Kristeva

In college I majored in philosophy and psychology, and thirty years later the question – “what are you going to do with that?” still echoes.
To be a philosophy major is to have encountered, now and again, some piece of writing that is a challenge to decipher, but nevertheless leaves you feeling that there is more there to be grappled with. Perhaps what I have done with my philosophy major is to search out, now and again, difficult and challenging writings that nevertheless speaks to me and stretches me, even if through a fog, a cloud, a mist.
Julia Kristeva and I share a birthday, eighteen years apart. Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born, French philosopher, novelist, psychoanalyst whose writings transcend various academic disciplines. To think the unthinkable: from the outset this has been Julia Kristeva’s project. Scanning with exceptional intensity the whole horizon of Western culture, her writing investigates the terrains of philosophy, theology, linguistics, literature, art, politics and, not least, psychoanalysis, which remains the crucial intellectual influence on her work…. Speaking across the conventional disciplinary boundaries of the academic world, Kristeva raises the fundamental issues of human existence: language, truth, ethics love. (Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader, vi)
This is my kind of stuff, so when I came across her book This Incredible Need to Believe, I wanted to read it – and a recent airline trip made that possible. The book consists of essays and interviews on religious themes which have engaged Kristeva for a long time. Her perspective is unique: a woman who is not a believer – a psychoanalyst, teacher, writer – convinced nonetheless that the “genius of Christianity” has introduced and continues to diffuse radical innovations as concerns the religious experience of speaking beings (88). Her appreciation for Christian faith runs deep. Christianity opened the vast field of the sacred to figuration and literature: to the inner experience that goes from the quest for convulsive communion to the necessity I feel of questioning everything – from the abysses of childhood up to the unknown (viii). The history of Christianity is a preparation for humanism (83). She sees possibilities for helpful “complicities” between “Christianity and the vision of human complexity to which I am attached” (78)
I don’t claim to have grasped everything that Kristeva wants to say, but I appreciated the scattered insights gained as I struggled with this challenging work. I share a few with you.
The psychic life of the speaking beings that we are is the result of a long “working out of the negative”: birth, separation, frustration, various kinds of lack – so many kinds of suffering (79). Each and every one of us is the result of a long “work on the negative”: birth, weaning, separation, frustration (94).
The only alternative to these different forms of barbarism founded on the denial of malaise is to work through distress again and again: as we try to do, as you try to do…. Still, when new barbarians, having lost even the capacity to suffer, strew pain and death around and in us: when poverty grows by leaps and bounds in the global world, face to face with extravagant accumulations of wealthy, which doesn’t care, aren’t compassion and sublimation not much help? Of course. What I do know, however, is that no political action could step in for them if the humanism – itself a kind of suffering – didn’t give itself the means to interpret and reinvent this “loving intelligence” that comes and is inseparable from the Man of pain and suffering’s compassion that might be confused with the divine itself. (97-98)
Freedom means having the courage to start over (44).
My conversation with Julia Kristeva is not over.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David