Kristeva on the need for ‘revolt’

Psychoanalytical theorist and philosopher Julia Kristeva's insights into the concept of 'revolt' offers inspiration for confronting the forces of hate so prevalent today

Having just listened to the Redacted report about the assassination attempt directed against ex-President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, and before that, to a report on the continued (deliberate) spraying of dangerous chemicals (‘chemtrails’) in the air, in most of the world’s countries, I was reminded of the ancient Greek philosopher, Empedocles’s cosmological philosophy of hatred or strife (neikos) and love (philia). According to Empedocles, these are ineradicable cosmic forces, always at work, cosmically, and also, of course, in people’s lives. Love is the constructive force that brings things and living beings together, and hatred is the destructive force that drives things and people apart.

At present, it seems undeniable to me – as I have argued before, in terms of Freud’s analogous concepts of Eros (love-drive) and Thanatos (death-drive) – that hatred appears to have the upper hand. That is no reason to despair, however; rather, it is good reason to redouble our efforts to work towards the predominance of love – after all, the point is to make the world a better place to live, as Haley Kynefin recently intimated in her uplifting piece on ‘Life among anti-life forces’ on Brownstone Journal.

How do we do this under the disruptive, disturbing circumstances under which we live today? Everywhere you look, what meets the eye is cause for concern. We are still in Portugal, where we attended a conference recently, since the conclusion of which we have been exploring the many beautiful parts of Lisbon, and yesterday the picturesque, ancient nearby town of Sintra, with its (remnants of) a late-medieval Moorish castle and the famous ‘initiation well’ where knights had to prove their worthiness by descending deep down a spiral staircase, blindfolded, with their sword pointing upwards against their throat, and up again, without faltering (and possibly dying), before being accepted into their brotherhood.

All of this was very interesting; what was less so was the fact that the sky above Sintra, and later above Lisbon, was covered with intersecting ‘chemtrails’ – deadly emissions from aeroplanes that have been released for decades now, apparently with the intention of poisoning people and other living beings. This was enough to introduce a note of dismay, if not anxiety, into our otherwise enjoyable day. To add insult to injury, the people around us did not seem in the least concerned – they seem to have fallen for the lie, that these ‘chemtrails’ had the purpose of ‘weather modification’ to combat ‘climate change.’

On the train back to Lisbon we noticed another sign of the sustained assault against us, the living: everywhere on the top of high buildings one could discern the tell-tale signs (rectangular boxes and antennae) of 5G installations, which most people believe to serve the purpose, only, of enabling more efficient and faster internet and Wi-Fi connections. Yet, many studies have exposed 5G as having a far more sinister effect, if not purpose, namely, to affect people in a very adverse, neurological manner (to say the least).

I haven’t even dwelt on the (by now) fully exposed, lethal effects of the Covid ‘clot shots,’ and the psychological and physical damage wrought by masking, ‘social distancing’ and ‘lockdowns’ (particularly among children) during the worst Covid years, but in sum one might say that, in Empedoclean terms, we have been witnessing a veritable bonfire of hatred directed against the living – people, animals and plants, all of which are adversely affected by ‘chemtrails,’ to mention only one thing.

Returning to my earlier question concerning how we work to engender more love (in the encompassing Empedoclean and Freudian) sense, in the hate-filled environment in which we live at present (something that also concerns Haley Kynefin in the article I linked earlier, and former First Lady Melania Trump, after the attempt on her husband’s life), a good avenue to pursue in this regard concerns the unlikely-sounding notion of ‘revolt.’ Like Haley – and as I have written several times before – I also see the need for, and encourage, ‘resistance’ at all levels against the neo-fascists who have put a target on our bodies and souls, but concomitantly, we should work to promote, and intensify, acts of love (related to what Haley called ‘creation and restoration’). And – improbable as it may seem – there is a sense of ‘revolt’ that enables one to do just that.     

It is time, in other words, to remind ourselves of the circumstances under which ‘revolt’ in this very specific sense becomes something to consider – something that sometimes actually becomes urgently necessary. The present moment in our history is such a time. For most people, understandably, ‘revolt’ carries connotations of political rebellion, such as the rebellion of the slaves under the leadership of the gladiator, Spartacus, against the imperial might of Rome in the ancient world. Then there were the American and French revolutions (in 1776 and 1789, respectively) – the people’s revolt against the colonial rule of Britain, in America’s case, and against the aristocracy and royalty in the case of the French Revolution, given the ruthless oppression of the proletariat (and to a large degree the bourgeoisie). And there are many others one could add.

But the psychoanalytical theorist and philosopher, Julia Kristeva unceremoniously dispels this prejudice. For example, take her response (Kristeva, in Revolt, she said – An interview by Philippe Petit (Rainer Ganahl, & Rubén Gallo), New York, Semiotext(e), 2002, p. 99-100) to a question by Rainer Ganahl, namely: ‘What is revolt, and where does this need for revolt come from?’:

In contemporary society the word revolt means very schematically political revolution. People tend to think of extreme left movements linked to the Communist revolution or to its leftist developments. I would like to strip the word ‘revolt’ of its purely political sense. In all Western traditions, revolt is a very deep movement of discontent, anxiety and anguish. In this sense, to say that revolt is only politics is a betrayal of this vast movement…Therefore if we still want to conquer new horizons, it is necessary to turn away from this idea and to give the word revolt a meaning that is not just political. I try to interpret this word in a philosophical and etymological sense. The word revolt comes from a Sanskrit root that means to discover, open, but also to turn, to return.

The fact that Kristeva argues in favour of ‘re-turning’ to a meaning that has largely been forgotten, covered up by its one-sidedly political use, is a salutary reminder of the wisdom that lies ‘buried’ in words, akin to abstract archaeological sites that can be revisited by those among us who crave digging up forgotten meanings, just like Freud thought of the psyche in terms of the metaphor of various layers the archaeologist has to sift through patiently to discover forgotten artifacts.  

Furthermore, ‘returning’ to revolt’s etymological sense of ‘return’ is itself a revolutionary gesture in the present climate of the so-called ‘elites’ making every effort to eliminate and/or enslave the rest of us. But here is the most important part of Kristeva’s insights: ‘revolt’ in the sense of ‘turning,’ and ‘re-turning’ also, very significantly, applies to one’s self. The call to ‘revolt’ means, most primordially, to rediscover who, and what, one is in the deepest recesses of your selfhood. It implies uncovering affirmative aspects of one’s self that have perhaps been forgotten, or covered up, by existing cultural habits and values, and reigniting them as powers for good.

To understand what is at stake it is necessary to realise that this does not only have a personal implication, though; it is also true, according to Kristeva, for and in (the history of) culture. What Kristeva has advocated for a number of years, is the urgent need for a return to the ‘culture of revolt’.  What does this mean? Why anyone should perhaps, in Kristeva’s judgement, be interested in pursuing such a culture, is not simply self-evident. It has to do with cultural renewal, just as ‘revolt’ at a personal niveau entails self-renewal. Moreover, the many historical instances of cultural revolt reflect, if she is right, a deep-seated need for ‘revolt’ at a personal as well as societal level. From the perspective of the history of European culture – and one is bound to find parallels in other cultures, too – there is nothing extraordinary about her call for a resurrection of the ‘culture of revolt’; as she reminds one (Kristeva, The sense and non-sense of revolt: The powers and limits of psychoanalysis, Vol. I, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 6-7):

Europeans are cultured in the sense that culture is their critical conscience; it suffices to think of Cartesian doubt, the freethinking of the Enlightenment, Hegelian negativity, Marx’s thought, Freud’s unconscious, not to mention Zola’s J’accuse and formal revolts such as Bauhaus and surrealism, Artaud and Stockhausen, Picasso, Pollock, and Francis Bacon. The great moments of twentieth-century art and culture are moments of formal and metaphysical revolt. 

I doubt whether anyone (assuming they are familiar with the cultural history in question) would have difficulty in relating to revolt in this sense. In any case, were it not for these intermittent artistic or intellectual challenges of what had become entrenched, if not petrified traditions at certain historical junctures, one could hardly speak of a ‘history’ of European (or any other) culture. An example of this is the Dada-movement in the early 20^th century, which was provoked into being by what the dadaists believed to be the ‘obscenity’ of the First World War’s senseless trench warfare and slaughter, incongruously occurring in a society that valorised ‘pretty pictures.’ Hence the dadaists’ rejection of traditional art, which they saw as metonymy of this society that was insensible to obscene phenomena such as warfare. Their use of visual and audial shock tactics was intended to shock people into an awareness that, instead of condoning the war and everything that underpinned it, they should revolt against it in the name of humanity.

But Kristeva does not want one to restrict ‘revolt’ to these intellectual and formal-artistic rebellions.  It is clear that she wants to bring it down to ground-level, as it were, to every human being capable of understanding that their very capacity to resist the dominant, officially sanctioned ‘culture’ (if today one could call it that, without any irony) around them is in serious danger of becoming, not just dormant or anaesthetised (which it already is on the part of most ‘unawakened’ people), but perhaps altogether erased.

In fact, just how successful the agencies serving the neo-fascist cabal (like so-called ‘fact-checkers’ and ever-active censors) have been at neutralising the possibility of revolt by people who might have possessed a smidgen of a chance to initiate doubt or scepticism regarding things like official explanations of chemtrails, manifests itself in the largely unconcerned manner in which they go about their daily lives. Here in Lisbon (and in the pretty town of Sintra), both of which were virtually covered by chemtrails yesterday, we could not detect anyone in the crowds around us who glanced quizzically upwards from time to time, as we did, for instance, even when my wife or I deliberately pointed upwards to test the gesture’s possible effect.   

So what are the chances of ‘revolt’ in the Kristevan sense occurring on a scale where it could perhaps gravitate towards critical mass? Because ‘critical mass’ is what we would need for it to have a perceptible impact. However, it would seem, in the light of the still overwhelming impression of a collective anaesthesia among ‘normies’ - or more critically - ‘sheeple,’ to be negligible. But – and it’s an important ‘but’ – in principle it is always there, because, as Albert Camus also knew, everyone is capable of glimpsing what he called ‘the absurd’ from time to time, and that is when one is most likely to revolt against this absurdity; needless to emphasise, today such ‘absurdity’ has assumed a concrete appearance in many different guises. This is precisely what could, and should, trigger ‘revolt.’

To drive this point home, think of the following. In the earlier excerpt from her work, Kristeva (2002: 99-100) connects ‘revolt’ with ‘a movement of discontent, anxiety and anguish’. Who could possibly be attracted to something as ostensibly unappealing as that? And yet, I would wager that, if I (or anyone else) could communicate (and concomitantly demonstrate how to communicate) to readers, or perhaps especially interlocutors who have not awakened to the terrible moral and physical danger in which we find ourselves, what there is about this that is attractive, and even imperative to embrace, some would have the courage to do so. A good starting point to persuade someone that no one could really do without at least a modicum of revolt in their lives, is Kristeva’s remark (2000: 7), that:

Happiness exists only at the price of a revolt. None of us has pleasure without confronting an obstacle, prohibition, authority, or law that allows us to realize ourselves as autonomous and free. The revolt revealed to accompany the private experience of happiness is an integral part of the pleasure principle. Furthermore, on the social level, the normalizing order is far from perfect and fails to support the excluded: jobless youth, the poor in the projects, the homeless, the unemployed, and foreigners, among many others.

Kristeva wrote these words long before Covid, but if we replace the examples that she furnishes of ‘the excluded’ in the excerpt, above, with ‘those who resist the attempts to impose a totalitarian world order on the rest of us’, it makes perfect sense.

What does this have to do with the need to activate love, alongside our equally indispensable acts of resistance? Just this: if love entails, as both Empedocles and Freud argued, all those activities and their accompanying feelings, which tend to be culturally constructive, that is, life-promoting instead of life-destroying, then ‘revolt’ undeniably serves and reinforces love insofar as it ‘returns’ us to ourselves. And this entails rediscovering what we are collectively as human beings, and individually as someone who can make a unique contribution to what it means to live as a human being, even in the midst of tyranny. In fact, under current, unprecedented conditions, revolt is indispensable, as indeed love is.