[In the following essay, Jones considers critical reception of Kristeva's The Old Man and the Wolves within the context of two interviews following its publication.]

In October 1991 Julia Kristeva's Le Vieil Homme et les loups appeared, to a mixed reception.¹ This paper considers the novel's reception in the light of two recent interviews with Kristeva, in order to say something about her view of the role of the writer in times of trouble.

In his ‘review of reviews’ for Le Nouvel Observateur Bernard-Henri Lévy notes ‘a strange uneasiness, a perplexity’ in critical responses to the novel.

Why these embarrassed silences on the subject of The Old Man and the Wolves, these attacks? Is it because of the form? The principle? Is it the idea of combining the philosophical novel with fantasy and the detective novel? Is it the change of genre? The author herself? The story?²

Unfortunately for Kristeva, Le Monde's Michel Braudeau is not one of the silent critics.³ His own review begins with the assertion that Kristeva's first novel, Les Samouraïs, had ‘fallen into certain—occasionally glaring—affectations of style … which the kindness and indulgence accorded to early efforts had discreetly overlooked’.⁴ In the light of what followed, he is quite clear that this indulgence was misconceived. Les Samouraïs was ‘an intellectual love story, a contemporary one, her own, with characters who were real, recognizable, barely disguised’. With Le Vieil Homme, however, we move from ‘embellished memoirs’ to ‘fiction’. The distinction is evidently more clear-cut for Braudeau than for some of his readers, but it hardly justifies the vehemence of what follows.

Before turning to Braudeau's version of Le Vieil Homme, however, it's worth quoting in full the summary from the novel's dust-jacket.

This fantasy narrative is also a detective story. The wolves invade Santa Barbara, killing animals and humans and changing the faces of men and women, who become arrogant, criminal and animal.

An anonymous woman is fished dead out of a lake. Alba and Vespasien dream of killing each other, while the Old Man—the only individual to remain vigilant and reject the surrounding barbarity—dies an inexplicable death. Who is the murderer?

Stéphanie Delacour is a journalist who turns detective in order to lead the hunt. What she sees is a civilization in metamorphosis. Santa Barbara has lost its values: the one-time people's democracy or extreme-liberal society has come to epitomize hate and banal crime.

This Goyaesque vision of the world emerges from the intense mourning at the heart of the detective's private journal. The Old Man and the Wolves is addressed to those who have lost someone dear to them and sicken with anguish before the unimaginable nature of death, as they try to articulate the violence of a solitude they cannot share.

In this novel, the detective story and the philosophical tale converge.

In the latest issue of L'Infini Kristeva discusses her new novel in relation to the earlier ‘best-seller’.⁵ As her interviewer Bernard Sichère indicates, Les Samouraïs was more ‘positive’, less ‘sombre’ and less ‘pessimistic’ than its successor. Kristeva situates her new novel

at the meeting point of individual shock （that is, mourning the death of my father who was killed in a Sofia hospital by the incompetence and brutality of medicine and of the régime） and collective trouble, the fact … of general disorder in society, our society. … （L75）

Her response to Sichère's charge of pessimism is a familiar question: ‘what's the good of novels in times of distress?’ （L75）.

The answer seems to bring together two phases of Kristeva's work: the more recent concern for （individual and generalized） distress, and the earlier interest in the potentially revolutionary effects of artistic practice.⁶ In a recent interview with Vassiliki Kolocotroni for Textual Practice Kristeva outlines some of the factors she sees as underlying contemporary distress.⁷ There is totalitarianism in all its forms, she observes, including ‘restrictive aspects’ of ‘bourgeois society’ such as the ‘extremely permissive’ media show with its ‘pleasant and exciting’ illusions that mask social crisis （T161）. Each contributes to the creation of a ‘harmonized’ society, a ‘levelling’, ‘the uniformization and elision of all differences’ （T161）. When asked by Kolocotroni whether artistic practice could do anything to alleviate this distress by transforming socio-political structures, Kristeva answers ‘Yes and no’ （T161）.

The Textual Practice interview took place shortly before Le Vieil Homme was completed; the L'Infini interview took place a couple of months after its publication. Although the second interview focuses, like Le Vieil Homme itself, chiefly on Eastern Europe, Kristeva does not exclude the West when she alludes to a ‘national depression’ that is excluded from the ‘media show’, to increasing evidence of ‘aggression’, ‘banalization’, ‘melancholy’, ‘barbarism’, ‘violence’, ‘criminality’, ‘hatred’, ‘a destruction of language’ and ‘a general destruction of culture’ （L83, L78, L76）. Having talked to her at length on the role of the intellectual in such circumstances, Sichère ends with its ‘political dimension’, asking Kristeva whether she is ‘on the left’, and whether this isn't one way of resisting the ‘scramble which takes the crumbling of the communist world as a pretext for expressing its hatred of popular liberation and instituting … a witch-hunt’ （L85/6）. Kristeva responds by noting that ‘new modes of political life’ need to be created, ‘beginning with a genealogy of current political life’, but maintains that the job of the writer is ‘to circumscribe this political space in order to reinvent it endlessly, to trace it. … To think, speak and write about the free, unwonted, and strange links between irreconcilable individuals’ （L86）. In her view party politics, ‘this alternation between two political and ideological poles’, is unable to speak to individual polymorphism or to compete with the speed and effectiveness of media representations （L85）.

Kristeva is drawn by Sichère into a discussion of politics, but makes it clear that she is interested less in ‘the political man or woman’, than in his or her ‘being’ （L86）. The two are less easily extricated in Kristeva than in some writers, particularly where the revolutionary role of the artist is concerned. In her exchange on this point with Kolocotroni, Kristeva begins with a reference to the ‘micro revolution’ achieved by the artist's ‘calling into question of language and of the individual’, and moves on to the dramatic political changes that have taken place in Eastern Europe （T161）. In her view, revolutionary art implies revolutionary form, a political practice which has its effects, not at the level of ideology, but in the production of subjectivity. Great works of art, she affirms, are in effect ‘masterful sublimations … of psychotic crises’.⁸ Since this involves the spontaneous ‘semiotization of the symbolic [and] the flow of jouissance into language’, it necessarily excludes metalanguage, the representation of progressive ideology at the level of content and self-conscious experimentation.⁹ Instead, this process of semiotization is achieved through poeticized language or text （writing in its materiality and its music—alliterations, rhythms, repetitions, etc.） which signals the pre-signifying impulses and energies at work within language and throughout the symbolic order. By releasing forces that the symbolic normally represses, revolutionary art questions the bases of that repression and the system of representation and identity it underpins. In this way it can come to stimulate and reveal ‘deep ideological changes’ within the symbolic which are ‘searching for their own accurate political framework’.¹⁰

Since the intelligibility of jouissance depends on its mediation through language, avant-garde or modernist art cannot abolish the limits of the symbolic, but only push them back transgressively and provisionally. In her discussion with Kolocotroni, however, Kristeva recognizes the dramatic changes brought about in their societies by radical Eastern European writers such as Václav Havel. Her statement involves an interesting distinction between revolutionary and radical art, revolving around the assumption that radicals are ‘within the lineage’ of the avant-garde, but by implication somehow different （T161）. At first sight that difference looks quantitative rather than qualitative: for Kristeva, all art can liberate semiotic energies, but only the anarchic excesses of revolutionary—avant-garde, modernist—art can fundamentally undermine the bases of representation and the symbolic. There is, however, a more obvious sense in which avant-garde artists may be revolutionary, but not all revolutionaries are avant-garde artists. While the ‘micro-revolution’ of avant-garde artists was achieved primarily at the level of anarchic form, the revolt of radical artists might be said to be articulated chiefly at the level of content. Concerned as he was with the status of language under totalitarianism, Havel, for example, nevertheless articulated his concerns （for example in The Garden Party and The Memorandum, both written in the 1960s） primarily through radical content rather than revolutionary form.

No doubt the odds against Václav Havel becoming President of Czechoslovakia would have been longer had his claim been based exclusively on micro-revolutionary achievements. This is not incompatible with Kristeva's point, of course. It is arguably not the job of revolutionaries to achieve high political office, and while the revolutionary artist may stimulate and reveal ideological changes searching for their own ‘political framework’, there seems no reason why radical artists shouldn't be characterized as agents for such change, actively pursuing the development and realization of appropriate political frameworks.

If radical art engages directly with collective crisis, the avant-garde artist is concerned primarily with subjective crisis: the work and play of signs produces ‘a certain harmony of the most violent drives’ which can bring about ‘a sense of stability within （and with） the crisis’ （T159）. However this ‘harmonization can be very fragile’ and needs a ‘favourable transference’, acceptance and ‘understanding’ from the other, if it is not to be ‘swept away and with it the individual him/herself’ （T159/60）. At the same time, any positive ‘harmonization’ that resulted would risk conspiring with the negative harmonization attributed to media society. For all these reasons revolutionary artists of the late twentieth century are faced with problems of intelligibility, accessibility and recuperation radically different from those of their predecessors.

In times of collective and subjective crisis it could be argued that we need both micro- and macro-revolution. On the other hand, it could be argued that we don't. Kristeva's own response to contemporary trouble is to turn from metalinguistic statements of semiotic potential to dramatizations of the recuperative powers of the symbolic. In Revolution in Poetic Language, she underlines the socio-cultural and historical specificity of revolutionary processes and their effects.¹¹ Implicit in her current concern with radical writers and media recuperation is the possibility that avant-garde revolutionary art may not be possible, recognizable, or even desirable right now. Given the link posited by Kristeva between the liberation of repressed energies and the risk of fascist or totalitarian resurgence, to unleash semiotic forces in Santa Barbara would be reckless or worse. Yet Kristeva insists it is precisely in these times of trouble that we most need the novel's ‘truth effects’ and its ability to ‘take over the death drive and its manifestations’ （L82）.

The risks need not be as great as they seem, however. Kristeva's own attempt to supply this need in Le Vieil Homme does not imply any revolutionary claims in her own terms: a woman writer simply couldn't express such claims in the symbolic as a woman. As a radical artist, however, Kristeva could give symbolic expression to the semiotic, without inducing the more fundamentally subversive effects of revolutionary art.

As recent interviews indicate, however, the socio-cultural and political factors which make revolutionary art a high-risk activity at present, will also prejudice radical art. Le Vieil Homme is a black novel—even down to its dust-jacket—and if the tone of the L'Infini interview is blacker than the earlier one it may be because some of the novel's assumptions seem to be borne out by its reviews. Given the risks and difficulty of arousing readers from their neuroleptic slumbers in order to achieve ‘favourable transference’, it may be that Kristeva herself feels in imminent danger of being swept away—or travestied by media-led recuperations. The wolves of her title recall not only ‘the invasion of the red armies, the installation of totalitarianism … [but] more artfully the barbarism, the criminality of each individual … the invasion of banality’ （L76）. The prospects for contemporary aesthetic revolution without media support seem clear enough: ‘[y]ou can have your own little revolt but it doesn't sell, [it] will not be a “success”’ （T161）. There is no longer any possibility of posterity for artists who don't make their name immediately in consumer society. And they can only make it as media personalities, whose insights are recuperated in terms of their ‘most consensual, flat and general elements’ （T162）. This is a psychoanalyst's response to commodification and media massification. Between the publication of her novel and the Sichère interview, however, it becomes clear that any attempt to circumvent the media and appeal directly to the reader in his or her intimacy needs the publicity that only the mass media can provide.

A profound sense of national depression and alienation, and the personal shock of losing her father, underlie Kristeva's personal investment in the socio-cultural and psychic conditions she describes. It is compounded by an intense consciousness of her status as a Bulgarian immigrant in Paris. One key assumption of Le Vieil Homme—and one that is developed in an earlier study, Strangers to Ourselves—is that we cannot live with others until we learn to live with the otherness within ourselves.¹² The novel's many quotations in Latin—a language strongly associated with her father—are part of an attempt to ‘graft onto the body of the French language and syntax a sense of pain and evil from elsewhere’ （L81）. At the same time they offer readers an insight into the dislocatory effects of engaging with an alien language. The aphorism we wait for, however, never comes: lupus est homo homini, quom qualis sit non novit—Plautus' observation that man is a wolf rather than a man to another man, until he has found out what he's like.

Strangers to Ourselves begins with a lengthy meditation on the treatment strangers receive at the hands of host societies—the aggression, the lionizing, the hatred, the indifference, the patronage, and the incomprehension. This is inflected in Le Vieil Homme when Alba Ram, a newcomer to Santa Barbara, discovers her cat has been killed and attributes it to the fact that ‘[p]eople don't like strange men, and they like strange women even less, so they take their revenge on whatever the stranger holds dear’ （LV16）. Foreignness, and the importance of recognizing and valuing the polyvalency of the other are key elements in Kristeva's recent work; in addressing them she is also trying to recover herself and her own body in an act of transference, so as to put an end to depression （T165）. Within Kristeva's own system, as noted, a woman writer with revolutionary aims can't express them as a woman, because the order of language is only accessible to the masculine subject. It is not in writing itself, therefore, but in the act of transference it can produce that she places her faith. One thinks of Luce Irigaray's recent work on women's use of pronouns, in which she notes that ‘[w]omen's discourse designates men as subjects—except in psychoanalytic transfer’ where the support is woman.¹³

As noted, Le Vieil Homme registers a sense of generalized social ‘disorder’ and the ‘personal shock’ of the death of Kristeva's father. Implied in this disorder are other deaths, among them the much-debated death of psychoanalysis.¹⁴ Kristeva acknowledges the self-destructive tendencies of certain Freudian dogmatists and sectarian followers of Lacan, two more dead fathers （L84）. She nevertheless affirms her continuing faith in a ‘rich and living analytic discourse’, whilst recognizing its tension with the current trend towards the ‘chemical bombardment’ of depressed individuals （L84）. By ‘[snatching] away their individual responsibility’ neuroscience conspires with media spectacle ‘with all that implies for psychic laziness, fleeting narcissistic mirages carefully displacing the reality of suffering’ （L84）.

This confiscation of suffering renders it unnameable. One reason Kristeva gives for writing novels is the importance of metaphor, ‘insofar as it gives form to the infantile psychic inscriptions situated at the borders of the unnameable’ （L75）. Modern writing has repressed metaphor in the name of ‘good taste’, but Kristeva uses metaphor in her allegory of hatred and mourning ‘to signify pain without fixing it, but by radiating it, making it vibrate oneirically, according to the personal resources of each reader, in the time and space of his or her own afflictions and choices’ （L76）.

Setting aside the problems of ‘radiating’ what can't be said, sophisticated readers will rarely find allegory satisfying. Returning to its reviews, one is nevertheless struck by the vehemence of Michel Braudeau's response to Le Vieil Homme, and in particular the protestation of indifference:

Wolves have invaded Santa Barbara, but not the Californian city. It snows, too. Clearly we're in the East. An old man keeps watch. He's called Septicius Clarus, his pupils are called Alba, Chrysippe, Stéphanie. Then there's Vespasien, a military doctor, a surgeon. And barbarism. And death. And mourning. There's certainly a big plain symbol [un bon gros symbole] prowling this fable, prowling around in search of a way out, a way round, trying to tell us something. But it can't, the poor thing, it's tied up, caged in lifeless, graceless, prose, where weighty metaphors gradually block the circulation of meaning in the sentences: The strength of these anthracite visions remains, before agony overturns the last pot of carbonised gouache, paralyses the last brush of the visible, and leaves the white screen of wordless cells without colour or support or surface. Yes indeed! And what about the brush of indifference, what does that paint?¹⁵

This is too calculated to be indifference. In a couple of hundred words he has managed to damn Kristeva's current and future fiction, and retrospectively withdraw the approval granted （in an access of leniency） to her past attempt. But if his words resist the point of Le Vieil Homme, his tone and methods affirm it. The multiple names and doubling of characters, the implied polyvocity, have all vanished. It's as if the entire symbolic dimension had been bracketed, if not caged, in （his） prose. Braudeau's discomfiture is understandable: speaking on behalf of a group under attack he responds with the weapons available to him. In the process he confirms Kristeva's view that what media society will not acknowledge is its own refusal or inability to deal with certain issues, including attacks on itself in forms which it cannot re-represent. If Kristeva is looking for ways of articulating suffering, he is certainly doing his bit to encourage her—not least by refusing to acknowledge as much. Her response is clear: ‘[t]he perverse [les pervers] can't understand any more, a “plain symbol” [gros symbole] prevents them from thinking’ （L81）.

For Kristeva, writing is anarchic, recuperable and intransigent. It's an incitement to rise up against the ‘domestication’ and ‘communal illusion’ purveyed by media society （L82）. This is no time for more fairy stories, not even Little Red Riding Hood. Lévy's review offers a story, or nightmare, of a rather different kind. Braudeau uses an oddly atypical passage to justify his assertion of indifference. Lévy's reading is doubly partial, in the sense that it purports to admire Kristeva's second novel even more than her first, but on the basis of a reading of only half of it. The following lines are fairly typical of the full-page review:

In the East as in the West. Always hate. The hate that is proper to man [sic]. Definitive hate. Defining hate. Hate your neighbour as yourself. One day you'll die of hate. For the moment, you live by it.

Kristeva is quite clear that Le Vieil Homme is ‘a novel which is about hatred, the sort of hatred that kills people’; it is also about foreignness, violence and death seen from ‘within’ （T164/166）. The novel form also suggested itself, she states, as a vehicle for the presentation of an intrigue which ‘enacts the dramatic essence of passion’, that is, the ‘double possibility’ that eludes theory, the indissoluble coupling of hate and love （L75）. It may be that what Braudeau the media critic cannot understand also eludes Lévy the theorist. It is, significantly, ‘subjective experience … [Stéphanie Delacour's] sensibility as a woman, a child, a lover’ that constitutes the ‘counterweight to death and hate’ （L77）. This insistence on the double possibility of the text is not simply another critic's preference for fairy-story over nightmare. Le Vieil Homme involves a doubling and dissemination of elements in order to say something about contemporary metamorphic culture. It ‘implies the fragmentation of the narrative … [and a] multiplicity of codes and levels of enunciation …, [since] the story cannot unfold in a naïvely univocal fashion, nor the characters embody stable identities’ （L76）. The reader is thus struck （though perhaps not surprised） by Lévy's passionately univocal reading of the end result, not least because his celebration of hate sits so oddly alongside Kristeva's starkly non-euphoric vision of national depression. Her alternative to the illusory consolations of ‘the media show’ and ‘the vain discourses of hope’ is not pessimism, but a ‘demystifying critique’ that is not afraid to disappoint its audience ‘if that's the way to knowledge and truth’ （L83）. It has little in common with the exultation that rings in Lévy's phrases.

In such a cheerless scenario the idea that there is a ‘way to knowledge and truth’ itself seems optimistic. It would after all require a degree of sophistication to square the fragmentation, the instability, and the rejection of a ‘naïvely univocal’ reading, with the detective format, its orientation towards the exposure of a truth that ‘one can know’ （L77）. Kristeva's provisional solution lies in an ‘interior space’, apparently shielded from the play of polyvocity and dissemination, which is hollowed out by a combination of ‘erotic upheavals’ and Stéphanie's mourning for her father （L77）. Truth is worked out in the eroticized space of the father's loss.

But if the novel can keep a space open for truth or the possibility of truth in this way, and （at least some） of its readers can recognize it, who will be able to ‘accept that truth without feeling unmasked, betrayed, exposed?’ （L83）. The answer is not only exposed but finally enacted, when Stéphanie discovers that the wolves are everywhere, and that the death of the Old Man is one small element in ‘a hyperbolic but disseminated barbarity, the worst feature of which is that everyone is complicitous with it’ （LV265）. The Old Man was killed, not by a crime that Stéphanie could solve, but by his final vision of the unconscious ‘overturning the policed spectacles of being, and revealing us in all our barbarity, a prey to death’ （L86）. Her will collapses:

[n]o sooner does the thought occur to me than I experience that feeble lassitude that comes with the end of a course of antibiotics. … Let them do as they wish. I shan't stir any more. Crime can't touch me. I'm part of it. A she-wolf. Who understands logic and speaks it. That is the only difference. What difference? （L264/9）

The intellectual recognition of suffering simply confirms its ubiquity, but in the process makes what was unnameable （almost） nameable. The recognition is difficult, but is made ‘more realistic, almost bearable … a game’ by virtue of its detective format, ‘[a] way of continuing analysis’ （L83）.

Stéphanie Delacour's recollection of the primal scene and the white wolves in the tree suggest one form of analysis, but it's not the only one available. We are, after all, talking about a novel in which old men are dying along with their teachings. Kristeva's Old Man

is by no means a master, and even less of a hero; but he remains an enigma at the very heart of a sea of insignificance or brutality … a figure of the law … [but] not a severe or abstract law … not a superego [but] an ‘embodied’ man who is present in all the density of his psychology, his emotions, his fears … a revolutionary … and at the same time a man of grief, a Christ figure. … It's a question of making space for the possibility of law and passion and, to the extent that I personally have no need of a God hypothesis, [it's] a question of finding new atheistic figures, which respond to the situation we live in, at the end of a world. （L181）

There is another character in the novel who is, in his way, equally suggestive, not least because he is lost （presumably to the wolves） before the novel begins. His name, Chrysippe, recalls a parallel moment of physical, economic, political and moral uncertainty, in which the Stoic philosophy emerged. Its view that everyone has the power to achieve happiness through knowledge, even in a depraved world, has something about it of ‘atheistic Christianity’ while its sages recall the Old Man. Clearly Kristeva is missing her fathers and would-be fathers, and we should respect her grieving. There may after all be some truth in the suggestion that only a figure of the law could restore psychic and social order to a depressed society. Her Old Man certainly doesn't look like a Hitler or a Stalin—but perhaps in the beginning they never do. Her interview with Kolocotroni throws some light on this ambiguously attractive scenario when Kristeva observes that novels give ‘more pleasure’ to writer and reader alike than theory （T164）. But the psychic pleasures may be as potentially treacherous as the political ones. In Strangers to Ourselves Kristeva notes Freud's comment that the pleasures of text, especially a text that is attempting to articulate the unnameable, should be taken in moderation.¹⁶ His view of literature—that it risks denaturing the strange or uncanny by making it too obvious or not dangerous enough to be psychically useful—recalls her view of the media.

It's an important point, especially for literary critics. At the same time one can't help observing that, pleasures of writing apart, the uncompromising tone of the novel suggests little danger of facile pleasures. In Camus's The Plague another sage, Dr Rieux, is slightly more comforting when he reflects that the plague of rats may have been defeated, but the plague bacillus never dies. In Le Vieil Homme where Camus's human will might have been, there is the ‘psychic space’ that is kept open for the work of truth, ‘the safeguarding and creativity of which lie at the heart of Freudian thought’, enabling psychoanalysis to play its part ‘in resisting and awakening and guaranteeing culture, or what remains of it’ （L84/5）.

This interior space, central to both Stéphanie Delacour and Freudian thought, indicates the extent to which Kristeva's profound sense of cultural disorder is bound up with the decline of psychoanalysis. Her view of the media's complicity in both characterizes and compounds her tendency to homogenize media response, rather as she accuses the media of homogenization effects. Lévy's review for Le Nouvel Observateur attributes critical apathy and irritation with Le Vieil Homme to the fact that Kristeva has ‘said too much’ about society's dependence on hate. He may be right: her aim was, after all, to bring the hate that is for both Freud and Lacan ‘the truth of love’ to consciousness, in the face of a ‘consensual ideology’ that makes discourse on ‘the economy of negativity’ almost impossible （L83）. Braudeau's acceptance of her earlier ‘love story’ and rejection of her hate story seems to bear out this concern. Kristeva's response to the media's perverse ‘recuperation of analytic discourse’ is understandable enough: in her terms the decline of psychoanalysis presages ‘the end of a world’, including her personal micro-engagement, its revolutionary possibilities and pleasures （L81）.

Le Vieil Homme's focus on Eastern Europe reminds us that the elements of our contemporary distress are manifold, and that the loss of revolutionary possibilities applies to more than just writers. In her interview with Bernard Sichére, Kristeva unambiguously rejects the ‘reassuring discourses which are seeking to take over from that “positive” discourse we knew as Marxism’ （L83）. Instead she advocates ‘taking more seriously than ever, in the face of moralizing and euphoric discourses, the theoretical work carried out previously in Tel Quel. … It's really a question of a discourse that is critical rather than nihilist’ （L83）. As Le Vieil Homme closes, Stéphanie Delacour asks ‘[I]s there always crime if there are no more frontiers?’ （LV269）. In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall Fredric Jameson asks a similar question, and follows it up with another: ‘[c]an the prospect of political and economic autonomy be held out for the new Europe when … cultural autonomy proves there also to be so dismal a failure’.¹⁷ In the face of what he sees as an inevitable negative, he advocates ‘the deepest pessimism’ as a ‘genuine source of strength’ and notes that ‘only for those who have nothing against being used and manipulated is optimism, of even the weakest variety, recommended’.¹⁸

In the aftermath of the British general election it's not difficult to empathize with Kristeva's view and Jameson's, that alternatives are crumbling away. The wolves are not yet in the city, however. We do have options, but as Jameson indicates they do not include facile optimism. Instead an active, critical pessimism seems in order, one that is not nihilistic, and that resists the temptation to eject babies with bathwater, of withdraw into despair, resentment—‘the antipodes of thought’—or political paralysis while we re-examine our first principles （L86）. In this context Kristeva is right to insist on the need ‘to invent new modes of political life’, and writers will continue to play a part in this process. If we want these new forms to last, however, we need to ensure that any changes will—among other things—facilitate the replacement of some dead fathers by vital mothers. Constitutional and legal reforms are essential to this process, but psychoanalysis in some form has its own micro-revolutionary role to play. Without all three, ‘single party’ rule will persist, and we'll have lost another opportunity to secure the possibility of authentic, productive and lasting dialogue in the future.

Notes

1. J. Kristeva, Le Vieil Homme et les loups （Paris: Fayard, 1991）. Henceforward page references are shown in brackets in the text, and prefaced ‘LV’. In order to avoid confusion with the character of the same name, the title is left in French throughout, in the abbreviated form of Le Vieil Homme: where it occurs in a quotation the title is translated in full. All translations of French material are my own, unless indicated otherwise.

2. B-H. Lévy, Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 1415 （26 December 1991 to 1 January 1992）, p. 66.

3. M. Braudeau, ‘Le Sexe des m‚taphores’, Le Monde （11 October 1991）, p. 18.

4. J. Kristeva, Les Samouraïs （Paris: Fayard, 1990）.

5. ‘Roman noir et temps présent’, J. Kristeva interviewed by B. Sichére in L'Infini, 37 （Spring 1992）, pp. 75-86. Henceforward page references are shown in brackets in the text, and prefaced ‘L’.

6. See J. Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes （Paris: Fayard, 1988）. Translated by L. Roudiez as Strangers to Ourselves （London: Harvester, 1991）. （All references are to this translation.） Also J. Kristeva, Soleil noir, dépression et mélancholie （Paris: Gallimard, 1987）. Translated by L. Roudiez as Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia （New York: Columbia University Press, 1989）.

7. V. Kolocotroni, ‘Interview with Julia Kristeva’, Textual Practice, 5, 2 （Summer 1991）, pp. 157-70. Henceforward page references are shown in brackets in the text, and prefaced ‘T’.

8. E. H. Baruch, P. Meisel, et al., ‘Two interviews with Julia Kristeva’, Partisan Review, 51, 1 （1984）, pp. 131-2, cited in Kolocotroni, op. cit., p. 159.

9. J. Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique. L'avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle. Lautréamont et Mallarmé （Paris: Seuil, 1974）. This translation from Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. M. Waller （New York: Columbia University Press, 1984） p. 80.

10. J. Kristeva, Polylogue （Paris: Seuil, 1977）. This translation from ‘How does one speak to Literature?’, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. L. S. Roudiez, trans. T. Gora, A. Jardine and L. S. Roudiez （Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981）, p. 92.

11. See Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language and J. Lechte's Julia Kristeva （Routledge: London, 1990）, p. 142.

12. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves. See particularly chapters 1 and 8.

13. L. Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous （Paris: Grasset, 1990）, p. 42.

14. Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 1404 （3-9 October 1991）, pp. 4-9.

15. Braudeau, op. cit.

16. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, p. 187.

17. F. Jameson, ‘Conversations on the New World Order’, in R. Blackburn （ed.）, After the Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism （London: Verso, 1991）, pp. 255-68.

18. ibid.