Hatred and Forgiveness

Julia Kristeva, Jeanine Herman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231512787
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Julia Kristeva refracts the impulse to hate (and our attempts to subvert, sublimate, and otherwise process it) through psychoanalysis and text, exploring worlds, women, religion, portraits, and the act of writing. Her inquiry spans themes, topics, and figures central to her writing, and her paths of discovery advance the theoretical innovations that are so characteristic of her thought.

Kristeva rearticulates and extends her analysis of language, abjection, idealization, female sexuality, love, and forgiveness. She examines the "maladies of the soul," utilizing examples from her practice and the ailments of her patients, such as fatigue, irritability, and general malaise. She sources the Bible and texts by Marguerite Duras, St. Teresa of Avila, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Georgia O'Keefe. Balancing political calamity and individual pathology, she addresses internal and external catastrophes and global and personal injuries, confronting the nature of depression, obliviousness, fear, and the agony of being and nothingness.

Throughout Kristeva develops the notion that psychoanalysis is the key to serenity, with its processes of turning back, looking back, investigating the self, and refashioning psychical damage into something useful and beautiful. Constant questioning, Kristeva contends, is essential to achieving the coming to terms we all seek at the core of forgiveness.

PART 1

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WORLD(S)

1

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THINKING ABOUT LIBERTY IN DARK TIMES

First of all I would like to thank the Holberg Prize Jury for their generosity in awarding me this first Holberg prize for research in the field of the human and social sciences, law, and theology. I would also like to thank you for your presence at this conference, for the interest you have shown in my work, and for your participation in detailed and gracious discussions of my ideas, which I regard as both an honor and highly stimulating. Finally, I would like to thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk about the intellectual quest which has brought me here today, and how I relate it to the present moment in history.

You have in front of you today a European citizen, of Bulgarian origin and French nationality, who considers herself a cosmopolitan intellectual; this last quality alone would have been enough to merit persecution in the Bulgaria of my childhood. Much has changed since then, and although my country of origin is still struggling with various economic and political problems, the way is now open, not only for Bulgaria to become a member of NATO, but also for her to join the European Union as a full member. All of this would have been impossible to imagine thirty-nine years ago, in 1965. That was the year I left Bulgaria to continue my studies in Paris, thanks to a grant furnished under the policy of that visionary leader, Charles de Gaulle, who had already foreseen a Europe stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals.

Now, in 2004, I still think of that time, in the not-so-distant past, and of all the efforts, sometimes discreet, but sometimes quite risky, made by many intellectuals and others during the communist era. Thanks to such courageous individuals, Bulgaria is today a member of the community of democratic countries. This fact may seem miraculous, until one remembers the suffering, the never-failing hopes and the constant underground work of so many members of the thinking professions, which slowly ate away at the foundations of totalitarianism.

It is customary on occasions such as this to evoke the memory of one’s parents, and indeed I think of my father, Stoyan Kristev. This educated member of the Orthodox Church wanted me to learn French from an early age and duly registered me at a primary school run by French nuns, so that I could absorb some of the critical spirit and taste for freedom for which France is rightly famous. I also think of my mother, Christine Kristeva, who combined a sharp scientific mind and a strong sense of duty with a gentle nature and passed on to me the kind of rigor that is such a necessary part of one’s development, especially for a woman, and even more so for a woman in exile. This is my family background, which was reinforced by the respect for culture and education that had developed in Bulgaria during the course of its turbulent history; it is the foundation on which I subsequently placed what French civilization had to offer me. I have a strong sense of indebtedness to France, and feel proud, in the globalized world in which we live today, to bear the colors of the French Republic in the various countries and continents which I have occasion to visit.

There is a line in my book Strangers to Ourselves that I hope you won’t mind me taking the liberty to repeat here. I wrote that “one may feel more of a foreigner in France than in any other country, but at the same time one is better as a foreigner in France than in any other country.” The reason is that, although its universalism may be ambiguous, the French tradition of critical questioning, the importance given to political debate, and the role of intellectuals—exemplified by the Enlightenment philosophers who are so emblematic of French culture—are factors that continually revivify public debate, and maintain it at a very high level. This is a real antidote to national depression, and to its manic manifestation in nationalism. I would therefore like to pay tribute to my adoptive culture, which is never more French than when it is engaged in self-criticism. To the degree that it is able to laugh about itself—and what vitality there is in this laughter!—it is able to forge links with other cultures. I have absorbed this French language and this French culture so thoroughly that I am almost taken in by those Americans who welcome me as a French writer and intellectual.

The Holberg Prize rewards my work, which it calls “innovative, and devoted to exploring themes at the frontiers of language, culture and literature,” and which you consider to be “of capital importance” in the “numerous disciplines of the human and social sciences,” as well as in “feminist theory.” Indeed, since I first arrived in France at Christmas 1965, just when the feminist movement was gaining new momentum, I have never stopped thinking about the contribution that women have made to contemporary thought, and this work has crystallized in my recent trilogy on Feminine Genius: Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Colette. You might wonder what the connection is between this trilogy and my origins.

Well, I could speak to you at length about the intelligence and the endurance of the women of my country of origin, many of whom have distinguished themselves in literature, and many others in various struggles for liberation. Nevertheless, I did not devote my work on female genius to them, because I wanted to use examples that were known and accepted everywhere. My aim was to address the following question: “Is there a specifically feminine form of genius?” This question is not a new one, but it still retains much of its mystery. I will return to Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Colette. But first I would like to reveal to you something that is not in these books.

My research on this topic led me to the discovery that the first female intellectual—and as such, necessarily a European—was neither a saint like Hildegarde of Bingen (1098–1179) or Angela of Foligno (1248–1309), nor even a writer (the writers came later) such as Mme de Sévigné (1626–1696) or Mme de Staël (1766–1817) who, as a theoretician, writer, and political thinker, has always been considered the first female intellectual in the strict sense of the word. I discovered that the first female intellectual was in fact a Byzantine, a woman from my native region. Her name was Anne Comnena, and she was the author of a superb history of the crusades and of the reign of her father, the Emperor Alexis I. This was the monumental Alexiade, in fifteen volumes. Born in 1083, Anne Comnena began writing this work in 1138 at the age of fifty-five, and completed it ten years later; as the first female historian, she offers us an interpretation of this period that is very different from those of western chroniclers such as William of Tyre or Foucher de Chartres. This devotee of what would later be called orthodox Christianity was nevertheless raised on the Greek classics and was a fervent reader of Homer and Plato. She was sensitive, melancholy, and indeed romantic, a girl who was proud of her father; she was a philosopher and a politician, and her writing shows an awareness of the need for European unity, which was such an important issue at that time.

Since I am convinced that a wider Europe will only really come into being if there is a genuine dialogue between the eastern and western churches, and if a bridge can be built across the abyss which still, unfortunately, separates the Orthodox and Catholic churches in particular, I strongly believe that the exceptional work of Anne Comnena, among others, will be essential for thinking about our future Europe. That is why I made her one of the main characters in the novel that I have just published in France! I didn’t do this for chauvinistic reasons, since Anne Comnena wasn’t Bulgarian, but a Byzantine princess, although her grandmother was a member of the Bulgarian nobility, and there were many marriages between Bulgarian sovereigns and the royal families of the new states that were constantly testing the borders of the Empire. In this region, wars and peace treaties followed each other in rapid succession, making this part of the world famous for its conflicts, but also for the ability of its inhabitants to find ways of coexisting. All of this was present, and prescient, in the work of Anne Comnena, a female genius whom the future Europe would do well to rediscover. Coming as I do from the Balkans, I am pleased to have contributed to this rediscovery. I would therefore like to invite you to read Anne Comnena, in addition to Arendt, Klein, and Colette. Europe still has many surprises in store for us.

Nevertheless, without isolating women’s experience as a separate “object” of study, I would like to place this experience in the context of the various political, philosophical, and literary debates which have nourished women’s—and men’s—liberation in recent times. In other words, I only accept the “feminist” label on the condition that my thinking on the themes of writing and feminine sexuality is seen within the general framework indicated by the title of my presentation today: “Thinking about liberty in dark times.” With hindsight, I think that this title could apply more generally to what, outside France, is often referred to as “French Theory.” This expression was coined in American universities, and my name is often associated with it. If I emphasize the American reception of my work today, here in Norway, it is because I believe that without the English translations of my books, and without the recognition that I have received in the United States, my work would not have been accessible to readers in your country and all over the world, and it is in this context that my work has been recognized and honored by the Holberg Prize. I hope, in what follows, to be able to place my own work in the context of this “French Theory” movement, and further, to shed light on the difficult, and sometimes conflictual, dialogue between two different conceptions of liberty at work today.

When I arrived in Paris, the war in Vietnam was at its climax, and we often protested against the American bombing. It was then that René Girard, having attended one of my first presentations of Bakhtine in Roland Barthes’ seminar, invited me to teach at the University of Baltimore. I could not see myself collaborating with the “world’s policeman,” as we used to say at that time and, in spite of the dialectical advice that I was given by my professor, Lucien Goldmann, who used to say, “My dear, American imperialism has to be conquered from the inside,” I honestly did not feel that I had the strength for such a challenge. So I remained in France. It was 1966. Several years later, in 1972, I met Professor Leon Roudiez from the University of Columbia, at the Cérisy conference on Artaud and Bataille. That is how I made my first trip to New York in 1973, and ever since I have been a Visiting Professor at the Department of French at Columbia, which, without improving the quality of my English, has at least helped me make many friends and find accomplices in the very unique context of American Academia. At present, I have the honor of teaching in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research—the university that welcomed Levi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, and Hannah Arendt during and after the Second World War.

Of all these experiences, which I cannot summarize here tonight, and which I wrote about in my first book, Les Samourais (Fayard, 1990), I would simply like to mention two symbolic images that have become inseparable from my psyche and which, I hope, may give you a sense of what my attachment to the United States means.

The first one is a tiny amateur photograph, in black and white, that Leon Roudiez took of me, and which shows me with my long student hair, on the ferry that took me to the skyscrapers of Manhattan. Since I do not have a picture of my arrival in Paris, this one is the only and best proof of my renaissance in the “free world.” You can see this picture in Kristeva Interviews, a book published by Columbia University Press. I would like once again to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to my collaborators at Columbia University Press for their loyalty and friendship. It is thanks to their efforts that my work has become accessible to an English-speaking public all over the world, as I have already said.

The second image that I have in mind is that of my apartment on Morningside Drive, which overlooks Harlem Park, close to Edward Said’s apartment and to the flat where Arendt used to live. It is where I usually stay when I teach at Columbia, a place flooded with that unusual American light, dazzling and inviting at the same time. Here I wrote pages that are dear to me from Histoires d’amour/Tales of Love (1983) and Soleil Noir/Black Sun (1987) as well as the books on Female Genius, a place that remains, in my personal mythology, a space of happy solitude.

Many people were surprised when Philippe Sollers and I decided to devote a whole issue of Tel Quel (71/73, Fall 1977) to New York. What came across in that issue was praise of American democracy, as opposed to French centralization, which seems so hierarchical and Jacobin by contrast. It was actually an acknowledgment of what seems to me to be the most important quality of American civilization, and which also explains my attachment to American academia, namely, its hospitality. To be precise, in the designation “American,” I should include the USA’s neighbors to the North: Canada and Canadian universities.

By hospitality I mean the ability that some people have to offer a home to those who do not have one or temporarily lack one. Fleeing communism to go to France, I did not encounter that kind of hospitality, although France has given me my French nationality, for which I will always be grateful. My adoptive country is grounded in its administrative and cultural history, although it is also famous for the radically innovative spirit of many of its citizens, such as the artistic, philosophical, and theoretical avant-gardes that have seduced me, and have ensured its glory abroad. Such innovations often engender violent rejection, if not active hatred. America, on the other hand, seems to me to be a country that welcomes grafts and even encourages them.

It is, however, a profoundly French woman that you are welcoming today, whether you consider me a Gallicized European or the very “essence” of Frenchness. This often comes as a surprise to the French themselves who obviously do not see me as one of them. Sometimes, after returning from New York, while passionately discussing my work as part of “French theory,” I am even tempted to take myself for a French intellectual. At other times I actively consider settling abroad for good, all the more so when I feel hurt by the xenophobia of that old country that France is.

In this modern world of ours, in this “New World Order,” we seem to lack a positive definition of humanity (not in the sense of the “human species” but rather the quality of being human). We sometimes have to ask ourselves what “humanity” or “humanism” is all about when we confront “crimes against humanity.” My own experience, though, makes me think that the minimal definition of humanity, the zero degree of humanity, to borrow an expression from Barthes, is precisely hospitality. The Greeks were right when they chose the word “ethos” to designate the most radically human capacity, which from then on is referred to as the ethical capacity and which consists of the ability to make choices, the choice between good and evil—and all the other possible “choices.” It is interesting to note that the word “ethos” originally meant a “regular sleeping place or animal shelter.” By derivation it came to mean “habit” and “character” and what is characteristic of an individual and a social group.

I found this sense of hospitality in the United States, which, despite the numerous faults of the “American way of life,” for many still represents a future in which we will live in a globalized society, where foreigners share their lives with other foreigners.

This hospitality, which I am so happy to experience again today, here in Norway, was first and foremost hospitality toward my ideas and my work. When I travel I take with me a French and European cultural heritage, in which there is a mixture of German, Russian and French traditions: Hegel and Freud, Russian formalism, French structuralism, the avant-gardes of the “nouveau roman,” and Tel Quel. I hope that Americans, and now you here in Bergen, will feel that my “migrant personality” is less “French” in the sense of being somewhat arrogant and haughty. As a foreigner, I have managed to appropriate this culture and I hope that the elements of this French and “old” European culture, so often inaccessible and jealous of its own purity, which I will present to you today, will be accessible to you as English-speaking foreigners. Certainly part of my work has resonated in a special way in American universities and has further developed in a direction that I am most pleased with, and which encouraged me to continue. Sometimes, however, I am surprised by the images of myself and my work that are reflected back to me, and I have difficulty recognizing myself. I have never had and will never acquire a taste for polemics, partly because I am convinced of at least one thing: either these interpretations go against me in a useless way, and consequently exhaust themselves in the process (for example, certain militant and “politically correct” comments), or they are part of a more personal quest of original and innovative American men and women who assimilate my work into theirs at their own risk, which may well be, after all, a wonderful way of practicing this hospitality that I have been talking about. Isn’t the whole idea of a “transplant” or “graft” meant to generate unexpected consequences, the very opposite of cloning? However, as regards the politically correct interpretations, I have never had the impression that they were widespread in European universities, whether of Latin, Germanic, English, or Scandinavian language, no doubt because these institutions are more attuned to the European sensibility which underlies my work, and to which I will return in a moment.

Some Themes of Our Interface

I will now revisit some of the main themes of my work that have given rise to much discussion. They are: intertextuality, the distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic, the concepts of the abject and abjection, and my emphasis on the themes of the foreigner and foreignness.

1. The concept of intertextuality has enjoyed a certain degree of success internationally. This idea, which I developed from Bakhtine, invites the reader to interpret a text as a crossing of texts. Very often, in formalist or structuralist approaches this has been perceived as a return to “quotations” or to “sources.” For me it is principally a way of introducing history into structuralism: the texts that Mallarmé and Proust read, and which nourish the Coup de Dés and A la Recherche du temps perdu allow us to introduce history into the laboratory of writing. Mallarmé’s interest in anarchism, for example, and Proust’s interest in Zohar’s Jewish mysticism and the Dreyfus Affair are useful materials in this kind of approach. Also, by showing the extent to which the internal dimension of the text is connected to the external context, such interpretations can reveal the inauthenticity of the writing subject. The writer becomes “le sujet en procès”: this French expression means both a “subject in process” and a “subject on trial.” As such, the speaking subject is a carnival, a polyphony, forever contradictory and rebellious. The post-structuralist theme of intertextuality also gave birth to an idea that I have been trying to work on ever since, especially in my books from 1996 and 1997, namely that of the connection between “culture” and “revolt.”

2. The distinction that I have established between the semiotic and the symbolic has no political or ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword: Pierre-Louis Fort
• Translator’s Acknowledgments
• PART 1: World(s)
• PART 2: Women
• PART 3: Psychoanalizing
• PART 4: Religion
• PART 5: Portraits
• PART 6: Writing
• Notes
• Notes on the Origins of the Texts
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List