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The Samurais `tels quels
Julia Kristeva
If we admit, as I do, that writing is thinking, we can take up and reformulate the
question that . v. t.v.. . posed in Platos pv.t : W v. .. are we when we think? W v. ..
are we when we write? In the obscurity of non-being, according to the sophist? In
the clarity of being, according to the philosopher? Are both questions just as blinding
for the eyes of the vulgar soul? W v. .. is the region of the mind, this t p . .t, that
all have searched for, from Parmenides to Heidegger and Hannah Arendt? Where
is this space the Greek invites us to in these words: `Observe now how that which
is far away from thought becomes pure presence?
W v. ..?
This is the question of a stranger anxious to anchor down the time that exceeds him
or her in a xed point in order to orient him or herself.
It is a metaphysical question, as I like them, imagining a voyage of initiation to some
`Orient which is, however, none other than the Orient of the self nally found and
re-found (see t, .). It is a ridiculous question, I grant you, in a world made of TV
screens, of information highways, or simply of neuroleptics.
It so happens, though, that someone asks himself this question, and at a turning
point of historical transition the question `W v. .. becomes possible again, for some.
Maybe this question becomes always periodically and eternally possible at certain
turning points.
What is even more ridiculous, in the sense of the ridiculous as an unexpected and
uncertain happiness, is that that ptv. is no longer kept a secret of mental activity,
but nds a ..vt pv. to shelter it. High school, temple, church, monastery, school,
royal court, theatre why not? Didnt Proust nd his `embodied time in the salons
of the declining aristocracy or in bordellos? At the height of ridiculousness, I propose
that a journal can also become a real space favourable to this invisible space. Its a
rare thing. Having glanced over the literary journals which have more or less success-
fully replaced since the Third Republic the literary salons or the Verdurins, I must
admit that these journals seemed to rival each other in political machinations, reli-
gious rivalries ripe in secularity, institutional pressures, personal ambitions and sexual
goings-on which have inspired t . t .v~ t , t. , and not so secretly as has been thought.
. .t Q ~. t certainly doesnt escape these internal logics present in all social artefacts.
The only dierence being that even if we werent spared the foolishness, at least we
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can say that the game we played was not one of advancement, recompense, or power,
but one of j ... ptv, .
Let me return to thinking-writing. It is a sort of madness (of language coming o its
hinges), stabilised by an amorous state (in this new form or new thought language
nds its satisfaction and its ideal). It is a passage to the limits of the self, a crossing
of frontiers. I have done this very concretely: from Soa to Paris, from Bulgarian to
a French already active, but reserved. These voyages can crystallise into melancholy
or marginality. In the meantime, each p..t is a superimposition of innities. And
here a literature freed from commerce is no longer an anomaly, but puts into play
the very life of a language mutilated by the norm of the day-to-day grind. I like to
think of these states of thinking-writing as feverish states. We were supposed to appear
somewhat exalted in the eyes of our parents or of `others. But this exaltation did
not have a specic name. Call it what you will, `structure or `China, it was and is
a temporary receptacle for the feverish state, for that place where what is still far
from thought is advanced before becoming rm presence.
I had just discovered Saussures .v.v. newly published by Jakobson. I was
reading Lautreamonts L. r vv.t !. : vt !.. and his . . ., along with Mallarmes
Lv : ~ .,~. .t t . L.t t... I believed that Saussures r ~. !. t ..~. t.,~. . ...vt. was not
telling the truth of language, that signs were not a simple two-sided coin of sound
and meaning, that volumes of hidden meanings were lurking about like the secret
names in Vedic and Saturnine verse, like Freuds dreams, like my dreams. A student
passed me the latest issue of `Clarte: Sollers was explaining there that style trans-
formed mentalities, that it was a latent revolt. We met in the ..t Q ~. t oces at Seuil.
Desire is the wave that carries thinking-writing. ..t Q ~. t ceases to be for me an `oce
or a `publication, and becomes instead a space of life. From now on I live in Paris,
France, but in reality, I inhabit . .t Q ~. t. With Marcelin Pleynet, Jacqueline Risset,
Jean-Louis Baudry and the others we share a curiosity for the excesses of the other.
Not as a community, for we rarely see each other and we neither talk about our
lives nor exchange anxieties, projects, gossip or whatnot, as is usually done in a
group. Rather, there are echoes, tangents, welcomes and a pulse of ties favourable
to the pulse of thinking-writing.
Without having to ask for their advice, counsel, discussion, encouragement or other
forms of conviviality, its nonetheless with them and for them that I continue to have
it out with Saussure. A hell of a business! The signier is not linear and how! The
logic of poetry is rather on a tabular model you only have to think of it, and there
Lacan comes into the picture! Each word, each letter in literature is revealed to
be a superimposition of an innity of meanings, an `intertextuality; wouldnt
Barthes be thrilled! Or rather, if we think of Leibniz and of innitesimal calculus,
the superimposition is of innity-points right, Badiou?
In short, it was all about thinking the power of language, and maybe, in a certain
way, giving this power back to language. Did we feel language was threatened by
the narrowness of what we called the `society of consumption, later to become the
`society of the image? Still, this desire to discover and to return a `new meaning to
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the words of the tribe (Mallarme ) is the authentic motive behind this research that
some were all too willing to reject as `technical or `terrorist.
However, we already appreciate, and will be able to appreciate even better as the
image damages the imaginary to the point of endangering the life of the psyche itself,
that this is a great era, one in which men and women are creating multiple logics
of thought out of the very esh of this thought.
From then on, the experience of Mallarme and Lautre amont appeared to me to
continue, even today, to slip away from professorial gropings and from the frustrations
of those poets lacking in (.. vt !. ) desire, which they take as a quest for spirituality.
This experience was like a thinking of thinking, like a springing forth of language
from its felt connes to the confusions of dream and the exhaustion of the concept,
as well as the other way around. I felt for several years the fever of a `revolution in
poetic language in which Mallarme and Lautre amont dialogue with Husserl and
Freud, those centres of phenomenology and psychoanalysis who spearheaded the
investigation of the speaking being in the twentieth century. Their entanglements
with the Ego and Transcendence, with Language and Matter resonate with the
superb crises, apparently poetic ones, of the French language at the end of the
nineteenth century. That poetry can be an exploration of the logical potentialities
of the conscience (as Lautreamont shows) or an exonerated battle of `a horrible
sensitivity, `alone and up a dead end street with `that mean old chicken, fortunately
dead, Godtheres enough there to disappoint all the university chairs of poetics
and other journals for kindred spirits. In this `impersonal poetry, in this `elocutory
disappearance of the poet, I wanted to decipher neither a complacent impotence,
nor an inalterable ambition towards the absolute, nor a backdrop of a community-
wide disappointment that masks the eternally held-out hand (`.t.. v.. .t !. ....t).
I wanted rather to decipher, very dramatically, a re-volted lucidity. By turning back
on its trajectory, by re-volting against itself, the French language was able to incarnate
in those two experiences a conjunction of philosophy and of beauty. By the same
token, the French language exhausted metaphysics in an ironic provocation and
rendered impossible its own sanctication. The revolution of poetic language of
Mallarme and Lautreamont was second to neither Husserls immanence of transcend-
ence, nor Freuds `Wo Es war soll Ich werden. This revolution took, as well, the
added risk of admitting madness, but was accompanied by the added bonus of
pleasure the pleasure of the senses and of words. And I continue to think that we
havent nished pondering this turning point of the nineteenth and twentieth centur-
ies that, by its radicality and its epistemological and poetic re-volution, seems well
ahead of our own spiritualist n-de-siecle. I never tire of rereading Lv R . .t~t. . !~
t v.v. p.t.,~. with my students, with, for example, this passage from Mallarme: `The
religious instinct is one way for people to do without Art (with a capital A); it contains
Art in an embryonic state. Art can only emanate, in its pure state, when diverted
from this inuence. At . .t Q ~. t, we were never able to do without art, with a little a.
The C .~p. t v... , ~. of the rue de Rennes displayed to the `public this eervescence
that was the reality of . .t Q ~. t, indeed, reality such as it was (`la realite telle quelle).
I was exposed to the heart of the debate with Saussurean linguistics that became
`For a Semiology of Paragrams and `The Engenderment of the Formula, on Sollers
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novel N t ... From everyday language we were entering into the alchemy of dreams
and bodies, and these preoccupations, of psychoanalytic and theological origin, did
not seem to make the audience uncomfortable, but rather, won them over. However,
I only retain a vague memory of these evenings. Is that because I already described
them in L. v~.v. and the writing has absorbed the lived intensity? Or is it because
they were already back then a spectacle that was less important to me than the
groundwork done before the staging of it? . .t Q ~. t still remains for me today a
reserved complicity, an invisible eervescence. While a banalising, standardising post-
industrial society was settling in, we took the risk of a dicult thought that some
found esoteric. But for us, it was obvious, we saw no risk. In this sense, we were
v~.v. .
I remember more clearly one of the more political evenings of the C .~p. t v... , ~. .
Jean Genet had invited Mahmoud Hamchari, the PLO representative. He explained
to us that the `Palestinian revolution had been the `spearhead of the Arab social
revolution. Paule Thevenin and I left for Kuwait to discuss this point at an interna-
tional conference. Accompanied by Artauds ghost, we visited the Emirs palaces as
well as the ruins of Babylon in Baghdad, and the Temple of the Sun at Palmyra. An
old friend from the `Komsomolskaya pravda, also invited to this `spearhead,
explained to me that Arabs were completely incapable of civilisation. I tried in vain
to have the question of an Arab co-existence with Israel brought up for discussion.
I returned, incapable of saying what it had been about. Then Mahmoud Hamchari
was killed by the explosion of a bomb hidden in the handset of his telephone. I set
my sights, with several others, on psychoanalysis and the novel. Such is the way of
the samurais.
The perceptive reader will notice, condensed or not, this history has totally left aside
the sizeable question, `What place is there for a woman amidst these samurais?
A rst answer: no problem! Never has a journal so favourably received texts by
women; nowhere else have women writers been so encouraged. The misogynist irony
of the samurais is only a token defence against their actual complicity with the dark
continent.
A second answer: indeed, didnt Clorinda have to constantly disguise herself as a
man to confront, that is, to meet her Tancred? Solitude, bitterness, and a feeling of
strangeness come before stratagems, combinations, ruptures and reconciliations of
all sorts. There is an inexhaustible sadomasochism on the part of brothers which
always nds a woman to pull into the game in order to make themselves more
seductive to each other.
A third answer: what if there werent a real space entirely propitious to the t p
. .t? Because, precisely, all groups (and women as a group even more violently so),
all social spaces are founded on a homosexual passion. On the contrary, the space
of thinking-writing that some of us strangers have been searching for since the dawn
of time appears in some ways to be the opening up of the masculine to the feminine,
to be the co-presence of the masculine and the feminine.
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That would mean there is no one good group for thinking-writing. I feel that I have
participated in the least bad one the one where the samurais are the most playful
and the most aware of their own femininity. Thats the case at least of the ones I
knew. But thats another story, a novel.
Julia Kristeva is Professor at the Universite de Paris VII, and at Columbia
University, and author of critical essays and novels. Her most recent publications
include the novel .. . (Fayard), the essay .. .t . . .. !. t v .. .tt . (Fayard),
and L. t .p .. . tt . .~ t .t t ..p. ..... t .tt. .v... (Gallimard), which has been translated
into English under the title . . . v.! .. ..
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