Julia Kristeva's concept of intimate revolt is at once ephemeral and highly engaging. The subject is renewed through a revolt in their own psyche, which “exposes the speaking being to an unbearable conflictuality” (19) as they transition from the old to the new. Yet, as this volume seeks to explore in depth, such intimate revolt has implications for politics and aesthetics, as well as psychoanalysis and social theory. So, how might we understand the concept of revolt? Must it turn to revolution, be revolting (in an abject sense), be socio-political, or might we better find it by looking at art and literature? Ten authors investigate Kristeva's intimate revolt from such various angles in this varied and interesting volume. In this review, for reasons of space, I focus on only a few essays from the book, selected solely as they provide some flavor of the variety held therein—readers are encouraged to consult the contents for a full rundown of the subsections and essays.
The volume opens with an essay on revolt by Kristeva, in which she summarizes a lecture given to The Kristeva Circle in 2014. Here, Kristeva distinguishes her understanding of revolt from nihilism, and from change that has already resulted in new and stable values. Under her conception, by contrast, revolt is a space created between the old and the new, a moment of vacillation in which we are not quite at the space of the new values being instituted and accepted as stable or natural. Instead, it is the very birthplace of the new, of possibility. Such vacillation is, in Kristeva's view, the only possible savior of humanity: “It is uniquely through the continuing questioning of our personal, social, and historical situation that we can make decisions for society and history” (18). The notion that we might find ultimate values or one true way of life is rejected as authoritarian.
Such rejection of true values and the affirmation of the possibility of something new is interrogated in Surti Singh's opening essay, “Spectacle and Revolt: On the Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Social Theory in Julia Kristeva's Work.” By interrogating Kristeva's inheritance of Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle, Singh argues that Kristeva does not sufficiently grapple with the fact that the revolting psyche is always socially embedded nor that Kristeva's idea that its newness is really a healing, coming back to itself, means that its link to social revolt is lost. However, Singh concludes that “Intimate revolt is always already social revolt, if indeed the subject's psychic life is formed by the society of the spectacle” (35). Thus, Singh shows how the social can be incorporated back into Kristeva's concept once this fact of embeddedness is re-added.
By contrast, Melinda C. Hall takes up the question of Kristeva's intimate revolt in a highly localized and intimate setting, that between medical professionals and their patients. In her essay, “Patient Interpretation: Kristeva's Model for the Caregiver,” Hall makes the case that Kristeva's model of the caregiver, fundamentally in a dialogic relationship with those they care for, is necessary to overcome the perils of the patient being ignored or effaced in the relationship. In benevolent listening, caregivers can open a space for the patient to understand themselves and to revolt against some of the formulations placed on them as patients. Such a space, Hall contends, would not only allow the patient to revolt and reformulate the self but could have wider implications for a social revolution in our construction of the patient.
Finally, Amy Ray Stewart, in “Extimate Trauma, Intimate Ethics: Kristevan Revolt in the Artwork of Kara Walker” delivers a commentary on how we might use Kristeva's concept to read Walker's art, and vice versa. For Stewart, Walker's work evokes a space which “uncovers the repressed legacies of racial and sexual abjection” and “also implicates the spectator into these repressed legacies to prompt self-questioning” (88). Thus, Walker's work suggests an intimate revolt in its viewers, who are necessarily discomfited and probed in their presence. However, Stewart, too, understands that this intimate revolt can have wider implications when we additionally understand Walker's work as an act of resistance that can “incite the rebirth of psychical life and the recovery of social ties” (103). Walker's work is thus intimate, but placed as it is in a structural context of racism, it is also a space of social revolt and renewal.
I have a couple of minor criticisms of the volume. First, in a few places I felt the authors met their word count just as they had arrived at an excellent point or topic, and I was left frustrated that the thoughts were not given sufficient space to flourish. However, it's clear that wanting more, and not less, shows how highly engaging these ideas were. Second, the editors, in the introduction, picked up an important criticism of Kristeva regarding her apparent Eurocentrism and lack of engagement with structural racism. This topic was dealt with in a way that I appreciated, with some nuance and delicacy, but without covering it over. However, there was limited engagement with such criticisms in the essays themselves. In many ways, as my discussion above shows, the authors were keen to re-place Kristeva's concept into a social milieu with structural markers; however, although highly constructive, this re-placement did not highlight this problem as a general one for Kristeva's thought.
However, these criticisms cannot undermine the fact that this volume spans a highly interesting and varied number of topics and achieves excellent scholarly standards. Readers of Kristeva will be interested in this volume, as well as various scholars writing about political and social theory, language, or aesthetics.
