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*Julia Kristeva's About Chinese Women: Kristeva was never a Maoist
There are three entries in Google for Julia Kristeva being a "raving" Maoist in the eyes of Noam Chomsky commenting on post-modernism no less in 1995.
"'The others I don't mention because I don't regard them as even minimally serious (to the extent that I'm familiar with their work, which is very slight). Kristeva I met once. She came to my office to see me about 20 years ago, then some kind of raving Maoist, as I recall. I was never tempted to read further' (31 Mar. 1995)."(1)Here again, MIM is concerned with a number of associations and censorings-- Kristeva as Maoist and Maoism as post-modernism.
In the united $tates, MIM has already commented on the link between the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS) and crucial academic struggles for post- modernism. The LRS using Mao's name swallowed a large enough dose of cultural relativism and identity politics to be right in tune for the upsurge of post- modernism in the 1980s. As MIM has said before, we don't look forward to the history book that will emerge from that, but there are certain lessons from Marxism which if taken the wrong way lend themselves to relativisms behind post-modernism.
In France, the transition from Maoism to post-modernism was much more stark and important. French intellectuals for Mao in the late 1960s through the 1970s were much more theory-inclined and had none of LRS's orders from Deng Xiaoping on the relativism question. The big names of post-modernism came from a journal called Tel Quel. There we will find Derrida, Barthes and Georges Bataille (at least posthumously) for example.
Intellectuals and age groups
Arnold Schwarzenegger is a perfect example of a demographic phenomenon flaring up right now and influencing politics. We speak of someone not old enough to really know what was going on in World War II, but nonetheless conscious and liable to say, "I was there and it was like this. . . ." Schwarzenegger claims to have seen Soviet tanks in the streets repressing his Austrian people, just as the Nazis said it would happen in the post-war occupation, but Schwarzenegger was not born till 1947.
Freudian Julia Kristeva born in 1941 is pretty much in the same boat, four years old when the war ended. Living in Bulgaria till age 24, she is taken as some kind of authority on "Stalinism," though Stalin died in 1953.
This generation that really did not properly own World War II is at the height of its influence in some ways, because much of the older generation that really was able to live through and understand World War II is gone or increasingly inactive. Now is the time of the historically revisionist. In Soviet families, it's the time when the children who remember World War II as a shortage of lollipops remain.
Much more likely for this age group than directly understanding World War II was that it would get a partial grip on the challenges of upheaval in 1968. Here is where Tel Quel comes in.
The worldwide revolutionary upsurge associated with Mao in the 1960s stormed and took the heights of academia and cinema in France--right away. Expecting revolutionary bullets to rain down from the heights, in the case of Tel Quel, the masses found that the Tel Quel soldiers had on hand some dusty copies of Freud and Sade. Mao's banner flew crisply hoisted on the heights, but books on Flaubert, Joyce etc. rained down on bourgeois heads as before.
On Tel Quel it appears that Sollers did the most work in attempting to serve a useful role to Maoism. He translated Mao's poems and also discussed Mao "On Contradiction" at length in French in issue number 45 in 1971. Yet even Sollers appears to have defended the trajectory of Tel Quel as being similar to what peasants do after encountering Maoism--continue farming. Tel Quel continued what its participants were doing before. Kristeva even brought the world perilously close to a white-collarism by dedicating so much analytical focus to the "activity" of the writer, as if the writer were a "laborer," or worse yet, a proletarian.
So the problem is that had these intellectuals lived in China in 1968, they would not have missed the boat a second time like Kristeva and Schwarzenegger in World War II--two Europeans who ended up in the united $tates and hostile to "totalitarianism," with Schwarzenegger vetoing gay marriage and Kristeva making gay sexuality the hinge of totalitarianism.
The trouble is that there was a language and culture barrier, so Maoism becomes absorbed in bits and pieces and much more slowly than the demand for revolution, which already achieved barricades heights in 1968 in Paris. Maoism became another set of references and words and the question became who will eat whom, and in the end neither ate the other. Maoist universalism did not conquer Tel Quel and Tel Quel did not digest Mao for French conditions, but instead continued on its same trajectory of French struggle.
Some of the clearest political language appears at the end of the Tel Quel of 1971 with some manifestos from something calling itself the June 1971 Movement.(2) Already then there was the political criticism about the Freudian psycho-analysis that Kristeva claimed to want to reconcile with dialectics, along with the theory of language, aesthetics and "revisionist junk" generally covering up the Chinese experience. The same political activist tract said that "Our avant-garde [also vanguard--ed.] is not formalism, futurism, surrealism or the 'new new roman,' etc."
The outsiders looking in would see Kristeva hurl the invectives "bourgeois" and "revisionist" (perhaps incorrectly in opposition to each other as if to imply a lack of bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union or even the PCF) in sentence one of her article in the Autumn issue 1971 of Tel Quel. Then would follow a deep discussion of Barthes not likely to assure the public that it was learning anything from China via Tel Quel. In a footnote, Kristeva defends Tel Quel against criticism: "Mao is the only political man, the sole communist leader since Lenin to insist on the necessity of working on language and literature to transform ideology." She has a point: Mao transformed the whole Chinese language, so by implication how can the revolutionaries object to the percolation of theories of language in the name of Mao? Yet this is the pace at which points arose and hence MIM's objection to calling Tel Quel or Kristeva "Maoist" at some point in time.
At the same time, Tel Quel was there for the battle to get Maria Macciocchi's book on China distributed. Monthly Review played a similar role in the united $tates. The difference is that Tel Quel folded in 1982 and there is no enduring French Maoism from intellectual leaders, just discussion of it as a sort of priority.
An unfavorable comparison for Mao
While it is true that Tel Quel's "Maoism" was highly dubious, there are worse examples. At this moment, the relativism of the post-modernists has introduced a manner of speaking about Islamic culture that is serving as ever so slight a brake on imperialist war. In Iran, much has been done with Maoism, but when we think about Arabic countries, what comes to mind at this moment in 2006 is the lack of Maoism in Arabic.
Along these lines we cannot only hold the Tel Quel people to blame. Mao had state power in a large state for 27 years. Translation became Zhou Enlai's responsibility, but even with all the resources and connections at his disposal, Mao never put together a basis in Arabic for our struggle today. So there are worse results possible than what happened with Tel Quel.
Missing the boat twice
These intellectuals at Tel Quel were cosmopolitan travelers, translators and Freudians. The "three Ms" of the day were "Marx, Mao and Marcuse."
While they did not miss their own revolt in Paris in 1968, these intellectuals did fail in their project. They raised the Maoist banner, but did not do much to aid digestion. They failed in serving as a bridge to the East. As MIM pointed out, with Peking Review coming out in English, the Black Panthers dominated in the streets of the united $tates, but anarchists dominated in the streets of Paris.
We are left wondering if it were pure demography when Kristeva managed to stake out a position (along with much of France) that Maoism was not "Stalinism." Kristeva tried to tell us Mao was not Stalinist, by which she meant not the Khruschevism and Brezhnevism of her own experience. At the same time, she told us that psycho-analysis was drawing from the same thing as dialectics was, the unconscious. In both cases, Kristeva claimed Maoism for what was already her experience. She reached her height in sniffing out the counterrevolution in China in 1976, but she never left her Freudian course for Lenin and Mao who consciously opposed Freud.
There is much, much more to say on these topics and we are sure there are writers out there who can do these subjects much better justice. If so moved by Maoism, please send us articles on these topics.
Notes:
1. The Intellectual as Commissar
http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/5/8.html
2. There is some discussion of this in another source here:
http://www.humanite.presse.fr/journal/2004-10-26/2004-10-26-448603
Derrida left/was purged some time around 1970.