Julia Kristeva and Female Genius
When [women] possess genius, I believe that it makes a more original impression than in us.
—Diderot, Sur les femmes
In the four decades that followed these portraits of Hölderlin, French theory showed little interest in the issue of genius. But at the very end of the century the notion makes a dramatic and unexpected return in female guise with Julia Kristeva’s three biographical studies of Hannah Arendt (1999), Melanie Klein (2000), and Colette (2002). Published under the collective title Le Génie féminin, these biographies make no explicit connection with either Jouve or Blanchot, though three lines from Jouve’s translation of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets provide an epigraph for the Melanie Klein volume. Nor is Kristeva concerned with insanity and its possible relations to genius. Her perspective is, nonetheless, predominantly psychoanalytic: each of the books describes Kristeva as a “psychoanalyst,” as well as a professor at the University of Paris VII and docteur ès lettres. Collectively, the trilogy offers a psychoanalytically grounded account of gender and femininity as part of its reflection on genius. Genius takes a new, explicitly gendered form and it does so thanks to the mix of literary criticism, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis that is characteristic of the later years of “French theory.”
There is a certain boldness in Kristeva’s approach, which, against the grain of previous tradition, treats female genius as a given rather than defensively pleading the cause. Her generic title is a defiant assertion that women can be geniuses too, her three subjects being offered as ostensive proof for her claim. There is also a certain defiance in the very recourse to the notion of genius, which in the context of French theory, Kristeva acknowledges as a “provocative hyperbole.”1 Hannah Arendt herself said in The Human Condition (1958) that the term smacks of idolatry and that twentieth-century artists had preferred to emphasize craftsmanship or competence as the necessary conditions for artistic production.2 But, as we shall see, it is Arendt who supplies Kristeva with some of the key arguments that she uses to justify genius. Indeed, the word “justification” is much closer to the spirit of Kristeva’s project than any other. Like Jouve and Blanchot, Kristeva eschews explanation and treats genius as an object of celebration—or, to use her own word, “admiration.” And like them, she approaches her subject through biographical example rather than theoretical abstraction. What Hölderlin, Nerval, and Tasso were for Jouve, Arendt, Klein, and Colette are for Kristeva, albeit on a much larger scale, since each of her biographies runs to several hundred pages.
EXEMPLARY SINGULARITIES
What is new about Kristeva’s justification of genius is the case she makes for its necessity, a necessity that arises from the social, cultural, and existential conditions of the modern world. “Genius” has a specific application in our age, says Kristeva, and is now a “therapeutic term” that saves us from “dying of uniformity.” Whereas Barthes and Sartre condemned genius for its complicity with contemporary cultural values, Kristeva regards it as a necessary corrective to them: “the term ‘genius’ seems to me to designate those paradoxical occurrences, singular experiences and surprising extremes that arise, despite everything, in our increasingly standardized universe.” Norms are everywhere, and individual character is now an exception of which the singularity of genius is an extreme but vital instance, opening up human existence to the possibility of meaning in ways that are capable of transforming the lives of all those who encounter it. The examples proposed by Kristeva are precious because they suggest “that our existence is indefinitely renewable by means of the extraordinary.”3 Genius is restored to exemplarity and its extraordinary character offered for emulation.
The singularity that Kristeva identifies as the central feature of genius is not innate so much as achieved, and the work of genius is the means whereby its exemplar realizes herself as a subject. To read the life of a genius as these biographies present it is to track “the forming of a subject,” and to be invited to “attempt an analogous surpassing of oneself.” It is to discover the possibility of becoming a qui rather than a quod, a “who” rather than a “what,” a “someone” rather than an “anyone.” This distinction (if not the precise terms) is central to Hannah Arendt’s thinking—of which Kristeva’s argument can be seen as a continuation—even though neither Arendt, nor Klein, nor Colette had any interest of her own in the issue of genius. Genius in Kristeva’s version is an extreme form of the constitution of subjectivity as qui that she urges everyone to aspire to. It is such ecceitas (a term she takes from Duns Scotus) that provides the necessary antidote to the modern “maladies of the soul,” conditions that Kristeva explored a few years earlier in a work of that title and for which she is proposing genius as a cure.4 Genius in this argument both goes against the grain of social norms and once again constitutes a model of psychic health.
The singularity of genius is exemplified in the manner in which the genius-subject constitutes her own subjectivity through her life and her work. But it is also written into the intellectual practices she adopts: narrative rather than theory, relation rather than autonomy, example rather than system. None of Kristeva’s geniuses is a theorist, though each—Arendt and Klein in particular—is a major thinker. However, “far from being a ‘professional thinker,’ Hannah Arendt enacts her thinking in the midst of her life.” Her criterion for evaluating the human condition is narrative rather than theoretical, and this narrative is pragmatic rather than poetic. “Arendt rehabilitates the praxis of narrative,” and the goal of human life is to transform mere biological zôè into meaningful, narratable bios.5
Equally pragmatic, Melanie Klein left it to her followers to draft the theory that bears her name. In Kristeva’s account Melanie Klein was primarily a clinician and worked by intuition: “a courageous clinician and in no sense a ‘maître à penser’.” Her work takes the form of case studies (of Dick or Richard, for example), and narrative is once again the medium of her thought whose novelty is, however, nothing less than “a psychoanalysis of the capacity to think.”6 The same absence of abstract thought characterizes the work of Colette who stands out from her novelist contemporaries Proust and Gide for her indifference to theoretical discussions of the novel, whether her own or any other. In pursuing genius through the medium of biography, Kristeva is responding not only to the singularity that each genius-subject represents, but also to their own preference for pragmatism and narrative over theory.
RELATIONALITY
The second feature common to each of Kristeva’s female geniuses is the preference for relation in their thinking, a preference that follows as a kind of logic from their refusal of abstraction. For Arendt there is no “solitary Ego,” and the transcendence of the individual subject is achieved by “acting and speaking with others.”7 The fullest elaboration of relation and its importance in human existence is to be found in Melanie Klein’s notion of object relations. The human subject comes into being through its relations to objects (the good breast, the bad breast) and to others, but in particular through its complex negotiations with the mother figure. In Kristeva’s estimation, it is the mark of Melanie Klein’s genius not only to have had this insight, but also to have achieved her own, real-life negotiation of this relation. Genius is its outcome, and in her accounts of Colette and of Melanie Klein, Kristeva makes the maternal relation a key feature of their individual development.
As in the case of Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein’s own thinking provides Kristeva with the basis for her identification of this dimension of genius, and her reading of Colette is explicitly Kleinian in this regard: “Wonderfully illuminated by the perspicacity of Melanie Klein, Colette’s genius carves out … a path that breaks through her own guilt to a more archaic oedipal relation with an all-powerful mother, and transforms the angry stance, … and even the infantile psychoses, into a reparation.” The breakthrough (dépassement) develops into a form of female sexuality that Kristeva regards as a further achievement in its own right: “In a general intuition, Colette senses that by appropriating her mother, and creating the mythical figure of Sido, it will become possible for her to definitively transmute perversion [père-version] into ‘mère-version,’ to reconcile herself to her slightly humiliated femininity, and finally to settle into the selfless sensuality of a writing that will henceforth be her destiny.” On the basis of this “intuition”—expressed through Kristeva’s punning on the auditory overtones of “perversion” as pronounced in French to suggest a maternal alternative—Colette pursues a path that both reveals and fulfils a female sexuality, which for most women remains unrealized, but whose pursuit is a manifestation of Colette’s genius: “it is the journey to the end of the night of her passions, which she stamps with her true genius.”8
In Kristeva’s eyes this genius is most manifest in Colette’s physical relation to the material world. Her achievement is to have devised a form of writing that is multiply relational, an “interpenetration of language and world, style and the body.” The material world is palpable in her writing, and the relation between words and living things exists equally as one between Colette’s own life and her work. This is not just a matter of Kristeva’s choice of critical approach (the-life-and-work), but is presented as an exceptional feat, which in and of itself demonstrates the genius of Colette. If life and work are indistinguishable, they are so to an unusual degree in the case of Colette because hers is a life “entirely remade in and through writing.”9
Kristeva is more lavish in her use of the term genius for Colette than she is for either of her other two genius-subjects, and this seems to stem from Colette’s multiple and entirely untheorized exemplification of relation. In fact, relation proves to be contagious, and Kristeva repeatedly writes her own relation to Colette’s work into her narrative as she recalls first reading the novels in Bulgaria with the aid of a French dictionary, compares Colette’s arrival in the capital from the provinces to her own experience of arriving in Paris as a foreigner, or acknowledges her initiation into gardening through Colette’s horticultural lexis.
MATERNITY
Kristeva’s discussion of genius is guided first and foremost by her own admiration, expressed in her choice of subjects and by her own elaborations of their thinking. But, as has already become clear, her treatment of those subjects reveals certain recurrent motifs, which collectively suggest a definition—if not a full-blown theory—of female genius. Following on from the collective title of the biographical trilogy, the issue is directly addressed in the first volume, which opens with an introductory essay titled “Female Genius.” This introduction sets out the case, which the concluding essay of the third volume completes by outlining a response to the question posed in its title, “Does Female Genius Exist?”
Kristeva starts out from the ungendered and uncontentious core notion of genius as exceptional, but she goes on to make the quite specific claim that this exceptionality is proven by the necessity of reading the work of genius as being rooted in the biographical experience of its creator: “Let us call ‘geniuses’ those whose lives we are compelled to narrate because they are inseparable from their inventions.” Genius is characterized by its representation in the form of the biography it elicits; and biography is the response to the admirer’s sense that behind the invention of genius there is a “someone” whose example is an invitation to “be someone” in turn. The exceptionality of genius is “the most complex and the most seductive” form of the singularity on which survival in an automatized world henceforth depends.10 This seduction and the resulting admiration constitute a further form of the relationality that Kristeva associates with genius.
So far, so gender-neutral. But the modern era has tipped the balance toward female genius by creating unprecedented conditions that make genius available to women. The twentieth century required a female work force and produced the means of controlling the fertility that had previously excluded women—whether in reality or because of prejudice—from the activities in which they might excel. Added to this, twentieth-century feminism granted women the chance to assert their own difference, whether in language, sexuality, or politics. But Kristeva takes the argument a stage further by claiming that motherhood, which previously debarred women from genius, is now its essential feature. Victor Hugo may have declared that “[t]here is something maternal in genius,” but for him this maternal quality was little more than a variant of the predominantly fraternal capacity of genius to welcome others into its abode.11 For Kristeva, by contrast, motherhood lies at the very core of female genius and, as the cases of Klein and Colette have already indicated, is manifest in a variety of forms.
The first of these is Hannah Arendt’s privileging of birth as the model for the absolute beginning that ensures the uniqueness of every individual. Unlike Melanie Klein and Colette, Hannah Arendt was not herself a mother, but she makes the inaugural force of natality (this is her term) the fundamental condition for becoming a “someone.” In Kristeva’s view it is the mark of Arendt’s genius—especially as a woman, and even more especially a Jewish woman in the shadow of the Holocaust—to have conceived of freedom in these terms. Melanie Klein was a mother several times over, and became a psychoanalyst as a means of emerging from a particularly difficult relationship with her own mother. According to Kristeva, this dual experience of motherhood is integral to Klein’s reflection on the infant’s relation to the mother and the basis for her groundbreaking conception of object relations. More importantly for Kristeva, the Kleinian approach allows for a gendering of the child’s development to provide an account of the specific experience of girls who are notably absent from Freud’s male-oriented Oedipus theory.
Each of Kristeva’s women geniuses had to break a mold established by a powerful male precursor—Freud in the case of Melanie Klein, Heidegger in the case of Arendt, and a rather more anodyne Willy in the case of Colette. To this extent they subscribe to a common pattern of genius, and although Kristeva describes Arendt and Melanie Klein as “insubordinate” and as “dissidents in the worlds into which they were born, prey to the hostility of prescriptive coteries, but also capable of fighting mercilessly to develop and defend their original ideas,” much the same might be said about any male counterpart.12 But when Melanie Klein breaks with Freud as the “father” of psychoanalysis to become its “mother,” she does so by demonstrating the extreme complexity of the relation between mothers and daughters, a complexity that makes the daughter’s necessary break with her mother a far more difficult and demanding negotiation than is the boy’s necessary break with either mother or father.
Motherhood lies at the heart of Melanie Klein’s object relations, but it is also the model for the psychoanalytic relation between analyst and analysand as described by Kristeva in her own development of Kleinian thinking. Maternity offers women their first encounter with a unique other: for women, “[t]he child is the first other,” and motherhood becomes an apprenticeship in the recognition of the singularity of another being. The psychoanalyst shares this “maternal vocation,” and psychoanalysis is portrayed by Kristeva as a “[c]ontinuous creation of alterity,” in which the analyst is simultaneously “reborn and allows the analysand to be reborn.” Which returns us to Arendt’s topic of natality, but with the addition of the double-gendering that follows from the bisexual identity of women, argued for by Kristeva on the basis both of Kleinian theory and of Colette’s notion of a “mental hermaphroditism.” The regendering of psychoanalysis also applies to the male analyst whose role requires him to acknowledge “the feminine and even the maternal that he carries within himself.”13 The task of the maternal analyst—whether male or female—is to facilitate the emergence of the singularity of which the genius is the supreme example.
All this comes very close to suggesting not just that female genius is possible, but that genius can now only be female. For better or for worse, says Kristeva, the twenty-first century will be female—and if it is not to be for worse, this will be because of the distinctive qualities of female genius. Female genius as it emerges in Kristeva’s three examples is peculiarly well suited to the conditions of the third millennium, which—this still according to Kristeva—will be “that of individual possibilities, or it will not be.”14 In their different ways, in their different domains, and by means of their different strategies, Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Colette each exemplify the singularity that is the hallmark of genius and that will be the key to survival in the future that Kristeva envisages for contemporary civilization.
There is, however, a paradox in Kristeva’s version of genius, since she also indicates that while preparing the way for the future, her three female geniuses belong to a past that no longer exists. The era of “geniuses” and their accompanying systems is over, she says, and has been succeeded by one that now takes the form of “chance and personal risk, and intersecting networks of exchange.” Colette (b. 1873), Melanie Klein (b. 1882), and Hannah Arendt (b. 1906) all belong to a time when the twentieth-century conditions for female genius were not yet in place, and they demonstrated their own genius through the manner in which they broke out of the circumstances in which their respective worlds sought to constrain them. The examples of ecceitas that they offer are their legacy to a changed world in which genius has, as it were, become democratized as the capacity of each individual subject to invent her own sexuality: “this is where his or her genius lies, and it is quite simply his or her creativity.”15 Or, in a slightly different but equally democratic formulation, genius shares with all singularity the character of its incommensurability. If genius remains special, it is no longer because it is restricted to a small number of exceptional figures, but because its specialness is something to which each and every person can—and, as Kristeva insists, must—aspire.
It might seem something of an anticlimax to discover that the conclusion to Kristeva’s argument is that if women can be geniuses, then anyone can. But this misses the contention that it is women geniuses who have made it possible for the rest of us to seek to develop our own creative singularity. Put another way, we owe the best chance of achieving singularity to the discourse in which women have excelled and which calls for particularly feminine qualities in its practitioners, namely, psychoanalysis. Kristeva’s account of female genius is essentially psychoanalytic, and this is due to something more than the accident of her own disciplinary preferences. Psychoanalysis may favor women practitioners, but its importance in Kristeva’s argument derives from her view that it has the capacity to provide a better understanding of our contemporary world than any other form of thought. In combining Melanie Klein’s psychoanalysis with Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy and her own literary-critical reading of Colette’s texts, Kristeva has woven three discursive strands together to consider afresh the topic of genius. The result is a mutually reinforcing justification of genius and of the implicitly gendered psychoanalytic language in which it is rehabilitated.