Hatred and forgiveness

368 Pages·2010·2.19 MB·English

by  Julia Kristeva & Jeanine Herman

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EuropEan pErspEctivEs: a sEriEs in social thought and cultural criticism k Julia Kristeva refracts the impulse to hate
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praise for Julia Kristeva e
va e and text, exploring worlds, women, religion,
portraits, and the act of writing. Her inquiry
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r im ol to her writing, and her paths of discovery
ag u a advance the theoretical innovations that are
e: © age “Jwuiltiha Ksurcisht envaam ise so anse Gofe ntheett lee,a Fdoinugc avuolitc, eGs rieni mcoanst, eamndp oortahreyr sF.r”ench criticism, on a par mbia t n so characteristic of her thought.
nce —Paul de Man u r Kristeva rearticulates and extends her
opa ni e analysis of language, abjection, idealization,
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/j. f “Julia Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the latest preconception, er d female sexuality, love, and forgiveness. She
oley the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud; sit d e examines the “maladies of the soul,” utilizing
julia kristeva is professor of linguistics y a examples from her practice and the ailments
what she displaces is the illusion that it has all been said already, that is, she removes
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at the Université de Paris VII and author of r of her patients, such as fatigue, irritability,
the pressure of the signified—in a word, stupidity; what she subverts is authority— e n
many acclaimed works and novels, includ- s and general malaise. She sources the Bible
that of monological science, of filiation.” s
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ing This Incredible Need to Believe, Murder in Byz- v and texts by Marguerite Duras, St. Teresa
—Roland Barthes
antium, Strangers to Ourselves, New Maladies of the n e of Avila, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beau-
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Soul, Time and Sense, Hannah Arendt, and Mela- w voir, and Georgia O’Keefe. Balancing polit-
“Both readers and listeners, whether agreeing or in stubborn disagreement with Julia y o
nie Klein. She is the recipient of the Hannah o ical calamity and individual pathology, she
Kristeva, feel indeed attracted to her contagious voice and to her genuine gift of r
Arendt Prize for Political Thought and the k r addresses internal and external catastrophes
questioning generally adopted ‘axioms,’ or to her contrary gift of releasing various i

Holberg International Memorial Prize. g and global and personal injuries, confronting
‘damned questions’ from their traditional question mark.” w r
w the nature of depression, obliviousness, fear,
—Roman Jakobson w i g
jeanine herman is the translator of . v and the agony of being and nothingness.
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volumes 1 and 2 of Julia Kristeva’s The Powers u Throughout Kristeva develops the notion
“A formidable cultural historian and critic.” p e
and Limits of Psychoanalysis, and her translation .c that psychoanalysis is the key to serenity,
—Library Journal o n
of Julien Gracq’s Reading Writing was a finalist l with its processes of turning back, looking
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for the French-American Foundation Trans- m e t r back, investigating the self, and refashion-
“Julia Kristeva takes us through an adventure in innovative reading whose daring and b
lation Prize. ia s ing psychical damage into something use-
vigor have rarely been matched in the annals of modern criticism.” .
e ful and beautiful. Constant questioning,
—Philip Lewis, Cornell University d s julia kristeva
u Kristeva contends, is essential to achieving
jacket image : © gallerystock/harry weber a the coming to terms we all seek at the core
jacket design: chang jae lee co translated by Jeanine Hermano of forgiveness.
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ISBN 978-0-231-14324-0
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hatred and forgiveness
European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
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European Perspectives: A Series in Social Thought and Cultural Criticism
laurence d. kritzman, editor
european perspectives presents outstanding books by leading european
thinkers. with both classic and contemporary works, the series aims to
shape the major intellectual controversies of our day and to facilitate
the tasks of historical understanding.
For a complete lit of books in the series, see pages 343–345.
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hatred and forgiveness
j u l i a k r i s t e va
translated by jeanine herman
columbia university press new york
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columbia university press
Publishers Since 1893
new york chichester, west sussex
La Haine et le pardon: Pouvoirs et limites de la psychanalyse III © 2005 Librairie Arthème Fayard
English translation © 2010 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kristeva, Julia, 1941–
[Haine et le pardon. English]
Hatred and forgiveness / Julia Kristeva ; translated by Jeanine Herman.
p. cm.—(European perspectives)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-14324-0 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0~231-51278-7 (e-book)
1. Psychoanalysis and literature. 2. Psychoanalysis in literature. 3. Literature—Psychology.
I. Title. II. Series.
PN56.P92K7313 2010
809′.93353—dc22 2010024645
Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable
acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author
nor Columbia University Press is responsible for Web sites that may have expired or changed since
the book was prepared.
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CONTENTS
foreword
Pierre-Louis Fort vii
translator’s acknowledgments
xi
part i
World(s) 1
1. Thinking About Liberty in Dark Times 3
2. Secularism: “Values” at the Limits of Life 24
3. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and . . . Vulnerability 29
part 2
Women 46
4. On Parity, Again; or, Women and the Sacred 49
5. From Madonnas to Nudes: A Representation of Female Beauty 57
6. The Passion According to Motherhood 79
7. The War of the Sexes Since Antiquity 95
8. Beauvoir, Presently 99
9. Fatigue in the Feminine 114
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vi CONTENTS
part 3
Psychoanalizing 127
10. The Sobbing Girl; or, On Hysterical Time 129
11. Healing, a Psychical Rebirth 153
12. From Object Love to Objectless Love 159
13. Desire for Law 170
14. Language, Sublimation, Women 177
15. Hatred and Forgiveness; or, From Abjection to Paranoia 183
16. Three Essays; or, the Victory of Polymorphous Perversion 195
part 4
Religion 207
17. Atheism 209
18. The Triple Uprooting of Israel 213
19. What Is Left of Our Loves? 222
part 5
Portraits 229
20. The Inevitable Form 231
21. A Stranger 245
22. Writing as Strangeness and Jouissance 251
part 6
Writing 257
23. The “True-Lie,” Our Unassailable Contemporary 259
24. Murder in Byzantium; or,
Why I “ship myself on a voyage” in a Novel 273
notes 307
notes on the origins of the texts 319
bibliography 323
index 329
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FOREWORD
PIERRE-LOUIS FORT
“Kristeva’s work constitutes this admonition: that we are still going too
slowly, that we are wasting time in ‘believing,’ i.e., in repeating and humor-
ing ourselves, that often a supplement of freedom in a new thought would
suffi ce to gain years of work,” Roland Barthes wrote in 1970, speaking of
the originality and innovative power of this body of work.1
Thirty years later, the qualities underscored by Roland Barthes were
recognized by the Holberg Prize awarded to Julia Kristeva—the fi rst person
to be given this honor—by his Royal Highness of Norway, Crown Prince
Haakon, on December 3, 2004, at the University of Bergen, for her “excep-
tional work” and its “capital importance” in “many disciplines in the human
and social sciences.”2 It is worth noting that on this occasion psychoanaly-
sis was recognized for the fi rst time in an international interdisciplinary
forum.
At the award ceremony Julia Kristeva gave a talk entitled “Thinking
About Liberty in Dark Times.”3 The title of this speech resonates with
her engagement as a vigilant intellectual in a political and cultural context
that is both shifting and destabilizing, not only because the idea of “think-
ing about liberty in dark times” is remarkably current but also, above all,
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viii PIERRE-LOUIS FORT
b ecause it is the main theme of many of the lectures the author has given
over the past ten years, which have accompanied her publications, her an-
alytical practice, and her university teaching: a presence, a necessity, and
a gift. A presence in the sense of the political and ethical challenges Julia
Kristeva enjoys taking again and again, because nothing is more stimulating
to her than what seems impossible. A necessity, too, as a positive counter-
point to crisis situations, a way of going back to the essential, an attempt at
rebirth, successful each time. And a gift, because thought, as Julia Kristeva
understands and practices it, is a sharing, a generosity, a promise, and a
proposal of human, spiritual, and intellectual opening.
Hatred and Forgiveness is composed of six parts and concludes with an in-
terview as a kind of overture rather than a fi nale. Certain texts appear here
for the fi rst time; others are based on earlier refl ections.4 The reader will
not be surprised to fi nd fragments that, while published elsewhere in part,
have become topical again in light of specifi c social and cultural situations,
making this collection an illumination open to other perspectives. Nor will
it be surprising to read a few prescient texts that echo the current state of
things. Indeed, Julia Kristeva is capable of being a “public intellectual” as L e
Monde recently wrote: parallel to her research, she willingly participates in
public debates with various social actors, attempting to share with them her
psychoanalytical interpretation of current political events.5
T he volume begins with “World(s)”: the world as it is, as it was, as it
might be; the world as it gets by or doesn’t; the world, or rather worlds , be-
cause Julia Kristeva is particularly attentive to singularities, especially when
the threat of a generalized Santa Varvara looms.6 Worlds in the plural,
then, to refl ect on the rustle of people, individuals, and souls—those to
whom the author listens with endless curiosity. To begin Hatred and Forgive-
ness , Julia Kristeva gives us a section on Europe, freedom, secularism, and
vulnerability, inviting us to examine the fundamental questions of identity
and religion and bringing us back to what is sometimes forgotten when not
sacrifi ced: the speaking subject, our inalienable singularity.
T he second part is called “Women,” as women have long been central to
her research. Among her most famous essays, we could cite “Unes femme s ”
published in 1975 and “Le temps des femmes” published in 1979.7 When
the last volume of her Female Genius trilogy was published, Julia Kristeva
went back to a woman who was one of the leading lights of feminists in
the twentieth century: Simone de Beauvoir.8 In this series of texts, Julia
Kristeva explores aesthetic and political territories in relation with the
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FOREWORD ix
feminine. And she ventures over one of the continents dear to her, that
of motherhood, examining its meaning and issues, without neglecting
mother-daughter relations.
A psychoanalyst since the mid-seventies, Julia Kristeva revisits desire
and law, hysteria and time, and hatred and love in the third part of this
volume, aptly entitled “Psychoanalyzing.” She examines the analytical prac-
tice, questions the soul, renders homage to Freud, rereads Paul Ricoeur
and André Green, takes a look at St. Teresa of Avila, and does not hesi-
tate to invoke literary texts by Proust and Colette alongside clinical cases.
One essay, in particular, which gives this volume its title, is worthy of note:
“Hatred and Forgiveness” retraces the clinical meanderings of the destruc-
tion of connection to others as well as the reconstruction of psychical space
through transference/countertransference. It may be read as an example of
the crisis-and-reconstruction of identity and meaning, which is this book’s
main preoccupation.
R eligions are the red t hread of the fourth part of the collection. Not
that they do not appear in other parts; in this book as a whole, religion
is at the forefront. Julia Kristeva goes behind the scenes of faith, examin-
ing the notions of atheism and belief, connection and rejection, tolerance
and peace, and, of course, love. While at times the religious ramifi cations
of certain texts fade in favor of more humanist or political considerations,
they remain latent and emerge clearly when the author writes about the
fate of Israel.
In the fi fth section, Julia Kristeva discusses Roland Barthes, whose
thought she has not ceased to explore, and renders a lovely homage to him.9
There is an essay on Marguerite Duras, in which she examines her kinship
with the writer and studies her poetics, and one on Georgia O’Keeffe, in
which she retraces her life to illuminate the sources of her painting— human
subjects and aesthetic subjects united and marked by their diversity.
In “Writing,” the last section devoted more specifi cally to writers, we
fi nd some of Julia Kristeva’s favorite authors: Proust, the subject of her T ime
and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature , and Aragon, analyzed in T he Sense
and Non-sense of Revolt and I ntimate Revolt .1 0 This auscultation of the major
writings of the twentieth century, parallel to her own vital experience, was
bound to lead Julia Kristeva to the novel, which she defi nes as being “the
unbearable elevated to the savor of language.” 11 As the author of four nov-
els, T he Samurai , The Old Man and the Wolves , Possessions , and Murder in Byzantium ,
she explains in the interview at the end of the book her predilection for the
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