Julia Kristeva 1966–96: Aesthetics politics ethics (Parallax, Issue 8 July–September 1998)

178 Pages·1998·6.03 MB·English

by  Griselda Pollock

parallax
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parallax
Issue 8 July–September 1998
julia kristeva 1966–96:
aesthetics.politics.ethics
guest editor:
Griselda Pollock
Introduction 1
Griselda Pollock
Dialogue with Julia Kristeva 5
De L’étrangeté du Phallus ou le Féminin Entre Illusion et Désillusion 19
Julia Kristeva
Experiencing the Phallus as Extraneous, or Women’s Twofold Oedipus Complex 29
Julia Kristeva
Strangers in Analysis: Nationalism and the Talking Cure 43
John Mowitt
Three Images for Kristeva: From Bellini to Proust 61
Stephen Bann
To Inscribe in the Feminine: A Kristevan Impossibility? or Femininity, Melancholy and 75
Sublimation
Griselda Pollock
Transcendence, Fixation and Belief in the Vicissitudes of the Imaginary 107
John Lechte
Julia Kristeva and her histories 121
Adrian Rifkin
Book Reviews
Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean (eds), The Spivak Reader 129
Sara Ahmed
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech 133
Lynn Turner
Christina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria 137
Marq Smith
Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, Vols I and II 141
Joanne Morra
Francesca Hughes (ed.), The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice 145
Rob Stone
Nadir Lahiji and D.S.Friedman, Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture 149
Stephen Walker
Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition 153
John Protevi
vi
Conference Report
Politics, Friendship and ‘democracy to come’; Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship 159
Paul Bowman
parallax, 1998, vol. 4, no. 3, 1–4

Introduction
Griselda Pollock
In June 1996, the Centre for Cultural Studies hosted a conference entitled Aesthetics. Politics. Ethics: Julia
Kristeva 1966–96. It was held at the Leeds City Art Gallery whose monumental neighbour is the equally
nineteenth century structure of Cuthbert Broderick’s Town Hall: the proximities of, and the tensions
between the state and culture are often the very topics of Cultural Studies. This conference could have been
hosted by one of several subgroups within the University of Leeds and the Department of Fine Art in
particular. As an art historian, I could have planned this event to consider the contributions of Julia Kristeva
to ways of thinking about the aesthetic, the image, and the larger historical frameworks within which certain
themes have been obsessively pursued. As a feminist theorist I could have arranged this event to consider
Julia Kristeva’s significant interventions in the political and cultural theories of femininity, sexual
difference and revolution. As a critic of modern and contemporary art, I could have invited her to focus
analysis on questions of modernity and post modernity in literature, film and the visual arts. As a director of
the Centre for Cultural Studies I might have thought we needed to take time to assess the whole political
and cultural climate of our moment of extreme tensions between left and right, the outbreaks of neotribalism,
xenophobia and racism, the questions of globalisation in contemporary capitalism and the impact of media
massification and the information society on the status of singularity and subjectivity. Julia Kristeva has
credentials for being called upon to assist in all such reflections.
In the end, we opted for organising this event through the Centre for Cultural Studies since it would be
within that fictional space that all of the above could be brought into play. Our aim was to touch on the
complex relations between politics, aesthetics, and ethics. According to Jürgen Habermas, these domains
were structurally severed at the beginning of the era of modernity and their segregation functioned as the
defining feature of, if not the condition for the development of modernity. In the era of so-called
postmodernity the contradictions inhering in modernity’s fantasies of order and progress, rationality and
science, have come home to roost, presenting us with a deeply depressing contemporary scenario that is
only temporarily lightened by fantasmatic, and to my mind, fantastically misplaced, utopian hopes lodged in
one or other of these divided realms: art, new technology, philosophy.
In the Centre and its larger institutional partner at the University of Leeds, the Department of Fine Art,
we have been reputed for a blockheaded pertinacity in our interest in and commitment to historical
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2 POLLOCK
materialism, addling our graduates’ brains in week one of most core courses with their sudden immersion in
Chapter I of Volume I of Das Kapital and the Introduction to the Grundrisse. Justified not so much on
political as intellectual grounds, this training in the masterful transformations of Hegelian philosophy by their
application to the fundamental structures of the political economy of capitalism already exposes students to
the complex intellectual hybridism that is necessary in order to encompass either the social production of art
or the analysis of contemporary culture. The problem for us all at the end of this century is to accept the
historical failures of the very structures and theories in which the moderns placed their hope while not
succumbing to the despair and disillusionment that must attend the attenuation of all religions or dogmas,
the so-called grand narratives, including those of modernity or communism.

Julia Kristeva has herself stated that:
Our civilisation is going through a depression…We intellectuals must seek out the causes of this
discontent. This is not a time for advice. It is the moment for diagnosis—a negative one…I would not
give an optimistic prognosis. I believe the moment of militancy is over and we are living in a therapeutic
age in which which we must face up to our problems.1
Within these few words are the seeds of this conference: a desire to bring intellectuals together for a kind of
‘facing up to the problems’ rather than a rash of overconfident prediction or prescriptions for action. For
such an event not to be merely another piece of academic self-promotion and scholarly competition, it must
have both a political and an ethical commitment—or rather show a historical self-understanding of the
intellectual’s function and limitations. The role of the intellectual, as David Macey has shown, so involved
with a history of modern France, has shifted dramatically from the political engagement of Zola’s mighty
‘J’accuse’.2 As Zygmunt Bauman has argued, the intellectual has lost the role of legislator or even
legislator’s conscience, to become localised, partisan, a mere interpreter of ever dividing subcultures and
their particular languages and interests.3
I think a conference focussing upon the work of Julia Kristeva that takes place both in her presence and with
her active participation offers us another model: a model committed to the political, ethical and
philosophically rigorous role of the intellectual in the social totality. One new aspect of the concept of the
intellectual she has offered us comes from her conjugation in both theoretical and professional work of scholar/
thinker/teacher and analyst.
In my own work, a double formation within conflicting strands of intellectual and political activism has
forged a continuing concern to push the limits of the productive relations and tensions between Marxism
and psychoanalysis in the belief that to address the intricate imbrications of class, sexual and cultural
difference, we need simultaneously theories of the social and productive totalities, theories of the ideological
and the cultural, theories of the text and the sign, and theories of the subject and of difference.
I would like to take this space once again to thank Julia Kristeva for her participation in the event of
which this publication is the monument. Her graciousness in responding so positively to our request for
dialogue and a lecture was truly appreciated because any person of her stature must always run the risk of
being consumed by the need of others to have ‘direct access’ to the star. In order to minimise that dreadful
aspect of the commodification of intellectual life I arranged this conference to begin with a dialogue
between Julia Kristeva and the very considerable number of graduate students in the audience. I did hope to
attract several hundreds of people all paying full rate so that my academic adventures would also win me
brownie points on the now accountancy-led scales of university assessment where how much money I
attract can be counted, while how much academic value I generate cannot. But I am more pleased to report
PARALLAX 3
that the take up for this conference has largely been amongst graduates students in this and other
universities. I am sure that as apprentices to the academic world graduate students attend many conferences
as silent witnesses to the performance of a David Lodge-like internet where academics, well known to each
other from a hundred other conferences, veil their well honed competitiveness behind publicly claimed
familiarities. To minimise this traditional format, we shall start with a forum for public discussion of the
issues raised by the now considerable work of Julia Kristeva.
I want to comment briefly on the time frame established for the conference. Julia Kristeva arrived in Paris
as a graduate student in 1966—the date if any that can be used for the beginning of the post-structuralist
revision—Ecrits, Of Grammatology—you name it, the works that still constitute an intellectual frame were
first delivered in the mid 1960s. Julia Kristeva both joined and transformed the intellectual scene she
entered in 1966 with a series of major books that culminate with the most recent Sens et Non Sens de la
Révolte.4 She is still one of the most significant, provocative and compelling intellectuals of her generation
and our time. This conference was organised to offer some acknowledgement of the pleasure and
stimulation of this remarkable body of work that dares to reach to the most advanced limits of linguistic
philosophy while plumbing the affective depths of the social and personal psyches of the human subject,
not only writing about love, death, horror, depression and maternity, but providing the means to think about
such domains of social practice and cultural investigation without romanticism or mysticism.
For thirty years, the years that bridge the historical period in European history from the revolts of 1968
through the ratification of the new right’s hegemony in Western economies, from the new social movements
in the West of the 1960s to the end of Eastern European Communism, from the Beatles to Bosnia, from the
aftermath of the Algerian war to contemporary Muslim fundamentalism, from the television era to the
internet, Julia Kristeva’s works follow an elliptical traverse across a historical territory whose current
contours we may hardly be equipped to map. But let me close with a quote from her paper on a ‘New Type
of intellectual: The Dissident’:
For true dissidence today is perhaps what it has always been: thought. Now that Reason has been
absorbed by technology, thought is only tenable as an ‘analytical position’ that affirms dissolution and
works through differences. It is an analytic position in the face of subjective, sexual and linguistic
identity. From this, modern philosophy only retains either the notion of a position in order to offer a
specialist or totalizing point of view (as in Marxism, Freudianism, Phenomenology and various forms
of empiricism); or else it retains only the notions of analysis as dissolution, and writes in a style
similar to that of an outmoded avant-garde such as symbolism. Torn between being the guardian of
the law and that instance which disavows the law, hasn’t philosophy turned away from thought?
Julia Kristeva sees the displacement of Reason and Right and the Death of Man by the ‘sudden surge of
women and children in discourse’ which renders both myths of resurrection and renaissance improbable and
untenable:
But through the efforts of thought in language, or precisely through the excesses of language whose
very multitude is the only sign of life, one can attempt to bring about the multiple sublations of the
unnameable, the unrepresentable, the void. This is the real cutting edge of dissidence.5