PHILIPPE SOLLERS: I like the title, “Inner Experience Against the Current.” In “inner experience” the word to watch is of course experience, because I expect, or hope, that everybody here enjoys an inner life, despite the massive violence with which the general current opposes any such thing these days. This inner experience, then, means the experience with the person in here, which has been going on for a while, though also for a very short time, in view of the intensity of that experience. We shall have to say what kind of fundamental experience we are talking about: experience of what? To do with what thing, what object? Etc. Nothing spiritual, nothing mystical, none of that global charlatanry around the lucrative commodifications of the word inner. Experience being a form of knowledge, we shall attempt to say what knowledge is implicated here.
Next: “against the current.” The current of what? Of the society of the spectacle, that’s what, another name for this ongoing globalization, universal interconnection in so-called real time, deaths in real time—but what do we mean by “real time”? Data designed to lather the brain of anybody who would wish to learn something under his own steam. This devastation will chiefly affect, not just human interiority, but also what is most precious to the human being: his language. For years and years now, from the beginning, the emphasis we’ve placed on this experience of language has seemed to us the most important thing. It’s increasingly rare to come across anyone who truly reads anything, who hasn’t succumbed to the flatness and impoverishment of instant communications.
So, to establish a context and give Julia a chance to respond, to say what she has to say upon the subject, I shall simply table the question of childhood. “The childhood we revisit at will,” as Baudelaire said. Because childhood is, I believe, the location under greatest pressure today, the most highly monitored, the most damaged in its very fibers. Because childhood is decisive for the genuine constitution of inner experience. It so happens that, for swimming “against the current,” you can’t do much better than the two unrepentant children sitting in this very room, for reasons that are historical first and foremost. Julia is a child who went through the experience of totalitarianism. She lived in Bulgaria, under the former Soviet regime, and she underwent a traumatic experience, the death of her father, which she related in a very fine book called
The Old Man and the Wolves.
1 I met her as a person just emerging, escaping, from a totalitarian experience. I found that tremendously intriguing and impressive, and it made me ask her over and over again about her childhood.
For my part, something is always denied me, because there weren’t that many childhood experiences like mine in France: I had the great privilege of being born, shortly before the Second World War, into a thoroughly Anglophile Bordeaux family. When the German Occupation began, the Germans were always downstairs, having occupied all of our houses, and then they flattened a property in the Île de Ré because it got in the way of their coastal batteries. I heard German spoken a great deal during that period; while in the cellars, or the attics, we were listening to Radio Londres, “The French talking to the French.” For a child, it was utterly decisive to belong to a family whose guiding principles—very oddly and unusually for Vichy France—led them to bet on London. “The English are always right”—that’s what they said at home. So, Radio Londres, the admirable broadcasts of the Free French in 1940, with their coded messages. “Here are some personal messages…” I was six years old, listening to those nonsensical phrases that really struck the ear of someone destined to be a writer: “I like women dressed in blue. I repeat: I like women dressed in blue.” “We will roll across the lawn. I repeat: We will roll across the lawn.” All against a crackling background of interference, you know? Like that.
Two very singular childhoods, then. And so here we have, sitting next to each other, two stubbornly unruly and unrepentant children who chucked their papers, their countries, overboard. Julia is familiar with the slogan I recite to her from time to time: Vichy-Moscow, neither Vichy nor Moscow. Much as I say it, much as I repeat it, it’s like I’m never really being heard.
COLETTE FELLOUS: Do you sometimes feel that you’ve loved each other through the telling and the experience of your two childhoods?
PS: The love encounter between two people is the rapport between their childhoods. Without that, it doesn’t amount to much.
JULIA KRISTEVA: You’re right to begin with childhood, because ours were so different, and yet we’ve brought them into tune.
Is it because I was born in a totalitarian country, is it because I was a little girl—rather than a little boy—adored by her father? All through my infant years, my one longing was to grow out of childhood, and I took my desires for realities while being convinced that my father only had eyes for me. Accordingly, his literature and gym and swimming lessons, our outings to soccer matches and to the theater, even our heated arguments made me believe that I belonged in the world of adults…Shoulder to shoulder with her husband, who had studied theology before doing medicine, Mom had had to give up biology and its Darwinism to devote herself to her two girls, but never tired of repeating to my sister and me that she didn’t want to sit on us like eggs, but to “give us wings.” In Bulgarian, ne zakrileni (“hatchlings”) rhymes with okrileni (“having wings”). It’s her who taught me that the fastest way to travel was not in an airplane or a rocket but in thought; she went over my math with me so I’d win the school competition…And, in spite of all this, I can’t remember wanting anything but to grow up and make Dad proud of me; to escape from childhood and embark on that “winged” (okrilena) life my mother lacked. Which everybody around me lacked, in a country where “nobody lacked for anything”—communist equality guaranteeing the minimum required to get by for the population at large; but people felt infantilized by the daily worries and by the single line of thought. Anyone who spoke up got sent to jail and even to the camps. One had to grow up in order to escape…
The first stirrings of puberty, in sentimental intimations and idealistic daydreams, led to solitary pleasures and greedy kisses rather than sexual discoveries. It was like childhood regained, a time of abandon and innocence, protected by its covert complicities; and it was in these teenage romances, which ended up pitifully damaging for most of my girlfriends, that I accepted myself as a child. Playful, mischievous, outside time, fulfilled. A kind of childhood secreted by those fleeting, clandestine moments, boundless yet transitory. Is there such a thing as the one original childhood? Isn’t it, instead, always to be experienced anew?
In any case—coming back to your political remarks—when we met, Philippe and I, two years before May ’68, it was not so much France and the French language I discovered—because kindergarten with the Dominican nuns, then the Alliance Française, and then doing Romance philology at Sofia University for my doctorate had more than acquainted me with both. The surprise was that sexual explosion and my long-awaited liberation. The affinity between us was obvious from the start. And that word, obvious, sends me back to the childhood theme, in the sense I was trying to explain: a childhood recovered in retrospect, via an encounter, that makes one brand-new again, renascent as a different person according to the obviousness of the magnet-lover (aimant-amant); that makes one relive a sensory memory retrieved, revealed, and suddenly more intense, renewed. This is the base. Given this base, an existential complicity that is intellectual, cultural, professional, and lasting through time becomes possible. For me, the foreigner, this chiming with Philippe’s infant self made me feel I could relate to what he embodies, what sustains him: the French language and mindset, the history of France…Of course, I’ll always be this semi-integrated foreigner. However, in the love that rekindles our confided childhoods, and nowhere else, I cease to be a foreigner.
My entrance into psychoanalysis can only be understood as the prolongation of that infantile obviousness we were lucky enough to recreate together. After all, wasn’t it on found-created childhood that Freud based free association and the transference/countertransference link? The analysand is invited to excavate their childhood—and the events of their whole life—and thus to mature step by step, baby to child to teen to parent, etc., on the analyst’s couch.
I want to say a few words more about the stamp left by totalitarian communism on these infantile traces.
When I set out to talk about women’s liberation, I chose the provocative term of female genius—taking Arendt, Klein, and Colette as examples. It was meant as an invitation to each of us, female or male, to cultivate their creativity in order to resist—“against the current”—today’s ongoing massification: now that we all belong to some “community” (women, gays, bourgeois, proletarians), out goes the individual, as though we’d forgotten that liberty is a singular noun. The figure of Hannah Arendt came self-evidently to mind; I couldn’t start with anyone better than the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (in three parts, “Antisemitism,” “Imperialism,” and “Totalitarianism”). My father had just died, three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead of the simple operation he needed—while the operating suites were out of surgical thread, apparently—my father was killed in the hospital: they used to conduct experiments on elderly people. We couldn’t bring this Bulgarian citizen to France while his postoperative condition was deteriorating. After that, I was told that he’d have to be cremated rather than buried, as there was no more room in the Sofia cemetery and anyway the graves were reserved for communists, in order to prevent crowds of believers from gathering; my father was a devout Orthodox Christian. When I offered to pay for a grave in hard currency (dollars or francs), the answer was that it would be feasible, since I was fairly well-known, but only if I died first…in which case my father and I could be buried together.
PS: With your husband!
JK: Anyhow, the world has turned this dismal page, now only relevant in the lamentable case of Cuba and especially China—although some sectors of the left are still pretty intoxicated by it, especially in France, clinging to past “gains” and digging their heels in against reform…But other phenomena are on the rise, tending toward the automization of the human species. Hyperconnection, virtual reality, the digitization of human memory, genetics, bio- and nanotechnologies, robotics, etc.: no previous generation has ever been exposed to such swift and far-reaching upheavals. New technologies are able to alter reproduction, repair organs, and increase life expectancy. Everything is changing: family structures, gender relations, and the very notion of sexual identity; our attitude to writing, books, language…These facilities and velocities have a downside. “Talking points,” e-mail, SMS, blogging and tweeting create the mirage of a new bliss, that of the hyperconnected loner in a so-called virtual community. The Web has no outside or inside, and is open to every kind of use—consumerism, pornography, propaganda, “social” networks, collective outrage over this or that, sundry radicalizations, not to mention decapitations, to lure you in, to manipulate you…Are you on board? You may think you are, but you’re nowhere, there’s no “you” anymore, just the floating, the surfing, the falling to bits…
That said, I don’t share the despondency of those who predict the end of a world that has surrendered so willingly to technology, to the Internet, to fanaticism. On the contrary, I make Colette’s conviction mine: “To be reborn has never been beyond my strength.” This wager on the possibility of starting over has deep roots in the European continent to which I feel bound, after my voyage from Sofia to Paris, and even more since I began traveling the world from New York to Beijing, from Buenos Aires to Bergen, and found myself always homing (back)…to Paris!
Rebirth: there’s no better way to swim against the current of mass leveling and automation of bodies and minds. The possibility of being reborn exists in Judaism, and in a different way in the Greek tradition. It was transfigured by Christianity; the humanism of the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment opened it up to everyone; finally, Freud had the insight to adapt it to the traumas and pain of the analysand. It parallels the certainty that troubles and sorrows are what make us think.
My life in Bulgaria had not blinded me to these rebounds, but nor had it convinced me that I myself might be capable of this trajectory of survival. And it was Philippe’s vitality, coupled with his evident wounds, that locked the erotic and intellectual understanding between us into the irrefutable alchemy for which we only possess one word, love—even though the experience of it is plainly unique to each person and moment, with no common yardstick between them.
Ever since our first encounters, I was struck by his modernity: it resides in that lively wit and footballer’s body and in that taunting laugh, the frequent scourge of the society of the spectacle, which can only take it for dubious whimsy or gratuitous frivolity or who knows what reactionary pathology. I soon realized that the light-hearted repertoire, the “joker pose,” were his whole personality and exceptional, unclassifiable, immoderate oeuvre. However, I really got carried away by his “countercurrent” because I also perceived—not that he makes any bones about his sources—how well it accorded with the dynamic of Ulysses the seaman, with the humor of rabbis reweaving the joy of the Torah, and with the depth of the transfiguration wrought by Christ.
Having arrived in Paris with five dollars in my pocket, bursting with brave but hazy ideas, I had the good fortune to meet someone who stayed by my side and who stood out in that rather dreary French panorama, with its petty and grand bourgeois, shivering at the loss of Algeria, reluctant to face up to a changing world, and harangued by de Gaulle amid as much booing as cheering. What a country! I had to stay. With him.
One incident will give you the picture. We were in front of La Coupole under pelting rain, I was staring at the water pouring down, I must have looked preoccupied: visa problems, grant problems, I don’t recall. All of a sudden you said: “Not worth bothering about tiny puddles. Jump!” I realized I wasn’t alone and that I could do it: I could jump. Or more accurately, I could travel myself, in the neologism that a heroine of my novels would invent. To put it in other terms again, my tendency is to spade away at the death drive until hollowing it right out, but you gave me the courage to lean on your dramatic vivacity—you know that I know how dramatic it is—in order to jump over the puddles as well as the more daunting obstacles.
PS: One thing: going “against the current” doesn’t mean going along with something that’s very trendy at the moment and wide open to hijacking as well, indeed is hijacked all the time, namely all that prosopopeia about decline, how it’s all going to the dogs, etc. Why is our critique nothing to do with that? Because it’s full of positive counterproposals. The critics who warn about creeping vacuousness, apocalypse, and so on are actually part and parcel of the system, the media lap up that kind of thing, just to compound this sort of regression that’s pretty much accepted by everybody. I’m not going to go into the political state of affairs, there’s no point, everybody knows about it, and this is just the beginning, wait and see where we’re headed! What’s absolutely fundamental to everything we do is the counterproposal. All of our books present one, whether in a novel like Women or essays like “Female Genius.” There lies the crux of the matter, and hence a certain ambiguity appears, a sort of veil, because you’re talking about the media: yes, I do think, unlike every species of puritan, that one has to know how to use the media, and I enjoy nothing more than to meet someone with major listening vibes, for example, Colette Fellous when she shows up with her Nagra, and then we make little programs that last forty minutes and go into the archives. That’s it: archives, counterarchives…We do TV! We do counter-TV. We do radio! We also do counter-radio. We are doing an event in public here today, and at the same time it’s a counterevent, because we’re saying things we don’t usually say or that have different repercussions.
CF: One gets the feeling, too, that you’re springboards for each other. I’m thinking of that memory you have of the day you said to Julia, in front of a puddle, “Jump!”
PS: About the “Jump!” there are memories in common. What she remembers is that it was raining, she was depressed, and I told her “Jump!” What I remember is loads of other things, but it’s true that that was one of the first things I said to you as we were walking down toward La Coupole, was it, or not far off, we were headed for the Rosebud, rue Delambre—how many evenings…Right, enough of that. I told you something else too, I remember it well. Very firmly, I said: “We shall lift the ancient curse!” Remember?
JK: Not only do I remember, but I’ve just received it on my BlackBerry, in the form of a rather peculiar question. Tomorrow, at Paris-7 University, there’s an all-day event organized by my friend Bernadette Bricout, vice president in charge of cultural activities, entitled: “Julia Kristeva in consultation on the topic ‘Speak to Me of Love’.” We’ve just changed the title to “Is There Such a Thing as Modern Love?” But it comes to the same. So, here’s the question sent in by somebody who’s going to attend the improvised “consultation”: “How did you manage to lift the ancient curse of the sexes?” The strangest coincidence, don’t you think? I don’t know if we managed to lift it, that old curse, but we certainly tried our best.
CF: I like your puddles story, because I had something similar with Philippe, one day when I was feeling low, in your office, I think, and I said: “I’m fed up,” and you replied: “Now, let’s see…” And then you said: “Do you know how to swim?” I said, “Yes.” You said: “Well then, you’re OK!” So there’s always this idea of water, currents, the urge to struggle, to fight back, to be free, within a flow that must constantly be analyzed and reviewed. I was just wondering, in fact: Do you have conversational rituals, like do you discuss the news together at the end of the day?
PS: Colette, we’re pursuing a conversation right here in public that’s gone on for forty years. It never stops. We can’t say, it’s this in the morning, afternoons it’s that, while in the evening…It’s a conversation. I very much like what they used to say in the nineteenth century, or before: “Adultery, according to the English, is a criminal conversation.” Well, I conduct criminal conversations with my wife [laughter].
JK: Ah! When the wife is the mistress…In any case, we’re not going to tell you everything today, so let’s remain on the philosophical level, swimming against the current.
CF: There’s also Inner Experience by Georges Bataille: a text that can’t be avoided and that no doubt also forms part of your bond, your coming together during those early Tel Quel years. How would each of you describe your own inner experience today?
PS: I’m seventeen or eighteen, I’m in Bordeaux. I’m visiting this old bookshop where there are books all over the floor. I bend down and my eye lights on a book called
Inner Experience. The title intrigues me. It’s by a writer I’ve never heard of—Georges Bataille. It came out during World War II, a time when in the midst of historical insanity there’s a weird character writing a book called
Inner Experience, a rather dated book, in fact, that prompts considerable upset. He is going through a real experience and he refuses to use the word
mystical: that’s what’s so interesting. Let me mention in passing that Georges Bataille, someone I told Julia about immediately—she didn’t know him, I don’t think, though she had heard of Blanchot and others—Bataille, then, published two books in 1955 which I found completely mind-blowing, especially one of them, I can see myself reading it now, about the caves of Lascaux, discovered in 1944; the other one was on Manet, a painter you can check out this very day at the Musée d’Orsay, having a sort of resurrection, given that the last Manet exhibition was in 1983. Georges Bataille,
Inner Experience, Lascaux, Manet: vistas opened out…And, of course, along with Bataille came the figure he always talked up with something close to idolatry—as I’m rather prone to do myself—namely, Nietzsche. And that went against the current of those days, because Nietzsche was commonly regarded as a fascist. Nietzsche was Nazis, and Bataille came over as a bit murky or disturbing: his erotic writings,
Madame Edwarda, dreadful stuff. Thoroughly unedifying: not just Nietzsche, but Sade into the bargain. So then we started to publish
Tel Quel, and Bataille would drop in at the offices of this quarterly that was sowing such alarm among the editorial and ideological milieus of the day. What was he after? Why did he come and sit in that office? He’d take a chair, he never said much, except for one thing I remember very clearly, he said: “Ah…at the lycée, they used to call me ‘the brute.’” What a magnificent poet! His blue eyes, etc. You won’t dispute that by the time you and I met—it was in 1966—I’d already published a book called
Event,
2 which Barthes wrote about; we’ll return to that later if you don’t mind. I encouraged you to read a number of things, more in depth, let’s say, than you previously might have done. You were twenty-five. Utterly brilliant, like nobody else at that age, astounding, even. Yup, astounding: Let’s marry her [
laughter]!
JK: Deeply impressed is what I was…
PS: It must be said that, before the puddle and the jump, well, Julia shows up with her communist passport, and, as she falls ill right away with a deadly serious hepatitis, before getting her into a hospital room—it was the Hôpital Cochin, I recall—I was with you in A & E, the wait went on forever. Meanwhile the fascist press, Minute and so forth, were painting her as a KGB agent infiltrating the country, you know, Elsa Triolet–style. No way, not like that at all: Elsa Triolet and Aragon, what a tired old movie! When we got married, actually, it was funny, we had two witnesses and we all went to La Bûcherie for lunch, and miraculously—we’ll move on to Lautréamont anon: “In the new science, each thing comes in its turn, so excellent is it”—who should be sat next to us but Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet, holding a rather closed-circuit conversation. We were lumbered for years with Communist Party propaganda to the effect that I was the new Aragon and Julia Kristeva the new Elsa Triolet. Wrong: no more than Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. As wrong as the ravings of the far right. Wrong: there’s her, there’s me, and it has nothing to do with the others, though of course we take those others into account.
CF: And you, Julia, what about your “inner experience”?
JK: At the time I didn’t ask myself any questions, I was “traveling myself”…But now, I do wonder how I did it, arriving out of the blue like that, an unknown from a little-known, backward country, how did I ever cope with all the turmoil…
PS: Your French was fantastic; you were—you still are—absolutely amazing.
JK: Sure, my French was good…But, before I embark you all on those crossings with me, just to hear Philippe reminisce about that period—the Parisian milieu with its intrigues, its communists, fascists, publishers, writers, journalists—brings home to me, once again, and more clearly than ever, perhaps, in the presence of all of you here, how sheltered I was. In spite of culture shock, hard times, malicious gossip, rejections, and false gratifications. And what sheltered me? You, of course, your presence. You played the game, carried the can, taught me the ropes, explained the maneuvers. But I remained an outsider, I didn’t get involved, I didn’t belong to that “world.” My professional life—from college to psychoanalysis, via writing, essays to start with, then novels, published by Tel Quel, Seuil, and finally Fayard—unfolded in a space apart, away from the cozy bubble of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. More and more, in fact, due to my frequent commitments away from Paris: teaching in New York, Washington, Boston, and elsewhere. In short, I had—and still have—the advantage of being kept abreast of Paris ways, the city’s blessings and impasses, everything that foreigners naively associate me with. In reality, though, I was—I am—free of it: precisely because we maintained two distinct social spaces, two psychic spaces, autonomous and discrete, never merged but always with something to tell each other…A couple? Yes, but…two in one, duplicated unity, yin and yang, perhaps. This precious independence also means solitude, an aloneness essential to the “mystery” that was billed as the title of tonight’s event; necessary to inner experience. So…[silence]
JK: As you well said, a long tradition precedes us, a mostly Catholic memory, of which Georges Bataille reminds us by turning it upside down. On pain of overburdening our talk—forgive me if that’s the case—I can’t avoid, now that we’re here in this ancient Cordelier monastery, and to clarify my intellectual procedure which is inseparable from the “shared life” people are so curious about—I can’t avoid dwelling yet again on certain key moments of European culture. This culture made us the way we are, even if the disillusioned Europeans we’ve become are not as proud of it as we ought to be. And in this culture experience is THE fundamental notion. It is with and around experience that was forged the free and infinitely constructible/deconstructible subjectivity that has been corrupted or abolished, separately and in parallel, by so many crimes and fratricide wars including the Inquisition, colonialism, and the Shoah. Yet it remains the great value to be defended during this time of “loss of values.” Apologies for the long exposition. To return specifically to experience itself…
I already mentioned the heteronomy of my family. On the one side, the theological training of my Orthodox father, strongly imbued with Greek mythology, Platonism and Neoplatonism, French and German philosophy—Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and of course Hegel; and the Russian novel. On the other side was my mother’s Darwinism, grafted onto the memory, long extinct among her ancestors, of the mystic Shabbetai Tzvi…Bulgaria is more than the home of rejuvenating dairy products, the Rose Valley and the essence of roses that perfumes grieving hearts and the universe. It’s the only country in the world that celebrates culture with an Alphabet Day. May 24 is the feast day of Cyril and Methodius, the brothers who created the Cyrillic alphabet. Schoolchildren, teachers, librarians, writers, and artists parade through every town and village with a big cut-out letter of the Slavic alphabet pinned to their smock, shirt, dress, or jacket. Each person becomes a letter, and so did I, and that was the first experience that I perceived as such: being a letter among a host of letters…Before attempting to elucidate how European culture posits and develops that notion, from Plotinus to Freud, among others, may I pause a moment on that particular experience, on the echoes it awakens?
PS: It’s very important.
JK: I was a me outside myself, merged with a letter that was inserted into a word or a sentence made of other bodies, other “me’s,” other letters. Disseminated through a festive community with its songs, its scents of roses and peonies…There were no people anymore, and yet this took on meaning; the grammar inscribed a message; I was taking part in this writing that transcended me, that regulated an extra world, while also being engraved on my body…“A rule that cures everything” (as Colette, whom I would discover later, wrote), and can even cure one of communism…
This experience mingles with other memories or maybe dreams, I’m not sure. I’m by the Black Sea, it’s coming nearer, about to sweep me away; I grab my father’s hand, and he saves me from drowning. I’ve never forgotten that first sensation of the loss of self. It’s the moment that precedes and conditions the emergence of the new “you,” the new “other”…Then the dream changes: I’m clutching a letter of the alphabet, clinging to its curlicues and propellers; the letter reassures me, I feel proud of myself…When I wake up, I reflect that this dream uses two moments experienced in real life in order to repair some tiny slights, humiliations, or rejections that hurt me and that I had to get over. Like when I wasn’t allowed to carry the school flag on Alphabet Day, because my parents weren’t communists, or when I was turned down by the Russian and the English high schools for the same reason; or when I couldn’t study for a physics and astronomy degree in any of the “closed scientific cities” of the USSR, because they were reserved for the Russian nomenklatura. I never shed tears over those failures, I held on to my safety buoy: alphabet, books, curiosity…Were they a consolation? More of a direction to take. It was the same in Paris, in the ups and downs of personal relationships, professional disappointments, skirmishes at Tel Quel, upsets at the university or in psycho-Freudian circles…That dream kept on recurring.
With this foundational experience, and not yet familiar with Bataille’s
Inner Experience, which you got me to read in our first months together, I filled my intellectual knapsack by foraging through the history of philosophy, then borrowing from Freud…That alluvium of dreams and letters, barely noticeable during my semiological period, resurfaced at tough times. Like many women, before the Simone Veil Act of 1975, I went through the ordeal of a clandestine abortion, which put me in the hospital. All I had in my small suitcase was a toothbrush and two volumes of Hegel:
The Phenomenology of Mind and
Science of Logic. I was lulled by the twists and turns of the
negative, transported to something like joy by the power of Hegel’s ideas on the polyphony of experience. It was only later, when impatience, anger, and indifference were beginning to take it out on love itself, and I’d already become a psychoanalyst, who knew from Freud that the best way to rescue love is to lie it on the couch while continuing to write about it, that I immersed myself once more in mythology, Platonism, and Neoplatonism, in order to go back to Hegel and Heidegger and gain a better understanding of the transference/countertransference Freud passed down to us. A book resulted,
Tales of Love,
3 that deals with nothing but
experience: in the Song of Songs, Plato, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Bataille…and Spielberg’s
E.T.…
PS: Here we go…
JK: Back in Sofia I’d read
Hegel’s Concept of Experience,
4 the Heidegger text that had just appeared in French. A friend brought it me from Paris. As you know, it constitutes an introduction to the
Phenomenology of Mind (1807), which laid the groundwork for the “science of the experience of consciousness” that ultimately developed into
phenomenology. Heidegger comments and expands the Hegelian concept of consciousness as
a movement that apprehends itself, that detaches from itself, and insists on the
emergence of a new object in the course of this trajectory: he stresses the “tending-toward,” the “path along which we are escorted to…” A capital moment of experience: the “new object” is not
this one,
this friend, say, who is there before me in this room; as I look at him, a “new friend” appears to my consciousness: this emergence
is experience. Experience means that I lose the certainties my senses and consciousness entertained about this friend prior to seeing him here tonight. Over there I see Chairman Vincent Berger and my friend Bernadette Bricout; a brief glance takes them in as a pair of neutral bodies, abstract photos. On the other hand, if my gaze is that of an experience, then I see them, for example, as being among the friends who accompanied various intense moments of my life—Bulgarian friends,
Tel Quel friends, New York friends; at that point I register them in the complex memory of my emotional experience. I question them, agree with them, or dispute them. As a Freudo-Lacanian, I may also, in this renewed apprehension of my friends, include loving passion and also an unconscious “hatelove” (nobody’s immune from that one, though Bernadette and Vincent score better than some).
5 They appear in my consciousness transformed, at the exact moment of this exact encounter when I lose certain facets of them and of myself, so that a new apprehension of their alterity and my identity may take place. Hegel, endorsed by Heidegger, puts it admirably: there is in experience an “absolute Good Friday.” To be clear, “God is dead” means everything except that there is no God. The reasoning is subtle: God, even when dead, doesn’t disappear, and he can begin again. The same goes for consciousness as for experience: it vanishes only to begin again, loss and renewal; so long as it is an
experience, consciousness
lives; the life of consciousness involves the construction-deconstruction of unity-identity, whether it be that of consciousness, the subject, or the object. Perpetual rebirth.
CF: We’re not so far from Freud…
JK: Quite right, Freud is not far off. The Freudian unconscious, particularly attentive to Hegelian negativity, adds a new stratum to interiority: the emergence of the new object, for the experience of the subject that I am, must come into play via the logics of unconscious “primary processes,” urges and affects…New stakes, at the intersection of life sciences and sciences of the mind, arise at that point for the person who is the theater of an experience…But they arise also for the compartmentalized disciplines inside our compartmentalized knowledge systems, whereas experience urges us to be interdisciplinary.
Thus understood, experience presents a new challenge for humanism, so long as humanism refuses to consider itself a moral system fixed by the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the positivism of the late nineteenth century; so long as it attempts to integrate this interdisciplinarity, without forgetting the onslaught of reinvigorated, fanaticized religions. The multiverse of the “life of the mind,” the complex dynamics of psycho-somatic experience, promise riches liable to revolutionize the conception of the human, in abeyance today. Linking up with the traditions that precede us, but also proposing an alternative to that aggressive, efficient and yet constricted mentality encouraged in us by hyperconnection.
To rethink inner experience from this angle is not simply an epistemological challenge. I’ve brought it up because I want to say that, with all the revolutions going on, it’s the love experience that matters. We could do with a lover’s discourse able to take the measure of the intimate by locating it in that interaction we call experience, able to constitute it as creativity, starting over, and renewal.
I hear you object: Has inner experience resorbed narcissism? What happened to identity and its quest for the ideal? Have they lost their way in the meanders of an identity attracted by the magnet of the unconscious and the other, definitively hateloving and innovative?
At the heart of love, Freud places narcissism (“I” regards himself as the one and only object of care, safeguard, and affection; failing that, he allows himself to be captivated by the narcissism of his partner) and also idealization (“I” finds in the beloved an “ideal of myself” that “I” cannot live up to in and for himself; at best, it is the encounter, the bond, that constructs an ideal state, project, oeuvre). Neither the hesitations (autoeroticism versus narcissism) nor the leaps and bounds (“primal identification with the father of prehistory,” “ideal of the self,” “need to believe”) can be understood without returning to the genealogy of the Narcissus myth.
CF: This myth has become an omnipresent reality.
JK: It’s not enough to condemn the “supersize ego” of this or that political or media celeb and the me-me-me of popular fiction. Omnipresent as it is, the so-called narcissistic experience has nonetheless changed its shape through history.
It came on the scene courtesy of Ovid, in the first century of our era. Narcissus is the contemporary of the God-Man, of the religion of the incarnation. The desire to know oneself, instilled by Roman stoicism, reverted into a painful fable: the human Narcissus can only love his own image, but it is an inconstant one, vanishing into water. Lacking a stable identity, prey to one lure after another, unable to know who he is, Narcissus kills himself. Linking the gaze, the image, the inability to love others, and suicide, the text transmitted by Ovid anticipates the difficulty in forming bonds and the “autistic” inadequacy that threaten, as they did the humid torpor of Roman Europe in decline, our current virtual, screen-fixated society. What is to be done?
Plotinus, a contemporary of Narcissus, offered a Neoplatonist solution. The inmost space or “heart of hearts” of Western man was created when he, dissatisfied with the tête-à-tête of self and image, replaced this disastrous narcissistic showdown with…the joined hands of prayer. It’s futile to contemplate your reflection in elusive representations, is roughly what he said; instead, seek your identity in and through the intellect (νοῦς or “nous”), carve it out “face to face with yourself”: become another by the light of the intelligible. Only by dint of questioning and arguing, dialoguing with yourself, will the space of subjective interiority be opened out—for good (self-knowledge) and for ill (the complacent pathos of TV soap operas, say).
Since then, over the course of four hundred years, the biblical grafted onto the late Roman eventually produced Christian theology and its apogee in the inner experience of St. Augustine. His greatest transports, in Milan or Ostia, were only possible because he introduced into Plotinus’s prayerful contemplation the loving ardor of the Song of Songs in which we hear, for the first time ever, a woman, the Shulamite, speak to her king (or shepherd) about God. From then on the interiority of the man of faith grew frenzied and extravagant, verging on psychosis, and many saints gladly wallowed in those extremes; but the same interiority attempted, often successfully, to clarify, channel, and rein in the new madness of love by making an ideal of perpetual self-surpassing, faith, and reason—but failing to guard against murderously dogmatic deviations.
So what about sexuality, in this vast program?
PS: Aha…[laughter]. Here we go again!
JK: You didn’t think I’d forgotten about sex? Underlying, denied, condemned. Sublimated into music and painting and literature. Restrained within marriage, exploding into transgression, libertinage, and crime. Freud straightaway saw it in the “polymorphous perverse” infant, and associated Eros with Thanatos, the death drive, not to be confused with erotic aggression. Bataille’s work pushes the boundaries still farther in this respect, restoring its full potency to the destructiveness inherent in the amorous bond, in the sadomasochism of the primal scene, which the majority of mystics wove into their aura…If God himself arouses, according to Freud, “the deep emotion that comes from childhood,” it’s because experience is struck by the unknown and “overturns everything in us like a violent wind.” Very few of those who made suffering sacred ever renounced it. Teresa of Avila was one, thanks to the joy her raptures gave her. Another was Meister Eckhart, by conceptualizing this alchemy in a lexicon he would bequeath ready-made to German philosophy.
I’m nearly done, Philippe; I know, I’ve been talking too much! I just want to add that sadomasochistic sexuality always lurks in the background of the love experience, including that of couples. Aside from the option of denial, in the manner of puritan morality, there’s no other way of appeasing it than to elucidate it without end. I don’t see exhibitionist autofiction cutting through this madness inherent in the logic of desires; instead it flatters and perpetuates it. But you, you went in for the Enlightenment style: you avoid misery in your books (as Lautréamont advised), suggest the impossible in short, succinct tales, steer clear of the “universal reportage” Mallarmé hated so much, and think in a poetry alive to concepts. It’s not just a literary prescription, it’s the way you live: tightly, caustically, mixing irony and fun in daylight clarity and keeping all the rest under wraps. As for me, I’m curious to know and to elucidate, in order to get in touch, to touch. My novels serve to filter through what I call “metaphysical detective stories” my rebounds and survivals, reconfigured and transfigured; deliriums in “vibrating mode,” never “at a rush” (as Céline described his own procedure); tireless reevaluations of belief and knowledge.
CF: After hearing your account, Julia, we can see very well how this “inner experience” came to fill an inner space you’ve been building since you were a little girl. That Alphabet Day was a collective event, but not everyone who took part became a theoretician of language or a writer or a poet. The outlook of an already creative child can permeate the rest of its life. I expect it was the same for you, Philippe—that the world you perceived as a boy was already sustained and magnified in you by imagination, creation, art…
PS: Two things strike me in the current conditions of general anthropological rumination, human, human—human, all too human, as someone said. First, the staying power of what everybody seems constantly to be reading, the family saga, to my mind the most ghastly brew, unless spiked with wholesome Freudian venom; we are drowning in family sagas, there are six hundred of them a year, all “me-me” as you say, but of the most constricted kind when it’s in the shape of family drama. Historically speaking, there’s a dozen reasons for it, I won’t bother listing them. I’ll just mention that there would be a lot to say about Europe and European guilt, and this, as I’ve explained, owing to the Anglophilia of my family—I want to be sure to get that point across—I didn’t share. I feel completely and utterly innocent of the extermination of European Jews and the totalitarian catastrophe across the continent. Meaning that there could well be—in however inaudible a form—a counterproposal to be made, a totally revolutionary one to boot, that Denis Diderot, who talks to me now and then on the phone, knows all about. To return to what I wanted to say after listening to you, we are seeing the family saga make itself comfortably at home again, as if it had never been analyzed. And then, no less staggering, in the same context, is the extraordinary overrating of sexual hang-ups. Sexual hang-ups proliferate, as everyone thinks they have access to the alleged wonders of sex. In just a few years, this matter has grown extremely interesting. There’s a dreadful inadequacy everywhere, and if you have the knack of depicting it, like Michel Houellebecq, for instance, does, you will immediately find a captive audience. This is the first time that it’s been acknowledged and laid out flat, so it’s hardly surprising if there’s a tsunami of general conformism.
Coming back to the singularity of experience, which can only reach, of course, an individual in a family, the case of that individual will be exceptional, he will keep quiet and learn to be cunning, because he will feel like an exile in this world; he’ll be a metaphysical being, a foreigner. After that, two singular foreigners meet, have loads of things to talk about from their own singularity and carry on talking in the form of a marriage that’s unlike any other.
You brought up Hegel, rightly I think, and now, if you agree, I’d like to leave Europe, leave the West. I have an image of us during the magnificent summer, summer of 1967, you must remember. You were reading Hegel and so was I…
JK: And Science and Civilisation in China, by Joseph Needham…On the Île de Ré, on the beach of the Conches, under the lighthouse of the Whales…
PS: In a famous formulation that can be applied every day to everyone one meets, Hegel said: “To see what little contents the mind is to measure the immensity of its loss.” If you’re content with what happens, I have nothing to add. Anyway, while reading Hegel, the Phenomenology of Mind, the Logic, and some Lautréamont on top, you were writing your Revolution in Poetic Language. It was wonderful weather, we ate grilled fish and spent hours on the beach, and we also read Science and Civilisation in China by Joseph Needham, whom you met. China’s pull for us is not a recent thing. Why did it beckon two singularities, in France, in 1966–67? And in depth, mind you: to do with China’s poetry and painting and calligraphy and thought. But not just China, there was also the attraction of Sanskrit, which you worked on, as did I. How come that at such a time, after the disaster of the already declining twentieth century, two singular minds, who seldom encountered minds they could communicate with, were already interested in China and in what today are called “emerging countries”? Please, tell us about Needham.
JK: I shall talk about him with all the more feeling and pleasure for seeing a special face among our audience, Marian Hobson, who’s been a dear friend of mine ever since our student days…and a fellow of the British Academy, where we recently coincided; she’s the person who introduced me to Joseph Needham. Along with Émile Benveniste, who opened my eyes to Indo-European linguistics, Needham and his monumental work were decisive for me, for us, in providing in-depth support for our Chinese yearnings—it’s important to spell this out, because nowadays people are saying all kinds of things about our Maoism.
CF: Excellent idea!
JK: I’d read an article by Needham in an academic journal, then Philippe Sollers and I had bought the first volumes of the veritable, indispensable encyclopedia he directed, and I was bowled over by the specificity, originality, and unfamiliarity of logic that underpin Chinese scientific thought. In a different way than the admirable Marcel Granet in La Pensée chinoise, Joseph Needham explores Daoist and Confucian beliefs and inventories the specific contributions of Chinese models to the study of matter, optics, the body, astronomy, mathematics, geometry, and more. A biologist at Cambridge, a Christian and a socialist, he became interested in Chinese science, learned the language, surrounded himself with a glittering constellation of Chinese scientists and thinkers, directed the Sino-British Science Co-Operation Office in Chongqing, traveled the length and breadth of the country, and amassed an extraordinary trove of documents that would form the basis of successive volumes of Science and Civilisation in China. After the war he returned to Cambridge—where Marian was an undergraduate, then a research fellow and professor, and often invited me—and around the time I met him (1967, I believe) he was appointed Master of Gonville and Caius College. I was startled and delighted by the elegance, humor, and generosity of his welcome.
We met again in Paris; he was attentive to the cultural, scientific, and civilizational mainstays of our curiosity about China, a curiosity that drew us into the political commotion and upheavals besetting Chinese Communism at the time. I never discussed the “Cultural Revolution” with him; the expression made him smile, I thought, with a mixture of benevolence and skepticism. In the aftermath of May ’68, Needham showed solidarity with the students, though his decision to sponsor a fete—rather than assign the same sum to college grants—was sharply criticized by a student organ, the One Shilling Paper. I recall that incident as symbolically revealing of a warm, convivial man who balanced rigor and anarchism and whose free-spirited gaiety always prevailed over convention. He could tell I wasn’t about to become a sinologist or start campaigning for the Cultural Revolution. But he encouraged my desire to immerse myself as much as possible in Chinese “science and civilization” as a way of broadening my research into language as experience. I signed up for a degree in Chinese at Paris-7, while taking private lessons with François Cheung. “Splendid! Writers and intellectuals will come around to it sooner or later,” Needham said cheerfully.
CF: A visionary?
JK: The trend was already apparent: even in Bulgaria, before I left, one of the foremost critics, Tzvetan Stoyanov, a dear friend of mine, had written an imaginary dialogue between Lao Tzu and Confucius. The discrepancies between the two Chinese masters could be read as an emblematic expression of the political and ethical issues that lay behind the crisis of communism. As for Joseph Needham, I found out much later, in a posthumous biography of him, that he’d been manipulated by Soviet agents during the Korean War and fooled by trumped-up evidence of the American use of biological weapons in the conflict; he was blacklisted by the CIA as a result, persona non grata. Still, in the end his skepticism would prevail and detach him from the ideological dragooning to which so many Western intellectuals of his generation had fallen prey. Be that as it may, I remain indebted to a work that continues to enlighten me whenever I seek to grasp, with the modest approximations of a nonspecialist, the particulars of Chinese thought, history, and society.
CF: On your return from China in 1974, you wrote
About Chinese Women.
6 Did Chinese women seem to you a source of hope against totalitarian bureaucracy?
JK: The way both men and women are steeped in the Dao, their adaptability to social, financial, and political fluctuations—presently relayed by wholesale hyperconnection—are just as likely to tip Chinese society into chaos as to bring about an automation dispensing with all concern for truth and freedom. That assessment is not the same as disillusion, nor am I predicting the apocalypse. I’m pointing to the latent and the potential, trying out hypotheses against which I’m quite sure that countercurrents and antidotes exist, including the inner experience that has gathered us here tonight. Might China, its intellectuals and students who are presently turning toward Europe and our human sciences, our art and literature, and even to psychoanalysis, be able to join up—in their own way—with the necessity, imposed on us, of transvaluing the Greek-Jewish-Christian-humanist heritage with its Muslim graft? In order to refound the principles of freedom, dignity, and autonomous subjectivity and reevaluate the social bond? The creation of the Institute for Advanced Studies in European Culture, at Jiao Tong University, directed by Mr. Gao Xuanyang, of which I am honorary president, allows us to hope so…
PS: I almost never hear intellectuals talking about Europe. They’re not in Spain, they’re not in Italy, they’re not in Germany, they’re not in Holland, and to conclude, they’re not anywhere. Europe has vanished. Europe has gone under, guilty as it is of an appalling crime…One has to feel guilty to accept such a denial! I, therefore, put my foot right in it, on purpose: I don’t feel guilty! Globalization on the rampage challenges Europe’s writers and thinkers: Get a move on, what have you got to say for yourselves?
CF: I’d like to go back to what you were saying, Philippe Sollers, and you, Julia Kristeva, with regard to Freud. At what point did Freud appear on your path?
PS: A final word about the denial of European culture. It is a glaring consequence of America’s dictatorship in every domain. The colonized Europeans are the foremost lackeys of that worldwide dominion, a vise we have to try to loosen by any means we can.
JK: My father had a book by Freud in his library, the only one, I believe, to have been translated into Bulgarian before the Second World War. I hardly dared approach the incandescent spot, as Freud was reputed to be the epitome of decadent culture, sex, and the bourgeoisie; he was mentioned very rarely, and in veiled terms. It was you who got me to read him in French, before, during, and after Lacan’s seminars. Philippe was our shrink, an inveterate reader and champion of Freud. I can still visualize the pages you underlined and annotated…
I came back from China with two desires, to write a book about Chinese women—as you reminded us, Colette—and to become a psychoanalyst. The evidence was clear: the political strategies that claimed to jettison the dogma of Soviet totalitarianism and instead draw on national cultural specificity were part of the potential of that Chinese thought I was trying to fathom, but it lay dormant under the lid of a dogmatic regime. The promises of Western democracy left us free to test our loving and thinking beneath the wing of certain institutions (universities, publishing houses…), and yet those establishments also circumscribed, in an underhand way, the daring moves, the risks I felt like taking in my life. Being an exile had given me the taste for them, almost a sort of mandate. Teaching, research, and writing itself benefited from those freedoms, but they still displayed the hallmarks of their institutions. It seemed to me that psychoanalysis was the only discipline that would be able to decipher “the China” inside me and reveal my unknowns to me before I set off for the unknown elsewhere.
So I went to see Lacan. He had been due to form part of our
Tel Quel “delegation,” along with Philippe Sollers, Roland Barthes, Marcelin Pleynet, and François Wahl, but had pulled out at the last minute. “We know each other too well for me to consider an analysis with you,” I said to him. “Could you recommend one of your colleagues?” Straightaway he produced the name of his last mistress’s lover. Had he forgotten that I’d happened to witness a stormy scene between the three of them, shortly before our departure for China, where she’d been supposed to accompany us? Was he trying to tell me that anyone starting analysis in his school would be expected to engage with its incestuous networks? This was not the way I saw things, so I applied to the Paris Psychoanalytic Society on the advice of a linguist friend, an excellent connoisseur of Freud and of psychoanalysis, Ivan Fonagy—you knew him as well, Philippe. His son, Peter Fonagy, a member of the IPA,
7 has lately emerged as a recognized authority of British psychoanalysis in London. Ivan Fonagy, the father, is…
PS:…Hungarian…
JK: Yes, and very close to the Hungarian school of psychoanalysis, from Šandor Ferenczi to Imre Hermann. I don’t know whether he’d had analysis himself, but his thinking was certainly steeped in it. A communist, he realized that the confessions made by the defendants in the Hungarian Stalinist trials, after the war, had been extracted under duress.
PS: Same as in Moscow…
JK: Absolutely. Except that Fonagy uncovered the truth because he was an experienced linguist. Hungarian is not an Indo-European tongue, I know nothing about it and can’t begin to explain how a linguist managed to spot the lie. But he noticed at once that the “confessions” were expressed in the third person, not the first: it was therefore a pseudo-trial rewritten by a third party, there was no “I” who was “confessing” anything…Such a gross forgery dealt the coup de grâce to what remained of Fonagy’s communist ideals, and he began moving heaven and earth to obtain exile in France. I learned a great deal from his important work, especially his observations of language acquisition in children. He noted and described the involvement of the primal urges dependent on the erogenous zones—oral, anal, urethral—in the formation of consonants and vowels. The erotic body impresses itself on the phonemes, flesh speaks, for language is not merely a sign to convey an idea…
PS: The instinctual bases of phonation…
JK: Exactly! I used those terms and Fonagy’s research to analyze the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. This great French symbolist is reputed to be an abstruse, ineffable, metaphysical poet. He is undoubtedly all of those things. But Mallarmé is also the author of Mystery in Literature and Music and Letters, essays in which he avers that it would be possible—and necessary—to revolutionize the alexandrine, the dominant meter of French poetry, by composing and recomposing the musicality embedded in French words—repetition, alliteration, rhythms, and vocalization—to imbue verbal flows with the erotic vibrations of the speaking body, inseparable from the “message” or “theme” of the poem. We were speaking of Manet earlier: Manet and Mallarmé were linked in terms of their similar esthetics and sensual bent, as well as by Méry de Laurent, the celebrated muse and lover of both…Talking of the “instinctual bases of phonation,” we have only to listen to “Prose for Des Esseintes”:
Hyperbole! De ma mémoire
Triomphalement ne sais-tu
Te lever, aujourd’hui grimoire
Dans un livre de fer vêtu8
One has to hear the syllables, the consonants and vowels, sense the pronunciation and the energy it unleashes, hear the further meanings carried by the various syllables in a lexical, grammatical chain: père, bol, phal, ivre, livre, vêtu, veux-tu [father, bowl, phall, drunk, book, clad, will you]…As we listen, the mounting aural polyphony prompts articulation in the mouth, mobilizing tongue and lips and teeth, at the same time as the words spark further meanings and invite us to reverie, imagination, creation, in and through this act of reading. After all, the latent theme in “Prose for Des Esseintes” is none other than resurrection.
CF: In fact, one sees how this “inner experience” resides simultaneously in language and in the body, for both of you. Perhaps you could say something here about
Proust and the Sense of Time.
9
JK: Yes, Proust inspired me, in that respect, more immediately than other novelists, with his “involuntary memory” and his revelation of the sadomasochism at the heart of human attachment. And I can’t help recalling that prophetic remark of his, so casually thrown out: “Reality, the refuse of experience…” Psychoanalysis, if I may come back to it briefly, was just then seeping into linguistics as well, more discreetly and more laboriously, but the field was henceforth open…A colleague said something to me just now: “I was a linguist, and you came to our university, and we discussed Chomsky, but we didn’t know anything about Freud.” Obviously not: “we” were Cartesians, at best. And yet Benveniste had already commented on the place of language in Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. Benveniste’s notion of enunciation implied a speaking subject who was not Chomskyan-Cartesian, but alert to phenomenology, to dialogue, and also—more quietly but very clearly, for those with their ear to the ground—in the grip of unconscious instinctual logics.
PS: The body speaks, but most of the time nobody’s listening. We don’t listen to what our bodies are saying. It’s a mistake…I’d like to return to something from long ago: what Barthes wrote on the subject of a book of mine called
Event,
10 dating from 1965. He says this: “
Event looks back at a golden age, the age of awareness and utterance. Its time is that of the body as it awakens, still brand-new, neutral, untouched by remembrance or signification. Here is the Adamic dream of the total body, marked at the dawn of our modernity by Kierkegaard’s cry of ‘Give me a body!’ The total body is impersonal; identity hovers like a bird of prey high above a slumber in which we peacefully go about our real lives, our true history. As soon as we begin to wake, the bird swoops down, and it is during that dive, before it reaches us, that we must outstrip it and speak. The Sollersian awakening”—sorry, that’s how Barthes put it—“is a complex span of time, at once very long and very short. It is a nascent awakening, an awakening that takes its time being born.”
The body speaks, and it doesn’t speak just anyhow—it has to be deciphered. Here’s where analysis comes in, that splendid invention of Freud’s, for whom I have the greatest admiration, greater every day in fact, the more I hear people blurting out, in the course of ordinary conversation, enormities of which they seem entirely unaware. I don’t wander into Julia’s therapy room and say, “So, is it working?” No, I carefully steer clear of psychoanalysts, one is quite enough for me [laughter].
CF: Julia, you were saying that Philippe was your best patient.
PS: I am definitely her best patient, and it costs me very dear, actually…but it does me so much good, doesn’t it?
JK: Apparently it does…The most famous patient!
PS: But forget my case, the issue is: What do you get out of your analytical practice?
JK: What do I “get out” of it? I’ll tell you. In a book called
New Maladies of the Soul,
11 I reviewed the recent phenomena my analysands are involved in and exposed to, which are far more difficult to encapsulate than the various forms of totalitarianism: the shifting composition of the family, the new calibrations of sexual difference via the stress on psychological bisexuality, increasingly affirmed by both sexes; narcissistic deficiencies; uncertainties around identity…Result? The psychic space itself comes under threat; in some cases, it is almost destroyed. This “inner space” or “psychic interiority” that the West has pinpointed, furthered, and optimized since the time of Narcissus and Plotinus with Christic
prayer and
confession, then through the
experience elucidated by Hegel and Heidegger and also by Georges Bataille, of which Freud made an observation lab, but also the
lever empowering a new psychological survival by means of transference/countertransference—well, where are we with
that? Does
that continue to protect us from attack, whether internal (biophysiological) or external (the violence meted out by family, society, nature, history)? Or is it on the way out? Since when? Under pressure from the image? From the spectacle? From the slackening of family ties? From the absence of authority? When the dark chamber of the psychic apparatus falls apart, psychosomatic ailments ensue, bouts of depression, vandalism, or addiction, eruptions of the death drive, fanatical outbursts…The analyst who hears all this doesn’t “get” anything out of it, properly speaking, other than evidence of the need to reevaluate previous knowledge, refine her listening, and find different ways to interpret and accompany this ill-being.
What is in abeyance is the capacity to “psychalize,” if you’ll forgive the neologism: the ability to put excitation, distress, or trauma into words. To represent them by other means too, such as painting, music, dance, sport, but, above all, to name them. Because language not only has the power to displace the upset, by attenuating it, but also to interpret it and ultimately to share it, with the mutual capacity of a partner. In the absence of this modulation, inner space begins to shrink and come undone, and the impulse turns against the source-person, causing them to explode into psychosomatic sickness—if not literally, as a suicide bomber. The human becomes depersonalized until nothing is left but a destructive weapon.
CF: The decomposition-recomposition of the family unit, of fatherhood and motherhood…
JK: Yes, motherhood, which feminism has tended to disparage and doesn’t easily relate to. “We,” the secular democracies, are the only civilization that lacks a discourse on motherhood. There’s some sense of what a Jewish mother might be, or a Catholic mother, under the patronage of the Virgin Mary. But the modern mother, often a single mother in the absence of the father or a partner, has nothing to turn to but the supermarket and the pediatrician to answer the children’s needs and her own anxieties…And that, clearly, is not enough for those who end up putting their babies in the freezer…Infanticide is hardly a modern invention, it just gets more widely publicized by today’s mass media. All the same, we shouldn’t underestimate the way contemporary life conditions can aggravate the loneliness of mothers.
But, contrary to a widespread prejudice, psychoanalytic research exists and offers greater support than ever in the face of such phenomena, with better answers than other approaches. For instance, the knowledge of borderline cases and how to treat them, the early monitoring of the mother-baby relationship, the care of autistic children and the interaction with other disabilities, from elementary and junior high upward. Psychoanalysis is steeped in these concerns, which I adapt to the analyses undertaken with my adult patients. So I can be in osmosis with their complexity, before fine-tuning the tact of interpretation.
PS: A quick word. The other day, you said, “It’s funny, really: people are exposed to instant information in so-called real time, rushing past at full speed…But when it’s a question of themselves, the odd thing is you’d think they lived in a sealed can.” Amazing, that, when you come to think of it. To be relentlessly globalized at every second, and yet live stuck inside a can!
Another thing you told me—and I find this more interesting—is that you often struggle to memorize a text…
JK: Struggle with the inability to read…
PS: I read something, and then I can’t remember what it was. Those other people aren’t suffering from Alzheimer’s, unless it’s very early onset, but…This is something that absolutely fascinates me, because I believe it to be one of the great symptoms of our time. We could conduct an experiment: I hand out a text of about twenty lines, by whoever you please, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, say; I collect it up after ten minutes, to be generous, and then I ask everybody to tell me what they just read. I’m sure the results would be astounding. I’ve coined a word for that, the verb
oublire, which allows me to say to someone who fancies they know me: “I see,
vous m’avez oublu” [
laughter].
12 And it’s true. You often quote the same complaint from your analysands: I read, but can never concentrate on it, or I can’t recall the book I just read. Everyone is assumed to be a reader, to know how to read and all that. I beg to differ. I think that nowadays we’re all engaged in a gigantic anti-inner experience.
JK: The people who’ve “forread” you are caught in Sollersian hatelove…They don’t ever appear on my couch. They “forread” you because they approach your writing with a mixture of love and hate. You have a lot of readers, but you never indulge their unhappiness, you challenge it, and they find that hurtful.
PS: Well, so they forread me…Hang on a second, that’s why I set such store by poetry. In fact, the antidote is surely to learn poems by heart. Defend yourself against every onslaught by learning poetry by heart. Some people do feel that way, though not many: they recite Baudelaire and La Fontaine to themselves…
JK: There you’re touching on something we haven’t sufficiently discussed, we only mentioned it in passing: the role of language, of style, in experience. Was it Wittgenstein who said that experience can be shown but not said? Or more precisely, “There is what is inexpressible, and this shows itself, it is the Mystical.” “That which can be shown cannot be said.” “Clearly, ethics cannot be put into words.” He brilliantly defends a certain experience. I venture to claim that there are other kinds. In common with the post-Freudians, and the moderns you invited to write in Tel Quel and L’Infini, magazines that shed considerable light on those thinkers, some of us—including myself, and you too, I believe, in a different way—work on the assumption that that can be uttered. Not definitively, or not totally, but it’s a part of experience to wager on that being sayable. From upstream, in writing, in psychoanalysis…
I was looking just now for the famous sentence that preceded us in this wager, the one you comment on in Dante et la traversée de l’écriture, if I’m not mistaken. It goes something like this: “He who is ignorant of his language serves idols, and he who sees his language sees God.” That’s crucial: language as a link, a bridge to interpret what is experienced as loss of self, followed by the rebirth of the self. Rebirth of whatever would remain lost in the absence of language: whatever might, without it, be reduced to “talking points” or be stifled by repression or lead to the most barbaric actings out. Psychoanalysis has come to occupy this precise and unexpected place, so as not to leave it to the managerial mercies of politics or institutionalized religion. But instead to reinstate this verbal microcosm in the freedom of the speaking subject, by listening to the unsayable rendered sayable, without end. By restoring it to the experience of subjectivization itself, rather than to any other institution, thus inviting the analysand to locate and live out her singularity. There is little appreciation—or a mistaken one or none—of the degree of transfiguration of freedom, of the human, wrought by psychoanalysis when it is understood like that. Are psychoanalysts themselves aware of it?
PS: What do you think [laughter]?
JK: Aside from that, I’ve also permitted myself to adopt a language that differs from the conceptual idioms of philosophy or theory. While always being a foreigner abroad, and participating in the mixture of languages thrown up by globalization like a rerun of Babel, I’ve allowed myself that first-person utterance that we call fiction.
Why and how did it come about, this authorization? It was all down to you, because you encouraged me from the start…Not to write the way you do, since your artistry with and mastery of the language and literary memory of France are completely beyond me, and any attempt to emulate, compete, or genuflect on that terrain would be laughable, to say the least. No, you encouraged me to dress the seizing of experience with my taste for the sensuality that infuses words and the wanderings of the imagination: in short, to dress it in narrative. “Hagamos cuenta,” as Teresa of Avila put it: “Let us tell stories, the better to understand.” Those words could have been mine. Or again: “I regard it as impossible that love would ever be content to remain stationary.”
After that, my personal analysis detached me from conceptual French and enabled me to talk of affects in this second language that became, as a result, ever less foreign. David played a decisive part in my choice of the novel form. Living with a child who’s learning French as his birth language means becoming familiar with his “instinctual bases,” as taste, smell, touch, and hearing infuse words, grammar, and reasoning. I settled myself in the novel, knowing that, though my works would be unlikely to rival those of Kafka, Proust, Colette, or Sollers, they were nevertheless in equilibrium with the life and death drives, which the dramas of existence never fail to rouse in me; knowing that this equilibrium that I try to “set to music” could be apprehended by the reader, so he could think it, and also feel it, in French. To bring to existence in a novel that inner experience we’ve been talking about, fraught with love, reflection, motherhood, commitment, desires—that’s what at the present moment seems to me the most desirable, the most difficult, and the most right thing to be doing.
CF: That sensation of exile is very interesting, actually, one can perfectly well feel like an exile or a foreigner without ever stepping out of one’s country or language. But with you, Julia, your genuine exile has acted as a stimulus…
JK: Could I read out a few lines that have a bearing on foreignness in language? Would it be possible to answer by reading a few pages, later on, toward the end of our conversation?
PS: One is exiled in humanity. There’s not a single interesting writer, whether Kafka, Joyce, whoever you care to name, or Mallarmé, or Rimbaud, or others, or Dante, who didn’t feel a deep metaphysical banishment by the very fact of being human.
JK: There, that’s experience in the strong sense of the word. The verb used by Dante, trasumanar, means “to pass though the human”…That’s the sense in which writing is an experience of exile. Every writer feels it when he wrenches himself out of his so-called normative humanity and innovates, but only Dante formulated it with such absolute concision. Mallarmé says the same thing in another way…
PS: They all do, every one of them…
JK: Mallarmé, he aspired to write a “total word, new, alien to language”. And then Aragon…
PS: Every one of them…
JK: Aragon confessed to living “in a strange land inside my very land”…This poet reinvented the national tongue.
PS: All of these writers dreamed up their salvation, while threatened with being wiped out. Human beings are sleepwalkers, sound asleep, and it’s not natural, Pascal thought. Voltaire held the same opinion, really: “They turned devout,” he says, “for fear of being nothing.” When Manet showed Olympia and The Luncheon on the Grass, the whole of Paris flocked to spit on and insult his pictures. Manet was taken aback, because, being quite naive, he thought of himself as a producer of the nicest classical painting. He couldn’t get over people ganging up to insult him. He died at the age of fifty-one, which is pretty young, after all. He said that sustained abuse crushes you in the long run, makes you lose all taste for life. Ah, that’s where inner experience has to be worth its salt, because…Would you like to see my insults collection? There’s smoke coming out of the computer…[laughter].
JK: That’s your own foreignness in French, and that of many writers. But you push that outsiderness to an extreme that rattles people, because you invite them to an ultimately joyous freedom to transcend rather than to belong. Which involves a certain solitude, the shunning of massification…
I’d like to return to that other foreignness, linked to globalization and overlapping with yours, but not the same as yours. One can be a foreigner in one’s own language in order to reawaken it, to restore full potential to it. And one can be a foreigner by being swept up in the flow of hyperconnections, company relocations, globalization. To be caught in the maelstrom of languages, switching from one to the other, is like dying and being reborn, I’ve said so more than once tonight. But it can also be a hopelessly painful experience. Some of my students have adopted a foreign language (French on occasion, English by obligation) to apply like a plaster on top of old childhood and family hurts: the foreign language helps them to forget, for a while. Then this remedy doesn’t pass the test of time, the person sinks into depression before turning up at the hospital of the Cité Universitaire, where I find them somatic or suicidal, because they no longer possess their own words. The newly acquired tongue is no better than a dead skin, a borrowed code that fails to internalize the person’s affects. Until it has incorporated the unconscious, it is not a language.
But lately a new human species has emerged, speaking several languages: the new Homo europeanus, the Erasmus student—a kaleidoscopic individual who may not completely master all of the twenty-eight tongues, but has a fair grasp of several. And can even play around with them, with a creativity that heralds a startling time to come: the time of federal Europe, something entirely unsuspected by the bulk of depressed Europeans.
PS: We ought to finish on Heidegger’s
zeitigt, “time-making.”
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JK: Shall we? All right. Fifteen more minutes?
PS: No, ten [laughter]!
JK: OK. I was talking about being a foreigner inside language as an allusion to two extracts from past texts of mine…The first of these concerns the relationship between French and Bulgarian, the second deals with the experience of death.
It’s no use my trying to come back to life in French; for almost fifty years now my French taste has not always been able to resist the jolts of an early music coiled around a memory that is still vigilant. From these connected vessels there emerges a strange language, a stranger to itself, neither from here nor from there, a monstrous intimacy. Like the characters in Proust’s refound time, whose long years of voluntary and involuntary memories are embodied in immense spaces, I am a monster of the crossroads.
At the intersection of two languages, and of at least two lengths of time, I mold an idiom that seeks what is obvious so as to hollow out pathetic allusions there and, under the smooth guise of these French words polished like the stone of a holy water font, to uncover the dark gilt of Orthodox icons. Giant or dwarf, the monster who struggles out of them takes pleasure in never being content with itself, at the same time as it exasperates the natives—those of the country of origin as well as those of the receiving country.
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And now for a passage taken from Their Gaze Pierces Our Shadows, a collection of the letters between myself and Jean Vanier, the Catholic founder of L’Arche, which set up care homes for the disabled in 140 countries, back in 1964. When I arrived in France, as you witnessed, exile put me into the hospital. I got better thanks to you, among others. Here’s the text:
I stared at my hands holding the pen, at my face in the mirror. I was not myself, someone else had taken the place of what had been me, I wasn’t that other nor was I my previous self, having died in my native language and unsure whether I could survive in the adoptive space of French. Analysis would reconcile me with both those specters, and since then I’ve existed in French alone, as best I could, not without sporadic auscultation of the still-warm corpse of my mother tongue. But the experience of death, symbolically so intense that it was felt by me as real, took hold inside. When David was born, our early worries could not be named, and we had to behave as though all was well. Until his first coma, two weeks of hanging between life and death, real death this time. A few years later, the same ordeal. I tried to keep going by reading books. And it was on a hospital mattress, at the foot of a hospital cot, that I wrote the pages of my work on Hannah Arendt that examine the difference the philosopher draws between physiological processes and the vital impulse, that is, what the subject and her group have to say and tell about it, and the pages about motherhood as the freedom to begin, the beginning of a singular, ephemeral life, beginning of the self, too, the mother’s self-commencement. On both occasions when David came out of his coma, we embarked on a new life, in the grip of that rebirth. Is that a pleasure? Indeed it is, but lined with anguish, softened with serenity, a hope.
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CF: Thank you, Julia. A truly beautiful text. Shall we close on that? We’d planned for each of you to say something about the other’s books, but it’s getting a bit late…
PS: One minute…
JK: I thought you might discuss the verb
to timeper,
16 which you used in the context of Bach.
PS: No, no…Just a minute. I expect you feel the same as me, and I feel pretty moved. Now, to be moved, in my case, flips at once into the mood that Italian has such a fine word for: sprezzatura, “offhandedness.”
JK: Here, look…
PS: What is it? Oh, how sweet of you…
JK: Not really…but “being moved,” I understand…Emotion’s tough, it abolishes time, it goes on and on, outside time…Anyway, we’d agreed I was to xerox you those pages in large type [laughter from PS].
PS: Yes, so this is about time, in Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. If you’re agreeable, shall I wind us down in music? Here goes:
Nobody ever says so, but little Bach was a particularly playful, mischievous, cheeky, and fugitive child. Outside of his precocious passion for music and his grave demeanor in church, he was always to be seen scampering about the countryside in the vicinity of Eisenach. Who had never watched him as he raced, scurried, swooped, stopped dead, dashed forward again like the clappers, fell back on the grass with arms outflung, sprang up, and ran headlong till running out of breath, when he would sit down and have a long think before resuming his antics, to the despair of his mother, who could make no sense of his way of tempering, or more exactly
timepering, regulating the tempest, and that awful crucifixion business. To resuscitate the spirals, that’s the journey. And that is just what darkens the countenance of the Prussian king one day when the aged Bach shows up. Everyone is in the dining room. A footman enters, whispers to the king. He stands up and says: “Gentlemen, old Bach has arrived.” So everybody stands up, since the king stood up. They don’t care, of course: old Bach will be sat before the keyboard. Nobody wonders if he’s had supper. He traveled through driving snow, and he’s got to perform, he didn’t come here to eat. That’s what darkens the countenance of the king: old Bach’s dizzy, childish joy for all to see, Bach on whom time shall have no dominion, his uninterrupted prayer, his movement of perpetual adoration, in short, his love.
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CF: So we’ll bring this encounter to an end on that word: love.