JULIA KRISTEVA AND FEMINIST THOUGHT

JULIA KRISTEVA
AND FEMINIST THOUGHT
Birgit Schippers

‘Schippers provides a very readable and balanced account of the complex

relations between Kristeva’s thought and contemporary feminism. While
making some telling criticisms of Kristeva, Schippers reads her recent
philosophy of freedom and revolt – against the grain – as a feminist
philosophy and succeeds in making Kristeva’s ideas productive for feminist
political thinking.’
Alison Stone, Reader in European Philosophy, Lancaster University

In this new study, Birgit Schippers provides an engaging appraisal of the complex
relationship between Julia Kristeva, an important and influential figure within
contemporary Continental thought, and feminist theory. Drawing in particular
on Kristeva’s recent writings on revolt, female genius and freedom, Schippers
makes a case for Kristeva’s significant contribution to a feminist project that is
sympathetic to her account of fluid subjectivity, her critique of identity politics
and the deeply ethical orientation of her work.
Key Features
• Offers a detailed assessment of the diverse feminist responses to Kristeva’s
key ideas
• Demonstrates how feminism’s troubled relations with Kristeva can only be
understood by attending to the plurality and heterogeneity of contemporary
feminist positions

JULIA KRISTEVA
• Elucidates the fault-lines that run through contemporary feminism and
clarifies the anxiety that Kristeva’s ideas generate amongst her feminist critics

Birgit Schippers
Birgit Schippers is Senior Lecturer in Politics at St Mary’s University College
Belfast. Her areas of interest include feminist theory, citizenship and democratic
theory, and identity politics. and
Feminist Thought
Edinburgh University Press
22 George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9LF

Edinburgh
www.euppublishing.com
ISBN 978 0 7486 4089 8
Jacket image: © AFP/Getty Images
Birgit Schippers
Jacket design: Michael Chatfield
 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

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SCHIPPERS PRINT.indd ii 01/03/2011 16:29
 JULIA KRISTEVA AND
FEMINIST THOUGHT

Birgit Schippers

Edinburgh University Press

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 © Birgit Schippers, 2011

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

www.euppublishing.com

Typeset in Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7486 4089 8 (hardback)

The right of Birgit Schippers

to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

SCHIPPERS PRINT.indd iv 01/03/2011 16:29

 Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Abbreviations ix

Introduction 1

1 Kristeva and Feminism: A Critical Encounter 21

2 Crisis, Revolt, Intimacy 55

3 Corporeal Ethics: Between Violence and Forgiveness 87

4 The Singularity of Genius 115

5 Towards a Philosophy of Freedom? 145

Bibliography 175

Index 193

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SCHIPPERS PRINT.indd vi 01/03/2011 16:29
 Acknowledgements

The ideas presented in this book began their life as part of a PhD
thesis, and I wish to express my sincere thanks to my two PhD
supervisors, Moya Lloyd and Iain MacKenzie. For their encour-
agement and support at various stages of this project I would
like to thank Yvonne Galligan, Vincent Geoghegan, Kimberly
Hutchings and John Thompson. Thanks are also due to my editor
at Edinburgh University Press, Carol Macdonald. The research for
this project was funded by the British Academy Small Research
Grants Scheme (award reference no. SG090610), facilitating visits
to the British Library and to the Hannah Arendt Zentrum at the
University of Oldenburg/Germany. Oliver Bruns from the Hannah
Arendt Zentrum and the staff at the British Library Humanities
reading room were tremendously helpful in sourcing the material I
needed for my research. I owe a big ‘thank you’ to the library staff
at St Mary’s University College, whose support went beyond the
call of duty (they will know what I mean!). Thanks are also due
to Damian Knipe from St Mary’s Research Office and to the chair
of the research committee, Gabrielle Maguire, for their support
during crucial stages of the project.
Many of the arguments presented in this book have been ‘tested’ at
various conferences, and I would like to thank all those who helped
me to clarify my ideas, especially the participants of the Kristeva
roundtable at the 2009 Manchester Workshops in Political Theory.
I would also like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to
the two anonymous reviewers; their generous and useful suggestions
have been very beneficial in improving the quality of my script. It goes
without saying that the sole responsibility for its content, including
any errors or omissions, lies with me. Finally, I want to acknowledge
my biggest debt, to my partner Tom Hartley. His love and support
sustained me throughout the duration of this project, and his encour-
agement helped me to get through the mundane and difficult aspects
of the writing process.

vii

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SCHIPPERS PRINT.indd viii 01/03/2011 16:29
 Abbreviations

BS Black Sun
Crisis Crisis of the European Subject
CW About Chinese Women
‘Dissident’ ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’
DL Desire in Language
HA Hannah Arendt
IR Intimate Revolt
NMS New Maladies of the Soul
NwN Nations without Nationalism
PoH Powers of Horror
Revolt Revolt, She Said
RPL Revolution in Poetic Language
‘SM’ ‘Stabat Mater’
SNSR The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt
StO Strangers to Ourselves
ToL Tales of Love
‘WT’ ‘Women’s Time’

ix

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SCHIPPERS PRINT.indd x 01/03/2011 16:29
 Introduction

I don’t consider myself a theorist of feminism. What little I wrote on

women is empirical, dispersed, work in progress . . .
(Revolt: 29)

[E]mphasizing the singularity realized in exemplary works . . . is also a

way of disassociating myself from feminism as a mass movement.
(Colette: 404)

Few scholars can lay claim to being immortalised in a pop song;1

that the Franco-Bulgarian literary theorist, semiotician and psy-
choanalyst Julia Kristeva can garner such admiration is testimony
to her wide appeal and indeed to her cult status. Such a tribute,
moreover, in no way diminishes her enormous scholarly achieve-
ments, and it is therefore without irony that she can be included
among that small group of people that she herself refers to, rather
disparagingly, as the ‘Star Academy’ (2009a: 20). Kristeva is much
in demand as a speaker, and she has received many prestigious
awards, including the Holberg International Memorial Prize and
the Hannah Arendt Prize.2 The output and scope of her work
to date are staggering and still growing, stretching from early
work on linguistics and semiotics, to literary theory, psychoa-
nalysis, political philosophy, feminism and, in recent years, fiction.
However, despite Kristeva’s intellectual stardom and broad reach,
she is a contested figure, especially within that area of critical
thought that is the subject matter of this book: contemporary
feminist theory. Exploring the reasons for feminism’s diverse and
conflicting responses to Kristeva is one of my aims, but I also want
to establish Kristeva’s significant contribution towards contempo-
rary feminist thought.
Despite wide-ranging references to Kristeva’s ideas within some
sections of contemporary feminism, such as literary theory, film
theory and aesthetics, their wider relevance for a feminist project is

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

subject to much dispute, and it is fair to say that few other thinkers
are as contested within feminism as Kristeva. Described by some of
her critics as anti-feminist (Jones 1984: 56), unuseful for a feminist
project (Fraser 1992b: 189), misogynistic and even proto-fascist
(J. Stone 1983), she is celebrated by others as ‘a brilliant feminist
voice’ (Zerilli 1992; see also Ziarek 1992; 2001). Such conflicting
interpretations and assessments of her writings are compounded
by her own ambivalence towards feminism, which ranges from
a recognition of the importance of feminism’s achievements, to a
reluctance to subscribe to a feminist perspective (see Lechte and
Margaroni 2004: 24), up to an occasional outright rejection of
feminism as totalitarian.
The feminist reception of Kristeva’s ideas, alongside her own
treatment of feminism, has intrigued me ever since I first engaged
with her work, and it is this interest that constitutes the back-
ground to my book; I wanted to make sense of the various read-
ings, misreadings and productive rereadings of Kristevan ideas and
their contribution to feminist thought. I also wanted to establish
why, notwithstanding serious limitations in her thought, she is
an important thinker to engage with, especially for anyone with
an interest in feminism. This book is my contribution to such an
engagement and it presents my critical appropriation of what I
consider to be Kristeva’s significant input into feminist theory,
but it also reflects my discontent with her shortcomings in rela-
tion to feminism and politics. I will pay particular attention to
Kristeva’s relationship with the wider field of feminist political
philosophy because it is this area of feminist thought that has been
most reluctant to embrace Kristevan ideas. If feminism, broadly
understood, is a project aimed at social and political transforma-
tion, then it is over the question of feminist politics, the agency of
the female subject and the subversive capacity of Kristeva’s con-
ceptual tools that she has been most vehemently criticised. While
I remain puzzled by her many hostile remarks about feminism,
including her apparently ill-judged assertions regarding the nature,
prospects and desirability of feminist politics, I am also attracted
to her compelling critique of identity, her persistent emphasis on
the centrality of embodiment to social and political life, and her
concern for the fragility and precariousness of the subject.
As I want to demonstrate, feminism’s conflicting accounts of
Kristeva are as much the result of the ambiguity of her conceptual

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 Introduction

apparatus and her idiosyncratic understanding of feminism, as

they are the product of a reading practice that does not sufficiently
consider her fundamental ambivalence regarding all matters femi-
nist. Yet, I want to suggest that it is paradoxically this conceptual
ambiguity that facilitates a feminist appropriation of her ideas
and that offers feminism a sophisticated conceptual apparatus to
theorise issues of key concern to feminism, such as questions of
embodiment, motherhood, sexual difference, ethics and prospects
for social transformation. By remaining open to a plurality of
interpretations, her writings facilitate an active misappropriation
of Kristevan concepts for feminist purposes. It is this latter point
that I advocate here: I want to show that Kristeva’s conceptual
tools, regardless of her position vis-à-vis feminism, can be utilised
in the direction of feminist theory.
Kristeva’s conceptual apparatus and her idiosyncratic under-
standing of feminism alone are not enough to account for her con-
flicting reception in feminism; neither does it suffice to charge her
critics with a lack of intellectual generosity or with a misreading of
her ideas. Rather, central to the understanding of the relationship
between Kristeva and feminism is the way that her ideas epito-
mise the tensions and fissures in contemporary feminist theory.
Kristeva’s intellectual debts and her contribution to contemporary
critical thought, including her insistence on the fluidity and insta-
bility of the subject, her displacement of politics and her critique
of identity politics, have been broadly welcomed within those
strands of feminist thought associated with post-structuralism or
postmodernism. Likewise, feminists influenced by Critical Theory
or by standpoint feminism have often been unsympathetic or even
hostile towards Kristeva’s work.3 Thus, what is seen as a troubled
relationship between Kristeva and feminism can only be under-
stood if we examine how Kristevan ideas relate to wider debates
within feminism, such as the controversy over the status of the
female subject and her agency, her notion of the maternal body,
the relationship between the feminine and women, the status of
nature and culture, the debate over essentialism and, more widely,
her views on feminist politics.
I already alluded to Kristeva’s wider contribution to contempo-
rary critical thought, and it is important to stress that the recep-
tion of her writings is not restricted to feminist scholarship. In
fact, a burgeoning Kristeva scholarship is emerging that engages in

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

sensitive and sympathetic readings of Kristeva’s work, and that

has already gone some way in establishing Kristeva as a thinker
with feminist credentials.4 Yet, it is her relationship with feminism
that has occupied most of her commentators and that deserves
renewed attention; of central importance to my discussion is the
scrutiny of Kristeva’s recent work, including her books on revolt
and on the female genius, and her essays on Europe and freedom.5
While my overall emphasis lies with an exposition and critical
analysis of Kristeva’s recent writings and their significance for
feminism, I begin with a brief sketch of some of the key debates
within recent feminist theory. This is followed by a broad outline
of Kristeva’s intellectual heritage and position within the French
intellectual scene of the 1960s and 1970s, and the dispute over
so-called ‘French feminism’. I conclude with a brief methodologi-
cal reflection and with a summary of the chapter structure of my
book.

Feminist Theory Today

As I indicated, feminism’s heterogeneity and plurality constitute
the point of departure for my analysis of the relationship between
Kristeva and feminism. I further develop this aspect in Chapter 1,
where I assess feminism’s diverse reception of some of Kristeva’s
key ideas, such as her notions of the semiotic and the symbolic,
and her discussion of the chora and the maternal body. For now,
I want to map, albeit briefly, this heterogeneity and plurality, by
attending to some of the debates and contentions within current
feminist thinking.6
An emphasis on difference, diversity and plurality is often
considered to be a key feature of contemporary feminist thought;
however, it is fair to say that diversity and plurality have char-
acterised feminism from its inception. Debates over the status of
class or race in feminist thought, disputes over feminism’s wider
ideological attachments, manifested, for example, in the classifi-
cation of feminism into liberal, Marxist and radical strands, and
also questions of nationhood and nationalism, or of sexuality and
morality, have structured feminism from its beginnings. To deny
this conflictual history would amount to what Linda Zerilli calls
‘a retroactive fantasy about the wholeness of political origins’
(2005: 2). In a recent state-of-the-art article, Mary G. Dietz makes

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 Introduction

a similar claim for the diversity and plurality of contemporary

feminism, describing feminist theory as ‘a multifaceted, discur-
sively contentious field of inquiry that does not promise to resolve
itself into any programmatic consensus or converge onto any
shared conceptual ground’ (2003: 400). This absence of consensus
does not seem to concern Dietz overly much; in actual fact, she
sees it as a sign of the dynamism and vitality of contemporary
feminist thought. A detailed exposition of the rich and diverse
field of methodological, epistemological and ontological positions
would lead me well beyond the scope of this book, but in order to
aid the understanding of feminism’s heterogeneous Kristeva recep-
tion, it is helpful to provide a brief sketch of the fault lines that
make up contemporary feminist thought, and to evoke the wider
context of the theory debates over the last thirty to forty years.
Feminists’ various positioning vis-à-vis so-called ‘postmodern-
ism’ is frequently conjured up as a dividing line between differ-
ent and opposing feminist camps (see, for example, the essays in
Nicholson 1990); however, such an emphasis disguises a wider set
of differences, shifting alliances and controversies, and it evades
the nuanced and subtle positions put forward by many feminist
scholars.
It is probably fair to suggest that the controversy over the ques-
tion of the subject lies at the heart of these current feminist con-
tentions. Disputes over the subject are not the exclusive domain
of feminism, though; rather, they connect with wider discussions,
pertaining to the idea that ‘the individual’ or ‘the self’ is not an
unencumbered, stable individual, but is divided, decentred or sub-
jected. This is not the place to track the origins of the debate over
the subject or to expound on the subtleties and nuances of various
critiques of the subject, informed, for example, by Foucault, psy-
choanalysis or Derridean deconstruction (see Williams 2001).
Instead, I want to underline the manifestation of these discussions
for feminist theory. The key reference for feminist discussions
of the subject is the position taken vis-à-vis the term ‘woman’,
which is considered to be the raison d’être of feminism, its privi-
leged object of analysis and the rational underpinning of feminist
politics. However, the term remains highly contested within femi-
nism, in the first instance because there is no consensus as to who
should be subsumed under the label ‘woman’. Its inflection with
race, class or sexuality, and the pursuit of exclusionary practices

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

and strategies based on these categories has spurred major

debates, splits and controversies. For example, the famous ques-
tion, uttered in the nineteenth century by the African-American
Sojourner Truth, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’, has been taken up by late
twentieth-century feminist thinkers to critique the idea of ‘woman’
based upon the racial exclusions that it performs (hooks 1984).
Denise Riley (1988) deploys Sojourner Truth’s exclamation to
provide a critical genealogy of the term woman and its exclusion-
ary practices that identifies the racial and cultural heterogeneity of
women. Riley is at pains to stress that this genealogical critique of
‘woman’ does not advocate a feminism without women; rather, as
she suggests, it points to a ‘dangerous intimacy between subjecti-
fication and subjection’: according to Riley, ‘“women” is a simul-
taneous foundation of and an irritant to feminism’ (1988: 17; see
also Butler 1990). This critique of the subject draws on what Dietz
(2003) refers to as the politics of difference as much as it draws on
the politics of diversity, two important and related strands within
feminism that put forward a philosophical critique of the subject
on the one hand, influenced, in the main, by psychoanalytic and
post-structuralist thought, and a critique that draws on the inter-
section of gender with other identity categories on the other.
I have already stressed how feminism, defined as a project
aimed at social and political transformation, is inherently political.
Even though many debates within contemporary feminism seem
highly abstract and are perceived to be of academic interest only,
they are also intimately linked with feminism’s political controver-
sies and have impacted upon concrete concerns over policy. One
such concern, which follows from the dispute over the subject,
is the issue of female agency and feminist politics. At the heart
of this concern is the question whether a critique of the subject
can generate and sustain a feminist political practice, or whether
feminism needs to define its agents in advance. The implications
of either position seem far-reaching. Can feminism do without a
clearly defined subject, or can it afford to leave the question of the
subject open? What, on the other hand, are the risks that come
with the notion of a pre-constituted subject? This debate between
versions of a pre-constituted subject on the one hand and a decen-
tred subject, or subject-in-process, as Kristeva calls it, on the other,
has exerted an enormous influence, both directly and indirectly,
on most other areas of recent feminist debate, and I return to it

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 Introduction

throughout the book. It is also directly linked to the seemingly

intractable feminist controversy over essentialism. Often taken as
a short-hand for a presumed set of shared characteristics, essential-
ism has served as a rallying call for feminist debates over sameness
or difference, the question whether women, as women, possess a
set of shared characteristics or features, and whether these features
serve as the ground for a feminist ethics or for feminist politics.
These features have been explained as both innate and acquired
characteristics, such as an alleged capacity to mother, an innate
non-violent relationship to the other, or the capacity to care.
Because of its link with the question of the subject, the essential-
ism controversy has also had an impact upon the categorisation of
contemporary feminism, where those feminist positions associated
with difference or diversity are often seen as hostile to essentialist
accounts, whereas feminist views presuming a unified subject have
often been described – and decried – as essentialist.
The question of sexuality, its relationship to the body, and
its linkage with that other central category of feminist thought,
gender, has also occupied feminist theorists. An important element
of feminist discussions over sexuality pertains to the question of
sexual difference. Drawing on psychoanalysis and its narrative of
the subject’s alleged psychosexual development, sexual difference
theorists, including Kristeva, provide an account of the develop-
ment of the feminine (and by extension the masculine) that stresses
the subject’s complicated process of individuation in the frame-
work of language, culture and the body. Critics of sexual differ-
ence point to the way that it entrenches the hegemonic binary of
masculinity and femininity, and retains its attachment to biologi-
cal notions of the body. Related to this charge is the feminist cri-
tique of the notion of gender, previously championed by feminists
to refute naturalising accounts of women’s status in society. As
argued by Judith Butler, gender is only meaningful in a system of
binary (hetero-)sexuality, where the terms of gender acquire their
meaning as heterosexual.
The final key controversy that I want to draw attention to is the
debate within feminism over the status of universality and its rela-
tionship to particularity. At the heart of this concern lies the femi-
nist dispute over the politics of multiculturalism and its impact
upon women’s lives; it also pertains to the relationship between
Western feminism, understood as a position articulated by and

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

representing predominantly white, European, North American

or Australian feminists, and its postcolonial feminist critics.7
Highlighting these disputes, which evolve, in the main, around the
intersection of gender with questions of race and culture, some
feminists have sought to bring to the fore the racial blind-spots
of contemporary feminist thought. In recent years, these debates
have acquired a particular poignancy in the wake of 9/11 and the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, challenging feminists to articulate
and justify an adequate feminist response to what some perceive as
part of a terrorist onslaught resulting from Muslim fundamentalist
intransigence, while others see it as part of a wider colonial project
that, despite its claims to liberate women, is deeply misogynistic
and anti-feminist, and inherently racist.
I am conscious of the fact that this, necessarily brief, survey
does not offer a comprehensive overview over the current field of
feminist scholarship; neither can it do justice to the importance or
complexity of the topics that I have addressed here. Its aims were
more modest; it sought to identify some areas for discussion that
correspond to many of Kristeva’s recent concerns, and it hoped to
illustrate the heterogeneity and diversity that define contemporary
feminism and that come to mould feminism’s diverse and hetero-
geneous reception of Kristeva’s ideas. Indispensable to an analysis
of Kristeva and feminism is also the way that her writings are
located in specific intellectual, cultural and geographical settings. I
turn to these contexts in the next section.

French Theory: From Tel Quel to French Feminism

The predominantly Anglophone nature of the feminist Kristeva
reception should not cloud the significance of the intellectual
atmosphere of her adopted country, France, for her work. Here
it may be helpful briefly to recall her early intellectual develop-
ment following her arrival in France, as this has contributed to the
emergence of those very positions that later came to dominate the
feminist reception of her work. Central to this development and to
Kristeva’s impact within the French intellectual scene and beyond,
is her involvement with the journal and group Tel Quel. This story
is by now well documented and has been told by Kristeva scholars,
as well as by Kristeva herself (1984b).8 A short synopsis should
therefore suffice.

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 Introduction

Kristeva’s arrival in Paris in December 1965 on a scholar-

ship offered by the French Government paved the way for her
involvement with Tel Quel, which played a formative role in
her intellectual development. The Tel Quel group, established
around Philippe Sollers, had an instrumental role in the theoretical
debates, specifically in the promotion of the avant-garde; it also
provided an early publication outlet, in the shape of the journal
Tel Quel, for many of the figures that later became associated with
French thought, such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault (see
Caws 1973; ffrench 1995; ffrench and Lack 1998). Tel Quel’s
engagement with avant-garde literature, with Maoism and with
psychoanalysis, amongst other areas, generated a series of highly
influential writings that put forward a view of writing, broadly
construed as production and as analogous to revolution. These
themes, underpinned by Tel Quel’s wider theoretical perspec-
tives, are largely reflected in Kristeva’s early essays from the late
1960s and early 1970s, and they culminate in the publication of
her famous doctorat d’état, La Révolution du langage poétique
(1974a), whose first part is published in English as Revolution in
Poetic Language (1984a).9 As the Kristeva scholar Joan Brandt
recently suggested, Kristeva’s work is usually read through a femi-
nist lens; such a reading, according to Brandt, neglects Kristeva’s
wider political agenda, including the political dimension of her
involvement with the journal and group Tel Quel, and with Tel
Quel’s political project (Brandt 2005; see also Sjöholm 2005).
Brandt’s insistence on the political dimension of Kristeva’s ideas
challenges a widespread perception of Kristeva’s alleged lack of
political concerns, said to be dominated by an ‘aestheticizing bent’
that values avant-garde aesthetic practices above political work
(see Fraser 1992b: 187; see also Butler 1990). It also calls for a
wider engagement with Kristeva’s writings, above and beyond
feminism. Indeed, Tel Quel’s engagement with theory and with
avant-garde literature aimed at a political horizon has been highly
significant to the formation of Kristeva’s ideas.
Yet, it would unfair and also inaccurate to portray Kristeva as a
blank slate inscribed by Tel Quel ideology. In fact, she was instru-
mental in shaping the direction of Tel Quel and, more specifically,
in introducing some of the intellectual figures of Eastern Europe,
such as Bakhtin, to a French audience (see Chapter 1). It is difficult
to underestimate the significance of this aspect of Kristeva’s œuvre,

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

and it has deservedly received much scholarly attention.10 Of inter-

est to my discussion is a further point: already in her early writings
on language, language acquisition and semiotics (or semanalysis,
as she calls it), Kristeva subscribes to a Freudian framework that
grows in importance as her writings develop. The full import of
Kristeva’s debt to psychoanalysis, as far as her reception within
feminism is concerned, is revealed in some of her famous writ-
ings on women, such as ‘Women’s Time’ (1979), ‘Stabat Mater’
(1977a) and About Chinese Women (1986). This aspect is of key
significance, as it is at this juncture in the 1970s that the inception
of ‘French feminism’, and Kristeva’s association with it, originate.
What, then, is ‘French feminism’, and how is Kristeva positioned
in relation to it?11
The term ‘French feminism’, as distinguished from feminism
in France, refers to a number of authors based in France who
are loosely associated with psychoanalytic thought, especially in
its Lacanian manifestation, and with Derridean deconstructive
methods. However, ‘French feminism’ is a hotly disputed notion,
not least because none of the three figures most commonly associ-
ated with it, Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, is French-
born. Yet the question of nationality or origin does not lie at the
heart of the dispute over ‘French feminism’. Rather, it is a dispute
over the term and concept of feminism, the desirability of feminist
politics, and the particular relation between notions of the femi-
nine and women. Christine Delphy (2000), a critic of ‘French femi-
nism’, has described it as an American invention, because its origin
is said to lie in North America, especially in the literature depart-
ments of the academy (see also Moses 1998). It was in this aca-
demic and geographical environment, beginning in the mid-1970s,
that a series of highly influential publications, mostly by North
American feminist literary scholars, on recent theoretical develop-
ments emerging amongst sections of feminist groups in France,
were generated.12 This highly selective reception of ‘French’ ideas
into the North American academy, focusing, in the main, on
Lacanian and Derridean ideas, proved to be extremely open to
forms of literary criticism already influenced by post-structuralist
and psychoanalytic thought. However, as Christine Delphy has
pointed out, this selective reception bore no relation to the experi-
ences and conditions of feminism in France at the time; one should
also add that this notion of a ‘French feminism’ accords a sense of

10

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 Introduction

coherence to the theories and ideas of its alleged practitioners that

is not reflected in the self-understanding of those who are labelled
with this term. Intriguingly, Delphy does not describe Kristeva’s
position as anti-feminist, but as pre-feminist. As she explains,
some of the writers subsumed under the term ‘French feminism’
are not hostile towards feminism; rather, they do not address
feminist concerns; with respect to Kristeva, she declares that
‘Kristeva . . . does not address the questions raised by feminism
because she does not know what they are. Her only information
about feminism is the kind of caricatures circulated by the media’
(2000: 196). As I illustrated above, such hostility is emblematic for
a particular reception of Kristeva’s work, but it did not stop the
widespread reception of her ideas, or those of ‘French feminism’,
for that matter, which came to influence feminist thought beyond
the confines of literary criticism and which prepared the ground
for the articulation of many of the ideas which later generated the
feminist contentions which I sketched above.
Kristeva’s participation and position in feminist debates in
France seem to have been, by all accounts, short-lived. What
interests me here is not her engagement with the feminist move-
ment in France, though. Rather, I want to pursue the impact of
her writings on (Anglo-American) feminist thought, and to assess
the wider potential of her thought for feminist theory. Several of
her iconic pieces from the 1970s have come to influence the femi-
nist reception of her work, and they continue to be influential to
this day. This influence, as I discuss throughout this book, should
be set alongside her ambivalence towards feminism, which she
expresses frequently in her writings, and which poses a series of
questions for the feminist Kristeva scholarship. For example, is it
legitimate to judge her writings by feminist standards, especially
since, as I have already intimated, it is difficult, if not impossible,
to establish a set of shared criteria as to what constitutes feminism?
Can a feminist aspiration be read into Kristeva, thereby neglect-
ing her explicit wish not to be read in such a way? And finally, to
return to my proviso, which feminist benchmark should be used
to assess Kristeva? These questions, which have a direct import on
the methodological and epistemological approach of this book,
are addressed in the next section.

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

Reading Kristeva – Reading Feminism

The key substantive issue under investigation in my book is
to appraise Kristeva’s contribution to contemporary feminist
thought, alongside an assessment of feminism’s diverse and con-
flicting responses to Kristevan ideas. Drawing, in the main, on
Kristeva’s writings published in English since 2000, Julia Kristeva
and Feminist Thought deals centrally with what may be termed
‘the politics of reading’. As I have already intimated, the question
of ‘how to read Kristeva’ can only be addressed by considering
her fundamental ambivalence towards feminism, and by unpack-
ing the ambiguities and inconsistencies of her conceptual tools. A
recourse to interpretative methodologies and a close reading of
Kristevan texts bring these ambiguities to the fore and illuminate
the diverse reception of her ideas. However, it is in the nature of
ambiguities that no conclusive interpretation of Kristeva’s con-
ceptual apparatus is possible; it is therefore unsurprising that the
Kristeva reader operates in an intertextual space that allows for
a variety of interpretations. As I demonstrate in Chapter 1, com-
mentators have used different textual passages to inform their
respective interpretation of Kristeva’s texts. What looks like arbi-
trary choice between different hermeneutic practices may in fact
be compatible with the methodological insistence on a ‘surplus of
meaning’ (Ricœur), where texts and reading practices are open to a
plurality of interpretations, beyond the control of the author, and
where the elusiveness, contingency and indeterminacy of political
concepts, as elements of language, allow for competing interpreta-
tive versions (see Freeden 2008). Such an approach facilitates an
active misappropriation of Kristevan concepts for feminist pur-
poses, even against the intentions of their author. It is this latter
point that I wish to advance in my book, as I seek to demonstrate
how Kristeva’s conceptual tools, notwithstanding her own posi-
tion vis-à-vis feminism, can be utilised in the direction of feminist
theory.
Whether Kristeva can be read for a feminism that she tends
to disavow is a crucial question. Despite her stance as a ‘reluc-
tant feminist’, I want to argue that it is legitimate to do so. To
begin with, Kristeva’s writings have persistently addressed issues
of relevance and interest to women, and I believe it is therefore
legitimate to declare a ‘feminist interest’ in her work. The ques-

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 Introduction

tion of the permissiveness of a feminist appropriation of Kristeva

leads to a further question, however. Considering my emphasis
on feminist political philosophy, is it also legitimate to engage in
a political reading of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory? Moreover,
should feminism turn to psychoanalytic theory, such as Kristeva’s,
in its attempt to illuminate the notion of the (female) subject
(see Chapter 1), to articulate a feminist ethics (see Chapter 3),
or to formulate a feminist politics (see Chapters 4 and 5)? Maria
Margaroni (2007) further pursues the question of the legitimacy
of such a transposition from psychoanalysis to political thought.
Such a transposition, according to Margaroni, may be required if
we want to make sense of the numerous challenges we are faced
with today, but it needs to be mindful of the way these transposi-
tions are read. As Margaroni claims, a simplistic transference of
psychoanalytic concepts on to political processes raises serious
problems, and she advises against the use of such analogies
between political structures and psychic structures, suggesting that
we proceed instead on the basis of a hermeneutics of complication
that is mindful of the essentially separate spheres of psychic and
social life. I am sympathetic to such a call for caution and I also
acknowledge the necessity of a hermeneutics of complication, but
I wonder whether such a caution circumvents the critical inter-
rogation of the implicit political assumptions of psychoanalysis;
thus, I advocate the need to challenge psychoanalysis for these
assumptions, embodied, in particular, in distinctive normative
conceptions of gender. Kristeva’s own transpositions, between
corporeal affect and signification, and between psychic and social
life, I believe justify such a project.
The interpretative challenges, which the reading of Kristeva
poses, are mirrored by a similar set of challenges that arises from
the analysis of feminism’s engagement with Kristeva.13 How are
we to assess the diverse feminist responses to Kristeva’s thought?
As I intimated above, Kristeva’s ambiguities are partly respon-
sible for the conflicting and diverse interpretations of her work.
There is more to this, though, than an arbitrary choice between
two (or more) opposing sets of reading practices and interpreta-
tions. As I outlined above, one of the substantive points of con-
tention discussed in this book pertains to Kristeva’s positioning
vis-à-vis feminism, and to the reception of her work as ‘French’
theory within strands of Anglo-American feminism. Through a

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

close reading of Kristeva’s texts, I want to demonstrate that her

reading of feminism is underpinned by a conception of feminism
that is, on the whole, surprisingly unaware of feminism’s plural-
ity, and that constructs feminism as a monolithic and homogene-
ous theory and practice. A similar claim has been made by Kelly
Oliver, who considers it ‘an unfortunate irony that while Kristeva
is concerned with difference and individuality, she denies the dif-
ferences and individuality of multitudes of feminists writing and
working all over the world’ (1993a: 2). Such a denial, according
to Oliver, is particularly regretful because she values Kristeva’s
challenge to traditional psychoanalytic theory and its usefulness
for feminism. Instead, Oliver asserts, it has alienated many of her
Anglo-American readers. Given feminism’s plurality and diversity,
Kristeva’s reading of feminism is clearly out of step with the het-
erogeneous landscape of contemporary feminism, with its multiple
and competing political projects, analyses and ontological com-
mitments.
Finally, as I already intimated, key to my assessment of the
feminist reception of Kristeva is feminism’s own heterogeneity
and plurality. I therefore take it as my task to make the wider
political attachments and commitments of Kristeva’s feminist
readers explicit. This, I believe, is crucial if we aim for a better
understanding of the reception of Kristeva’s work within con-
temporary feminism. Moreover, as I already suggested, such an
approach illuminates how Kristevan ideas, especially those ele-
ments of her work that stress the fluidity of the subject and that
underscore a psychoanalytic perspective, generate anxiety within
those sections of feminism that are attached to conceptions of a
stable self and forms of agency based upon notions of a stable
self. Developing this point, I want to suggest that the anxiety
that Kristeva’s work generates within sections of feminism attest
to her commitment, broadly speaking, to post-structuralist ideas
about the critique of identity and identity politics, her insistence
on difference, and her psychoanalytically informed conception
of the subject. This, as I argue, contributes substantially to a
feminist project that seeks to connect the realm of the intimate
with the political; besides, it illuminates her recent interest in
conceptions of freedom, and the interrelated production of biog-
raphy and politics. However, it is undermined by her evasion of
a more serious investigation into the question of feminist politics,

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 Introduction

which she also fails to connect with her radical critique of the
subject.

Structure of the Book

As I already suggested, the focus of Julia Kristeva and Feminist
Thought lies with those Kristeva texts that have been published, in
English, since 2000. However, for heuristic reasons, some context
is necessary, and I provide this in Chapter 1. There, I stage an
encounter between Kristeva and her feminist interlocutors, and I
extrapolate some of her key concepts that have been particularly
influential within the feminist reception of her work. These include
her distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic, her notion
of the subject-in-process, her engagement with psychoanalysis and
her account of corporeality. This chapter is by no means a compre-
hensive analysis of Kristeva’s overall œuvre, but I hope that it will
be helpful to those readers who are new to Kristeva’s ideas. Thus,
while this chapter sketches familiar territory, the approach allows
me to map the reception of Kristeva’s ideas within the heterogene-
ous field that is contemporary feminism. The argument advanced
in this chapter suggests that Kristeva’s radical philosophical and
psychoanalytic assertions, which draw on the notion of the het-
erogeneity, instability and fluidity of the subject, and which are
underpinned by her celebration of singularity and plurality, do
not translate easily into feminist perspectives. This disconnect is
compounded by a dispute over the meaning of the feminine, its
relation to woman/women, and its location within sexual differ-
ence. However, I also seek to appreciate Kristeva’s emphasis on
negativity, which, I wish to aver, contributes to the articulation of
feminism as a critical practice.
Kristeva’s writings on crisis and revolt are the focus of my
discussion in Chapter 2. These topics, which underpin Kristeva’s
wider philosophical considerations, receive a distinctive attention
in her work published since the 1990s. While one of my aims in
Chapter 2 consists of a careful unpacking and interpretation of
these writings, my particular interest evolves around two related
themes that emerge from Kristeva’s texts; these are the etymologi-
cal link between crisis and critique and its potential for feminism
on the one hand, and on the other, her notion of intimate revolt,
described by some commentators as a ‘displacement of politics’,

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

and its consequence for female revolt. Developing my argument

from Chapter 1, here I will suggest that Kristeva’s notion of the
feminine, together with the importance she accords to a critical
ethos, holds out the promise of establishing feminism as a critical
project. A feminist scrutiny of these writings is only now begin-
ning to emerge. Such work is crucial, however, because it can
bring to the fore Kristeva’s attention to issues of key concern to
feminism, including the micro-political aspects of subjectivity and
politics, the mutually constitutive realms of embodiment, psychic
and social-political life, and the theorisation of female sexuality.
Kristeva’s writings, whilst not explicitly feminist in their aims or
aspirations, constitute an important contribution towards a deter-
ritorialisation of politics that stresses those intimate aspects of
political life.
Kristeva’s significant contribution to the field of feminist ethics,
underpinned by her assertion of the centrality of embodiment to
human life, is the subject of Chapter 3. I begin by considering
Kristeva’s insistence on heterogeneity and on alterity, leading to
what I will call an ethics of traversal. A key section of this chapter
revisits Kristeva’s conception of a maternal ethics, which, as I
demonstrate, has come to influence much of the critical reception
of her work within feminism. Building upon her overall concern
with corporeality and, more specifically, with the theory of the
drives, I then proceed to consider the foundational role of vio-
lence in Kristeva’s theory of the subject and its application in the
context of conflict. This leads to my concluding section, on the
notion of sublimation and forgiveness. As I will demonstrate in
this chapter, I am broadly sympathetic towards Kristeva’s ethical
project; however, I will also argue that Kristeva’s radical theory
of heterogeneity and alterity, which informs her ethics, does not
translate easily into feminist political efficacy. Developing my dis-
cussion from Chapter 1, I will also revisit some of my reservations
regarding Kristeva’s conception of the feminine.
Chapter 4 introduces Kristeva’s recent writings on the female
genius, focusing in particular on her work on Hannah Arendt
and on the development of Arendtian themes in Kristeva’s ideas.
So far, this aspect of Kristeva’s œuvre has not received much
coverage in the critical commentary; hence, this chapter aims to
provide a more detailed examination and discussion of Kristeva’s
work on Arendt, and seeks to initiate a feminist interpretation of

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 Introduction

these texts. I begin by attending to an exposition and assessment

of Kristeva’s Romantic heritage and its impact on the concept of
(female) genius; I then proceed to discuss her engagement with
Arendtian conceptions of narrative, life and rebirth, before con-
sidering the question of political bonds and its implications for
feminist thought. I conclude with some rather tentative thoughts
on a recent development in Kristeva’s writings: namely, her
engagement with the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Building upon
Kristeva’s insistence on the singularity and plurality of life, I want
to suggest that her engagement with Arendt’s ideas establishes the
framework of a political philosophy that could, potentially, come
to shape a feminist appropriation of Kristeva’s work.
Chapter 5 further develops the reference points of Kristeva’s
political philosophy that I established in the preceding chapter, but
asks a more specific question: how can we read Kristeva’s philoso-
phy of freedom as a feminist philosophy? And how does Kristeva’s
conception of freedom enhance feminism, understood as a political
project? Drawing on an exposition and critical analysis of some of
Kristeva’s most recent writings, I critically interrogate the geopo-
litical and geophilosophical premise that underpins her discussion
of freedom and that establishes Europe as a privileged space of
freedom. Moreover, I assess this geopolitical element of Kristeva’s
discussion against the psychosexual and racial narratives that
underpin her philosophy of freedom. I conclude by sketching
the elements of a Kristevan feminist theory that is attuned to her
critique of the subject, along with its emphasis on heterogeneity,
alterity and fluidity, but that embraces more consciously and fully
the potentially radical implications of her ideas.

Notes
1. The Norwegian band, The Kulta Beats, wrote a song entitled ‘Julia
Kristeva’. See www.thekultabeats.com/julia.php.
2. The Holberg Prize was established by the Norwegian Government
to honour outstanding scholarly work in the arts, humanities and
social sciences. Kristeva was the first recipient of this award in 2004.
The Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought is awarded by the
German Heinrich Böll Foundation. Kristeva was its recipient in
2006. A complete list of Kristeva’s awards can be found on her web
site at www.kristeva.fr/parcours.html.

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

3. I am conscious of the fact that these rather crude characterisations

are not sufficiently attentive to the fissures that exist between and
within different strands of feminism. For reasons of space I cannot
do justice to this problem in this introduction; however, it is key to
my discussion of Kristeva’s reception within feminism and will be
dealt with in detail in Chapter 1.
4. Recent important additions to the Kristeva scholarship include
Beardsworth (2004a), Sjöholm (2005), Lechte and Margaroni
(2004), Chanter and Ziarek (2005), and Oliver and Keltner (2009).
A further book by Keltner, part of the Polity Press Key Contemporary
Thinkers series, is forthcoming.
5. Kelly Oliver’s Reading Kristeva: Unravelling the Double-Bind
(1993) was the first monograph to engage with Kristeva’s contribu-
tion to feminist thought.
6. For a useful overview see, for example, Dietz (2003). See also Lloyd
(2005) and A. Stone (2007).
7. See, for example, Susan Muller Okin’s essay, ‘Is multiculturalism
bad for women?’, as well as the various responses to it (Okin 1999).
8. On the group and journal Tel Quel see, for example, ffrench (1995),
ffrench and Lack (1998), and Caws (1973). For two recent accounts
of Kristeva’s intellectual beginnings see Brandt (2005) and Sjöholm
(2005). See also her novel The Samurai (1992), a fictionalized
account of the French intellectual scene of the late 1960s.
9. Parts B and C of La Révolution du langage poétique, which deal
with avant-garde literature, have not been translated into English.
10. Several of Kristeva’s early writings on language and literature can be
found in The Kristeva Reader (1986) and also in Desire in Language
(1980). For a useful overview see, for example, Becker-Leckrone
(2005) and Bové (2006).
11. The critical literature on ‘French feminism’ and its relationship to
feminism in France has grown substantially over the last two decades.
For recent assessments see Gambaudo (2007b), Delphy (2000) and
Moses (1998). The invention of the term ‘French feminism’ is often
ascribed to Alice Jardine (see Jardine 1981; 1982). For older assess-
ments see Spivak (1981), Burke (1978) and Marks (1978). Grosz
(1989) and Cavallaro (2003) provide introductions to some of the
theoretical debates in French feminism, while Duchen (1986) offers
very useful historical context. Excerpts from Kristeva’s writings are
included in numerous readers and anthologies on French feminism.
Some of the better-known texts include Fraser and Bartky (1992),

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 Introduction

Marks and de Courtivron (1981), and Moi (1992). See also Oliver
(2000) and Oliver and Walsh (2004). Cahill and Hansen’s recently
published series on French feminists (2008) contains a volume on
feminist writings on Kristeva.
12. The enormously influential and prestigious feminist journal, Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, is closely associated with
the advancement of French feminism. Kristeva features in the very
first issue of Signs with an article ‘On the Women of China’ (1975),
an extract from her Des Chinoises (1974).
13. My analysis of feminism’s engagement with Kristeva occupies my
discussion in Chapters 1 to 3. Given the relative recent publication
of the texts under discussion in Chapters 4 and 5, there is as yet not
much feminist material available.

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SCHIPPERS PRINT.indd 20 01/03/2011 16:29
 1

Kristeva and Feminism: A Critical Encounter

I think feminists should have . . . only the most minimal truck with
Julia Kristeva.
(Fraser 1992b: 177)

Kristeva offers us a strategy of subversion that can never become a

sustained political practice.
(Butler 1990: 81)

Julia Kristeva [is] one of the most brilliant feminist voices speaking
today.
(Zerilli 1992: 111)

This chapter provides an exposition of Kristeva’s key concepts

and ideas, and sketches the diverse feminist responses to her
work. Its aim is to map the fault-lines, both within feminism, and
between Kristeva and feminism, that allow for an assessment of
the turbulent relationship between Kristeva and feminism. As I
already stated in the Introduction, such a task is complicated by
feminism’s heterogeneity and plurality; after all, which feminist
principles and ideas should be used as a benchmark to gauge
Kristeva’s feminist credentials? It is further obfuscated by an ambi-
guity at the core of her conceptual apparatus and compounded by
Kristeva’s ambivalence about feminism. Is it not unfair, then, to
seek answers to feminist questions in Kristeva’s œuvre? My overall
aim in Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought is to demonstrate
that feminists would benefit from an engagement with Kristeva’s
ideas. However, this assertion requires a further qualification; as I
suggest in this chapter, Kristevan ideas do not translate easily into
feminist thought, and where they do, they are bound to disappoint
those feminist readers whose philosophical and political attach-
ments are diametrically opposed to Kristeva’s.
Taking the interlocking of the personal and the political as

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

the central message of the feminist project, I want to suggest that

one of Kristeva’s most important contributions to contemporary
feminist thought – indeed, to critical theory in general – lies in her
persistent attention to the traversal between the personal and the
political, affect and signification, body and meaning. This aspect
of Kristeva’s thought is a guiding thread of my overall analysis of
her work that I begin to map in this chapter, where I sketch those
elements of her work that have received considerable attention
from her feminist readers. This includes an outline of her theory
of language and the speaking subject, a discussion of her concepts
of the semiotic and the symbolic, and with it, an assessment of
the status of negativity. It will be followed by an overview of
Kristeva’s concept of the subject and its significance for feminism,
a consideration of her psychoanalytic thought and a summary of
her philosophy of corporeality.
Although this chapter sets out my interpretation of her work (I
develop this further in the following chapters), my main focus is
to provide exposition and context to Kristeva’s key concepts and
their reception within feminism. This emphasis is also reflected
in the sources I have used, which include, in the main, some of
Kristeva’s early essays on language (1969a; 1969b; 1973a), her
Revolution in Poetic Language (1984a) and her essays collated in
Desire in Language (1980), as well as some of her essays and inter-
views from the 1970s and early 1980s that are widely read within
feminism, including ‘Women’s Time’ (1979) and ‘Stabat Mater’
(1977a; see also 1974b; 1977b; 1981).
I have already suggested that my discussion is selective in its
focus on feminist political philosophy and its wider emphasis on
questions of social and political transformation. This focus frames
the range of my sources, which by and large neglects Kristeva’s
important writings on aesthetics, and it influences the selection of
themes I have chosen to explore. These include an examination of
the debates over agency, the notion of the feminine and its rela-
tion to women, the status of nature and culture, politics, and the
maternal body.
It is perhaps not surprising that much of my discussion in this
chapter is devoted to Kristeva’s concept of the semiotic. As a quick
glance through the critical literature reveals, it is with the notion
of the semiotic that her work is mostly associated; it is key to an
understanding of Kristeva’s ideas in general and her reception

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 Kristeva and Feminism

within feminist debates in particular. The semiotic, identified by

Kristeva as one of her core ideas (2002: 258–61),1 encapsulates
feminist aspirations towards social and political transformation;
moreover, it alludes strongly to the embodied nature of subjectiv-
ity and politics. Whilst I briefly identify the wider-ranging deploy-
ment of the notion of the semiotic within Kristeva’s œuvre, my
focus lies with the exploration of the potentially transformative
deployment of this concept; this, as I argue, plays a crucial role in
the feminist readings of Kristeva and it exerts a strong influence on
feminist discussions of fluid and decentred subjectivity. Building
on my explication of Kristeva’s ideas, which stresses their contri-
bution to feminist philosophy, I proffer a critical interpretation
of the readings that the notion of the semiotic has received in the
feminist critical literature. This includes an analysis of the recep-
tion and deployment of Kristeva’s notion of the subject-in-process
within feminist writings. I also aver that the promising account of
the concept of the semiotic for a theory of embodied subjectivity,
and for a feminist project of political transformation, is under-
mined by Kristeva’s ambivalent attitude towards feminism as a
collective political project – in fact, towards politics in general. In
order to rescue the semiotic for feminist philosophy and politics,
I stress the negative dimensions of the semiotic, highlighting its
Hegelian and Freudian connotations.

The Speaking Subject

As I intimated in the Introduction, Tel Quel’s mixture of theory,
avant-garde literature and politics has been highly significant for
the formation of Kristeva’s ideas, especially the development of her
theory of language, which provides the backdrop to her concepts
of the semiotic and the symbolic. Her work on language is intrinsi-
cally linked with her key contentions about politics; as she herself
suggests, it is aimed at the political horizon.2 Moreover, her asser-
tions about language acquisition prove to be central to her claims
about the agency of the subject, including the subject’s positioning
within the wider social realm. An exploration of Kristeva’s notion
of the speaking subject serves as a useful path into her ideas, as
it illuminates her discussion of subjectivity and of politics, and
underpins her early work on language, culminating in the publica-
tion of Revolution in Poetic Language. This early work, developed

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

in a critical encounter with the writings of the key figures of

structuralism, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism,
is particularly important to a feminist interpretation of her work,
because it sheds a light on her relationship with structuralism (I
return to this point later) and on the role of agency.
Early on in Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva identifies
two linguistic traditions, both highly influential during the 1960s,
which, in her view, and notwithstanding substantial differences
between them, share a series of problematic features. One is
Saussurean structuralism; the other is the rationalist humanism of
Generative Grammar. Both traditions, according to Kristeva, are
void of social-economic and historical references (see also Kristeva
1973a), and they ignore how subject and language are shaped by
bodily drives, unconscious desires and sexual difference. Crucially,
following Kristeva’s reading, they also fail to acknowledge the
subject’s agentic capacity for a transgressive practice.
It is important to note Kristeva’s criticism of structuralism
early on in my discussion, as her alleged adherence to structuralist
positions has often been used to reject her work.3 Arguing against
structuralist formalism and rationalist, disembodied linguistics,
Kristeva builds instead upon the ideas of the Russian linguist
Mikhail Bakhtin, whose critical reworking of structuralist formal-
ism exerts a strong influence on Kristeva’s theory of language (see
DL: 64–91). Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, which stresses the sig-
nificance of context for the establishment of meaning, against the
universalistic and ahistorical account of structuralism, and which
emphasises the socio-historical dimensions of subject constitution,
is particularly important to the development of Kristeva’s ideas,
and it allows her to articulate her critique of structuralism further.
Dialogism also proves central to the formulation of the Kristevan
concept of intertextuality: it indicates the existence of an other in
language and in meaning, paving the way for Kristeva’s theory
of an ethics of alterity (see Chapter 3). It also underlines those
dimensions of language that exceed formal meaning, pointing to
Kristeva’s use of the notion of the semiotic. Bakhtin’s emphasis
on heterogeneity has proven equally important to the intellectual
formation of Kristeva, which she deploys to highlight two related
aspects of language – the multiplicity of meaning and the opera-
tion of drives (see RPL: 17; DL: 92–123; 1973a: 28) – and which
come to influence her account of the subject.

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 Kristeva and Feminism

Equally important to the development of her theory of language

is the notion of the ‘speaking subject’, which she borrows from
the French linguist Emile Benveniste (1971).4 His ideas further
underpin Kristeva’s concern with human agency and, in that
sense, she is not, as some of her critics suggest, unambiguously
anti-humanist but emphasises instead the historical, social and
corporeal context of subject constitution and language. Kristeva
utilises another element of Benveniste’s ideas: the constitutive role
of psychoanalysis, which proves to be indispensable for her early
theories of language, and which becomes even more important in
her work on the body, informed by the notion of sexual difference
and the theory of drives (see below). The link with psychoanalytic
models of language acquisition, in the wake of Lacan, proves to be
of enduring importance to her account of subjectification.5 In fact,
Kristeva’s ideas cannot be dissociated from psychoanalytic ideas
(see also Gambaudo 2007a) and her adherence to psychoanalysis
constitutes a key reference for her reception within feminism. As
I discuss below, it is in particular her psychoanalytic decentring
of the subject that places her firmly within the fault-lines of the
‘feminist contentions’ of the 1980s and 1990s (see Benhabib et
al. 1995); it aligns her ideas with those positions in contemporary
feminist theory that subscribe to a critique of the subject, a per-
spective that, as I indicated in the Introduction, has proven to be
highly contentious amongst contemporary feminism. Kristeva’s
psycho-linguistic account of subject constitution, her concern with
creativity and practice, and her assertion of the intersection of the
psychic and social are captured in her notions of the semiotic and
the symbolic. It is to these two concepts that I turn next.

The Semiotic and the Symbolic

One of Kristeva’s key interests relates to the issue of significa-
tion, which she theorises with her notions of the semiotic and the
symbolic. I already intimated that the semiotic, together with the
symbolic, constitutes the conceptual core of Kristeva’s theory of
language and of subjectivity; the two notions surface, in various
guises, throughout her writings, and they operate in a dialectical
fashion, forming a signifying process during which the subject
is constituted in and through language. Her linguistic account is
mapped, in an intertextual fashion, upon psychoanalysis, where

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

the stages of language acquisition mirror the stages of the child’s

psychic development. Thus, the terms ‘semiotic’ and ‘symbolic’
designate two different modalities of language; they also refer to
two different psychic registers and they acquire gendered connota-
tions, with the semiotic signifying the feminine/maternal and the
symbolic representing the masculine/paternal.6
To stay with this developmental perspective, the semiotic desig-
nates, broadly speaking, the pre-Oedipal psycho-sexual phase and
a corresponding set of expressions available to the pre-Oedipal
child. Characteristic of this stage is a symbiotic mother–child rela-
tionship during which the child, dominated by bodily needs and as
yet unable to control its drives, is sustained by the mother (RPL:
27). The child has not yet acquired formal language and com-
municates instead in echolalia, the gurgling and babbling noises
of babies that resemble a musical, rhythmic sound and that lack
sense, meaning and structure. Kristeva’s presentation of the tran-
sition from the pre-Oedipal to the post-Oedipal stage, from the
semiotic to the symbolic, is thoroughly Lacanian; the imposition
of a formal syntactic structure, following the intervention of the
phallus, paves the way for the child’s entrance into the symbolic.
Crucially, however, Kristeva departs from Lacan by stressing the
semiotic’s persistence as a subversive force within the symbolic;
in this guise, it designates a modality of language that, like the
pre-Oedipal language of the baby, lacks structure, rules and order.
Linguistically, this absence of rules and order manifests itself in
so-called glossolalia,7 in psychotic discourse, as well as in music
and in poetic language. Thus, Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic
encompasses ‘pre- or translinguistic modalities of psychic inscrip-
tion’ (1987b: 5); it is captured via the idea of an other ‘language’
that transcends formal, coherent communication, whether in the
form of the pre-Oedipal echolalia of the child, or in art or psy-
chosis, and, hence not or no longer recognisable within symbolic
discourse.
One manifestation of this other language that interests
Kristeva’s early work is poetic language; it forms the centrepiece
of La Révolution du langage poétique (1974a), her exploration of
the work of nineteenth-century French avant-garde writers such as
Mallarmé and Lautréamont. In this book, Kristeva emphasises the
interconnected production of subject and society, of psyche and
language, and of language and of subject, a theme that also occu-

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 Kristeva and Feminism

pied Tel Quel’s avant-gardistic deployment of Marxism, including

their interrelated approach towards aesthetics and politics (see
Brandt 2005; ffrench 1995; ffrench and Lack 1998). Kristeva’s
discussion of poetic language, a term associated with Russian
Formalism, draws again extensively on Bakhtin. Poetic language
vocalises, like the echolalia of the baby, the materiality and sound
of language;8 it is rhythmic and musical (see also Todorov 1988),
and it points to the heterogeneity of language and to the exist-
ence of a form of language in the margins of the symbolic (DL:
65). This exploration of signification in the margins is a leitmotif
of Kristeva’s work, brought to the fore in the attention given to
notions of dissidence and singularity (see Chapter 4).
The importance of poetic language and, by extension, of the
semiotic lies in the potential to initiate a ‘revolution in language’,
based upon a transgressive capacity that is said to engender change
in the subject and within society at large; it contains a focus on
practice, derived from the semiotic’s operation within the sym-
bolic on the one hand, and its transgression and renewal of the
symbolic on the other (1973a: 29). Kristeva’s emphasis on practice
encapsulates her critique of structuralism’s neglect of the agentic
subject on the one hand, and of the ‘necrophiliac’ rationalist phi-
losophies of language on the other. Thus, she proposes a notion
of the subject as open and fluid, equally indebted to semiotic proc-
esses and symbolic modes of signification. The influx of the semi-
otic is essential, as it generates, via drive energy, the possibility of
symbolic exchange; without drive energy, meaning (and the sym-
bolic) collapse. Furthermore, the subject’s openness and fluidity do
not preclude its engagement in (transgressive) practice; rather, it
is the recourse to semiotic drive energy and the openness towards
others that generate practice in the first place. To accuse Kristeva
of succumbing to a structuralism that denies the subject any
agentic capacity therefore neglects Kristeva’s substantial departure
from structuralism. Rather than precluding practice or agency,
her account of the decentred subject puts forward a conception of
agency that challenges notions of a willing, conscious subject. It
pre-empts some of the key feminist controversies of the 1980s and
1990s that explore the question of female political agency, female
solidarity and the feminist project of emancipation. Indeed, as I
argue below, it is the (transgressive) practice of the subject that
Kristeva celebrates, over and above symbolic agency. As I outline

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

in the next section, central to this claim is Kristeva’s appropria-

tion of Hegel’s notion of negativity, which denotes this moment of
semiotic transgression and which gives the semiotic its subversive
potential.9 I further explore Kristeva’s account of the decentred
subject and its implications for feminism in the next two sections;
in the remainder of this section I want to clarify her account of the
relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic.
The semiotic can justifiably be claimed as Kristeva’s origi-
nal contribution to contemporary critical thought; it should be
stressed again that, for Kristeva, the semiotic is only intelligible in
relation to the symbolic, a term adapted from Lacan’s work (see
Oliver 1993a). Whilst she remains faithful to Lacan’s linguistic
interpretation of the symbolic, Kristeva also departs substantially
from Lacanian ideas, proposing a re-evaluation of the semiotic-
symbolic relationship. According to Kristeva, the symbolic, like
the semiotic, indicates a dimension of language as well as a stage
in the subject’s psycho-sexual development. It is the stage of the
post-Oedipal that characterises a particular modality of language
and that displays formal rules, including syntax and grammar,
aimed at conveying meaning. The child accesses the symbolic with
the resolution of the Oedipal crisis, following the intervention of
the paternal signifier, the phallus. It becomes initiated into the
mirror stage and subjected to the intervention of the Name-of-the-
Father. This development is complete once the child controls its
bodily functions, sublimates drive energy and acquires language
and culture. Furthermore, the symbolic, according to Kristeva,
is initiated with the thetic break, Husserl’s term that Kristeva
applies to the subject’s psycho-linguistic development. It indicates
the break-up of the symbiotic mother–child relationship, leading
to the assertion of a position or a thesis, essentially a negation,10
the establishment of identity and of a subject–object relation-
ship. Hence, the acquisition of subjectivity requires a distinction
between subject and object; as Kristeva suggests, ‘the symbolic –
and therefore syntax and all linguistic categories – is a social effect
of the relation to the other’ (RPL: 29; italics in original).
The notions of the semiotic and the symbolic, and their at
times inconsistent deployment in Kristeva’s ideas, have generated
much controversy and led to conflicting receptions of her work.
Her critics read her, in the main, through a developmental lens
that is mapped upon the psychoanalytic account of psycho-sexual

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 Kristeva and Feminism

development and that posits the semiotic as a subversive force,

outside or before culture. More sympathetic interpretations, in a
Hegelian vein, highlight the semiotic’s disruptive and transforma-
tive potential in a socio-symbolic order defined as phallocentric.
As I already suggested, Kristeva offers no conclusive account of
the precise nature of the relationship between the semiotic and the
symbolic; in fact, her characterisations are ambiguous and seem
contradictory.
Early on in Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva classifies
the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic as dialecti-
cal. The two modalities, Kristeva claims, can only be separated for
analytical purposes. Language consists of semiotic and symbolic
elements, and their respective coupling characterises a particular
type of language. Metalanguage, for example, such as mathematics
and theoretical texts, displays a rigid, formal and logical structure,
which indicates a predominance of the symbolic; poetic language,
on the other hand, with its imitation of sound, its resemblance
of echolalia and glossolalia, and its absence of a rigid structure,
highlights a predominance of the semiotic (RPL: 24). Influenced
by Freud’s stages of psycho-sexual development, she proffers a
developmental account, arguing that the semiotic precedes the
symbolic, logically and chronologically (RPL: 41). This emphasis
stresses the importance given to the non-symbolic, including the
feminine, which becomes associated with the semiotic, and it may
be read as her critique of the dominance that Lacan ascribes to
the paternal-symbolic function and to masculinity. However, in
the same text she contends that ‘the semiotic that “precedes” sym-
bolization is only a theoretical supposition justified by the need for
description’ (RPL: 68), while elsewhere she suggests that it is the
symbolic that precedes the semiotic, logically and chronologically,
asserting ‘the logical and chronological priority of the symbolic in
any organization of the semiotic’ (1983: 34).
Kristeva’s apparent inconsistencies pose serious challenges for
the critical exegesis of her work, and they contribute substantially
to the contradictory and often negative reception of her writings
within feminism; it becomes impossible to adjudicate between a
‘proper’ and ‘improper’ reading.11 I will illustrate the implications
of these ambiguities for the feminist Kristeva reception below;
for now, I want to consider the methodological implications.
Perhaps surprisingly, not all of Kristeva’s readers fault her for her

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

inconsistencies; in fact, some commentators regard them as closely

aligned with Kristeva’s wider philosophical project. For example,
Michelle Boulous Walker (1998) challenges what she terms ‘one-
sided readings of Kristeva [which] miss . . . the importance she
herself places upon keeping ambiguity alive in her work. Kristeva’s
texts refuse the simple binary logic that would settle the matter
for all time’ (1998: 124). While Kristeva’s refusal to submit her
argument to an identitarian logic may motivate her ambiguities
(see also Oliver 1993a: 1), it certainly does not aid the scholarly
exegesis of her work. Building upon Kristeva’s wider concern with
the fluidity and the precariousness of the subject, my own inter-
pretation leans towards those readings of the signifying process
that stress the dialectical entwinement of the semiotic and the
symbolic. As I suggest in the next section, such a reading is further
supported by Kristeva’s positioning of the semiotic as a force of
negativity. I begin by unpacking Kristeva’s reading of negativity in
Revolution in Poetic Language; I then discuss the reception of the
semiotic in the works of two of her feminist critics, Judith Butler
and Diana Coole.

Semiotic Negativity: ‘Reading Hegel through Freud’

Kristeva shares with many contemporary critical theorists an
enormous debt to Hegel, and Hegelian ideas obtain a particular
importance for the understanding of her concept of the semiotic;
as I already intimated, it is via her deployment of the Hegelian
notion of negativity that the semiotic acquires its subversive
quality. She also goes beyond Hegel, though, insisting on the need
to supplement his dialectics with the Freudian theory of drives.
How, then, should we understand negativity, and what is its rela-
tion to the semiotic?
Diana Coole (2000) traces negativity’s deployment in those sec-
tions of Continental philosophy that are, broadly speaking, inter-
ested in questions of otherness. Negativity, according to Coole,
defies the positive, reified and ossified structures that dominate
society and that stress instead the radical, subterranean, transgres-
sive and ultimately transformative forces that challenge the status
quo. Coole emphasises negativity’s critical dimension, and also,
importantly, its affirmative and generative features. She regards
Kristeva, whose discussion of negativity receives a chapter-length

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 Kristeva and Feminism

treatment in Coole’s book, as one of the adventurers in negativ-

ity. This stress on negativity, as I already indicated, highlights an
important theme in Kristeva’s writings; here I want to suggest
that it illuminates in particular the understanding of the semiotic,
whose connotation with negativity is essential for an interpreta-
tion of this concept.
Kristeva establishes the link between negativity and the semiotic,
and its importance to the formation of the subject, in Revolution
in Poetic Language. Key to her discussion is the Hegelian impetus
towards a productive rupture. She claims that semiotic negativ-
ity transgresses the symbolic order and, in doing so, generates a
transformation associated with creation. As she suggests, ‘[W]hat
remodels the symbolic order is always the influx of the semiotic’
(RPL: 62). Thus, the semiotic interrupts, subverts and undermines
the symbolic: for example, in the form of poetic language, music
and parapraxes. It becomes a subversive force that, as I outlined
above, provides the potential for political change and must be
distinguished sharply from negation; whereas negation, the capac-
ity to say ‘no’ that is associated with the thetic function and with
judgement, is a property of the symbolic, semiotic negativity
traverses and exceeds the symbolic.12
It does more, though. Given its dialectical coupling with the
symbolic, the semiotic keeps the symbolic, and indeed the subject,
permanently ‘in process’ (see next section). It is therefore crucial
to reiterate that the semiotic does not function independently,
but operates only through its dialectical articulation with the
symbolic, producing language and subject. Hegelian negativity
plays a central role in this process; it constitutes ‘the liquefying
and dissolving agent that does not destroy but rather reactivates
new organizations and, in that sense, affirms’ (RPL: 110), and
it unsettles ‘the immobilization of the thetic’, thereby providing
access for semiotic motility. Kristeva further utilises Hegel to
account for negativity’s role in the production of the subject as
split or divided, or, in her words, ‘in process’ (see next section).
Yet, because the Hegelian ‘I’, according to Kristeva, will eventu-
ally become unified, she misses in Hegel a more radical approach
to the split subject that, moreover, could also take into account
the materialist basis of subject constitution. Kristeva finds this
materialism in Freud. Thus, Hegelian ideas can only become fully
operable if read through the lens of Freudian materialism, which

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

considers the operation of bodily drives (Rajan 1993: 221; see also
below).
So far, I have traced the role of semiotic negativity in Kristeva’s
account of the subject. Given the semiotic’s dual function, gen-
erating symbolic operations on the one hand whilst traversing it
on the other, how does it function politically, or, as Diana Coole
asks: ‘How is negativity to be practised?’ (2000: 62). In other
words, how can it be translated into a feminist practice? This is a
key question to be asked of Kristeva’s theoretical apparatus and
has divided her feminist readers; it will occupy me throughout this
book. I begin to attend to this question in the next section, while
in the remainder of this one I examine the reception of the semi-
otic in the critical literature, focusing on the work of Judith Butler
and Diana Coole, two feminist thinkers whose work, like that of
Kristeva, is influenced by ideas about negativity. As I intimated
above, much of the interpretation of Kristeva hinges upon the way
that her critics have conceptualised the semiotic-symbolic relation-
ship. If we take into consideration the ambiguities in Kristeva’s
portrayal of the signifying process, which I sketched in the previ-
ous section, it is far from certain whether semiotic negativity is
inherently subversive. This bears directly upon the interpretation
of the semiotic as a force of negativity and, more specifically, on
its ability to generate change and transformation. It should come
as no surprise that Kristeva’s conceptual ambiguity is reflected in
the feminist critical commentary of her work.
One such critic is Judith Butler, whose own leanings towards
the negative, including her Hegelian-inflected reading of French
philosophy, as well as her important contributions to feminist
debates over the last two decades, are worth considering in this
context. Butler’s ontological commitments, as well as her epis-
temological framework, overlap substantially with Kristeva’s;
like Kristeva, she is sympathetic towards ideas of the fluidity and
instability of the subject. However, Butler raises fundamental
objections against Kristeva’s version of the subject; her critique
turns on the semiotic’s alleged subjection to the symbolic, which
is said to posit the semiotic outside culture. In Gender Trouble
(1990), Butler grounds her reservations about Kristeva’s semiotic-
symbolic distinction and, more specifically, about the positing of
the semiotic as a subversive force in Kristeva’s alleged adherence
to Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular and to the structuralist

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 Kristeva and Feminism

distinction between nature and culture in general. She concludes

that the semiotic cannot serve as a subversive force, because it is
embedded in a symbolic law which inherently tames any challenge
to its prohibitions (1990: 80).
Much of Butler’s critique hinges upon her reading of Kristeva’s
presentation of the maternal body, which I examine below. For
now, I focus on Butler’s assessment of the semiotic-symbolic
relationship. First, Butler asserts that the relationship between
the semiotic and the symbolic is hierarchical, and she alleges that
the symbolic assumes a hegemonic role in this relationship that
makes it immune to challenge (1990: 80). Without specifying the
nature of this symbolic hegemony over the semiotic, Butler con-
tends, furthermore, that the semiotic is produced by the symbolic.
In fact, any autonomy that the semiotic might possess, including
its alleged subversiveness, is said to be derivative, conferred by
the symbolic.13 While Kristeva, according to Butler, proffers the
semiotic as ‘a perpetual source of subversion within the Symbolic’
(1990: 79), she ‘alternatively posits and denies the semiotic as
an emancipatory ideal’ (1990: 80). To claim the semiotic as a
source of subversion is, according to Butler, self-defeating, and she
declares Kristeva’s political programme futile. Her overall assess-
ment of Kristeva is epitomised in her claim that ‘[Kristevan] sub-
version becomes a futile gesture, entertained only in a derealized
aesthetic mode which can never be translated into other cultural
practices’ (1990: 78).
While I share Butler’s concerns regarding the developmental
account presented by Kristeva, I would also suggest that her
critique is not sensitive to Kristeva’s, admittedly problematic,
textual ambiguities. I already intimated that the semiotic-symbolic
relationship could be read as mutually constitutive rather than
developmental, with each element of the relationship generating
and facilitating the functioning of the other. Hence, to suggest,
as Butler does, that the symbolic configures the semiotic neglects
the symbolic’s dependence upon the semiotic, which manifests
itself primarily through the inscription of drive energy into the
symbolic (more on this below). Thus, without the semiotic there is
no language, meaning or subject. A more fruitful way of utilising
Kristeva’s ideas has been proposed by Lechte and Margaroni; they
suggest that the relationship between the semiotic and the sym-
bolic is more accurately one of antagonism, which they describe

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

as ‘reciprocally deconstructive’ (2004: 18), where each element of

the signifying process puts the other under erasure. Such a reading
is particularly attentive to Kristeva’s concern with the precarious-
ness and instability of the subject, captured in her discussions of
melancholia and abjection, and it resonates with her more recent
concerns with psychic suffering and crises (see Chapter 2). Butler’s
developmental reading of the semiotic-symbolic relationship fails
to consider the generative function of semiotic negativity, as well
as the deconstructive nature of the semiotic-symbolic relation-
ship,14 and she ends up neglecting Kristeva’s important emphasis
on the precarious and ambiguous nature of subjectivity, always
under threat of dissolution. Besides, Butler misjudges, in my view,
Kristeva’s deployment of the notions of subversion and transgres-
sion. These are not consistently discussed in relation to politics
or political transformation; rather, they refer in equal measure to
Kristeva’s interest in the subversive and transgressive nature of
aesthetic and individualised practices that, given Kristeva’s dia-
lectics of aesthetics and politics, are aimed at the political horizon
(see also Moi 1995: 171).
Notwithstanding my reservations regarding Butler’s critique
of Kristeva, the concerns expressed by Butler illustrate starkly
why some feminists are so easily frustrated with Kristeva. A
more sympathetic reading of Kristevan negativity is proffered by
Diana Coole (2000), whose materialist interpretation of Kristeva’s
signifying process emphasises the drive basis of the negative;
by tracing Kristeva’s journey through Hegel and Freud, Coole
stresses the dialectical articulation between the semiotic and the
symbolic, between body and signification, and between aesthet-
ics and politics. It is this latter aspect that, according to Coole,
leads to a displacement of politics on to signifying practices and
the psycho-cultural realm (see also Sjöholm 2005), culminating in
what she considers to be Kristeva’s postmodern politics. (I discuss
the question of Kristeva’s politics in Chapters 4 and 5.) Despite
Coole’s rather sober assessment of Kristeva’s feminist credentials
and interests, she considers Kristeva’s equation between negativ-
ity and the feminine, and its subsequent ‘gendering’, as having
useful implications for the articulation of feminist politics. Before
I develop these themes further, I want to examine how semiotic
negativity is crucial to Kristeva’s account of the production of a
subject-in-process. This politics of the subject, as I demonstrate in

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 Kristeva and Feminism

the next section, has shaped much of the feminist debate over the
last two decades.

The Subject and Her Agency

The semiotic’s transgressive capacities, which are indispensable to
the generation of signification, reappear in Kristeva’s articulation
of the subject. This becomes possible because negativity, already
contained within the subject, puts it ‘in process’. Kristeva’s empha-
sis on fluid subjectivity is part of a wider intellectual movement
indebted to anti-humanist positions that has exerted a consider-
able influence within feminist thought. Feminist debates over the
notion of the subject are at the heart of the so-called feminist
contentions, between those who subscribe to a position of a coher-
ent, unified self, and those who, variously influenced by psychoa-
nalysis, post-structuralism and deconstruction, put forward ideas
about a decentred, unstable and inherently fluid subject.15
Despite Kristeva’s prominent association with notions of fluid
subjectivity and, more specifically, with the idea of the ‘subject-in-
process’, it is important to stress that not all feminists who position
themselves within this tradition of fluidity subscribe to Kristevan
ideas.16 However, her notion of the subject-in-process figures
prominently in feminist receptions of her work, which could be
grouped, broadly, into three strands that comprise, first, those
feminists who reject the notion of a subject in process altogether
and instead hold on to notions of stable identity (see, for example,
Leland 1992; Fraser 1992b); a second group of feminist scholars
who subscribe to notions of fluid subjectivity but either criticise
(Cornell 1991) or reject the Kristevan version of the subject (see
Butler 1990); and a third group, who build upon Kristeva’s ideas,
which they utilise to stress the heterogeneity of the subject, its
relationship with alterity and its attention to difference (see, for
example, Oliver 1993a; Ziarek 1992; 2001). Before I map this
critical engagement with her ideas, I want to take a close look at
Kristeva’s writings on the subject. As I demonstrate here, whilst
I am broadly sympathetic towards Kristeva’s conception of fluid
subjectivity, I have two reservations. First, building on Cornell
(1991; see also Cornell and Thurschwell 1987), I am concerned
by Kristeva’s slippage between the notion of the feminine and her
subscription to sociological concepts of gender; second, I aver

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

that her insistence on the fluidity and instability of the subject is

missing in her at times stinging critique of feminism and (feminist)
politics.
The articulation between the semiotic and the symbolic, as we
have seen, does not just configure language; it is also constitutive
of the subject. The subject remains indebted to both notions of
the signifying process, oscillating between them. Kristeva refers
to this unstable subject with her notion of the ‘subject-in-process’,
a concept with three related connotations. First, it highlights the
fluidity of the subject; contained within this claim is a rejection of
fixed subject positions and an emphasis on the subject’s oscillation
between the semiotic and the symbolic. The second connotation
plays on the double meaning of the French original, ‘sujet-en-
procès’, translated as the ‘subject on trial’ or ‘subject before the
law’. Here, Kristeva emphasises the importance of the paternal
law for the constitution of the subject, as well as the subject’s
transgression of the law. Finally, ‘subject-in-process’ indicates
how the subject is implicated in a practice, the process of significa-
tion, which, in turn, is aimed at a transgression of the law.
The idea of a subject in process is mapped in Revolution in
Poetic Language (see also Kristeva 1973b), but I want to draw on
a well-known interview with Psych et po, a prominent and contro-
versial group within the feminist scene in 1970s France (see Duchen
1986; Moses 1998), which proved to be highly influential for the
feminist appropriation of Kristeva (Kristeva 1981). Explaining her
emphasis on the fluidity of subjectivity, which characterises the
concept of the subject-in-process, she rejects fixed notions of ‘man’
and ‘woman’, and deploys the semiotic’s negative characteristics
to outline a fluid female subjectivity. Given the importance of this
aspect to Kristeva’s overall theoretical argument, as well as to her
reception within feminism, it is worth quoting her at length:

The belief that ‘one is a woman’ is almost as absurd and obscuran-

tist as the belief that ‘one is a man’. I say ‘almost’ because there are
still many goals which women can achieve: freedom of abortion and
contraception, day-care centers for children, equality on the job, etc.
Therefore, we must use ‘we are women’ as an advertisement slogan for
our demands. On a deeper level, however, a woman cannot ‘be’; it is
something that does not even belong in the order of being. It follows
that a feminist practice can only be negative, at odds with what already

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 Kristeva and Feminism

exists so that we may say ‘that’s not it’ and ‘that’s still not it’. (1981:
137)

Despite Kristeva’s attachment to what might be termed a ‘strategic

essentialism’ (Spivak 1988) that recognises the important political
achievements of feminism, she stresses, in the main, her underlying
radical critique of identity. As Kristeva further suggests, the opera-
tion of the negative, and the avant-garde practices associated with
it, ‘dissolve identity’, challenging those theories that proclaim fixed
categories of male and female. This assertion raises three issues
that are central to Kristeva’s account of the subject and to her con-
figuration of feminist politics: first, her stress on the plurality of
women, a claim which comes to inform her refutation of feminism
as a form of totalitarian identity politics (see Chapter 4); second,
her insistence on the precarious nature of the subject, including its
oscillation between a semiotic and a symbolic mode of significa-
tion; and finally, her openness regarding the nature of feminist
practice, emphasising the critical aspect of feminist practice (see
Chapters 2 and 5). Offering an account of the female subject
that is strongly reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir, ‘woman’, for
Kristeva, is forever in the process of becoming. Thus, there is no
essence to ‘woman’, leading Kristeva to assert, moreover, the sin-
gularity and plurality of women. It is this assertion, at least, that
should put to rest some of the concerns over Kristeva’s alleged
essentialism.17 It is with the French original term, “unes femmes”,
that she captures this plurality and singularity of each woman
which, furthermore, undermine unitary notions of ‘woman’. The
assertion of the plurality and singularity of women is indeed a
leitmotif of Kristeva’s vision of a new generation of feminism that
guides her critique of existing feminist movements (see Chapters
4 and 5). However, as I illustrate now, her rejection of the alleged
totalitarianism of feminism, as much as her particular deployment
of psychoanalysis, tends to undermine the feminist implications of
her radical critique of the subject. I want to unpack this further,
by drawing on one of Kristeva’s most famous essays, ‘Women’s
Time’ (1979).
In this essay, Kristeva presents a narrative of feminism that is
mapped upon a temporal sequence of three generations of femi-
nism. According to Kristeva, feminism’s first generation, broadly
conceived as egalitarian feminists, fought for the achievement

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of equal rights, including reproductive rights and freedoms for

women. Feminism’s second generation, which could be labelled
difference feminists, were mainly concerned with women’s differ-
ence from men, and with their positioning vis-à-vis power and a
socio-symbolic contract defined as masculine. It should be stressed
that Kristeva acknowledges the achievements of both generations
of feminism, but she criticises them for their articulation of forms
of collective politics that she rejects as totalitarian and at odds
with the singularity and individuality of each woman. She faults
the first generation for seeking to gain acceptance in the exist-
ing social-symbolic contract by emulating the masculine, at the
expense of the feminine (and a denial of sexual difference), whilst
the second generation is said to have sought refuge in feminist
utopias and counter-societies that equally failed to address ques-
tions of plurality (a denial of female plurality). Given her criticism
of the previous two generations of feminism, Kristeva envisages
a third generation, which celebrates difference over unity, and
which seeks to tap into the semiotic potential that women are said
to possess.
One could plausibly argue that Kristeva’s vision of a third
generation overlaps with many positions put forward by those
feminists who subscribe to notions of a decentred subject and who
employ the idea of the indeterminacy of the category ‘woman’ (see,
for example, Riley 1988). Moreover, as I already suggested, this
heterogeneous subject-in-process is not void of agency, drawing
instead on semiotic and symbolic modes of inscription. Yet these
positions, as Riley has argued, have generated a profound anxiety
amongst some feminists who, Riley conjectures, fear that a cri-
tique of the subject may erode the self-identity of women and of
feminism as a political project (1992: 121).
I have already declared my sympathy towards positions like
Riley’s, and indeed Kristeva’s; however, the critique of the subject
still leaves open the question of how it translates into (feminist)
political agency. As Noëlle McAfee articulates it, ‘Can the subject-
in-process be an effective political agent?’ (2000: 19; italics in
original). This question has indeed been taken up by Kristeva’s
critics, who, for various reasons, denounce the effectiveness of
(her version of) the decentred subject. Nancy Fraser, for example,
grounds her critique in Kristeva’s Lacanianism, which she charges
with being ahistorical and atemporal. She rejects what she refers

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to as ‘the subject of the symbolic’ as an ‘oversocialized conform-

ist’, while the semiotic subject is said to be posited beneath culture
and society; its radical negative agenda, furthermore, cannot effec-
tively pursue the kind of reconstructive and collective agenda that
Fraser considers essential to the project of feminism (1992b: 189;
see also Leland 1992 and Meyers 1992). As we have already seen,
Judith Butler, albeit positioned in a different philosophical tradi-
tion to Fraser – in fact, one that, like Kristeva, draws on notions
of fluid subjectivity and the critique of the subject, is also highly
critical of what she perceives as Kristeva’s alleged Lacanian narra-
tive, leading her to reject Kristeva’s psychoanalytic account of the
decentred subject.
If the question of the female subject constitutes one area of dis-
content, it is the question of (feminist) politics that has also trou-
bled many of Kristeva’s feminist readers (see also Chapters 3, 4
and 5). Yet not all commentators take issue with Kristeva’s notion
of the decentred subject, which has been welcomed by some femi-
nists as a relief from essentialist and repressive notions of identity.
Kelly Oliver, for example, highlights how Kristeva’s critique of
identity is indispensable to a notion of feminism attuned to the
idea of difference, including a difference already located within
the subject (Oliver 1993a: 14; see also A.-M. Smith 1998: 24).
Drucilla Cornell and Adam Thurschwell (1987) also provide a
largely sympathetic assessment that stresses in particular the dis-
ruptive quality of the negative and its anti-essentialist potential for
feminist politics. Like Coole, Cornell and Thurschwell subscribe to
a philosophy of negativity that endorses the disruptive-affirmative
potential of the negative; they also abide by Kristeva’s articulation
between negativity, the semiotic and femininity, establishing the
feminine as a force of subversion within a phallogocentric sym-
bolic order. Yet, they diagnose a problematic slippage in Kristeva’s
writings, pertaining in particular to her celebration of motherhood
(see Chapter 3), from the notion of a subversive feminine to a soci-
ological conception of women. This slippage has indeed plagued
Kristeva’s ideas, re-introducing an essentialist account of ‘woman’
into her ideas that runs counter to her anti-essentialist philosophi-
cal intentions. It points to a key dilemma in the feminist reception
of Kristeva’s writings; her philosophical ideas and critique are not
easily mapped upon her statements on politics, leading many of
her feminist readers to abandon her work. The question of the

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subject and politics, as it emerges from Kristeva’s psychoanalytic

and philosophical account, evades its direct translatability into the
language of political philosophy, even though they are not irrec-
oncilable. As I already suggested, politics, for Kristeva, is displaced
into the realms of aesthetics and art (see Coole 2000; Sjöholm
2005), and into a more profound concern with the realm of the
intimate (see Chapter 2) and with ethics (see Chapter 3). For many
of her feminist critics, this disjuncture between Kristeva’s philo-
sophical ideas and her views on the subject, agency and politics is
further compounded by her deployment of psychoanalysis, which
I turn to in the next section.

The Dutiful Daughter? Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and

Feminism
Kristeva’s persistent adherence to psychoanalysis is doubtlessly
one of the major contributing factors for her contentiousness
within feminism; this is true even for those feminists otherwise
sympathetic towards fluid notions of subjectivity. As we have
already seen, the charges against Kristeva range from a funda-
mental critique of her subscription to psychoanalysis,18 to a more
specific critique of her engagement with Lacan’s ideas. This cri-
tique taps into a more widespread feminist discontent with psy-
choanalysis.
Feminism’s engagement with psychoanalysis is marred from
the beginning by a dispute over the value of psychoanalysis for
feminist thought and practice, which evolves around the alleged
a-historicism of psychoanalysis, its misogyny and its biologism, all
of which are said to contribute towards a discursive constitution
of essentialist accounts of gender and the subjugation of women. It
is the structuralist aspect of psychoanalysis, in particular, embod-
ied in its adherence to the notion of the Oedipal family, with its
relating elements of castration fear and penis envy that has proved
to be particularly contentious with feminism. Others point to a
misogyny, rooted in the positioning of women as inherently infe-
rior to men, and to the way that bodily organs, specifically the
penis, are elevated to the status of key signifier. And yet, some
feminists also began to explore the usefulness of Freudian thought
to an account of women’s subordination, to the representation of
femininity in society, and to the internalisation of misogynistic

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 Kristeva and Feminism

norms by women. Juliet Mitchell’s work (1990; 2001) proved to

be groundbreaking in this respect, and her claim that Freud’s texts
should be understood descriptively, not prescriptively, exerted an
enormous influence on the reception of Freud within wider femi-
nist thought.
Mitchell’s thought also proved to be crucial in another respect;
together with Jacqueline Rose (Mitchell and Rose 1982), she
helped to introduce the thought of Jacques Lacan into English-
speaking feminism. Lacan’s work, as I already suggested, has
been enormously influential for the development of ‘French
feminism’ and for the ideas of Kristeva. However, this proved to
be a double-edged sword for the feminist reception of Kristeva,
given the contested status of Lacan within feminism, specifically
his stress on the paternally coded symbolic order. It is because of
this perception that Kristeva has been described as one of Lacan’s
‘dutiful daughters’ (Grosz 1990; Gross 1986; Braidotti 1991); the
depiction is meant to diminish Kristeva’s feminist credentials, but
neglects her substantial reworking of and departure from Lacan,
reflected, for example, in the importance she accords to the role
and function of the semiotic, the feminine and the maternal. This
is not the place to assess Kristeva’s relationship with Lacan further
(see Kristeva 1983); instead, I want to use this section to present a
brief sketch of those themes that, in my view, are instrumental to
the feminist engagement with Kristeva and more widely to femi-
nist thought in general. These are her account of identification, her
treatment of kinship matters, and her writings on sexuality.
I already intimated that Kristeva maps her account of the signi-
fying process upon the psychoanalytic narrative of gender acqui-
sition. Combining Freudian premises with Lacan’s emphasis on
language acquisition, Kristeva claims that the subject emerges as
a result of language acquisition and of entrance into the symbolic.
Following Lacan, boy-child and girl-child acquire language differ-
ently and take up different positions in the linguistically structured
symbolic order. Girls’ psycho-linguistic development connects
them to the semiotic and positions them on the periphery of the
phallogocentric symbolic order. I alluded above to the fact that lan-
guage, according to Kristeva’s psychoanalytic framework, emerges
as a result of the break with the maternal object, which only boys
can fully accomplish, a prerequisite for entry into the symbolic and
for language acquisition. Due to girls’ difficulty in separating from

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

the mother and their cultural compulsion to identify with her, they
remain connected to the maternal semiotic. Whilst women are not
barred from speech or symbolisation, they remain under constant
threat of psychic disintegration, engaging in a life-long battle with
the paternal-masculine symbolic. This also clarifies women’s rela-
tionship with the semiotic. Women’s attachment to the semiotic
does not preclude access to the symbolic, a claim sometimes made
by Kristeva’s critics (see, for example, Gross 1986: 131); rather,
they oscillate between the semiotic and the symbolic.
I already argued that Kristeva’s deployment of psychoanalysis,
despite its commitment to heterogeneity and a ‘subject-in-proc-
ess’, generates a gendered order where femininity cross-checks
with women. This, however, does not follow conclusively from
Kristeva’s account. Indeed, as we have seen, sexed positions, for
Kristeva, are not rigid, and either sex can, potentially, assume
either of the two sexed positions. Masculinity, for Kristeva, is not
barred for women, and neither is femininity necessarily barred for
men. As Kristeva asserts, ‘“man” is in “woman”, and “woman” is
in “man”’ (1981: 140). It is the link with the semiotic and the sym-
bolic that defines femininity and masculinity respectively. Thus,
neither masculinity nor femininity is defined in relation to a given
biological body, but in relation to the subject’s position in lan-
guage.19 Moreover, Kristeva’s assertion, that the dialectical rela-
tionship between the semiotic and the symbolic is constitutive of the
subject, and that the subject is indebted to both semiotic and sym-
bolic processes, implies that any subject position is, ontologically,
unstable. Through her emphasis on dialectical negativity, Kristeva
endorses the fluidity associated with subjectivity and she stresses
the instability of identity. Situating herself within the context of
French post-structuralism, Kristeva asserts that ‘[o]ur work fought
against [identificatory thinking], producing instead a vision of man
and his discourse that is . . . clearly anti-identificatory’ (1996a:
259). It is the transgressive capacity of the semiotic which subverts
stable forms of subjectivity and puts the subject ‘in process’.
Yet identification is also at the heart of psychoanalysis, and
central to Kristeva’s further discussion is the idea of a melancholic
identification (1989a). Following Kristeva’s psychoanalytic
assumptions, the normal route to femininity forecloses an iden-
tification with the father and requires instead a (melancholic)
identification with the mother. However, female melancholia

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 Kristeva and Feminism

is countered by jouissance which, potentially, protects women

from the workings of the death drive. Still, father-identification
is not completely impossible for women. Access to the symbolic
and sublimatory activity are difficult, though not impossible, for
women to achieve. As Kristeva asserts, ‘shifting to the symbolic
order at the same time as to a sexual object of a sex other than
that of the primary maternal object represents a gigantic elabora-
tion in which a woman cathexes a psychic potential greater than
what is demanded of the male sex’ (BS: 30). Indeed, once women
separate from the mother, they are capable of producing symbolic
discourse and, thus, of overcoming melancholia. In this way,
women engage in a balancing act between their attachment to the
maternal-semiotic and a yearning for the Law (1977a: 175).
Thus, even though women are under a cultural compulsion
to identify with the mother, Kristeva concedes that father-
identification is possible. Such an identification, however, is
pathologised, and she describes father-identified women as
‘Electras’, ‘militants in the cause of the father, frigid with exalta-
tion – are they then dramatic figures emerging at the point where
the social consensus corners any woman who wants to escape her
condition: nuns, “revolutionaries”, even “feminists”?’ (1974b:
152).20 Key to the process of identification is the subject’s relation-
ship with embodiment, and it is to this aspect that I turn in the
next section. As I will argue there, it is with her emphasis on the
body that Kristeva makes a significant contribution to contempo-
rary feminist theory.

Body Matters
Although Kristeva’s discussion of the maternal body has divided
feminist assessments of her work, it is also fair to say that embodi-
ment constitutes a leitmotif of practically all of Kristeva’s writ-
ings, informing her work on language, psychoanalysis, women
and foreignness. Her persistent attention to body matters offers a
radical challenge to the dualistic Cartesian mind–body hierarchy
and a rejection of the ‘somatophobia’ of Western philosophy (see
Spelman 1982), that disembodied understanding of human experi-
ence that, furthermore, associates women with the body and men
with the mind or reason, and that disqualifies and abjects women
from the realm of the properly human. Even though Kristeva

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

has at times been criticised for failing to give due recognition

to the corporeal implications of sexual difference (see Boulous
Walker 1998), a more generous interpretation may highlight how
Kristevan corporeality cuts across sexual difference. In this respect,
and notwithstanding the attention she gives to women’s bodies, it
would also be misleading to reduce her account to a theory of
women’s bodies. Rather, Kristevan embodiment, couched in a psy-
choanalytic narrative that is based upon the Oedipal family drama,
is played out along an axis of sexual difference, where embodied
masculinity and femininity develop differently, constituted as a
result of the workings of the drives, the acquisition of language,
and the intervention of the phallus (see also Chapter 2). Thus, over
and above her writings on maternity and her notion of abjection,
which has been taken up more broadly within feminist debates on
aesthetics, art and film, Kristeva’s important contribution to the
formulation of a corporeal philosophy consists in the notion of a
body-in-process that paves the way towards a corporeal ethics (see
Chapter 3) and that I will map briefly here.
I already stressed the semiotic’s operation within language; it is
equally imperative to highlight its centrality to the generation of
embodiment. In fact, Kristeva’s opening argument of Revolution
in Poetic Language is that the body is implicated in the process
of signification, a contention that affirms the link between body,
language and psychic life. As Kelly Oliver points out, part of
Kristeva’s project is to bring the speaking body back to significa-
tion (1993a: 3). Kristeva’s criticism, directed against what she
terms the ‘necrophiliac philosophies of language’, should thus
be read alongside her refutation of disembodied notions of sub-
jectivity and signification (see Grosz 1990: 80). Whilst she leaves
unexplored the assertion of the primacy of the somatic dimension
of embodiment, she is concerned with the issue of body constitu-
tion, the establishment of a ‘body proper’ (RPL: 27), and with
the implication of bodies in the process of signification. Early on
in Revolution in Poetic Language, she connects the body with
language and the psyche, with the constitution of the subject in a
theoretical framework informed by psychoanalysis, and located in
the social structure of capitalism.
Crucially though, the body is not a passive surface, subjected
to social and historical inscription; it displays ‘somatic agency’
(Coole 2005), engaging in a practice that rejuvenates society, and

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 Kristeva and Feminism

that moves with and transgresses, through the operation of nega-

tivity, the social structures of capitalism, which in turn attempt
to hinder this ‘body-in-process’. In times of change or crisis,
when political revolutions coincide with a revolution in language,
subject and body are implicated in such change and the dynamic
quality of body and subject come to the fore (RPL: 15; see also
Chapter 2). It is important to highlight this facet of Kristeva’s
work, as it stresses the constitutive role of the body in the creation,
sustenance and also transgression of systems of representation.
However, socio-historical factors alone do not account for the
constitution of the body. As we have already seen, they require a
materialist foundation, which Kristeva finds in psychoanalysis and
which provides her with two interlinked approaches to the body:
the Oedipal family, with the mother’s body as a central reference
point on the one hand, and the theory of drives on the other.21
The heterogeneous drives, channelled, ordered and directed by
the protagonists of the Oedipal family, point the body in distinc-
tive directions, in accordance with psychoanalytic injunctions of
gender normativity.22
Drives also discharge the transgressive negativity that is essen-
tial for the emergence of language and for the rejuvenation of
the symbolic, and that Kristeva, as I outlined above, associates
with practice. This assertion also allows for a further revision of
Butler’s critique of Kristeva (Butler 1990). Questioning the nature
of the dialectical relationship between the semiotic and the sym-
bolic, Butler wondered whether the semiotic owes its subversive
potential to the symbolic. Equipped with Kristeva’s theory of the
body, we can now re-emphasise the symbolic’s dependence upon
the drive energy transmitted by the semiotic. Even though the sym-
bolic configures semiotic transgression, it can only do so because
of the semiotic discharge into the symbolic. In the absence of drive
energy, meaning, and thus the symbolic, collapse. To remain with
Butler’s critique for a moment, in Gender Trouble (1990) she
challenges Kristeva’s assumption of a pre-constituted body, unaf-
fected by socio-cultural inscriptions, and she criticises Kristeva’s
association of the semiotic with the maternal body and its embed-
dedness in the functioning of the drives operating in the pre-
Oedipal body. This assertion, however, fails to consider Kristeva’s
dialectics between the semiotic and the symbolic, including the
workings of negativity in the constitution of the symbolic on the

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

one hand, and of the ordering of the semiotic by the symbolic on

the other. If Butler’s critique requires some modification, if not a
reversal, in the light of Kristeva’s discussion of drives and of the
body, it also allows for a clarification of Kristeva’s use of the term
‘dialectic’; it is not resolved in a Hegelian ‘Aufhebung’, but oscil-
lates permanently between semiotic drive energy on the one hand,
and symbolic ordering on the other, both of which are dependent
upon one another. It is thus essential to acknowledge the corporeal
dimension of the semiotic and the symbolic.
Yet it is the maternal body that receives particular attention
from Kristeva and that attracted much feminist commentary. She
theorises the maternal body via the concept of the chora, a notion
she borrows from the Timaeus (Hamilton and Cairns 1999),
Plato’s narrative of the creation of the universe that defines the
chora as a nourishing and maternal space, or receptacle, which he
opposes with a paternal principle and a child principle (48b–52d).
Plato’s chora already precipitates the emphasis on the maternal
developed by Kristeva. In Revolution in Poetic Language, she
introduces the chora as a ‘non-expressive totality formed by drives
and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is
regulated’ (RPL: 26), while she defines it elsewhere as ‘a matrix-
like space that is nourishing, unnameable’ (NMS: 204). The chora
is not yet subject to the symbolic, but it is regulated by social and
natural constraints, such as family structure, culture and sexual
difference. As a mother–child totality, it is already implicated in
the Oedipal triangle and becomes subject to the intervention of the
phallus: ‘social organisation, always already symbolic, imprints
its constraints in a mediated form which organises the chora
not according to a law (a term we reserve for the symbolic) but
through an ordering’ (RPL: 26–7; italics in original).
Kristeva continues that it is the mother’s body that mediates
the symbolic law, and that therefore becomes the ordering prin-
ciple of the semiotic chora (RPL: 27). This association between
maternal body and chora has received much comment from her
feminist readers. More hostile interpretations regard the chora
as a metaphor for the uterus, a view which confirms the critics’
perception of Kristeva’s essentialism and her association of the
maternal body, and of women more generally, with the pre-
symbolic and pre-cultural (see J. Stone 1983: 42; see also Butler
1990, Huffer 1998). Others stress the function of the chora as a

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 Kristeva and Feminism

metaphor for the symbiotic link between mother and child (see
Grosz 1992: 195; Gross 1986). Such a spatial interpretation of
the chora should be complemented, according to Margaroni
(2005), by the chora’s temporal function, as that which lies prior
to the intervention of the phallus and the Name-of-the-Father.
In that respect, the chora, together with the semiotic, represents
the challenge to the symbolic, located on the side of the feminine
that, moreover, articulates the beginning of the ethical encounter
with alterity (see Chapter 3). Via the chora as a maternal space,
Kristeva theorises the maternal body as the child’s first point of
reference. The drives and their satisfaction – in other words, the
child’s dependence upon the mother for its physical and emotional
well-being – connect the body of the child to that of the mother
(RPL: 27–8). Yet, in spite of this symbiotic relationship, which
supports the child’s fragmented and undifferentiated body image,
the ambiguity and contradictory aims of the drives imply that the
pre-Oedipal body is already split (RPL: 27). Hence, the danger of
bodily disintegration and thus the need for bodily boundaries are
a constant concern (see below).
The fault-line between nature and culture, which informs
Kristeva’s deployment of the chora as well as the feminist
responses to it, returns in her discussion of the pregnant body,
which Kristeva characterises in the following way:

Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and
body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the
body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one
is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify
what is going on. ‘It happens, but I’m not there.’ (DL: 237)

It should come as no surprise that Kristeva’s emphasis on the

absence of the female subject during pregnancy has invited com-
mentators to suggest that Kristeva’s pregnant body is a body
without a subject and, hence, a body without agency (Gross 1986:
131). This denial of agency, as I indicated previously, chimes
strongly with the wider critique of Kristeva’s alleged neglect of
women’s agency, and it also relates closely to the contested status
of nature and culture in her thought. Yet despite this allusion to
women’s ‘absence’ as a subject during their pregnancy, Kristeva
does not associate pregnancy with nature; rather, pregnancy is

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

positioned on the threshold between nature and culture, concep-

tualised as one of those borderline experiences that Kristeva posits
as dialectical. As she argues,

[t]hrough a body, destined to insure reproduction of the species, the

woman-subject, although under the sway of the paternal function (as
symbolizing, speaking subject and like all others), [is] more of a filter
than anyone else – a thoroughfare, a threshold where ‘nature’ con-
fronts ‘culture’. (DL: 238; italics in original)

Is it so easy to dismiss the concerns of her critics, though? As Boulous

Walker (1998) has pointed out in her broadly sympathetic assess-
ment, there is something in Kristeva’s texts, despite her intentional
ambiguities, that remains stubbornly attached to the notion of women
as evacuated from the realm of the symbolic. Boulous Walker traces
this attachment to Kristeva’s discussion of the avant-garde, but it is
also apparent in some of her more brusque comments about female
embodiment. For example, in her essay ‘A New Type of Intellectual:
The Dissident’ (1977b), Kristeva evokes the subversive dimension of
the semiotic, and with it the subversive function of the intellectual
and the avant-garde writer as examples of two figures who draw on
the subversive potential of the semiotic. Women are also included in
Kristeva’s consideration of dissidence, but this specifically female dis-
sidence is embodied ‘simply through being pregnant and then becom-
ing a mother’ (1977b: 297). Taken together with a further claim, in
the same text, that ‘[a] woman is trapped within the frontiers of her
body and even of her species’ (1977b: 296), this makes for uncom-
fortable reading.
Kristeva returns to her consideration of the nature–culture
threshold with her discussion of the nursing body, which turns the
mother into ‘a strange fold that changes culture into nature, the
speaking into biology. Although it concerns every woman’s body,
the heterogeneity that cannot be subsumed in the signifier never-
theless explodes violently with pregnancy (the threshold of culture
and nature)’ (1977a: 182–3). What is more, the nursing maternal
body does not solely belong to the mother, but, as I already out-
lined, forms a symbiotic chora with the child:

My body is no longer mine, it doubles up, suffers, bleeds, catches

cold, puts its teeth in, slobbers, coughs, is covered with pimples, and

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 Kristeva and Feminism

it laughs. . . . But the pain, its pain – it comes from the inside, never
remains apart, other, it inflames me at once, without a second’s respite.
As if that was what I had given birth to and, not willing to part from
me, insisted on coming back, dwelled in me permanently. One does not
give birth in pain, one gives birth to pain. (1977a: 167)

Yet, the child’s symbiotic relationship with the mother and the
maternal body comes to an end; separation from the maternal
body is necessary for the emergence of the subject. Key to under-
standing the idea of separation is Kristeva’s concept of abjection.
While the origins of the concept of abjection go back to her dis-
cussion of rejection (see RPL: 147–64), it is in Powers of Horror
(1982a) that Kristeva, influenced by anthropological work on pol-
lution (Douglas 1966), introduces the notion of abjection. With
the notion of abjection, Kristeva further challenges assumptions of
a coherent body that highlights her concern with the fluidity of the
subject – in other words, her claim that bodies are not coherent,
but split, and that they oscillate between the semiotic and the sym-
bolic; abjection also underscores the threat to its integrity. Initially
located in the process of subject constitution, it induces the sepa-
ration of the child from the parents, in particular the cutting of
the symbiotic link with the mother, and the establishment of the
child’s tentative bodily boundaries. Abjecting the parents, the
child develops its bodily awareness, transforming the fragmented
‘body-in-bits-and-pieces’ into a coherent whole. The child also
transforms its relationship with bodily excrements; previously
experienced as pleasurable, they are now subjected to feelings of
loathing and disgust. While the abjection of bodily excrements
and of the parents establishes its sense of bodily boundaries, these,
however, are continuously undermined by the persistence of those
bodily fluids and bodily organs that excrete the abjected bodily
stuff. The subject thus engages in a continuous struggle with the
transgression of bodily boundaries. This disregard highlights
abjection’s paradoxical nature; whilst it is necessary in order to
obtain a sense of bodily, and indeed psychic, integrity, this sense
of integrity is deceptive, as boundaries are crossed and violated,
beyond the control of the subject. The illusion of stable and
clearly demarcated boundaries, whether morphological or indeed
social, can only be maintained at the price of the temporary, and
essentially futile, exclusion of that which is considered as not

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belonging to this body. Although the abject points to the subject’s

lack of autonomy with respect to his or her bodily affairs, it is
paradoxically only through the abject that there is a subject at all.
Moreover, it is important to distinguish the abject from the other
transgressive force, the semiotic; whereas the semiotic rejuvenates
the symbolic, the abject undermines and threatens the symbolic.
Hence, with the notion of abjection Kristeva highlights her
concern with the vulnerability and precariousness of the subject,
which Kelly Oliver refers to as the dark side of the subject (1993a:
62); abjection threatens the integrity of the subject’s corporeal
boundaries, while it is also constitutive of the subject.
To emphasise the ambiguity of abjection, Kristeva defines
abjection as what ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not
respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous,
the composite’ (PoH: 4). She illustrates abjection through the
example of food loathing and the sensation of disgust at certain
smells or foods, and also feelings of disgust at the thought or sight
of bodily secretions: blood, excrements, vomit, mucus; of corpses.
However, despite abjection’s connotation with bodily waste,
it does not represent a lack of cleanliness or health; Kristeva’s
concern with abjection is thus not a ‘mania for cleanliness . . ., a
“housewife psychosis”’ (J. Stone 1983: 45). Such a claim points to
a fundamental misunderstanding that fails to recognise abjection’s
ambiguity and hovering on the borders.
The concept of abjection has been deployed by some com-
mentators to account for the constitution of the social body, and
to explain misogyny, homophobia, racism and anti-semitism: in
short, practices of oppression that draw on the abjection of those
groups who are seen as a threat to the boundaries of the social or
political body (see Young 1990).23 What, though, is its relation-
ship to women? Is abjection gendered? Like much of Kristeva’s
work, Powers of Horror is not immediately feminist and it does
not explicitly deal with gender issues. Abjection, and the simulta-
neous horror and fascination of abjection, are experienced univer-
sally; they emerge following the separation from the parents and
the establishment of psychic and bodily boundaries that facilitate
the development of ego and superego as psychic agencies (see also
Lechte 1990: 158). Highlighting the universality of abjection,
Judith Still avers that associating abjection with the maternal is
an attempt to ‘tidy up’ the Kristevan text (Still 1997: 224). She

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challenges, in particular, Kelly Oliver’s claim that abjection is a

struggle to separate from the maternal body (1993a: 56). Against
Oliver, Still draws on Elizabeth Grosz’s analogy between the semi-
otic, the maternal chora and the abject (Grosz 1989), which is said
to avoid the connotation of abjection with (empirical) women,
and specifically with mothers, drawing instead on the feminine’s
critical and subversive capacity, beyond its association with binary
conceptions of gender.
Yet, Kristeva’s discussion, including her account of the femi-
nine and of abjection, remains open to different and contradictory
interpretations. According to Kristeva, it is the fear of women,
which is said to have its basis in women’s reproductive capacities,
that is turned into phobia and leads to the abjection of women and
to the association of women with the abject (PoH: 77). Moreover,
as Kristeva claims,

the relation to abjection is finally rooted in the combat that every

human being carries on with the mother. For in order to become
autonomous, it is necessary that one cut the instinctual dyad of the
mother and the child and that one become something other. (1996a:
118)

This ‘fascinated rejection’ is captured with the notion of abjection.

However, as I already indicated, women cannot unambiguously
reject the mother; instead, they identify with her, by becoming
mothers themselves. The centrality of motherhood to Kristeva’s
œuvre will occupy me again in Chapter 3, but in the next chapter
I will take a closer look at Kristeva’s writings on crisis and revolt.
This discussion, as I hope to demonstrate there, will add to my
assessment in this chapter, which focused, in the main, on the
dispute over the female subject and her constitution, the question
of her agency, and the controversy over her alleged subversive
capacity. Developing my journey into Kristeva’s ideas further
will also allow me to broach a further question that is of crucial
interest to feminism: this is the question of feminist politics and its
location in Kristeva’s recent, psychoanalytically informed, ideas
on revolt.

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Notes
1. In the same essay, Kristeva posits as her other core ideas intertextu-
ality, abjection and foreignness/strangeness.
2. A comprehensive assessment of Kristeva’s linguistic ideas and their
contribution to literary theory can be found in Becker-Leckrone
(2005). See also Bové (1983; 2006).
3. See, for example, Nancy Fraser who accuses Kristeva of subscribing
to a ‘quasi-Lacanian neostructuralism’ (1992b: 186). For a more
cautious assessment of Kristeva’s engagement with structuralism see
Kearney (1994).
4. It should be added that Kristeva’s work on language is also influ-
enced by Barthes and Jacobsen; however, I cannot consider their
influence within the context of this book.
5. As I argue below, Kristeva does not uncritically adopt a Lacanian
perspective. In fact, much of her conceptual apparatus is a critical
response to perceived shortcomings in Lacanian theory.
6. In a recent essay, Kristeva claims that the distinction between the
semiotic and the symbolic has no political or feminist connotations,
and is merely concerned with meaning (2004a: 204–5).
7. According to David Crystal (1992: 11), glossolalia consist of few
predictable, structural units lacking systematic word or sentence
meaning.
8. See also Kristeva’s recent discussion of Colette’s sensuous style of
writing (2004c), which receives a book-length treatment as part of
Kristeva’s genius trilogy (see Chapter 4).
9. It also provides the subject with jouissance, the Lacanian concept
that designates an unidentifiable capacity for enjoyment that lies
outside the realm of the symbolic and defies control, definition and
representation (Lacan 1998).
10. Negation – that is, the position of a thesis – should not be confused
with (semiotic and transgressive) negativity.
11. I do not share Anne-Marie Smith’s endorsement of Kristeva’s ‘con-
ceptual coherence’ (1998: 4).
12. The idea of traversal is also key to my discussion of Kristeva’s ethics
(see Chapter 3).
13. Although otherwise more sympathetic towards Kristeva’s ideas than
Butler, Jacqueline Rose also queries the semiotic’s alleged subversive
potential, arguing that ‘[t]he semiotic can never wholly displace the

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 Kristeva and Feminism

symbolic since it relies on that very order to give it its, albeit resist-
ant, shape’ (1993: 43). Of course, one should equally stress that the
symbolic can never displace the semiotic.
14. Intriguingly, Butler entitles her chapter ‘Kristeva’s Body Politics’,
without taking much account of the corporeal dimension of the
signifying process and the generative function played therein by the
semiotic.
15. Many of these ideas are articulated in the contributions to Nicholson
(1990). See also Butler and Scott (1992), and Benhabib et al. (1995).
16. For an outline of the different versions of the subject-in-process in
contemporary feminist thought see Lloyd (2005).
17. However, as I argue further below, her philosophical anti-essentialism
is undermined by her adherence to the psychoanalytic narrative of
gender identity, which, despite Kristeva’s efforts to the contrary,
does not resolve the tension between her insistence on plurality and
singularity, and the psychoanalytic injunction of gender normativity.
18. As Eleanor H. Kuykendall states, ‘Kristeva’s ethics of linguistics is
not, finally feminist . . . in that it is avowedly Freudian and leaves no
place for a feminine conception of agency’ (1989: 181).
19. And in relation to the signifier phallus, where ‘having the phallus’
refers to masculinity and ‘being the phallus’ to femininity. See Lacan
(1993: 289–90).
20. This pathologisation of the father-identified, or phallic, woman also
underpins Kristeva’s depiction of the figure of the lesbian, a point
that has been taken up in queer readings of her work (see Butler
1990; Cooper 2000).
21. I return to a discussion of the drives in Chapter 3, where I consider
the role of the death drive in the generation of violence.
22. Following Freud, Kristeva defines the drive as ‘a pivot between
“soma” and “psyche”, between biology and representation’. The
somatic or biological facet of the drive is itself implicated within the
social; as she declares, ‘what we understand by biology is – drives
and energy, if you wish, but always already a “carrier of meaning”
and a “relation” to another person’ (NMS: 30). I consider the ethical
dimension of Kristeva’s intercorporeal account in Chapter 3.
23. See McAfee (1993) and Moruzzi (1993) for a consideration of
abjection in the context of the nation and migration. See also Butler
(1990; 1993), who employs Kristeva’s concept of abjection in her
discussion of sexuality.

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 2

Crisis, Revolt, Intimacy

[H]appiness exists only at the price of a revolt. None of us has pleasure

without confronting an obstacle, prohibition, authority, or law that
allows us to realize ourselves as autonomous and free.
(SNSR: 7)

In the previous chapter, I alluded to the pivotal role of the idea of

crisis in Kristeva’s early work. As I intimated there, Revolution in
Poetic Language discusses how the crisis of modernity displaces
political revolution on to a revolution in signification and into the
field of aesthetics more generally. Her 1980s trilogy, which com-
prises her book on abjection, Powers of Horror (1982a), her book
on love, Tales of Love (1987a), and her book on melancholia,
Black Sun (1989a), delves further into the topic of crisis; however,
instead of attending to the working-out of crisis at the wider social
and political level, Kristeva’s writings take an inward turn, which
manifests itself in her concern with the psychical symptoms of indi-
vidual crises, and which are conveyed in the individual’s suffering
in the face of familial and social problems. A more systematic
treatment of this topic can be found in Kristeva’s recent writings,
beginning with New Maladies of the Soul (1995) and continued in
the volumes of The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis.1 It is in
this latter work that she develops the link between crisis and revolt
more fully (see also Kristeva 2000c); as I outline in this chapter,
her emphasis now lies with the assertion of the unfolding of a crisis
of Western societies, coupled with modern Man’s curtailed ability
to generate meaning and engage in representation. Furthermore,
these crises, according to Kristeva, produce specific types of
psychic illnesses, which she refers to as ‘new maladies of the soul’
(this is also the title of her book from 1995). As a path out of
crisis, Kristeva proposes the need to re-establish a lost European
tradition of revolt (see also Chapter 5) that can restore the capac-
ity for representation.

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

Like most of her other writings, Kristeva’s texts on crisis and

revolt are not obviously recognisable as feminist; they do not
explicitly address feminist concerns or offer feminist solutions
(although comments on feminism are interspersed throughout
them). This absence of a feminist sensibility is also reflected in the
critical commentary. Recent works, notably several of the contri-
butions to Chanter and Ziarek (2005) and to Oliver and Keltner
(2009), as well as recent monographs on Kristeva, have given
this issue some attention (see in particular Gambaudo 2007a;
see also Beardsworth 2004a; Sjöholm 2005). However, feminist
analyses of this work are only now beginning to emerge (see, for
example, Ziarek 2005). Such work is crucial, however, because it
can bring to the fore Kristeva’s attention to issues of key concern
to feminism, including the micro-political aspects of subjectivity
and politics, and the mutually constitutive realms of embodiment,
psychic and social-political life. Described by commentators as a
‘displacement of politics’ – Kristeva herself refers to it as ‘intimate
revolt’ – this emphasis should also entail an analysis of Kristeva’s
theorisation of female sexuality and of the specifically female pros-
pects for revolt and transformation. Hence, these writings, whilst
not explicitly feminist in their aims or aspirations, constitute an
important contribution to a deterritorialisation of politics that
stresses the intimate aspects of political life.2
The importance that Kristeva accords to the idea of crisis is
underscored by a more fundamental assertion that also informs
her recent writings and that further aids, in my view, a feminist
appropriation; this is the connection she establishes between
psychic and social life. This aspect has recently been emphasised
by Sylvie Gambaudo (2007a), who formulates a compelling case
in favour of such a cultural reading of psychoanalysis, by sug-
gesting that Kristeva’s œuvre makes an important contribution
to the understanding of recent socio-cultural changes in gender
relations, specifically as they pertain to parenting. Kelly Oliver’s
work illustrates how Kristeva’s psychoanalytic thought can be uti-
lised in a more specifically feminist direction (Oliver 1993a) and
to account, more broadly, for what Oliver terms a psychoanalytic
social theory (2004; see also Margaroni 2007). As I suggested in
the Introduction, such a use of psychoanalysis generates its own
set of challenges: for example, is it acceptable to deploy psycho-
analytic terms and concepts for an analysis of gender relations

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 Crisis, Revolt, Intimacy

if, as I sought to demonstrate in the previous chapter, psychoa-

nalysis has been dismissed by many feminists for its complicity in
the production of misogynistic discourses on gender? Moreover,
can a psychoanalytic discourse provide feminism with the tools
to explain unequal gender relations and to articulate ideas for a
feminist project of political and social transformation, a feminist
revolt? We have already seen that a widespread feminist response
to this challenge consists in abandoning psychoanalysis altogether
(see Chapter 1). However, against such as a rejection, I want to
advocate a more nuanced engagement with Kristevan psychoa-
nalysis because it offers, in my view, an insightful account into
the interrelated production of psychic, social and political life that
could be read, against the grain, in the service of a feminist project
aimed at transformation.
Therefore, this chapter fulfils two functions. I want to demon-
strate, first, that Kristeva provides feminism with a very helpful
account of the intersection of psychic and social life. This contri-
bution, useful overall, is, however, undermined by her reluctance
to embrace more fully the political dimension of revolt, and in
doing so, fails to address explicitly the prospects for political
transformation that emerge from her thought. In essence, her
response to the psycho-social causes of crisis is a predominantly
individual or, as she calls it, intimist, one that does not connect
the two more fully. This is somewhat paradoxical, as it tends to
downplay her insistence on the socio-genetic origins of crisis at
the expense of a psycho-genetic account. Central to my further
discussion will be the question of the connection between femi-
nism and revolt: is feminism, for Kristeva, a form of revolt? And
if not, can Kristeva be utilised for a feminist conception of revolt?
This requires a critical assessment of her emphasis on the intimate
sphere and her apparent endorsement of individualised accounts
of revolt. As I argue here, these ideas cannot be understood outside
the context of her social analysis. Moreover, mapping out the
feminist implications of this work, I want to suggest that her writ-
ings on revolt should be interpreted in conjunction with her most
recent publications on the female genius (see Chapter 4). I want to
begin this task by providing an exposition of Kristeva’s key ideas
on crisis and revolt. This will be followed by an examination of the
role accorded to the feminine in these recent texts.

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Crisis, the Society of the Spectacle and the New Maladies

of the Soul
According to the philosopher Simon Critchley, the theme of
crisis is a leitmotif of contemporary philosophy that is both
intrinsically and etymologically linked with the self-awareness
of philosophy, especially in its Continental manifestations. The
importance accorded to crisis is evident, Critchley argues, in the
circuitous undertaking of philosophy, which offers a critique of
the present on the one hand, while basing this critique upon its
diagnosis of the crisis of society on the other (Critchley 1999:
12).3 Even the most cursory survey of Kristeva’s writings will rec-
ognise that she belongs to this philosophical tradition. Stressing
this aspect of Kristeva’s work also underpins a central argument
of Sara Beardsworth’s analysis of Kristeva’s writings (2004a).
Beardsworth conceptualises Kristeva’s ideas as a philosophy of
modernity that offers a response to the problem of nihilism, a phil-
osophical concern that occupied the writings of, amongst others,
Nietzsche, and that emerged in response to the decline of religious
certainties and the subsequent uncertainty faced by modern Man.
Focusing on Kristeva’s 1980s trilogy, Beardsworth contends that
at the core of Kristeva’s thought lies the diagnosis of the loss of
loss; therefore, her concern with meaning, authority and its col-
lapse must be positioned within the wider context of nihilism and
its treatment of loss.
If philosophical concerns frame Kristeva’s wider discussion, it is
psychoanalysis that informs her concrete analyses of the problem
of crisis (see Gambaudo 2007a). Even though this psychoanalytic
response is primarily a therapeutic one, it is also part of a philo-
sophical tradition that seeks to offer an answer to the crisis that is
modernity. Kristeva argues as much when she asserts that ‘psycho-
analysis is determined as much by philosophical preoccupations
as it is influenced by its own scientific sources’ (IR: 144). I return
to this theme below, where I ask how women are inscribed in this
circuitous discourse of ‘crisis-of-modernity’ and ‘modernity-as-
crisis’. For the moment, my interest remains with the emergence of
Kristeva’s account of and her answer to crisis.
I previously indicated that the crisis evoked by the onset of
modernity informs Kristeva’s understanding of human interac-
tion and leads to her engagement with that other theoretician of

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 Crisis, Revolt, Intimacy

the crisis of modern Man, Freud. Thus, whereas Revolution in

Poetic Language could be described as a philosophical reflection
on crisis and on the role of aesthetics, albeit one already informed
by psychoanalytic categories, the work Kristeva has published
since the 1980s takes a distinctly psychoanalytic and therapeutic
turn, addressing the individual manifestations of this crisis, which
she experiences in the psychoanalytic encounter with her patients.
I already mentioned her 1980s trilogy, whose main foci, on love,
abjection and melancholia, engage with the subject’s suffering in
the face of crisis. Here I want to draw attention to New Maladies
of the Soul, where Kristeva illustrates at length the emergence of
new patients who suffer from a society that no longer provides an
adequate outlet for representation.4
New Maladies of the Soul constitutes a departure in more than
one way, though. For one, it has been described as instituting a shift
from an Oedipal to a narcissistic framework (Gambaudo 2007a;
Beardsworth 2004b: 126). With this shift, Kristeva accounts for
the crisis in authority, specifically a decline in the authority of the
paternal function, which, as Gambaudo avers, is generated by
changes in the structure of modern parenting (see also Chapter
3) and which leaves the subject with no outlet for revolt (more
on this below). It also introduces a new gender narrative vis-à-vis
the question of suffering. Whereas Black Sun, for example, draws
extensively on the subject of female suffering, experienced as
female melancholia, and whereas earlier work stressed the para-
doxical nature of maternal suffering (which, as we have seen in the
previous chapter, is always offset by jouissance), New Maladies of
the Soul introduces a set of new patients who emerge from across
the gender divide. What they share is a suffering triggered by the
crisis of paternal function, which, as we have seen, is said to cor-
respond to wider changes in social life, such as changes in the
structure of parenting.
Given her psychoanalytic emphasis, Kristeva’s key interest lies
in an exploration of the implications of this crisis for psychic life
and, more specifically, for psychic well-being. In order to pursue
this further, I want to turn to some of the psychoanalytic ideas that
underpin Kristeva’s discussion of revolt and that she discusses in
Revolt.
Following Kristeva’s focus on the interrelated production of
the psychic and the social realms, the origin of crisis cannot just

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

be found in society. Rather, as she discusses at length in New

Maladies of the Soul, individual suffering is also the product of
a crisis of authority in the familial realm, where the place of the
paternal remains vacant. The first part of the book presents at
length several case studies of her patients that are said to display
these symptoms. These include mainly an inability to form con-
nections or bonds with others and, crucially, an inability to form
representations. However, due to the widespread nature of these
individual malaises, Kristeva concludes that they are experienced at
a collective level. Declaring that we live in a culture of melancholy,
Kristeva asserts that melancholia is not merely the expression of
individual suffering, but a wider cultural symptom. Reflecting on
the geographical and national context of her work, she observes
these symptoms in particular in France, a country that in her view
suffers from national depression (see also Chapter 5).
I already alluded to a potentially profitable reading of Kristeva’s
work at the intersection between psychic and social life.5 New
Maladies of the Soul brings this traversal between the psyche and
the social to the fore, by demonstrating how wider social trends
intersect with the functioning of the Oedipal family, and how
together they spark off a crisis of the subject. Before I comment
on this further, I want to introduce a central reference point that
underpins Kristeva’s discussion of these new maladies of the soul
and that makes a frequent appearance in her work, but receives
scant detailed analysis; Kristeva’s writings on crisis, and indeed
her work on revolt, are informed by Guy Debord’s situationist
analysis of the society of the spectacle (Debord 1994).
Broadly speaking, Debord’s work is an attempt to couple aes-
thetic practices with transformations in everyday life and, informed
by a critique of consumer society and of the attempts of (left-wing)
organisations, challenges the dominance of late-modern capital-
ism that is said to stifle creativity and rebellion.6 As I mentioned
above, Kristeva does not provide a comprehensive engagement
with Debord’s ideas; rather, they are invoked, at various points,
as a metaphor for crisis and its manifestations, to the point where
the title of Debord’s book, The Society of the Spectacle, acquires
the status of a theoretical concept in Kristeva’s discussion of the
crisis of contemporary society. What, then, does this crisis consist
of, and how and why does it generate the kinds of patients that I
alluded to briefly at the beginning of this section?

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 Crisis, Revolt, Intimacy

According to Kristeva, the dominance of a media society,

with its spectacles and theatricalisation, combines with economic
deprivation as a result of neo-liberal policies to form a crisis that
grips Western societies.7 In this crisis, individual suffering, result-
ing from a lack of ideals, including a decline of paternal author-
ity, conjoins with the effects of socio-economic deprivation, such
as unemployment and poverty (2000b: 55). The outcome of the
cultural crisis of the society of the spectacle culminates in a new
world order, which is said to normalise and to corrupt (SNSR:
5). As Kristeva avers, ‘the normalizing order is far from perfect
and fails to support the excluded: jobless youth, the poor in the
projects, the homeless, the unemployed, and foreigners, among
many others (SNSR: 7). Intrinsically connected with this crisis,
and part of what Critchley refers to as the circuitous argumenta-
tion of Continental philosophy (see above), is a curtailed ability
to revolt, which endangers what Kristeva regards as an older
European tradition of revolt. As she suggests, ‘the very notion of
culture as revolt and of art as revolt is in peril, submerged as we
are in the culture of entertainment, the culture of performance,
the culture of the show’ (SNSR: 6). Building further on Debord,
Kristeva claims that the image, the media, trivialisation and the-
atricalisation have usurped individual and public imagination,
resulting in a weakening of the imaginary and a decline in the
capacity for representation. The excluded are left with images and
regressive ideologies, culminating either in the spread of psychic
illness or in aimless rioting and violence (SNSR: 7).8 Kristeva’s
thesis is an intriguing one, and it would be worth while examining
it further. However, my focus lies elsewhere; rather than further
investigating her assertions drawn from her reading of Debord, I
want to pursue the implications that build on her diagnosis.
Overall, Kristeva’s diagnosis of contemporary society is a rather
pessimistic one (see also Gambaudo 2007a: 189), and one is left
wondering whether a way out of crisis is possible at all. Yet, as I
hope to show in the next section, despite her pessimism, she holds
on to the idea of revolt, asserting that the capacity for revolt is
not completely lost and can be restored. Thus, paradoxically, and
in spite of the infringement of crisis upon the capacity for revolt,
only revolt presents a solution to crisis. This idea is more fully
unpacked in Kristeva’s writings on revolt, specifically in The Sense
and Non-Sense of Revolt (2000a), where she further maps her

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understanding of crisis and revolt. It is also there that she sketches

three related responses to crisis; these include a psychoanalytic-
therapeutic response, an aesthetic response and a philosophical
response.

From Crisis to Revolt

One of Kristeva’s privileged responses to crisis, which I discuss in
Chapter 5, is the practice of critique (see also Brown 2005), but for
now I want to return briefly to the relevance of Debord, whose sit-
uationist response to the society of the spectacle consists of a series
of strategies that seek to disrupt the routine of a society in the
thrall of consumer capitalism. Such strategies include the deploy-
ment of ludic elements, eroticism, dérive and détournement.9
These elements of a strategy of revolt are considered to contribute
ultimately to the downfall of the capitalist system of production
and reproduction. Elements of this situationist strategy of revolt
can also be detected in Kristeva’s writings (and, more broadly
speaking, in Lacanian conceptions based upon jouissance). Yet,
Kristeva’s answer to the problem of crisis ultimately is not a
ludic or situationist one, but draws instead upon psychoanalytic
insights. The details of this response occupy me in the remain-
der of this chapter, where I attend to the notion of revolt, as it is
presented in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt and in Intimate
Revolt.
It may be intuitive, especially in a book concerned with the
feminist appropriation of Kristeva’s ideas, to expect an explora-
tion of the conditions, prospects and strategies of political revolt.
Yet the kind of revolt envisaged by Kristeva is not primarily asso-
ciated with politics or with political transformation, even though
she begins The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt with the intention
to ‘evoke the current political state’ (SNSR: 1). In fact, any link
between revolt and politics is tentative; following her concern,
since the 1980s, with individual well-being, she emphasises instead
the necessity to restore psychic life, and to re-establish the capac-
ity for intimate sensory experiences that allow for a reconnection
between discourse and affect. In this respect, her work on revolt
evokes her criticism, articulated two decades earlier, of feminism’s
first and second generations; she charges the first generation for its
attempt to gain access to the paternally coded symbolic order, at

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the expense of the maternal-feminine, while she faults the second

generation for its alleged efforts at establishing a feminist counter-
culture that turns its back on the symbolic. Translated into the
language of political philosophy, Kristeva’s criticism is aimed as
much at attempts located in the wider landscape of civil society,
whether they attempt to overthrow existing institutions via politi-
cal violence, or whether they enter and engage with the existing
institutional network of formal democracy (1977b). As I will
suggest in the next section, Kristeva’s revolt performs what Diana
Coole, as well as Cecilia Sjöholm, has described as a displacement
of politics that focuses its attention on to the private and micro-
political or, as Kristeva refers to it, the intimate realm (see Coole
2000; Sjöholm 2005).
Kristeva justifies her seemingly non-political account of revolt
via a series of etymological expositions of the term that, at least
on the surface, resemble Hannah Arendt’s similar use of etymol-
ogy in her discussion of revolution (Arendt 1963); unsurpris-
ingly, aim, focus and result differ substantially. Unlike Arendt’s,
Kristeva’s discussion does not focus upon revolt’s political con-
notations. In fact, as I have proposed, the idea that politics is, at
least potentially, antithetical to the possibility of revolt lies at the
heart of her argument. Inspired instead by her reading of Freud
and also of Proust (1996b),10 she proposes an interpretation of
revolt as remembrance and return. This, as I want to suggest,
also requires renewed attention to her use of negativity and of the
concept of the semiotic. In The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt,
the first volume of the revolt series, Kristeva identifies three con-
stellations of revolt that are said to be logically independent but
psychologically interdependent. These are revolt as the trans-
gression of prohibition; revolt as repetition, working-through
and working-out; and revolt as displacement and games (SNSR:
16). All three, according to Kristeva, are essential elements of a
Freudian conception of revolt, and they are said to facilitate the
subject’s return to its unconscious, but it is the second element that
Kristeva favours in particular. Building upon her assertion of the
alleged loss of a culture of revolt, Kristeva surmises that this loss
cannot be regained by embarking on a project of political rebel-
lion. The capacity for rebellion is contingent upon the existence of
authority; in other words, it requires an obstacle that can be trans-
gressed. Such authority, however, is in decline, and hence there is

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no obstacle, no prohibition or authority left against which we can

rebel. What is required instead is the reconstitution, with the help
of psychoanalysis, of the psychic imaginary, of sublimation and of
a balance between drive and language. It is through this inward
turn, or turn towards the intimate (see below), that psycho-
analysis plays a central role in the re-establishment of a culture of
revolt.
For now, I want to remain briefly with New Maladies of the
Soul, where Kristeva further outlines the role of psychoanalysis.
As she states, to rectify individual suffering, we need to restore the
capacity of individuals to rebuild their psyches, ‘to create a space
for an “inner zone” – a secret garden, an intimate quarter, or more
simply and ambitiously, a psychic life’ (NMS: 27). Psychoanalytic
therapy is central to the restoration of psychic life, but she also
broadens its function, and devotes most of her second volume of
the revolt series, on intimate revolt, to it. Thus, in the wake of
New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva further develops her account
of crisis, most prominently in her volumes on revolt (2000a; 2002;
2005b). In fact, these books could be read quite profitably as an
answer to the questions that emerge in New Maladies of the Soul,
and I turn to an exploration of their key themes in the following
sections.
I already alluded to Kristeva’s claim that a culture of revolt
previously existed within European societies. Such a culture of
revolt is necessary, according to Kristeva, for psychical and social
well-being, as it provides an outlet for the pleasure principle,
and she is at pains to assert the ‘necessity of a culture of revolt
in a society that is alive and developing, not stagnating. In fact,
if such a culture did not exist, life would become a life of death’
(SNSR: 7). While this general endorsement of revolt and its alleged
benefit for psychic well-being informs Kristeva’s wider concerns,
she identifies society’s margins as a privileged location for revolt,
because it is there, according to Kristeva, that the drive or change
is said to be generated (1996a: 45). Conceptually, her celebration
of marginality (and a permanent one at that) resonates strongly
with her concept of the semiotic; the semiotic, along with the femi-
nine, is a metaphor for marginality whose transgressive capacities
rejuvenate the symbolic and engender change (see Chapter 1).
Kristeva also offers a sociological account, which identifies those
groups who, as I alluded to above, are excluded by the society of

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the spectacle, as the agents of this change. Taken together, they

constitute a fairly heterogeneous group, consisting of artists, the
unemployed, young people, immigrants and so on. Unfortunately,
Kristeva does not develop this further, leaving open any questions
regarding the specific nature of revolt, the formation and exercise
of collective agency, or the relationships between the different ele-
ments of the marginalised. Moreover, it would also be interesting
to ask why revolt emerges at the margins; in other words, whether
marginality constitutes a privileged position in the generation of
change.
While these questions remain unanswered (in fact, they are
not posed by Kristeva), it should be stressed that her celebration
of marginality (as we will see in Chapter 5, her preferred term in
her more recent writings is ‘singularity’) reverberates more widely
with her previous writings on dissidence, and with the intellectual
and aesthetic creations associated with dissidence (1977b). Two
conclusions can be drawn from this. First, Kristeva’s notion of
revolt is not primarily aimed at the political horizon and cannot
easily be translated into collective revolt – for example, in the
form of feminist activism; instead, it is closely linked with aes-
thetic practice (2000b: 80–1) and with psychoanalytic experience,
aimed at providing an outlet for the drives. Kristeva is at pains
to detach the term ‘revolt’ from its exclusively political connota-
tions (2000b: 99).11 As she states, in her introduction to The Sense
and Non-Sense of Revolt, she wants to evoke the current political
state, characterised by a lack of revolt; moreover, she promises
not to evade the problem of politics, but to approach it ‘from a bit
of a distance’ (SNSR: 1). Yet, this promise is never kept, and the
connection between politics and revolt is, at best, tentative and, at
worst, severed at the expense of politics.
It is easy to see how the charges raised against Kristeva’s earlier
work, including the doubts over her political usefulness and her
contribution to feminism, are confirmed by such a reading of her
most recent writings. For Kristeva, revolt seems a solitary experi-
ence, aimed at providing an outlet for the drives. There are pas-
sages in Kristeva that describe politics as part of the problem, even
though she stresses the importance of politics and indeed of politi-
cal struggle. (I return to this below, with respect to feminism.) In
a sense, psychic well-being precedes the capacity or even desir-
ability of political engagement. Hence, it also follows that the step

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between revolt-as-return and revolt-as-politics is not a necessary

one.12 Yet, revolt is necessary and possible.
There is a second aspect to Kristeva’s discussion of revolt,
which I develop further in Chapter 5; this is her insistence on ques-
tioning and on permanent inquiry and critique. In her recent work,
Kristeva asserts, following in particular her reading of Hannah
Arendt, the need for questioning, and thus for psychoanalysis
as a discourse of ‘permanent inquiry’ (IR: 236) where question-
ing becomes the ‘quintessential mode of speech in analysis’ (IR:
236). Such an approach provides Kristeva with the link between
psychoanalysis, as the epistemological and therapeutic device, the
permanent questioning and critique, and revolt as return. It is to
this last point that my attention turns in the next section.

Beyond the Phallus? Female Sexuality, Oedipus and Revolt

We have already seen that Kristeva’s concept of revolt carries a
series of related connotations that aim at the psychoanalytic and
the aesthetic, as well as the philosophical horizon. Here I want to
look more closely at some of the psychoanalytic ideas that under-
pin her writings on revolt. Of particular interest to my discussion
is her reformulation of Freudian conceptions of sexuality, as this, I
believe, illuminates her work on revolt and establishes its connec-
tion with the feminine. It also allows for a fuller development of
the potential cross-fertilisation between her writings on revolt and
their possible contributions to feminist thought (see next section).
In order to develop such a reading, I will consider the psychoana-
lytic narrative of revolt. However, this also returns me to a ques-
tion I asked in the previous chapter: namely, whether the ethos and
practice of psychoanalysis is antithetical to the idea of revolt. In
other words, I want to ask whether psychoanalysis is a conform-
ist enterprise, or an enterprise of revolt. To understand Kristeva’s
insistence on the role of psychoanalysis in the re-establishment of
a culture of revolt more fully, it is therefore necessary to examine
how she conceptualises the function of psychoanalysis, and what
role she imagines it to fulfil in revolt.13
I already intimated that Kristeva refers to psychoanalysis as
a questioning and critical practice (I develop this more fully in
Chapter 5). She vehemently opposes normalising and conformist
interpretations of psychoanalysis, most strongly articulated in her

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critique of ego psychology, which she accuses of stifling the nega-

tive, and with it, the openness, fluidity and precariousness of the
subject. This is not to say that Kristeva wants to put the subject in
crisis; in fact, as I stated above, an important concern of her work,
especially in the 1980s trilogy, deals with the challenge of provid-
ing subjects with some form of psychic stability. However, this
emphasis on stability can only ever offset a suffering psyche out of
joint. Thus, instead of ego psychology’s attempts at shoring up the
stability of the subject, Kristeva advocates a form of psychoanalysis
that brings to the fore the subject’s suppleness and openness. This
openness manifests itself in the figure of the analysand as much as in
the figure of the analyst, leading Kristeva to proclaim that analysis
must result in ‘a state of perpetual rebirth’ (IR: 233), while the ‘ana-
lyzed subject . . . must be a subject in revolt’ (IR: 237).14 Hence, the
methods deployed by psychoanalysis, as well as its goal, must aim
towards this rebirth-in-revolt, returning the subject to its uncon-
scious and on to a journey back through its own (pre-)history.
Unsurprisingly, the issue of sexuality is central to Kristeva’s
psychoanalytic discussion of revolt. In Chapter 1, I sketched
Kristeva’s psychoanalytic version, influenced by Freud and Lacan,
of the girl-child’s incomplete route into the order of law and lan-
guage. Here I want to pay attention to Kristeva’s recent discus-
sion of female sexuality and the ensuing prospects for revolt. As
Kristeva states, girls and women, by necessity, position themselves
in relation to the phallus, language and the symbolic order, but
this positioning is ambiguous, informed by a female irony that
recognises the illusory nature of the phallus. This female ambigu-
ity and irony vis-à-vis the phallus and the symbolic order also shed
some light on the question of women’s oscillation between the
semiotic and the symbolic, a question that has occupied Kristeva’s
feminist critics and that has led some to claim – wrongly, as I sug-
gested in the previous chapter – that Kristeva denies women access
to the symbolic order. Female irony, furthermore, is indicative
of women’s constitutive psychic bisexuality, which engages in an
inscription into the social order with ‘aloof efficiency’, described
by Kristeva as a ‘critical and ironical capacity’ (SNSR: 103).
In order to understand Kristeva’s theory of female sexual-
ity more fully, it is helpful to recall briefly some of Freud’s key
assertions on the development of female sexuality, which he
developed over a period of more than two decades.15 Crucial to

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his discussion, but also to Kristeva’s appropriation of his work, is

the consideration given to the girl-child’s positioning vis-à-vis the
Oedipus complex, specifically her self-‘discovery’ as a castrated
being, and her ambivalent relationship towards her parents. As is
well known, Freud asserts that the little girl’s path towards mature
adult sexuality undergoes a more complex process of differentia-
tion and development than that of the little boy. In essence, this is
due to the social, psychic and familial compulsion imposed upon
the girl, who has to change both object and aim of her initial affec-
tion: the mother. While the little boy accomplishes this infantile
trauma by transferring from the mother to another woman – that
is, from one female object to another (Kristeva refers to this as
‘Oedipus 1’), the ‘normal’ route to femininity requires the girl to
switch both aim and object, away from the mother and on to a
male object of love (Kristeva calls this ‘Oedipus 2’). Yet, despite
this Oedipal injunction, girls rarely complete this process success-
fully, which accounts, according to Freud and Kristeva, for the
more frequent display of bisexuality in women.
If the girl, following Freud’s narrative, cannot or does not
accomplish the requirements imposed upon her by the incest taboo
– that is, the prohibition on the mother, she seems additionally
burdened by her restricted ability to revolt against the father and,
hence, against authority. The boy, on the other hand, along with
his brothers, does not suffer the same fate. As outlined by Freud in
Totem and Taboo (1998a), a text Kristeva invokes repeatedly, the
sons wage a revolt against the father, which results in the replace-
ment of the authority of the father with the totemic symbol (and
thus to a restoration of authority). Female revolt, as I proposed
in the previous chapter, is more likely to perform an inward turn,
experienced, in the main, in the frequent display of female melan-
cholia (see also Chapter 3).16
Whereas Freud’s narrative of revolt ends with the brothers,
Kristeva develops his story to account for a form of female revolt
that she locates in women’s constitutive bisexuality and in their
ambiguous position vis-à-vis the phallus and the order of law and
language. Two central elements inform this narrative; these are her
assertion of the universal applicability of the Oedipal injunction,
notwithstanding its concrete modifications (more on this below),
and phallic monism. With Freud, Kristeva insists on the universal
application of the Oedipus complex as the structure that frames

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the child’s entrance into the order of law and language. While she
alludes, too briefly, to the fact that the concrete manifestations
of the Oedipus complex may differ, thus hinting at a potential
departure from the traditional heterosexual family structures
(see Chapter 3), she firmly holds on to the notion of a triangular,
universally applicable structure. Unfortunately, Kristeva does not
develop this point further, and hence one can only speculate on
how she would envisage a non-heterosexual Oedipality, or how
the masculine and the feminine would be distributed in a non-
heterosexual context. Such a discussion could have presented an
interesting addition to recent debates on kinship structures, located
at the intersection of feminism and queer theory, which have chal-
lenged the position of the heterosexual family.17 Moreover, such
a queer reading of sexual difference may have led to a welcome
deconstruction of the foundational binary of masculinity and
femininity, which haunts theories of sexual difference and which
acquires its meaning in the context of the heterosexual matrix
intrinsic to the configuration of the Oedipal constellation. While
Kristeva does not pursue these questions, it is worth mentioning
that her ‘concession’ regarding the viability of a non-heterosexual
Oedipality constitutes a welcome departure from her previously
expressed view, that the absence of the father carries the danger of
psychosis in the child (I return to this aspect in Chapter 3).
She also posits, secondly, the operation of what she refers to
as phallic monism: that is, the universal application of the phallus
as a reference point for the development of both male and female
sexuality. However, despite the universal operation of Oedipus
and phallus as structural reference points for the development of
female and male sexuality alike, there emerge substantial differ-
ences in the sexual individuation of boys and girls, and in their
entrance into the symbolic order. It is at this juncture that the
difference between ‘Oedipus 1’ and ‘Oedipus 2’ comes into play.
Oedipus 1, as I already intimated, articulates the prohibition
of the child’s incestuous desire for the mother; its ‘law’ obtains
universal applicability in so far as both boy-child and girl-child
must submit to it. Oedipus 2, on the other hand, is an injunction
against the girl-child and a prerequisite for the development of a
‘normal’ female sexuality, requiring her to change her desire from
the maternal object on to a man.
While Kristeva, as we see below, will map an alternative path

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towards female revolt, she leaves unchallenged the main premises

of Freud’s narrative. These include, as mentioned, her insist-
ence on the universality of a triangular Oedipal structure and of
the necessity of phallic monism. She also does not question the
implicit normative content of sexed positions. As Judith Butler
(1990) has stated, the meaning of masculinity and of femininity
can only become intelligible within a wider normative framework
of heterosexuality, where desire is channelled into a heterosexual
direction, and where gender emerges and is continuously reaf-
firmed by the articulation of such heterosexual desire. Moreover,
bisexuality, which, according to Kristeva, is most prominent
amongst women, can only be understood inside this ‘heterosexual
matrix’, as an oscillation between heterosexuality and homosexu-
ality.18 While such a ‘queer’ reading of Kristeva would lead me
beyond the scope of this book, it is, I believe, a necessary challenge
to any feminist interpretation that leaves unquestioned the notion
of sexual difference, and of the binary between masculine and
feminine (see also Cooper 2000).19 For now, I want to return to an
immanent reading of Kristeva, by attending further to the implica-
tions that follow from her story of female sexuality.
The openness of the psyche, which raises the prospect of a
variation from the normal route to adult sexuality, generates a
series of potential implications that can follow from women’s con-
stitutive bisexuality. Key to these options is women’s respective
positioning vis-à-vis the phallus. While an acknowledgment of the
illusory position of the phallus risks the descent into depressive
regression, this risk is outweighed by the danger and disadvantage
that follow a denial of psychical bisexuality, and with it a denial of
the illusory, an identification with the phallus and the emergence
of the female paranoiac.
What, though, happens to women beyond depressive regression
and paranoia? If women’s position vis-à-vis the phallus is illusory,
what are the implications for revolt? Are women also beyond the
phallus? Kristeva denies this, insisting again on a phallic monism:
that is, on the universality of the phallus. However, girls’ and
women’s position towards the phallus differs substantially from
that of men, and it is due to this differential position that the
prospect for feminine (though not feminist) revolt emerges. Much
has been made of the gendering of Kristeva’s categorical distinc-
tion between the semiotic and the symbolic, and about women’s

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position in the symbolic order. As we have seen in the previous

chapter, this has been a key issue of contention in the reception of
Kristeva’s ideas, leading to accusations that she condemns women
to a position outside the symbolic and, hence, outside intelligi-
bility. Without making an explicit reference to these debates,
Kristeva takes up the central issue in The Sense and Non-Sense of
Revolt, where she outlines women’s position vis-à-vis the phallus.
She suggests that women recognise what she describes as the illu-
sory nature of the phallus, allowing them to inscribe themselves
into the social order – that is, the symbolic – while at the same
time remaining removed from it. With reference to Hegel’s quip
about women being the eternal irony of the community, Kristeva
characterises it as an ‘aloof efficiency’ (SNSR: 101–2). In Intimate
Revolt, she develops this point, locating the source of women’s
irony and aloofness with respect to the symbolic order in their
‘sensory intimacy’ (IR: 5), providing them with the capacity to
develop a questioning attitude that she sees as the hallmark of
revolt (see also below and Chapter 5). Thus, for Kristeva, women’s
psycho-sexual development, culminating in a constitutive bisexu-
ality, equips them with an attitude of revolt, what I will call an
ethos of revolt. Their capacity to engage in revolt, however, is
contingent upon their ability to engage with their constitutive
ambiguity: that is, their bisexuality. The main threat to this capac-
ity is the essentially futile attempt to hang on to phallicism, which
is rooted in the denial of bisexuality. The consequences of such
denial stretch from the benign to the dangerous, and they are key
to informing Kristeva’s views on feminist politics. As she suggests,
identifying with man’s phallicism generates female paranoia,
embodied in the figure of ‘the boss, the director, or virile lesbian,
partisans of power in all its more or less dictatorial forms’ (SNSR:
102).
It is not difficult to recognise in this last claim an assertion
already encountered in her earlier work – for example, in her
essay, ‘Women’s Time’ (1979), where she diagnoses and criticises
paranoid investments that, in her view, lie at the bottom of any
political involvement, including feminism (‘WT’: 203). I return to
this point in the following section, as it is crucial to the assessment
of Kristeva’s conceptualisation of feminism. But they can also
have more serious implications, and Kristeva illustrates this by
introducing, early on in her chapter on female sexuality, three case

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studies of women suffering from such an adherence to the phallus,

an ‘unbearable phallicism’ (SNSR: 96).
Because of Kristeva’s caution with regard to women’s alleged
phallicism, it is difficult to see how her account of female bisexual-
ity, and its corresponding link with female revolt, could translate
into a strategy for feminist political practice. For one, her account
of female sexuality, especially her insistence on phallic monism, sits
oddly alongside her equally forceful insistence on female plurality.
How can such a post-phallic plurality emerge from the universally
experienced stages of psycho-sexual development? In other words,
how do we get from monism to plurality? As I intimated in the
previous chapter, this is a serious challenge for any feminist theory
informed by psychoanalytic categories and it is one that Kristeva
does not answer adequately or satisfactorily.20 Kristeva’s account
raises a further challenge. It is difficult to imagine how women’s
privileged position vis-à-vis the phallus, their ‘aloof efficiency’ and
irony, could translate into the language of political philosophy.
How does such an account accommodate concepts such as agency,
solidarity, citizenship or justice? This challenge has recently been
taken up by Ewa Ziarek (2005), who seeks to utilise Kristeva’s
narrative of women’s ironic relationship with the symbolic for the
possibility of an ongoing transformation of the symbolic.
Ziarek locates the capacity for a transformative practice, which
is said to emerge from irony, in the emphasis accorded to con-
testation (see also Chapter 5). While she criticises Kristeva for a
series of limitations, specifically her alleged focus on aesthetic and
religious manifestations of revolt, which, according to Ziarek,
are stressed at the expense of working out the political logic of
revolution, Ziarek also brings to the fore what she considers to
be of value in Kristeva’s discussion of feminine revolt. In what,
then, does this consist? Her point of departure is the work of
Frantz Fanon, and more specifically Fanon’s critique of Jean-Paul
Sartre’s treatment of the relationship between the universal and
the particular in Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s book, The Wretched
of the Earth (2001). In this short text, Sartre (2001) is said to
perform a feminisation of the excluded particular, embodied in
the figure of the Black man, whom he tasks with abandoning his
racial particularity and with adopting the position of the universal,
untainted by racial particularities. Against Sartre, Fanon takes up
this challenge by engaging in an interpretative act of reversal that

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feminises the universal, which he sees embodied in another figure

of particularity, Europe. (I return to this discussion of universality
and particularity, and of Europe, in Chapter 5.) Developing this
contamination of universal and particular that is said to follow
from Fanon’s account, but connecting it now with Kristeva’s dis-
cussion of revolt, Ziarek suggests that the feminisation of the par-
ticular can be reversed into a feminine ironisation of the universal
(2005: 58). Kristeva, in her view, performs such a reversal by
adding to Freud’s story of the rebellion of the sons, which stresses
the gaps and fissures opened up by female (bi-)sexuality. Central
to Kristeva’s discussion, and considered by Ziarek as the key con-
tribution to working out the political logic of revolution, is the
feminine emphasis on irony. The feminine points to the illusory
nature of the law and of authority. As Ziarek suggests, ‘feminine
logic is associated with the ironic adherence and non-adherence to
this new form of authority, and with the refusal of the fetishistic
fixity of symbolic and psychic protections against the finitude and
the contingency it offers’ (2005: 69). She concludes by stating that
feminine ironisation takes place ‘when the excluded, feminized
particular lays claim to universality through identification with
the new form of paternal authority. This ironic play with illusion
. . . opens the symbolic to ongoing transformation’ (2005: 69) (see
also Chapter 5). Kristeva herself underscores this crucial aspect in
an interview where she states that:

the woman is a stranger to the phallic order she nonetheless adheres

to, if only because she is a speaking being, a being of thought and law.
But she keeps a distance vis-à-vis the social order, its rules, political
contracts, etc., and this makes her sceptical, potentially atheist, ironic
and all in all, pragmatic. I’m not really in the loop, says the woman,
I’m staying outside, I don’t believe in it, but I play the game, and at
times, better than others. (Revolt: 93)

It is difficult to imagine how such a focus on irony is said to gener-

ate a transformation of the symbolic, or how it can be translated
into a feminist political practice. For example, it remains unclear
whether and how female irony replaces, displaces or transforms
the symbolic. Ziarek herself concedes that Kristeva’s conclu-
sion may seem banal. Moreover, as Ziarek has demonstrated,
while Kristeva’s insistence on the ironic posture of the feminine

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

generates a nuanced and sophisticated account of revolt vis-à-

vis the symbolic, beyond phallicism and psychosis, it is not at all
clear whether this relates exclusively to women. Furthermore,
what remains unspoken is whether this feminine ironisation of
the law can relate in any way to a feminist reformulation of it.
Kristeva herself does not address this, and one can only surmise
whether her references to the feminine refer specifically to women
or whether they articulate, more broadly, a feminine heterogeneity
that is said to be a feature of both men and women.
Notwithstanding these reservations, I want to suggest that the
value of Kristeva’s account of female irony for feminism lies in its
emphasis on the critical, open and contestatory practices associ-
ated with revolt, which connect with her earlier assertions about
feminism. Recall that Kristeva, in her famous interview with Psych
et po (1981), identifies feminism as a practice of the negative,
leaving intact the heterogeneity of the female subject and the fluid-
ity of the subject-in-process (see Chapter 1). As Ziarek points out,
by stressing the illusory nature of the law and of authority, the
feminine ironises the claim to an impossible fullness, and in doing
so reveals a gap between the particular and the universal. As she
suggests, ‘the estrangement of revolutionary illusions maintains
the conflicting relation between the particular and the universal,
and, in doing so, sustains the culture of revolt’ (2005: 74); in fact,
it may even, as Ziarek intimates, dissociate the universal from
paternal authority. It is thus in this gap between the universal and
the particular, and in the continued opening of this gap, that the
promise of a Kristevan politics of futurality lies. (I discuss this in
more detail in Chapter 5.)
This returns me to the question that I alluded to briefly in my
discussion of crisis. As I intimated there, the notion of crisis is
intimately linked with that of critique. I therefore want to suggest
that one of Kristeva’s key contributions to contemporary feminist
thought, albeit possibly unintended, is her insistence on critique,
contestation and questioning. As I already stated, feminism as a
political project aimed at social and political transformation is
deeply embedded in this nexus of crisis and critique. The birth of
feminism constitutes a twofold response, to the crisis of a moder-
nity blind to gender injustices and as a critical response to this
crisis.
In her insightful historical study of French feminism and its

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engagement with the notion of the rights of man, Joan W. Scott

(1996) uses the framework of paradox to assess feminist practice.
She suggests that feminist agency is paradoxical because it is con-
stituted by a universalist discourse, that of individualism, which
at the same time evokes particularity through the idea of ‘sexual
difference’ in order to naturalise women’s exclusion (1996: 16).
To make sense of feminism, Scott suggests, requires a reading for
paradoxes, looking at internal tensions and incompatibilities and
engaging in a technically deconstructive way, both of which sit
uneasily within a linear historical narrative and teleology (1996:
16). Clearly, this has implications for the way we assess Kristeva.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, her narrative of the
temporality of women is also uncomfortable with the notion of
a linear history of progress. Moreover, women’s agency, and
more specifically their capacity for a transgressive practice of
revolt, is in an uneasy relationship with some feminist narratives
of female agency. Yet, returning to the idea of a hermeneutics
of complication that positions Kristeva at a series of thresholds
(Margaroni 2007; 2009), we are left with the fact that Kristeva
does not provide us with easy answers. As I discuss in more detail
in Chapter 5, where I examine her notion of singularity, Kristeva’s
reservation about forms of collective agency, including feminism,
complicates a fuller engagement between Kristeva and feminist
thought, despite her repeated acknowledgement of the achieve-
ments of feminism.
There is a further aspect to this. As I argue in the next section,
by introducing her notion of the intimate to the realm of revolt,
Kristeva opens up further avenues for theorising the political as a
displacement activity. I have repeatedly stressed Kristeva’s ambig-
uous relationship with feminism as a political movement. Her
writings on revolt, which stress the intimate dimension of revolt,
and the marginal attention given to feminism in these writings
which focus, in the main, as we have seen above, on male figures,
seem to suggest at first glance that there is not much to be gained
for feminist purposes.

‘Tiny Revolts’: The Intimate

In the previous chapter, I suggested that the assertion of an inter-
connected relationship between psychical and social processes of

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transformation is a key feature of Revolution in Poetic Language.

The thesis advanced in Kristeva’s books on revolt reiterate this
earlier assertion, as they, like Revolution in Poetic Language,
explore the psychic potential for revolt in a society that Kristeva,
building upon Debord, diagnoses to be in crisis. However, devel-
oping the ideas that she introduced in New Maladies of the Soul,
Kristeva stresses a further aspect of the crisis–revolt nexus with
her concept of the intimate and of intimate revolt. Examining the
scope for a psychic life, against the restrictions imposed by sym-
bolic and social injunctions, and by the degenerate trends associ-
ated with the society of the spectacle, is, as we have already seen, a
leitmotif of Kristeva’s work. She develops this in detail in Intimate
Revolt, the second book of her trilogy on revolt. I want to begin
with a brief exposition of her main arguments, before examining
more closely its implications for feminist thought. What I want to
suggest is that, in addition to the ‘unfaithful’ feminist appropria-
tion of The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, which, as we have
seen, exposes the illusory nature of paternal authority, Kristeva’s
emphasis on the intimate opens up further avenues for theorising
feminism. These avenues emerge, I want to suggest, in the intertex-
tual space between the intimate and revolt, and they develop femi-
nism’s own emphasis on intimate and private realms. (I propose a
distinction between the two below.) However, despite Kristeva’s
allusion to the political horizon of (intimate) revolt, she does not
fully develop its potential implications; it is this task that occupies
me in this section and that I continue in Chapter 5.
In the opening chapter to Intimate Revolt, the second volume
of the revolt series, Kristeva specifies, in a theoretically more rig-
orous way than in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, what she
considers to be the key issues for an account of revolt. Just like The
Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, Intimate Revolt is not a feminist
book; despite alluding to the role of women and the feminine in
revolt, and some general and brief comments about feminism,
which I discuss below, there is no specific or detailed engagement
with women or with gender issues. Nevertheless, I want to suggest
that the two Revolt publications have an – albeit indirect – bearing
upon theorising gender and the role of feminism as a transforma-
tive political project, a project of revolt. What, then, are the key
assertions of Intimate Revolt?
Already in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, Kristeva alludes

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to the possibility of a non-political, intimate form of revolt. She

develops this idea further in Intimate Revolt, where she provides
a more philosophical grounding of her assertion of the crisis of
modern Man, above and beyond her deployment of Debord’s
concept of the society of the spectacle that I discussed previously.
This philosophical grounding turns on the development of philo-
sophical thought since Hegel, and it considers the emergence of
nihilism in modern thought that I referred to at the beginning of
this chapter. As I outlined there, it is this nihilism problematic,
coupled with the challenges of contemporary society, which con-
stitute the crisis, and which curtail the prospect for revolt.
Two arguments are central to the further development of
Kristeva’s account. First, revolt, Kristeva avers, challenges the
stability of the subject, emphasising instead its fragility and pre-
cariousness. As Kristeva declares,

[t]he permanence of contradiction, the temporariness of reconciliation,

the bringing to the fore of everything that puts the very possibility of
unitary meaning to the test (such as the drive, the unnameable femi-
nine, destructivity, psychosis, etc.): these are what the culture of revolt
explores. (IR: 10)

This challenge to unity also links her recent work on revolt with
her earlier revolutionary writings, which stressed (semiotic) nega-
tivity, disruption and instability (see Chapter 1). In this respect,
this recent stress on fragility, precariousness and the negative also
requires, I believe, a qualification of those positions that accen-
tuate a rupture between an early, revolutionary Kristeva of the
1970s, and the Kristeva of the 1980s who is said to consider more
strongly the need for stability, and with it, to lay more emphasis
on the symbolic. While the Revolt publications highlight the need
for psychic well-being, and hence require the stabilising function
provided by the symbolic, they also underscore the importance of
fluidity that keeps the subject in process and thus alive.
It is this rediscovery of negativity, or rather a more fully rec-
onciled account of rupture and stability, that, in my view, makes
Kristeva’s writings on revolt interesting for a theory of politics
and, by extension, for feminist theory. Such a suggestion, however,
requires further justification, given that the explicit emphasis of
Intimate Revolt, on the intimate, seems counter-intuitive to the

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idea of a politics. Towards the end of the first chapter of Intimate

Revolt, Kristeva asks whether intimate revolt is the only possible
form of revolt (IR: 12). The focus of Intimate Revolt, as well as
the implicit assumption contained in The Sense and Non-Sense
of Revolt, seems to affirm this question. Yet, I want to argue for
a wider deployment of the concept of revolt which encompasses
the political and which, again, reconnects Kristeva’s recent under-
standing of revolt with her earlier conceptualisation of politics. As
she contends:

[I]t is not exclusively in the world of action that this revolt is real-
ized but in that of psychical life and its social manifestations (writing,
thought, art), a revolt that seems to me to manifest the crises of modern
man as much as the advances. Yet as a transformation of man’s rela-
tionship to meaning this cultural revolt intrinsically concerns public
life and consequently has profoundly political implications. In fact, it
poses the question of another politics, that of permanent conflictuality.
(IR: 11)

What this ‘other politics’ will look like, and what its implications
for feminist theory are, will occupy me in Chapters 4 and 5. For
now, I want to examine more closely Kristeva’s emphasis on the
intimate.
As we have already seen, Kristeva’s general concern, at least
since the 1980s and expressed in a more pronounced way since
the 1990s, lies with the psychic well-being of the individual. I have
already stated that it is driven by a cultural pessimism, including a
lack of faith in the atoning capacities of contemporary art, and in
the capacity of political projects to provide an adequate response
to the crisis. Yet, despite the apparent non- or a-political connota-
tion of the intimate, it is important to stress that individual crises
are not merely the product of a private or privatised family drama;
rather, they are embedded in and also generated by the social
world and its manifestations, most recently through the specta-
cle, a decline of authority and the law. Psychoanalysis has a key
role to play here, although Kristeva is at pains to stress that psy-
choanalysis is no cure for wider social ills, but can only ever work
effectively at the individual level. Still, it shores up the individual
against the onslaughts of the spectacle and other crises of contem-
porary society, by restoring the individual’s psychic life. It does

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so by reconnecting the drives and affects with discourse, allowing

the suffering patient to restore his or her imaginary and to begin
the process of representation anew. This alone, according to
Kristeva, establishes the capacity for happiness, and it is in this
sense of the term revolt, as a return to the unconscious, that
Kristeva’s concern with revolt should be understood.
Connecting her broader ideas on crisis and psychic life with
her recent work on revolt, she investigates the possibilities of an
intimate revolt. As I already suggested, the bond between revolt
and political transformation is rather tentative and fragile. In its
place, Kristeva advances the linkage between revolt and return, or
rather, revolt as return, where through revolt we can facilitate an
immersion into our archaic past – that is, into the unconscious –
in order to restore a psychic healing and life that is, in Kristeva’s
view, necessary. Yet, her apparent turn from politics towards the
intimate is paradoxical, as it is through the emphasis on the inti-
mate that the future can be secured: ‘we will have to re-turn to the
little things, tiny revolts, in order to preserve the life of the mind
and of the species’ (IR: 5).
Intimate revolt, or maybe more correctly a revolt towards
the intimate (in the sense of turn or return), also underscores
Kristeva’s emphasis on the connection between drives and signifi-
cation, language and affect, body and psyche. One could plausibly
link these recent insights with her foundational categorical distinc-
tion between the semiotic and the symbolic; if the two are out
of joint, the subject suffers. However, a permanent equilibrium
or balance may not be possible either; in fact, it is the return to
the unconscious (and hence to the negative) that invigorates and
facilitates a process of rebirth. Thus, in accordance with Kristeva’s
concern with individual psychic well-being, it is not surprising that
the intimate obtains such a prominent position in her recent work.
Curiously, though, as I want to suggest, this focus on the intimate
prepares the way for Kristeva’s more recent concern with political
philosophy. In fact, as she proposes early on in Intimate Revolt,
(intimate) revolt has political implications, posing the question of
‘another politics’ (IR: 11). (I deal with this aspect in Chapter 5.)
The intimate, or rather the restoration of the intimate, seems to
occupy the space of resistance against the onslaught of the society
of the spectacle. This also implies that psychoanalysis can shore up
the individual’s resistances against an oppressive social hegemony.

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Yet what does this mean for the way that the psychic and social
are connected? And where does this leave the concerns over the
transpositions from psychoanalytic theory and concepts to social
and political theory? The answer to this question, as I already sug-
gested, depends upon the way we conceptualise psychoanalysis.
For example, Butler’s critical engagement with psychoanalysis
depends upon the way that the (gender) norms of psychoanalysis
contribute to the normative constitution of the subject. Translated
into her Foucauldian terminology, it means that, as she suggests,
the conceptual apparatus that establishes us as subjects is pervaded
by power (1990). For Butler, the prohibitions and the ‘incitements’
of psychoanalysis operate as part of the social world; therefore, to
posit a realm of the psyche as independent of the social is a ruse of
power (1997). Despite Kristeva’s frequent allusions to the intersec-
tion of the psychic and social world, it is not fully developed nor,
I suspect, recognised.
Is there a role for women in this intimate revolt? Kristeva seems
to suggest this, when she stresses the ‘sensibilities and passions’,
or more generally, a ‘sensory intimacy’, coupled with the capacity
to ask questions (see Chapter 5) that some individuals, includ-
ing women, bring to life. Yet this female capacity is severed from
the possibilities of the feminist practice; in fact, it seems only to
develop fully after the time of feminism:

I am convinced that after all the more or less reasonable and promising
projects and slogans the feminist movement has promulgated over the
past decades, the arrival of women at the forefront of the social and
ethical scene has had the result of revalorizing the sensory experience
. . . The immense responsibility of women in regard to the survival of
the species – how to preserve the freedom of our bodies while at the
same time ensuring the conditions for better lives for our children? –
goes hand in hand with this rehabilitation of the sensory. (IR: 5)

The theme of intimacy has recently received some attention in

the critical commentary on Kristeva. Keltner’s treatment of the
subject (2009a), in her contribution to a recently published edited
collection on Kristeva’s work (Oliver and Keltner 2009), offers a
helpful explication of the concept of intimacy in Kristeva’s writ-
ings, tracing its emergence and development in Kristeva’s recent
thought.21 The backdrop to Keltner’s analysis is Hannah Arendt’s

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thought, which serves as a contra-point to Kristeva’s delineation

of the intimate. Keltner positions Arendt’s diagnosis of the loss
of the public space, and of politics more generally, in the modern
world, which, according to Arendt, sees the intimate move centre-
stage, against Kristeva’s assertion of a loss of intimacy in the
modern world. This loss of intimacy, as we have seen, can only
be recuperated by restoring the connection between affect and
language. Keltner’s questions aim at political theory, and while
she concedes that Kristeva’s concern for intimacy, and indeed her
writings more generally, do not meet the requirements of politi-
cal theory proper, she nevertheless sees this concern for politics
emerge in Kristeva’s attention to difference, to the feminine and to
marginalised groups. It is there that, according to Keltner, the need
to reinscribe the intimate into politics is established. Furthermore,
it is this emphasis, according to Keltner, that makes Kristeva’s
contribution to social and political thought so distinctive, even
though it condemns politics to futurality.22 As I already suggested,
this emphasis on futurality is indeed a key feature of any account
of politics that draws on Kristevan ideas. It is coupled, moreover,
as I argued, with the emphasis she accords to the practices of
contestation, questioning and critique, and it is at this juncture
that feminism, as a critical practice, overlaps with Kristeva’s
concern.
The theme of corporeality, as I also intimated in Chapter 1,
constitutes an essential part of such a dialogue between Kristeva
and feminism, and this aspect is taken up in a further contribution
in the same book, by Cecilia Sjöholm (2009), who emphasises inti-
macy’s link to corporeality and sensuality. In particular, she con-
trasts the Kristevan conception of the intimate with the common
demarcation of the public and the private (she illustrates this
mainly through reference to Habermas), stressing the protective
function of the intimate. More specifically, she posits the intimate
as the domain of singularity (2009: 191), and in that respect, like
Keltner, establishes Kristeva’s contribution as an important cor-
rective to a political theory that lacks attention to corporeality and
sensibility. A central element of Kristeva’s discussion of intimate
revolt, as I have demonstrated, is its return to the unconscious;
such a return provides the subject with the capacity to establish, or
re-establish, connections with others. Hence, in addition to its psy-
choanalytic dimension, the intimate obtains further significance

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as an ethical category. It is to this aspect that I turn in the next

section.
In conclusion, as I sought to demonstrate in this chapter,
Kristeva’s writings on crisis and revolt establish a close connection
between the realm of the social and the intimate via their concern
for the suffering of contemporary individuals. This suffering, as
we have seen, occurs in the face of what Kristeva considers to be
fundamental changes in wider society and which she captures,
building upon the work of Guy Debord, with the idea of the
society of the spectacle. While Kristeva alludes to the wider social
reference points of this crisis, her concern is primarily with the
well-being, or suffering, of the individual.
Furthermore, I suggested that despite the absence of an explicit
feminist sensibility, Kristeva’s writings on crisis and revolt resonate
with wider feminist concerns. The persistence of a gendered nar-
rative, intrinsic to the psychoanalytic ideas deployed by Kristeva,
facilitates a feminist critique of her texts. Building on feminist
work that criticises the gendered and heterosexist assumptions of
psychoanalysis, I took issue with Kristeva’s deployment of psy-
choanalysis. In its place, I advocate a more attentive reading of
the operations of social norms in the generation of psychoanalysis.
Moreover, while the wider references to the possibility of a politi-
cal revolt or transformation are missing in her work, I suggested
an appropriation of Kristeva’s emphasis on the intimate that
draws on her displacement of politics.
It is paradoxically around the idea of the intimate that a con-
vergence becomes possible, because it is there that a feminist focus
on the ‘art of living’ or on the politics of everyday life emerges.
Moreover, as I suggested, the connection that Kristeva makes
between the practice of revolt and the practice of questioning and
critique is an essential component of feminism’s self-understanding
as a critical theory and practice, which I termed Kristeva’s ethos of
revolt. I will return to this aspect, which is so crucial to Kristeva’s
most recent work, in the final chapter. In the next chapter, I will
explore how this crisis plays itself out in the field of ethics.

Notes
1. The academic literature commonly references these volumes by their
individual titles, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (2000a) and

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Intimate Revolt (2002). These two volumes encompass three French

texts, Sens et non-sens de la révolte (1996), as well as La révolte
intime (1997) and L’Avenir d’une révolte (1998), the latter two of
which are published in Intimate Revolt (2002). A further volume of
the revolt series, La Haine et le pardon (2005), will be available in
English from Columbia University Press in 2011. See also the collec-
tion of interviews in Revolt, She Said (2000b).
2. This also includes Kristeva’s claim of a crisis of paternal author-
ity and her wider reflections on parenting. On these points see
Gambaudo (2007a), who provides an assessment of Kristeva’s work
on crisis, above and beyond her reception within feminism.
3. On the etymological link between crisis and critique see also Brown
(2005). In Chapter 5 I discuss how Kristeva’s answer to crisis is
related to the practice of critique.
4. The idea of representation is central to Kristeva’s thought. It entails
the transmission of drive energy and affect, generating symbols and
signification. The issue of representation takes on a particular signifi-
cance in her writings on women and motherhood.
5. I explore this theme further below, where I question Kristeva’s
reading of Oedipality. See also Margaroni (2009) on the notion of
crossroads.
6. To discuss the details and merits of Debord’s work would lead
me beyond the scope of this book. Moreover, it is not my inten-
tion to assess the validity or accuracy of Kristeva’s engagement
with Debord’s ideas. Rather, I want to contextualise this aspect
of Kristeva’s thought. For a recent assessment of Debord and
situationism see, for example, Clark and Nicholson-Smith (1997),
McDonough (1997), Raunig (2007), D. Smith (2005) and Wollen
(1989).
7. Kristeva also avers that the decline of religion and, more generally,
of the realm of the sacred is one of the main contributing factors
to society’s contemporary crisis. I want to stress that she does not
envisage, as some of her critics have claimed, a return to religiosity.
Rather, she laments that, with the decline of the sacred, modern
Man has lost his or her inner space. The role and function of religion
or, more generally, of spirituality has been usurped by the society of
the spectacle.
8. In Chapter 3 I will connect this with a discussion of violence.
9. According to Smith (2005), situationist strategies promote playful,
ludic or erotic elements that seek to disrupt, decontextualise and

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reappropriate the social order: for example, through the practice of

drifting through urban spaces (dérive) or the relocation of objects
into new contexts (détournement).
10. Kristeva engages with the idea of return, with respect to Marcel
Proust’s writings, in her book on Proust (Kristeva 1996b).
11. In this respect, Kristeva’s account differs substantially from Arendt’s
notion of revolution, despite the similarities in their respective ety-
mological methodology and a concern with crisis. For Arendt, revo-
lution is captured in collective action; its sole purpose is freedom,
and the establishment of institutions which guarantee freedom. See
my discussion in the next chapter.
12. As I discuss below, this facet of her writings is also linked to her
dislike of political movements.
13. My discussion draws in particular on Chapters 4 and 5 of The Sense
and Non-Sense of Revolt (see also Kristeva 2001c; 2004b; 2004c:
404–19).
14. The theme of birth or rebirth is also a central aspect in Kristeva’s
discussion of Arendt. See Chapter 4.
15. In her discussion of female sexuality in The Sense and Non-Sense of
Revolt, Kristeva draws on several of Freud’s texts. See Freud (1994a;
1994b; 1997; 1998e).
16. Freud, in ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1998b), refers to this inward
turn as a ‘psychic constellation of revolt’. I will consider the wider
question of the role of murder and of violence in the next chapter.
17. For a critical interrogation of the role of Oedipus in the formation of
kinship see Butler (2000a).
18. One may also ask, with Butler, after the meaning of bisexuality and
its relationship with heterosexuality. See also Butler’s alternative
reading of the phallus in Bodies that Matter (1993).
19. For a deployment on Kristeva for transgender theory see Maur (no
date).
20. In Chapters 4 and 5, I outline how feminist theories ‘beyond the
subject’ that draw on Arendtian categories attempt to answer this
problem.
21. According to Keltner, Kristeva’s use of the term intimacy can be
traced back as far as her Powers of Horror, even though, as Keltner
points out, the meaning and use of the term remain somewhat
opaque.
22. I questioned above whether Kristeva’s notion of revolt can be trans-
lated into the language of (feminist) political philosophy. The same

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question could be asked of the concept of intimacy. As I suggest in

the next chapter, although she remains removed from political con-
cerns, narrowly defined, her concept of intimacy ties in with wider
discussions on intimate citizenship, especially as they pertain to what
might be termed ‘the art of living’.

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 3

Corporeal Ethics: Between Violence and

Forgiveness

[T]he issue of ethics crops up wherever a code (mores, social contract)

must be shattered in order to give way to the free play of negativity,
need, desire, pleasure, and jouissance, before being put together again,
although temporarily and with full knowledge of what is involved.
(DL: 23)

Kristeva’s focus on representation, including her writings on art,

constitutes an important component in the feminist Kristeva recep-
tion that I alluded to previously. One would expect her works on
ethics to have a similar impact, but it is somewhat puzzling to
compare the prominence of her ethical thought in the Kristeva
scholarship with the relative neglect in the wider field of feminist
ethics. For example, two of her best-known and highly influential
essays, ‘Stabat Mater’ (1977a) and ‘Women’s Time’ (1979), both
of which articulate distinctive conceptions of the feminine and of
the maternal, do not feature extensively in the field of feminist
ethics.1 Her association with post-structuralism, and its perceived
ethical deficit, may account for such a gap in the literature, yet
even some of the prominent texts in post-structuralist feminist
ethics pay scant attention to Kristeva’s ethical thought.2
This relative neglect within the wider area of feminist ethics
is out of tune with the importance accorded to her ethics in the
Kristeva scholarship. For example, some commentators have iden-
tified elements of her writings as specifically ethical, such as her
Strangers to Ourselves (see Beardsworth 2004a: 130), while others
take an even broader view, suggesting that an ethics is implicit in
all of Kristeva’s work (Lechte and Margaroni 2004); one com-
mentator goes as far as describing her as an ‘ethical thinker par
excellence’ (Graybeal 1993: 32).3 As I already suggested, the most
widely discussed aspect within the feminist commentary on her

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work has been her attempt to develop a maternal herethics (see

below), whilst her writings on the ethical dimension of immigra-
tion and multiculturalism, discussed in Strangers to Ourselves
and Nations without Nationalism, have also received substantial
attention. The stress on the question of a maternal ethics reflects,
for obvious reasons, the wider feminist interest in issues such
as care and motherhood, but it should not cloud the import of
Kristeva’s idea for a broader utilisation of feminist ethics. Here
it is also important to emphasise that her occupation with ethical
matters originates in her early work on language and language
acquisition (see, for example, the essays in Desire in Language),
and it weaves itself consistently throughout her œuvre, right up to
her most recent writings on revolt, crisis and freedom; hence, I will
return to questions of ethics in the remaining chapters. Moreover,
whilst I give substantial consideration to the maternal aspect of
a Kristevan ethics, I want to advocate a wider use of Kristeva’s
ethics, drawing in particular upon some of her more recent writ-
ings on revolt, violence and forgiveness.
I begin by mapping the wider philosophical commitments of
Kristeva’s ethics, which I want to call an ethics of traversal. This
includes a brief exposition of Kristeva’s concern with ethics in her
early writings on language and it paves the way for a more careful
consideration of the core of a Kristevan ethics, which, as I will
demonstrate, is derived from her wider psychoanalytic thought.
My second task in this chapter is to revisit Kristeva’s conception
of a maternal ethics, and to assess some of the feminist responses
to it. Following this, I assess Kristeva’s recent writings and their
ethical linkages. Specifically, I want to engage with Kristeva’s
ideas for recent feminist discussions on violence, vulnerability and
forgiveness. This thematic focus relates back to the discussion of
revolt in the previous chapter, but it also points towards Kristeva’s
engagement with Hannah Arendt (see Chapter 4), with cosmo-
politanism and migration, and with violence, terrorism and the
‘particular other’ in the figure of the Muslim (see Chapter 5). This
discussion leads to a consideration of questions of forgiveness and
to the wider role of psychoanalysis in Kristeva’s ethics.

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An Ethics of Traversal
Much of feminism’s critical engagement with Kristeva has concen-
trated on her theory of a maternal ethics (see next section); yet it is
necessary to recall that her concern with ethics is already embedded
in her theory of language, articulated in some of her early writings
on semiotics (see Kristeva 1969a; 1969b; 1973a) and in some of
the essays published in Desire in Language. There, she calls for an
ethics that builds upon the heterogeneity of the subject, and that
draws on the subject’s relationship with the other. Such an ethics is
underpinned by Kristeva’s commitment to the subject-in-process,
and it is juxtaposed to morality, defined as a rigid code that runs
counter to the idea of fluidity. Whilst the thematic application of
her ethics broadens in later works, including her consideration of
maternity and her concern over questions of the nation and migra-
tion, it is in these early writings that Kristeva outlines some of the
key elements that continue to shape her ethical thought into the
present. At the centre of this early ethical thought is her concern
for the pulverisation or shattering of discourse, and of the flow of
semiotic drive energy and rhythm into the symbolic (DL: 24). In
other words, it articulates the significance that Kristeva accords
to the heterogeneity of discourse and of the subject. This is an
important point to make, because it establishes the parameters
of Kristeva’s ethical thought, and I would therefore suggest that
any consideration of Kristeva’s ethics needs to be mindful of this
emphasis on heterogeneity. It also has two important implications:
it establishes difference or otherness within the subject (I return to
this point towards the end of this section), while it also articulates
the wider aim of her ethics, which is to work towards establishing
a relationship with the other.
These two elements, pertaining to the other within and to the
relationship with the other, have led Ewa Ziarek to characterise
Kristeva’s thought as a ‘heterology’, which she defines, broadly,
as an attempt, located mainly in Nietzschean and neo-Nietzschean
philosophy, to think otherness (1992: 102). In her essay ‘At the
Limits of Discourse: Heterogeneity, Alterity, and the Maternal
Body in Kristeva’s Thought’ (1992), Ziarek explores this idea of
otherness with respect to Kristeva’s discourse on maternity, but she
also points up some of its underlying philosophical commitments
that help to clarify, in my view, Kristeva’s notion of heterogeneity

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and the attendant feminist concerns over the status of culture and
the pre-cultural (see Chapter 1). As Ziarek suggests, heterogeneity
refers to an infolding of body and language, and of the two signify-
ing economies, the semiotic and the symbolic. Following Ziarek, I
would suggest that this emphasis on heterogeneity and alterity has
important and useful implications for radical theorising. For one,
it challenges any attempt towards closure, in line with Kristeva’s
emphasis on process, keeping open the generation of subject and
signification. This, essentially futural, conception of the subject is
underscored by its always precarious relationship with corporeal-
ity and meaning, and their respective articulation.
Ziarek broadens the potential uses of Kristeva’s ethics in her
An Ethics of Dissensus (2001). There, she makes the case for an
ethics that extends beyond care ethics and, more generally, beyond
a normatively rigid account associated with morality. This oppo-
sition to morality is invoked in Ziarek’s appeal to the notion of
dissensus, a term that emphasises the contested nature of ethics,
as opposed to morality; ‘dissensus’ also evokes the dual reference
points of meaning and sensibility. In addition, Ziarek stresses
ethics’ carnal dimension, the necessity to consider questions of
corporeality, and she concludes that such an ethics must, by
definition, engage with racial and sexual differences. The terrain
mapped out by Ziarek for such an ethics brings her to a discus-
sion of Kristeva (who is also the subject of one of the chapters in
Ziarek’s book), given the importance accorded to corporeality and
sensibility, meaning and language in Kristeva’s ideas on ethics.
Ziarek’s orientation points are helpful in delineating Kristeva’s
ethical terrain, which include, as we have already seen, a concern
with language, but also and in particular a psychoanalytic under-
pinning of ethics. At the centre of this psychoanalytically informed
ethics, Ziarek avers, lie three psychic modalities: fantasy, abjec-
tion and the sublimation of the death drive (more on this below),
which require the subject to come to terms with its own otherness.
According to Ziarek, the subject’s attempt to deal with the asser-
tion, essentially ideological, of the coherence of the social order, a
fantasy of fullness, can only be maintained at the cost of the expul-
sion and abjection of the sexualised and racialised Other. Such a
traversal of fantasy requires the subject to confront its own abjec-
tion as interiorised, the Other within, in order to offset its always
precarious and unstable imaginary and symbolic identifications

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 Corporeal Ethics

(2001: 132). Thus, the traversal of fantasy, sublimation and the

encounter with the abject articulate what Ziarek considers to be
Kristeva’s account of the subject’s ‘unsettling heterogeneity’: ‘the
acknowledgment of the internal alterity and antagonism within
the subject’ (2001: 127).
It is against this background that I want to describe Kristeva’s
ethics as an ethics of traversal.4 To flesh this out further, the idea of
traversal, and its ethical dimension, draws on the various elements
of traversal that make up Kristeva’s philosophy. These include a
movement between affect and signification, between the semiotic
and the symbolic, between the feminine and masculine, between
body and discourse. This idea of traversal, or threshold, has also
been highlighted by Noëlle McAfee, who points up Kristeva’s con-
tribution towards a thinking of how affective and somatic forces
enter into language and culture, traversing the threshold between
the pre-discursive and the discursive. Such a threshold, according
to McAfee, is central to any theory of intersubjectivity; it is par-
ticularly pertinent to Kristeva’s thought, given her stress on the
heterogeneity of the subject, where difference and otherness are
located within the subject (2005: 113–14).
Thus, building upon Kristeva’s early work, which places a
particular emphasis on the work of negativity in the operation of
ethics and which provokes a shattering of established codes and a
renewal of symbolic systems, I would identify her concern for the
other, her insistence on heterogeneity and her practice of traversal
as the key themes of Kristeva’s ethics. These reveal themselves
through her assertion of an intersubjectivity that is constituted and
experienced corporeally. Moreover, this insistence on the impor-
tance of corporeality and signification operates in the wider field
of sexual difference, of the feminine and the masculine, and, as we
will see in the next section, it is fleshed out via her discussion of
the maternal body.

Maternal Bodies, Herethics and the Feminine

The idea of an ethics of traversal is famously captured in Kristeva’s
discussion of maternity and of the maternal body. If motherhood,
according to Kristeva, poses a challenge for representation (see
below), it also raises the question of a new ethics, which Kristeva
refers to as ‘herethics’, a pun on ‘her ethics’ and ‘heretics’ that

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refers to the transgression of the rigid moral codes associated

with the paternal-masculine symbolic (see Kristeva 1977a).5 This
herethics encapsulates the ethical function of the maternal body
as a bodily threshold, which establishes a relationship with the
other whilst oscillating between the semiotic and the symbolic.
Kristeva’s idea of a maternal ethics, which draws upon some of
her well-known essays, such as ‘Stabat Mater’ (1977a), ‘Women’s
Time’ (1979) and ‘Motherhood according to Bellini’ (included in
Desire in Language, 1980), has received substantial critical atten-
tion within feminism. With these texts, Kristeva aims to initiate
a discourse on motherhood that, in her view, is missing in femi-
nism and, more generally, in Western discourses of representation
(see 1977a; see also 2001c). Here I want to recapitulate some of
Kristeva’s key premises and the debates surrounding a Kristevan
ethics, which have been central to the wider feminist engage-
ment with Kristeva’s thought. I want to suggest that the idea of
an ethics of traversal, which I introduced in the previous section,
is epitomised in the maternal body; central to this undertaking is
Kristeva’s insistence that ethics is grounded in corporeality.
As I discussed previously, Kristeva’s important work on cor-
poreality, including her assertion of the ethical dimension of
corporeal bonds, and her stress on the centrality of abjection to
the process of subjectification, has occupied much of the feminist
engagement with her work. The significance of motherhood as
a theme in Kristeva’s writings is well known; it originates in her
early work, such as Revolution in Poetic Language, where she
establishes the maternal body, and with it the chora, as a reference
point for the child’s psycho-linguistic development, and it weaves
its way through some of her most recent publications (see Chapter
1). This importance accorded to motherhood is part of Kristeva’s
wider contribution to psychoanalysis, which puts forward a narra-
tive of the intersubjective relationships between the three protago-
nists of the Oedipal triangle (see Chapter 2). For the purpose of my
argument it is important to identify a second source of Kristeva’s
interest in motherhood: this is her interpretation of feminism,
which she criticises for its neglect of the importance of maternity.
She outlines this critique in her essay ‘Women’s Time’ (1979; see
also 1977a), where she develops her account of motherhood out
of her critique of the first two generations of feminism. These,
according to Kristeva, regarded women’s desire to be a mother

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as ‘alienating and reactionary’ (1979: 205). The alleged hostility

of the first and second generations of feminists arose, according
to Kristeva, out of their respective concerns with different sets
of issues, pertaining to struggles for equality in the case of the
first (and existentialist) generation, and the building of a female
counter-symbolic in the case of the second generation (see Chapter
1). While Kristeva takes feminism to task for failing to consider
women’s maternal desires more fully, she hopes that a third gen-
eration will contribute to the initiation of such a discourse. Its
concern should lie with the recognition of sexual difference, of
which motherhood is one aspect, and with the development of a
theoretical discourse on the maternal.
Kristeva’s critique of the first and second generations of femi-
nism is indicative of her wider engagement with feminism: apart
from her allusion to existential feminism and its alleged hostility
towards motherhood, which, without actually mentioning her,
points to Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of motherhood’s ground-
ing in a patriarchal context that retains women in a condition of
immanence (see de Beauvoir 2009). Kristeva does not provide
a detailed analysis of feminism’s engagement with motherhood,
but, notwithstanding her rather one-sided characterisation of
feminism’s position regarding motherhood, it is important to
acknowledge the context of her emphasis on motherhood, as this
goes some way towards explaining her ideas on maternity. Thus,
a more generous interpretation might overlook the scholarly (and
indeed political) shortcomings of her writings on feminism and
motherhood, stressing instead her effort to counterbalance a per-
ceived deficiency in feminist discourses on motherhood. Key to her
own work on maternity, and to the feminist responses to it, is the
question of the centrality of motherhood to a woman’s life, which,
as I will illustrate, has generated substantial discontent amongst
her feminist critics.
In one of her interviews, Kristeva qualifies the importance of
motherhood to a woman’s life by maintaining that motherhood
should not be women’s exclusive domain. Work, a husband or
lovers constitute potential supplements to the child (1984d).
Besides, motherhood, according to Kristeva, could be understood
in a non-literal sense. Asked whether a woman who chooses not
have children is incomplete, Kristeva responds by advocating a
‘symbolic maternity’, which can be found, for example, in the

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teaching and caring professions, and also in a woman’s personal

life. Such a stress on ‘symbolic maternity’ is said to allow for the
necessary deflection of drives on to an other, by transforming
biology into signification, representation, language and thought
(Revolt: 69–70). It is this latter aspect, the ethical encounter with
the other, which is particularly important to Kristeva’s concep-
tion of motherhood. This emphasis should put at ease those critics
who accuse her of relegating motherhood to the only socially rec-
ognised activity in a masculine-defined symbolic order. However,
even though she supports women’s professional aspirations, she
wonders whether women’s ‘double shift’ of working and caring
is sustainable (Revolt: 70). Worryingly, this concern does not
lead her to rethink women’s double burden by considering, for
example, a redistribution of parental responsibilities or the wider
sexual division of labour in the home. Although Kristeva concedes
that both sexes could be involved in nurturing and separating (she
is reluctant to consider the prospect of same-sex parenting, even
though, as we have seen in the previous chapter, she evacuates, in
The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, the triangular Oedipal struc-
ture from its heterosexual content), she fears a ‘decimation’ of
the paternal function and the subsequent emergence of borderline
children, a concern that ties in with her wider assertion of a crisis
of authority (see Chapter 2).
If the paternal function is diminished, she suggests that institu-
tions outside the family, such as the school or even the psycho-
analyst, need to take over in order to ensure the child’s separation
from the mother and its insertion into sociality. As she ponders, ‘if
fathers become mothers, one may well ask oneself who will play
the role of separators’ (1996a: 118–19)?6 Although not developed
by Kristeva, such a displacement of the paternal function opens
up the possibility of rethinking the function of sexual difference,
and with it the connotation of the feminine and the masculine. In
other words, is the paternal function exclusively associated with
the masculine or male? Can mothers occupy the paternal function?
And how is the paternal function allocated in non-heterosexual
parenting arrangements? It is fair to say that Kristeva’s scepticism
towards alternative kinship structures beyond the heterosexual
core family fails to resolve the question of the positioning of the
paternal and maternal in a more radical way; it also fails to address
the unequal distribution of domestic and emotional labour within

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the (heterosexual) home, which does not generates a rethinking of

women in their traditional gender roles, connected, in the main,
with motherhood.
Beyond such sociological concerns, Kristeva conceptualises
motherhood as a borderline experience that oscillates between the
semiotic and the symbolic, constantly transgressing the boundaries
between these two signifying systems. She is at pains to emphasise
mothers’ essential contribution to the symbolic, their ‘civilizing
function’ (Crisis: 105; see also 1977a: 183; 1996a: 10), which
requires them to prepare the child for entry into the symbolic (see
Chapter 1). Thus, according to Kristeva, women are connected to
the symbolic in two ways: as speaking beings (see Chapter 1), and
as mothers, who are tasked with ‘[passing] on the social norm,
which one might repudiate for one’s own sake but within which
one must include the child in order to educate it along the chain
of generations’ (1977a: 183; italics in original). An individual
woman might reject the social order for herself, but by becoming
a mother she is connected to the socio-symbolic order, which she
reproduces and guarantees through her contribution to the child’s
preparation for the rule of the law.
As Allison Weir asserts, motherhood ensures participation in
the symbolic order while simultaneously maintaining women’s
heterogeneity; in doing so, it helps women to circumvent the fate
of phallicism, being tied to the Law of the Father, but also disrupts
women’s exclusive association with the semiotic chora, and their
representation as biological creatures exclusively destined for
procreation (1993: 89). This importance accorded to heterogene-
ity, which, as I argued in the first chapter, is crucial to Kristeva’s
notion of the speaking subject, further unfolds in the experience
of motherhood, which is also an inherently ethical experience,
because it helps a woman to establish a relationship with an
other:

[W]ith the arrival of the child and the start of love (perhaps the only
true love of a woman for another person ...), the woman gains the
chance to form that relationship with the symbolic and ethic Other so
difficult to achieve for a woman. . . . [M]aternity is a bridge between
singularity and ethics. Through the events of her life, a woman finds
herself at the pivot of sociality – she is at once the guarantee and the
threat to its stability. (1977b: 297; see also Crisis: 105–6)

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According to Kristeva, at the heart of a woman’s desire for a child

lies a wish for unity and completeness. However, to prevent a
descent into psychotic fusion, the symbolic must intervene. Thus,
women’s attachment to the Law upholds their connection with
the symbolic order and constitutes a safeguard against a psychotic
fusion with the child. Moreover, if pregnancy and motherhood
threaten a woman with psychotic fusion in her relationship with
the foetus and the child, they also provide a woman with the
unique chance to enter into a renewed relationship with her own
mother:

Such an excursion to the limits of primal regression can be phan-

tasmatically experienced as the reunion of a woman-mother with
the body of her mother. The body of her mother is always the same
Master-Mother of instinctual drive, a ruler over psychosis, a subject of
biology, but also, one toward which women aspire all the more pas-
sionately simply because it lacks a penis: that body cannot penetrate
her as can a man when possessing his wife. By giving birth, the woman
enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own
mother; they are the same continuity differentiating itself. (DL: 23)

Yet, unlike, for example, Irigaray (1993), Kristeva does not pursue
the prospect that an ethical relationship with the mother brings
to the development of a female genealogy; motherhood, for her,
is a singular experience that does not translate into collective
action. Neither does she translate her account of motherhood into
maternal political practice, as, for example, maternal feminists
such as Sara Ruddick (1989) have attempted to do. At the core of
Kristeva’s account of motherhood lies her emphasis on the radical
and heretical nature of ethics, which requires the contribution of
women. This maternal ethics, as indeed the feminine ethics more
widely, is conceptualised as a transgressive practice that chal-
lenges and subverts the masculine symbolic order; hence, it is
also juxtaposed against the allegedly masculine sphere of politics,
characterised by its association with the symbolic and its neglect of
the corporeal and affective dimensions of human life. Diagnosing
the implications for women’s political participation, Kristeva
asserts that ‘[w]e cannot gain access to . . . political affairs, except
by identifying with the values considered to be masculine (domi-
nance, superego, the endorsed communicative word that institutes

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stable social exchange)’ (CW: 37). Although it is crucial to re-

emphasise that Kristeva is sympathetic to the political achieve-
ments of feminism, she is reluctant to connect (feminist) politics,
always coded as masculine and symbolic, with the heterogeneity
of a feminine ethics. This disconnect between politics and ethics
may account for the absence of a more widespread engagement
with Kristeva’s ethical thought in the wider feminist scholarship
on ethics. However, it has also received substantial criticism from
those who did engage more fully with her ethical thought. I have
already alluded to the critical reception of Kristeva’s writings on
motherhood and here I want to give this aspect more attention, by
concentrating on three well-known critics, Nancy Fraser, Judith
Butler and Drucilla Cornell.
Nancy Fraser regards Kristeva’s emphasis on the maternal
as proof of her conservatism and her affirmation of traditional
gender roles, and she criticises Kristeva’s alleged ‘essentialising
identification of women’s femininity with maternity’:

Maternity, for [Kristeva], is the way that women, as opposed to men,

touch base with the pre-Oedipal, semiotic residue. (Men do it by
writing avant-garde poetry; women do it by having babies.) Here,
Kristeva dehistoricises and psychologises motherhood, conflating con-
ception, pregnancy, birthing, nursing, and childrearing, abstracting all
of them from socio-political context, and erecting her own stereotype
of femininity. (1992b: 190)

While Fraser, in my view, does not give due consideration to the

importance that traversal and heterogeneity have in Kristeva’s
discussion of maternity, I would nevertheless concur with some
of her reservations, specifically with her critique of Kristeva’s
decontextualisation of the experience of motherhood that does
not acknowledge the range of different maternal experiences
and that, I would add, is at odds with her insistence on plurality
(see Chapter 4). Butler’s critique of Kristeva’s emphasis on the
maternal juxtaposes the need for subversive cultural practices
with Kristeva’s emphasis on the maternal, and she contends that
‘for Kristeva, poetry and maternity represent privileged practices
within paternally sanctioned culture which permit a non-psychotic
experience of that heterogeneity and dependency characteristic
of the maternal terrain’ (1990: 85). Butler takes particular issue

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with Kristeva’s notion of the maternal body, which, according to

Butler, together with the drives, the feminine and the semiotic, is
posited as pre-cultural or natural. However, as I argued in Chapter
1, neither the (maternal) body nor (maternal) drives are unam-
biguously ‘natural’ for Kristeva; rather, they oscillate between the
semiotic and the symbolic, and point to the heterogeneity of the
subject.
Drucilla Cornell’s (1991) analysis, while more sympathetic
towards Kristeva than that of Fraser or Butler, is just as critical
of the ethical implications of Kristeva’s account of maternity and
the maternal body. She recognises maternity’s importance to femi-
nism, because it is said to illustrate the subject’s heterogeneity and
irreducible alterity (see also Ziarek 1992). The feminist turn to
the maternal realm, according to Cornell, is said to help uncover
‘the irreducibility of the feminine as a basis for a shared female
identity and also for an expression of the potential within woman-
liness as it is lived’ (1991: 21). Such a turn towards the maternal,
following Cornell, can be found in Kristeva’s writings. However,
she diagnoses a tension in Kristeva’s writings between her work
on semiotics and on maternity, which, according to Cornell, has
‘ultimately been resolved in favour of the “conservative” position
that rejects the value of the fantasy figure of the phallic mother as
the only way to express the repression of the feminine’ (1991: 22).
Cornell’s critique draws on a perceived shift between Kristeva’s
early writings, said to invoke the phantasmatic connection between
woman and Woman, between empirical women and the feminine,
and a later account that, in Cornell’s words, is ‘obsessed with
[Kristeva’s] desire for the Law’ (1991: 37) (see also Rose 1993).
Cornell appraises Kristeva’s account against what she terms
‘ethical feminism’, based on a futural construction of women, ‘not
on what women “are”, but on the remembrance of the “not yet”’
(1993: 59). In doing so, it draws on imagination, not description,
on ‘should be’ and not on ‘is’ (see also Cornell 1995). Central to
Cornell’s critique of Kristeva is her claim that Kristeva, especially
in her later works, collapses the feminine with empirical mother-
hood. While Cornell applauds Kristeva’s challenge to Freud’s
notion that motherhood constitutes woman’s accomplishment of
the Oedipal crisis, advocating instead the possibility of a relation
to the Other/the Mother/the child, this is said to be undermined by
Kristeva’s failure to hold on to the radical promise of the feminine

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as, potentially, other than the mother. As Cornell suggests, ‘the

later Kristeva can only save women by forsaking Woman’ (1991:
72). This critique of Kristeva ties in with Cornell’s wider attempts
to free the feminine from the stranglehold of a gender hierarchy
that is configured by what Butler terms a ‘heterosexual matrix’
(see Butler 1990), where both the feminine and the masculine are
defined in accordance with heterosexual desire. Against such a
move, Cornell envisages the feminine as essentially a metaphor
of the other, rather than a gendered signifier in a system of sexual
difference where the feminine comes to stand for ‘not man’ (1995:
75).
As I already argued, there are moments in Kristeva’s writ-
ings that evoke such a meaning of the feminine and that chime
strongly with Cornell’s vision of an ethical feminism. Moreover,
these moments are not, as Cornell seems to suggest, restricted
to the early Kristeva; rather, they are interspersed throughout
her writings, including some of her recent work on the female
genius (see 2001a; 2001b; 2004c; see also Chapter 4). This recent
work also challenges a further concern of Cornell’s: namely, that
Kristeva only ever ends up construing the feminine as the mater-
nal, by emphasising more strongly female creation above and
beyond motherhood (though it also, as I demonstrate in the next
chapter, evokes the maternal). Furthermore, I also have reserva-
tions about Cornell’s vision of linking the irreducible feminine to
a ‘shared female identity’ (see above); such a linkage seems to me
at odds with Kristeva’s persistent challenge to identitarian logic.
However, like Cornell (and indeed Fraser), I remain uncomfort-
able with Kristeva’s wider assertions about maternity and ethics.
Clearly, there is a radical account of heterogeneity at the heart of
her discussion (see Ziarek 1992), which, furthermore, connects,
albeit always temporarily and in a fragile bond, the corporeal with
signification and representation. Yet, it is difficult to see how this
radical philosophy of feminine heterogeneity, on which Kristeva’s
ethics is based, translates into (feminist) political efficacy. As I
will illustrate in the next section, it is in the field of politics that
Kristeva’s feminine ethics takes a further problematic turn.

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Violence and Vulnerability

While motherhood constitutes a significant reference point of
a Kristevan ethics and its reception within feminism, I want to
suggest that her writings pose a more fundamental ethical ques-
tion: namely, that of violence, its constitutive role in the gen-
eration of the subject, and its manifestation in our relationships
with (gendered and racial) others. Some of these ideas have been
presented in Strangers to Ourselves, where Kristeva discusses the
role of violence in the relationship between foreigner and political
community; however, her assertion of the foundational role of vio-
lence can be traced back to her writings of the early 1970s, such as
Revolution in Poetic Language, which draws on anthropological
notions of sacrifice and on psychoanalytic notions of expulsion,
separation and the theory of drives. These ideas also influence her
subsequent engagement with violence, such as her discussion of
abjection and her deployment of the Freudian notion of melan-
cholia. In this section I will briefly sketch these ideas, but my main
task is to attend to Kristeva’s more recent consideration of the role
of women as agents of violence, which is set in the context of the
Middle East conflict. This focus is of particular interest, I believe,
because it supplements a widespread, and necessary, focus within
feminist ethics on women as victims of violence with an account
of women as agents of violence. Furthermore, it illustrates some of
the problems that emerge in the application of Kristeva’s ethics on
to politics. It also, as I suggest below, opens up a wider discussion
on what I want to refer to as an ethics of forgiveness and an ethics
of living. (I will discuss these in the last section of this chapter.)
Separating these three components of Kristeva’s ethical thought
serves merely analytical and heuristic purposes; to gain a compre-
hensive understanding of Kristeva’s ethics they need to be thought
together. They also inform some of the questions that I pursue in
Chapters 4 and 5.
I already stated that a concern with otherness sits at the heart
of Kristeva’s ethical project; this concern is underpinned by her
adherence to a philosophical anthropology that posits violence as
a fundamental feature of human life. It emanates from the violence
of the drives, specifically the death drive, and it establishes the
susceptibility of human life to vulnerability, which manifests itself,
in the first instance, in the subject’s fundamental dependency upon

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an other. Violence and vulnerability constitute, paradoxically, the

parameters that enable our existence, but they also pose threats
and limits to human life. Kristeva’s assertion of the centrality of
violence builds upon anthropological claims regarding the role of
sacrifice in the foundation of society (see Girard 1977; Reineke
1997), and, more specifically, on Freud’s anthropological nar-
rative of the social contract and his theory of drives. Recall that
Freud, in Totem and Taboo, posits the murder of the father by the
horde of brothers, and the displacement of the father’s authority
on the totemic object, as the beginning of sociality. Kristeva sub-
scribes to these basic premises – though I will argue below that
she also substantially adds to them – by stating that the sacrifi-
cial murder (of the father) initiates the socio-symbolic order. As
she claims, sacrifice has ‘an ambiguous function, simultaneously
violent and regulatory’ (RPL: 75). It is a violent act that ends
semiotic violence, embodied in the uncontrolled flow of the drives,
and that displaces this uncontrolled violence on to the symbolic.
In Kristeva’s own words, ‘Far from unleashing violence, sacrifice
shows how representing that violence is enough to stop it and
to concatenate an order’ (RPL: 75). At first glance, Kristeva’s
retelling of Freud’s story in Revolution in Poetic Language seems
strangely gender-neutral, possibly a testament to her emphasis on
the operation of drives in the pre-Oedipal child. However, as sug-
gested by Reineke (1997), the narrative of sacrifice is embedded
in a wider framework of sexual difference that is indispensable
to understanding Kristeva’s account. Her coding as masculine of
the symbolic order that is said to emerge from this fraternal pat-
ricide goes some way towards redressing this (as I demonstrate
below, she attends to this matter in The Sense and Non-Sense of
Revolt).7
Thus, Revolution in Poetic Language deploys an essentially
Freudian account of the foundational role played by violence in
the formation of subject and society. Key to Kristeva’s further dis-
cussion is the violence of the drive, enacted through the process of
rejection that leads to the establishment of the subject. Following
Kristeva’s account, the previously uncontrolled and ungendered
use of violence becomes masculine once this violence transmogri-
fies into the symbolic. Kristeva reaffirms her position on the foun-
dational status of violence and vulnerability in a more recent text,
where she claims that

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this I that speaks is unveiled to itself insofar as it is constructed in a

vulnerable bond with a strange object, or an ec-static other, an ab-jet:
the sexual thing . . . This vulnerable bond to the sexual thing and in
it . . . is no different from the heterogeneous bond . . . on which our
languages and our discourses depend. (2009a: 22; italics in original)

Hence, vulnerability is written into the subject, both in its rela-

tions with the other in the present, via language and the social
bond, and in the originary and constitutive process of abjection
and rejection. Moreover, as Kristeva has argued consistently, with
reference to her notion of abjection, we remain vulnerable because
we are constituted via the other, the thing. I will return to the idea
of the violence of the drives in the next chapter, but for now I want
to continue my survey of Kristeva’s narrative of violence.
Out of Kristeva’s wider œuvre, it is possibly Powers of Horror
that is most widely associated with her claim about the foun-
dational status of violence. As I demonstrated in Chapter 1, the
expulsion of what is in between, through a process Kristeva terms
‘abjection’, becomes crucial to the establishment of bodily bound-
aries. Recounting the process of abjection, Kristeva provides a
story of individual subjectification that requires the expulsion of
the parents and of bodily matters.8 Moreover, as we have seen in
the first chapter, while there is some dispute within the feminist
commentary over the gendered nature of abjection, it raises the
spectre of the violent expulsion of the mother and the maternal
body. Hence, it is perhaps unsurprising that Kristeva asserts the
necessity of another act of violence, that of matricide, as indispen-
sable to the establishment of the subject (BS: 27).
Whereas abjection culminates in the, always provisional, violent
expulsion and externalisation of what is considered as filth, melan-
cholia attends to an inwardly turned aggression, an internalisation
of the violence of the death drive that can lead to symbolic or real
death. Described by Freud as a ‘mental constellation of revolt’
that emerges as a result of loss (1998b), melancholia attests to the
interrelated production of psychic and social life, and the inter-
nalisation of a social prohibition into the psyche, leading to the
establishment of conscience and to the emergence of the subject.
While this theme has received little attention in the critical com-
mentary on Kristeva, it has attracted substantial feminist inter-
est. Wendy Brown (1995) considers how vulnerability, or injury,

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forms the basis for what she calls ‘politicised identities’. According
to Brown, the constitution and preservation of the identity of
marginalised groups, such as women, are contingent upon their
attachment to their own exclusion because, Brown claims, their
identity is premised on this exclusion for its very existence as iden-
tity. As she states, ‘the formation of identity at the site of exclu-
sion, as exclusion . . . installs its pain over its unredeemed history
in the very foundation of its political claim, in its demand for
recognition as identity’ (1995: 73–4). Developing Brown’s point
further, Moya Lloyd asks how loss and attachment can configure
feminist politics. As Lloyd suggests,

feminists are wedded to their identity as women even as that identity

is grounded in subordination and injury. It is this that gives meaning
to feminism as a marginalised political grouping even as it guarantees
that very marginalisation. . . . In affirming one’s identity, one affirms
and reiterates the hurt that constitutes that identity in the first place.
To let go of the hurt is to let go of identity and to risk dissolution.
(1998–9: 41)

To put it simply: there can be no identity without subjection,

injury or loss, and hence violence.9 While both Brown and Lloyd
account for the generation of feminist identity via political read-
ings of injury and violence, Kristeva’s focus on art and therapy (see
Beardsworth 2004a), and its seemingly attendant individualistic
slant (see McAfee 2000), foreclose such a reading.10 At best, she
can hope for an aesthetic outlet of the transformation of the vio-
lence of the drive; at worst, it results in the riots of the marginal-
ised, those affected by the society of the spectacle (see Chapter 2).
Before I move on to consider a possible application of Kristeva’s
discussion of violence, I want to pause for a moment and reflect
upon the implications of her discussion of violence. I want to
suggest that Kristeva’s account of violence is a radical one; putting
violence at the origin of society has profound implications, for her
narration of the subject and of social formations, including the
family and society, as well as for her ethical project. Thus, violence
is intrinsic to the subject, and for Kristeva, there is no escaping
from it (see also Lechte and Margaroni 2004: 87). Besides, for
her, the question of violence is not a normative one: that is, it is
not a question of whether we ought or ought not to use violence.

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Rather, what occupies her ethics is how the violence constitutive

of the subject can be transformed into less violent or non-violent
practices. I already alluded to one such example of a constructive
transformation of original violence in the previous chapter, where
I pointed up the transformative role of representation, in particu-
lar in its aesthetic manifestations, in the emergence of the subject.
Yet, it is also fair to state that Kristeva’s overall assessment of
the potential for representation is rather pessimistic. In her view,
the effects of the society of the spectacle and the loss of author-
ity in the modern world have substantially reduced the capacity
for representation and have increased the risk of more violence;
this becomes aggravated by the violence of the image, which she
associates with the spectacle, and which further diminishes the
subject’s capacity to reconstruct its imaginary.11
I already raised the question whether Kristeva’s account of
violence is gendered, or, more generally, what the gendered dimen-
sion of her discussion of violence is. We have seen that an original
violence, which emanates from the operation of the drives, exists
prior to any conception of gender or sexual difference. Yet, the
sacrifice that initiates society also founds a gendered order, a
‘sexual contract’ (Pateman 1988) that codes that order and its vio-
lence as masculine. By extension, the feminine becomes antitheti-
cal to violence, and this assertion also informs Kristeva’s further
claims about women’s relationship to violence and violent acts.
Such an equivalence between the feminine and non-violence is a
fundamental assertion of much of feminist ethics; it underpins in
particular feminist care ethics, and it also informs many debates
in international relations, which have recently been challenged by
feminist scholars (see Sjoberg and Gentry 2008). Here I want to
turn to a recent development in Kristeva’s writings, her response
to the crisis in the Middle East, which offers further insight into
her perspective on violence.
If a consideration of fascism accompanies Kristeva’s psycho-
social analysis of abjection, then her most recent writings turn
on some pressing current political issues, most prominently the
problem of (Islamic) terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism and the
conflict in the Middle East. Kristeva’s engagement with these
issues is an intriguing one, especially in light of the gendered narra-
tive that runs through her story and that connects this most recent
work with some of her early writings on feminism. The violence

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associated with global events surrounding 9/11 and the West’s

strategy of embarking upon a so-called ‘war on terror’ have occu-
pied much of feminist discussion in this last decade. What these
debates illustrate is that violence and vulnerability are not merely
ontological conditions that configure the subject’s existence; they
are also brought upon us through others and they are distributed
unevenly across racial and gendered divides (see Butler 2004;
2009).
Here it is worth exploring Kristeva’s essay ‘Can We Make
Peace?’ (2007a),12 in which she reasserts her claim of an original
violence, embodied in the workings of the death drive. This essay,
originally a chapter from La Haine et le pardon (2005b), the third
volume of her series on revolt, positions her psychoanalytic, philo-
sophical and literary discussions of the first two revolt volumes in
the context of the events in the wake of 9/11. While Kristeva, faith-
ful to psychoanalytic thought, posits the operation of an original
violence, she also seeks answers as to how to deal with it. Building
upon her previous discussion, she finds the answer to this ques-
tion in a strengthening of the imaginary, including analytic and
aesthetic practices, as well as in an adherence to freedom (more on
this below). The context for her discussion is her assertion of the
need for a discourse on life on the one hand, and her concern with
the political crisis in the Middle East on the other. Kristeva claims
that peace is in crisis because we lack a discourse on human life.
While Kristeva connects this crisis with the regime of the
spectacle already discussed (see Chapter 2), she suggests that this
crisis manifests itself most clearly in a culture of death13 that she
ascribes to ‘Muslim fundamentalist intransigence’ (2007a: 124)
and terrorism following 9/11. The explanation for violence pro-
vided by Kristeva is thus psychoanalytical on the one hand, but it
also points to what is essentially described as a deeply entrenched
violence of Muslim fundamentalism and what lacks any social,
historical, political or economic reference points. She introduces
a further dimension into her discussion, which displaces original
violence even further, this time on female suicide bombers, or
shahidas. I will further comment on her engagement with Islam
in Chapter 5. For now, I want to focus on her exploration of a
specifically female form of violence that she locates in the practices
of so-called shahidas, female Palestinian suicide bombers. Here it
is worth quoting Kristeva at length, as this, I believe, illuminates

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a fundamental problematic in her approach, which, as I stated

above, abstracts from context. Shahidas, according to Kristeva,
are ‘originally destined for procreation’ (she supplements with
reference to Arendt’s distinction between bios and zoon); they
are then ‘sent off to sacrifice and martyrdom in imitation of the
warlike man and possessor of power’. Moreover, prior to their sui-
cidal act, they are alleged to have experienced ‘amorous disasters’,
such as ‘pregnancy outside marriage, sterility, desire for phallic
equality with the man’ (all references are from 2007a: 125). In
short, shahidas are Muslim women whose life-stories, prior to
their suicidal act, are said to depart from the cultural and religious
expectations of their society.
Overall, it is fair to say that this essay engages in a crude gen-
eralisation that reduces complex political, ethical and cultural
constellations to a question of personal tragedy, without con-
sidering the social and political contexts that generate violence;
this displacement of politics on to an implicit gendered ethics is
compounded by her failure to reflect on the variety of individual
histories and motivations. Besides, reading Kristeva’s charac-
terisation of twenty-first-century shahidas, one is reminded of
her depiction, in the texts from the 1970s, of the equally phallic
feminist or terrorist sisters in Europe who are juxtaposed to the
third-generation feminists aiming to establish the feminine. From
an ethical perspective, the problem lies with a disregard of female
difference and the concomitant disregard of zoon or life. Her
ethics of non-violence is mapped upon a sociological account of
gender and a normative conception of the feminine. If the femini-
sation of the foreigner, as Ziarek (2005) and Ahmed (2005) have
demonstrated, constitutes one aspect of Kristeva’s ethics, then it
is the masculinisation of feminists and shahidas that stands in the
way of an ethic on the other hand.
Thus, it is a rather disappointing account that lacks in social-
historical analysis, relying instead on commonplace assertions and
generalisations (see also Chapter 5). Moreover, it returns to the
now familiar argument of the ‘failure’ of some women to succumb
to their femininity and become masculinised. I have already com-
mented on Kristeva’s treatment of feminism in some of her texts
from the 1970s, where she describes politically active women, in
particular those women who seek full equality within the frame-
work of the symbolic, including feminists, as virile, phallic, mas-

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culine and homosexual. This negative characterisation accorded to

feminists, female politicians and female terrorists in the 1970s is
now given to the shahidas. Thus, Kristeva offers a rather disturb-
ing and facile characterisation of these women, without providing
the necessary socio-cultural or historical reference points. This, I
want to suggest, hinders any serious understanding of such a sensi-
tive issue. It also impedes efforts to articulate more fully the psyche
with the social. At least in this instance, Kristeva’s ‘psychic life of
ethics’ (see Ziarek 2001), which takes seriously one’s ethical obli-
gation towards the other and which reflects the heterogeneity and
otherness within the subject, falls remarkably short of considering
the social and political conditions of the emergence of violence.
Without referring to Kristeva, Cornell broaches this issue in a
short piece, part of a wider feminist forum, published in the femi-
nist philosophy journal Hypatia (2003), which seeks to establish
feminist responses to 9/11. Cornell takes exception to what she
considers a colonialist response to the situation in Afghanistan.
Of interest to my discussion is a further claim, building upon psy-
choanalytic insights, which suggests that in the official discourses
of Western governments, (male/Islamic) terrorism has become
feminised. Moreover, this feminisation of terrorism is mirrored by
what Iris Young refers to as a depiction of the masculinist protec-
tion dispensed by the security state (2003a; 2003b). This aspect
has also recently been taken up by Adriana Cavarero (2009) and
Kelly Oliver (2007a; see also Oliver 2007b; 2008; 2009a; 2009b),
who suggest that any discussion of the violence of the shahidas,
and of terrorism more generally, must also consider how violence,
in its gendered manifestations, structures the dispensation of state
violence. Thus, if in the official discourse of the West, the femini-
sation of non-state violence mirrors the masculinisation of state
violence, then this gendered narrative continues into the analyses
of the (gendered) actors who have recourse to violence. In this
respect, the mirror image of the shahidas is those female soldiers
who became associated with the widespread abuse in Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq, embodied most famously in the figure of Lyndsey
England (see Oliver 2007a; 2007b).
I have yet to respond to the second point raised by Kristeva in
her essay, which pertains to the question of life, the alleged lack of
a discourse on life and the need for a new humanism. I turn to this
point in the final section of this chapter, where I want to consider

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two immediate answers that Kristeva gives to the question of

violence and that constitute further cornerstones of a Kristevan
ethics: sublimation and forgiveness.

Sublimation, For-giveness and the Art of Living

Despite the persistence of violence and vulnerability, which, as we
saw in the previous section, Kristeva posits as ontological condi-
tions of the emergence of the human that come to frame the possi-
bilities for ethical life, she does not give up on the prospect of a less
violent world. As she claims, it is through forgiveness and sublima-
tion that we establish a more constructive relationship with vio-
lence, and a less violent relationship with the other. Sublimation
operates, in the first instance, through the transformation and
displacement of drive energy, but it is also a form of work and
working-through that requires psychoanalysis. Sara Beardsworth
interprets Kristeva’s concern with sublimation in the context
of the latter’s wider concern with crisis, and in particular with
the absence of authority in the modern world (see Beardsworth
2004b). Sublimation allows the subject to work through this rec-
ognition of the absence of authority and, in doing so, facilitates the
establishment of relationships not only with others, but also, and
crucially, with oneself. It is here that the crux of Kristeva’s ethics
lies; it interweaves the inter- and intra-subjective relationship with
the other. This relationship, as Beardsworth reminds us, includes
a recognition of the irreducibility of otherness, including the alter-
ity within (2004a: 132; see also Ziarek 2001), the central theme
of Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves. I return to a consideration of
this book in the last chapter; for now, I want to take a closer look
at Kristeva’s discussion of forgiveness.
Forgiveness, for Kristeva, manifests itself in two related ways:
love and transference. Already in Black Sun, Kristeva explores the
significance of forgiveness, against the backdrop of melancholic
suffering and the prospect of the atoning qualities of art. Primarily,
though, forgiveness plays itself out in psychoanalytic categories,
specifically in the giving of transferential love and the identifica-
tion with the imaginary father or, more generally, ‘an other who
does not judge but hears my truth in the availability of love’ (BS:
205) and who allows the depressed patient to begin anew, to com-
mence a rebirth. (I return to the idea of birth and new beginnings

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in Chapter 4.) Kristeva pays renewed attention to forgiveness

in her work on revolt, especially in Intimate Revolt, where she
stresses the instrumental role of intimate revolt for channelling
violence into liveable forms (see Chapter 2). It is worth explicating
these ideas in some detail.
Whilst she states at the outset of her discussion on forgive-
ness in Intimate Revolt that forgiveness is not a psychoanalytic
concept (IR: 14), she nevertheless establishes the idea of forgive-
ness firmly within psychoanalytic parameters (see also Chapter 4).
Contrasting psychoanalysis with those discourses of forgiveness
that are said to posit an evil requiring forgiveness external to the
subject, she believes that psychoanalysis locates the guilt that is
concomitant to forgiveness in the interior of the subject: to be
precise, in the process of subjectification. What does this mean?
Freudian theory, like the philosophy of Heidegger that Kristeva
utilises in her discussion of forgiveness, posits a guilt that is coex-
istent with being. For Heidegger, this guilt arises from the mere
fact of Dasein, from the fact that we are thrown into the world,
whereas Freud delineates guilt in the establishment of the psychic
apparatus. Guilt, according to Kristeva’s reading of Freud, is inter-
nal to the structure of consciousness; it follows the internalisation
of the paternal law, with its set of prohibitions, and the regulation
and ordering of drives and affect that divide the psychic appa-
ratus into consciousness and the unconscious. In essence, what
will require forgiveness is associated with the re-emergence of
the drives, especially the violence associated with the drives, and
with their clash with conscience. Hence, the violence emanating
from the drives, whilst under the control of consciousness and the
super-ego, tends to resurface and needs to be channelled into non-
violent forms. For Kristeva, it is not violence as such that causes
hurt and that makes us vulnerable; rather, injury and vulnerability
emerge whenever violence collides with conscience and conscious-
ness. Thus, the generation of a condition that requires forgiveness
is an ontological condition of human life, an ontological guilt.
However, while guilt is preceded by a primordial violence, it
also entails the condition for forgiveness and thus ethics. For one,
the ontological status of violence posited by Kristeva removes or
displaces the notion of the victim, and the distinction between
victim and perpetrator: ‘we are all guilty, we are all responsi-
ble.’ It is crucial to stress that Kristeva’s assertion pertains to the

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foundational status of guilt and its ethical function in our relation-

ship, or debt, towards others. In that sense, the displacement of the
notion of victim operates prior to, or outside, the possibility of an
act of evil, which does not absolve responsibility for one’s actions
(see also below). Here it is again helpful to invoke Kristeva’s dis-
cussion of Heidegger. Drawing on the German word for guilt,
‘Schuld’, Kristeva, following Heidegger, establishes the possible
ethical connotations of guilt. ‘Schuld’, in German, has two mean-
ings, guilt and debt; Kristeva connects these two meanings by
claiming that the guilty person is a person in debt, specifically
towards those who facilitate our Dasein. This guilt-debt that we
owe others contains within it the seeds of forgiveness; because we
owe a debt – that is, because we are, ontologically, guilty – our
guilt-debt can be cancelled by the gift of the ‘par-don’, the giving
of the gift of for-giveness.
Although situated in a structure that differs from Heidegger’s
philosophy, psychoanalysis operates according to similar prin-
ciples. Psychic illness is caused by the inability to connect drive
energy with meaning, and it is the collapse of meaning that is the
most prominent symptom of those who are ill (see Oliver 2009b).
The task of psychoanalysis is to restore the capacity for significa-
tion, primarily by forgiving the sense of guilt via transference love.
This in itself, according to Kristeva, helps the analysand to love
and forgive him- or herself, and to begin the process of recovery.
At the core of this process lies the restructuring of the psychic
apparatus, a revolt leading to a rebirth and the capacity to begin
anew (see Chapter 4).
The ethical relationship at the centre of this process is that
between analyst and analysand, but this relationship of love and
forgiveness has wider applicability, allowing for the creation of
what she terms ‘a new, subjective and intersubjective configura-
tion’ (IR: 16). Analytic experience, via transference love, facilitates
the construction of an ethical position; moreover, it facilitates the
emergence or re-emergence of the capacity for revolt, through
permanent inquiry; and finally, analysis allows the analysand to
re-establish connections, both with the other and with oneself (IR:
236–7). Already in Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva addresses this
ethical dimension at the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise. As
she states towards the end of this text, psychoanalysis teaches us
to recognise the other/the foreigner within me. This ethics of psy-

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choanalysis, based upon transference love, acquires the status of

a politics that builds upon a cosmopolitanism that, furthermore,
recognises this unconscious (StO: 192).14
Moreover, despite Kristeva’s insistence on the ahistorical and
timeless nature of forgiveness, given the alleged archaic nature of
the drive and imprint of the Other (BS: 204), it requires a con-
frontation with the social nature of consciousness and with the
social norms that make up the paternal law. Besides, by recog-
nising the fundamental, albeit potentially violent, role played by
drives, forgiveness entails a recognition of embodiment, which,
while ideally experienced in sublimatory aesthetic activity (see
also Black Sun), is achieved in the representation of the violence of
the drives. Crucially, though, as I already stated, forgiveness does
not absolve responsibility: ‘Forgiveness does not cleanse actions.
It raises the unconscious from beneath the actions and has it meet
a living other – an other who does not judge but hears my truth in
the availability of love, and for that reason allows me to be reborn’
(BS: 205).
If Kristeva’s ethics displays, as I suggested at the beginning of
this chapter, an orientation towards the other, it also contains a
fundamental orientation towards the self. This orientation, as we
have already seen, is the result of the operation of the drives, the
crossing of the threshold between drive and signification, nature
and culture, feminine and masculine. Here I want to address
briefly a further aspect of Kristeva’s thought, what we might term
her ethics of the self, or what Kristeva herself calls the art of living.
In the previous chapter, on revolt, I highlighted the etymological
emphasis that Kristeva places on the notion of revolt, as a return
to drive, memory and unconscious. This idea of the return also
influences her ethics of the self, which is performed through the
practice of revolt.
Psychoanalysis plays an essential role in this revolt, as it allows
the subject to engage in this return via language and transference.
As she develops this further, she establishes how such a revolt-
cum-return facilitates a rebirth, generating the capacity for making
lives and new beginnings (see Chapter 4), and how it facilitates a
freedom realised via an ethos of questioning, a questioning attitude
that she posits as inherently ethical (see also Chapter 5). Of rel-
evance to my discussion here is a further dimension to this revolt-
cum-return: her claim that this could constitute the foundation for

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a new humanism. Kristeva alludes to this claim briefly towards

the end of Intimate Revolt, and she returns to it in her speech
accepting the Holberg Prize (2005a) and in La Haine et le pardon
(2005b). Already in Intimate Revolt, Kristeva claims that we lack
a positive definition of humanity. Very briefly, she asserts that
the base level of humanity should be hospitality, delineated by
its association with ethos, as a habitat or resting place (IR: 257;
see also 2004c: 25). Her discussion of humanity and hospitality
relates back to her discussion of foreigners, where hospitality, and
hence humanity, consists of welcoming the foreigner. It is in this
‘ethical and philosophical horizon of a revision of the conception
of the subject itself’ (2009a: 22), against the encroaching of massi-
fication, of the spectacle and the patrimonial person, that Kristeva
sees the emergence of a new form of humanity, embodied by its
attention to singularity and life. Thus, Kristeva’s insistence on het-
erogeneity, embodied in the traversal of the maternal body, and
on the oscillation of the drive into signification, is given a more
fundamental grounding in her attention to singularity, which I will
discuss in Chapter 4.

Notes
1. See, for example, Gilligan (1982) and Held (2006). Sara Ruddick
makes a brief reference to Kristeva, endorsing her stress on dissi-
dence while simultaneously equating mothering with the principle
of non-violence (1989: 225). Contributions by Kristeva are not
included in Gatens (1998; 2002) or Frazer et al. (1992; she is listed
in the bibliography, however).
2. Some of the most prominently discussed books, such as the works
by Diprose (1994) and Gatens (2002), whilst broadly sympathetic
towards post-structuralist thought, pay scant attention to Kristeva.
Diprose, for example, engages closely with the works of Foucault
and Irigaray, relegating Kristeva to one footnote and a brief consid-
eration of one of her commentators, Graybeal (see Graybeal 1993).
3. Edelstein (1993) describes Kristeva as a postmodern ethicist pursu-
ing a ‘poléthique’ that combines ethics with politics. However, as I
will argue further below, Kristeva’s reluctance to embrace politics
more fully is in fact one of the reasons why this potential linkage
between politics and ethics is never fully fleshed out.
4. For a related argument pertaining to Kristeva’s practice of traversal

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see also Rose (1993). Mary Ann Caws (1973) locates the idea of
traversal within Tel Quel’s, and Kristeva’s, subscription to the idea
of the interdiscursive and intertextual.
5. Kelly Oliver (1993a) refers to it as an outlaw ethics.
6. It also highlights the importance of the father, and more generally,
of the paternal function, for the development of the child’s psychic
health. The father is thus always present in Kristeva’s writings, and
this paternal presence manifests itself not only in the father’s role as
a separator, but also in the mother’s need for the father, as father-
husband-phallus and as the imaginary father; the mother–child
relationship is thus not the only sexual relationship for Kristeva, as
suggested by Grosz (1990: 94). For a more detailed assessment of the
role of the father in Kristeva’s writings see Oliver (1993a).
7. A different version of this story of violence and sacrifice has been told
by Carole Pateman (1988), who asserts that the violence enacted by
the brothers against the father establishes a fraternal contract that
provides the brothers with access to women.
8. Powers of Horror also alludes to the collective operation of such an
expulsion as a mass psychological process that underpins fascism.
Kristeva’s notion of abjection also plays a significant role in the theo-
risation of a racial social contract and the policing of the boundaries
of the body politic. See Young (1990).
9. See also Butler’s account (1997) of the subject’s attachment to
subordination, through guilt and injury, which is said to reaffirm
the melancholic incorporation of subordination that produces the
subject in the first place. For an alternative vision of feminism
beyond the subject see Zerilli’s account (2005), which I discuss in
Chapter 5.
10. For further political readings of the inwardly turned violence of
melancholia in the context of sexual and racial-colonial politics see
Butler (1997) and Bhabha (1992).
11. For a more detailed discussion of the role of the image that also
draws on Kristeva see Oliver (2009b).
12. This essay was originally delivered as a contribution to the Universal
Academy of Cultures at UNESCO in 2002. There is some overlap
with Chapter 14 of Intimate Revolt. See also Kristeva (2004a;
2009a).
13. The term ‘culture of death’ was coined by the late John Paul II in his
encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae from 25 March 1995. The papal
reference relates, in the main, to the Catholic Church’s opposition

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to abortion. The notion of a culture of death is also deployed by the

New Right and conservative republicans in the United States. For a
discussion that engages with the suicide bombings carried out by the
shahidas see Victor (2004).
14. I return to this aspect in Chapter 5, where I proffer a more critical
assessment of Kristeva’s account of strangeness that draws upon
recent critical readings of the racial subtext of her argument.

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 4

The Singularity of Genius

In my feminist years, I entitled a piece about the difficulty of being a

woman “Unes femmes”: how to preserve each woman’s uniqueness
within the plurality of the group.
(Kristeva 2001a: 184; italics in original)

In the conclusion to her book on Kristeva, Sara Beardsworth

(2004a) takes Kristeva’s 1980s trilogy to task for failing to explore
how lives are made. This fault is said to originate in a gap between
Kristeva’s emphasis on art on the one hand, and on therapy on the
other. While both art and therapy are said to constitute distinctive
responses to the crisis experienced by modern subjects, they fail to
elucidate, Beardsworth suggests, how people make lives. This gap,
according to Beardsworth, is filled with Kristeva’s genius trilogy,1
whose linkage between life and narrative, and whose focus on the
exemplarity of genius, provide answers to the problem of crisis
that have occupied Kristeva in much of her work since the 1980s.
Thus, it is in yet another trilogy, on female genius, that the concept
of life, and in particular the connection between life and discourse,
take centre-stage.
The lives explored in the genius trilogy are no ordinary lives,
though. They encompass three prominent female intellectuals of
the twentieth century: the German–Jewish philosopher, Hannah
Arendt; the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, also German–Jewish;
and the French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. What connects
these three books, and with it the lives and writings of the women
who are under discussion there, is the notion of genius. Genius,
as Kristeva intimates in her introduction to the first volume of
the trilogy, on Hannah Arendt, describes those whose life-story is
closely connected with their intellectual creations (HA: xi; more on
this below). Although Kristeva offers a distinctly individual attrac-
tion to account for her choice of Arendt, Klein and Colette, stress-
ing the ‘personal affinities’ (HA: xv) she feels with these women,

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there is more to it than individual intellectual indulgence. Rather,

reading through the books, it becomes clear that her affinity draws
on a substantial thematic and biographical overlap with Kristeva’s
background, pertaining to the respective conceptual apparatus
and methodologies of her chosen geniuses, as well as to their
experiences of emigration, exile and marginality. I already inti-
mated how Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic enterprise, especially
her championing of the importance of the death drive, constitutes
an important influence on the development of Kristeva’s psycho-
analytic thought (see Chapters 1 and 3); there are also obvious
parallels between Colette’s sensuous and sensual style of writing,
Kristeva’s emphasis on the semiotic dimension of language (see
Chapter 1), and its impact on the intimate (see Chapter 2).
My focus in this chapter lies with Kristeva’s engagement with
Hannah Arendt.2 While the genius trilogy as a whole awaits a
comprehensive analysis in the critical commentary, I want to
justify my emphasis on Arendt with my own affinity with some
of Arendt’s ideas, especially with her agonistic account of politics,
which articulates original and novel perspectives on the question
of identity politics (see Disch 1995; Honig 1995b; Zerilli 2005).
Moreover, whereas the import of Kristeva to Arendtian ideas
has recently received attention in the Arendt scholarship (see
Birmingham 2003; 2005; 2006; see also Zakin 2009),3 I believe
that it will be of interest to turn this around and to inquire into
Arendt’s significance to Kristeva. Hence, one of my aims in this
chapter is to provide a more detailed unpacking and discussion of
Kristeva’s work on Arendt, and to map an, albeit tentative, femi-
nist interpretation of these writings.
Of course, Arendt was famously dismissive of what she termed
‘the woman question’ and she therefore seems an unlikely object
for a feminist analysis, especially one that considers her impact
on Kristeva and her relationship with feminism. Furthermore,
Arendt’s and Kristeva’s respective reference points and frame-
works, including their positioning vis-à-vis politics, as well as
their relationship with psychoanalysis and embodiment, seem
to put them at opposite ends of the spectrum of contemporary
thought. And yet, as I hope to demonstrate here, Arendtian ideas
obtain an increasing prominence in Kristeva’s writings since the
1990s and they inform her current thinking on politics, philoso-
phy and ethics (see also Chapter 5 on the notion of freedom and

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Chapter 3 on ethics and responsibility). I believe that there is a

further justification for such an analysis. As I have stated repeat-
edly, Kristeva’s wider philosophical thought, together with her
critical attitude towards politics, has complicated the feminist
appropriation of her ideas, especially if we understand feminism
as a project aimed at social and political transformation. Yet, as I
seek to demonstrate in this chapter, it is via her engagement with
Arendt’s ideas, which entails both an appropriation of as well as a
critical departure from Arendt’s work, that we can begin to map a
more coherent political philosophy that resonates with Kristeva’s
critique of identity and with her insistence on heterogeneity, and
that contributes to the formulation of a Kristevan feminism. (I will
continue this task in the next chapter.) Thus, I want to suggest that
it is through the writings of Arendt that Kristeva’s wider politi-
cal ideas are advanced, albeit in a distinctly Kristevan direction.
This chapter begins the task of delineating the contours of such
a Kristevan political philosophy, despite or even against her own
intentions, by sketching her critical engagement with Arendt’s
thought, which, as I demonstrate, evolves around the themes of
singularity, plurality and natality, and which draws on the topics
of narrative and life, embodiment, political bonds and totalitarian-
ism.4
I wish to stress emphatically, though, that I do not seek to assess
the accuracy or validity of Kristeva’s Arendt interpretation. In this
respect, my aims are more modest; I want to identify a number of
‘crystallisations’, Arendt’s term for the emergence and materialisa-
tion of political events, that advance Kristeva’s writings and ideas.
Such an approach, I believe, will further elucidate the understand-
ing of Kristeva’s critique of feminism, and it will contribute to
a continuation of feminist analyses of Kristeva’s thought. Thus,
whereas I engage with the import of Arendt’s ideas and writings
for Kristeva’s recent thought, I am not concerned with Kristeva’s
contribution to the Arendt scholarship. This entails, by necessity,
a rather generous oversight of Kristeva’s occasionally disappoint-
ing engagement with Arendt, including her chronological and
thematic exposition of Arendt’s biography and well-known texts.5
This omission allows me, on the other hand, to focus on Kristeva’s
critical interventions into Arendt’s writings and to develop these
in the direction of feminist thought. My overall interest in this
chapter could thus be summed up as follows: what does Kristeva’s

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engagement with Arendt add to Kristeva’s thought? And how

could it advance a feminist reading of Kristeva?
In the first section of this chapter I consider the influence
of Romanticism on Kristeva’s ideas, specifically Romanticism’s
import for the notion of genius. This discussion is followed by
three sections on Kristeva’s engagement with Hannah Arendt,
which explore the themes of narrative, life and rebirth; the rela-
tionship between the body and politics; and the deployment
of totalitarianism, singularity and plurality. I conclude with a
brief consideration of Kristeva’s recent discussion of Simone de
Beauvoir’s work. The overall aim of this chapter, as I already inti-
mated, is to aid the construction of a more nuanced and explicit
Kristevan political philosophy, which, despite Kristeva’s reluc-
tance to embrace politics more fully, should hopefully also add to
the feminist interest in her work.

Romantic Genius
In my Introduction, I alluded to a widespread reception of
Kristeva’s ideas, both within and beyond feminism, which sub-
sumes her under the label of ‘French theory’ (see also Kristeva
2004a). As I argued there, one of the problems associated with
such a label lies with the appearance it gives of a sense of coher-
ence among a diverse body of thought that does not pay due atten-
tion to the substantial differences that exist between its alleged
practitioners, a point that has been repeatedly stressed in the
critical commentary on ‘French feminism’. Besides, it also fails
to acknowledge the wide range of reference points of Kristeva’s
thought: specifically, her debt towards German idealism and
post-idealism, and its wider Romantic attachments.6 Even though
Hegel’s relevance to Kristeva’s thought is often pointed out, the
latter is better known for her work on (French) modernism and the
(French) avant-garde, and not often associated with the ideas of
(German) Romantic philosophy.7 This influence, however, can be
detected early on in her work, and it manifests itself in particular
in her attachment to the notion of singularity, which comes to bear
significantly on her discussion of genius. I previously intimated
that the idea of singularity is central to Kristeva’s conception of
the subject and that it adds force to her critical distance from femi-
nism. The theme of singularity also runs through her genius trilogy

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and, more specifically, through her not uncritical commitment

to the ideas of Hannah Arendt, who herself was not immune to
Romantic notions (see Young-Bruehl 2004). Here I want to focus
on one aspect of her Romanticism that is of particular relevance
to my discussion: her engagement with the idea of genius and its
connotation with the female and the feminine.
As I already indicated, Kristeva justifies her selection of the
three geniuses, Arendt, Klein and Colette, as personal affinity,
but it is helpful to consider briefly the wider motivation for her
engagement with genius, as this will elucidate the thematic empha-
ses of her trilogy: specifically, the connection she makes between
narrative and life (see next section). Kristeva proffers an outline of
the concept of genius in the ‘General Introduction’ to her genius
trilogy, included in the volume on Arendt (Kristeva 2001a), and
she returns to it in the conclusion to the trilogy, which is part
of the volume on Colette (2004c). In her introduction, Kristeva
defines genius as

those who force us to discuss their story because it is so closely bound

up with their creations, in the innovations that support the develop-
ment of thought and beings, and in the onslaught of questions, discov-
eries, and pleasures that their creations have inspired. (HA: xi)

This intrinsic connection between narrated life – that is, biography

– and creation is a guiding thread of her understanding of genius,
and she repeatedly returns to this theme, in her theorisation of
genius as well as in her discussion of the lives of her three chosen
geniuses. Crucially, Kristeva declares that it is not creation alone
that defines genius; rather the hallmark of genius is the way that
creative output connects with one’s life. But there is still more to
this. Through her discussion of female genius, Kristeva re-empha-
sises the main tenets of her theory of female sexuality, which, as
we have already seen, constitutes one of her key contributions to
psychoanalytic theory, and which seeks to recuperate the femi-
nine, above and beyond women’s concrete experience of mother-
ing on the one hand (see Chapter 3), and feminist activism on the
other. As she states in the conclusion to the trilogy, three common
traits, which also run through the works of Arendt, Klein and
Colette, constitute the characteristics of genius. These are, first,
the intersubjective dimension of the individual, which she posits

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

as a defining feature of female psychosexuality (see Chapter 2).

The second characteristic, as already mentioned, relates to the
interweaving of life and thought, while the third element is a focus
on new beginnings or rebirth (see below). Taken together, these
features culminate in the generation of singularity, which, accord-
ing to Kristeva, is the most important characteristic of genius. As I
will discuss shortly, it is through her notion of female genius that
Kristeva underscores her critical distance from feminism, which
she can only understand in its manifestation as a mass movement
that is at odds with singularity. In other words, (female) genius
allows her to rearticulate the feminine, while at the same time
evacuating it from feminism.
Because this central feature of Kristeva’s notion of genius ties
in, rather significantly, with her wider treatment of feminism, I
want to take a closer look at this. In the introduction to the trilogy,
Kristeva begins by locating genius in relation to feminism. Building
on some of her ideas, first articulated in the 1970s – for example,
in the essay ‘Women’s Time’ (1979) – Kristeva declares that femi-
nism establishes sexual difference, and in that respect recognises
the singularity and plurality of each man and woman; however,
it is also said to tend towards the totalitarian, which only the sin-
gularity of female genius can transcend. Thus genius, according
to Kristeva, simultaneously embodies and transcends feminism;
it transforms feminism’s alleged massification, which Kristeva
detests, and in its place it brings to the fore female singularity. As
I stated in previous chapters, Kristeva’s depiction of feminism is
curiously inattentive to feminism’s plurality and heterogeneity.
What’s more, her celebration of the plurality of women, which
is intrinsically linked with her assertion of the singularity of each
woman, remains indebted to an account of women in the singular
that builds substantially on psychoanalytic notions of a general-
ised femininity, drawing on phallic monism and the universality
of the Oedipal structure (see Chapter 3). Thus, it is fair to say
that Kristeva’s characterisation of feminism in the genius trilogy
is again emblematic of her curtailed reading of feminism. I return
to her depiction of feminism as totalitarian further below in this
chapter, but for now I continue with my examination of Kristeva’s
treatment of genius.
Whilst Kristeva’s insistence on the importance of the biographi-
cal dimension of genius leads her to consider the historical context

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of her three chosen geniuses, she does not further contextualise

the concept of genius, leaving the genealogy of term and concept,
and its relation to sexual difference untheorised. Thus, despite her
insistence on the importance of a narrated life to the idea of genius,
she pays scant attention to the social or historical context of the
genius discourse; this includes an omission of the relationship of
genius discourse to Romanticism and its cult of creativity. Such an
omission, however, is deeply problematic. As Christine Battersby
(1989) has argued, the genius discourse cannot be understood
outside its historical context: specifically, the movement of the
Renaissance and the Romantics. Battersby’s discussion helps to
detect several blind-spots in Kristeva’s analysis, and I therefore
want to remain with her analysis for the moment.
Battersby locates the deployment of the notion of genius in the
context of the aesthetics of the Renaissance, Romanticism and
modernism, all of which seek answers to the question of creativity.
Through a critical genealogy of the discourse on genius, she asserts
in particular the development of a close and paradoxical asso-
ciation between genius and femininity in the Romantic tradition.
According to Battersby, the notion of genius is deeply embedded
in Romanticism, whose emphasis on values such as originality,
creativity, authenticity and feelings is said to capture the essence
of genius. Crucially, the Romantic genius is a male, ‘full of virile
energy’ (1989: 3), and able to transcend the constraints of his
biological features. As Battersby claims, ‘[c]reativity was displaced
male procreativity: male sexuality made sublime’ (1989: 3). To
be precise, male procreativity is displaced on to the feminine and
turned into creativity. Hence, the creative Romantic genius is the
feminine male. Women, on the other hand, are destined to fail;
creative women – according to Battersby, almost a contradic-
tion in terms for the Romantics – fail their (feminine) sexuality,
while feminine women forego their creativity. It is easy to see why
Battersby considers this Romantic conception of genius, and its
dismissal or stifling of the development of a female aesthetics, to
be harmful to women (1989: 23). What the Romantics achieved,
according to Battersby, is the exclusion of women from the realm
of the aesthetic and the association of (male) genius with the femi-
nine.
Despite an occasional insistence on the importance of history,
and a brief allusion to the Renaissance context of the genius

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discourse, Kristeva’s discussion is curiously inattentive to histori-

cal context. However, her lack of attention to context should not
cloud the import of Romantic conceptions of genius to Kristeva’s
ideas; these include the association of genius with creativity, origi-
nality and exceptionality. Thus, the Romantic emphasis on crea-
tivity, which, according to Battersby, displaces divine powers from
God to modern Man, is mirrored in Kristeva’s definition of genius.
There, we find an equally strong emphasis on creativity that sits at
the crossroads of the genius’s life; as we have already seen, it is the
intersection of the biographical with the creative that characterises
Kristeva’s female genius. The three examples chosen by Kristeva,
notwithstanding their different intellectual and professional con-
texts, testify to this. Hannah Arendt, for example, was the first
female professor at Harvard University; Colette established herself
as an important writer who also set herself above the conventions
of motherhood and heterosexual coupledom; whilst Melanie Klein
made a significant contribution to the psychoanalytic tradition.
However, whilst Kristeva’s trilogy delves into the details of the
intellectual contributions of these three exceptional women, she
is also at pains to advocate a conception of genius that links it
with life, understood as biography, and with experience. It should
be stressed, though, that Kristeva’s use of the term experience
acquires a very specific meaning. Experience, for Kristeva, is not a
means of giving privileged status to women’s lives, practices, skills
or knowledges. In this respect, it differs fundamentally from the
function that experience obtains in some feminist discourses, such
as standpoint feminism, where its importance lies in the valuation
given to previously subjugated practices, and where experience
obtains the status of a privileged epistemological position. For
Kristeva, experience is not an epistemological category, linked to
knowledge, but an ethical one that allows the subject of experience
to engage in a more meaningful relationship with the other.
This ethical aspect also allows Kristeva to include motherhood
in the expression of genius. It is in the particular accomplishments
of each woman, especially the accomplishment of motherhood, that
Kristeva detects genius. As she declares, ‘Mothers can be geniuses . . .
of a certain approach to living the life of the mind. That approach to
being a mother and a woman . . . bestows upon mothers a genius all
their own’ (HA: xv). She continues by establishing motherhood as
‘the most essential of female vocations’: ‘In the future, motherhood

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will be desired, accepted, and carried out with the greatest blessings
for the mother, the father and the child’ (HA: xiii). We have seen in
Chapter 3 that one element of this celebration is her assertion of the
ethical dimension of motherhood. This idea resurfaces in her discus-
sion of Arendt’s treatment of love, which affords Kristeva an entrance
point to her reinterpretation of Arendtian thought and connects it
with her discussion of motherhood. Motherhood, Kristeva persists, is
a ‘loving concern for the other’ (1997: 169), especially for the other
in their vulnerability and fragility. As I will suggest below, Kristeva’s
insistence on human ordinariness and vulnerability, over and above
the exceptionality of genius, constitutes a distinctive addition to the
discourse on genius.
However, building upon my previous discussion (see Chapter
3), I would suggest that Kristeva’s association of motherhood
with genius is rather ambivalent in its implications for women
and, more widely, for feminism. On the one hand, it broadens
the concept of genius, beyond the status of the exceptional that is
certified by one’s intellectual or artistic creation; in that respect,
it equalises and democratises genius and in doing so, it subverts
and undermines genius’s claim to exceptionality. It becomes pro-
foundly problematic, though, if it elevates motherhood to the
status of women’s particular and unique contribution to genius.
Recall my discussion in the previous chapter, on motherhood,
where I considered Cornell’s claim (1991) that Kristeva’s treat-
ment of the feminine always ends up returning to motherhood. As
if anticipating such criticism, Kristeva defines motherhood as an
expression of vulnerability, and it is on this basis that she further
asserts that ‘[l]ife will be feminine, or not at all’ (1997: 169).
Moreover, this femininity, or maternity, is not exclusively linked
to women or mothers. She returns to this point in the conclusion
to her genius trilogy, where she asks

Can one define, not Woman or All Women, but a feminine specificity
that is declined differently in each sex (the feminine of woman, the
feminine of man) and in a singular manner for each subject, without
confining that subject within the ‘other’ or the ‘unrepresentable’?
(2004c: 408; emphasis in original)

While such an understanding of the feminine as irreducible

heterogeneity should put at ease critics such as Cornell, it sits, as I

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stated previously, in an uncomfortable relation to Kristeva’s wider

assertions about motherhood.
Also unresolved in this context is the question of Oedipality,
its relation to sexuality and the figure of the lesbian. As I demon-
strated previously, Kristeva alludes to the possibility of Oedipus
beyond heterosexual kinship structures, yet she remains com-
mitted to notions of heterosexual parenting. Declaring that ‘[t]
hrough their love of men, too, women will continue to give birth’
(HA: xiv), she anchors birth and motherhood in the heterosexual
couple, ‘the fruits of men’s and women’s freedom to love one
another’ (HA: 45). Paradoxically, the heterosexual couple’s gen-
eration of life is predicated upon the figure of woman-as-feminine
who is defined through her psychic bisexuality (HA: 48; see also
Chapter 3). Thus, the maternal genius is a feminine – that is, psy-
chically bisexual – woman, whose experience of maternity can be
shared by those males who can tap into their feminine disposi-
tions. Such a conception denies the prospect of lesbian mothering,
and with it, access to maternal genius.
As I already stated, the two key themes that emerge repeatedly in
Kristeva’s discussion of genius and, by extension, in her consideration
of Arendt’s writings, are singularity and plurality. They play a sig-
nificant role in Kristeva’s critical exegesis of Arendt’s work, but they
take on added importance in Kristeva’s critical assessment of femi-
nism. Her main point of contention, as I already stated, is feminism’s
alleged neglect of the singularity of each woman and of the plurality
of women. The notion of genius helps her to advance this argument
further. Thus, my discussion in the following sections is underpinned
by a central concern within feminist debates that resonates strongly
with Kristeva’s own concerns: how can we reconcile feminism, under-
stood as an identitarian project that engages in collective action, with
a concern for difference, singularity and plurality? Moreover, how do
we move from Kristeva’s, essentially ethical, concern for singularity
towards feminism’s, essentially political, project aimed at transfor-
mation? These questions guide my overall discussion in this chapter
and I hope to demonstrate that Kristeva’s engagement with Arendt’s
political philosophy will go some way towards answering them. The
connection between biography and writing, or between life and nar-
rative, which Kristeva considers to be a key element of genius, forms
a central aspect of these wider considerations and it is to this issue
that I turn now.

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Narrative, Life and Natality

As I intimated above, exploring the possibilities that Kristeva’s
reading of Arendt may offer for feminist theory poses an intracta-
ble challenge. Not only do the two thinkers appear diametrically
opposed in the importance they accord to the role of politics;
both are also unlikely champions of feminism. How, then, does
Kristeva, whose stance towards politics is ambivalent at best,
openly hostile at worst, and who is often seen to favour aesthetic
practices at the expense of political engagement, read the work of
Arendt, the theorist of politics par excellence? Furthermore, how
does Kristeva’s persistent emphasis on the importance of embodi-
ment sit alongside Arendt’s admittedly impoverished account of
the body? Clearly, Kristeva’s engagement with Arendt’s ideas
engenders a series of intriguing questions that aim, directly or
indirectly, at some of the key concerns of feminism, including the
question of collective agency, the role of identity, the status of
corporeality and affect, and the relationship between the intimate
and the public. Whilst these questions foreground my exploration
of Kristeva’s reading of Arendt, I want to establish in particular
how her deployment of Arendtian thought advances her own
ideas in the direction of feminist theory. In this section, I focus
on three interrelated themes that inform Kristeva’s discussion of
Arendt: narrative, life and natality. As I will suggest, Kristeva’s
Arendt interpretation subjects Arendt’s explicitly political use of
these concepts to an intimist interpretation that engages them, at
least at times, in a pre- or anti-political way. While this may seem
frustrating for the project of feminist political philosophy, it also,
paradoxically, recuperates an aspect that remains underdeveloped
in Arendt but is central for Kristeva and feminism; this is the inti-
mate or psychic dimension of human life.
Kristeva’s book on Arendt tracks closely the development of
Arendt’s life and œuvre, and is divided into three parts. Part I
provides an overview of Arendt’s childhood and early years, and
offers an exposition of her books on Rahel Varnhagen (1997),
The Human Condition (1958) and Men in Dark Times (1968).
Arendt’s engagement with the disasters of the twentieth century
dominates the second part of the book; it includes a consideration
of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1979), Arendt’s book on the
emergence and rise of Nazism and its political structure (and to

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a lesser extent Stalinism), and Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann

trial (1992), as well as her reflections on revolution (1963).
The final part turns to Arendt’s unfinished philosophical work,
The Life of the Mind (1978). Given my focus on Kristeva, I do
not offer a detailed reading of Arendt; nor is it my intention to
‘police’ Kristeva’s reading of Arendt. What interests me instead
is Kristeva’s utilisation of Arendt’s work, which she deploys, at
times in a critical fashion, to develop her own ideas. These critical
interceptions, which read Arendtian thought through Kristeva’s
psychoanalytic lens, are crucial, though, because they advance
Kristeva’s thought in a number of directions and, in doing so,
serve to underscore Kristeva’s emphasis on the intimate, on the
operation of drives and on the body.
Kristeva’s notion of genius, as I suggested, draws on the con-
nection she establishes between life and creation. Such a link,
however, is not sufficient for genius to emerge; it requires that
the story of one’s life is told. According to Kristeva, Arendt
embodies this close connection between life and work because
she interweaves the story and experiences of her own life with
her intellectual apparatus and philosophical ideas. Thus, Arendt’s
genius, as diagnosed by Kristeva, consists in the way she combines
the narrative of the twentieth century with her reflections on
this narrative. Arendt herself develops this theme in The Human
Condition (1958), where she celebrates the role of narrative and
narrator, and their contribution to the dissemination of the glori-
ous deeds of political actors.8 This function, for Arendt, is central
to the flourishing of the polis, as it encourages political actors to
excel in their contribution to their political community.
Of course, narrative is also at the heart of the psychoanalytic
enterprise, which turns the psychoanalytic session into a form of
story-telling. Hence, adding to Arendt’s political dimension of nar-
rative, it acquires a therapeutic-diagnostic dimension, as a ‘talking
cure’, in Kristeva’s texts and in psychoanalysis more widely. As
Kelly Oliver states, ‘we have a sense of ourselves, through the nar-
ratives which we prepare to tell others about our experience. Even
if we do not tell our stories, we live our experience through the
stories that we construct in order to “tell ourselves” to another, a
loved one’ (Oliver 2003: 42). This personal, or intimate, story is
closely linked with the immediate family dramas, but it also con-
nects with the wider social context. This assertion, as I discussed

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previously, informs Kristeva’s psychogenetic and socio-genetic

account of crisis, generated by the society of the spectacle (see
Chapter 2); hence, narrative also connects the suffering of the indi-
vidual with wider social crises. Besides, the function of narrative,
while clearly therapeutic, is also epistemological and ethical; for
one thing, it contains a meta-narrative, a history about the present
and about the way we understand, configure and conceptualise
our understanding of the present. But it is also ethical, allowing for
the creation of an ethical encounter with the other.
What is more, narrative is embedded in corporeality, depend-
ent upon the inscription of drive energy that generates narrative in
the first place. But, to turn this around, narrative also tells stories
about bodies and, as McAfee (2005) demonstrates in her account
of public testimony, it connects the somatic dimension of suffering
with a therapeutic outlet and with political conflict. She commends
Kristeva’s work in general for the attention it pays to the affective
and somatic dimension of language, but she is particularly keen
to deploy Kristeva’s thought to an analysis of truth commissions.
The narration of the experience of violence draws on somatic and
affective forces (2005: 117), but it also, rather poignantly, is said
to generate the conditions for ethics by preparing the ground, at
least potentially, for forgiveness that allows victim and perpetra-
tor to work through conflict.9 McAfee’s discussion illustrates,
both with and against Kristeva, how a conception of narrative
that draws on soma and affect, and hence on Kristevan categories,
can play a central role in political philosophising. Thus, Kristeva’s
intimist reading of Arendt, turned against itself, has a crucial role
to play in a theory of politics.
Arendt’s answer to individual narrative, as is well known, is not
a therapeutic one, given her aversion to psychoanalysis. Instead,
she pursues two converging paths that allow for individual as well
as collective forms of life. These are, on the one hand, the life of
action, the vita activa, whilst the other is the contemplative life,
the life of the mind. In recent years, Kristeva has drawn in par-
ticular on this latter aspect; her book on Arendt engages in a close
reading and careful exposition of Arendt’s The Life of the Mind
(1978), and she extracts several key themes that she develops in
her own work. These include an emphasis on questioning and on
the development of a critical attitude, and the endorsement of the
importance of experience. As I suggested previously (see Chapter

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

2), Kristeva’s emphasis on questioning as a guiding principle of

revolt resonates strongly with a broader conceptualisation of femi-
nism as a critical project; such an emphasis on feminism’s critical
ethos connects with the critical interrogation of key concepts and
norms, including those gender norms used within feminism. (For
a fuller discussion see Chapter 5.) Kristeva utilises these Arendtian
themes to underscore a concern of her own, which she shares,
furthermore, with Arendt: the pairing of singularity and plurality.
However, she departs from Arendt’s philosophy in one impor-
tant respect. Whilst Arendt places a strong emphasis on the active
life of the polis, which she connects explicitly with the life of
the mind, especially with the capacity to judge and to think (see
Arendt 1958; 1978; 1992), Kristeva withdraws Arendt’s empha-
sis on the public and active dimension of thought into the realm
of the intimate. This intimist reading of Arendt’s philosophy is a
key feature of Kristeva’s engagement with Arendt that generates a
paradox for any feminist interpretation; on the one hand, it with-
draws from Arendt’s emphasis on politics, while on the other it is
more attentive to the intimate and affective dimension of human
life. Because Kristeva’s intimist reading of Arendt is crucial to the
further development of her thought, I want to examine it more
closely.
In one of her early essays on Arendt (1997), Kristeva maps the
direction of her thinking as it departs from that of Arendt. She sug-
gests, contra Arendt’s assertion in The Human Condition (1958),
that action itself cannot guarantee a free creative life; rather, build-
ing upon Arendt’s late work, she advocates an emphasis on the
life of the mind (Arendt 1978). More specifically, and in response
to her sensitivity to the notion of crisis (see Chapter 2), she sug-
gests the opening up of psychic life as the privileged path towards
the upholding of human freedom. The practice of writing, and in
particular the sensuous style of writing that she associates with
Colette, has a crucial role to play here, as it is said to constitute
an important corrective to Arendt’s narrow focus on the political.
She further specifies this claim, again contra Arendt, by holding on
to the value of the poetic and the importance of the avant-garde
(Kristeva 2004c).
Central to Kristeva’s further analysis is her critique of Arendt’s
distinction between zoē, the biological life and its concern with
sheer physical survival, and bios, that part of life that can be told

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and that is destined for the realm of the public. Against this dis-
tinction between zoē and bios, which generates Arendt’s strangely
somatophobic conception of life and narrative, Kristeva roots
both zoē and bios firmly within the process of subjectification,
which she conceptualises as intersubjective and embodied. As we
have seen, narrative arises out of the actions of the drives and the
separation from the mother. In other words, Kristevan narrative,
whether that of the Arendtian spectator who recalls heroic actions,
or that of the patient on the analytic couch, is rooted in zoē, in the
biological life processes. Through her critique of Arendt’s disem-
bodied notion of narrative, Kristeva re-emphasises her assertion
of the connection between zoē and bios. In contradistinction to
Arendt, despite her stress on the Arendtian emphasis on bios, and
in accordance with her overall thought, it is clear that for Kristeva,
bios without zoē is not possible. Even though her notion of genius,
as we have seen, borrows substantially from Arendtian concep-
tions of life and narrative, she presents into Arendtian thinking her
own, psychoanalytically inflected, twist.
Her discussion of Arendt’s concept of life (1997) introduces two
interjections, both of which refer back to her earlier concerns with
revolt and with ethics. To begin with, she is sceptical of Arendt’s
emphasis on action, conceding that even art can no longer provide
meaning in the time of the spectacle. Instead of action, Kristeva
advocates the opening up of psychic space, which, as we have
already seen, is said to be essential for the individual and collec-
tive well-being of contemporary subjects. With her emphasis on
the opening up of psychic space, Kristeva also aims to integrate an
area of human life of which Arendt remained suspicious: the body
and its drives. Thus, narrative generates prospects for representa-
tion that, in Kristeva’s view, are necessary for psychic well-being.
The practice of writing, through its transgression of the semiotic-
symbolic threshold that introduces jouissance into the symbolic, is
a privileged form of narration that, moreover, connects the prac-
tice of narrative directly with revolt, with the introspective and
questioning return that establishes the link between the intimate
and the symbolic and public dimensions of human life. Clearly,
these are not Arendt’s concerns; they constitute Kristeva’s idiosyn-
cratic ‘intimisation’ of the Arendtian project that maps Arendt’s
thought on Kristeva’s ideas and, in the process, substantially trans-
forms them.

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It is through her consideration of a further Arendtian theme,

natality, that Kristeva accentuates the importance she accords to
sexual difference and reaffirms the significance of motherhood
and of women’s desire for motherhood. As I discussed previously,
Kristeva’s celebration of motherhood and her interpretation of
feminism as an essentially anti-maternal movement have left
many of her feminist readers puzzled. The genius trilogy restates
motherhood’s significant role in a woman’s life and it elevates, as
I outlined above, motherhood as women’s contribution to genius.
Drawing on assertions presented in earlier work (see, for example,
Kristeva 1977a; 1980), Kristeva considers motherhood to be
women’s unique contribution to life at the crossroads, or thresh-
old, between zoē and bios. Yet, the idea of natality also acquires
an additional meaning, beyond its narrow association with preg-
nancy and motherhood; it evokes the cyclical nature of women’s
time and, crucially, stresses the capacity for new beginnings that
Kristeva associates in particular with feminism’s third generation.
It probably comes as no surprise that Arendt’s celebration of
birth or natality is not intended as a political celebration of moth-
erhood. Rather, she builds upon Augustinian conceptions that
suggest the possibility of new beginnings. For Arendt, natality
and rebirth contain the promise of politics; this is the capacity to
begin anew, which renews life and carries important ethical and
political implications (see Arendt 1996). Natality allows for the
foundation or refoundation of the polis, an indispensable condi-
tion for the revolutionary refoundation of freedom and politics,
but it is also inherently ethical; it is precisely because we can start
anew that we are capable of forgiving. Moreover, for Arendt, as
indeed for Kristeva, natality ensures the plurality of human beings.
For Arendt, such a plurality is the prerequisite for politics, because
plurality creates a world, that space of ‘in-between’ that she
defines as politics. Hence, politics, which entails acting in concert,
is contingent upon the condition of plurality, which, as Arendt
puts it, ensures that there is more of us than one. Kristeva’s turn
to plurality, on the other hand, tends to depart from politics and
collective action, which she views, at least potentially, as totalitar-
ian. This fear of the totalitarian nature of collective action emerges
early on in her writings (see, for example, 1977b; 1979) and it is
exemplified, as I intimated previously, in her characterisation of
feminism as totalitarian, which has put her at odds with many

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of her feminist interlocutors; against the alleged totalitarianism

of political movements, Kristeva celebrates marginality, dissi-
dence, singularity and plurality. One could plausibly argue that
her endorsement of singularity, together with her suspicion of all
forms of collective agency, is already contained in her earliest cel-
ebration of aesthetic practices, further evidence of her attachment
to Romantic notions of exemplarity and geniality. I return to the
discussion of singularity towards the end of this chapter, but for
now I want to attend to Kristeva’s treatment of the body and its
relationship with Arendtian conceptions of politics.

Bodies, Affect and Politics

One of the central aims of Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought is
to assert the importance of corporeality to Kristeva’s conceptions
of the subject and of ethics; as I stated previously, her writings on
the body constitute, without a doubt, one of her most significant
contributions to contemporary feminist thought. I already out-
lined the importance that Kristeva accords to the body in previous
chapters (see Chapters 1 and 3), where I demonstrated how she
dedicates much of her writing to establishing the body within its
wider social and cultural context. Given Kristeva’s stress on corpo-
reality, and its central role to psychic as well as to social and politi-
cal life, it seems all the more puzzling to account for her interest in
Arendt. After all, does Arendt, more explicitly and forcefully than
many other contemporary thinkers, not relegate bodily matters
to outside the realm of politics and philosophy? If we were to put
Arendt and Kristeva into dialogue with one another, one may
well imagine that the question of the body would emerge as a key
point of disagreement and contention between the two. Yet, as I
want to suggest here, it is paradoxically around the body that a
complementary reading of Kristeva and Arendt is most beneficial;
while Kristeva provides Arendt with a sophisticated understanding
of the social and political significance of embodiment, which adds
a corporeal dimension to Arendt’s somatophobic account of poli-
tics,10 Arendtian thought may supplement Kristeva’s ideas with a
more sophisticated account of civic bonds that is not at odds with
Kristeva’s insistence on singularity and plurality. Here I want to
sketch the contours of such an embodied understanding of politics
that draws on Kristeva’s engagement with Arendt.

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As is well known, the body, for Arendt, is a metaphor for need

and pure life, in other words, of zoē, which is diametrically opposed
to politics. This assertion is woven throughout Arendt’s writings
but illustrated starkly in On Revolution (1963), Arendt’s account
of the revolutions of the eighteenth century and of the founda-
tion of freedom in the modern world. There, she explains the
failure of the French Revolution, as opposed to the relative success
of the American Revolution, by referring to the overwhelming role
of poverty, need and hence the demands of the body. The revolu-
tion in France failed, according to Arendt, because revolutionary
politics in France was in the thralls of the social question, Arendt’s
euphemistic term for poverty and the necessity of sheer physical
survival. Poverty, according to Arendt, puts men ‘under the abso-
lute dictate of their bodies’, and she concludes that ‘freedom had
to be surrendered to necessity, to the urgency of the life process
itself’ (1963: 60). If the French Revolution failed as a result of its
admittance of the social into the public, the relative success of the
American Revolution is due to its ability to evade the question of
the social, helping it to succeed in the foundation of a political
order based upon human singularity, common bonds and mutual
promises (1963: 175).
Leaving aside Arendt’s highly idiosyncratic interpretation of
the two revolutions, and her disregard for bodily matters that she
combines, rather paradoxically, with her deployment of corporeal
metaphors, specifically the metaphor of birth, it is important to
stress that Arendt recognises humans as embodied beings. Yet
she is wary of the alleged danger that the body is said to pose to
politics and its supreme goal: freedom (see also Chapter 5). For
Arendt, politics, not the body, is the realm of freedom, of com-
monality and inter-esse. It is the realm of appearances and of
virtuous deeds, and it is juxtaposed with the private realm as the
realm of necessity, the location of the household, where humans
pay attention to their needs: specifically, their bodily needs. Hence,
she claims that participation in the public realm of politics is con-
tingent upon the way that bodies are catered for adequately in the
domains of the social and the private. Bodily matters and needs are
relegated to the realm of the household, a realm void of freedom
that, during antiquity, was populated by slaves and (non-slave)
women. Arendt distinguishes this economy of the household, the
oikia, from the polis as the space of politics. As is well known,

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many feminists have taken issue with Arendt’s rigid distinction

between a public and a private realm, which is mapped upon a
gendered division of labour and which has been interpreted as the
glorification of essentially masculine activities, at the expense of
feminine activities (see Dietz 1995).
It is at this junction that Kristeva’s reading of the body and,
more specifically, of the politically pertinent function of bodily
drives fundamentally demarcates her thought from that of Arendt.
She points this up explicitly in her discussion of Arendt’s distinc-
tion between oikia and polis, and proposes, contra Arendt, the
need for a political anthropology that re-establishes the impor-
tance of the private sphere. Kristeva’s critique of Arendt proceeds
in two steps. She begins by pondering the connotation of the
notion of oikia, the economy of the household, which she connects
etymologically with the idea of the icon. This connection, Kristeva
argues, allows for the representation of the divine, ‘a ruse and a
negotiation with immortality’ (HA: 161), which, furthermore,
links it with the feminine. Such a representation of the divine,
an iconography, is associated in particular with the Byzantine
world and Orthodox Christianity, two examples that, according
to Kristeva, celebrate the intimate and the sensuous, and that she
connects with the semiotic (see Chapter 5). Moreover, in addition
to the household’s privileged function in the representation of the
divine (Kristeva’s more contemporary concern is for the sacred;
see Kristeva 2001c), it is also the space where bodily needs and
desires, and with them the link to the maternal, are maintained.
Kristeva’s critique of Arendt’s treatment of the oikia and the polis
goes some way towards addressing the concerns of those, includ-
ing Kristeva herself, who fear the glorification of the polis at the
expense of the maternal and the feminine.
Of greater interest to my argument is Kristeva’s second interjec-
tion, which further develops her critique of Arendt’s conception of
the body and its related neglect of psychic life and intimacy (HA:
162; see also pp. 171–84). This critique of Arendt chimes strongly
with Kristeva’s conception of revolt, which, as I established in
Chapter 2, is displaced from the realm of politics on to the inti-
mate and the aesthetic. Such a view is encapsulated in Kristeva’s
charge against Arendt’s alleged undue focus on political freedom,
which, according to Kristeva, neglects ‘the plural and possible
economies of prepolitical freedom that disclose “the social” and

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that are precisely what interests us today’ (HA: 162). Against

Arendt’s interchangeable deployment of politics and freedom,
Kristeva declares politics as, at least potentially, antithetical to
freedom. For her, it is the realm of the intimate that constitutes a
bulwark of freedom, which protects against the totalitarian and
evasive interventions of politics. In this context, it is worth while
briefly revisiting a concern I addressed previously (see Chapter
2): namely, the status of the intimate in Kristeva’s thought. As we
have seen, despite Kristeva’s allusion to ‘approaching politics from
a bit of a distance’ (IR: 1), she seems, at times, to propose a retreat
from politics by emphasising intimate revolt as an alternative to
politics and to political revolt (see also Keltner 2009a). This stress
on the intimate as a replacement for politics is closely connected
with her understanding of freedom. For example, in Black Sun,
she asserts that

Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human
freedom is unfurled. The modern world . . . [does] not have the civi-
lized splendour of the Greek city-state. The modern political domain
is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, levelling, exhausting. (BS:
235)

It is difficult to reconcile Kristeva’s retreat from politics into the

intimate with her call for a political anthropology that seeks to
redress a perceived imbalance between politics and the intimate.
She returns to this idea of an extra-, pre- or anti-political realm of
freedom in Intimate Revolt, where human freedom is said to be
generated and at its most fertile in the realm of the intimate. As
she states there, politics and political revolution may stifle revolt,
and hence the art of living, by prohibiting or even strangling the
freedom to question (IR: 265–6) (see also Chapter 5). I take up
Kristeva’s discussion of freedom in the next chapter, where I chart
her further engagement with freedom and her turn back to politics
in her most recent writings, but for now I want to develop her cri-
tique of Arendt further.
As I suggested, Kristeva’s call for a political anthropology
draws on her concern for the role of the oikia, the realm of need,
desire and representation, and it builds on her critique of Arendt’s
neglect of corporeality and, with it, of the realms of psychic life
and intimacy. This request is preceded by a further demand, this

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time for a psychoanalytic anthropology, which in her view is

also missing in Arendt (HA: 129). According to Kristeva, such a
psychoanalytic anthropology is anchored in the theory of drives,
which, as we have seen in Chapter 1, is essential to her discussion
of the process of signification, her treatment of poetic language,
and art more generally, and to her account of the subject-in-
process. In her engagement with Arendt, she proffers a more con-
crete reason why she considers a theory of the drives to be central.
What, in her view, is missing in Arendt’s attempt to understand
the violence of totalitarianism is a theory of sado-masochism, as
this, according to Kristeva, provides a more fundamental expla-
nation of totalitarian violence that goes beyond Arendt’s ethico-
political explanation of the banality of evil.11 While Kristeva
acknowledges Arendt’s important contribution to the analysis
and understanding of modern totalitarianism and its apparatus
of terror and destruction, it lacks, in Kristeva’s view, attention
to the role played by the drives, and by sado-masochism in par-
ticular. As she asks, ‘how can our individual and collective desires
avoid the trap of melancholic destruction, manic fanaticism, or
tyrannical paranoia?’ (HA: 129). I already identified the relevance
accorded to the drives in my discussion of violence, in the previ-
ous chapter, where I charted Kristeva’s account of violence and
its constitutive role in the generation of the subject and of bodily
and social boundaries. Her work on abjection has also gone some
way towards the development of a theory of the affective nature of
politics. However, because of Kristeva’s reluctance to consider the
political implications of her ideas more fully, her readers are still
awaiting a more detailed consideration of the relationship between
affect and politics. Hence, it is mainly in the critical commentary
on Kristeva that this aspect is fleshed out (see Young 1990; Ziarek
2001; Oliver 2004).
Taken together, it is fair to suggest that Kristeva’s political and
psychoanalytic anthropology, with its emphasis on corporeality
and on affect, and its displacement of politics on to the intimate,
addresses many feminist concerns over the alleged valuation of
masculine activities and the masculine sphere of politics. What,
though, are its implications for the building of community? How
can it address the question of female or feminist agency and
political efficacy? Unsurprisingly, Kristeva’s turn to the intimate
and the singular has at times been accused of succumbing to an

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individualistic streak (McAfee 2005) that, paradoxically, given

her intersubjective emphasis, neglects the communal or collective
dimension. Thus, which types of bonds become possible, and, cru-
cially, which forms of community can counter the violence of the
drive and the, always inevitable, threat of abjection?

Singularity, Plurality and Communal Bonds

The question of political bonds is of crucial importance to Arendt’s
political thought, and she offers an unequivocal answer. Despite
her contempt for organised collective action, whose worst excesses
she sees embodied in the manifestation of totalitarian movements,
she articulates a version of the public realm that builds upon her
celebration of spontaneity and rebirth, and that is contingent upon
human relationships and the importance of a space between them;
this emphasis on the in-between, which she refers to as an inter-
esse, generates politics while at the same time leaving the plural-
ity of its actors intact. This idea finds a poignant articulation in
Arendt’s acceptance speech for the Lessing Award (1968), which
invokes the notion of a political friendship that transcends any
claims to truth, knowledge or pre-given and pre-established identi-
ties or communities, and that establishes a blueprint for political
bonds that can accommodate difference. (I return to this below.)
Unsurprisingly, Kristeva is rather uneasy with the idea of politi-
cal bonds. As I already pointed out, Kristeva, quite consistently,
refuses to translate her conceptual tools into a more coherent
political philosophy. Yet, as I also suggested previously, her notion
of the drives and her account of the inter-subjective constitution of
subjectivity lend themselves to a more thorough examination into
the development of bonds. In fact, as I already intimated, it is out
of her ethics of alterity that she articulates the prospects for the
generation of bonds. (See also my discussion in Chapter 5.)
Kristeva’s concern for singularity and plurality, which sits at the
heart of her critique of feminism, connects her more recent works
with some of her early comments on feminism (see 1979; 1981).
As I already stated, this insistence on singularity and plurality
chimes more broadly with her appropriation of Arendtian themes,
such as Arendt’s endorsement of plurality and her famous rejec-
tion of totalitarianism. How, though, does Arendt translate this
concern for singularity and plurality into the language of politics?

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Here I want to return to the consideration with which I began this

section: the idea of political friendship and bonds. There, I briefly
intimated how Arendt stresses the value of political friendship that
she sees embedded in the ‘inter-esse’, the in-between of men and
women, which does not rely on any pre-given notion of a shared
identity. This aspect has been taken up by Lisa Disch (1995) in
her reading of Arendt’s acceptance speech when she was awarded
the Lessing Prize. Acknowledging the import of what she refers to
as radical constructivist feminism, and which she associates with
a critique of identity and, more broadly, a politics of difference
and diversity, Disch wonders whether new forms of collectivity
are possible without having to rely on a pre-established sense of
the collective self. Importantly, as she reminds her readers, this
critique of identity does not deny the possibility of feminism as a
collective practice; rather, it rejects the idea of a given identity as
the unquestioned ground of feminism (see also Butler 1990). To
facilitate such a post-identitarian feminist practice, Disch suggests
a shift from unity to solidarity; according to Disch, feminist attach-
ments to the idea of unity should not be turned into a precondition
for feminist practice. In fact, any insistence on unity may well end
up excluding those women who do not conform to a prescriptive
account of ‘woman’, or whose vision of feminism clashes with pre-
established criteria (see also Chapter 5). Disch also claims, again
drawing upon Arendt, that solidarity must be articulated and can
only arise from inter-esse, manifested in a concern for the world.
Such a solidarity is embodied in what Disch terms ‘vigilant parti-
sanship’, a form of political friendship that rejects the need for a
sense of identity based upon abstract conceptions of womanhood
or a shared orientation grounded in one’s alleged moral capacities.
Both presuppositions, following Disch, run counter to the very
plurality that informs the radical constructionist feminist critique
of identity and of the subject. I examine some of the implications
of Disch’s critique below; for now, I return to Kristeva’s appro-
priation of Arendt.
As is well known, Arendt’s discussion of totalitarianism (1979),
which she diagnoses as the defining political phenomenon of
the twentieth century, connects her historical sociology with her
philosophical insistence on worldliness, appearance, judgement
and plurality. Totalitarianism, according to Arendt, destroys our
common world, the ‘inter-esse’ between the plurality of political

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

actors with their shared responsibility for the world; in its place,
totalitarianism plays on the dispersed mass society with its lack
of connections and bonds. In its worst excesses, in the hell of the
concentration camps, totalitarianism sets out to destruct what for
Arendt is the uniquely human characteristic: the ability for spon-
taneity and new beginnings. Whilst not primarily concerned with
the historical or sociological context and explanations that occupy
Arendt’s treatment of totalitarianism, Kristeva also deploys the
term totalitarianism, albeit in a very specific context. She appro-
priates Arendtian themes, but she also, in addition to engaging
directly with Arendt’s discussion of totalitarianism, utilises them
for her own analysis of identity and collective politics. Similar to
Arendt’s discussion, the context evoked by Kristeva is the crisis
that is modernity and that, for her, is displayed most visibly in the
new maladies of the soul. However, totalitarianism, for Kristeva,
operates in a more insidious way, associated with the levelling out
of difference, plurality and singularity even within the modern
liberal-democratic state. Rather surprisingly, Kristeva’s analysis
of totalitarianism focuses in particular on those broadly left-wing
political movements that are said to pursue collective practices at
the expense of the singularity of the individual. One such move-
ment is feminism. Kristeva’s reasons for associating feminism with
totalitarianism are as much biographical as they are conceptual.
As she states,

[p]erhaps because of my childhood and adolescence were passed in a

totalitarian country, I have long mistrusted the liberation movements
even of our democratic societies. I always fear they may have hidden
totalitarian aims. . . . It is out of this mistrust that I have tried to dis-
sociate myself even from mass feminism, while at the same time paying
tribute to feminine creativity. (2008: 353)

If biographical factors, including her childhood spent in communist

Bulgaria, constitute one element of her understanding of totalitari-
anism,12 they are complemented by a philosophical concern that
reverberates with her concept of genius as the epitome of singu-
larity. Moreover, to restate a point I made previously, Kristeva’s
theoretical wariness of what she refers to as totalitarian, which
develops through her discussion of Arendt, connects with her
work from the 1970s. For example, in ‘Women’s Time’ (1979),

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she criticises the inclusion of women in the power structures of

modern states, including those in the former communist regimes,
and she warns against women’s identification with those power
structures, for example, in Nazi Germany. It seems quite a dis-
tance to move from a critique of women’s support or participation
in totalitarian regimes, to a critique of feminism as totalitarian; yet
Kristeva seems willing to make this connection. As she suggests,
at the heart of such an identification lies a ‘paranoid type of coun-
ter-investment in an initially denied symbolic order . . . moving
towards levelling, stabilization, conformism’ (‘WT’: 201). In its
place, she evokes the value of dissidence, ‘[t]his ruthless and irrev-
erent dismantling of the workings of discourse, thought, and exist-
ence’ (‘Dissident’: 299). A feminist manifestation of dissidence is
probably most closely associated with feminism’s third generation
(see Kristeva 1979), whose openness to plurality and singularity
is said to counter the totalitarian tendencies of political move-
ments, including those of the first two generations of feminism.
Ultimately, though, such a vision does not address the question of
political efficacy or agency, or of political bonds. Although by no
means solipsistic, the singular female genius weaves her relation-
ships around the realm of the intimate, forever the narrator but
never an actor.

From Mothers to Sisters

In her conclusion to the genius trilogy, Kristeva declares a feeling
of ‘sisterly proximity’ with her protagonists that she experienced
during the process of researching and writing the books. Without
denying ‘irritating differences and critical dismissals’ (2004c:
403), she confesses her admiration for the genius of Arendt, Klein
and Colette, which she sees embodied in the way that these three
women managed to intertwine life and œuvre. This genius of singu-
larity, as we have seen, is juxtaposed against the alleged totalising,
indeed totalitarian aspirations of liberation movements, of which
feminism is but one example. Thus, Kristeva can declare that her
interest in singularity is ‘also a way of distancing myself from femi-
nism as a mass movement’ (2004c: 404). Intriguingly, it is from her
critique of feminism, which she reaffirms in her conclusion to the
genius trilogy, that she turns to the figure of Simone de Beauvoir,
who is embraced, in the same text, as another example of genius

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and singularity (in fact, it is to de Beauvoir that she dedicates her

genius trilogy). This is rather surprising, as it is de Beauvoir who
is the, unnamed, object of criticism in Kristeva’s earlier attempts
to distance herself from a conception of feminism that, she claims,
rejects motherhood (Kristeva 1979). This departure in Kristeva’s
most recent work also requires a revision of the claim, made
with some justification, that Kristeva, along with Irigaray, has
‘tense theoretical relations with Beauvoir, recognizing her work
as perhaps historically important but nonetheless somehow out-
moded’ (Zakin 2006: 31). In recognition of Kristeva’s latest work,
it becomes necessary, as one commentator has remarked, to chal-
lenge a perception of Kristeva and de Beauvoir as diametrically
opposed thinkers (Keltner 2009b: 225).13
It is too early to assess the further direction and wider impact
of this development in Kristeva’s work. (In fact, her writings on
de Beauvoir are still few in number, and a critical commentary
on this aspect of her work has, at least at the time of writing, not
yet emerged.) Up to now, her texts on de Beauvoir include a short
section in her conclusion to the genius trilogy (2004c), as well as
several speeches, delivered as part of her work on the committee of
the Prix Simone de Beauvoir (more on this below), and some short
articles that are published on her web site (see www.kristeva.fr).14
At this point, one can only speculate whether the engagement with
de Beauvoir will renew the feminist interest in Kristeva’s work;
however, what emerges in these texts is a closer engagement with
de Beauvoir’s ideas that could lead to a firmer formulation of a
Kristevan feminism. What, then, are these ideas and how are they
reformulated in Kristeva’s writings?
In her essay ‘Beauvoir and the Risks of Freedom’ (2009b),
originally delivered as the keynote address at the 2008 conference
in celebration of de Beauvoir’s centenary,15 Kristeva applauds
de Beauvoir for initiating an ‘anthropological revolution’ that is
grounded in ‘transcendence as freedom’ (2009b: 226; italics in
original). Kristeva draws on de Beauvoir’s emphasis on equality,
which she grounds in Western, and more specifically European
conceptions of the universal, as embodied in republican ideals and
the French Enlightenment (see also Chapter 5). As evidence of the
continued relevance and appeal of de Beauvoir, Kristeva refor-
mulates de Beauvoir’s famous assertion that one is not born, but
rather becomes a woman, by stating that ‘“One” (the impersonal

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body) is born a woman, but “I” (subject) am continuously becom-

ing one’ (2009b: 239).
De Beauvoir, according to Kristeva’s reading, critiqued the
association of women with facticity and immanence, as this was
said to prevent women from gaining access to a true humanity,
defined through autonomy and freedom. Moreover, she posed a
conflict between the demands of every subject, seen as essential,
and the imperatives of the situation, which she considered ines-
sential. Kristeva reformulates this idea as a conflict between the
condition of all women and the free realisation of every woman,
in effect relating it back to her assertion of female singularity and
plurality that is expressed prominently in many of her writings
from the 1970s. In her analysis of de Beauvoir, Kristeva positions
herself firmly on the side of singularity. In fact, she is critical of de
Beauvoir’s privileging of the transformation of women’s condi-
tion and her alleged dismissal of the essential issue: namely, that
of the singular initiative. It is this point that allows Kristeva to
reinvoke the notion of genius: the ‘breach through and beyond
the “situation”’ (2004c: 407), which is meant to free the female
condition and to lead to the realisation of freedom. Her conclu-
sion to her essay on de Beauvoir articulates a thought that captures
Kristeva’s own philosophical project; she applauds de Beauvoir for
‘her capacity to embody a political philosophy of freedom in the
microcosm of the intimate’ (2009b: 229).
I began this chapter by describing Kristeva as a reluctant politi-
cal philosopher; this reluctance, I suggested, lies in her unwill-
ingness to embrace more fully the political implications of her
radical account of the subject, and to connect her celebration of
singularity, plurality and difference with a conception of political
bonds. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that Kristeva cannot
engage with the question of political efficacy and feminist political
agency. While her resistance to uniformity and her endorsement of
plurality and singularity are not out of place in any understand-
ing of feminism that builds upon difference, and that challenges
conceptions of a coherent subject, I suggested that Kristeva’s cel-
ebration of plurality and singularity results in a distancing from
feminism, which she depicts as a totalitarian mass movement.
Yet, notwithstanding these reservations, I also want to stress
that her writings are embedded in a wider set of ideas that take
seriously the affective and corporeal dimension of politics and that

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are attentive to the question of difference. In this respect, I would

like to suggest that her engagement with the work of Hannah
Arendt, which evolves around the notions of narrative, singular-
ity and plurality, and which articulates, in contradistinction to
Arendt, a revaluation of the sphere of the maternal and posits a
political and psychoanalytic anthropology, constitutes the founda-
tions of a Kristevan political philosophy that has much to offer to
feminist thought. A central element of such a political philosophy
is Kristeva’s deployment of the notion of freedom; it is this aspect
that will occupy me in the final chapter of this book.

Notes
1. The title of the genius trilogy is Female Genius: Life, Madness,
Words – Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette. It is published in
three volumes: Hannah Arendt (2001a), Melanie Klein (2001b) and
Colette (2004c).
2. Kristeva’s most comprehensive coverage can be found in her book
on Arendt (Kristeva 2001a). A modified version of the first chapter
of the book is presented in Crisis of the European Subject (2000c);
for a shortened version see Kristeva (1997). See also several of
her essays (2004a; 2004b; 2005a) for further references to Arendt
and Arendtian ideas. The English-language version of her accept-
ance speech given at the 2005 Hannah Arendt Prize Award can be
found in Kristeva (2008), while the responses are available at www.
hannah-arendt.de/Festschriften/Festschrift_20061175498415.pdf.
3. For further discussions see also McAfee (2005), Keltner (2009a) and
Sjöholm (2009).
4. I also want to flag up the centrality of the notion of freedom, which
I turn to in Chapter 5.
5. Zakin has denounced Kristeva’s attempt as ‘cheap psychobiography’
(2009: 204).
6. I should stress, though, that Kristeva has repeatedly acknowledged
the range of influences on her work. See, for example, Kristeva
(1996a).
7. For a recent consideration of Kristeva’s Romanticism see
Varsamopoulou (2009). While the focus of this chapter lies with
Kristeva’s discussion of genius, one could add her commitment to
notions of intimacy as a further element of her Romanticism. See her
Strangers to Ourselves (1991a) and my discussion in Chapter 2. In

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 The Singularity of Genius

Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva locates the emergence of German

nationalism in Herder’s, essentially Romantic, connection between
national genius and national language.
8. For a critique of Arendt’s glorification of public deeds, which associ-
ates the public sphere with virile masculinity, see Cavarero (2000).
9. However, in order for this kind of testimonial narrative to work, it
must connect affect with meaning. A simple display of images will
not do (see also Oliver 2007b). Narrative without meaning remains
empty or banal, as illustrated by Arendt in her study of Eichmann.
See Arendt (1992).
10. Recent discussions that have utilised Kristeva’s thought for an
analysis of Arendt include Birmingham (2003; 2005; 2006). See also
Zakin (2009) for an Arendtian critique of Kristeva.
11. See also my discussion of forgiveness in the previous chapter.
Despite Kristeva’s critique of Arendt’s neglect of sado-masochism,
Arendt manages, more successfully in my view, to connect ethics
with politics.
12. One could consider Kristeva’s experiences with feminist groups in
the 1970s as a further biographical factor in her endorsement of
singularity and her characterisation of feminism as potentially totali-
tarian.
13. On the question of motherhood, she does not revise her thoughts,
and she charges de Beauvoir, and along with her ‘a great many femi-
nists’ (2009b: 229), with a devaluation of maternity that threatens
and pressures women today. The second threat, also to do with
motherhood, is the reduction of maternity by a ‘technicist biologism
to an instinct of the species’ (2009b: 229).
14. Kristeva’s first novel, The Samurai (1992), which fictionalises the
Parisian intellectual climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s,
is reminiscent of de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins (2005). Kristeva
acknowledges that there are similarities, although she also declares,
in an interview published initially in 1990 in the journal L’Infini,
that she is closer to Simone Weil than to the rationalism of Simone
de Beauvoir (1996a: 252). Kristeva’s wider scholarly activities,
including her role as chair of the annual Simone de Beauvoir Prize,
are further evidence of her interest in de Beauvoir.
15. This conference also inaugurated the Prix Simone de Beauvoir, the
Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom, which is chaired
by Kristeva. For a useful summary of Kristeva’s lecture see Keltner
(2009b).

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 5

Towards a Philosophy of Freedom?

I am increasingly skeptical about the capacity of political movements

to remain places of freedom . . . We saw this with the feminist move-
ment which rapidly became a movement of chiefs where women
crushed women inside the same group. The strategies of the oppressors
against which women fought were reproduced in their own groups.
(Revolt: 107–8)

The previous chapter identified the themes of singularity and plu-

rality as key reference points of Kristeva’s political philosophy,
which, as I suggested, is reaffirmed through her engagement with
the ideas of Hannah Arendt, and which comes to inform her recent
writings on politics. While Kristeva’s interpretation of Arendt’s
thought displays an explicit consideration for the political, it
withdraws, as I demonstrated, Arendt’s emphasis on ‘the world’
and on politics into the intimate. Even though, as I have suggested
throughout Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought, the idea of the
political receives some considerable attention in Kristeva’s writ-
ings, this is mainly implicit, and it sits uncomfortably alongside
her dislike of matters pertaining to politics.1 In this chapter I
want to consider possible ways to bridge this gap between politics
and the political in Kristeva’s thought; my task is aided by the
thematic orientation of some of her most recent writings, which
have a direct bearing on politics, such as her interviews on revolt
(2000b) and her essay ‘Europhilia, Europhobia’ (1998a) and its
various modifications (2004a; 2005a), as well as some of her
other more recent texts (2007a; 2007b; 2007c; 2009a; 2009d). It
should be stressed again that these are not explicitly feminist writ-
ings; however, like all of Kristeva’s work, they are underpinned by
a psychosexual subtext that addresses the question of alterity, a
core theme of Kristeva’s writings. In fact, one may plausibly argue
that her attention to otherness is one of the reasons why her work
has received so much attention in the feminist commentary. For

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

Kristeva, as I argued previously, otherness constitutes an ontologi-

cal condition of human life, it is there from the start, and it attests
to the subject’s heterogeneity; the other is always there.
This attentiveness to otherness demonstrates Kristeva’s sensi-
tivity to the social conditions of the emergence and persistence of
the subject. However, given her declared focus on psychoanalysis,
she has not always fully developed the political implications of
the centrality of alterity in her thought. This deficit in Kristeva’s
writings, as I stated previously, has disappointed those readers
who were looking for a more fully developed political theory in
her writings. However, this gap between her, mostly implicit,
consideration for the political and her general distaste for politics
has also generated opportunities for a critical intervention and
reinterpretation of her work, a reading against the grain, which
has emerged wherever Kristeva neglects the sensitivity that she
displays in her radical philosophical assertions. This chapter wants
to illustrate such possibilities for a critical intervention by focusing
on some recent concerns in political philosophy that also surface
in Kristeva’s writings, such as the idea of Europe, immigration
and strangeness, and by assessing what I consider to be the psy-
chosexual undercurrent of her geopolitical and geophilosophical
considerations.
My main emphasis in this chapter lies with the interpretation
and critical assessment of a crucial development in Kristeva’s
recent thought, which, as I want to suggest here, has paved the
way for her ‘return’ to politics. This is her celebration of freedom,
which relates directly to her writings on revolt and which is reaf-
firmed through her readings of Arendt and, to a lesser extent, de
Beauvoir. Although there are traces of a discussion of freedom in
Kristeva’s work prior to the 1990s (see, for example, Black Sun),
it is only with the series on revolt and subsequent work that she
undertakes a more systematic investigation into the notion of
freedom.2 This interest in freedom also relates to a more funda-
mental concern of mine: how can we read Kristeva’s philosophy
of freedom as a feminist philosophy? More specifically, how does
Kristeva’s conception of freedom enhance feminism, understood
as a political project?
I begin my discussion with an interpretation and critical assess-
ment of her recent engagement with the notion of freedom, which
draws in particular on the second volume of the revolt series,

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Intimate Revolt. This is followed by a reflection on Kristeva’s

treatment of universality, particularity and cosmopolitanism,
which reviews some of the assumptions initially presented in
Strangers to Ourselves and Nations without Nationalism. The
next two sections engage with Kristeva’s discussion of the idea of
Europe, focusing on her work on what I term ‘Europe’s others’, on
immigration and on ‘the other Europe’, her treatment of Eastern
Europe. I conclude with some broader reflections on the overall
usefulness of Kristeva for a feminist project.

Psychoanalysis and Freedom

Beginning with her series on revolt and developed more fully
in subsequent work, Kristeva’s recent writings pay consider-
able attention to the concept of freedom. This attention evolves
broadly around the question of universality and particularity, and,
as I hope to demonstrate throughout this chapter, it has a direct
bearing on feminist concerns. Kristeva’s treatment of the notion of
freedom is already prominent in the first part of Intimate Revolt,
where she establishes the realm of the intimate as a central locus of
revolt, and where she connects her concern with the intimate with
the question of freedom (IR: 13). Her understanding of freedom,
as I want to illustrate here, derives primarily from psychoanalytic
considerations, although she adds to these by pondering freedom’s
philosophical, ideological and geopolitical dimensions. (I discuss
these in the following sections.) It is with reluctance that I would
want to rank these influences according to their importance in
Kristeva’s work. However, one can safely assume that it is the
psychoanalytic aspect of freedom that underpins the relevance and
configuration of its other manifestations.
A fully-fledged engagement with freedom begins in the second
part of the English-language translation of Intimate Revolt, enti-
tled ‘The Future of Revolt’,3 where Kristeva discusses the status
of freedom in psychoanalysis. She claims that freedom is not a
psychoanalytic concept, an assertion derived from her reading of
Freud, who establishes an essentially Hobbesian and pre-analytic
account of freedom that associates it with the unrestricted opera-
tion of the drives; these have to be subjected and sublimated to
meet the demands of civilisation and community. Whereas for
Freud, following Kristeva’s reading, ‘natural’ freedom runs against

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the demands of culture and therefore has to be surrendered,

Kristeva goes on to demonstrate the crucial role played by freedom
in the maintenance or restoration of psychic life. In doing so, she
claims, contra Freud, freedom as a psychoanalytic concept. The
role played by prohibition, the operations of the drives and the
process of sublimation allow her to establish this connection.
Central to the process of sublimation is the psychoanalytic practice
of transference, which supports patients’ return to their unconscious
and which affirms the fragile psyche of the (transferential) love
accorded by the analyst. Psychoanalytic transference thus facilitates
what Kristeva calls, following Arendt, a process of rebirth (see
Chapter 4); this rebirth is in fact a permanent one, putting the subject
permanently in revolt and, in doing so, it provides the subject with the
freedom to begin anew. Importantly, as I demonstrated in Chapter
3, it also assists the subject’s capacity to establish a link to an other.
Thus, at the core of the psychoanalytic enterprise, and of the rebirth
and revolt that are said to be generated by it, sits a fundamentally
ethical dimension; it enables the patient to develop connections.
Psychoanalysis, as we have already seen, also assists the generation
of narrative, which manifests itself in the capacity of analyst and
analysand to articulate questions. An ethos of questioning, employ-
ing the modality of speech, allows subjects to question themselves;
this practice lies at the heart of revolt. Such a working towards revolt
and questioning, as Kristeva suggests, accounts for what she terms the
‘implicitly political impact’ (IR: 237) of analysis, creating a subject
in revolt. She emphasises in particular that ‘[t]he analyzed person
discovers his irreconcilable conflictuality, the dramatic splitting that
constitutes him and that detaches him from any will for control,
power, or even unity. This freedom distances psychoanalysis from
any moralistic or blissful humanism’ (IR: 237). Thus, to repeat a
point I made previously, Kristeva envisages a type of analytic encoun-
ter that puts the subject in process, that allows for the representation
of drive and affect, and in doing so, affirms the subject’s heterogene-
ity and singularity. In short, psychoanalytic revolt works towards
a decentred subject that challenges the view of a coherent, unified
self.
The psychoanalytic experience of transference, coupled with
philosophical considerations on nothingness by Sartre and
Heidegger, lead Kristeva to assert that analytic interpretation is
at its core a form of questioning; it is ‘the giving of meaning in

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 Towards a Philosophy of Freedom?

the course of the transference/counter-transference relationship’

(IR: 144). This assertion further illuminates her claim of the
function of pardon and forgiveness that I discussed in Chapter 3.
Psychoanalytic – that is, transferential – forgiveness takes the form
of questioning (IR: 145), which originates in the separation of the
subject and its accompanying frustrations and feelings of rejec-
tion that emerge in the wake of language acquisition. It becomes
the task of psychoanalysis to restore the capacity for speech, and
hence for questioning, putting to work affect and sensation on the
one hand, and language on the other.
Kristeva’s emphasis on questioning, which is central to clini-
cal practice, also underscores her wider philosophical considera-
tions on the concept of freedom. In her essay ‘Psychoanalysis and
Freedom’, included in Intimate Revolt, Kristeva is at pains to stress
the renewal and rebirth facilitated by the practice of questioning.
This connection between questioning and rebirth also returns her
to the issue of revolt; the practice of questioning is an act of revolt,
an attack, as she states, on ‘all unity, identity, norms, values’ (IR:
233). Hence, psychoanalysis, for Kristeva, is a ‘de-normalizing
non-conformism’ (Gratton 2007: 11; see also Chapter 2). While
it attempts to restore the psychic life of the patient (and in that
respect it is conservative), it also puts the subject back in process.
As Kristeva puts it:

no modern human experience aside from psychoanalysis offers man

the chance to restart his psychical life and thus, quite simply, life itself,
opening up choices that guarantee the plurality of an individual’s
capacity for connection. This version of freedom is perhaps the most
precious and most serious gift that psychoanalysis has given mankind.
(IR: 234)

It is also, as I suggested, an immensely ethical experience, which

generates, through revolt and the practice of questioning, the
subject’s ability to create, or to recreate, links with others. This
inherently ethical feature of freedom-as-questioning is central to
Kristeva’s psychoanalytic project because it helps the suffering
subject to recuperate its bonds with others. However, what inter-
ests me further are its political implications, to which I alluded to
above and which are said to contain the ‘seed of politics’ (IR: 232).
It is this aspect that I explore in the following sections.

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

Liberty in Dark Times

Out of her overall concern with crisis, and increasingly influenced
by her reading of the work of Hannah Arendt, emerges Kristeva’s
recent engagement with the idea of ‘dark times’. This develop-
ment is significant for my discussion, as it is in this context that
she comes closest to an explicitly political discussion of freedom.
As is probably well known, the notion of ‘dark times’ was used
by Arendt, who in turn borrowed it from a poem by Brecht,4 to
characterise two phenomena. These are the political catastrophes
of the first half of the twentieth century, specifically Nazism and
Stalinism; and second, in a broader sense, the decline of the public
sphere and of politics, and with it, a diminishing of the realm of
freedom in the modern world (1968: ix).
Kristeva’s use of the expression ‘dark times’ is mostly implicit
and not fully fleshed out; yet, it is fair to assume that she deploys
this term to give expression to her notion of crisis. In this respect,
one could surmise that the idea of ‘dark times’ articulates her
wider concern for the crisis triggered by the spectacle, the psychic
afflictions of individuals and the need to restore psychic life and,
with it, the realm of the intimate. We have already seen that revolt
is one of Kristeva’s privileged responses to the encroachment of
the society of the spectacle on psychic life. Freedom is her second,
and related, response, and she develops this aspect of her work
in a series of essays and speeches that cover similar ground; they
include the second part of Intimate Revolt, her acceptance speech
at the Holberg Prize award ceremony (2005a), and the second part
of Crisis of the European Subject (2000c), as well as some of her
writings on Hannah Arendt (2006; 2008; see also 1998a; 2004a;
2004b). The frequency with which Kristeva turns to this topic
attests to the interest and centrality it obtains in her recent work.
The main thesis advanced in these publications, and my main
concern in this section, draws on a conceptual and geographical
distinction that Kristeva introduces into her discussion; this is the
distinction between a European-philosophical and an American-
instrumental conception of freedom.5 Before I develop this point
further, I want to recall briefly the significance of Kristeva’s dis-
cussion of revolt, especially as it pertains to the idea of freedom,
critique and feminism.
Kristeva’s conception of freedom, as I already suggested,

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returns us to her discussion of revolt, and more specifically, to

her celebration of the intimate and its focus on contestation and
questioning. It also prepares the ground for a radical contestatory
practice that resonates compellingly with recent discussions in
the field of radical democracy (see, for example, Lloyd and Little
2009); however, despite alluding strongly to the political potential
of freedom, revolt and the radical contestatory practice associated
with it, it is surprising to find that her emphasis on the intimate
remains curiously removed from a political reading, focusing
primarily on the role of the imaginary and of intimacy in the con-
ception of freedom.6 Thus, while Kristeva’s writings on freedom
contain the seeds of a political philosophy that, furthermore, could
be highly useful for a notion of feminism conceived as a contesta-
tory political project, she does not bridge this gap between her
radical theory of the subject, her celebration of revolt and her
recognition of the importance of freedom on the one hand, and
the link to politics on the other. This discrepancy is particularly
noteworthy because it also fails to reconnect the practice of ques-
tioning and of freedom-as-revolt with her depiction of feminism
as a critical practice, which she advocated in her famous interview
with Psych et po (1981) and which informs her conception of the
feminine. Establishing more strongly the full import of Kristeva’s
account for a feminist political philosophy that builds upon the
critique of the subject and that is attuned to the idea of difference
and heterogeneity is only possible if we read her work against the
grain. While questions of sexual difference become submerged in
Kristeva’s recent texts on freedom, they appear, albeit implicitly,
through a psychosexual narrative that is mapped upon her geopo-
litical and geophilosophical considerations. It is to these issues that
I turn now.
Already in the two volumes on revolt, Kristeva alludes to free-
dom’s promise as a path out of crisis and as a distinctive expres-
sion of revolt. She expands upon this assertion in some of her more
recent work, where she distinguishes between two manifestations
of freedom, which are also given a geographical and cultural con-
notation. On the one hand, she refers to an American version
of freedom, which she describes as instrumental, and which she
associates with the logic of the calculus, the freedom of the market
and with liberalism. This form of freedom, which she traces back
to Kant’s invocation of a ‘self-beginning’, is said to be essential for

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the emergence of the enterprising, capitalist subject, inflected as

it is with its ‘calculus of the market’. It is important to point out
that Kristeva does not dismiss this form of freedom, but she is con-
cerned that its dominance encroaches upon other forms of freedom
and upon the creation of an intimate space. Thus, instrumental
freedom is a necessary, but also a less desirable complement to a
second form of freedom, described as European and traced back
to the Socratic tradition, to Heidegger’s notion of revelation and
to Arendt’s concept of disclosure. This form of freedom, which
defines itself through those practices of disclosure, revelation and
questioning, is epitomised in the capacity for critique. To assess
Kristeva’s intriguing geopolitical and philosophical connotations
would lead me beyond the scope of my argument in this section,
although I return to the import of Europe and its psychosexual
subtext in the following sections. For the moment, it suffices to
say that Kristeva does not dismiss either manifestation of freedom;
rather, she seeks to champion the extension of the latter because it
is said to provide us with an adequate response to crisis.7
While the essence of freedom-as-disclosure is captured in the
practice of contestation and critique, I want to reiterate that this
freedom is not primarily understood in a political sense; in fact,
despite the Arendtian influence on her work, Kristeva tends to
posit this form of freedom as antithetical to politics. For Arendt,
as is well known, freedom becomes the raison d’être of politics
(1977: 145), where ‘politics’ and ‘freedom’ can be used inter-
changeably.8 Unlike Arendt, Kristeva locates freedom in the realm
of the intimate. What, though, are we to make of this association
between freedom, revolt and the intimate?
Freedom, for Kristeva, is revealed through revolt. Politics and
political action are peripheral to this understanding; in fact, as I
suggested, they could even be seen to encroach upon freedom (see
Chapter 4). As Kristeva suggests, politics and political revolution
may stifle revolt by prohibiting or even strangling the freedom
to question (IR: 265–6).9 As I intimated in the previous chapter,
one may find some of the reasons for Kristeva’s pre- or even anti-
political conception of freedom in her biography, specifically in
the way that her dislike for what she terms totalitarian movements
is reflected in her conception of freedom and, more broadly, in
her conceptual apparatus, which, as we have seen, juxtaposes the
singularity of the individual against collective forms of expression,

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including politics. Her frequent personal interjections into her

theoretical pieces support such an interpretation,10 but, as I argued
previously, her theoretical writings also display such a philosophi-
cal orientation that can be traced back, despite modifications and
shifts in emphasis, to her early engagement with Tel Quel.11
And yet, as I have suggested repeatedly, there is also a strong
argument to be made for a reading of revolt and freedom beyond
the intimate. Sara Beardsworth (2005b) has stressed the ethical
dimension of ‘freedom as disclosure’ and its linkage to politics via
psychoanalysis. It is the sociality at the core of the psychoanalytic
encounter – that is, the relationship with the other – that consti-
tutes this ethical dimension of Kristeva’s notion of freedom and
revolt and which displays itself in a number of ways. To begin
with, it articulates what I referred to as a concern for the care of
the self (see Chapter 3). Kristeva seems to suggest as much when
she describes the characteristics of her privileged form of freedom
as emphasising ‘the intimate, the particular, the art of living, taste/
goût, leisure/loisirs, pleasure without purpose/plaisir pour rien’
(1998a: 329; italics in original; see also IR: 264; 2004c: 31–2).
There is more to this, though. Taking seriously the ethical
facet of freedom, Kristeva also highlights freedom’s concern for
the singularity and fragility of human life, including its attention
to difference. Kristeva associates such an ethical concern with
France, Italy, Spain and Poland: in other words, European coun-
tries that she associates with the Catholic tradition. This concern
for the fragility of life and for difference resonates strongly with
her engagement with the social status of the disabled, while the
connection she establishes between freedom and difference is
deeply embedded in her writings on foreignness and on sexual dif-
ference. Out of this ethical concern emerges, towards the end of
Intimate Revolt, a call for a ‘politics of solidarity’, ‘the expression
of popular unity that guarantees plurality in the unity of a nation
in solidarity’ (IR: 265), whilst in a different version of the essay,
in ‘Europhilia, Europhobia’, she advocates a ‘solidarian type of
freedom’ (1998a: 332); in the same text she endorses the way that
French étatisme advocates the principle of solidarity, over and
above liberalism, which Kristeva codes as American. The connec-
tion Kristeva establishes between unity, solidarity and plurality is
an intriguing one, which, on the surface, seems to run counter to
her emphasis on singularity and its connection with plurality. Here

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it might be helpful to recall a discussion from the previous chapter,

which, drawing on Lisa Disch’s reading of Arendtian thought,
explored the question of identity, the constructivist critique of
identitarian positions and the relation to feminist practice (Disch
1995). Recall that Disch’s response, informed by Arendt’s discus-
sion of political friendship, sought to develop the idea of what she
terms a ‘vigilant partisanship’, which generates practices based
on solidarity without having to seek recourse to a pre-established
subject or identity.
Disch’s discussion connects, I believe, with wider questions that
need to be asked of Kristeva, whose concern for freedom, as we
have seen, is intimist and ethical in its aspiration, and who fails to
connect this aspiration more fully with a political orientation. Is it
possible to read a desire for politics into her claim, that ‘politics,
strictu sensu, can be seen as the betrayal of this freedom of think-
ing’ (1998a: 330; italics in original)? Is Kristeva’s freedom limited
to an ethics of the self? Or can it translate into a feminist political
practice that addresses questions of political efficacy and feminist
agency? Linda Zerilli (2005), in her discussion of freedom in con-
temporary feminist thought, seems to suggest just that. Building
upon Arendtian notions of worldliness, Zerilli rejects feminist
thought based upon expediency, on the one hand, and upon the
subject, on the other. According to Zerilli, a feminism based upon
expediency legitimises itself through the relevance of the social,
and through an insertion of social demands via a language of
social justice and rights, into the fabric of the community. Such a
strategy is said to presuppose an understanding of a shared set of
needs, requirements and demands: in other words, of feminism as
a movement of sameness. Zerilli also refutes conceptions of femi-
nism based upon the subject, including those third-wave feminist
critiques that reject the notion of a pre-established subject but that
remain, through their critique, in the thrall of the subject. Instead,
Zerilli advocates a feminist politics, understood as a practice of
freedom, which seeks to build (upon) a common world. Such a
conception, according to Zerilli, holds on to feminism, by combin-
ing feminist political practice with the idea of plurality. Zerilli’s
feminism of plurality, beyond expediency and subject, offers a
very helpful corrective to Kristeva’s invocation of totalitarianism,
and it seems to me that Kristeva’s account, specifically her insist-
ence on singularity and plurality, could be developed profitably

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along such lines. As Zerilli points up, feminism does not require
a sense of shared identity, needs, moral capabilities or biological
features in order to qualify as feminism, or to articulate a feminist
vision of the world. To evoke Arendt’s ideas that lie at the heart of
Zerilli’s discussion, ‘the appearance of freedom, like the manifes-
tation of its principles, coincides with the performing act . . . to be
free and to act are the same’ (Arendt 1977: 151; italics in original).
What is missing in Kristeva is a more fully fleshed out engagement
with the political implications of her thought, and a more honest
acknowledgement of the political dimension of her intellectual
enterprise that deals in a more constructive manner with the ques-
tion of politics and female and feminist political agency.
As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, it is the theme of
otherness that runs through Kristeva’s psychoanalytic writings
and that also informs her wider perspectives on ethics and politics.
The following sections chart this aspect of her work further, and
I begin by looking at the status of the universal and the particular
in her account.

Universality, Particularity and Cosmopolitanism

Kristeva’s philosophy of freedom, as I intimated in the previous
section, is filtered through the lens of her conception of Europe and
its relation to its other. In this section, and in the following two,
I will explore this aspect further, and I begin by revisiting some
of Kristeva’s writings from the late 1980s and early 1990s on the
idea of the nation and on nationalism (1991a; 1993). These works
have received much critical commentary and it is not my inten-
tion to offer a novel interpretation of them. Rather, they provide
me with some necessary context for my discussion. This context
allows me to pursue some pertinent questions regarding the status
of the universal and the particular in Kristeva’s work. This theme
has remained with Kristeva, finding its manifestation in some of
her more recent work on fundamentalism and on Europe.
In Strangers to Ourselves (1991a), Kristeva present a narrative
of the role and status of the foreigner in the history of the West
and Western philosophy. It is also a vehicle for Kristeva to declare
her position on the engagement with foreignness in a world that is
becoming increasingly complex and intertwined. These arguments
are presented again, in a more condensed form, in Nations without

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Nationalism (1993), a collection of essays, letters and interviews

on the topic of the nation and nationalism. There, Kristeva
describes herself as a ‘rare species’: ‘I am a cosmopolitan’ (NwN:
15). This confession, along with the overall objective of her book,
should be seen in the political context of late 1980s France, which
saw a rise in the vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National
and which witnessed, in 1988, the controversy over l’affaire du
foulard, the so-called headscarf affair involving the expulsion and
subsequent reinstatement of three schoolgirls in a French school.12
Thus, Kristeva’s self-declared position as a cosmopolitan should
be seen in the first instance as an expression of her opposition to
what she considers a nationalist fundamentalism, evidenced in the
rise in nationalist sentiments and votes. Before continuing with
this point, I want to return briefly to some of Kristeva’s conclu-
sions, presented towards the end of Strangers to Ourselves, where
she advocates an ethical engagement with foreignness, drawing on
the idea that we are all foreigners, or strangers, to ourselves. In
Chapter 3, I briefly alluded to Kristeva’s propagation of an ethical
cosmopolitanism that is embedded in the political structure of a
nation-state and that entails legal provisions for foreigners; these
legal-political considerations are mapped upon her psychoana-
lytic discussion, which posits an ontological structure of radical
strangeness within the subject and which concludes by demanding
a psychoanalytic-cosmopolitan ethics of recognising the other.
As I stated in Chapter 3, I am broadly sympathetic towards the
central elements of Kristeva’s ethical ideas, in particular her ethical
orientation towards otherness. However, to repeat a claim I made
previously, these ideas sit uncomfortably alongside some of her
political assertions, which, as I want to demonstrate now, have
invited substantial criticism (see Moruzzi 1993; Ahmed 2005).
To begin with, Kristeva’s cosmopolitanism is a peculiar one,
as it is embedded in her attachment to the idea of the nation and,
more specifically, to the ideals of the French nation.13 Kristeva
does not reject the idea of the nation, which she considers as a,
perhaps necessary, form of political organisation in our frag-
mented political world. There is more to this, though, than a
pragmatic endorsement of the idea of the nation. Without denying
the violent and problematic emergence of the nation in the context
of the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Kristeva
remains attached to the ideas of the French nation, as these are

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said to embody the ideals of universality. This strange mixing of

the universal and particular is not just of conceptual interest. In
fact, as I demonstrate in the next two sections, it has profound
implications for Kristeva’s thinking about immigration and about
Europe. For now, though, I want to outline her treatment of cos-
mopolitanism and of universalism further.
Building upon her endorsement of cosmopolitanism, Kristeva
rejects the critique of human rights, as expressed, in different ways,
by Edmund Burke and Hannah Arendt. As is well known, Arendt,
in a famous section of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1979),
condemns a conception of human rights that is removed from any
attachment to politics and citizenship. Whilst Kristeva acknowl-
edges Arendt’s critique, she declares that it is important to defend a
‘universal, transnational principle of Humanity’ (NwN: 26), what
Arendt, rather disparagingly, refers to as ‘naked humanity’, which
is removed from the concrete historical realities of the nation and
of citizenship. Kristeva justifies her position, against Arendt, by
suggesting that only a universal conception of humanity, grounded
in cosmopolitanism, can serve as a bulwark against the contem-
porary fragmentation caused by nationalism and religion. She
combines her attachment to the ideas of cosmopolitanism with
her endorsement of the wider ideals of Enlightenment universal-
ism, including her support for a conception of human rights, and
she makes an explicit case for holding on to a universalist con-
ception of humanity, against its potential nationalist or religious
fragmentation (NwN: 26–7). It would be interesting to pursue her
call for such a universalist project of humanity, specifically in its
relationship to her insistence on the subject as heterogeneous and
in-process.14 What interests me here, instead, is to trace the further
unfolding of her argument on universalism and its relationship to
the particular, embodied in the French nation. Cecilia Sjöholm
has described Kristeva’s engagement with universalism and cos-
mopolitanism as ‘hollow’, as it is said to entail, ‘not a negation of
the particular, but the cut of alterity in subjectivity’ (2005: 59),
which, furthermore, displaces questions of politics into the realm
of the intimate. While I share Sjöholm’s latter diagnosis regarding
Kristeva’s displacement strategies, I have reservations concerning
her thesis of a hollow universalism; as I want to suggest in the
remainder of this section, Kristevan universalism is contaminated
by the particular, embodied in the figure of the French nation.

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As I already stated, Kristeva’s cosmopolitanism does not entail

a rejection of the nation; rather, drawing on her reading of
Enlightenment universalism, she finds the most suitable expression
of this cosmopolitanism in the idea of the (French) nation. Two
elements are key to the further development of her argument; these
include her delineation of the idea of the French nation against
the backdrop of a predominantly Muslim migration into France
(see next section), and her equation of the French national idea
with the ideas of the Enlightenment and its legal and institutional
embodiment in the French Republic (NwN: 40). The ideas that
inform such an argument have recently been criticised by Joan
Scott (2007), who contends that such a view expresses a mythical
image of France that, at least in its most recent manifestation, relies
upon a negative portrayal of Islam and that fails to consider the
social and historical specificity and context of the emergence of the
nation (2007: 7). Moreover, as several other commentators have
pointed up, Kristeva’s discussion of the stranger, and her reflec-
tions on the state of the nation under conditions of immigration are
strangely oblivious to the racial undertone of these ethico-political
reflections. Norma Claire Moruzzi, for example, takes issue with
Kristeva’s discussion, because it lacks, in her view, ‘an acknowl-
edgment of racial configurations’ (1993: 139). Sara Ahmed (2005)
critiques Kristeva’s wider discussion of the stranger, including her
call for an ethics based upon the recognition of strangeness. This
call, expressed in Strangers to Ourselves, builds upon Kristeva’s
diagnosis of the radical alterity within the subject, which leads
Kristeva to conclude that we are all strangers to ourselves; only
on the basis of such radical strangeness, Kristeva suggests, can we
begin to establish ethical relationships with others. However, as
Ahmed argues, rightly in my view, and notwithstanding our ethical
imperative to recognise others, including strangers, strangerness
is unevenly distributed along racial lines; hence, the inscription of
racial difference into the process of constructing some as strangers
and others as hosts is an effect of power that cannot be willed
away by appealing to a general, non-particular heterogeneity of the
subject or a set of good intentions (Ahmed 2005: 96).
Ahmed’s critique raises a further issue that has also recently
been taken up by Margaroni (2007) and that I referred to previ-
ously in my discussion; this is the question of whether psychoana-
lytic concepts can be transposed on to an analysis of politics. As

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Ahmed asks, ‘Is the subject like the nation insofar as it requires
differentiation from strangers?’ (2005: 95; italics in original).
Kristeva seems to answer this question in the affirmative, and her
frequent allusions to what she calls a national melancholia testify
to this. As I already suggested, her discussion of the nation is an
intriguing one because it sits oddly alongside her insistence on
the fluidity and plurality of a split subject in process; instead, it
seems grounded in a conception of sovereignty that is ill at ease
with her wider work. While the connection between her psycho-
analytic decentring of the subject to her discussion of the nation
is precarious, she deploys the psychoanalytic concept of melan-
cholia to make sense of the contemporary national malaise, and
she has stressed repeatedly, especially in some of her interviews,
her concern for what she terms a widespread national depression
(more on this below). Her response to this national depression is
analogous to that of the melancholic suffering of the individual;
the nation has to have its confidence restored.
This, however, throws up serious questions about the treat-
ment of those at the margins of the nation. It also demands a
more fundamental questioning of her thesis. Peter Gratton (2007),
for example, criticises Kristeva’s thesis of a national depression,
which is said to be triggered by, amongst other factors, immi-
gration, and which requires as its cure a restoration of national
confidence. Such a thesis, according to Gratton, is only possible
because Kristeva is blind to France’s colonial history. Hence, what
Kristeva diagnoses as a national depression may in fact turn out to
be what Paul Gilroy (2004) refers to, with reference to Britain, as
a postcolonial melancholia, triggered by a loss of colonial power
and the inability to come to terms with this loss. For Gratton,
France’s loss of its colonies constitutes the source of the decline
in national confidence amongst a section of its population, and he
challenges Kristeva’s reluctance to consider the colonial undercur-
rent of this national melancholia. While, as he further suggests,
the figure of the foreigner makes a notion of the ‘we’ impossible,
he also proposes, with and against Kristeva, to hold on to the idea
of a ‘paradoxical community’ promised in Strangers to Ourselves,
which is said to be truly open to the other (StO: 10).
Yet, as I argued, such a call leaves unanswered the question
of the concrete other; it also fails to consider universalism’s
contamination with the particular. Because Kristeva tends to

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anchor the French nation in the genealogy of the (French)

Enlightenment, it is perhaps unsurprising that she has been
accused of proffering a conception of the nation and of cosmo-
politanism that is profoundly French, even chauvinistic, and that
is void of any political-historical analysis (see Varsamopoulou
2009). Her movement between the universal and the particular
is particularly prominent in her discussion of Europe, where her
texts display frequent elisions between ‘France’ and ‘Europe’, or
‘French’ and ‘European’ (see, for example, 1998a; 2004a; 2005a),
and I want to explore concrete instances of this textual strategy in
the following sections.

Europe’s Others
I already alluded to the centrality that the issue of Muslim immi-
gration occupies in Kristeva’s discussion of the nation. There are
obvious sociological and political reasons for this emphasis, given
the geographical background and religious make-up of many of
France’s immigrants, and the ensuing debates over integration,
particularly in relation to the role of religious symbols in the life
of a state that defines itself as secular. This is an ongoing issue
in contemporary French politics, and recent debates over the
introduction of a ban on wearing a veil in public spaces attest to
its continued relevance, but my focus lies elsewhere. Developing
my arguments from the previous section, I want to examine
further the psycho-sexual subtext in Kristeva’s writings on the
nation and on immigration. Her comments on the veil, in Nations
without Nationalism, serve as a useful entry point to this debate.
Diagnosing a ‘twofold humiliation’ that faces the French, coming
from without, such as the erosion of national sovereignty in the
face of the workings of the European Union and the re-emergence
of a powerful neighbour in the wake of German unification in
1990, and from within, through immigration, Kristeva raises the
spectre of the veil and its impact on the French population, which
she sets against her assertion of the hard and long-fought-for
values of freedom and culture: ‘(why accept [that daughters of
Maghrebin immigrants wear] the Muslim scarf [to school]? Why
change spelling? . . .)’ (NwN: 36). Further below, she continues:
‘To what libertarian, cultural, professional, or other advantage
would a Muslim wish to join the French community?’ (NwN:

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37). As Sara Ahmed, in her critical reading of the same text, has
pointed out, Kristeva’s question proceeds on the assumption of a
binary between French and Muslim, where French is defined as
‘not Muslim’ and Muslim signifies ‘not French’ (Ahmed 2005).
This in itself is problematic, because it implies a racial undertone
in Kristeva’s discussion that undermines her subscription to what
we might term civic conceptions of the nation. But there is a further
comment to be made. Key to Kristeva’s concept of the (French)
nation is the role of culture: specifically, language and literature.
This assertion, however, in addition to the racial undertone of her
claim, inscribes a notion of sexual difference into ‘Frenchness’ and
‘immigrants’. By claiming the nation as a symbolic pact, defined
by language, she relegates those outside the national culture to the
status of the abject feminine, engaging in an ‘autistic withdrawal
into their originary values’ (NwN: 11). Moreover, the example of
the veil codes the Muslim as feminine and hence as a stranger to
the masculine national community.
As Ahmed asserts, ‘[m]odernity is understood as an empty form
of universalism, one that does not take the shape of particular
bodies. As such, Kristeva suggests that modernity can allow others
into its community of strangers as long as they give up the visible
signs of their concrete difference’ (2005: 98). I already indicated
that this hollow modernity comes to be filled with particular
(French) content in Kristeva’s further discussion, leading some of
her critics to accuse her of proffering a conception of cosmopoli-
tanism and of Europe that is profoundly French and read through
a French lens. Evy Varsamopoulou (2009) contends that Kristeva
conflates the idea of Europe with the ideals of France: specifically,
with those ideals that, as we have already seen, Joan Scott refers
to as a mythical conception of the French nation (2007). Whilst
Varsamopoulou acknowledges the importance of the ethical ori-
entation of Kristeva’s discourse on foreignness, a position shared
by most commentators, she faults Kristeva in particular for her
lack of a historical-concrete analysis. This critique is also pertinent
to Kristeva’s treatment of immigration. In her letter to Harlem
Désir, the figurehead of the French anti-racism organisation, SOS
Racisme, she makes the following claim:

It is time . . . to ask immigrant people what motivated them (beyond

economic opportunities and approximate knowledge of the language

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propagated by colonialism) to choose the French community . . . The

respect for immigrants should not erase the gratitude due the welcom-
ing host. (NwN: 60)

One is tempted to answer Kristeva’s question, tongue-in-cheek,

with Stuart Hall’s account of migration into Britain:

[T]hey had ruled the world for 300 years and, at last, when they had
made up their minds to climb out of the role, at least the others ought
to have stayed out there in the rim, behaved themselves, gone some-
where else, or found some other client state. But no, they had always
said that this [London] was really home, the streets were paved with
gold, and bloody hell, we just came to check out whether that was so
or not. (quoted in Brown 1995: 52)

At worst, Kristeva’s comment displays a lack of sensitivity, and

indeed a lack of knowledge, towards those who migrate, often
under personally difficult and indeed dangerous conditions, to
France; at best, it displays a curious disconnect from her own
ethical account of a hospitality that is grounded in one’s own
foreignness. Yet, despite my criticism of Kristeva’s treatment of
the subject of the stranger, I would be reluctant to dismiss this
aspect of her work completely. Beyond the problematic aspects of
her consideration of the concrete experience of migration, what
emerges is, as I already mentioned, an ethical orientation towards
otherness that is grounded in the concept of the nation and that is
attentive to the affective and somatic dimensions of living together
under conditions of multiculturalism. In fact, this stress on the
subterranean somatic and affective aspects of the nation could
be considered more widely as her effort to recapture the idea of
the nation from the kind of nationalist fundamentalism that she
detests. In this respect, one may regard her attempt to underpin
the nation affectively as a crucial element in a hegemonic strug-
gle towards a different conception of nationhood, based upon a
pragmatic recognition of the persistence of nationhood in an era
of globalisation that takes account of the porous boundaries of the
nation and its subjects.
Ash Amin (2004) draws substantially on Kristeva’s writings on
the nation in his effort to revive the idea of Europe. He suggests
that in the face of multiculturalism and diversity in Europe, where

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increasing numbers of Europeans trace their ancestry outside

Europe, the old foundation myths of Europe, such as adherence to
Roman law, a Christian-inspired ethics of solidarity, liberal indi-
vidualism and Enlightenment reason, no longer have the capacity
to inspire the contemporary European citizen. In their place, he
proposes, building upon Kristeva, the installation of the principles
of hospitality and mutuality. Hospitality, as I intimated in Chapter
3, is a central feature of Kristeva’s ethics, described by her as the
‘degree zero of ethos’ (IR: 257), which, in her view, constitutes the
core of the European conception of freedom. The idea of hospital-
ity is based upon a recognition that we are all strangers in need
of shelter. Such an essentially ethical commitment underlines the
bond that exists between humans, between host and foreigner.
However, even if we leave aside the question of its institutional
implementation (Amin gives this some thought), it seems to me
that Kristeva’s idea of hospitality looks rather hollow, especially
if it is contingent upon the condition of the recognition of the
principles of French nationhood. There is indeed something rather
‘thin’ about Kristeva’s principle of hospitality. How, though,
does it fare in comparison to the second principle championed
by Amin, that of mutuality? One may, in fact, consider mutual-
ity as an important addition to the principle of hospitality; its
recognition of intersubjectivity strengthens the status of those in
receipt of hospitality vis-à-vis the position of the host. But even
the idea of mutuality eludes the question of the particular: what
kinds of concrete others share this intersubjective bond of host
and guest? And, following Ahmed (2005), what kinds of racial
and sexual configurations underpin the notions of hospitality and
mutuality?
In Strangers to Ourselves, Kristeva describes women as the first
foreigners; hence, their ethical stake in conceptions of welcoming
otherness seems to be particularly high. Yet, in Nations without
Nationalism, she also fears that women are particularly vulnerable
to a notion of the nation grounded in Volksgeist, Herder’s term for
the mythical and mystical conception of the nation grounded in
soil, blood and linguistic genius, which Kristeva rejects in favour
of Montesquieu’s notion of esprit général. Women’s biological
fate, including their capacity to have children and their attachment
to the child and the home during nursing, according to Kristeva,
ties them to such mystical conceptions of space. At the same time,

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women’s narcissistic wound – specifically, their struggle to find a

place in the symbolic – facilitates an identification with the power
of the existing order. Already in ‘Women’s Time’, Kristeva raises
these issues, lamenting women’s alleged tendency to become
complicit with an, ultimately phallogocentric, status quo. Even
though women’s heterogeneity predisposes them to participate in
an ethical conception of strangeness, Kristeva fears a close alliance
between nationalism and feminism in its maternalist expression
(NwN: 34).
There are two further facets to this discussion that I will address
in the next section but want to highlight briefly here. First, while
my emphasis so far has been with Kristeva’s treatment of the ques-
tion of immigration and its psychosexual and racial configuration
of host and stranger, Kristeva’s more recent work also raises the
spectre of a colonialist or orientalist subtext that connects with
some of her previous writings. Such an accusation of orientalism
underpins the critique of Gayatri Spivak, who, in an influential
essay published in 1981, takes issue with Kristeva’s portrayal of
China in her About Chinese Women. In addition to her staunch
critique of the scholarly nature of Kristeva’s argument and use
of sources, Spivak accuses Kristeva of engaging in a ‘colonialist
benevolence’ (1981: 161) that speaks from the position of ‘a gener-
alized West’ (1981: 164). One can plausibly suggest that a similar
colonial undertone appears in some of Kristeva’s recent writings
on Islamic fundamentalism. In a revised version of her 1998 essay
‘Europhilia, Europhobia’, Kristeva raises again the spectre of the
Arab world, but this time not as the other within, embodied in
the figure of the Muslim migrant, but the figure outside, resulting
in a rather intriguing characterisation that is worth quoting at
length:

[T]he knowledge that we in Europe have of the Arab world, after

so many years of colonialism, has made us very sensitive to Islamic
culture and rendered us capable of softening, if not entirely avoiding,
the ‘clash of civilizations’ to which I have referred. In this situation,
what is at stake is our ability to offer our active support to those in the
Muslim world who are now seeking to modernize Islam. At the same
time, however, the insidious anti-Semitism in our countries should
make us vigilant faced with the rise of new forms of anti-Semitism
today. (2005a: 32; see also 2004a)

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Here, Kristeva presents a highly problematic textual strategy

that establishes a disturbing analogy between the terms ‘Arab’,
‘Muslim’, ‘Islam’ and ‘anti-semitism’, all of which are held
together in a seemingly precarious balance by the threats posed by
a clash of civilisations and underpinned by an orientalist knowl-
edge established in the wake of colonialism. Moreover, as we have
seen in Chapter 3, the spectre of violence that looms in this state-
ment is embodied in the figure of the shahida, the female suicide
bomber, who surfaces in some of her most recent writings. The
relationship of universal to particular, which structures Kristeva’s
depiction of Europe’s, and specifically France’s, relationship with
its others, returns in her discussion of the internal divisions that
run through Europe and that have generated distinctive concep-
tions of East and West.

The Other Europe

Before delving further into Kristeva’s writings on Europe, I want
to recall briefly my discussion of freedom that I began in the
first section of this chapter. There, I introduced Kristeva’s recent
emphasis on the notion of freedom that, as I sought to demon-
strate, is read through the lens of psychoanalysis. As I also inti-
mated, Kristeva’s conception of freedom is distinguished by its
explicit connotation with place; this, as we have seen, is introduced
through her distinction between a European and an American
version of freedom. She develops her discussion of freedom, in the
geographical context of Europe, in subsequent writings, where
she introduces a further division by opening up the possibility of a
distinction between an Eastern European and Orthodox Christian
tradition on the one hand, and a Western tradition of freedom on
the other. In her essay ‘Europe Divided: Politics, Ethics, Religion’
(published in Kristeva 2000c), Kristeva demarcates a Western
European version of freedom, defined as the ‘desire for objects,
knowledge, and production’ (Crisis: 159), against an Eastern
European and Orthodox version that embodies ‘the freedom
to withdraw into intimacy and mystical participation’ (Crisis:
159–60). Both versions, according to Kristeva, are inseparable.
Here I want to explore a little further what this Eastern version
entails. As Kristeva suggests, the Eastern experience (which is not
reducible to Orthodoxy and which is said to retain strong links

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to paganism) is essentially one of affectivity and of the senses. It

is therefore not surprising that Kristeva links this experience with
her notion of the semiotic, opposed to an association of the West
with the symbolic. She suggests the necessity to connect the East
with the West; after all, semiotic and symbolic modalities can only
operate fully if they are connected.
Kristeva’s 1998 essay, ‘Europhilia, Europhobia’, which I already
referred to above, contains no references to the East, constructing
instead a complementary transatlantic space of freedom shared
between Europe and America. A revised version of this article,
published under the title ‘French Theory’ (2004a), introduces a
more nuanced conception of Europe that acknowledges differ-
ences, especially cultural and religious differences, between ‘Old
Europe’, a term that refers to the countries of Western Europe,
and ‘New Europe’, a shorthand for the former Soviet bloc coun-
tries in the East. This idea of two Europes recurs, in yet another
version of the same article (2005a), where she considers, in several
short remarks, the need to bridge the gap between East and West,
especially by paying attention to the differences between the
eastern and western churches. This religious dimension is indeed
crucial to Kristeva’s account, and is central to ‘Europe Divided:
Politics, Ethics, Religion’, too. There, Kristeva outlines in detail
her ideas for a complementary reading of two European traditions
of freedom that chimes with her previous work on revolt and inti-
macy. Beginning from the assumption that the European subject is
in crisis, Kristeva asks whether there is any prospect for a shared
European cultural identity. Whilst the question of European iden-
tity remains implicit and essentially unanswered, it is her focus
on the development of a new conception of freedom that interests
me here. Kristeva is adamant in claiming the Eastern tradition,
particularly the traditions of the Orthodox faith, since they have a
central contribution to make. What would be the elements of such
a contribution?
While her essay begins with some sociological observations,
pertaining to the East’s economic backwardness and alleged short-
comings in public morality (more on this below), Kristeva moves
swiftly towards a discussion of freedom that draws on philosophy
and the theology of Orthodox Christianity. Her comments on the
contribution of Kant and Heidegger, and the subsequent distinc-
tion between a Protestant and a Catholic tradition of freedom, are

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by now familiar. What the essay brings new to my discussion is

her consideration of Orthodoxy’s contribution to a conception of
freedom. According to Kristeva, the Orthodox faith introduces an
affective or sensory dimension into culture, which she traces back
to Orthodoxy’s emphasis on experience and union, as opposed
to the Western philosophical tradition of questioning, derived
from Western Christianity. This distinction leads Kristeva to con-
clude that Orthodox faith is one of affect, of sensory experience,
derived also from the sensory paganism that, in her view, is still
widespread in Eastern Europe. Mapping this affective element of
Orthodoxy on to her categorical distinction between the semiotic
and the symbolic, Kristeva places Orthodoxy on the side of the
semiotic, which, as she suggests, ‘valorizes the preoedipal, narcis-
sistic, depressive stage of personality’ (Crisis: 149). This valorisa-
tion of the affective and sensory is connected, furthermore, with
Orthodoxy’s alleged privileging of the intimate, which, as Kristeva
suggests, may go as far as resulting in a lack of attention towards
the public realm (and which is said to manifest itself in widespread
practices of corruption and extortion; see Crisis: 136). Thus, even
though Kristeva identifies what she considers to be the faults and
failures of Eastern Europe, she is also at pains to establish the
important contribution that the countries of the East can make
towards a newly configured and enlarged Europe. As we have
seen in Chapter 2, intimacy and a rich psychic life are essential
components of our overall psychic well-being; they are also the
precondition of our capacity for revolt and hence, by extension,
for freedom. In that respect, the sensory nature of Orthodoxy adds
an important dimension to the conception of life and freedom that
Kristeva champions. As she suggests, ‘this passional and fusional
subjectivity also seems to me to offer a counterweight to the
exhaustion of Western freedom in pretense and the spectacular’
(Crisis: 136–7).
There is more to this, though. The affective dimension of a con-
ception of freedom grounded in Orthodox principles attests to the
capacity to form bonds; in other words, such a freedom is inher-
ently ethical. Kristeva says as much when she wonders whether
contemporary subjects are capable of forming bonds with others
without abandoning their freedom. For Kristeva, this is a difficult,
though not impossible task that requires a balancing between
freedom and bonds, and between understanding and the sensory

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(Crisis: 152). Kristeva’s more personal reflections on her Bulgarian

background further underscore the need for such a bond, and for
the crossing of the boundaries between East and West; she defines
herself as a ‘creature of the crossroads, between “them” and “us”,
belonging ultimately neither to “them” nor to “us”, but perhaps
to both groups’ (Crisis: 113).
I have emphasised throughout that I am broadly sympathetic
towards such a chiasmatic project15 and in particular to Kristeva’s
persistent attempts at establishing bonds between the affec-
tive or sensory dimension and the symbolic. Such a traversal of
boundaries, coupled with the need to create and recreate always
provisional and fragile bonds with others seems to me an essential
task for any feminist theory that takes seriously the critique of the
subject and of identity, the assertion of the heterogeneity of the
subject, and its relation to alterity: in short, a feminist theory that
takes Kristevan concepts as a point of departure. However, as I
have also stressed repeatedly, I remain sceptical about the concrete
implementation of these radical ideas. Here I want to illustrate
what I consider to be such a severance in relation to the psycho-
sexual subtext that informs Kristeva’s discussion of Europe and
that stem from her psychoanalytic reading of Orthodoxy.
In order to arrive at the assertion of the passionate and affec-
tive nature of Orthodoxy, Kristeva offers a psychoanalytic reading
of Orthodox faith that is based upon the idea of ‘per filium’, the
relationship between God, the Father and the Son, which, unlike
its Western Christian counterpart, is not one of equality (see also
BS: 208). Rather, following Kristeva’s reading, the authority of the
Father remains untouched and the Son is left with two options:
to submit or to reject the Father violently. The submissive son,
as Kristeva suggests, becomes effeminate, withdrawing into a
feminine position of passivity (Crisis: 140) that is coded as male
homosexuality. Women, on the other hand, become masculinised,
displaying courage, tenacity and intellectual prowess, and turning
into ‘“hardcore-feminists”’ (Crisis: 141).
A more sustained engagement with the theme of East and West,
which, as I illustrate below, has received substantial criticism, can
be found in her essay ‘Bulgaria, My Suffering’, also included in
Crisis of the European Subject (2000c). ‘Bulgaria, My Suffering’
is Kristeva’s attempt, informed by autobiography, to understand
contemporary Bulgaria after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In this

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essay, she develops more fully what she considers to be the weak-
nesses of Eastern Europe, consisting of corruption and the Mafia,
a certain psychopathology and the attitude towards cleanliness
and filth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she again brings into play a
psychosexual context that concentrates on the maternal aspect of
Bulgaria, embodied in the mother tongue and the maternal body.
This attachment to the figure of the maternal-feminine is also
invoked in her repeated references to the figure of Anne Comnena,
a character in Kristeva’s novel Murder in Byzantium (2004d), but
also a historical figure from the Balkans whom Kristeva describes
as the first female intellectual. Her assertion of female genius,
represented in the figure of a Balkan woman, attests to Kristeva’s
self-confessed pride in the achievements of Bulgarian intellectuals
in general and of women in particular. Yet, there is also a darker
side to her analysis that has attracted strong criticism; if Bulgaria
signifies the maternal-feminine, does it also signify the abject?
Unsurprisingly, these claims have attracted strong criticism. One
commentator, Dušan I. Bjelić (2006), takes issue with Kristeva’s
narrative on the Balkans, and with the psychosexual imprint that
is mapped upon it. His central discontent relates to Kristeva’s
psychoanalytic construction of geopolitics, consisting of what he
terms a psychoanalytic account of the genital origin of civic sub-
jectivity (2006: 56). What does he mean by this? Building upon
his assertion that Kristeva’s account is void of socio-historical
context, he takes issue with her juxtaposition of French taste and
Balkan filth. This juxtaposition, according to Bjelić, is a way of
disavowing the violent and essentially unclean origins of nation-
hood, which is only sustainable if we ignore the intrinsic somatic
connection between the two parts of Kristeva’s discourse, where
France comes to stand for vagina/mouth and the Balkans stand for
anus/excrement. Of relevance to my discussion is a further aspect
of Bjelić’s discussion: the gendered connotations of Kristeva’s
East–West discourse. Bjelić points to those aspects of her writings
on the Orthodox faith that identify the son with the feminine, and
that, in his view, subscribe to a notion of Balkan homosexuality on
the one hand, and a masculinised version of Balkan women on the
other. As I indicated above, there is certainly much in Kristeva’s
texts that allows for such an interpretation; her distinction
between a sensory and intimate generalised East on the one hand,
and a questioning, critical West on the other subscribes to an idea

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

of coherence that is at odds with her insistence on heterogeneity.

However, a more generous analysis may point towards that aspect
which, in my view, is essential to Kristeva’s theoretical discussion:
the bond between the sensory and the symbolic, which, according
to her, bridges the gap between East and West.
A more nuanced criticism of Kristeva’s account of Europe,
and of her representation of the Balkans, can be found in Evy
Varsamopoulou’s essay on ‘The Idea of Europe and the Ideal
of Cosmopolitanism in the Work of Julia Kristeva’ (2009). Like
Bjelić, Varsamopoulou takes issue with Kristeva’s failure to attend
to a specific political-historical analysis, and, again like Bjelić, she
refutes Kristeva’s conflation of the idea of Europe with the ideals
of France, and the conflation of the ideas of France with universal-
ism and cosmopolitanism. Yet, Varsamopoulou also claims that
the best aspects of Kristeva’s work consist of ‘re-orientating our-
selves ethically to difference’ (2009: 38). This latter point returns
me to my discussion at the beginning of this chapter (and indeed
to a central argument of my book): that Kristeva’s political phi-
losophy, conceived as a theoretical discourse, aims at straddling
the gap between the sensory and the symbolic, between psychic
life and public life, and between intimate revolt and political
revolution. Questioning and contestation, as we have seen, are
key elements in this project, while the essence of this philosophy
is freedom; I will return, one last time, to this theme in the last
section of this chapter.

Towards a Kristevan Feminism?

In this chapter, I explored Kristeva’s writings on freedom, which,
as I have outlined, are informed by psychoanalytic, philosophi-
cal and geopolitical considerations. As I suggested, this thematic
emphasis provides a new and exciting departure in her work that
should stimulate the current and future Kristeva scholarship. Of
particular interest is the importance she accords to the practice of
questioning and critique. Although not developed by Kristeva in
a distinctly feminist direction, it should influence any conception
of feminism as a critical practice. However, in contradistinction to
Kristeva’s psychoanalytic and philosophical treatment of freedom
and critique emerges her ‘imaginative geography’ (Said 1978),
which associates Europe, and especially France, with the ideas and

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 Towards a Philosophy of Freedom?

ideals of Enlightenment universalism, and which anchors freedom-

as-contestation in the space of Western Europe. This imaginative
geography, as I argued here, is underpinned by a psychosexual
subtext, which establishes Europe as a subject in revolt, capable
of drawing on its semiotic and symbolic capacity, and which rel-
egates, in the main, Muslim immigrants and their descendants to
the status of abject.
What, though, remains of Kristeva’s overall relationship with
feminism? Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought examined Kristeva’s
relationship with feminism, which, as I stated in my Introduction,
is defined as much by her ambivalence towards feminism, as it is
structured by feminism’s heterogeneity and plurality. Because of
the diverse and plural perspectives that make up contemporary
feminist thought, there exists no coherent or unified response to
Kristeva’s ideas, and the reception of her thought within feminism
has been uneven. While her work has been welcomed by those
feminist scholars who are sympathetic towards Kristeva’s broad
ideas, such as her critique of the subject and of identity, or her
insistence on fluidity and instability, it has been rejected by others
who remain attached to stable notions of the subject, who are
hostile towards psychoanalysis, who question her usefulness for
a feminist account of political efficacy or who turn to alternative
accounts of the critique of the subject. Kristeva’s relationship with
feminism is further complicated because she remains ambivalent
about feminism’s importance. At least three responses to feminism
emerge in her writings, ranging from the recognition of the impor-
tance of feminism’s achievements, to an outright rejection of femi-
nism as totalitarian, and to a transcendence of feminism through
her emphasis on singularity and plurality. Thus, notwithstanding
feminism’s diversity and plurality, it is fair to say that Kristeva’s
thought does not translate easily into feminist theory. For one
thing, as I already stated, she does not explicitly seek to make
an impact. Moreover, her ambivalence towards politics does not
connect with feminism understood as a project that aims towards
social and political transformation. Hence, questions that have
occupied feminist debates, such as the dispute over female or femi-
nist political agency, political efficacy or political transformation,
will struggle to find answers in Kristeva’s writings.
But maybe these are the wrong questions to be asked of
Kristeva’s œuvre. Turning to Kristeva’s wider philosophical and

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

psychoanalytic ideas seems to me to be a more fruitful way of

engaging with Kristeva’s thought; a careful consideration of these
ideas reveals her significant contribution to contemporary feminist
theory. Such an assessment must, by necessity, consider her radical
philosophy of feminine heterogeneity; it must also consider her
ethics of traversal and her political anthropology, which seeks to
connect the body with meaning and which stresses the affective
nature of politics. One may add to this list her concern for the
intimate and her insistence on the importance of revolt, as well
as her celebration of singularity and plurality. Ultimately, I want
to suggest, it is in her wider concern with critique, revolt and
freedom that Kristeva’s significance to feminism lies. This concern
with critique, revolt and freedom contributes to the understand-
ing of feminism as a critical, contestatory theory and practice that
permanently negotiates and unsettles the boundaries between inti-
mate and political revolt. Whilst conceptualising feminism in such
a way can be profoundly unsettling for feminism, it also keeps
feminism’s heterogeneous, plural and diverse theory and practice
alive.

Notes
1. I am drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s distinction between politics,
defined as a set of practices and institutions, and the political, which
refers to the antagonism that is said to be constitutive of social life.
See Mouffe (2005: 9).
2. This aspect of her writings has, as yet, not received much criti-
cal attention, and critical commentary on this work is only now
beginning to emerge. See, for example, the contributions to Oliver
and Keltner (2009); for an earlier, brief response see Beardsworth
(2005b).
3. This part is published separately in French under the title L’Avenir
d’une révolte (1998b).
4. The expression ‘dark times’ is taken from Brecht’s poem ‘An die
Nachgeborenen’ (‘To Posterity’) (Brecht 1990: 722–5). The connec-
tion that Arendt establishes between dark times, illumination and
the singularity and biography of what Arendt terms genius lies at the
heart of Kristeva’s ‘genius’ trilogy.
5. I want to flag up at this point that this is not the only distinction
Kristeva makes. As I discuss in the following sections, she opens

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 Towards a Philosophy of Freedom?

up two further dichotomies, between a West European and an East

European conception of freedom, and between a European civilising
mission, based upon Enlightenment universalism, and the Muslim
world.
6. Judith Butler, like Kristeva, champions the practice of contestation
as intrinsically valuable, but she develops its political import more
fully. According to Butler, it is via this ‘political culture of contesta-
tion’ (2000b: 161) that subjectivities are made, remade and chal-
lenged.
7. Beardsworth describes Kristeva’s portrayal of the two versions of
freedom as a ‘valuational asymmetry’, which favours freedom-as-
disclosure (2005b: 38).
8. However, as I discussed in the previous chapter, Arendt’s celebra-
tion of politics-as-freedom goes hand in hand with her evacuation of
politics from the private sphere.
9. For a similar argument see her essay on dissidence (1977b), where
she celebrates various forms of dissidence, in particular the dissi-
dence of the avant-garde, as a bulwark against a stifling symbolic.
More recently, she includes female genius in the practice of dissi-
dence, referring to Hannah Arendt and Melanie Klein as dissidents
(2001b: 16).
10. Cooper (2000) makes a similar claim regarding Kristeva’s preoccu-
pation with the idea of strangeness.
11. It may be useful to recall an early article, on semiotics, that already
engages with the question of critique. See Kristeva (1969b).
12. For a very useful and detailed outline, coupled with a critical assess-
ment, see Scott (2007).
13. For a discussion of Kristeva’s distinction between the idea and ideals
of the nation see Ahmed (2005). I attend to Ahmed’s critical reading
of Kristeva below.
14. For a critique of Kristeva’s ‘reversion to the tenets of humanism’ see
Moruzzi (1993: 143). See also Ziarek (1995) for a more sympathetic
reading that draws on Kristeva’s deployment of the Freudian notion
of the uncanny.
15. See Margaroni (2009) for an excellent analysis of the chiasmatic
nature of Kristeva’s thought.

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 Bibliography

More than forty years of scholarship, both by and on Kristeva, have

generated an enormous output. This bibliography is not comprehensive;
it does not consider the totality of Kristeva’s output nor does it list every
critical response to Kristeva’s œuvre. It is limited to those texts that had
an immediate impact upon my discussion. Kristeva has recently begun
to make her shorter pieces available on her official web site (which can
be accessed at www.kristeva.fr). Many of these texts are available in
French and English; the web site also provides a comprehensive list of
Kristeva’s books and awards, as well as other information of use to
anyone interested in her work.

Writings by Julia Kristeva

(1969a), ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril
Moi, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 34–61.
(1969b), ‘Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science’, in
The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 74–88.
(1973a), ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, in The Kristeva Reader,
ed. Toril Moi, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 24–33.
(1973b), ‘The Subject in Process’, reprinted in Patrick ffrench and
Roland-François Lack (eds) (1998), The Tel Quel Reader, London:
Routledge, pp. 133–78.
(1974a), La Révolution du langage poétique. L’Avant-garde à la fin du
XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé, Paris: Seuil.
(1974b), ‘About Chinese Women’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril
Moi, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 138–59.
(1975), ‘On the Women of China’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture
and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 57–81.
(1977a), ‘Stabat Mater’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 160–86.
(1977b), ‘A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident’, in The Kristeva
Reader, ed. Toril Moi, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 292–300.

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 Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought

(1979), ‘Women’s Time’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 187–213.
(1980), Desire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art,
New York: Columbia University Press.
(1981), ‘Women can Never be Defined’, in E. Marks and I. de Courtivron
(eds), New French Feminisms: An Anthology, New York: Harvester &
Wheatsheaf, pp. 137–41.
(1982a), Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, New York:
Columbia University Press.
(1982b), ‘Approaching Abjection’, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 5, no.
1–2, pp. 125–49.
(1983), ‘Within the Microcosm of the Talking Cure’, in J. H. Smith
and W. Kerrigan (eds), Interpreting Lacan, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, pp. 33–48.
(1984a), Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University
Press.
(1984b), ‘My Memory’s Hyperbole’, New York Literary Forum, vols
12–13, pp. 261–76.
(1984c), ‘Histoires d’amour – Love Stories’, in L. Appignanensi (ed.),
Desire, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, pp. 18–21.
(1984d), ‘Julia Kristeva in Conversation with Rosalind Coward’, in L.
Appignanensi (ed.), Desire, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts,
pp. 22–7.
(1986), About Chinese Women, New York: Marion Boyars.
(1987a), Tales of Love, New York: Columbia University Press.
(1987b), In the Beginning was Love. Psychoanalysis and Faith, New
York: Columbia University Press.
(1989a), Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia, New York: Columbia
University Press.
(1989b), Language the Unknown. An Initiation into Linguistics, New
York: Columbia University Press.
(1991a), Strangers to Ourselves, New York: Columbia University
Press.
(1991b), ‘Strangers to Ourselves – The “Strangers”’, Partisan Review,
vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 88–100.
(1992), The Samurai: A Novel, New York: Columbia University Press.
(1993), Nations without Nationalism, New York: Columbia University
Press.
(1995), New Maladies of the Soul, New York: Columbia University
Press.

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 Bibliography

(1996a), Julia Kristeva Interviews, ed. Ross Mitchell Guberman, New

York: Columbia University Press.
(1996b), Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, New
York: Columbia University Press.
(1997), ‘Hannah Arendt’s Concept of Life’, Common Knowledge, vol. 6,
no. 2, pp. 159–69.
(1998a), ‘Europhilia, Europhobia’, Constellations, vol. 5, no. 3, pp.
321–32.
(1998b), L’Avenir d’une révolte, Paris: Calmann–Lévy.
(1998c), Visions capitales, Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux.
(2000a), The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. The Powers and Limits of
Psychoanalysis vol. I, New York: Columbia University Press.
(2000b), Revolt, She Said, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
(2000c), Crisis of the European Subject, New York: Other.
(2001a), Hannah Arendt, New York: Columbia University Press.
(2001b), Melanie Klein, New York: Columbia University Press.
(2001c), The Feminine and the Sacred, with Catherine Clément,
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
(2002), Intimate Revolt. The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol.
II, New York: Columbia University Press.
(2004a), ‘French Theory’, Irish Pages: A Journal of Contemporary
Writing, Autumn/Winter, pp. 201–14.
(2004b), ‘Female Genius, Freedom and Culture’, Irish Pages: A Journal
of Contemporary Writing, Autumn/Winter, pp. 214–28.
(2004c), Colette, New York: Columbia University Press.
(2004d), Murder in Byzantium, New York: Columbia University
Press.
(2005a), ‘Thinking about Liberty in Dark Times’, The Holberg Prize
Seminar, Bergen: Holberg, www. holbergprisen.no/images/materi-
ell/2004_kristeva_english.pdf, pp. 21–36 (accessed 7 April 2008).
(2005b), La Haine et le pardon. Pouvoirs et limites de la psychoanalyse
III, Paris: Arthème Fayard.
(2006), ‘Hannah Arendt oder: Wiedergründen als Überleben. Festvortrag
der Hannah-Arendt-Preisträgerin 2006’, Festschrift zur Verleihung des
Hannah-Arendt-Preises für politisches Denken 2006 an Julia Kristeva,
www.hannah-arendt.de/Festschriften/Festschrift_20061175498415.
pdf, pp. V–X (accessed 8 August 2008).
(2007a), ‘Can We Make Peace?’, in A. A. Jardine, S. Lundeen and
K. Oliver (eds), Living Attention: On Teresa Brennan, Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, pp. 117–26.

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(2007b), ‘My Motto is Diversity’, in Centre d’Analyse et de Prévision,

Collection Penser l’Europe (ed.), Diversity and Culture/Diversité et
culture, Paris: CulturesFrance, pp. 6–23.
(2007c), ‘Rethinking “Normative Conscience”: The Task of the Intellectual
Today’, Common Knowledge, vol. 13, nos 2–3, pp. 219–26.
(2008), ‘Refoundation as Survival: An Interrogation of Hannah Arendt’,
Common Knowledge, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 353–64.
(2009a), ‘A Meditation, a Political Act, an Art of Living’, in K. Oliver
and S. K. Keltner (eds) (2009), Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics
in the Work of Kristeva, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 19–27.
(2009b), ‘Beauvoir and the Risks of Freedom’, PMLA, vol. 124, no. 1,
pp. 226–30.
(2009c), ‘Decollations’, in K. Oliver and S. K. Keltner (eds) (2009),
Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Kristeva,
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 29–45.
(2009d), This Incredible Need to Believe, New York: Columbia
University Press.

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Amin, Ash (2004), ‘Multi-Ethnicity and the Idea of Europe’, Theory,
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Arendt, Hannah (1958), The Human Condition, Chicago: University of
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–– (1992), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,
London: Penguin.
–– (1996), Love and Saint Augustine, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
–– (1997), Rahel Varnhagen: Lebensgeschichte einer deutschen Jüdin aus
der Romantik, Munich: Piper.

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 Index

abjection, 34, 44, 49–51, 90, 92, 100, Bakhtin, M., 9, 24, 27
102, 104, 135–6 Balkans, 169–70
abject, 50, 169 Battersby, C., 121
abject feminine, 161 Beardsworth, S., 58, 108, 115, 153
abjection of women, 51 Benveniste, E., 25
universality of abjection, 50 biography, 14, 119, 122, 124
aesthetics, 1, 22, 34, 40, 44, 55, 59, Bjelić, D., 169
72, 121 body, 7, 22, 34, 42, 44–5, 79, 90–1,
aesthetic practices, 9, 34, 60, 65, 118, 125–6, 129, 131–3, 172
105, 125, 131 bodily boundaries, 47, 49, 50, 102,
affect, 13, 22, 27, 62, 79, 81, 91, 109, 135
125, 127, 135, 148–9, 167 bodily disintegration, 47
agency, 2–3, 6, 14, 22–3, 25, 47, 65, body-in-process, 44
72, 139 coherent body, 49
collective agency, 75, 125, 131 maternal body, 22, 43, 48–9, 91–2,
female agency, 75, 135, 155, 171 98, 102, 112, 169
feminist agency, 75, 135, 154 nursing body, 48
feminist political agency, 141, 155, see also abjection; corporeality;
171 embodiment; ethics; pregnancy
women’s agency, 47, 75 bond(s), 167–8
Ahmed, S., 106, 158–9, 161, civic bonds, 131
163 political bonds, 17, 117, 136–7,
alterity, 16–17, 35, 47, 90, 98, 108, 139, 141
145–6, 158, 168; see also ethics; political friendship, 136–7, 154
the other; otherness social bonds, 102
Amin, A., 162 Boulous Walker, M., 30, 48
anthropology Brandt, J., 9
philosophical anthropology, 100 Brown, W., 102–3
political anthropology, 133–5, 142, Bulgaria, 138, 168–9
172 Butler, J., 4, 7, 9, 21, 32, 39, 45–6,
psychoanalytic anthropology, 135, 70, 80, 97–8
142
Arendt, H., 16, 63, 65, 80–1, 88, 106, chora, 4, 46–8, 92, 95
115–19, 122–39, 142, 145–6, Colette, S. G., 115, 119, 122, 128,
148, 150, 152, 154–5, 157 139
art, 26, 40, 44, 61, 78, 87, 103, 108, colonialism, 159, 164–5
115, 129, 135 contestation, 72, 74, 81, 151–2, 170
art of living, 111, 134 Coole, D., 30, 32, 34, 63
authority, 74, 78, 104, 108 Cornell, D., 35, 39, 98–9, 107
paternal authority, 61, 73–4, corporeality, 15, 16, 22, 81, 90–2,
76 125, 127, 131, 134–5

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corporeality (cont.) ethical feminism, 98–9

corporeal ethics, 44 ethical orientation towards
corporeal philosophy, 44 otherness, 162
see also body; embodiment ethics of alterity, 24, 136
cosmopolitanism, 88, 111, 147, ethics of forgiveness, 100
156–8, 160–1, 170 ethics of living, 100
ethical cosmopolitanism, 156 ethics of non-violence, 106
crisis, 15, 45, 55–62, 64, 74, 76–9, ethics of psychoanalysis, 110–11
82, 88, 108, 127–8, 138, 150–2 ethics of the self, 111, 154
crisis of authority, 59, 60, 94 feminine ethics, 96–7, 99
crisis of paternal function, 59–61 feminist ethics, 7, 13, 16, 87–8,
crisis of subject, 60, 115 100, 104
see also revolt herethics, 88, 91–2
critique, 28, 62, 66, 74, 81–2, 150, see also corporeality;
152, 170, 172 cosmopolitanism; the maternal;
cultural pessimism, 61, 78 traversal
culture, 3, 7–8, 28–9, 32, 39, 46, 61, Europe, 4, 17, 73, 146–7, 152, 155,
90–1, 97, 148, 160–1, 167 157, 160–3, 165–8, 170
culture of death, 105 Eastern Europe, 9, 147, 167
European conceptions of the
De Beauvoir, S., 17, 37, 93, 118, universal, 140
139–41, 146 European tradition of revolt, 55, 61
Debord, G., 60–2, 76–7, 82; see Western Europe, 171
also situationism; society of the evil, 109–10, 135
spectacle exile, 116
Delphy, C., 10–11 experience, 122, 127
Dietz, M., 4–6
difference, 4, 6–7, 14, 35, 38–9, 81, Fanon, F., 72–3
89, 91, 124, 136, 138, 141–2, feminine, the, 3, 7, 10, 15–16, 22, 29,
151, 153 35, 38–9, 41, 47, 57, 63–4, 66,
Disch, L., 137, 154 69, 70, 76, 81, 87, 91, 94, 98,
discourse, 91, 115 99, 104, 106, 111, 118–20, 133,
discourse on life, 105, 107 151, 161, 169
dissidence, 27, 48, 65, 131, 139 feminine as force of subversion, 51
female dissidence, 48 see also ethics; heterogeneity
drives, 16, 24–5, 27, 30, 32–4, 45–7, femininity, 7, 39, 42, 44, 68–70, 106,
53n22, 64–5, 79, 89, 94, 98, 120–1, 123
100–2, 111–12, 126, 129, 133, feminism
135–6, 147, 148 as collective practice, 137
death drive, 43, 90, 100–5, 109, as contestatory political project,
116 151, 172
as critical practice, 81, 151, 170,
embodiment, 2–3, 16, 43–4, 48, 55, 172
111, 116–17, 125; see also body; as critical project, 16, 128
corporeality as political project, 38, 74, 76
Enlightenment universalism, 157–8, feminism’s critical ethos, 128
171 see also French feminism;
essentialism, 3, 7, 37, 39, 46 heterogeneity; plurality; politics;
ethics, 3, 87–91, 96–7, 99, 100, 104, revolt; totalitarianism
108–9, 111, 116, 127, 129, 131, foreigner(s), 100, 106, 110, 112, 155,
162 159, 163

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foreignness, 43, 153, 155–6, genius, 115, 118–25, 130, 138–9,
161–2 141
forgiveness, 16, 88, 108–11, 127, 149; female genius, 57, 99, 115, 119–20,
see also ethics 122, 139, 169
France, 8, 10–11, 60, 156, 158–62, Gratton, P., 159
165, 169, 170 Grosz, E., 51
French Enlightenment, 140, 156, guilt, 109–10
160
French nation, 156–8, 160–1 Hegel, G.W.F., 28, 30–1, 34, 71, 77,
see also Europe; French feminism; 118
French theory; immigration; Heidegger, M., 109–10, 148, 152,
universality 166
Fraser, N., 2, 9, 21, 38–9, 52n3, 97 heterogeneity, 16, 89–91, 97, 99, 112,
freedom, 4, 14, 17, 88, 105, 111, 116, 117, 151, 170
128, 130, 132–4, 141–2, 146–55, feminine heterogeneity, 74, 99, 123,
160, 165–7, 170, 172 172
American conception of freedom, feminism’s heterogeneity, 4, 8, 14,
150–1, 165 21, 120, 171
Eastern European version of heterogeneity of language, 27
freedom, 165 women’s heterogeneity, 6, 164
Ethical dimension of freedom, hospitality, 112, 162, 163
167 human rights, 157
European freedom, 150, 152, 163, humanity, 112, 141
165 new humanism, 107, 112
freedom as contestation, 171 universalist conception of humanity,
freedom as disclosure, 152–3 157
freedom as questioning, 111, 149
freedom as revolt, 151–2 identification, 41–3, 139
instrumental freedom, 152 father-identification, 43
Orthodox version of freedom, 165 identity, 103, 125, 137–8, 154–5
Orthodoxy’s contribution to critique of identity, 2–3, 14, 37, 39,
conceptions of freedom, 167 117, 137, 168, 171
Western European version of identity politics, 116
freedom, 165 immigration, 88, 146–7, 157–61, 164
French feminism, 4, 10–11, 18n11, emigration, 116
19n12, 41, 118 migration, 88–9, 162
French theory, 13, 118 see also France; Muslim(s); veil
Freud, S., 10, 29, 31, 34, 59, 63, intersubjectivity, 91, 163
67–8, 70, 72, 98, 101–2, 109, intertextuality, 24
147–8 intimate, the, 14, 64, 75–9, 81–2,
fundamentalism, 155 116, 125, 128, 133–5, 145, 147,
Islamic fundamentalism, 104, 150–3, 167, 172
164 intimacy, 80–1, 133–4, 167
Muslim fundamentalism, 8, 105 intimate revolt, 15, 56, 64, 76–80
nationalist fundamentalism, 156, intimist, 57
162 irony, 73
see also nationalism female irony, 67, 73–4
Futurality see politics; ‘woman’ feminine irony, 73
women’s irony, 71–2
Gambaudo, S., 56, 59 Islam, 105, 158, 164
gender, 6–8, 13, 35, 51, 56–7, 59, 70,
74, 76, 80, 104, 106 jouissance, 43, 52n9, 59, 62, 129

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Kant, I., 151, 166 multiculturalism, 7, 88, 162
Keltner, S.K., 80–1 Muslim(s), 88, 161, 164
Klein, M., 115–16, 119, 122, Muslim immigration, 160
139 Muslim migrants, 164, 171
Muslim migration, 158
Lacan, J., 25–6, 28, 40–1, 67 see also France; immigration
Lacanian, 10, 52n9, 62 mutuality, 162
Lacanian psychoanalysis, 32, 39
language, 7, 10, 41–2, 44, 64, 67, 79, narrative, 17, 115, 117–19, 124–7,
81, 88, 90–1, 94, 102, 111, 116, 129, 142, 148
127, 161 natality, 117, 125, 130
theory of language, 22–3, 89 nation, 89, 155–60, 162–3
life, 17, 107, 112, 115, 117–20, 122, civic conception of the nation,
124–9, 132, 153, 167 161
bios, 128–30 nation as symbolic pact, 161
narrated life, 121 see also France; immigration;
zoē, 128–30, 132 melancholia
see also Arendt; biography; genius nationalism, 4, 155–7, 164; see also
Lloyd, M., 103 fundamentalism
love, 108, 110, 123 nature and culture, 3, 22, 32–3, 47–8,
transference love, 110–11 111
nature–culture threshold, 48
McAfee, N., 38, 91, 127 negativity, 15, 22, 28, 30–2, 35, 39,
Margaroni, M., 2, 13, 33, 47 42, 45, 63, 77, 91; see also the
marginality, 64–5, 116, 131 semiotic
the marginalised, 65, 103
masculine, the, 7, 26, 38, 44, 69–70, Oedipality, 26, 59, 68–9, 124
91, 94, 97, 99, 101, 104, 106, Oedipal crisis, 28, 98
111 Oedipal family, 40, 44, 45
masculinity, 7, 29, 42, 69, 70 Oedipal triangle, 46, 92, 94
maternal, the, 26, 41, 63, 87, 93–4, universal applicability of Oedipal
97, 99, 133, 142 injunction, 68
maternal body, 3, 4, 22, 32, 45–7, universality of Oedipal structure,
91, 98 70, 120
maternal ethics, 16, 92, 96 see also psychoanalysis
maternal political practice, 96 Oliver, K., 14, 39, 44, 50–1, 56, 107,
maternal semiotic, 42 126
maternal suffering, 59 Orthodox Christianity, 133, 165–9
maternity, 44, 89, 91–3, 97–9, 123 other, the, 89–90, 94–5, 99, 102,
symbolic maternity, 93–4 107–8, 110–11, 122–3, 127, 146,
see also motherhood 148, 156, 159; see also alterity;
melancholia, 34, 43, 100, 102, 159 ethics
culture of melancholy, 60 otherness, 30, 89–91, 100, 108,
female melancholia, 42, 59, 68 145–6, 155–6, 163
melancholic identification, 42
national melancholia, 159 particularity, 7, 72–3, 75, 147
Middle East, 100, 104–5 feminisation of the particular, 73
Moruzzi, N. C., 158 particular, the, 72–4, 155, 157,
motherhood, 3, 39, 51, 88, 91–100, 159–60, 163, 165
124, 130, 140 see also universality
motherhood and genius, 122–3 paternal, the, 26, 94
see also the maternal paternal function, 94, 113n6

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phallic monism, 68–70, 72, 120 Reineke, M., 101
phallus, 28, 44, 46–7, 67–8, 70–2 representation, 55, 59–61, 79, 83n4,
illusory nature of the phallus, 67, 87, 91–2, 94–5, 99, 104, 111,
70–1 129, 133–4
universality of the phallus, 69–70 revolt, 4, 15, 55–7, 59–68, 71–9, 82,
plurality, 15, 17, 97, 117–18, 120, 88, 105, 109–11, 128–9, 133,
124, 128, 130–1, 136–9, 141–2, 146–51, 153, 167, 172
145, 153–4, 171–2 culture of revolt, 63–4, 66, 77
female plurality, 38, 72, 141 ethos of revolt, 71
feminism’s plurality, 4–5, 14, 21, European tradition of revolt, 55,
120, 171 61
plurality of women, 37 female revolt, 16, 56, 68, 70
poetic language, 26–7, 29, 135 feminine revolt, 70, 72
political philosophy, 1–2, 17, 40, 63, feminist revolt, 57, 70
72, 79, 117–18, 136, 141–2, freedom as revolt, 151
145–6, 151, 170 intimate revolt, 56, 76–9, 109, 134,
feminist political philosophy, 13, 170
125, 151 political dimension of revolt, 57
politics, 39–40, 65 political revolt, 62, 65, 82, 134
deterritorialisation of politics, 16, rebirth-in-revolt, 67
56 see also crisis
displacement of politics, 3, 15, 34, Riley, D., 6, 38
56, 63, 106, 135 Romanticism, 118–21
micro-politics, 16, 56, 63 Romantic, 17
political practice, 6, 72–3, 154 Russian Formalism, 27
politics, 2–3, 5–7, 10, 13–14, 38–9,
71, 97 sacrifice, 101
politics of futurality, 74, 81 Sartre, J.-P., 72, 148
women’s political participation, Scott, J. W., 74, 158, 161
96 semiotic, the, 4, 22–38, 41–2, 44–7,
post-structuralism, 3, 24, 35, 42, 87 49–50, 63–4, 67, 70, 79, 90–2,
pregnancy, 47, 96, 130 95, 98, 129, 133, 166–7
pregnant body, 47 semiotic as subversive force, 29–31,
see also the maternal; motherhood 33, 39, 45, 48
psychic life, 44, 55–7, 60, 62, 76, semiotic negativity, 30–2, 34, 77
78–9, 102, 128, 133–4, 148–50, see also drives; Hegel; negativity;
167, 170 the symbolic; symbolic order
psychoanalysis, 1, 5, 7, 9–10, 13, 15, semiotics, 1, 10, 15, 89, 98
24–5, 35, 37, 40, 42–5, 56–8, 64, sexual difference, 3, 7, 15, 24–5, 38,
66, 78–80, 82, 88, 92, 108–11, 43, 46, 69–70, 75, 90–1, 93–4,
116, 127, 146–9, 165, 171 99, 101, 104, 120–1, 130, 151,
psychoanalysis as questioning and 153, 161
critical practice, 66 sexuality, 4, 5, 7, 41, 66–70, 124
bisexuality, 70–1
questioning, 66, 71, 74, 111, 127–8, female bisexuality, 72–3
148–9, 151–2, 167, 170 female psychosexuality, 120
ethos of questioning, 148 female sexuality, 16, 56, 67, 69,
practice of questioning, 81–2, 151 70–3, 119
women’s constitutive bisexuality,
rebirth, 17, 79, 108, 110–11, 118, 68, 71
120, 130, 136, 148–9; see also women’s psychic bisexuality, 67,
revolt 70, 124

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shahidas, 105–7, 165 threshold, 48, 75, 91, 111, 129–30
signification, 13, 22, 27, 79, 91, maternal body as bodily threshold,
99–112, 135 92
singularity, 1, 15, 17, 27, 65, 75, 81, totalitarianism, 117–18, 131, 135–8,
94, 112, 117–18, 120, 124, 128, 154
131–2, 136, 138–42, 145, 148, collective action as totalitarian, 130
152–4, 171–2 totalitarian intervention of politics,
female singularity, 141 134
singularity of women, 37–8 totalitarianism of feminism, 2,
situationism, 60, 62; see also Debord; 37–8, 130, 138–9, 141, 171
society of the spectacle transference, 108, 111, 148
Sjöholm, C., 9, 63, 81, 157 transference love, 148
society of the spectacle, 60–1, 64–5, transformation, 22–3, 30, 56, 60, 62,
76–7, 79, 82, 103–4, 127; see 72–3, 76, 82, 124
also Debord; situationism political transformation, 2, 6, 34,
Spivak, G. C., 164 57, 171
Still, J., 50–1 social and political transformation,
strangeness, 146, 156, 158, 164 57, 74, 117, 171
stranger(s), 156, 158, 162–4 social transformation, 3, 57
structuralism, 24, 27, 52n3 transgression, 27, 34, 36, 45, 49, 63,
subject, 2–3, 5–7, 14–16, 25–7, 52n3, 92, 129
79–80, 90, 100–4, 109, 111, 131, transgressive practice, 24, 27, 75,
141, 146, 148, 151, 154, 156, 159 96
critique of the subject, 6, 14, 17, traversal, 22, 60, 90–2, 97, 112,
25, 37–9, 137, 151, 168, 171 112–13n4, 168
decentred subject, 6, 25, 27, 28, 35, ethics of traversal, 16, 88–9, 91–2,
38–9, 148, 159 172
female subject, 2–3, 13
fluidity of the subject, 15, 17, 30, universality, 7, 73, 147, 157
32, 35–6, 39, 42, 49, 67, 74, 77 universal, the, 72–4, 155, 157, 160,
heterogeneity of the subject, 15, 17, 165
35, 38, 74, 89, 91, 98, 107, 146, universalism, 157, 159, 170
148, 157–8, 168 see also Europe; humanity;
instability of the subject, 2, 15, 32, Oedipality; particularity; phallus
34–6, 42
precariousness of the subject, 30, Varsamopoulou, E., 161, 170
34, 37, 50, 67, 77 veil, 160–1; see also Ahmed; France;
speaking subject, 22–3, 25, 95 immigration; stranger(s)
subject in process, 6, 15, 23, 31, 34–6, violence, 16, 61, 88, 100–9, 111, 127,
38, 42, 74, 77, 89–90, 135, 148, 135, 165; see also ethics
157, 159 vulnerability, 88, 100–2, 105, 108–9,
sublimation, 16, 90, 108, 148 123
symbolic, the, 4, 15, 22, 25–34, 36–8,
42, 45–7, 49–50, 64, 67, 70, war on terror, 105
72–4, 77, 79, 89–92, 95, 97–8, 9/11, 8, 105, 107
101, 129, 166–8, 170; see also ‘woman’, 5, 37–9, 98, 137
semiotic futural construction of women,
symbolic order, 29, 31, 39, 41, 43, 98
62, 67, 69, 71, 94–6, 101, 139 writing, 9, 116, 124, 128–9

Tel Quel, 8–9, 23, 27, 153 Zerilli, L., 2, 4, 21, 154–5
terrorism, 88, 104–5 Ziarek, E. P., 2, 72–4, 89–91, 106

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