When taking stock of contemporary critical thought, it is impossible not to come across Julia Kristeva (1941), the foreign student who arrived in Paris midway through the sixties. She came to stay, always in the eye of the storm: semiotics, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and feminism, with de rigeur forays into the novel and so many other literary and theoretical genres that we might say of her (and I think she would take it the right way), as of other polymaths, that she was a jack of all trades and a master of none. She was no great writer, nor was she an original theorist, but she was perhaps the most vivid embodiment of the spirit of an age whose currents are still making an impact on our own century.
I am not a great admirer of La Révolution du langage poétique. L’avant garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (1974) due to its scholarly nature; it is the vade mecum of a school marked by the reading—Churrigueresque and simplified at once, and encoded in avant-garde terms, no less—of those whom critics writing in Tel Quel (1960-1982) had built up as masters, with the legitimacy lent to them by Borges.
The most original contribution that the Bulgarians Kristeva and Todorov brought to the linguistic turn—Russian formalism read in its mother tongue—was insufficiently influential: Chomsky and Barthes had greater resonance. Both, in turn, were readers of Jakobson, who had already formed part of the Western tradition for decades. Bakhtin, the Slavic novelty, began to be read the following decade and does not appear in the bibliography of La Révolution du langage poétique. On the other hand, Sigmund Freud is already disquietingly present.
As psychoanalytical practice became the essential drive behind her writing, Kristeva gradually left behind poststructuralist theoretical radicalism and adopted the more conventional but fairer positions of the same humanism that was so hated in prior years. Nonetheless, Female Genius, her trilogy dedicated to Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, and Colette, strikes me as Kristeva’s most fundamental (and perplexing) contribution to modern criticism.
The first volume, dedicated to the Jewish political philosopher from Berlin, is the most interesting of the three by far, because in Arendt (1906-1975) Kristeva’s “politics of the spirit” is most visible. While Female Genius is pleasantly surprising, as we shall see, for its reluctance to rely on identity, only in the case of Arendt’s Jewishness does Kristeva find a “gift” similar to that of her femininity, in an author who, like the psychoanalyst Klein and the novelist Colette, kept her distance from the feminism that developed from Beauvoir and The Second Sex (1949). Curiously, it is Arendt, who never had children, who gives rise, given her unerring confidence in community (which distances her both from the extreme individualism attributed to liberalism and from libertine excesses, her disapproval of which passes her off as conservative), to one of the most relevant subjects of Female Genius: the question of motherhood as a component that, at the time, Kristeva found lacking from feminist discourse. Here and here alone, in recognizing this absence with new verbs and declensions, the new feminists have paid her heed.
In The Human Condition, cited by Kristeva, it is Arendt who demands a “total experience of the fact of birth” because, in each birth, life itself is continually reborn, and with it the whole life of the spirit, which, for the German philosopher, is nourished by the plurality of others. Thus, Heidegger’s controversial pupil rejects those conventions reduced to Humanity, to Oneness, the Father, the Mother, or the Self itself. The miracle of birth is followed only by the joy of life, made manifest only through thought. And this manner of thinking is a shared endeavor that, for Arendt, allows for no particularisms, necessarily including both old and new feminisms.
The volume dedicated to Klein (1882-1960), the British psychoanalyst of Austrian Jewish origins, was the hardest for me to read, not only due to my own ignorance, but also because of my distaste for autotelic doctrines designed so as not to be refuted, psychoanalysis included. Consequently, Kristeva assumes that the reader entirely shares her creed and has at hand the theological tools with which to unpack it with all its hoaxes and minutiae. In spite of this, it is clear that Klein’s genius lay in rejecting the patriarchal Freud and placing the mother at the center of the child’s psychic formation, sharing affective essence with the father. Like Arendt, Klein puts forward a communal vision of humanity.
Kristeva concludes Female Genius with Colette (1873-1954). The great French writer was, at once, an example of emancipation and an anti-feminist; hers was, perhaps, a platonic feminism, not infrequently sapphic, eager to limit access to the port of the Island of Lesbos. She believed woman’s sensitive singularity was superior to man’s warrior vulgarity. Women’s right to vote or to take sides during the German occupation of France meant, for Colette, meddling in the neverending Trojan War waged among men. Between 1940 and 1944, this writer was concerned with ensuring the black market, palliating the hardships of the war, could supply bread and salt for the tables of needy French mothers; likewise, this seductress of her stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, saw the sexual initiation of young men as a mature woman’s prerogative.
From a spirit as academic as Kristeva’s, the failure to clearly and convincingly define the meaning of the “female genius,” to which she alludes throughout three volumes and 1,500 pages, cannot have been a simple lapse in memory. At any rate, the harmony between life and thought she finds in her three heroines is not, strictly speaking, female. This being the case, I suspect that for Kristeva as for Michelet, the true genius possesses the two sexes of the spirit, which, following Arendt, is explicable because in “the primordial difference between man and woman lies the starting point of all plurality”; in her reading of Klein, there is a “psychic bisexuality” in which to trust in order to attain the human being’s full potential; finally, in Colette’s right-wing anarchism, feminine servitude (from which she liberated herself with absolute determination) and the corset of marriage are yokes destined to be cast off when women and men alike give themselves over, with absolute freedom, to the sensory realm of pleasure. Obliquely, Julia Kristeva refused to read from a perspective of gender (and therein lies her importance to literary criticism), and Female Genius forms part of that androgynous tradition that has subcutaneously underlain the world since the earliest religions and mythologies.
2022
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
