Julia Kristeva and the Political

 Julia Kristeva, 1941 

The psychoanalytic concept of symbolic law refers to the form-giving function of social structures and institutions including language itself; 

Symbolic law supports bodily experiences and semiotic drives in meaningful signifying systems. 

Today, loving forms of social support are rare, as bodies silently suffer the disconnection from form-giving law, law itself "suffers" the disconnection of drives and affects [...]. 

These resonances deepen in Kristeva's more recent three-volume series on the "powers and limits of psychoanalysis" - The Sense and Nonsense of Revolt (1996), - Intimate Revolt (1997), -Hatred and Forgiveness (2005). 

There, she connects the emptying of symbolic law to the elaboration of regulatory power that reduces subjects to bodies of organs, bios to zoe. 

Engaging implicitly, if not explicitly with biopolitical themes, Kristeva warns that the expansion of regulation produces a "Life and Death" [...] a life for itself, a life without questions. 

The Power Vacuum 

Regulation and the Spectacle 

In her 1996 text, "The Sense and Nonsense of Revolt", Kristeva describes contemporary power as a kind of disciplinary "power vacuum"-normalizing, falsifiable, and non-locatable. 

Where the 1980s trilogy maps the deforming impact of fierce, yet artificial law on the preverbal child, the "power vacuum" connects the erosion of symbolic law to the proliferation of norms. 

Today, "in the place of the prohibilition or power that cannot be found, disciplinary and administrative punishments multiply, repressing, or rather normalizing everyone [...] 

Diagnosing a  soft symbolic law, Kristeva's own text describes a kind of regulatory avalanche, a disorienting phsychic trauma that leaves analysands suffering from a "lack of reference points". 

A a falsifiable order, the power vacuum marks how the growth of normalizing power lossens contemporary authority. 

According to Kristeva, the reduction of law to regulation undermines agencies of power open to corruption and perversion, "there are no longer laws but measures [...] susceptible to appeals and delays, to interpretations and falsifications". 

Today, legal interpretation amounts to little more than the pursuit of loopholes to "finding omission in the law that allows otherwise unlawful acts to be carried out within the terms of the law". 

[...] 

Kristeva draws on  Guy Debord's notion of the society of the spectacle to discuss the non-locatable (or 'invisible')  character of the power vacuum. 

Since disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms are diffuse throughout mass mediated culture, power cannot be located, in part, because a sea of images take up its operation and confirms the absence of authority on every stage, from celebrity judges to the incessant and ever-revisiting judgement of celebrities themselves.

As Kristeva puts it, the spectacle is a pervertible, normalizing "media-friendly" theatre in which "people are increasingly excited when they think they have unearthed a guilty party, a scapegoat", because we live in a so-called liberal society in which there is no surveillance and no punishment except in these theatrically mediatized cases that become a sort of catharsis of the citizen's nonexistent guilt". 

In this thatre of blame and shame, power reflects and supports the multiplication of norms and the corruption of authority. 

The spectacle does not simply frustrate individuals' ability to symbolize and represent physic trauma. 

It produces empty docile psyches unable to locate and question authority. 

Hansen, S. (2013). Julia Kristeva and the Politics of Life. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. Vol.XXI, No 1 (2013), pp. 27-43

Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential French thinkers of the twentieth century and is best known for her work in linguistics. Even though her work has been very influential, the political implications of her writings have so far been neglected. Kristeva and the Political is the first book to explore the relation of Kristeva's work to the political and casts new light on her work, connecting her to recent developments in literary theory, political theory, and cultural studies. In particular it shows how Kristeva's account of the unconscious and psychoanalysis generally, widens the notion of the political. Each chapter introduces a fundamental theme in Kristeva's work, highlighting a specific period of development in her thought and drawing on texts from the 1960s through to the 1990s. Themes addressed include Kristeva's theory of discourse, the theory of the subject, the notion of alterity, feminism and marginality and her theory known as the 'politics of meaning'. Kristeva and the Political also shows how Kristeva's notions of the political draw on a rich array of thinkers and writers, from Freud, Melanie Klein and Lacan, to Proust and Marguerite Duras.

URI

http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/24204