The Failure of the Paternal Function

The Failure of the Paternal Function The Failure of the Paternal Function: A Modernist Crisis? From the publications of Les nouvelles maladies, Kristeva consistently posits the crisis of the Paternal Function as the turning point in her own interpretation of the psychoanalytic project. Although she does not analyse the historicity of this crisis, she often explains that:

[…] the fundamental crisis in which the contemporary world is living […] began to unfold at the time of the French Revolution. […] I would say, together with certain historians, that the French Revolution is now coming to an end. This can be seen clearly by taking account of the phenomena of the problems of authority, of democracy, of religion, and of language in its relationship to sexual identity. I think that the crisis has opened and there will be a succession of crises. (Guberman, 1996: 36-7)

The French Revolution represents the rupture of an equilibrium which paved the way for new forms of representations (new forms of democracies, new moral questions such as that of reproduction). This break with the old system rendered the crisis not only explicit but also made of crisis the new organising force. ‘We can think of it this way: previous social forms counted on a certain calm, and crisis came periodically; but now an epoch has opened when we live in permanent crisis. What is provisional now are the moments of status quo’ (Guberman, 1996: 37). What Kristeva is suggesting is then a stalling of the modernist project at the point of crisis, that is modernism now equals crisis. She also proposes a way out of crisis. Against a defensive rejection of the achievements of modernism, she believes that to move beyond the narratives of modernism will entail a ‘passing through’ (Guberman, 1996: 225) those narratives. In other words, to transcend the modernist deadlock is to work through its narratives, and more importantly its points of resistance with the aim of finding new modes of representations that would permit to move the project beyond obstruction.