THE ETHICAL AND POLITICAL FUNCTION OF REVOLT IN JULIA KRISTEVA’S NOVELS by Laura Bianca Rus B.A., Babes-Bolyai University, 1998 M.A., Central European University, 1999 M.A., Babes-Bolyai University, 2001 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (Women’s and Gender Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) January 2011 © Laura Bianca Rus, 2011 Abstract This study examines the various ways in which Julia Kristeva’s novels complement her theoretical writings in reflecting on and responding to the cultural and political crises of European identity and the urgency of assuming responsibility for its heritage. By foregrounding Eastern and Western European aspects of her thought, Kristeva’s novels develop and illustrate the view that the crisis of Europe is not just collective, cultural and political. It also entails the suffering of individuals who are physically and/or psychologically oppressed and repressed, with a particular focus on female foreigners whose capacity to participate in the production of “what” and “who” is counted as European is limited or stifled. Kristeva’s notion of revolt, seen as an important aspect of European tradition, serves as a framework to examine her four novels, and the first chapter presents a critical account of the ethical, therapeutic and political functions of revolt in her novels. The four subsequent chapters provide a detailed analysis of the novels, each examining one particular aspect of revolt. In analysing The Samurai, the notion of writing as thought serves to examine the impact of the French Revolution and May 1968 on women and foreigners. The Old Man and the Wolves illustrates individual resistance against a totalitarian regime through action as thought. In Possessions, a focus on imaginary decapitations in relation to matricide reveals the emergence of specular thought as a form of revolt. Murder in Byzantium provides an account of thought as freedom, in a Europe (past and present) where the society of the spectacle (from religion to consumerism) leaves little room for individual creative or critical expression. This research shows how Kristeva situates feminine sensibility and creativity as alternative spaces that can generate new ways for rethinking the cultural and political memory of Europe, in such a way as to assume responsibility for its heritage as well as for its future. ii Table of Contents Abstract.............................................................................................................................. ii Table of Contents......................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................... v Dedication .................................................................................................................................... vi INTRODUCTION: Framing Kristeva’s Fiction...................................................................... 1 Approaches to Kristeva’s Work.................................................................................................... 2 Feminist Contexts and Controversies ........................................................................................... 5 The Shift to a Concern with Politics and Ethics ........................................................................... 6 Kristeva’s Novels.......................................................................................................................... 8 Problematizing “Europe.............................................................................................................. 11 The Foreign Woman as Witness ................................................................................................. 15 Novels of Revolt ........................................................................................................................ 16 The Variants of Revolt ............................................................................................................... 19 The Logic of Revolt in Kristeva’s Novels ................................................................................. 21 CHAPTER 1. THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION FOR KRISTEVA ...................................... 24 Types of Texts and Intertextuality............................................................................................. 24 Self-Performing Poly-Texts....................................................................................................... 26 Writing as a Psychoanalyst: Countertransference and Personal Therapy ................................ 29 How the Personal Becomes Political Through Fiction ............................................................. 33 Thinking Novels........................................................................................................................ 35 Narrative Revolts ...................................................................................................................... 39 The European Scene .................................................................................................................. 41 The Detective-Journalist as Witness ......................................................................................... 44 Kristeva and Arendt on Aesthetics and Politics ........................................................................ 46 Individual and Collective Memory ........................................................................................... 49 Feminist Critiques ..................................................................................................................... 51 Kristeva’s Debt to Arendt ......................................................................................................... 52 The Imaginary As Revolt .......................................................................................................... 54 Representative Thinking and the Politics of Representation .................................................... 56 CHAPTER 2. THE SAMURAI: NOVEL (OF) FOREIGNNESS ............................................ 62 Reactions to The Samurai ......................................................................................................... 62 The Role of Women and Foreigners in Re-thinking the Legacy of the French Revolution...... 65 (Dis)Connections between Strangers and The Samurai............................................................ 69 Writing as Thought.................................................................................................................... 74 The Interaction Between Literature and Psychoanalysis .......................................................... 75 Feminist Interpretations of The Foreigner................................................................................ 77 I. Foreignness Within: The Search for “Lost Time”................................................................. 80 The Journey to China as a Quest for Anti-Origins/ Otherness in the Self............................. 81 Revolt as Heterogeneous Temporality.................................................................................. 83 II. The Foreigner Outside: The Paradoxical Logic of the French Revolution ......................... 86 The Paradoxical Tenets of the French Revolution ............................................................... 87 Dissidence as Revolt ............................................................................................................ 88 The Cosmopolitics of the Now Group .................................................................................. 90 Maoism: A Failed Revolt? ................................................................................................... 93 Feminism and The Chinese Cultural Revolution ................................................................. 95 III. Psychoanalysis as a Politics of ........................................................................................... 98 CHAPTER 3. THE OLD MAN AND THE WOLVES: BETWEEN REVOLT AND FORGIVENESS......................................................................................................................... 108 Reactions to The Old Man ....................................................................................................... 109 Arendt on Totalitarianism and Authority ................................................................................ 114 Thought as Action ................................................................................................................... 118 Variants of Revolt: The Story of the Old Man ........................................................................ 120 Sadomasochism as Part of the Logic of Revolt....................................................................... 122 Meaning as Making Connections ............................................................................................ 124 “Whatever Singularity”........................................................................................................... 127 What Makes Revolt Impossible: The Story of Vespasian and Alba Ram ............................. 132 Hatred and the Misdirection of Revolt .................................................................................. 134 Narration