ABSTRACT
In 1992, Julia Kristeva painted a somewhat pessimistic picture of contemporary society, saying that, ‘the moment of militancy is over and we are living in a therapeutic age in which we must face up to our problems’ (Kristeva, 1992: 20). In the five years that followed, Kristeva committed herself to offering a psychoanalytic diagnosis of these problems, culminating in the publication of three texts: Les nouvelles maladies de l’âme in 1993, Sens et non-sens de la révolte in 1996 and La révolte intime in 1997. Her analysis is articulated around the two recurring themes of absence and revolt. The failure of the symbolic/paternal function and the return to archaic/maternal processes has brought about a situation of crisis. Human beings are experiencing a splitting of subjectivity, with a growing divide between two opposite poles. On the one hand, men and women are craving to become more efficient social performers with homogenised personal needs satisfied by manufactured sensations. This mass consumption has engendered schizoid social subjects whose identity crises have found their way into popular culture, in the alluring problematic of the replicant that films like Blade Runner (Scott, 1991) initiated. On the other hand, the singularities of human experience are displaced and transformed into social ‘diseases’, symptomatic of repression and homogenisation: the collapse of ideologies of revolt, the fragmentation of the family unit, resurgence of fundamentalism and extremism, may be aetiologically linked to the spread of stress related illnesses. In turn, sufferers of these fin de siècle diseases find fast and efficient relief in pills, ready-made images or euphoric discourses of damnation/salvation. Kristeva presents us with no less than the future of the human race. Throughout her 1990s work, we read that we are now faced with a choice: withdrawal from the human or reassessment and rehabilitation of the possibility for revolt and survival. Before we delve further into Kristevan crisis, we can pause a moment on the trajectory that led the author from her 1960s structuralist research on the limits of signification to her 1990s post-feminist stance on the human subject.
