contents  

Tome Kitli±ski

Kristevan polylogic: the subject in the process of strangeness

Amnesty International, the multi-national and non-state organisation, invited the most eminent contemporary thinkers to give a series of lectures in Oxford on the subject of human rights. Is not the multiplicity of identities which characterised nearly every speaker nothing else than a sign of the times? Born in Sephardic-Ashkenazy families in Oran, Algeria, Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous have, in the style of the ancients, crossed the boundary between philosophy and art, and are developing their creativity in the International College of Philosophy, which they have set up in Paris; the New Yorker Edward Said is a Palestinian expelled from Israel, educated in Egypt, the author of works about colonialism in literature, and a political activist. The richest itinerary, however, seems to be that of Julia Kristeva, the only one of AI's guests in Oxford to have been brought up behind the Iron Curtain, both among the French-speaking Dominican Sisters in Sofia and in the Komsomol. A naturalised French citizen, she is a Professor at the Denis Diderot University in Paris 7 and of Columbia University, and she is developing heterodox thought on the border of philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis and art; Kristeva writes about herself: 'In my French you can hear the polyphony of languages, while my thought is a mixture of logical systems, dragging me towards the dramaturgy of bodies and worlds in a conflict which I am trying to harmonise.' (1)

Is Kristeva therefore 'predestined' to create a theory of multiple intra- and inter-subjectivity, which would place her as the third way between the post-Aristotelian absolutisation of identity in the subject, and the negation of subjectivity, which is typical of postmodernism? In European philosophy it is the paradigm of a homogeneous, permanent and closed subject, whose prototype, the Aristotelian 'hypokeimenon', is the same, identical, identified with itself, which would have seemed to be dominant. This concept of subjectivity is continued as the Cartesian 'first person', the Kantian and Fichtean 'ego', right up to the models of contemporary cognitive sciences; here there follows another identification: thinking with subjectivity ('cogito', 'I think', the cognitive subject as a system of rules for processing information). In the theoretisations of intersubjectivity, the right of identity was obligatory even before it was formulated by Leibniz: however controversial, and particularly unclear in the definition of quality, this definition marks the identicality between subjects, even in the philosophy of so-called dialogue. From the very beginning religious and artistic experiences indicated the limiting of the problem of subjectivity understood in this way, which confirmed the modernist 'discovery of unconsciousness' and the simultaneous phenomenological breakthrough. Heidegger's warnings against the monopolisation of the problem of being by subjectivity were misinterpreted by post-modernists as a call for the negation of the subject, for an announcement of the subject's 'death' in Foucault's 'Les mots et les choses'. In turn Heidegger's questioning of 'Einheit der Identitat' and the postulate 'das Differente aus der Differenz' (2) led to Jacques Derrida's extreme of 'differance', which 'differs/defers', 'produces' differences (3), which Habermas accurately defined as the practice of 'process without subject' (4). The paradigm 'subject without process', the mind and the community of 'These Same', was regarded in post-modernism as exhausted and impossible, and was replaced by an equally reductive theory.

HOW POSSIBLE IS THE SUBJECT IN THE PROCESS?

In the Kristevan project of subjectivity there is the concept of 'polylogue': 'poly-logue: the multiplicity of rationalisations as an answer to the crisis of the western mind.' (5) Kristeva's neologism points, however, to further meanings: the prefix 'poly-', derived from the Indo-European root '*pele-', '*ple' ('to be full'), through 'plethora' ('fullness, abundance, excess') and 'polys' ('numerous, large, powerful'), has been combined here with the French lexeme 'logue', the equivalent of the Greek 'logos'. In this way we step into the plethora of meanings of the pre-Socratists, Plato, Philo, in Christianity and in Hegel, Freud ('Our God Logos' as the basis of psychoanalytic treatment), and Heidegger (his apophatic 'logocentrism' (6) The process of the emergence of meanings, i.e. 'signifiance', becomes subject to analysis; the term 'signifiance', borrowed from medieval modistae, through its active suffix '-iance' is intended to accent dynamism in contrast to the immobile 'significance'. It turns out that here we are involved in the interaction of two modalities: the semiotic and the symbolic. We can find the prefiguration of semioticity in the Platonic 'chorus' from 'Timaeus', thus the moving 'place' of union and contradiction, preceding the universe, the name and even the syllable. It is a vessel ('hypodocheion') of becoming with maternal ('tithene') connotations. The 'space' of provisional articulation, constituting itself in motions and ephemeral standstills, amorphous, based on rhythmicality (7). Although Derrida accuses Plato of ontologising Leucypus's and Democritus's 'rhythm' through a conceptualisation of the 'chorus' (8), Kristeva does not hesitate to designate pre-symbolic modality with this term. That which is semiotic (Kristeva goes back to the etymology of 'semeion', 'a trace, or signs, of an inscribed mark, an impression, distinguishing features') is the distinction capable of underdefined articulation, still (in children) or already (in psychotic or poetic discourse) not referring to the signifie of the Husslerian ethical consciousness. These are urges (theoretised by Freud: 'Triebe') and their articulation (whose status is only established by Kristeva): rhythm, pulsation, intonation. Prelinguistically, we find them in the pre-Oedipal phase in the child's first rhythms, pseudo-syllables and echolalia. Not only the shouts, vocalisations and gestures of a child are, however, semiotic, but also the translinguistic prosody, word-games, nonsense and laughter of the adult. Logically that which is semiotic functions as suprasegmental features, irrational, instinctive in various discourses (particularly in experimental literature) in the completion of sign and predicate, which in turn mark what is symbolic. Symbolisation is the sphere of nomination, syntax, denotation, which constitutes itself in the child from the Lacan mirror phase, awakening the ability of representation and abstraction; this is already social order.

'The subject in the process' is the interpenetration of what is semiotic and symbolic: decentralised, cut open and ready for the interaction of these modalities, 'it is incessantly semiotic and symbolic', writes Kristeva. In my opinion, the synthetic 'and' accentuates once again that this is not about dichotomisation as in the division between 'mania' and 'mind' in Plato's 'Phaedo', between the 'affections' and 'mind' in Spinoza's geometroidal definitions, between the Nietzschean 'what is Dionysus's' and 'what is Apollo's', or between Foucault's 'insanity' and 'mind'. In Kristeva's project of subjectivity there is talk of semioticity and symbolisation, recalling the Hegelian understanding of it as an 'old science' (not art), which returns anew, and it becomes necessary to draw conclusions different from those in the history of philosophy. Kristeva 'furnishes' the Hegelian dialectic with heterogeneity, thus her definition of dialectic runs like this: 'a heterogeneous contradiction between two spheres which are irreconcilable, divided, but inseparable in a process which accepts asymmetrical functions.' (9) These conclusions are complemented by the statement that in the definition of an intra-subjective dialectic, Rene Thom's catastrophe theory would be helpful if extrapolated onto an epistemological plan; in any case because semiotic and symbolic space are not subject to the same laws, the external space, called the control space, acts in such a way towards internal space that the change of control causes a forking, bifurcation, which either as a discontinuum or as a conflict means a catastrophe. This Hegelian 'fourth term of dialectics', 'Negativat', turns out to be in Kristeva's opinion, the organising principle, the 'pattern' of the process. Negativity, as opposed to nothingness or negation, 'sets in motion' (10), not being able to create anything other than the subject in the process, claims Kristeva. In other words, the subject constituting itself according to the laws of negativity cannot be anything other than its own subject penetrated by negativity, un-subjected ('un sujet non-assujetti'), free. (11)

Kristeva places subjectivity in the perspective of George Cantor's theory of multiplicity as a transfinite logic (das Transfinite (12)). In explorations of European logics she notices that the symbolic scientific discourse was based on the Indo-European sentence, whose starting-point is subject-predicate, developed through identification, determination and causality. In Kristeva's opinion it is impossible to formalise (without violating) the semioticised poetic language within the framework of existing logical systems, despite attempts to go beyond the O-1 compartment, from Gottlob Frege and Giuseppe Peano to Jan úukasiewicz, Robert Ackermann and Alonzo Church, and also more isomorphic formulae about language in the theory of collections of George Boole. As a discovery of the limits of Aristotelian logic Kristeva names the concepts of Chiang Tung-Sun and Michai│ Michai│owicz Bachtin (13): the ambivalent space results from 'two principles of formation: the monologue (each successive sequence defines the preceding sequence) and dialogue (transfinite sequences directly higher than the preceding causal chain).' (14)

It is not unity but multiplicity which marks intrasubjectivity in Kristeva's view, and this bears the subject of 'unity' both as a point, and also as the zero point of the subjectivity of the postmodernist 'subject in process'. Let us quote Kristeva's self-commentary: 'The wager in which we bet on the possibility of discovering the process of sense and subject has the boldness of Pascal's wager. It may not be insignificant that it is a woman who is saying this while philosophy in France to a great extent has given up all kinds of metalanguage and has put in its place discourse which calls itself a fiction [...] this points to the fact that despite appearances women remain the last guarantee of community after the crisis of the mind and the crisis of paternalistic functions which the West is currently experiencing.' (15)

CONFEDERATION OF STRANGENESS

Let us now trace how Kristeva transfers the processive theories of intrasubjectivity onto intersubjectivity. Here are her propositions in praxi: a contemporary state ought not to try to integrate immigrants, but should respect their right to choose strangeness. Immigrants ought to respect the strangeness of their hosts; in this way there will be constituted a 'confederation of strangeness', co-ordinated by the Montesquieuan 'general spirit' ('esprit general'). Montesquieu opposes the Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes, proposing instead as a principle of 'the rights of the soul' the idea of 'sociabilite humaine', which follows in the footsteps of Fenelon's Christian theology, and Locke's and Shaftesbury's writings. In her open letter addressed to Harlem Desir, the leader of the S.O.S. Racisme organisation, Kristeva cites the concept of the 'general spirit' presented in the book 'About laws and their connection with the principles creating the general spirit, habits and customs of a nation'. This 'general spirit' is not an abstraction (operating in abstractions was a charge levelled against the Enlightenment from Edmund Burke to Hannah Arendt), but a reformulation of the problem of national identity: that which is national, in Kristeva's interpretation, is understood as a relative stability (tradition) and the predominant instability, finding itself in the process. Montesquieu reminds us of the multiple causality of nature and culture ('Many things govern people: climate, religion, laws, principles of government, examples of past things, customs, habits: from which is formed a general spirit being their result'(16)). Around that which is national there operates, in Kristeva's argumentation, a logical multiplicity, whose variety ought to be retained without the possibility of domination by one social group over others. In this 'social politology' instead of a 'static, biological, totalising, archaic and unmoving' (17) idea of a nation, we are faced with the heterogeneity and dynamism of the 'general spirit'. Not to reject that which is national as a social construct, but to transcend it into a transnational position, which is allowed for by the openness of the 'general spirit' idea as opposed to 'Volksgeist' - such are Kristeva's postulates. Interpretations of Montesquieu's political thought was carried out in the post-war period by such different philosophers as Althusser, Arendt and Aron, but it was Kristeva who emphasised its universal cosmopolitanism. 'If I knew something beneficial for me, bur harmful for my family, I would put it out of my mind. If I knew something beneficial for my family but harmful for my country, I would like to forget about it. If I knew something beneficial for my country and harmful for Europe, or beneficial for Europe but harmful for the human race, I would regard it as a crime.' (18) Kristeva emphasises the necessity of guaranteeing personal freedom and entering into ever wider communities, on condition that in their assumptions there are multiplicity, openness, polyvalence.

IF I AM NOT A CITIZEN, AM I ALSO NOT A HUMAN BEING?

The above question reconstructs the thought of Hannah Arendt who was speaking for the rights of stateless persons and 'displaced persons' in the 'Declaration of Human and Citizens' Rights', whose formulations reserved the status of humanity for citizens. In this way the 'Declaration' from 1789 remains in its historical moment a 'victory of the nation over the state', but despite this Kristeva defends its apositionality and generally French enlightenment against the Frankfurter and postmodernist accusations of its ideology as a generator of totalitarianism: (Adorn's and Horkheimer's theses sharpened in postmodernist compilations). 'Keeping in force the universal, transnational principles of Humanity differentiated from the historical realities of nations and citizenship, means, on the one hand, the continuation of the Stoic and Augustinian legacy, and therefore the ancient and Christian cosmopolitanism, which finds its place among the most valuable points of our civilisation; we have to go back to it and bring it up to date. But above all the keeping in force of universality, the symbolic dignity of all humanity, seems to me to be not only a form of defence against nationalistic, regionalistic and religious fragmentation, whose integrational efforts are currently very clearly visible. Yes, let us preserve universality for human rights, on condition that we include in it the not simply self-satisfying principle according to which 'we are all brothers', but also the conflict, hatred, violence and destructiveness, which in the two centuries since the 'Declaration' have been unloaded in the reality of wars and fratricidal conflict - everything which the Freudian discovery of unconsciousness defines as a modifiable but constituent part of the human psyche.' (19) In Enlightenment thought there is the intuition that the stranger is within me: 'Master Rameau's Cousin' by Diderot, which forms a dialogue between the 'I' and the 'He', links the universalism of the enlightenment with the recognition of otherness. 'Strange, cynical, erotic, with a convulsive body and an ironic, allusive, polyphonic language often full of ellipses, the critic of social customs but also of philosophical thinking through the rational 'I'; in Diderot's text, it is this very 'He' who introduces strangeness into us'. (20) The Cousin's awareness, diagnosed by Hegel as torn asunder, becomes, according to Kristeva, symptomatic towards culture, which knows that it is at least double. Consciousness of one's own unconsciousness is a significant civilising step; let us try, like the Cousin, to recognise ourselves as strangers, in order to appreciate the strangers around us, instead of persecuting them and adapting them to the norms of our own repression. The first outsiders in Western history were women, the Danae in Greek mythology and in Aeschylus. While Simone de Beauvoir's generation was fighting for the identification of women with men, i.e. for equality, for the next generation it is the recognition of difference that is important (the identification of women against men). Kristeva on the other hand postulates the appreciation of strangeness in itself, while the very concept of identity has come to be questioned. Women have 'the good fortune to be and the responsibility of being border subjects' more dramatically than men: body and thought, biology and language, nation and world. It is not easy for them to restrain themselves from limiting their choice to only one of these areas, which would end their activity as for example fighters for nationalism. In contrast to de Beauvoir, Kristeva sees the possibility of development in motherhood, which 'drives the gear of passion between life and death, self and the Other, culture and nature, singularity, difference and ethics, narcissism and abnegation...Motherhood is Penelope's web or Leibniz's net.' (21)

THE STRANGER IS WITHIN ME

In an article from 1919 Freud philologically explicates the term 'das Unheimliche'. It turns out that the semantics of the adjective 'heimlich' evolves towards ambivalence until it coincides with the meaning of its initial antonym, furnished with the privative prefix, 'unheimlich'. (22) That which is familiar, homely, intimate, domestic is at the same time that which is hidden, secret, suspicious, demonic, strange, unnerving, alien. Freud cites Schelling, who states that as 'unheimlich' can be qualified that which should remain secret, in the shadows, but comes out from there. The Brothers Grimm note in their 'Deutsches Worterbuch' that the Latin counterparts of 'heimlich' are at the same time 'vernaculus', and 'mysticus', 'divinus', 'occultus' and 'figuratus'. The experience of 'des Unheimlichen' according to Freud is linked with fear, a doppelganger, repetition and unconsciousness, while among its catalysts are death, femininity and impulse. The exemplification of these theses is an analysis of '???' ['Piaskun'] from the Tales of Hoffmann, 'the incomparable master ''des Unheimlichen'' in literature'. Let us add that in philosophy the master of this experience is Heidegger, who, in 'Sein und Zeit', writes that 'in terror we do not feel ''at home'' ' (a sentence from 'In der Angst ist einem ''unheimlich'' ', translated by Bogdan Baran (23)). He adds that 'Unheimlichkeit' means in addition being-in-the-world, when there is a breakdown of familiarity in the sense of 'living beside...', being familiar with...', being takes on the existential modus of 'not in one's own home'. Cezary Wodzi±ski states that the very word 'Unheimlich' is 'ein unheimliches Wort' as Heidegger says, transferring with his help the term 'deinotaton' from Stasimon I 'Antigone', while the whole Sophoclean and at the same time 'the true Greek definition of man' as 'Das Unheimlichste des Unheimlichen ist der Mensch'. Familiarity without strangeness - let us return to Kristeva's statement - changes being into belonging. 'The unfamiliarity of man - as Wodzi±ski renders ''Unheimlichkeit'' - means that this is also a break in the predominance of being, a break, a crack, in which being itself reveals itself'. (24)

Once again Kristeva returns to the Hegelian negativity, which 'rehabilitates and systematises, forges the chains which it then puts onto the power of the Other, against and in the consciousness of Him Himself': this process leads to the Freudian discovery of unconsciousness and strangeness. She situates the concept 'des Unheimlichen' next to stoic cosmopolitanism and religious universalism, as an attitude of accepting strangers in strange familiarity, which is both theirs and ours. Kristeva perceives strangeness in a multiple subject, strangeness which incessantly accompanies familiarity: 'the stranger is within me. The ethic of psychoanalysis implies politics: this means cosmopolitanism, which transcends governments, economies, markets and opens out to a humanity conscious of its own unconsciousness - desiring, destructive, full of fear, impossible' (25). Only after an analysis of religious cosmopolitanism can we see how the Kristevan project of strangeness (inspired by them) wants to be closer to Being.

THOU SHALT LOVE THE STRANGER AS THYSELF

Although the Covenant with Yahweh made the chosen nation out of the Jews, from the very beginning there is written strangeness herein. Because everyone was formed in the image of God, the command in Leviticus 'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' (Leviticus 19,18) refers not only to one's neighbour from the same family or nation. According to ??? (Kedoszim) 'just as it is said about the man from Israel that thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, the same applies to the stranger'. And so in Leviticus in the Torah we read: 'And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him. [...] and thou shalt love him as thyself: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt' (Leviticus 19,34). No other command is repeated in the Torah more often, but on the other hand the use of the word 'ger' here, indicates the stranger's potential for proselytising.

Kristeva reminds us of the figure of Ruth: alien, yet a 'matriarch' in the genealogy of David. Let us recall her story: it was forbidden to marry a foreign woman, particularly a Moabite, as the Moabites had not accepted the Jews at the time of the Exodus from Egypt. In this chaotic moment in history, Elimelech leaves Judea and settles in Moabia, where his sons marry the Moabite princesses, Orpah and Ruth. After the death of her husband Ruth returns with her mother-in-law, Naomi, to Bethlehem, because she wanted to be loyal to Naomi (why not call this loyalty full passion? asks Kristeva) and faithful to her God: 'Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God' (Ruth 1,16) For the Judeans she is still a foreigner, and the time of her conversion remains unclear. Naomi, accepting the rules of the Levites, ought to find 'a redeemer, a kinsman' ('goel'): first in line is Tov, then Boaz; and it is to him that Ruth directs her question: 'Why have I found grace in thine eyes, that thou shouldest take knowledge of me, seeing I am a stranger?' (Ruth 2,10). Boaz replied: 'Thou art come unto a people which thou knewest not heretofore. The Lord recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee of the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust' (Ruth 2,12). Rabbinical commentators emphasise that Ruth's deserts turn out to be greater than Abraham's, so she is worthy of a full and perfect reward; Abraham left his father's home on God's orders, but alien Ruth did the same on her own initiative. In the Book of Ruth Boaz praises the acts of 'faithfulness' and 'goodwill, compassion, goodness' ('hesed') of the heroine, the future mother of Obed, the grandfather of David. Although the intervention of strangers in the royal genealogy will be pointed out ('How many times will they tell me in anger saying that he comes from an unworthy line? Is he not the descendant of Ruth the Moabite?' Ruth Rabba 8,1), Kristeva still reads the story of Ruth as a parable of accepting and recognising a radical otherness.

THERE IS NEITHER GREEK NOR JEW

In Christ's genealogy Matthew mentions Ruth as one of four women. But let us begin, following Kristeva's thought, from the strangeness of the persecutor, then the messenger of the Anointed, Saul/Paul: 'the Jew of Jews', the Roman citizen, came from the cultural melting-pot on the borders of Asia Minor and Syria, from the Greek town of Tarsus. Brought up in a Hellenistic environment, he received a rabbinical education. The duality of his name is significant, since he plays his social Jewish role with a Hebrew name, and his Greek role with a Greek Name; the cognomen Paulus indicates the connection with the converted proconsul of Cyprus. In the Pauline polyphony there will in addition be journeys, when the apostle addresses merchants, sailors, exiles and women, turning a small Jewish sect into the 'ecclesia', a new kind of community tearing itself away from 'laos' (Greek community), since it is formed from those who transcend national affiliation (26). Here is an exemplum of Pauline universalism from his prison letters: 'Ye who have put off the old man with his deeds; and have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge, after the image of him that created him: Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but Christ is all, and in all.' (Colossians 3, 9-11). That which is subjective and universal is crossed for the 'summoned' (etymology 'ecclesia') strangers in the 'absolute subject', the Anointed. What is more, Jesus in John's Gospel describes himself as a stranger on this earth: he is not 'of this world', he will find himself 'at home' when he is with his father (John 18,5). Surrounded by hostility, the community of St John will find its home in the 'house of the father': 'If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.' (John 15, 19)

Now it remains to let Kristeva speak: 'Nobody can forget the excesses which over the centuries the purist and inquisitional institution of the church imposed on heretics, and therefore on a new variant of strangers. Nevertheless Paul's spirit will be obvious many times in the history of Christianity. From this is Augustine's 'civitas peregrina' opposed to the oppressive state; as the one and only state of freedom, the pilgrims' state, tearing away from a place in order to give universal mutual help, bit also tearing away from whatever kind of identity (including one's own) in order to subjectively attain infinite 'caritas'. The discovery of 'savages' from the Renaissance up to recent imperialism indicated the narrowness and fragility of the boundaries of 'caritas'. It remains a fact , however, that in the face of a lack a deeper analysis of motivational forces, which control our ties with others and with our own otherness, the messages of Paul and Augustine remains the means of summoning people of good will against xenophobia and racism.' (27)

TO BELONG AND/OR TO BE

Kristeva shares with Hannah Arendt the conviction that it was Christianity which discovered the internal, admitting at the same time that the prefiguration of this discovery lies in the ideas of the Stoic scholars, who described themselves as 'citizens of the universe', since their megapolis embraced Greeks, Barbarians, freemen, slaves and the stars: it would not however have embraced anyone without their, the Stoics', mind, and that is why it turned out to be an autarchy. But Kristeva has managed to find a cosmopolitan nurturing the pluralised interior and strangers, because he knew that the stranger was he. Marcel Proust: a Jew and a Catholic, at the same time neither one nor the other, in the centre and on the periphery of the Dreyfus affair, and also of the French consequences of the Great War, on the borders of the sexual minority and majority. In this polylogic, Kristeva analyses the Proustian 'temps incorpore', where the world is a book, metaphor is metamorphosis, and the word is flesh. The last pair turns out to be the most significant: Proust's literary experience - as he himself put it - was a transubstantiation. Saussurian linguistics would regard transubstantiation as a lack of distinction between what is marked and what is significant: in any case in 'this is my body', 'this' indicates both the bread and the body of Christ. Port-Royal grammar rationalises the transformation through a double justification and a reference to time. Kristeva on the other hand defines transubstantiation as the thematisation of the fold between the space of need, nourishment, survival and the symbolic space of designation: the flesh, which means.

Proust was conscious of the dangers facing experiences, since he diagnosed that Hamlet's question 'To be or not to be' was becoming 'to be or not to be one of these': 'The question is not, as for Hamlet ''To be or not to be'', but whether to be or not to be part of a whole' (Boy-»ele±ski's translation accurately makes concrete the French expression 'en etre' (28)). According to Kristeva identity turns being into belonging. The very question of survival is connected with belonging to a nation, religion, sex, profession. What turns out to be decisive is adherence, membership, a covenant with 'them', which brings prestige, opinion, status, image. In this way we lose ourselves in what is social, where - and here Kristeva once again cites Hegel and Kojeve - rules the dialectic of master and servant. Closing ourselves off from mental life, we enter into a game of productive forces, capital, image and finally the New World Order, where politics and the legal system (nobody is guilty and nobody is responsible) have become devalued, while the subject has been recognised as a collection of organs, which are valued, 'a biological legacy' at the disposal of genetic manipulation. How to save the polyvalent internal space in unison with multiple Being?

It is not possible to choose between the bliss of Being ('la jouissance de l'Etre') and the image of belonging; what is important is that both modalities should be compared, questioned, analysed. Kristeva advocates a distance between every belonging: to be at the centre and on the periphery of clans; what fill us with optimism is the fact that belonging relies more and more heavily on the agreement of the person joining: the old idea of becoming a member through one's origins - as Habermas has noticed - is changing in favour of free choice. Kuncewiczowa, fighting for Nansen passports, tried to make a reality of 'the phantom of world citizenship', which as a 'relic of the Heavenly Kingdom in my internal homeland has ceased to be merely a phantom' (Habermas (29)).

Experience is the key to Julia Kristeva's philosophy. It is the thing which, according to the author's most recent works, broadens the mental space of the subject, which in our times is disappearing: experience is therefore a historical necessity - 'Erlebnis' bursting in a flash, becoming recognition, the patient knowledge of 'Erfahrung'; they find themselves in the dynamic of the subject and allow for the co-presence with the full plethora of Being. Kristeva spoke about this at the recent Nobel Symposium in Stockholm, once again citing religious tradition, and also Hegel and Heidegger. And so in reality: if anyone is undertaking a consideration of the latter from 'Identitat und Differenz' then it is Kristeva, while the continuation of 'Lichtung des sich verhullend Verschliessenden' is the subject in the process with strangeness in multiples written in, rather than 'differance'. In her newest essay, for the first time in thirty years addressed to Bulgarian readers, Kristeva writes: 'Men and women on the border, unclassifiable, cosmopolitan, among whom I count myself, represent as part of the pulse of the modern world the survival of lost values thanks to, or perhaps despite, the influx of immigration and metissage. On the other hand (and in consequence) they realise a new positiveness, which makes itself known in the face of national conformisms and internationalist nihilisms. In order to express itself more precisely there are two solutions to stand up to or even perhaps end the conflicts in Sarajevo and in Chechnya: on the one hand to allow national languages and cultures to bear fruit; but on the other hand to favour those spaces, at present rare but budding, to protect those hybrids which are us, migrant writers, taking on the risk of an uncertain, unstable situation. And for what? I ask. In order to create new existences from blood and language, not rooted in any language or in any blood, diplomats of the dictionary, Eternally Wandering Jews of Being, who oppose authentic and at the same time fighting citizens by choosing wandering humanity.' (30)

*************************************************************************** Translated by Tadeusz Z. Wola±ski ***************************************************************************

  1. Julia Kristeva, 'Monstrueuse intimite (de la litterature comme experience). Communication au Nobel Symposium 'Language and Mind', Stockholm' in 'L'Infini', Gallimard, Paris, no. 48, Winter 1994, p.60
  2. Martin Heidegger, 'Identitat und Differenz', Gunter Neske, Pfullingen 1957, p.64
  3. Jacques Derrida, 'La differance' in 'Theorie d'ensemble', Seuil, Collection Tel Quel, Paris 1968, p.53
  4. Jurgen Habermas, 'Le discours philosophique de la modernite', translated by Christian Bouchindhomme et Rainer Tochlitz, Gallimard, NRF Essais, Paris 1988, p.210
  5. Julia Kristeva, 'Polylogue', Collection Tel Quel, Seuil. 1977, p.7
  6. Derrida's diagnoses of Heideggerian 'logocentrism' are to be found in 'Marges - de la philosophie', Minuit, Paris 1972 in 'Psyche. Inventions de l'autre', Galilee, Paris 1987 and in 'Politiques de l'amitie', Galilee, Paris 1994; Cezary Wodzi±ski writes from another perspective about 'logos' in Heidegger in 'Heidegger a problem z│a' ('Heidegger and the problem of evil'), PIW, Biblioteka My£li Wsp≤│czesnej, Warszawa 1994
  7. c.f. Plato, 'Timaeus. Critias', translated by Pawe│ Siemek, PWN, Biblioteka Klasyk≤w Filozofii, Warszawa 1986, pp.67-68
  8. Derrida about the Platonic 'chorus' in 'Positions', Minuit, Paris 1972 and in 'Khora', Galilee, Paris 1993
  9. Julia Kristeva, 'La revolution du langage poetique', Seuil, Collection Tel Quel, Paris 1974, p.80
  10. Georg Wilhelm Hegel, 'Fenomenologia ducha' ('The Phenomenology of the Soul'), translated by Adam Landman, PWN, Biblioteka Klasyk≤w Filozofii, Warszawa 1963, vol.1, p.49. In contrast to the postmodernists, who attack Hegel (and Kojeve's 'book'), Husserl and Heidegger and the generation of the 'Three Hs' (as shown by Vincent Descombes in 'The Same and Different. Forty-five Years of French Philosophy (1933-1978)', translated by Bogdan Banasiak and Krzysztof Matuszewski, Spacja, Warszawa 1996), Kristeva remains heterodoxically loyal to the 'Three Hs'.
  11. Julia Kristeva, op. cit., p.85. Instead of negativity, contemporary philosophy has replaced with the concepts 'difference' and 'repetitions' (Gilles Deleuze) the polarities, in which forms Kant introduced 'the negative greatness', remaining - or so Kristeva argues - loyal to the unity of the Cartesian subject. In this same 'Revolution du langage poetique' from 1974, she writes that 'materialist dialectics' have not undertaken an understanding of negativity, in order finally to discard generally the problem of the subject, leaving only the process of the Spinozan substance or of the means of production, or hypostatising a certain external psychological 'subject' without process and without negativity.
  12. Here Jean-Louis Houdebine recalls the 'horror infiniti' diagnosed by Cantor, fitting also in out contemporariness (Sartre's statement 'We are for the morality and art of finiteness'). In this context 'Julia Kristeva is one of the few: from her first works published in France she situates herself in the problems of infiniteness'; 'Exces de langages (Holderlin, Hopkins, Cantor, Sollers)', Denoel, Collection L'Infini, Paris 1984, p. 291
  13. I do not discuss here the Kristevan development of Bachtin's philosophy, since the article devoted to this is available in Polish: Julia Kristeva, translated by Wojciech Grajewski in 'Bachtin. Dialog, jΩzyk, literatura', PWN, Warszawa 1983, pp.394-418
  14. ibid., p.401
  15. Julia Kristeva, 'The Speaking Subject' in 'On Signs', edited by Marshall Blonsky, Basil Blackwell, London 1985, p.216
  16. Montesquieu, 'O duchu praw' ('On the Rights of the Soul'), translated by Tadeusz Boy-»ele±ski, PWN, Biblioteka Klasyk≤w Filozofii, Warszawa, 1957, vol.1, p.433
  17. Julia Kristeva, 'Nations without Nationalism', translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, European Perspectives, New York 1993, p.6
  18. Montesquieu, 'Mes Pensees' in 'Oeuvres completes', La Pleiade, vol.1, p.918
  19. Julia Kristeva, 'Etrangers a nous-memes', Fayard, Paris 1988, p.220
  20. ibid., p.283
  21. Julia Kristeva, 'Nowy typ intelektualisty - dysydent' ('A new type of intellectual - the dissident'), translated by Barbara Smoczy±ska and Tomasz Kitli±ski in 'Rewia Kontr Sztuki', no.2, 1993, p.4
  22. c.f. Sigmund Freud, 'Das Unheimliche' in 'Gesammelte Werke', S.Fischer, Frankfurt/M., 1947, vol. 12, pp.229-268
  23. Martin Heidegger, 'Bycie i czas' ('Being and Time'), translated by Bogdan Baran, PWN, Biblioteka Filozofii Wsp≤│czesnej, Warszawa 1993, paragraph 40, p.267
  24. Cezary Wodzi±ski, op.cit., p.314
  25. Julia Kristeva, op.cit., p.284
  26. Vladimir Jankelevitch in 'Le Paradoxe de la morale', Seuil, Points, Paris 1981, p.42, reminds us that the New Testament uses the word 'prosopolepsoeia' to indicate the assessment according to the mask ('prosopon'), externality: 'God does not consider this, does not consider the colour of the skin or the shape of the nose [...]. The denial of 'prosopolepsoeia' expresses in the Gospel fundamental disinterest in all social, professional or ethnic divisions; from this the maximalism of compassion - extremism, universalism - is at the source of this disinterest'; c.f. 'Everyone, if he does something good, will receive it back from the father - whether slave or free man, and you, gentlemen, behave in the same way towards them: refrain from threats, conscious of the fact that in Heaven the Lord is the Lord of them and of you, that with him there is no consideration for 'prosopolepsoeia' '. (Ephesians 6,9)
  27. Julia Kristeva, 'Nations without Nationalism', op.cit., p.45
  28. Marcel Proust 'W poszukiwaniu straconego czasu' ('In Search of Lost Time'), translated by Tadeusz Boy-»ele±ski, PIW, Warszawa 1979, vol.II, p.965, quoted also by Hannah Arendt in 'Korzeniach totalitaryzmu' ('The Roots of Totalitarianism'), translated by Mariola Szawiel and Daniel Grinberg, Niezale┐na Oficyna Wydawnicza, Warszawa 1993, p.134
  29. Maria Kuncewiczowa, 'Natura', Wydawnictwo Lubelskie, Lublin 1989, p.7; Jurgen Habermas, 'Obywatelstwo a to┐samo£µ narodowa' ('Citizenship and National Identity'), translated by Barbara Markiewicz, Wydawnictwo IFiS PAN, Warszawa 1993, p.35
  30. Julia Kristeva, 'Bulgarie, ma souffrance' in 'L'Infini', Gallimard, Paris, no.51, Autumn 1995, pp.42-43