SOURCE: “From Revolution to Revolt: Kristevan Contestation for the Nineties,” in Southern Review, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1997, pp. 146-58.

[In the following essay, de Nooy examines the extent to which Kristeva's philosophical position has shifted since the 1970s, as well as her “elaboration of a feminine Oedipal experience.”]

The anecdote goes that when the news arrived at Versailles of the fall of the Bastille, Louis XVI asked, “Is it a revolt?” to which La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt replied, “No, Sire, it's a revolution.” Kristeva's latest theoretical book, Sens et non-sens de la révolte, seems to come to the opposite conclusion: no, not a revolution this time, but a revolt all the same.

In the final pages of La Révolution du langage poétique （hereinafter RLP）, Kristeva claimed that our century was still being carried along by the momentum of the late nineteenth century, and that we were engaged in the same kind of mutiny as its avant-garde against the unified subject and the power of social and linguistic constraints, against what she termed the symbolic. Although she hinted at the formation of a new configuration for negativity, the conclusion to be drawn was that Mallarmé's and Lautréamont's pulverisation （and consequent renewal） of symbolic meaning through the work of disruptive semiotic drive forces and rhythm was a model for aesthetic activity, a model that remained valid （RLP 618-620）. The pages are dated January 72-January 73, when the flavour of the 1968 student and general uprising in France was still fresh. No doubt the nature of revolution—whether on the streets or in poetic language—seemed clear at the time: it consisted of a violent confrontation with a unified instance of power by largely repressed transgressive forces. In RLP Kristeva insisted that for any successful signifying practice, a subject needed to be well anchored to the symbolic to be able to withstand the semiotic attack of drives without slipping into psychosis. Both law and its transgression were equally necessary to a dialectical movement that overturned an existing order and established a new version of it, to be threatened in its turn.

Kristeva's new book, however, questions the universal applicability of this model. Sens et non-sens de la révolte （hereinafter SNR） is in many ways a revisiting of the question explored in RLP, namely the role and functioning of aesthetic experience as contestation, but in it Kristeva sets herself a specific task: rewriting revolt for the 1990s. Full of fin de siècle pessimism—fin de millénaire oblige—she sees the late twentieth century as characterised by disintegrating subjects in a post-communist power vacuum. The new world order is a “normalising and falsifiable order” in which the status of power has changed （15）.¹ Power has become diverted into a regulatory administration that normalises instead of punishing, such that neither crime nor punishment can any longer be clearly identified. Law has dissolved into “measures,” into proliferating mechanisms of deferral to other instances, “open to appeals and referrals, interpretations and … falsifications” （17）. Kristeva also argues that the era of the subject is drawing to a close and that we are entering that of the “patrimonial person” （18）, the person as possessor of a collection of saleable organs. The subject has lost its centre and is “scattering into organs and images” （57）. The symbolic order is foundering, falling to bits. Law, power and the subject are all dissolving into the fleeting images of TV zapping. We are left with no clear limits, just an unstable pseudo-symbolic.

Now there are those who might argue—Foucault and Derrida spring to mind—that this is not historically specific to the 1990s, indeed that the mechanisms of power have always been diffuse, divertible, deferrable, interpretable and falsifiable, who might suggest that the subject has always already been decentred and dispersed. Whether or not this is the case, Kristeva's question is a potent one: how do you mount a revolution against a power vacuum? But to this we could add another question: how does Kristeva's symbolic/semiotic dialectic survive in a deconstructed/ing world? For Kristeva is describing a situation that sidelines the symbolic. And in RLP the symbolic function was essential not only to semiotic contestation but to the dialectical production of the text and the ongoing existence of the subject.

Kristeva observes that the shifts she identifies in the status of power seem to exclude the possibility of revolution as defined in RLP. So how do we revolt? For let us make no mistake, in Kristeva's view revolt is absolutely vital, “a continual necessity to keep alive the psyche, thought and the social bond itself” （302）.² Leaning on Freud's Totem and Taboo, she argues that one of the lessons of psychoanalysis is that “happiness only exists at the price of a revolt” and that we need to measure ourselves against a prohibition or an authority in order to experience intense voluptuous pleasure or jouissance （20）. The concept of revolt, however, needs to be substantially reworked to cope with a situation where there is nothing to confront but an elusive obstacle, an invisible law. And this is what Kristeva undertakes.

Drawing on the detours of the etymological itinerary of “revolt,” Kristeva manages to encompass nuances of return and diversion as well as transgression into a much broader understanding than that of revolution in RLP. The use of the word revolt allows her to maintain a connection with her earlier work and also emphasises that the non-transgressive forms she identifies have the same （ultimately conservative） function as revolution or killing the father, namely the renewal of law and the reaffirmation of the social bond （cf. 21, 60, 186）. Kristeva determines “three figures of revolt”:

1） “transgression of a prohibition”;

2） “repetition, perlaboration, elaboration”;

3） “displacement, combinative systems, play.” （40）

The first figure embraces revolution as transgression and confrontation but situates it historically—as merely one possible form of revolt, and a “dated, dialectical form” at that, although still possible in certain circumstances （66）. But far from abandoning the theory she elaborated in RLP by merely relegating the symbolic/semiotic confrontation to this first category and to the past, Kristeva strives to make it work in a modified way. She continues to emphasise the importance of both modalities and shows that it is the possibility of new relations between them, new configurations of power and contestation that produce the other two figures of revolt.

These latter are attempts to find a new logic of revolt: the second figure is the anamnesis or remembrance of things past of the psychoanalytical relation, the return to the past to modify it, the use of narrative to displace prohibitions and trauma; the third figure draws on twentieth-century aesthetic production. These answers to her question point to Kristeva's valorisation of psychoanalytical and literary discourses, privileged for the role they allow language.

Now when Kristeva shows the paternal function foundering in its avatars as central power or the centred subject in SNR, it is striking that she does not mention another crucial decentring of the symbolic, widely heralded—that of language. Unlike unstable law, unstable meaning is not set up as part of the problem hindering transgression from taking place. In fact, it gradually becomes apparent that language plays a major role in any possible solution. Our capacity for language is said to be a given and immanent instance of the paternal function in each of us, an intimate symbolic tie “with which, against which and in which men and women revolt” （68）. How then does language manage to do what other instances of shifting symbolic constraints fail to do, that is, enable and provide a possible site for revolt?

The answer is not obvious, but can be deduced from Kristeva's analysis of the second figure of revolt （anamnesis in psychoanalysis）, which starts with a lengthy and careful reading of Freud's models for language. She identifies three moments: 1） Freud emphasises the heterogeneity of verbal and infraverbal mechanisms; 2） he erases this alterity to some extent by positing language as the path of access to the unconscious,³ 3） heterogeneity is reaffirmed and language is seen as only one layer of what Kristeva calls signifiance—“the process, dynamic and moment of meaning [sens] that cannot be reduced to language although it includes it” （83）. Language as signifiance is at the intersection of the psychical and the physical; it embraces both thought and energy （77-78）. It is signifiance—and not language as defined by linguists—that is Kristeva's privileged object of study. And it is because the symbolic and semiotic aspects of sense are inseparable in signifiance that it is the launchpad for revolt.

Kristeva's insistence on signifiance as comprising both linguistic and extra-linguistic dimensions has not wavered from RLP. What is interestingly different however is her tendency to characterise the relation between these two aspects as “co-presence” in SNR and to downplay any hint of the kind of violent confrontation between them described in RLP （the “irruption” and “assault” of the semiotic which “disrupts,” “attacks” and “destroys” the “defensive construction” of the symbolic, RLP 47, trans. 49-50）. Does this indicate a new possibility for aesthetic practice as Kristeva claims … or a reworking of the basics of Kristevan theory? Already in Histoires d'amour, Kristeva was emphasising the mechanisms of imaginary identification over those of transgression. However, in SNR she seems to abandon entirely her earlier insistence on a dialectical conflict between the semiotic and the symbolic, even to account for rebellion. Certainly, if the two modalities are no longer necessarily involved in a “permanent struggle” （RLP 78, trans. 81）, the way is opened for effective contestation in the absence of a reliable symbolic. However, given her enormous investment in the dialectic in RLP, we might ask whether this change of emphasis points to a new form of revolt in poetic language … or what amounts to a revolution in Kristevan theory over the last twenty years.

The new configurations of the semiotic/symbolic relation are explored at length in Kristeva's development of the third figure of revolt, which occupies the entire second half of the book. Kristeva offers glimpses of alternative revolt in the work of Louis Aragon, Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes. All three writers had more or less fatherless childhoods, but Kristeva focuses less on their biography than on their texts to trace patterns of revolt that do not depend on there being a unified instance of paternal law to oppose in an Oedipal configuration. In Kristevan terms, she finds in each case an involvement of the semiotic in a contestation that, rather than attacking the symbolic, finds a way around it. However, these attempts at revolt are fraught with danger and the chances for success are severely threatened. Although there are moments when they have a sense or make sense, at other times they result in an impasse, in failure and absurdity, hence the “non-sense” of revolt. The failures have a rather ambiguous status, for they both open up and close off the possibility of rewriting the semiotic/symbolic dialectic, as Kristeva hovers between reaffirming and revising her position in RLP. They put into question the assertion that non-oppositional contestation can be effective.

Well if it's not about the father （the Oedipal revolt against paternal power）, then the obvious way to look is toward the mother, and Kristeva's analyses of Aragon and Sartre both involve coming face to face with the feminine, in the first case with feminine jouissance, in the second with the archaic maternal bond.

Kristeva interprets Aragon's literary enterprise, in particular “La Défense de l'infini,” as a confrontation with the impossible, where confrontation does not mean war. Rather than revolting against the father and law, it is a matter of trying to represent the irrepresentable or a-thought [l'a-pensée]. The negative prefix a- （as in asocial or acephalous … but that's another book⁴） is inaudible in French （la pensée/l'a-pensée） like the unthinkable underside of language that it designates and which corresponds to Kristeva's concept of the semiotic: “Neither knowledge nor action, but with them and through them, a-thought deploys [déploie = deploys, unfurls, displays] in the flesh of language the polyvalencies of metaphors, the semantic resources of sounds and even the throbbing of sensations” （254）. A-thought becomes discernible as Aragon attempts to translate “the feminine.” Kristeva's definition of the feminine has remained constant through her texts: “it is not a question of a particular woman or of women as social individuals, […] but a part of the psychic life of every subject, as that which is enormously difficult for either sex to represent” （253）.⁵ Similarly, feminine jouissance is only about female sexual experience insofar as the latter is a “fantasmatic representation” （294） or “example” of “sensorial experience at its most excessive” （292）. Aragon's revolt is thus a “confrontation with the maternal and the feminine insofar as these represent the fantasy of irrepresentable excitability” （303）. He attempts to make his words coincide with his perception of the excess of women's erotic experience （292）, to “speak feminine jouissance side by side with man's impotence” （289） in an “appropriation of the feminine as a revolt against the decline of man （or of Man if you like）” （281）.

In RLP, Mallarmé and Lautréamont were also seen to be attempting to represent semiotic excess. However, given what Kristeva regards as the impotence of the symbolic in Aragon's work, it doesn't seem to clearly fit the 1974 description of “poetic language.” In fact it seems closer to fetishism as it is outlined in a chapter of RLP called “The Unstable Symbolic. Substitutions in the Symbolic: Fetishism” （61-67, trans. 62-67） where Kristeva explicitly differentiates fetishism from poetic language. In the latter, the symbolic positioning is solid enough to protect the subject from being completely dissolved by the semiotic. This “thetic” positioning is crucial, being the precondition for artistic practice to have any communicable meaning. It enables poetic language to signify, although the signification is pulverised and displaced. Without a solid thetic position, the options are few and unpalatable: we risk sliding into psychosis or we can find partial salvation in fetishism, in which the denial of the symbolic and of the thetic position leads to its displacement on to drives and on to objects linked to the body by drives. In fetishism, signification is only possible through a sort of compromise whereby semiotic stasis—the fleeting arrest of drives—substitutes for the symbolic. Although Kristeva admits occasional difficulty in distinguishing fetishism from artistic practice in RLP, she insists on their difference, and on the inferiority of fetishism compared with poetic language.

Kristeva's analysis of Aragon's work seems to come dangerously close to her definition of fetishism. Indeed she uses this term to describe surrealism in general （SNR 303）. But its proximity to the borderline seems if anything to make Aragon's practice more valuable as a possible solution to the problem of revolt against a power vacuum. Valuable, but not necessarily viable. The danger is that there is nothing to hang on to but a mirage, nothing to support a-thought but the shimmering of sense provided by feminine jouissance （270）. Aragon thus runs a double risk: if a-thought goes too far in denying the symbolic （for example by retreating from any kind of communicable signification）, he risks a complete collapse of identity （psychosis）; on the other hand, if he takes the mirage of sense to be sense, he risks setting up feminine jouissance as a mock phallic order （fetishism）. Between the whirlpool of Charybdis and the monstrous Scylla, the challenge for an effective new form of revolt is to maintain a practice “in the crucible of a-thought” （255）, at its point of becoming.

This is strikingly similar to Kristeva's reading of Artaud's risky, even life-threatening borderline practice in the 1973 article “Le Sujet en procès” [the subject in process/on trial] （Polylogue 55-106）. Artaud too saves himself from collapse into emptiness and saves his work from complete loss of any signifying capacity through an ephemeral identification with the “spasmic asymbolic functioning” of feminine jouissance （Polylogue 78）. There is, however, a significant difference between “Le Sujet en procès” and SNR. In Artaud's work, “the moment of destruction, of annihilation of subjective unity, the moment of mortal anguish or, more simply, ‘emotional confusion’ thus yields before the affirmation of a productive unity; or rather, the moments are indissoluble in the process.” （Polylogue 85）. This “second moment” of the dialectic, the reassertion of symbolic unity and meaning into which the semiotic will burst forth again “is of capital importance” （Polylogue 104）. In SNR, on the other hand, Aragon is seen to avoid the moment of affirmation in his texts, and when the need for symbolic anchoring makes itself felt in a dramatic way elsewhere, it is cause for regret.

For ultimately Aragon fails to steer a course between psychosis and fetishism and starts to founder. Unable to sustain his borderline practice, he suffers a crisis of confidence in the imaginary to the extent of burning his work and attempting suicide, and finally throws in the oars and opts for the “lifebelt” （SNR 295） of political action with the Communist Party and the stability of coupledom with Elsa. His revolt is cut short. Here Kristeva sees the impasse, the non-sense, the “insanity” （insensé 294） of a revolt bypassing the symbolic. The antidote to loss of identity is to join something, anything （308）. Membership of the Communist Party being a more conventional （oppositional） form of revolt, Kristeva sees in it the desire to repair the father and symbolic law, to struggle against the invasion by the feminine and the terrible sinking into a-thought, to survive the destabilisation caused by the revolt Aragon attempted.

According to Kristeva, Aragon's aesthetic revolt offers a glimpse of a new kind of contestation, and yet in failing it seems to confirm the mechanisms of revolution in poetic language as outlined in the seventies and to reassert the inevitability of the dialectic. There is nonetheless an important shift in Kristeva's position. In “Le Sujet en Procès,” Kristeva declared that “the absolute rejection of the thetic, subjective and representative phase [cf. the threshold of the symbolic] is the very limit of the avant-garde experience” （Polylogue 102, original emphasis）. In SNR, she is no longer arguing for the necessity of the thetic position but lamenting that it still seems necessary. Rejection of the symbolic is no longer said to be an absolute limit—she looks at the possibility of pushing back this limit—but it is absolutely risky. Will she find a viable example of her new kind of revolt?

Sartre is Kristeva's second example of someone who takes the risk. Not exactly the same risk as Aragon, although his mode of contestation is also linked to the feminine/the semiotic. The revolt this time is not Oedipal because it is Oresteian. Kristeva studies Les Mouches, which is not about killing the father or even the substitute father, but about killing the mother and cutting all ties with the social group. Choosing exile, the protagonist becomes foreign even to himself.⁶ Kristeva then traces this form of revolt through La Nausée and L'Etre et le néant among other texts. In a gesture towards Deleuze and Guattari she states that this revolt is not so much anti-oedipal as an extension of the oedipal （339, cf. 305）. Kristeva interprets the Oresteian configuration thus: given the instability of the symbolic, oedipal revolt cannot fulfil its dialectical function of elaborating the autonomy of the subject, so the subject is obliged to break more archaic bonds—the attachment to the mother and even to biological survival （337）. After the maternal link, all other social ties are dissolved （357） as an a-social “subject” claims a liberty realised through violence （341, 348）. This is not just revenge on constraints and law through the putting to death of the other but the death of the self as unitary consciousness （348-349）, a liberation of the self and from the self in the annihilation of self.

Unlike Aragon's attempt to represent the irrepresentable feminine, which almost set it up as a substitute phallic order, Sartre puts the feminine to death along with the symbolic. He rejects all identity, not just symbolic positioning but even semiotic stasis. But this ideal of pure non-identity is also an identity of sorts and therefore a trap. Kristeva reads “nausea” in Sartre's writing as the trace of the refusal of identity coupled with the impossibility of this refusal （352-365）. Kristeva's descriptions of the annihilation of the self and of social ties （357-367） are not unlike those of the melancholia underlying creativity in Soleil Noir, Sartre's innovation is to transform a melancholic state into a position of revolt, for it somehow produces a renewal （a “psychical, physical and creative rebirth” 363） that is not a reassertion of symbolic unity.

Once again, however, this revolt seems to be unsustainable. After Les Mots, Sartre, like Aragon, is seen by Kristeva to renounce the imaginary, lured by the ideal of political action. The surge of negativity and otherness in language gives way to negativity incorporated in overtly political characters and themes （379-381）. Kristeva expresses her disappointment: Sartre's work loses its emotional substratum. He never ceases to revolt, but there is no longer the abyssal opening of the imaginary in each political stand taken, saving it in spite of the inevitable errors （the belief in absolutes, neglecting to revolt against the dogma of revolt, cf. 381, 385）.

Yet again, a revolt avoiding the second moment of the dialectic （the affirmation of a renewed symbolic） is said to fail in the long run. It seems to confirm the view of revolution articulated in RLP as the only viable one—to Kristeva's chagrin in the nineties. But third time lucky …

Roland Barthes is Kristeva's third example of an attempt at a new form of revolt. Barthes' revolt does not consist in contradicting paternal authority, but in showing up where it is false, faltering or lacking （389）. Rather than a transgressive revolt against the established order, it engages in a form of play that shows the instability of meaning and sense, the power vacuum in language. This “discreet,” “invisible” revolt is neither more nor less than the practice of interpretation, endlessly deciphering and displacing （391）, a “practice that destabilises even the elementary support of signification constituted by the unities and rules of language” （444） and thus threatens the very possibility of unified symbolic meaning. Barthes shows that “natural” meaning and the subject said to possess it are nothing but fictions. At the same time, he shows how supposedly transparent language masks another order, its less representable sensuous semiotic side （392）. His position as a critic is one of irony （442, cf. 390）: sense and meaning are necessary for communication, but are unstable. Kristeva sees his revolt in the fact that he continues to interpret at the very moment at which sense dissolves （394）, thus exposing the symbolic as merely a pseudo-symbolic.

Barthes' revolt does not seem to end in impasse like those of Aragon and Sartre. The reason, according to Kristeva, is that Barthes manages to turn the shortcomings of the sign into signs, gives a sense to the nonsense or to the loss of symbolic sense, and replaces the threat of existence without symbolic law by the pleasure of écriture with its sensuous substrata （444-445）. Barthes appears to use the symbolic against itself rather than denying it. He thus avoids Sartrian nihilism and gives voice to semiotic jouissance without apparently elevating it to mock symbolic status. By making sense of the loss of sense, he manages to remain between thought and a-thought. He neither seeks to preserve the symbolic from dissolution, nor stabilises jouissance in a lingering representation. It seems that this was what Aragon and Sartre were able to do fleetingly but not to sustain: to maintain that loss of sense as meaningful, to walk the tightrope without needing to call for a symbolic safety net.

Although Kristeva describes Barthes' practice of écriture as dialectical （404-405）, the dialectic is unlike that of RLP. It is represented in terms of translation （394, 407）, transformation （411）, transmutation （400） and translanguage （401）, in fact any trans-except transgression. Ecriture has become an “intermediary” （400） for the semiotic and the symbolic rather than a battleground.

When she writes of Barthes' semiological （ad）venture, we cannot forget that Kristeva herself was a fellow traveller, and indeed she mentions the revolt led by the Tel Quel group in the sixties and seventies. Nonetheless, it is difficult to see Tel Quel's revolt fitting into a paradigm of non-transgressive confrontation: they declared “war” on symbolic unity—social, linguistic and subjective （397）. Unlike Barthes', Tel Quel's revolt was hardly “subtle” （425）, “discreet” or “invisible” （391）. And yet this distinction is not always clear. Reading towards the end of the section on Barthes, I had the feeling that he too was waging the Tel Quel war or that they had muscled in on his revolt: negativity pulverising unity （439）, symbolic constraints blocking negativity （440）. The old two-beat symbolic/semiotic dialectic of transgression and collision seemed to be taking over again. Checking with Kristeva's earlier text on Barthes—“Comment parler á la littérature” （Polylogue 23-54, trans. Desire in Language 92-123）—I found that, apart from a few stylistic changes, the section SNR 439-443 is directly lifted from Polylogue 39-42 （Desire 107-109）.⁷

Now it is true that Barthes was writing at a time that Kristeva might now identify as the switching on of the power vacuum. Perhaps therefore Kristeva now feels the need to reinterpret his work in this context. However, it seems to me that the real rereading going on （with the exception of the recycled section） concerns the symbolic/semiotic relation—less struggle, contradiction and conflict and more co-presence, deferral and displacement.⁸ But if we were to argue that instability of meaning—the slipping and sliding that Barthes exposes—has always been at work, undermining our efforts at transparent communication and abetting the avant-garde in its use of poetic language, then perhaps we could go back to RLP and the analyses of Mallarmé and Lautréamont to question the dialectic there. To what extent was it conflictual? Were the symbolic order and the unity of meaning and of the subject necessarily reaffirmed in the text between waves of semiotic destruction? Is it possible, in the light of SNR, that aesthetic production in the nineteenth century also made sense of the loss of sense without relying on a strong symbolic instance against which to struggle?

If I have my doubts about the role of the symbolic, Kristeva can explain them …

I OEDIPUS FOR GIRLS

Unlike her analysis of Aragon and Sartre, Kristeva's reading of Barthes invokes neither the feminine, nor women, nor even his mother. However, her remarks about Barthes and irony tie in with an earlier section specifically about female experience. And suggest—although Kristeva does not draw this conclusion—that although she chooses male writers as examples, women may indeed be more apt at engaging in the new kind of revolt.⁹

If Oedipus is the paradigm of classic, transgressive revolt, the configurations are different for boys and for girls. Kristeva outlines Freud's theory for boys, accentuating the role of language, and then identifies two stages for girls. The first （Oedipe prime） superficially corresponds to the one the boy traverses （aided by the desire for the mother） and is the prerequisite to becoming a symbolic subject of language and thought. The second （Oedipe bis） involves a change of object from the mother to the father and is the （necessary?） precondition for heterosexuality.

From the beginning, however, differences appear in the way Oedipus works for each sex, and it is what happens in the first stage that is most pertinent to the question of revolt.

In the little boy's development, Kristeva emphasises the simultaneity between genital pleasure and the access to language: “The complex experience of access to language […] shows a co-presence of thought and pleasure—all the more gratifying in that it is threatened, presence and lack—that the little boy experiences with his genital organ, which is also that of the father” （180-181）. The Oedipal stage marks a first coincidence between investment in the phallus and the order of language: an imaginary identification or equivalence is produced between phallic pleasure and speech （180）. But speech seems abstract and cold in comparison with the body to body osmosis with the mother, the pre-oedipal semiotic dimension of rhythm and sensations. Speech therefore puts the developing subject in a position of frustration （alienation from pre-oedipal objects）. Gradually however it produces compensations as the source of new pleasures and powers.

In the little girl's development, there is similarly a co-presence of genital pleasure and the mastery of signs. However, they do not coincide in quite the same way. Whereas the penis stands up and stands out （visible, locatable, detachable） to be invested as the signifier of lack and of law, “the paradigm of the signifiable and the signifier” （158） and the support of difference （203）, the real and imaginary support of the little girl's pleasure, the clitoris, is “invisible and almost impossible to locate” [invisible et quasi-irrepérable] （209）, hard to put your finger on, so to speak. Therefore “a dissociation is structurally inscribed” between the girl's sensory experience and the signifying order （208-209）. The little girl accepts the phallus as the paradigm of the signifier and of law, but perceives it as foreign.¹⁰ She thus accedes to language and the conjunction between Logos and Desire like the little boy （209）, but her symbolic mastery is not accompanied by her erotic （clitoral） experience. This leads to a “belief that the phallus, along with language and the symbolic order, are illusory and nevertheless indispensable” （210）. Our position is inevitably double and therefore ironic. We invest in the phallus that makes us subjects of language and law, but the phallus remains somehow other. We play the game and pretend but we never really believe in it （211）. Kristeva cites Hegel: “Woman, the eternal irony of the community” （213）.

Oh! the mockery of it: the power of the phallus is real but it has somehow never really referred to us, never engaged us directly. Kristeva explains that it isn't the case that women believe in or worship the phallus—in fact it's a problem when we do, when we really try to take it seriously instead of living out a perpetual irony.¹¹ And the situation has its advantages: the possibility for the little girl of cultivating a secret sensoriality （hidden by the primacy of the phallus）, since she is not required to make her erotic pleasure coincide with her symbolic performance （211-212）. The sensations of pre-linguistic, pre-oedipal mother-daughter osmosis （the semiotic） are reactivated by the fact that the symbolic remains foreign to the little girl.

Now, Kristeva doesn't take this step, but it seems to me that coping with an illusory symbolic is not altogether unlike coping with a pseudo-symbolic. Perhaps we can infer that women are always-already in a difficult position where revolt is concerned.

Already in “Le Sujet en Procès” the irony and pretence of women were mentioned, together with their problematic position in relation to negativity. Alienated from the symbolic, women cannot easily participate in the transgression of classic revolt: we seem to make rejection and the re-establishment of the symbolic continuous and concurrent, not merely co-present but almost indistinguishable, rather than dialectically opposed and separated into negative and positive moments （Polylogue 76-79）. However, perhaps women are therefore more able to participate in the new form of revolt Kristeva announces where the symbolic is regarded with some distrust. After all, with our “secret sensoriality” we seem to be in a better position to evoke the maternal bond, a-thought and feminine jouissance. （Whether these are too close to be effectively represented is no doubt another question）. Moreover, our ironic position both within and alienated from the symbolic—our “critical and ironic capacity” （217）—seems to be very close to that of Barthes who “looks for […] the secret rules of what is presented as normal but is merely false” （389）. Barthes exposes unified meaning as fraudulent and yet he needs it in order to be able to signify: for him too, the symbolic is “illusory and nevertheless indispensable.” But then again, perhaps we women live the indispensable illusion without exposing it?

Irony is a slippery thing and sometimes shakes more objects than we might intend. Kristeva starts her book with the observation that we are faced with a pseudo-symbolic, goes on to show that half the population has only ever pretended to believe in the symbolic anyway, and finally presents Barthes' irony, revealing the falsity of the symbolic, as a successful example of non-confrontational revolt. And yet, amongst all this sham, one kind of truth remains—the authenticity of aesthetic experience as it pulverises the subject, pushing him to the edge of insanity. Indeed the possibility of falsification is denied on several occasions: Aragon is described as “an authentic alchemist of language, a true player who played to the limit” （309）, in whose work “the stylistic fragmentation reflects the hurricane shaking the writer” （293）. Similarly, when Sartre writes of play-acting, Kristeva insists that this is not some “artificial flippancy that wouldn't truly involve the subject” （347-348）.

The truth of aesthetic experience marks the limits of revolt—and of play. Interestingly, Kristeva doesn't feel the need to affirm the authenticity of Barthes' revolt. And yet I wonder whether his irony doesn't go further, whether he is not merely playing at sensuality in conjuring up the “mirage of the body […] at the horizon of [his] theory” （394, cf. 399）, rather than genuinely（?） investing drive energy. Perhaps Barthes—always difficult to pin down—is not only exposing a lame symbolic but teasing us with a mythical semiotic that floats out of reach.

Aesthetic practice finds its raison d'être in mimesis, in “the need to mime the revolt” of the primitive horde against the father in the form of religion and later art （33）. However only true mimesis, involving genuine revolt, will have the desired effect of reaffirmation and renewal of the social bond. But given that women seem to have made if not a career then at least a good job of simulacrum in going along with a doubtful symbolic, what is to stop us from faking aesthetic experience … even jouissance … in such a way as to produce a subtle revolt. A certain ironic distance, not just from the symbolic but from one's own aesthetic practice—pretending to risk body and soul, or identity, pretending to represent sensual experience at its least representable—may not count as revolt or even as poetic language for Kristeva, but I wonder whether, as a form of play, it may not have its place as contestation.

I even wonder whether not only the mimicking of revolt but the mimicking of law itself may not already constitute an invisible form of rebellion. Women, for example, might indulge while affirming phallic law: not transgression, not the overturning of the system, but an invisible undermining of the symbolic as we play along, all the more gratifying for being secret （feel that Mona Lisa smile）. And then there is the “falsifiable order” itself. With its mechanisms of deferral that substitute endlessly for unified power and Law, it seems very like Barthes' endless deciphering and displacing of meaning. Add a little reflexivity and the pseudo-symbolic becomes irony, potentially undoing the system. In fact we might end up asking whether the pseudo-symbolic is a case of unlocatable power … or of irrecuperable revolt.

Notes

1. Translations of SNR and of “Le Sujet en procès” are my own.

2. Cf. “the necessity of revolt-culture in a society that lives, develops and doesn't stagnate” （21）.

3. Kristeva argues that Lacanian theory remains at this second model.

4. Kristeva's detective novel Possessions was published simultaneously with SNR and concerns a headless female corpse. In SNR Kristeva leaves a clue to the mystery … （259）.

5. Cf. “the abyssal connotation of the feminine as the other side [l'envers] of the representable, the visible, the phallic, on which psychoanalysis sheds light, and which remains a place of fascination” （259）.

6. Kristeva gave a rather different interpretation of Orestes in “Le Sujet en procés” whereby the subject took refuge in sterile symbolic metalanguage （Polyogue 76）.

7. In her semi-autobiographical novel, Les Samouraïs, Kristeva describes herself and her Tel Quel colleagues as samurai, as warriors.

8. A deferral and displacement that Kristeva explicitly—although not entirely convincingly—distinguishes from （a psychoanalytical reinscription of） Derridean différance （425, cf. 179）.

9. It is worth mentioning in passing that as in her other texts, with the exception of the chapter in Soleil noir on Marguerite Duras, in SNR Kristeva studies literature written by men. Women are however cited as clinical case studies … （199-203）.

10. Kristeva insists that Freud only argues for a theory of the primacy of the phallus for both sexes in infantile genital organisation, although it may persist as an unconscious fantasy （159）.

11. Cf. the cautionary tale of the phallic girl （212）.

Works Cited

Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language. Ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1980.

———. Histoires d'amour. Paris: Denoel, 1983.

———. Polylogue. Paris: Seuil, 1977.

———. Possessions. Paris: Fayard, 1996.

———. La Révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Seuil, 1974.

———. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.

———. Les Samouraïs. Paris: Fayard, 1990.

———. Sens et non-sens de la révolte. Paris: Fayard, 1996.

———. Soleil noir. Paris: Gallimard, 1987.