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When introduced to philosopher, literary theorist, semiotician and psycho-analyst Kristeva, the typical student gets an exotic picture of a Bulgarian in France who starts as a Maoist--a picture that demographically-speaking does still make sense to MIM. In all truth, if Kristeva did not exist, MIM supposes she would have to be invented as she has been invented. It's good for messing with the mind before serving it the same old pot roast-- or steak and potatoes in the u.$. context. Afterwards, we can say we took a walk on the wild side while still eating steak and potatoes.
We can only guess that including Kristeva in the curriculum counts multiple hits in identity politics. Maybe the pc crowd thinks if we talk about Kristeva, we don't have to talk about Lu Xun in a compressed course needing international credentials. Alas the Maoist image is false.
The New York Times reported on a fiction book of Kristeva's this way in 1992:
We were aware that the leftist French philosopher Louis Althusser had lost his sanity and murdered his wife, but who would have believed he had not read his Marx? And now comes the revelation that Julia Kristeva, semiotician of desire and Maoist psychoanalyst, is in actuality a sentimentalist. Underneath that rugged exterior is a heart that thrills to the cadence of the Harlequin romance.(1)Crap.
Later Kristeva receives blame for being "naive" about China.(2) She herself also makes self-criticism from which we can almost gather that she was a ritualist revolutionary carried away by the motions of those in France aping the motions of others in China. It is probably just pc formality and academic marketing that Kristeva is still called "Maoist" in so many academic contexts, especially introductions to students.
In the repressive atmosphere of the 1960s only one decade after the 1950s and still deep in the Cold War, any similarity between an intellectual and Marxism gets called Marxism. Depending on where one lives, one may still experience in the United $tates being labeled Marxist for defending any one point in Marxism. In the red states to this day, Democrats who have never read any Marx can argue for raising the minimum wage only to hear that that is socialism and socialism is the same as communism which is the same as Marxism. Some of these reactionaries don't even bother anymore and just say liberalism is communism.
The funny part is that even among "senior comrades" in MIM circles, the Francoite equation of liberalism with communism still sticks sometimes. In some cases, this is evidence of political repression. In most cases, it is as MIM says that the white so-called working class has no capability to understand Marxism, because it is really a petty-bourgeoisie. If we ask Mao's inveterate enemy Deng Xiaoping who wrote on the topic in dismay, during the Cultural Revolution, one of the five essays students would be most likely asked to memorize was "Combat Liberalism." Yet in the West, it remains difficult to find people who know the difference. It's a question both of political repression and the spread of a monolithic exploiter class interest that makes the discussion almost impossible to have outside of esoteric circles.
Kristeva agreed with one or two things about Maoism and for lack of any other reference point, everyone in the West starts calling Kristeva "Maoist." Today in 2006 with all Mao's works available in English and so many books available on the experience of the Chinese Revolution, there's really no point anymore in accepting approximations to Maoism as some kind of starter discussion. While some such as Huey Newton in the 1960s did go deep into Maoism, most of that intellectual generation in the West called itself Maoist but was not. So we're not surprised Encyclopedia Britannica says Maoists published Kristeva's articles, because would-be Maoists were everywhere.
While there are many references to Kristeva being "Maoist,"(3) there are also references to her being "non-Freudian";(4) although, fortunately while much of the world has it wrong on the "non-Freudian" part, only the New York Times has called her a "Maoist psychoanalyst." This is a terrible misrepresentation and mix-up. If Kristeva is not Freudian, then no one is. If she is not Freudian it would only be because she and Lacan are now going to be a bigger influence than Freud himself among those studying Freud's same subject matters. She is definitely not Maoist.
Ironically, given the intellectual repression and monolithic nature of exploitation in the West, we are more likely to get more of the story from reading Kristeva's own esoteric works than we are to figure out what "-ism" she really is from reading the commentaries. In About Chinese Women, Kristeva takes up a consistent Freudian line that she will hew to later in life. It is not a case where she went from Maoist to anti-communist. Nor is it the case that Kristeva uses Freud as an infinite grab-bag. In About Chinese Women, Kristeva's later work is already apparent in outline. Crucially she does have one scientific line, not many.
Already on page 16, she is letting on that her cultural background predisposes her to Freud, "some Viennese professor." The best clue in the book about Kristeva's relationship to Mao is her own absolutely true statement:
"In all his articles inspired by the wave of suicides, Mao asserts that the pressures of family and society, the old Confucian morality, and various anachronistic social customs are diametrically opposed to individual freedom and the right of women to decide their own fate. Western commentators are surprised at the lack of psychological analysis: wouldn't personal psychological motivations and obsessions come into the picture? Some go as far as suggesting the probability of 'mental illness' in the case of Mlle. Zhao. Mao doesn't take this into consideration. In his revolt, he attributes all ills to society, and does not suspect that the individual in a given society internalizes much of its ethic within himself."This is Kristeva complaining via Freud about Mao, but she is absolutely right that Mao had no use for psychology. No doubt she is marveling in part because Mao's articles were from his earliest works as a young man, almost as if this is what Mao came with before intellectual interaction. Yet there it was--several articles on the subject of wimmin and suicide long before any investigation of a village's class structure--and none used a psychological explanation.
It's easy to see why two pages later Kristeva says that Mao's "avoidance of individualism" went to the point where she wonders
"does it derive rather from Chinese socio-symbolic structure where precocious socialization, particularities or communication (written, spoken, gestural) and intimate connection between relationships of production and those of reproduction may permit a considerable number of people to go beyond humanism, beyond individualism, beyond idealism? No one, in good conscience, can answer this question, which sums up the problem of China as a whole and underlies the difficulty in dealing with the problem of Chinese women in particular."Later in life, Kristeva concludes that what she saw in China was actually homosexually-driven totalitarianism and expulsive authoritarianism.(5) MIM would jibe in return that her vacation to the Other could have stayed in Paris and a book by E. Durkheim called Suicide.
Durkheim was a scientist without any need for psychology in explaining suicide. Yet, what mystifies about China is not the May 4th movement and its "Mr. Science," nor Mao the revolutionary scientist. Rather what is to wonder about is the extent that ideas of romantic love and psychology are or were lacking in China, not just among scientists.
Against MIM's analysis of Kristeva, yes, there is one big point. In December, 1976, Kristeva and nearly Kristeva alone with Carol Andreas stood up in print immediately to denounce the counterrevolution after Mao's death. Supposed vanguard parties got around to it only many years later.
Here is what Kristeva said:
"The information filtering out after his death seems to confirm the very opposite development: the triumph of a policy of stabilization, to be sure, but also, of conformism and stagnation, a policy anchored, on the one hand, in the Confucian bureaucratic tradition, and, on the other hand, in Soviet bureaucracy. . . . The removal of any traces of the Cultural Revolution; the censorship of any popular debate (even theatrical and guided as often in the past) on the present policy; economism accentuated as the sole objective; the role of the military more dominant than ever--all these things appear to be signs supporting the hypothesis of 'teleological stagnation.' An implicit rapprochment with the Soviet regime--not yet officially confirmed but visible--is shaping up in this evolution after Mao's death."(p. 205)So it was that two Western wimmin knew right away that China's revolution had gone down the toilet. On the other hand, Kristeva also denounces "Stalinism" and draws an unfavorable comparison between the "Gang of Four" and Trotsky, because Trotsky was better able to export his ideas after defeat.
We're not sure Kristeva would credit Mao's China as socialist anymore except in the trivially European way in which Mitterand in France counted as "socialist." Yet her theory of regression is different than others. Already in this early work, Kristeva is saying that what is missing in China is an eroticism and this worries her:
The theme of women's liberation has been generally understood to mean liberation of women's capacity to join the work force. Only the surface of the anti-Confucian theme of change in the family heirarchy (father/son, husband/wife, etc.) has been scratched; and it will be hard to dig any deeper without directly confronting sexual and psychological issues.(p. 143)
MIM would say Kristeva should have spoken to some women in Taiwan before concluding that Mao succeeded in only scratching the surface of Confucianism. It's much closer to the truth to say that Mao did in fact erase Confucianism.
To take action on her own concerns, Kristeva hints throughout the book that China is in the thralls of a dogmatism. To restore China its eroticism, she goes back to find statements and actions by Mao censored by the party. MIM had heard about the dancing with Western wimmin, and she is right that such dance remained wildly taboo in China right to Mao's death; even though even Zhu Deh thought it was a good idea.
When they wrote various laws for China, the Maoists made it clear that people should move on after divorce and death. Mao was well-known to push widows to re-marry. According to Kristeva, some original documents read that singles (via divorce or death) should hurry to "pick up" someone,(p. 120) before officialeeze watered them down. In his youth, Mao argued that China's family-related customs were squelching Chinese nationalism's development. We have to agree that in a theoretical sense, Kristeva is feminist, because she puts priority on such matters as being the source of the drive of revolution.
In addition to trying to restore Mao as a sexually in your face kind of guy, the most Western of Chinese people that there were available, contrary to what she was seeing in China everywhere, Kristeva attempts to eroticize her own observations of Chinese wimmin. So she has a chapter of her description of appearances, while simultaneously concluding that what is missing from China is eroticism.(p. 156)
While she would later detail her position at much greater length, she was already raising doubts about a homosexually-based totalitarianism in connection to Mao's China in 1977.
"Isn't Mao easily taken for a feudal lord, Chinese ideology for a flat and restrictive positivism, and the CCP for an offshoot of dogmatism? Indeed, nothing is more obvious, One one condition: that we don't take into account the fact that a society is a complex organism, that its ethic is determined perhaps above all by its family structure, and that it thus depends directly on the economy of the sexual difference. . . . The sexual body has found refuge only in the shadows of psycho-analysis. . . If, by contrast, one paid attention to women, to the family, and to the sexual difference, inasumuch as these factors determine a social ethic, and after having examined their problematic aspects in China, one might realize the necessity for creating a society where power is active, but not symbolized by anyone: no one can appropriate it for himself if no one--not even women--can be excluded from it. Women, the last of the slaves, necessary for the maintenance of their masters' power; their separation from power insures that power remains representable, and that it is up to men--fathers, lawmakers--to represent it."(p. 200)So this is Kristeva's supposed "Maoist era" conclusion criticizing China for its unisex clothing and other approaches eliminating difference between males and females. Masked in chic rhetoric of the time, it was nonetheless pure Freud, not Mao. Kristeva saw China relying on a feminist father image, but she wanted to see wimmin distinct from men, largely for fear of homosexual impulses. In retort, the Maoists might ask her where accentuating difference led to wimmin's seizing power. She even admits that "classical male oppression" is worse than denying "the difference."(p. 178)
In 2006, others might ask if Kristeva's whole psycho-analysis does not hinge on homophobia. While she quoted from rarely-read Lenin passages, she never directly confronted Lenin's position against Freud. On the whole, this book should not be seen as "Maoist era," but a highly intelligent comparative Freudian discussion of Mao's China based on first-hand observation. In the politically repressed West, to even discuss these ideas made Kristeva an alleged "Maoist," but we need to know better despite the censors.
While Kristeva has the sense to make allowances for senior citizens who just learned to read and now study Lenin's "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism," her reviewers obviously missed all the Freudian commentary and doubts about the Chinese throughout the book. At the beginning of China's revolution story, she locates Mao's comrades as feminists and Liberals. Then she claims Mao for anarchism without mentioning the anarchists who actually existed then and are now better documented for the West since the time she wrote her book. At the end, we have the tell-tale chafing against socialist realism (p. 167) and we can just guess that Kristeva is well on her way to a CIA stipend. (Unlike other claims MIM makes, this one does not have documents behind it. After a while one sees the patterns and cares not about the individual.)
Reviewers would also have to be blind not to notice Kristeva's suggestions about where Chinese wimmin's revolutionary impulse really comes from during the Cultural Revolution period. "The game of love for the father has two limits: aphasia and prison. To avoid the one without locking oneself up in the other is certainly our problem. Is it the problem of Chinese women as well?"(p. 181) When it comes to aggressively political wimmin, Kristeva just can't help seeing daughters avenging murdered fathers--a Freudian metaphor about "our relationship to our parents" and how the female must identify with the father and so on to enter science and politics.
With all due respect to Kristeva who unlike so many writers at least attempts to theorize on feminism, given what we can find about Kristeva on Google, MIM is obliged to bend the bar back: "Kristeva is a dogshit Liberal and always was." Now hopefully, we will start to see some balance and accuracy in discussion.
Notes:
1. Wendy Steiner, "The Bulldozer of Desire," New York Times 15Nov1992.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE0DF1E3FF936A25752C1A964958260
2. http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2005/06/foucault_and_ir.html
3. Google turns up 1410 hits for Kristeva and Maoist words taken together.
4. http://ms.cc.sunysb.edu/~hvolat/kristeva/krist01.htm
There are 111 Google references to Kristeva's being "non-Freudian."
5. Kristeva insists that womyn is bi-sexual, but she also insists that healthy
sexuality involves pleasure for both males and females, so gay behavior should only
be in the context of fun for both males and females and not as a foundation for
"two separate races." (pp. 23, 62) Though in many ways, Kristeva has crossed the
line into homophobia the way Betty Friedan also did it is 100 times more difficult
to get to the bottom of Kristeva's theories. Few will take the time to decide whether
there is a certain inherent logic to early childhood experiences such as separation
from the mother. Nonetheless, we must plod on in a scientific way and realize that
Kristeva's work is dense with such references. Required background for this
discussion is Totem and Taboo and Civilization and Its Discontents by Freud.
While hesitating in China's case in 1977, Kristeva makes it clear that she holds out
hope for Taoism's influence, because missing from China is something that if it
happened in the West she would predict "totalitarianism." (p. 156)