is the man without the woman nor the woman without the man in the Lord," he taught also that the male alone is in the image of God. "For a man ought not to have his head veiled forasmuch as he is the image of God: but the woman is the glory of man." Thus he carried the spirit of the Talmud, "aggravated and re-enforced," into Christianity, represented by the following appointed daily prayer for pious Jews: "Blessed art thou, O Lord, that thou hast not made me a Gentile, an idiot nor a woman." Paul exhibits fairness in giving reasons for his peremptory mandate. "For Adam was first formed, then Eve," he says. This appears to be a weak statement for the higher position of man. If male man is first in station and authority, is superior because of priority of formation, what is his relation to "whales and every living creature that moveth which the waters bring forth, and every winged fowl after his kind," which were formed before him?

And again, "Adam was not beguiled, but, the woman being beguiled, hath fallen into transgression." There was then already existing the beguiling agency. The transgression of Eve was in listening to this existing source of error, which, in the allegory, is styled "the most subtle beast of the field which the Lord God hath made." Woman did not bring this subtle agency ino activity. She was not therefore the author of sin, as has been charged. She was tempted by her desire for the knowledge which would enable her to distinguish between good and evil. According to this story, woman led the race out of the ignorance of innocence into the truth. Calvin, the commentator, says: "Adam did not fall into error, but was overcome by the allurements of his wife." It is singular that the man, who was "first formed," and therefore superior, and to whom only God has committed the office of teaching, not only was not susceptible to the temptation to acquire knowledge, but should have been the weak creature who was "overcome by the allurements of his wife."

But the story of the fall and all cognate myths and parables are far older and more universal than the ordinary reader of the Bible supposes them to be. The Bible itself in its Hebrew form is a comparatively recent compilation and adaptation of mysteries, the chief scenes of which were sculptured on temple walls and written or painted on papyri, ages before the time of Moses. History tells us, moreover, that the Book of Genesis, as it now stands, is the work not even of Moses, but of Ezra or Esdras, who lived at the time of the captivity, between five hundred and six hundred years before our era, and that he recovered it and other writings by the process of intuitional memory. "My heart," he says, "uttered understanding, and wisdom grew in my breast: for the spirit strengthened my memory."

With regard to the particular myth of the fall, the walls of ancient Thebes, Elphantime, Edfou and Darnak bear evidnce that long before Moses taught , and cetainly ages before Esdras wrote, its acts and symbols were embodied in the religious ceremonials of the people, of whom, according to Manetho, Mses was himself a priest. And the whole history of the fall of man is, says Sharpe, in a work on Egypt, "of Egyptian origin. The temptation of the woman by the serpent, the man by the woman and the serpent, may all be seen upon the Egyptian sculptured monuments."

This symbology signifies a deeper meaning than a material garden, a material apple, a tree and a snake. It is the relation of the soul or feminine part of man, "his living mother," to the physical and external man of sense. The temptation of woman brought the soul into the limitations of matter, of the physical. The soul derives its life from spirit, the eternal substance, God. Knowledge, through the intellect alone, is of the limitation of flesh and sense. Intuition, the feminine part of reason, is the higher light. If the soul, the feminine part of man, is turned toward God, humanity is saved from the dissipations and the perversions of sensuality. Humanity is not alone dual in the two forms, male and female, but every soul is dual. The more perfect the balance in the individual of masculine and feminine, the more perfect the man or the woman. The masculine represents force, the feminine love. "Force without love can but work evil until it is spent."

Paul evidently was not learned in Egyptian lore. He did recognize the esoteric meaning of the parable of the fall. To him it was a literal fact, apparently, and Eve was to be to all womankind the transmitter of a "curse" in maternity. We know that down to the very recent date of the introduction of anesthetics the idea prevailed that travail pains are the result of, and punishment for, the transgression of Mother Eve. It was claimed that it was wrong to attempt to remove "the curse" from woman, by mitigating her suffering in that hour of peril and of agony.

Whatever Paul may mean, it is a fact that the women of our aboriginal tribes, whose living was natural and healthful, who were not enervated by civilized customs, were not subject to the sufferings of civilized women. And it has been proven by the civilized woman that a strict observance of hygienic conditions of dress, of diet, and the mode of life, reduces the pangs of parturition. Painless child-bearing is a physiological problem; and "the curse" has never borne upon the woman whose life had been in strict accord with the laws of life. Science has come to the rescue of humanity, in the recognition of the truth that the advancement as well as the conservation of the race is through the female. His audacity was sublime; but it was the audacity of ignorance.

No more stupendous demonstration of the power of thought can be imagined, than is illustrated in the customs of the Church for centuries, when in the general canons were found that "No woman may approach the altar," "A woman may not baptize without extreme necessity," "Woman may not receive the eucharist under a black veil." Under canon 81 she was forbidden to write in her own name to lay Christians, but only in the name of her husband; and women were not to receive letters of friendship from any one addressed to themselves. Canon law, framed by the priesthood, compiled as early as the ninth century, has come in effect to the nineteenth, making woman subordinate in civil law. Under canon law, wives were deprived of the control of both person and property. Canon law created marriage a sacrament "to be performed at the church door," in order to make it a source of revenue to the Church. Marriage, however, was reckoned too sinful "to be allowed for many years to take place within the sacred building consecrated to God, and deemed too holy to permit the entrance of a woman within its sacred walls at certain periods of her life" (164-168).

Rupturing with The Yellow Wallpaper

I have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it [the wallpaper} changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move--and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern--it strangles so: I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white! If those heads were covered or taken off it would not be half so bad. The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In the novel, John’s wife after having a child suffers from a “temporary nervous depression” which at the time was treated with the “rest cure” which consists of a stay in the country, complete rest, and consumption of phosphates, tonics, and other elixirs. She believes that “congenial work with excitement and change” would do her good. However, her husband the physician totally disagrees, won’t discuss the situation, and mandates the “rest cure” which is based on the knowledge of the time and the authority of Dr. Weir Mitchell, its devisor. Consequently, his wife is sent to an upper room in a large rundown country house. The ghastly wallpaper is pealing and the windows are barred. She has requested convalescence in a downstairs well-lighted room , but John in his dual hierarchical role of husband and physician ignores her requests and protestations, thus preserving the hierarchical structure and her place within that structure.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper and the writing and publishing of it are examples of what Julia Kristeva defines as the new feminism and the use of language against itself to rupture the marginalizing of women. Kristeva identifies discourse which confronts language and thinks it against itself as “intertextuality” (The System 29).

John’s wife in her journal vividly depicts the impact society/culture has on women: inscripting and restricting them, “working to place the body (social or individual) under the law of writing.” The body is “itself defined, delimited, and articulated by what writes it” (de Certeau 139).The larger body influences a person and impacts the development of the material body itself. The inscriptions of society’s norms restrict if ruptures to the status quo are not attempted and/or acknowledged, entrenching hierarchical phallocentric culture and limiting rebirth often as the result of the norms being accepted as good or even truth. People are encouraged through speech and action to sustain what is “good and true” and not to challenge the norms, denying evolution and further rebirth.

John uses language to manage the other, to keep his wife in her subordinate role and disavow her ability to know what she needs. Kristeva would suggest that she disrupt the symbolic chain from her marginal position within the order. Kristeva believes that if a woman identifies with the mother, she ensures her exclusion from the marginality in relation to the patriarchal order. If, on the other hand, she identifies with the father--makes herself in his image, then she ends up becoming “him” and supporting the same patriarchal order which excludes and marginalizes her as a woman. Instead, women must work within the Law and accept sexual difference within the framework but refuse to “become one of ‘them.’” From her marginal position she needs to disrupt. If she doesn’t disrupt, the “balancing act” in between becomes too costly, with some women going mad or committing suicide (Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Maira Tsvetaeva). The heroine cannot seem to “break the code” which Kristeva insists needs to be accomplished (Bizzell 1259-60). John’s wife near the end of the story has three choices: either to accept her place in the normed society and hope the “rest cure” works to banish her depression (perhaps postpartum depression), or find her own provisional space or go completely insane. Sadly the latter is her outcome.

In writing about a woman’s bout with depression, its attempted cure, and her ultimate escape into madness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story is a rupturing from within of the patriarchal order. For Gilman to write this story at the time (about 1891) and get it published was no small task. Previous to the writing, Gilman found herself a victim of the same malady as her heroine and victim of a publishing world dominated by men.

Gilman responded to questions of why she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper in the October 1913 issue of The Forerunner explaining that for several years she had suffered with bouts of depression (Why I Wrote). After the birth of her first child in 1887, she was diagnosed as neurasthenic and sent to Dr. Weir Mitchell who prescribed the “rest cure” (Gilman, Charlotte). Physically the rest was successful and the doctors determined there was nothing much the matter, and she was sent home. She was instructed to live as “domestic a life as possible” and to have “but two hours’ intellectual life a day,” and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again” as long as she lived.” She went home and obeyed for three months and went almost totally insane. However, with the help of a friend, she went to work again, to a life of “joy and growth and service, with out which one is a pauper and a parasite--ultimately recovering some measure of power.” She rejoiced by writing The Yellow Wallpaper and sent a copy to the physician she claimed nearly drove her mad. “He never acknowledged it” (Why I Wrote).

The story was a rupturing of the status quo for Gilman held that man is “being held the human type; woman a sort of accompaniment and subordinate assistant, merely essential to the making of people. She has held always the place of a preposition in relation to man...before him, behind him, beside him, a wholly relative existence-- ‘Sydney’s sister,’ ‘Pembroke’s mother’--but never by any chance Sydney or Pembroke herself (qtd. in Jamieson 102). However, she had great difficulty getting her story published. She first sent her manuscript to William Dean Howells, who with some support, sent it to Horace Scudder, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, a very prestigious magazine at that time. According to Gilman’s account in her autobiography, he sent this note:

“Dear Madam, Mr. Howells has handed me this story. I could not forgive myself if I made others as miserable as I have made myself! Sincerely yours, H.E. Scudder.”

The story with its crawling mad heroine had obviously made an impression on Scudder, but he wasn’t about to let it affect the status quo. To rupture the structure and norms Gilman faced, she needed to get the story published. The New England Magazine finally published the story in 1892.

While some people responded positively to the story many did not. One responded that it was “perilous stuff,” another that it “posed a threat to relatives of such ‘deranged’ persons as the heroine” (Scudders’s). In The Transcript a physician said, “Such a story ought not to be written; it is enough to drive anyone mad to read it.” Yet another physician wrote, “It was the best description of incipient insanity he had ever seen, and-- begging my pardon--had I been there?” However, the best reaction Gilman claimed she ever got was when she was told years later that “the great specialist had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading The Yellow Wallpaper.” In addition, one woman had claimed the story saved her from the same end as John’s wife (Why I Wrote).

Gilman used language in her novel to situate herself within and to the norm. She worked in the margins to rupture the dominant culture, to work to generate social change. Kristeva notes in her description of intertextuality that the novel has the particular “potential for embodying a ‘redistribution’ of several different sign systems” where diverse meanings overlap allowing transpositions of signifying systems (Moi). The official text needs to be broken down and the writing seen as both subjectivity and communication--writing where one reads the other (Desire in Language). Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a model of Julia Kristeva’s theory.

Linguistic Theory

Julia Kristeva's main interest is in discourse which confronts language and thinks it against itself. She focuses on the signifying process, trying to answer not only the question of exactly how language means but also what is in language that resists intelligibility and signification. She argues that structuralism, which focuses on the static phase of language and attempts to fix it and describe its details, sees it as homogeneous. Semiotics, on the other hand, which studies language as discourse articulated by a speaking subject, sees it as fundamentally heterogeneous. Influenced by Lacan and her study of psychoanalysis, she combined semiotics with analysis to create "semanalysis" which sees language as a "signifying process," at once a system and a transgression, coming from the drive-grounded basis of sound production and produced in the social space---the site of the speaking subject. "All functions which suppose a frontier (in this case the fissure created by the act of naming and the logico-linguistic synthesis which it sets off) and the transgression of that frontier (the sudden appearance of new signifying chains) are relevant to any account of signifying practice, where practice is taken as meaning acceptance of a symbolic law together with a trangression of that law for the purpose of renovating it" (The Kristeva 29).

For Kristeva, semiotics occupies a paradoxical position. It is a meta-language---a language which speaks about language and, therefore, homogenizes its object in its own discourse. But, at the same time, semiotics insists on the heterogeneity of language. The semiotician, thus, finds herself caught, forced to analyze her own discursive position while at the same time renewing her connection with the heterogeneous forces of language. These forces, in her view, make it a productive structure. ". . .thus poetic language making free with the language code; music, dancing, painting, reordering the psychic drives which have not been harnessed by the dominant symbolization systems. . .all seek out and make use of this heterogeneity and the ensuing fracture of a symbolic code which can no longer 'hold' its (speaking) subjects" (30). Semanalysis, then, is a way of thinking about language which has the potential to subvert established beliefs in authority and order.

"Word, Dialogue, and Novel" from her work entitled Desire in Language shows the particular influence of the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin on Kristeva's work. Actually, she was one of the first to introduce Bakhtin's theories to the West. Her insistence upon the importance of the speaking subject as the primary object for linguistic analysis is itself rooted in "dialogism" and her own active dialogue with Bakhtin's texts. According to Kristeva, Bakhtin saw the literary word as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than as a fixed point or meaning---as a dialogue among various texts: the writer's, the character's, and the historical cultural context. Each word (or text) is an intersection of words or texts where at least one other word or text can be read; the horizontal axis composed of the writer-character intersects the vertical axis composed of the text-context. Any text, therefore, is double---both "an absorption and a transformation of another." This reading of Bakhtin's dialogism led to her own idea of " intertextuality ," identifying writing as both subjectivity and communication---writing where "one reads the other." Poised between structuralism and post-structuralism, Kristeva was also interested in the way structuralism's "pure" categories break down in circumstances where language is ambivalent, subversive, and mocking as in the tradition of carnival which Bakhtin described in his work on Rabelais. In the space of carnival, the official text broke down when it confronted the text of carnival (and Rabelais' rabble-rousing). Great potential exists within carnival where prohibition (the monologic) and transgression (the dialogic) co-exist. Language both parodies and relevatizes itself, thereby repudiating its role in representation. Dialogism situates philosophical problems within language, language as a correlation of texts. It does not strive toward transcendence; it absorbs concepts within relationships, working toward harmony while implying the idea of RUPTURE as a way of transforming. In examining the "ambivalence" of spectacle and of lived experience itself, the potental for rupture between them becomes possible. Culture, thus, can forsake itself to go beyond itself. The novel and other ambivalent literary structures, then, provide the basis for new intellectual structures. Interest in the subversive effects of language grounded her later interest in the politics of marginality.

Intertextuality

In Revolution and Poetic Language, Kristeva's thesis for her Doctorat d'Etat, she further developed her concept of intertextuality. To the two processes Freud identified as being at work in the unconscious, displacement and condensation, Kristeva added a third process, "the passage from one sign system to another." Inherent in this process she saw an alteration of the thetic phase of language involving the destruction of the old system and the forming of a new one. The new system may use the same or different signifying materials, as in "carnival" as described by Bakhtin. She argued that the novel particularly exhibited the potential for embodying a "redistribution" of several different sign systems. "Intertextuality," then, is a specific type of coextension in which a variety of diverse meanings overlap; it refers to the transposition of one or more sign systems into another or a "field" of transpositions of many signifying systems. The novel provides a particularly good space for this phenomenon to occur.

The Old Man and the Wolves

This interview was conducted by Bernard Sichere and was first published in a 1992 issue of L'Infini. It appeared in an English translation by Leon Roudiez in Partisan Review. Although the interview is based on Kristeva's second novel, The Old Man and The Wolves, much of the conversation addresses politics and contemporary culture. This interview shows Kristeva at her most pessimistic, describing a world tainted with pain, disorder, mourning, violence, apathy, depression, barbarity, and banality. She defends her idea of a contemporary "civilizational crisis," supporting it with her account of a recent trip to Moscow. Commenting on contemporary intellectual life, Kristeva claims that we must free ourselves from "consensual ideology" and "moralizing, euphoric discourses," adapting instead an "analytic, relentless position" that takes negativity into account. Although she acknowledges that psychoanalysis needs to confront some serious issues (excessive literalism, internal power struggles, the media's appropriation of psychoanalytic jargon, the rapid growth of psychopharmacology), she contends that it continues to furnish us with a "living discourse." At the end of the interview, she claims that the age-old dichotomy between the "right wing" and the "left wing" may no longer be relevant, and she lambastes a political culture in which no one admits guilt. She challenges "writers," as opposed to "intellectuals," to reinvent the political realm, "even to circumvent it." Speaking specifically about her novel, Krisreva notes that the Santa Barbara she describes combines the collapse of the East and the malaise and banality of the West. Suggesting that her novel serves as an antidote to "a deep crisis in language," she describes it as a "grafting of what comes from another culture, another mentality, onto the language I adopt and that I assume welcomes me." Also addressed are the characters of Stephany. whose "truth-seeking" is said to counterbalance the overarching negativity of the novel, the couple Alba and Vespasian, and the Old Man, whom Krisreva affecrionately likens to her father.

Two features of your second novel distinguish it from the first, it seems to me. Thematically, there was in The Samurai a sort of emphasis on the positive aspects of the main character as well as on her intellectual, erotic, and domestic journey, whereas The Old Man and the Wolves brings to the fore a dark, negative dimension, an outlook on the world that is more pessimistic. The second feature involves form: why is there, in this new narrative, a scrambling of codes and genres (clipped dialogue, allegory, first-person narrative), and such an increase in the variety of voices, so many metaphors?

In connection with what you call negativity, I would refer to Holderlin's well-known query, "Wozu Dichter in durftiger Zeit?" and rephrase it by asking, "Of what use are novels in times of distress?" The thrust of my new book stems from the conjunction of the personal shock of mourning (the death of my father, who was killed in a Sofia hospital through the incompetence and brutality of the medical and political system) and a public unease—the acknowledgment, which was indeed barely present in my first novel, of a general disarray in a society—to begin with, our own. As a psychoanalyst (that is one of my frames of reference), I am sensitive to the collapse of minimal values and the rejection of elementary moral principles. I found it imperative to choose the form of the novel instead of a theoretical form (as was the case in my earlier essays), because I realized that the novel form was a better way to portray that distress. On the other hand, within the novel form metaphore operates, giving form to infantile psychic inscriptions that are located on the border of the unnamable. On the other hand, by elaborating intrigue one enacts the dramatic essence of passion, the intolerable aspect of love as it is necessarily coupled with hatred. In comparison, the ability of theoretical discourse to rake on metaphore and intrigue seemed to be far behind the form of the novel. Recent French novels most often reject metaphor and avoid drama: "good taste" demands a certain amount of restraint. For my part, I have not ceased reading Proust: "Truth shall arise only at the moment when the writer, raking two different objects, will posit their relation [. . .] in a metaphor. The relation might be uninteresting, the object mediocre, the style awful, but so long as that has not taken place, there is nothing there."'

The allegorical dimension, for instance, which is indeed central in The Old Man and the Wolves, needs to be understood in that context. In contrast to The Samurai, my second novel is anchored in a pain to which allegory aims to give significance without fixing it, instead irradiating it, having it vibrate, in an oneiric way, according to each reader's personal framework of ordeals and choices. Thus the fictional city in the novel, Santa Barbara, might be located in the heart of Central or Eastern Europe, but it also suggests an American megalopolis, or some continental city: it harbors a fountain that strangely resembles the one at the Pompidou Center, and the Oasis Bar in the novel brings to mind a rather fashionable spot in San Francisco. Santa Barbara's very name suggests to me first the surrounding barbarity but also, by alluding to an American television series, the surfeited elements of American society and that vulgarization which constitutes one of the aspects of contemporary, savagery. In short, the novel's negative diagnosis first applies to the collapse in the former Communist countries of Europe, but at the same rime I did not want to exclude the West, the malaise of our society.

And the wolves? To what extent does this key metaphor illustrate (beyond its explicit reference to book I of Ovid's Metamorphoses) what you have just said?

Those threatening wolves, setting wildly upon their victims, recall the invasion of the Red Armies, the establishment of totalitarianism—my readers in Eastern Europe have had no problem identifying them. More deviously, the wolves are contagious; they infect people to the extent that one can no longer make out their human faces. They symbolize everyone's barbarity, everyone's criminality. They finally signify the invasion of banality, which erases the entire criterion of value amid the racketeering, corruption, wheeling and dealing.

Nevertheless, making all-pervasive violence or barbarity contemporary doesn't play off only on the level of the wolves. It also is reflected in the narrative fragmentation in the novel that you mentioned, in the multiplicity of codes and voices. In the novel's Santa Barbara, which is comparable to the declining Roman Empire, history cannot unfold in a naive, indubitable manner, nor can the characters themselves embody stable identities. Hence the presence of Doppelganger in the book: the Professor and the narraror's father, but also Alba and the other Alba who is discovered drowned. The shiftings in the narrative, the duplication and dissemination of identities, refer to the obvious fact that we are experiencing contemporary culture in a process of metamorphosis. Does it have to do with the return of the gods, as set our by Heidegger? Does it involve another fictional experience, and if so, which one? For the time being we are in the gothic roman noir.

But doesn't the book's shift to the first-person narrative, spoken by Stephany, the investigator, change the perspective from the dark, negative dimensions we have just conjured up?

Absolutely. Stephany doesn't play her part on the same level as the orhers. As soon as she speaks, the oneiric, confused universe of the novel's first section assumes the shape of a detective novel; it means that a crime has been committed and that it is possible to unravel the truth about this crime. A trurh-seeking effort takes place, thanks to Srephany Delacour, who will show up again in other episodes, for in the book there are a series of mystery, novels. So the "twilight of the gods" that makes up the first part of the novel acquires a meaning in the second part, which is simply the setting of a course, the shaping of a plot: it is possible to know. Henceforth, an ethics of knowledge, let us say, is involved. Consequently, I feel that to call my novel pessimistic is inaccurate. As long as the investigation is being carried out, the crime is challenged, and death does nor prevail. Stephany introduces the vigilance that is the resistant force of life, if not of hope. In the third section of the book, Stcphany imposes her diary upon the mystery novel, as a counterpoint.

Her subjective experience, her sensibility as a woman, a child, a lover is a veritable counterweight to death and hatred. If Srephany is able to undertake this investigative work and confront crime, it is because she doesn't ignore her personal experience, because she is plunged to a point of rapture, and not without cruelty, into the pain that mourning imposes on us: mourning for her own father, until then repressed, awakens on the occasion of the Old Man's mourning. As a consequence, the character of the journalist-detective introduces a certain psychoanalytic tonality in the book. Without this interior space sculpted out by mourning but given shape by other erotic upheavals— for mourning is an eroticism full of undulations, without the smooth visage of joy—no working-out of truth is possible. No investigation, no knowledge. Some based their aesthetics, for example, on Goethe, others on Rousseau, or Rimbaud; I consider myself a contemporary Freud. A possible wager: what about a novel that would be cognizant of Freud. Is such a novel possible? Would it attract readers? For my part, it is enough that the novel is disturbing.

The barbarity you alluded to earlier seems to me to be essential. Part of the opposition your book has encountered, I'm sure, has to do with its illumination of what is unbearable in our society, with people recognizing themselves. As I was reading the 600k—and what you have just said confirms it—I f ound two images of barbarity; criminality, violence, on the one hand, and on the other what you have termed "banality. " Coul you tell us a little more? To what extent does this duality reflect the distinction suggested by Guy Debark in Commentaire sur la sociere du spectacle between the "integrated spectacular" germane to the Western democratic societies and the archaic survival of tyrannic forms that, a short time ago, characterized communist societies?

'The Old Man and the Wolves is set in Santa Barbara—a city that also evokes the violence of our own societies, their racketeering and delinquency. At the same time violence has become banalized, a trivialization that is no less frightening. The psychoanalyst detects it in the speech of certain patients. We are basically dealing with the image of a depression that integrates aggression but under the ruinous guise of an erasure of meaning. That is what I depict in the character of Alba. Alba is one of those depressed persons who considers herself to be "void of meaning." She views her actions as neutralized, impossible to describe,even in the extreme, murderous facets that they might exhibit. A true depression of meaning itself takes place, and the insignificance into which the melancholy person sinks is not merely an individual, "pathological" occurrence. Because of its amplitude, it assumes the seriousness of a societal event, a civilization crisis. I should like to add something about the nature and the extent of that crisis. I have just come back from Moscow, where I have a series of lectures at the French Studies Institute in Moscow's Lomonosov University. I was struck by the pervasive crisis over there, the way in which it seemed to be the very realization of the crisis I portrayed in The Old Man and the Wolves. I recognized Santa Barbara. No one any longer respects authority; no one any longer occupies the seat of power, particularly in the university, where there are students but no semblance of rules and regulations; and no one is in charge. I am puzzled by contemporary studies of Soviet or Russian society that, knowingly or nor, minimize the extent of the catastrophe, which is not only economic but also ethical. In the face of such general decay, there is at the moment a massive regressive return to religion, which effectively serves as a solace but also a way to flee reality. The French Institute, which, on the other hand, enrolls a large number of very qualified and crirical-minded students who are eager to learn, constitutes a fortunate exception in that landscape. Basically, the most disquieting symptom, here as well as over there, the major consequence of which I have called banality, is the tendency that could result in a loss of interest in the psyche. In Western societies today, the most common temptation is to prescribe medicine to appease people's anguish rather than guide them to confront the pain of living. In this respect, I refer, in The Old Man and the Wolves, to Holderlin's Der Tod des Empedokes [The death of Empedocles] and Mnemosyne, from which the Old Man explicitly quotes, to the waning of the gods, which arouses in the Old Man a strange mixture of nostalgia, doubt, and fear. On the other hand, Alba in her own evil fashion rakes up a theme dear to Heidegger: the "protective heed" provided by being. Alba perverts the heed. She believes that paroxysmal conflict carried to the point of hatred is the only truth. That is her very own punctilious nihilism. She hates without feeling guilty, she ends up untouchable, "at home," proud within the supposed truth of her hatred. That is the dreadful part of it--the unscathed conscience, with neither unease nor hardship, present at the very core of hatred, which might go as far as murder. Within the reverberations of Holderlin and Heidegger, to which the Old Man and Alba harken again, the insistence of the question remains. In opposition, what strikes me in today's world, and this is why I speak of the loss of interest in the psyche, is the feeling that the very possibility of questioning has been closed. We have become unscathed in evil just as one might have been immaculate in love.

Fiction: The Samurai

In this interview, Kristeva speaks candidly and at length about The Samurai her first novel. The interview was published in an issue of L'lnfini, and the translation is by Ross Guberman. Kristeva explains why she wrote The Samurai and describes it as "popular" and "polyphonic."

With The Samurai, your first novel, you set aside theoretical writing and turned to fiction. How do you account for this shift from theory to the novel?

I was recently reading the manuscripts of Proust's notebooks, and I came across a question he asks in one of his drafts: "Should I make this into a novel or into a philosophical study?" People have always wondered if they should treat a subject that interests them through theory or through fiction. Is there really a choice to be made? Must we prefer one form of discourse to the other? If we think of more recent writers, we realize that Being and Nothingness did not prevent Sartre from writing Nausea. And Merleau-Ponty, who was less committed than Sartre or perhaps committed in a different way, planned to write a novel although he never did so. The imaginary could be understood to be the deep structure of concepts along with their underlying systems. The core of the symbolic lies in the fundamental drives of the signifier, that is, in sensations, perceptions, and emotions. When we translate them, we leave the realm of ideas and enter the world of fiction, which is why I sought to describe the emotional lives of intellectuals. You will forgive me, moreover, for believing that the genius of the French people is rooted in the links they make between popular passions and the dynamics of intellectual tensions. This close relationship exists nowhere else, yet certain time periods, particularly those plagued by national depression, such as our own, place a greater distance between intellectuals and the rest of the world. I thus tried to give nonspecialists a taste of what intellectuals do and what they are like. Finally, the lewd and pervasive influence of television has forced literature to go back and forth between documentation and invention and between autobiography and fiction. Yet because the whole truth can never be known—at least, this is what psychoanalysis along with other disciplines has taught us—inserting a bit of autobiography into a narrative guarantees a grounding in reality. At the same time, another piece, a fictional one, serves as a magnet for the intense subjective bonds that connect the narrator to other people as well as to himself. As opposed to the autobiographical piece, this fictional piece releases a certain discretion and modesty while transforming real-life characters into literary models.

Why did you wait so long to shift the focus of your work to fiction?

When I finished writing my book, I realized that I had needed to acquire enough distance from myself to become a "character" before I could become an "author." And my experience with psychoanalysis may have made me aware of the banality of life and the insipid richness of everyday language, which may have enabled me to take a step back from the symbolic asceticism of theory—for the time being, that is.

In which fictional genre would you place The Samurai?

I wanted to write a popular novel This may come as a surprise, especially because I wrote a story about intellectual circles. Let me explain what I mean. For me, a popular novel is a sensual and metaphysical narrative. I mean "popular" in the sense of Victor Hugo's phrase, "That enormous crowd eager for the pure sensations of art." Today, the crowds seem to be even more enormous and eager because they are so overtly targeted by the mass media. I mean "popular" in the sense of Mallarme's concern for the "necessary anecdote demanded by the public." I mean "popular" in the sense of Celine's claim that "in the beginning was emotion." I wanted to rely on language to reach an infralinguistic and infraconceptual experience consisting of emotion, sensation, and perception, an experience that could correspond to the conventions of the avant-garde and that could take shape as a source of jouissance that often remains hidden although it is occasionally acknowledged. I thus took note of Mallarme's declaration of his aesthetic project: In fact, it is to prolong, joyfully if possible, something for eternity. Let it be!" When a state of enthusiasm is attained through immediate access to an undecidable experience that appears to be less concerned with formal problems, it serves as a magnet of joy, anguish, and pain. In sum, such a state is a fusion of Eros and Thanatos seeking to create what is traditionally known as a "catharsis" for the reader as well as for the author. To put it another way, I wanted to reach the sensory core of language by sifting through a network of memories and fantasies. While I was writing my novel, I gave a course on Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception and on Proust. I had the feeling that The Samurai offered me a way to put into practice what I was trying to communicate theoretically to my students: the connivance between words and sensory rapture. So I wrote a story about intellectual creation, the conflicts that marked the years between 1965 and 1990, and the rise and fall of different theories and intellectual preoccupations: structuralism, psychoanalysis, political positions and experiments, religions, ecology (immersion in the mother-of-pearl reflection of a salty marsh or in the beautiful birds inhabiting an island), but also feminism, motherhood, an often burning or obscene intimacy.... The theoretical project, the "novel of ideas," never truly disappears from the novel, but it becomes increasingly intimate and personal as the novel goes along. The story becomes simply subjective, microscopic—and ethical.

Does the story become incarnate?

Yes, particularly in the experience of motherhood, which is rejected by Carole and chosen by Olga, who views it as a quasi-pantheistic accomplishment . . . My desire to reconstruct the sensory basis of language made me a great admirer of Colette. As to the theme of intellectual maturation, I was moved by the reflections on the body depicted in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Mann's novel is not very well known to French readers, who fear the weightiness of German literature, but the character of Hans Castorp is confronted with an ill body just as the Samurai contemplate erotic bodies. That said (am I simply echoing avant-garde thought here?), I sought not to build a mountain but to construct fragments, discontinuities, unexpected links, and reciprocal relationships among characters, places, and discourses. I wanted the emblem of my book to be not a mountain but an island, a secret island where characters could meet, an island open to all winds, the winds of other chapters as well as the winds of the interpretations that readers would use to fill the empty space between narrative sequences.

How do you think your writing compares with the ‘neutral writing"[e'criturc Blanche] that Blanchot and Barthes discuss?

Roland Barthes's Writing Degree Zero, a book I have discussed at length and continue to admire, successfully delineates the most rigorous currents of postwar literature. With "neutral writing," the writer acts as a technician of words, a sort of Orpheus (as Blanchot says) who crosses the river Styx into Hades, the hell of daily life. Along the way, he collects a few rare trophies that he transposes onto a sparse poetic text through ellipses and litotes. This sort of writing condenses impossibilities; according to Barthes, it "outlines in detail the breakup of bourgeois consciousness." I would add that it outlines in detail the breakup of all consciousness by collecting the fragments that remain and by extracting minute, modest, and extremely sparse races. Our silent anguish latches onto dhese traces, and when we experience psychic catastrophes, evidence chat they exist is what enables us to survive. We see this process at work, for instance, in the writings of Samuel Beckett. These two forms of writing do not entail the same relationship to meaning . . . The version I call Plutonian" is more similar to contagious writing, the postmodern, communicable writing I mentioned earlier while discussing the "popular" novel. What is more, the fusion between Eros and Thanatos that inspired The Samurai dearly stems from Freud's conception of the psyche, a conception that precludes any idea of a rational power rooted in an existential demand. None of the characters in The Samurai could say that Shell is other people," for hell is inside us. Similarly, no one can ask, "Should we burn Sade?" because Sade burns inside us. Acknowledging such cruel truths may open a path to "neutral" writing, but striving for a more immediate and cathartic contagiousness and communicability can also pave the way for a writing marked by the plenitude and abundance of joy and suffering. Childlike and infantile, this sort of writing may respond to the eternal childhood lurking inside us and to our need for ghost stories and fairy tales. In The Samurai, Olga writes a children's book called The Samurai. (Guberman, Ross Mitchell. ed. Julia Kristeva Interviews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.) [source]