A Private Happiness for All, Or, How to Cure National Depression, Hold Down a Career, Fulfill the Maternal Function and Still Wage Feminist Battle with a Smile

The text is divided into three sections. The interviews with Petit (originally published in France the same year as Le feminine et le sacr’)[^2] are here divided into four mini-chapters: ‘What’s left of 1968?’, ‘Why France, Why the Nation?’, ‘The Disorders of Psychoanalysis’, and ‘It’s Right to Rebel’'. The second section holds interviews with Rainer Ganahl called Revolt and Revolution (divided into ‘Politics and Psychoanalysis’ and ‘The Sacred’), and the third section offers Rub’n Gallo’s interview titled Can there Be Revolt without Representation? (subdivided into ‘Powers of Revolt’ and ‘Limits of Rebellion’). Each of the interviewers exhibits broad familiarity with Kristeva’s work and each asks compelling, intelligent questions. ↩︎

To Ganahl she notes her reliance on the Sanskrit root of revolt, meaning ‘to discover, open, but also to turn, to return’ (100). She says to Petit that revolt suggests ‘return, returning, discovering, uncovering, and renovating,’ and that it exhibits clear ‘potential for making gaps, rupturing, renewing’ (85). Kristeva takes the concept in two imbricating directions. First, summarized by Augustine’s phrase ‘Quaesto mihi factus sum (I have become a question to myself)’ (81), revolt concerns an intimate sense of self-questioning and anxious sense of negation or annihilation. Second, encapsulated in Thomas’s dictum ‘establish yourself within yourself’ (17), she posits revolt as a discovery of’or return to’the self, a renovation that functions as a psychological and ontological precondition for (political) engagement with others. The two senses of revolt imbricate or co-implicate in that the anxiety or restlessness of self-questioning acts as a clearing or opening that allows for self-renewal (‘establishment’) and for a revealing to and of the other that she calls ‘the foundation of freedom’ (104). ↩︎

In what follows I will pull across the book’s divisions to discuss certain key words and themes, notably revolution, the sacred, what I take to be her assessment, vision and hope for political action, and notions of femininity and feminism. ↩︎

In ‘What’s Left of 1968?’ Kristeva shares her memories of the events, goals, and effects of May '68 amid a number of delectable bits of intellectual biography for those of us who seek out that genre. For instance, she talks of reading Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s 18th Brumaire, of the currents of thought that led her into psychoanalysis, and of her early, disappointing experiences with the feminist movement. Still, her primary aim in this section is to convey the import and legacy of that unusual spring, and the conversation sets the theme of the entire collection. ↩︎

In discussing the events of that unusual spring Kristeva avers that, even then, she was less interested in ‘contestation’ in the sense of the ‘freedom to change or to succeed’ and more in terms of the ‘freedom to revolt, to call things into question’ (12). This shift in understanding of freedom and revolution’from, to put it crassly, an externally oriented battle against the status quo to a more internal and constitutive mode of being and thought’is the leitmotif of Revolt, She Said. Revolution should not, Kristeva claims, connote political upset or a struggle to overturn oppressive norms, but rather a psychological, even existential disposition. Revolution means ‘permanent questioning,’ the same mood and mode as what she suggests her reader hold onto as ‘imperative’ in her last sentence of The Feminine and the Sacred. How does she come by this understanding of revolt?^[3] ↩︎

To Kristeva, it is because social revolution ‘turns its back on’ (81) the relentless questioning that instigates it, that revolution ‘turn[s] into dogmatism, terror and totalitarianism’ (81). To obviate this failure, she implies, but never quite states that social revolution must be accompanied or preceded by psychological revolution. May '68 continues to be our inspiration, she posits, since that moment was essentially about just this mode of permanent questioning (26), but revolution now is not behind a barricade so much as on an analyst’s couch. With some humor and some sadness, Kristeva notes that today people ‘are [at most] asked to work well and buy as much as possible.’ In other words the hope of May '68 has devolved into the ‘terror and dogmatism’ of our corporatized and commodified worlds. Psychoanalysis, Kristeva urges, can act as yesterday’s political leader or last century’s spiritual shaman, guiding us in ‘rehabilitat[ing]’ our memories and disposing us to self-questioning in a process she terms an ‘essential kind of resistance’ to our technocratic society (101). ↩︎

The goal of such analysis (as was the goal of May ‘68) is ‘public happiness,’ or ‘public jouissance’, and Kristeva presumes the common currency of this goal in that we live in a culture that ‘continually questions identities and institutions’ (42). I’m not sure we do live in such a culture; but as with many of Luce Irigaray’s stated hopes for the future of women, the future conditional regularly pops up in Kristeva’s words. For instance, she rewrites Camus’ statement, ‘I revolt, therefore we are’ as ‘I revolt, therefore we are still to come’ (42). Thus rebellion morphs to revolution’which pulls change into the psyche and into the private spheres of society’and the immediacy of ‘we are’ morphs to the indefiniteness and deferral of ‘we are still to come’'which indicates that it is precisely the vagueness of permanent questioning that allows resistance to market forces. ↩︎

Despite her claim that we (that is, the left descendants of May '68 and, I assume, practicing psychoanalysts) hold to a goal of public jouissance, the revolt Kristeva has in mind does not blend well with the inevitable dogmatism of public institutions and political parties. ‘One wonders,’ she says, ‘if the realization of the revolt I am referring to is possible only in the private sphere’ (107). In answer to another question, she states that one can only revolt as (within) an individual; revolution against systems is not possible (113). As a result, and although she declares herself less pessimistic than Petit about the public sphere (53), Kristeva conditions her optimism or future conditional hopes by avoiding the ‘political’. We need to find spaces alternative to the political, she claims, spaces of ‘new forms of spirituality where people can attempt to find this kind of freedom that politics cannot provide’ (109). ↩︎

The latter clause is my clear transition to the next section on the sacred, but it seems important first to put Kristeva’s project in a larger frame. Doing so renders it unnecessary to ally with Kristeva’s desire for spaces alternative to the political, or with her apparent mandate for undergoing psychoanalysis. One of the persistent and haunting questions of the post World War II episteme remains why the oppressed desire their own oppression.[^5] Kristeva’s arguments remain compelling for the questions they pose and interventions they make within this larger question’questions about norms and values (and the desire to overturn them), questions about authority (especial vis-'-vis the place of the maternal), and questions about the relations among affect, body and thought. ↩︎