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College Literature, 31.4, Fall 2004, pp. 188-202 (Article)

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Hirtler, Kurt, Ola Stahl, and Ika Willis, eds.2003. Mourning Revolution. Special issue ofParallax 9.2,April-June 2003. NewYork:Routledge. $100 electronic copy. 113 pp.

Kristeva, Julia. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt:The Powers and Limits ofPsychoanalysis.Trans. Jeanine Herman. NewYork: Columbia University Press. $60.00 hc.$19.50 sc. 288 pp.

Kristeva, Julia. 2002. Intimate Revolt:ThePowers and Limits of Psychoanalysis.Trans.Jeanine Herman. NewYork: ColumbiaUniversity Press. $34.00 hc. $19.50 sc. 392pp.

I tell you this in truth: this is not only theend of this here but also and first of thatthere, the end of history, the end of theclass struggle, the end of philosophy, the

Revolutionaries withouta Revolution:

The Case of Julia Kristeva

Nouri Gana

Nouri Gana teaches at the

University of Monteal. His work

has appeared in American

Imago, tudes Irlandaises,

Law and Literature, Theory

and Event, and Mosaic.

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death of God, the end of re l i gi o n s , the end of Christianity and morals . . .theend of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end ofOedipus, the end of the earth,Apocalypse now, I tell you . . . the end of lit-erature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of psycho-analysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and phallogo-centrism, and I dont know what else? (Jacques Derrida,Of an ApocalypticTone Recently Adopted in Philosophy)

The Rhetoric of Ending and the Mourning to Come

Certainly Derridas inventory is far from being complete, but it recreateswith gripping poignancy the frenzy in which death certificates havebeen meted out to all repositories of thought, of hope, and of life writlarge. By virtue of enumerating, enlisting, and discerning the far reaches ofthe rhetoric of ending and of the apocalyptic imagination underpinning it,Derridas account itself can be said to participate in what it seeks to outflankin the first place.Yet, perhaps Derrida cannot be held accountable for thehairsplitting entrapments of this discursive graveyard-whistling; perhaps thisis, after all, the crime (or logic) of philosophy itselfa discourse that cannothelp folding back or receding into a reflection on its genesis and, by impli-cation, on its ending. More than anything else, perhaps philosophy is, asD e rrida himself intones, fond of quasimythical metadiscourses that can intran-s i g e n t l y, i r a s c i bl y, and in an ove r l o rd l y way declare its dissolution or, to useD e rri d a s own wo rd , its c a d a v ri s s e m e n t ( l i t e r a l l y, its reduction to a corp s e ) .

Not infrequently, the philosophical rhetoric of ending has unwittinglyoverlooked its implication in an indissoluble contradiction that, while con-tending that the ending has been reached, not only participates in it but alsolives 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 beannounced? Of course, such a rhetorical question implies that, should therebe an end or an apocalypse, no one would survive it in order to report it: theend would be the end of everything, period! For that is also, as Derridarightly conjectures,the end of the metalanguage concerning eschatologicallanguage (81). I am not here suggesting that there is no hors texte, no out-side, from which the end could be announced by a meta-being, only thatthere is, practically, no ending whatsoever that humanity can pronounce orannounce, let alone ascertain. On the other hand, Who (or what) wouldannounce the end were there nothing to be announced? is a question thatalso implies not only that the end (associated, for so long, with the end of themillennium) proved not to be an endonly a mere illusion, which is exact-ly the position held by Jean Baudrillardbut also that nothing really willever 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 ourprecursors, it is important to stress (1) that the rhetoric of ending is indisso-ciable from the rhetoric of mourning, from the ethical impossibility of therebeing such a thing as a successful mourning la freudienne any longer(Derrida 1994), and (2) that while philosophy cannot, much perhaps to thedistress of Derrida and Kant before him, completely banish the apocalyptictone from its discourse, it can nonetheless invent its own contrapuntal rhet-oric that would, parodying Shakespeares Edgar, remind us that, The end isnot/As long as we can say This is the end.

Yet, it would be unfair to restrict the obsession with the rhetoric of end-ing to the realm of philosophical discourse as sucha discourse that isaddicted to drawing attention to itself even at the risk of compromising itsvery existence in the process. No one who has read and reflected upon themany heterogeneous tendencies of (literary and critical) theory since the1950s would fail to notice at least two things: (1) the hectic proliferation ofnew theories, each of which purporting vociferously or reticently to effecta Khunian paradigm shift (thus, academics, who have an unyielding strain fororder, are bewildered by the plethora of such shifts that they have grownwary of classifying and opted instead for portmanteau prefixes as post- orneo- to relieve themselves from the burden of differentiating such that weare now going through a period of immense disarray given that we are prac-tically past all the posts), and (2) the celebratory and intransigent tonewith which the death or ending of an age or a discursive practice and thebeginning of another is announced.

As they parade in theoretical discourses today, announcements of end-ings 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 FukuyamasThe End of History and the Last Man. The end of history is the proverbialformula that Fukuyama makes use of in order to hammer home the morecontentious thesis of the triumph of liberal democracy. Likewise, MichaelHardt and Antonio Negri dress the obsolete word empire with the newclothes of globalization, whose emergence as a new form of sovereignty ismaterializing on the pyre of the sovereignty of nation-states. According toHardt and Negri, the end of imperialism, the decline of the nation-state, andthe emergence of what in their own parlance is a decentered and deterrito-rializing apparatus of rulea kind of global space of sovereignty that has nooutsideprovide the conditions of possibility of a new form of counter-Empire, a new form of political subjectivity (much of which neverthelesshinges on unlocatable and unmediated grains of resistance) that they callin a strange admixture of bombast, Marxism, and messianismthe multitude.

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Unfortunately, the inimitable ability of the new Empire to manage dissent, ifnot to warrant and sanction it, leaves little room for the multitude to makesignificant, let alone revolutionary, changes.

Whether it has to do with the end of history or with the end of impe-rialism and the nation state or any of the items inventoried by Derrida in theepigraph, the rhetoric of ending deployed by a variegated number of theo-rists today is in fact a function of the more encompassing rhetoric of seduc-tive reasoning that these theorists make use of in order to persuade the read-er of the necessity and validity of the alternative venue(s) of reflection whichthey propose.This applies not only to Fukuyama and Hardt and Negri, butalso to, among many others, Arthur Donatos After the End of Art, GianniVattimos The End of Modernity,Daniel Bells The End of Ideology, and, not sur-prisingly, to Julia Kristevas recent twin books, The Sense and Non-Sense ofRevolt and Intimate Revolt, in which she elaborates a theory of psychic revolton the pyre of socialist and political revolution. Of course, after the welter ofcommentary and the plethora of books that followed the collapse of theSoviet Empire, it hardly needs to be restated here that the promise of a pos-sible socialist revolution, while crucially attenuated by such an event, hascontinued to provoke disparate reactions. A recent special issue of Parallaxtitled Mourning Revolution attempts to capture this disparity by bringingtogether a variety of essays by Kristeva, Martin Jay, Alain Badiou, andBenjamin Arditi, among others.

While Kristeva and Jay contend, as will become clear in due course, thatrevolution is no longer a politically and socially useful concept, BenjaminArditi argues quite persuasively that revolution can still play a vital role in ourpolitical life even in the face of its practical impossibility. Drawing extensive-ly on Derridas thinking of the ethics of the impossible, Arditi was able toconclude in his piece tiltled Talkin but a Revolution: The End ofMourning that revolution is precisely what unfolds in the spacing or playbetween the promise that entices us to demand the impossible and the con-tinually deconstructible figures of possibility aiming to flesh out the prom-ise (Kurt, Stahl, and Willis 2003, 85). For Arditi, we lose nothing by think-ing the impossible, but we open up more roads into the possible.Adopting amore versatile approach, Badiou declines to reflect on the possibility orimpossibility of revolution today but presents instead a reflection on thewhole question by means of an aporia:If you think that the world can andmust change absolutely, that there is neither a nature of things to be respect-ed nor pre-formed subjects to be maintained, you thereby admit that theindividual can be sacrificed (73). In other words, the individual as suchasa 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 ofBadious contribution to Mourning Revolution consists of mapping variationson this unnaturalness of the human subject. Implicitly, the demand for rev-olution is presented as an effect of this unnaturalness. Since the human sub-ject as such, whether for Sartre or Lacan, is precisely that which lacks essenceand being, it is only by dissolving itself into a project which exceeds it thatit concretizes its essence (74). Ironically, striving for essence turns out to be,in Badious analysis, no more than a twentieth-century obsession with a for-mality: demonstration.To demonstrate is to evacuate the empty and vacantposition of an existence without essence and to melt into the we-subjectthat emerges out of the collection of otherwise isolated individuals (78). Itbears repeating here that after the collapse of the communist camp and thetriumph of capitalism, demonstrations have become, at least for Hardt andNegri, new forms of militancy.While Badiou is reticent about the politicalimport of this new form of militancy which came to stamp the twentiethcentury, Kristeva contends that the age of militancy is well behind us.

In her own autobiographical essay, My Memorys Hyperbole, whichfirst appeared in 1983 in Infini, the journal that replaced Tel Quel, Kristevadates 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. Kristevaexplains that the Tel Quels belief in the permanent subversiveness of theCommunist Party ceased as soon as the latter began its campaign to institu-tionalize and appropriate, on behalf of the establishment, those currents ofthought and aesthetic creation that would have remained marginal withoutit (15). She comments on the later visits of members of the Tel Quel (her-self included) to China after the 1974 Cultural Revolution as amounting tonothing more than an inauguration of the return to the only continent theyhad 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 engage-ment in politicsand from any belief in a socialist revolution, for that mat-terduring the early years of her involvement with Tel Quel, it is wrong toconclude that she ceased thenceforth to reflect on the concept of revolution.On the contrary, her whole oeuvre reveals her continually rediscovering thesame entelechy, the same impasse of political revolution, always trying toinventory a new language of salvaging it, always trying to displace it intoother realms of experience, be they poetic (as she suggests in her very firstbook of 1974, Revolution in Poetic Language) or psychic (as the present twinvolumes under review here attest).This seems to me to be Kristevas idio-syncratic 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 ofaffective ties from a lost (ideal) object and of the establishment of new tieswith a new objectrevolution in its lost political sense: rediscovering andreinventing it anew in poetic and psychic locales. But first, how does Kristevasort through the reasons that the task of situating revolt at the level of thepsyche 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 bettercapture the fichue position (to borrow a Joycean expression from Ulysses) inwhich she places the subject, the very focus of her reflections on the rele-vance of the concept of revolt in todays world. Who would revolt werethere 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 exceedsones capacity to revolt against, that powerful disembodied knitting machinecalled global capital whose handiwork is manifest everywhere but whose ori-gins are ghostly and impossible to pin down, let alone subvertthis is per-haps the case with Hardt and Negris multitude; (2) after the one who wouldbe willing to revolt but would find literally nothing to revolt against, no vis-ible constellation of power to overturnthis is perhaps the case withFukuyamas liberal democrats who seem to have overcome the last frontierafter the collapse of communism; (3) and, strangely enough, after the (no)onewho would not be able to revolt and for whom there would be absolutelynothing to revolt against anyway. Out of the three possible interpretations ofthe question suggested above, only the last one is in piece with Kristevasargument throughout her two volumes. In the eyes of Kristeva, not only isthere 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 whichKristeva suspends the political subject prior to rethinking its prospects foranother kind of revolt.

Kristeva expounds that revolt in its political sense is today mired not onlybecause the political landscape is becoming more and more homogenized asdissimilarities between parties are waning, but especially because there is notangible structure of power against which to revolt, only a power vacuum,and, gravely enough, no agent available to carry out the incumbent task ofrevolt.The harbinger of social change has become nothing more than a pat-rimonial person (personne patrimoniale), a mere conglomerate of organs(conglomrat dorganes) hardly capable of recognizing the power-technologiesinfused in him, let alone able to neutralize their virulent and hamstringingeffects (2002, 4). The modern subject is, according to Kristeva, a person

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belonging to the patrimony, financially, genetically, and physiologically, a per-son 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 weare to consider it against the backdrop of Fukuyamas most recent bookwhose title alone, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the BiotechnologyRevolution, chills the spine. For Fukuyama, George Orwells prophetic visionof a world dominated by information technology and by hovering BigBrother(s) has come true, and so has come as well Aldous Huxleys prescienceof 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 ofFukuyamas argument, I think that it draws a picture of the current worldthat is in many respects similar to the one Kristeva draws. In very generalterms, there are, according to Kristeva and Fukuyama, two dystopias materi-alizing before our eyes: (1) a virtual rather than real world in which themedia, undergirded by a complex network of information technology, fos-ters and promotes what Kristeva calls, after Guy Debord, the society of thespectacle and the culture of entertainment rather than the culture of revolt,and (2) a biotechnological world, in which the wedge is being slowly butsteadily opened for new technologies to take possession of the human body,thus managing it at will. According to Fukuyama, this is humanitys mostfrightening nightmare and literally the post human stage of mans exis-tence, 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 ormastering it.

Unlike Fukuyama, a policy maker who goes on in his Our PosthumanFuture to suggest pragmatic solutions to containing this otherwise runawayworld in which the biotechnological revolution resulted, Kristeva is no pol-icy maker but a thinker whose work traverses a wide array of philosophical,literary, linguistic, and psychoanalytical interests and who is primarily con-cerned with the ways in which the velocity of the biotechnological revolu-tion might be slowed, as well as the ways in which the hold of the cultureshow might be dispelled.As such, she sets herself the task of pointing out theway for a culture of revolt, a culture that would move us beyond the twoimpasses where we are caught today: the failure of rebellious ideologies, onthe 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 happi-ness, 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 undertakesto trace its writerly manifestation in the experiences of Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Aragon, and Roland Barthes. Although the two volumesdeal with different texts by each of these above-mentioned writers, theyoverlap, almost exquisitely, insofar as the argument of both is concerned. Iwill not therefore alternate between each but will instead deal with both ofthem simultaneously.

Attentive to the linguistic difficulties of the task at hand, to the automaticassociation of the concept of revolt with the political and the ideological,Kristeva undertakes first to wrest it, etymologically, from the overly narrowpolitical sense it has taken in our time in order to bring to light its rich-ness, polyvalence, and plasticity and relate it thereof to the intimatesphere of the psyche (2000, 3). In this respect, she contends that the termrevoltwhose Latin lineage (volvere) implies movement and return, aswell as reversal, detour, etc. (3)did not come to lose its initially celes-tial origins in favor of more overtly political and historical purchases until theearly beginning of the eighteenth century.

Kristeva complains that the word revolt has been repetitively used inrelation to the suspension of old values such that the new nihilistic values areswallowed wholesale, rather than questioned in turn like the old ones. Assuch, the pseudo-rebellious nihilist, far from being a man in revolt, is in facta man reconciled with the stability of new values (2002, 6). Kristeva goeson to propound that the technological development, the desacralization ofChristianity, along with the abandonment of the Augustinian introspectiveand 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 theparalysis of the will, on which totalitarianism preys:I can never sufficientlyemphasize the fact that totalitarianism is the result of a certain fixation ofrevolt in what is precisely its betrayal, namely, the suspension of retrospectivereturn, which amounts to a suspension of thought (6).

Kristeva begins both of her volumes by effectuating yet another returnto Freud, perhaps in competition with Lacan but certainly not laLacanienne. Indeed, her championing of Freuds models of language inchapter three of her first volumeand her contention that the unconsciouscannot be mapped onto Saussures linguistics of signifier-signifiedtakes aimat Lacan, who famously claimed that the unconscious is structured like a lan-guage. Of course, we are here treading on familiar Kristevian grounds: eversince her early years of apprenticeship which culminated in the publicationof Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), Kristeva has adhered with fascinatingbut predictable consistency to a cornerstone theoretical distinction between

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the symbolic and the semiotic, between what is purely linguistic or meaningproper (the symbolic) and what is not strictly so or linguistic per se (thesemiotic) in that it encompasses the pre- or trans-linguistic organization anddischarge of bodily drives through rhythms, tones, and alliterations anteriorto signs and syntaxes. It is Kristevas unfaltering argument, throughout herwork, that signifiance or significance emerges in the dialectic between thesymbolic 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, onrevalorizing the sensory experience, the antidote to technical hair-splitting(2002, 5). In other words, much of Kr istevas sense and non-sense ofrevolt rests squarely on whether or not we are to accept the conditions onwhich her argument is predicated: Kristeva asserts that the semiotic is asymp-totic and irreducible to language and intellect, only to contend in the finalanalysis that nowhere else can we come closer to psychic revolt than in theobstinate attempt to activate, articulate, and narrate the semioticthe depos-itory of the unconscious, of sexual fantasies, of oedipal aggression, of incest,of matricide, among other somatic instincts or drives. It is only at this stagethat we have perhaps to decide whether we can afford to follow Kristevas ini-tially compelling argumentonly, that is, when psychic revolt comes tomean slowly but overwhelmingly clinical analysis, at which time we realizethat Kristevas version of revolt is costly and therefore inaccessible to thosewho lack the economic means and the educational knowledge necessary tobenefit 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 Kristevareconciles between her version of revolt as an aspect of the clinical and ana-lytical experience of transference (developed at length in the second volume)and revolt as Freud presents it in Totem and Taboo: a facet of primitive cultureat the origin of religion (developed mainly in the first volume). In IntimateRevolt, Kristeva revels in analyzing the virtues of the analytical experience oftransference and counter-transference whose alleged terminus is freedom. Itis not freedom in Sartres sense of condemnation to choice and responsibili-ty but freedom from the guilt of being as such (Heidegger) and from thevicissitudes of consciousness whose penchant for interiorizing the collectiverealism of sin in individual responsibility is unquenchable (Freud). HereK ri s t eva s interp re t ive elaboration of the concept of forgiveness as re b i rt h ,as suspension of judgment, as re t ri eval of the s i g n i f i c a n c e ( i . e. s e m i o t i cdimension) of the drive, and generally as the unconscious coming to con-sciousness in transfere n c e ( 2 0 0 2 , 19) might prove rewa rding for those

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(Hegelians and Freudians alike) interested in the traps of consciousness inthe road to happiness.

It is, however, in The Scandal of the Timeless, chapter three of IntimateRevolt, that Kristeva delivers a sustained and compelling philosophical argu-ment on the concept of the timeless (lhors-temps/Zeitlos), on its role andimportance vis--vis the transferential experience of analysis. Kristeva arguespersuasively that while human existence is intrinsically linked to time, theanalytical experience reconciles us with this timelessness, which is that of thedrive, and more particularly the death drive (2002, 12)that which feedson what, according to Kristeva, Freud calls the symptom of being con-scious (27).While one cannot here but admire Kristevas diligent construc-tion of the different figures of the timelesswhich range from the memo-ry trace and working through to interminable analysisone nonethe-less wonders what has become of psychic revolt in the process. Is psychicrevolt here indissociable from the jouissance of psychic aggression at work inthe death drive that the Homo analyticus (the analyst) brings to the fore? Thisquestion is of grave consequences as to the theoretical valences of Kristevasconcept of psychic revolt, all the more so if we are to consider it in relationto two Freudian texts: Remembering, Repeating and Working-Throughand Totem and Taboo, both of which Kristeva quotes.

In Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, Freud insists thatthe significance of the transferential experience of analysis lies in its ability tobring forth a playground of psychic transferal and struggle (between the ana-lyst and the analysand) whose success or failure depends on the analystscapacity to dispel the hold of repetition compulsion into the more laboriouswork of remembering. Specifically, what might amount to psychic revolt onthe part of the analysand and to analytical triumph on the part of the analystis nothing less than the moment of mastering the repetition compulsion andthe Zeitlos underpinning itof keep[ing] in the psychical sphere all theimpulses which the patient would like to direct into the motor sphere(Freud 1968, 153). The clinical and analytical experience in Freud has themerit of releasing the subject from the unconscious compulsions (of aggres-sion, 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. Kristevais not perhaps unaware of this facet of psychic revolt (as a break out of themould of repetition compulsion), but she tends to stress a less finite aspect ofrevolt which she associates with the experience of transference itself. Thebulk of Kristevas understanding of psychic revolt in Intimate Revolt is dedi-cated to insisting that, once analysis is over, the analysand will be opened upto innumerable opportunities of identification, to the re-creation of thetransferential dynamic with other others (2002, 40). Like Freud, Kristeva

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does not think that analysis is terminable; unlike Freud, however, she revers-es the interminability of analysis into a virtue: no longer inexorable butopen, this interminability will continue to inspire the analysand in his subse-quent quest to bond with others.

The question that is left hanging is this: How can we reconcile this ami-cable version of psychic revolt with the other more political (and violent)version that Kristeva analyzes, somewhat elegiacally, in Totem and Taboo? Howcan we reconcile Kristevas reprisal of Freuds construction of the birth ofHomo religiosis on the pyre of the father of our ancestral historyand in thewake of guilt and repentancewith the analytical version of revolt as con-tainment of aggression (Freud) or as a license to love, as Kristeva herself con-tends in Intimate Revolt? My guess is that Kristeva has not been able to ban-ish the political completely from the psychic tropography (the troping of revoltin the geography of the psyche) in which she attempts to locate it. My guesssoon turns into certitude when Kristeva moves to illustrate what she meansby her version of psychic revolt in the works of the surrealist Aragon, theexistentialist Sartre, and the structuralist Barthes.

Getting the Political out of Revolt

Is the psychic revolt that Kristeva discerns and redeems in the literaryand philosophical texts of Aragon, Barthes, and Sartre separable from itspolitical import? Moreover, does writerly revolt, for these writers, hold thesame status as political engagement? While Kristeva is aware of the undecid-ability of the heterogeneous group of surrealists on this issue, all the more soin the case of Aragon whose suspicion of the political dimension of the lit-erary experience pressed him to join the Communist Party, she attempts toconvince us nonetheless that Aragon was unequivocally an alchemist of theWord whose non-sense pursuit of ideological revolt (through the spec-tacle of adherence to the Communist Party) must not blind us to the irre-movable sense of psychic revolt that ripples through his entire oeuvre.Kristevas tone here is intransigent and irascible toward a culture that burieswriters and their works in the shadow of their political or institutional mem-bership. On the other hand, her tone seems apologetic since much of whatshe says about Aragon amounts perhaps, as the following confession implies,to nothing less than a projection of her own non-sense of political revoltat the time of Tel Quel:There may have been a crisis of love, values, mean-ing, men, women, history, but I am not going to Abyssinia, I do not belongto the Communist Party, and if I venture to China or into structuralism, Icome 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 whoeverreads Sartres existentialist manifesto, Existentialism and Humanismwhoseemphasis on the moral responsibility involved in the condemnation to free-dom cannot be overstatedwill not fail to note its consistency with his choicenot to accept the Nobel Prize, Kristeva reads it as an emblem of the senseand non-sense of revolt (2000, 150). For Kristeva, Sartre wanted to set, onthe one hand, an example for writers who might want to dissociate theircontinual revolt from honorific institutions. On the other hand, she claimsthat his concern to detach himself from Western conformism had blindedhim, and he adhered completely, without the spirit of revolt demanded else-where, to a certain leftist propaganda of the time (152). Of course, Kristevamisses here the portion of doom and condemnation involved in revolt, whichSartre carefully elaborates in his writings and for which the Nobel Prizeaffair is, in my view, a dazzling example. By and large, I think the power ofKristevas analysis of Sartre, especially in Intimate Revolt, lies in the centralconceit of its polemic, which is to read Sartre not only against himself butalso against the backdrop of the present, in which the virtual is alienating uswith the foundational ngatits (by which Sartre means the copresence ofnothings and identity) at the heart of being.The thrust of Kristevas argumentpoints to the pertinence of Sart re s work on the imagination to the necessityof building psychic dams firm enough to counter the flood of images of thesociety of the spectacleKri s t eva s b t e - n o i r e t h roughout her two vo l u m e s .

Kristeva presses forward in her remapping of different types of textsthrough the lenses of the theory of psychic or intimate revolt by turning herprobing gaze, in an admixture of mourning and melancholia, to her deceasedteacher: Barthes. Kristeva takes good care to steer Barthes clear of the ter-rorist charges foisted on him by his detractors who are in point of factalarmed by the subversiveness and negativity of his writing, a negativity thatworks against the transparency of language and the symbolic function ingeneral (2000, 210-11). Kristeva shows the extent to which negativity iscentral to Barthess desubstantifying project of writinga project thatundoes the plenary and hackneyed communicative thrust of language in theservice of the transformative, the unfamiliar, that is, the antilanguage(Joyce) that is sacrificial (Bataille) that also bears witness to the social struc-ture in upheaval (211). Barthes demystifies the latent ideological structure ofmyth, which is otherwise veiled under the linguistic sign; in so doing, heexercises an interpretive revolution in that his exercise is not neutral but clearand lucid. For Kristeva, Barthes is a demystifier of social proprieties, norms,trifles, and sweet nothings, as well as a decoder of intimacy: his writingsseductively move the reader from the sensorial realm of taste and fashion intothe 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 notfail to notice the heart of a failed poet beating here and there in Kristevasprose, but her reading of Barthes is lucid and rewarding.

In the fleshing out of her own concept of psychic revolt to the writingsof Aragon, Sartre, and Barthes, Kristeva finds herself overtly involved in thespecific historical and cultural circumstances that inform these texts.Kristevas project would have been better served had she attempted to rec-oncile her pronouncement of the death of revolutionist ideologiesand ofthe alleged necessity of pursuing a low form of revolt (une forme basse de larvolte), a form of tiny revolutions (r-volte infinitsimale), in order to preservethe life of the mind and of the species (2002, 5)with the ways in whichshe then proceeds to investigate a number of texts whose historical contextis traversed by the promise of socialist revolution, even if there is also in thema fringe of open texture that warrants what Kristeva means by intimaterevolt.A good deal of what passes for psychic revolt in Kristevas reading ofAragon, Sartre, and Barthes certainly does fall under the heading of the polit-ical, but the very idea that intimate revolt could somehow compensate for orreplace political revolt is in the final analysis self-defeating and impertinentto these texts themselves: the sense of intimate revolt in Aragon, Sartre, andBarthes is indissociable from the political and revolutionary horizon thatinforms it; it is, moreover, within a hairs breadth of morphing into politicalaction. To the extent that her readings of these authors might bring them(especially Aragon who is, according to Kristeva, hardly read today) back tothe attention of the candid reader, she performs a laudable task; to the extentthat she reads these authors to hammer home her vision of psychic revolt,she has not perhaps convincingly delive red us from the political.T h i s , h ow-eve r, must remain a methodological pro blem that threatens to attenuate thep remises of the thesis of psychic revolt writ large; by no means does itu n d e rmine the many moments of insight that fill her separate readings ofeach author.

There are, of course, other more general problems that arise in relationto the broad strokes of Kristevas argument: first, if the subject is no longeranything but a marketable collection of organs, how would it be reconciledto the sensory? To the extent that such revalorization of the sensory, theintrospective, and the self-reflexive is possible, would it not present itselfunder the guise of the culture show? With no fringe of free will, no penum-bra of critical distance, and with no allowance that the subject can somewhatexceed the power structures of which s/he is a product, there can hardly beany possibility for revolt whatsoever, even the kind of revolt in miniature thatKristeva 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 aspace where tiny coups could be mounted. Second, what would intimaterevolt amount to if not to sharpening the faculty of critique, of discerningthe contours of ideological apparatuses locally and globally, and of undertak-ing political action? Should not intimate revolt prepare us for the politicalrather than deliver us from it?

In her recent contribution to Mourning Revolution, a special issue ofParallax, Kristeva reiterates her position that political revolt is over. I cannothelp but remain slightly puzzled by Kristevas appropriation of the rhetoricof endingnamely, the ending of the subjectin the service of a theory thatwould not obtain without the subject. Is her elaboration of intimate revoltan attempt to trope the subject back into existence? In Mourning aMetaphor: The Revolution is Over, also a contribution to MourningRevolution, Jay points out that the word revolutionwhose astronomicalorigins invoke celestial movement and circular or elliptical return to a for-mer placeis nothing more than a mere metaphorical displacement. Theword was used, according to Jay, in the face of events whose violence andunpredictability seemed impossible to comprehend, but it was not until thelate eighteenth century that it was used in the peculiar and, ever since, morewidespread sense of a utopian tomorrow. By 1989, however, the latter morepromissory meaning of revolutionwas crashed and we are, according to Jay,no longer beholden to maximalist fantasies of redemption and epochaltransformation, fantasies whose defeat leaves us feeling impotent and lost(Kurt, Stahl, and Willis 2003, 19-20). Jay argues, in other words, that there wasa time when we might have needed metaphors such as revolution to fashionthe world according to our own dreams, but that time is over, and we nowneed to understand that metaphors are nothing more than metaphors.Thegood news is that it may therefore be better to wander forever in the desertof metaphorical displacement than set up our camp in an oasis that provesonly to be a mirage (20).

Perhaps no one has so far understood this lesson more than Kristevasince her concept of intimate revolt can be seen as nothing more than ametaphorical displacement, all the more so since she purports to effect areturn to the original meaning of revolt which is nothing other thanreturn itself.The original meaning itself is a metaphor: Kristevas return isthus nothing but a remetaphorization.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. The Illusion of the End.Trans. Chris Turner. Stanford: StanfordUniversity 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 NewInternational.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 TheStandard 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: AvonBooks.

. 2002. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress.

Kristeva, Julia. 2002. My Memorys Hyperbole. In The Portable Kristeva, ed. KellyOliver. NewYork: Columbia University Press.

Shakespeare,William. 2000. King Lear, ed. Stanley Wells. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Vattimo, Gianni. 1988.The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in a Post-mod -ern Culture. Oxford: Polity Press.

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