New Forms of Revolt: Essays on Kristeva’s Intimate Politics ed. by Sarah K. Hansen and Rebecca Tuvel (review)

The essays in this volume constitute a rich and critical engagement with Julia Kristeva. They situate and develop her work in relation to such thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Gillian Rose, Ferdinand de Saussure, and Guy Debord, but also challenge and interrogate the limits of Kristeva’s understanding of linguistics and political action. As editors Sarah K. Hansen and Rebecca Tuvel write, ‘many of the essays in this volume can be described as revolts against and through Kristeva’s texts’ (p. 11). In their Introduction, the editors note that Kristeva’s reduction of histories of racism, colonialism, migration, and segregation to abstract categories endangers the revolt as such. There is thus an attempt to think and thematize that which remains to a certain extent unrepresented in Kristeva’s thought with regard to questions of the social and the intimate; linguistics and politics. Attentive to Kristeva’s distinct psychoanalytic understanding of the production of the speaking being between the ‘semiotic’ and the ‘symbolic’, Elena Ruiz, for example, demarcates the limits of Kristeva’s ‘universalist’ project by situating her work within the European linguistic tradition. Surti Singh argues that Debord’s theory of the spectacle provides a framework for reconsidering the relation of Kristeva’s intimate revolt to social structures. Sara Beardsworth understands Kristeva’s and Rose’s critiques of Arendt to constitute a chiasmus that thematizes the ‘indefinite relation between action and revolt’ (p. 45). Elaine P. Miller focuses on the theme of ‘estrangement’, which she exposes in Kristeva’s concept of revolt and Arendt’s concept of natality. Sarah Kathryn Marshall compares Arendt’s and Kristeva’s readings of the myth of Orpheus and argues that the latter’s understanding of the political is inseparable from the feminist project of Eurydicean revolt. Amy Ray Stewart analyses Kara Walker’s anti-racist art, which she understands to initiate ‘an intimate ethics of aesthetic revolt’ (p. 86) that concerns the production of sense between the psychic and the social. Melinda C. Hall argues that medical professionals can create spaces of revolt to help their patients through patient interpretation. Beata Stawarska reconsiders the relation between Saussure and Kristeva in order to suggest that there is an alliance between their linguistic projects that offers a strategy of revolt against normalization in both the psychic and the social sphere. Alice Jardine’s autobiographical reflections on Kristeva’s life conclude the volume, a volume of essays in which the possibility and development of the concept of intimate revolt in relation to the social is a general concern. As such, the essays are a welcome addition to the literature on Kristeva, and deepen our understanding of the possibilities of forms of resistance.