International Colloquium
30 Oct - 1 Nov 2009
Institute of Romance Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

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Francey Russell (New School for Social Research, New York, USA)
Active Interpretation in Nietzsche & Kristeva

In this essay, which I will present in English, I will bring Kristeva into conversation with Nietzsche.  Both thinkers understand forms of culture (primarily religion and art) to be responses to, interpretations of, the self-differing that constitutes and burdens the human psyche.  Further, both diagnose modernity as an age characterized by its lack of such powerful interpretations; that is, the modern subject is no longer comforted by the religious and metaphysical interpretations that have heretofore functioned to secure meaning and truth.  And while Nietzsche is surely aware of the burden that befalls man after the “death of god,” it is Kristeva’s work as an analyst that provides the most sensitive account of the effect of this lossof meaning-giving narratives on the psychic life of individuals.  Kristeva provides both a symptomatology of the loss of ground and a suggestion as to how such a groundless subject can reconstruct meaningful narratives without resurrecting the consoling yet falsifying edifice of religion or metaphysics.  For Kristeva, the source of such non-totalizing meaning is precisely art, or sublimation.
For Nietzsche, the internalization of the drives and the subsequent creation of conscience, or unconsciousness, must be understood as constitutive for the human as such: our painful self-differing is not an aberrant yet correctable deviation, but is instead our essential constitution as human beings.  If this is so, if we are necessarily strangers to ourselves, then the Nietzschean question is: how do we interpret this situation?  While the religious or metaphysical subject elects a reactive interpretation, weaving a cohesive narrative of guilt and redemption, the artist—as exemplified in Greek tragedy—provides an active interpretation, an affirmation, of our painful self-difference.
            Kristeva also emphasizes the essential nature of the non-self-coincidence of the psyche and its tendency to demand an interpretive response, whether this response be reactive or active.  Her work interrogates a great breadth of material—philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, literature, and art—in an effort to analyze how a given epoch symbolically interprets or frames human life, and further, how this symbolic “coding” bears on and informs inner experience.  Nietzsche and Kristeva thus assume the same methodical perspective, seeking to analyze forms of culture as both expressions of and therapeutic responses to the painful, unknowable ground of human experience.
            For the modern subject, however, in an ostensibly secular world, there are no or very few such symbolic forms available: “our modern world,” Kristeva writes, “has reached a point in its development where a certain type of culture and art, if not all culture and art, is threatened, indeed, impossible.”   When meaning-giving forms of culture are no longer powerful or no longer meaningful, the result is a crisis in meaning, with personal pathology as one symptom of this crisis: it is here, in response to this crisis, that Kristeva’s work is most astute.  Her close analysis of the role historically played by religions for the individual psyche—their functioning as mediators, as interpreters, as anchors—expresses, not a nostalgic desire to reinvigorate religion, but a commitment to articulating how psychic life can be experienced as meaningful in their absence.  In so doing, she is acknowledging that the collapse of meaningful culture is registered, suffered, at the level of the psyche, and that the task for modern subjects is precisely to create new creative discourses that provide ground and context without falling back into the absolutizing discourse of religion.  For Kristeva, art and aesthetic experience function to provide meaning that has strength enough to be believed in, yet is sufficiently supple and evasive such that it can be transformed and reworked.  Through my presentation of Nietzsche and Kristeva, I will both diagnose the particular kind of suffering undergone by modern subjects—the crisis of meaning—and the precarious yet powerful means available to us to respond to this condition—art, sublimation, meaningful illusion.