A Private Happiness for All, Or, How to Cure National Depression, Hold Down a Career, Fulfill the Maternal Function and Still Wage Feminist Battle with a Smile

Hamner - A Private Happiness for All ... - JCRT 4.1

A Private Happiness for All, Or,
How to Cure National Depression, Hold Down a Career, Fulfill the Maternal Function and Still Wage Feminist Battle with a Smile

A Review of Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, ed. Sylv're Lotringer, trans. Brian O'Keeffe (Semiotext[e] Foreign Agents Series: 2002); and Julia Kristeva and Catherine Cl'ment, The Feminine and the Sacred, translated by Jane Marie Todd (Columbia University Press: 2001).

Gail Hamner
Syracuse University

Perhaps the reader will hold on to the imperative for permanent questioning
as the principal note of our approach to both the sacred and the feminine.

The above sentence forms the end of Julia Kristeva's entries in The Feminine and the Sacred, a book of letters she co-wrote with Catherine Cl'ment. Cl'ment's rejoinder is a mere two sentences, the second of which reads: 'Act will therefore be the last word.' Taken together the sentences cradle the best of Revolt, She Said, a collection of interviews with Kristeva that forms the substance of this review. Action, imperative, questioning, the sacred, and the feminine: these terms cradle 'the best' of Revolt, She Said. They also capture what is odd, if not downright problematic about it, a claim that will come as no surprise to those who have, like me, trudged through The Feminine and the Sacred and wondered with depressing frequency why, exactly, I was reading this bizarre 'exchange'. Nonetheless, I will focus on what I find compelling and helpful in this short book.

It is when revolt becomes the majority position
that it takes to killing.

Revolution

I am not speaking of secularism, understood as a battle against religion,
but of atheism as the resorption of the sacred into
the tenderness of the connection to the other.

Sacred

Supposing that a non-sacrificial sacred exists, might not the imaginary be one of its possible variants?
The imaginary as eternal return, which opens the mind and body to an inquietude without end,
and makes it possible to stand straight and lithe in the world?

Political Action

Femininity and Feminism

Coda

Notes

Gail Hamner is Assistant Professor of Religion at Syracuse University and author of American Pragmatism: A Religious Genealogy (Oxford UP: forthcoming). Currently she is editing a manuscript on religion and film and researching the feminist political legacy of Roland Barthes' philosophy of love.

' 2002 Gail Hamner. All rights reserved.
Updated 07/28/21.
http://jcrt.org/archives/04.1/hamner/

Translated by Jane Marie Todd (Columbia University Press: 2001), 178. The translation is from the Le feminine et le sacr' ('ditions Stock: 1998).

Julia Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, ed. Sylv're Lotringer, trans. Brian O'Keeffe (Semiotext[e] Foreign Agents Series: 2002). Three-quarters of this text present a series of interviews with Philippe Petit originally published as Contre la depression nationale (Les Editions Textuel: 1998). The remainder of the book consists of interviews by Rainer Ganahl and Rub'n Gallo, which I presume were conducted for this English publication.

Catherine Cl'ment, The Feminine and the Sacred, 176.

The thematic reworking of revolution is given greater space in Kristeva's two recently translated works, The Sense and Nonsense of Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (Columbia UP: 2000)/Sense et non-sense de la r'volte (Jussieux, Paris: 1996) and Intimate Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (Columbia UP: 2002)/ La R'volte intime (Librairie Arth'me Fayard: 1997).

This question is posed, for example, in the work of Gilles Deleuze and F'lix Guattari, especially in their two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. But the question 'belongs' to no theorist in particular, acting, as it did, as a rhizomatic network growing over the Cold War landscape.

Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred, 60

Isolation or alienation differs from a conflict and fragmentation within the self, which Kristeva terms pleasurable (100).

Kristeva calls the 'Sacred' a 'knife-edge between life and meaning that goes beyond the social,' and on which women are 'positioned more dramatically' than men. The sacred incarnates'through revelation to the other'a type of freedom that is both 'impalpable' and 'a very pragmatic one of production and the market.' To her, this type of freedom can act against the limited freedom encased in 'free enterprise' (76).

Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred, 117.

Page 20: 'In modernity from Diderot and de Sade to Proust and Bataille, this way of taking into account sexual experience and its co-presence with thought is unique to France.'

See, e.g., her preference for dialogue with what she terms the 'maybe more mature, more knowing' French than with Americans with their 'na've curiosity' (51).

She, too, exemplifies this virtue it seems, since she claims that she remains a stranger in France and probably always shall (45-46).

True, she does say 'it would be pointless for us to mock the American feminists' aggression', but only because 'it's not clear that our refinement as Latins and Europeans can protect us in the long run from this very same barbarity' (72).

See Nancy Miller, Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (NY: Routledge, 1991), 23: 'The slip of anger passes through the conventions of gender', a rhetorical image that has stuck with me for years.