Revolutionaries without a Revolution: The Case of Julia Kristeva

Abstract

Hirtler, Kurt, Ola Stahl, and Ika Willis, eds. 2003. Mourning Revolution. Special issue of Parallax 9.2, April-June 2003. New York: Routledge. $100 electronic copy. 113 pp. Kristeva, Julia. 2000. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. $60.00 hc. $19.50 sc. 288 pp. Kristeva, Julia. 2002. Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press. $34.00 hc. $19.50 sc. 392 pp. I tell you this in truth: this is not only the end of this here but also and first of that there, the end of history, the end of the class struggle, the end of philosophy, the [End Page 188] death of God, the end of religions, the end of Christianity and morals . . .the end of the subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse now, I tell you . . . the end of literature, the end of painting, art as a thing of the past, the end of psychoanalysis, the end of the university, the end of phallocentrism and phallogocentrism, and I don't know what else? (Jacques Derrida, "Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy") The Rhetoric of Ending and the Mourning to Come Certainly Derrida's inventory is far from being complete, but it recreates with gripping poignancy the frenzy in which death certificates have been meted out to all repositories of thought, of hope, and of life writ large. By virtue of enumerating, enlisting, and discerning the far reaches of the rhetoric of ending and of the apocalyptic imagination underpinning it, Derrida's account itself can be said to participate in what it seeks to outflank in the first place. Yet, perhaps Derrida cannot be held accountable for the hairsplitting entrapments of this discursive graveyard-whistling; perhaps this is, after all, the crime (or logic) of philosophy itself—a discourse that cannot help folding back or receding into a reflection on its genesis and, by implication, on its ending. More than anything else, perhaps philosophy is, as Derrida himself intones, fond of quasimythical metadiscourses that can intransigently, irascibly, and in an "overlordly" way declare its dissolution or, to use Derrida's own word, its cadavérissement (literally, its reduction to a corpse). Not infrequently, the philosophical rhetoric of ending has unwittingly overlooked its implication in an indissoluble contradiction that, while contending that the ending has been reached, not only participates in it but also lives through it, that is, in many respects survives it in order to announce it. "Who (or what) would announce the end were there nothing to be announced?" Of course, such a rhetorical question implies that, should there be an end or an apocalypse, no one would survive it in order to report it: the end would be the end of everything, period! "For that is also," as Derrida rightly conjectures, "the end of the metalanguage concerning eschatological language" (81). I am not here suggesting that there is no hors texte, no outside, from which the end could be announced by a meta-being, only that there is, practically, no ending whatsoever that humanity can pronounce or announce, let alone ascertain. On the other hand, "Who (or what) would announce the end were there nothing to be announced?" is a question that also implies not only that the end (associated, for so long, with the end of the millennium) proved not to be an end—only a mere illusion, which is exactly the position held by Jean Baudrillard—but also that nothing really will ever end without leaving remains, without coming back under the banner of [End Page 189] "hauntology," a theme Derrida belabors in Specters of Marx. By and large, whether we have missed the end or fallen prey to the returning ghosts of our precursors, it is important to stress (1) that the rhetoric of...