The Cost of Critique: In(ter)vention and Ethical Violence in Kristeva and Benjamin

ABSTRACT

In this essay we argue that there is an important but frequently overlooked link between Walter Benjamin’s and Julia Kristeva’s attempts to explore new modes of critical practice. What connects Benjamin and Kristeva, in our account, is a vital concern with the cost of critique, that is, with the question whether critical agency in its most productive modes is inherently related to certain forms of ethical violence. We aim to show that, once we read them together, these authors’ pivotal contribution consists of offering an alternative model of critique animated by an ethos of in(ter)-vention, which is keyed to techniques of criticism that are both disruptive and innovative. Ethical violence here refers to a strategic displacement of moral self-perception, which undercuts people’s aspirations toward maintaining a morally robust character in the face of political adversity and social injustice. To illustrate the stakes of such displacement, we turn to the figure of the ‘anti-journalist’ Karl Kraus whose in(ter)ventions display integrity in action rather than integrity of character. Specifically, under the rubric of ethical violence, we propose a dynamic interpretation of Kraus’ performance in terms of polemical witnessing, which combines the corrosive aspects of Benjamin’s ‘destructive character’ with the constructive aspects contained in Kristeva’s notions of ‘sharing singularity’ and ‘intimate revolt’.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Marcus Bullock, Katherine Arens and two anonymous reviewers for their critical comments on earlier versions of this essay. Their generous feedback has helped us improve the substance and thematic focus of our discussion. We would also like to thank Erdmut Wizisla and Ursula Marx at the Walter Benjamin Archive in Berlin for expertly guiding us in exploring the complex relation between Benjamin and Kraus in the third main segment of our essay. Any remaining shortcomings are our sole responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Markus Weidler is an assistant professor in philosophy at Columbus State University.

Mariko Izumi is an associate professor in communication at Columbus State University.

Notes

1. A prime example of such theorizing is John Holloway’s Change the World without Taking Power (Holloway 2002). Though philosophically more refined, some weaknesses similar to Holloway’s, as Kristeva and Benjamin would perceive them, come to the fore in Part Three of Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition (Stout 2004).

2. See, for example, Terry Eagleton’s (2009) rather nonchalant dismissal of Kristeva. Symptomatically, Eagleton’s assessment is marred by a weighty inaccuracy, when he groups Kristeva with Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, and then claims that ‘[f]or all these thinkers, the symbolic order is to be undone’ (89–90). Without any qualification, this is surely false in Kristeva’s case, since she makes it very clear that in her view the symbolic order cannot permanently be rejected or exited, short of suffering a psychotic breakdown. This last point has been stressed by Jacqueline Rose (1993: 43–46) who avoids Eagleton’s theoretical misgivings about Kristeva, but remains concerned about a fundamental ambivalence in Kristeva’s work. In particular, Rose perceives a recurrent tendency in Kristeva to associate the figure of the mother with a pre-symbolic realm before and beyond language, which threatens to turn the critical force of Kristeva’s work against itself, ‘implicating her own concepts in the fantasies, ambivalence and projections which she describes’ (52). This provides an important clue for the later parts of our discussion. In the context of Benjamin’s engagement of Karl Kraus, we shall explore the notion of self-implication in terms of critical performance rather than concepts. Along these lines we perceive more potential for political traction in Kristeva’s writings than Rose seems to do, while our analysis has benefited from Rose’s well put reservations in this regard.

3. It is true that, after this pronouncement, Benjamin does add various comments on God. Yet, for the most part, these subsequent remarks are as elusive as the one about true reconciliation just mentioned. For example, Benjamin does not pause to clarify the meaning of phrases like ‘Nazarene essence’ in a crucial passage where he hints at the difference between ‘the Romantics’ and their understanding of ‘the mystery of hope’, in supposed contrast with the distortions of such hope effected by the ‘Christian-mystical moments’ at the end of Goethe’s text featuring the symbol of the falling star (Benjamin 1996: 355).

4. See Kristeva (2009: 47–55). Àpropos Kristeva’s working conception of secular faith, cf. also the characterisation of her position as ‘neither belief nor nihilism’ in Kristeva (2002b: 237).

5. Concerning this dilemma, cf. also Manning and Massumi (2014: 87) and Rose (1993: 46, 51).

6. Proceeding selectively here, one can find this theme to be particularly prominent in Chapters 8 and 9 of Strangers to Ourselves (Kristeva 1991). These passages can effectively be read in conjunction with her Proust study (Kristeva 1993) and her various publications on the topic of revolt, all the way up to a recent keynote address titled ‘New Forms of Revolt’ (Kristeva 2014).

7. As subsequent references will show, our textual focus lies with Benjamin’s essays on ‘The Destructive Character’ and ‘Karl Kraus’, along with the ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’ as well as a posthumously published fragment on ‘Capitalism and Religion’.

8. An important exception to this general state of affairs is Chapter 5 in Body- and Image-Space (Weigel 1996).

9. ‘Choric’ refers to Kristeva’s Plato-inspired but modified notion of the chora, which she originally introduced in Revolution in Poetic Language: ‘The chora is a modality of signifiance [sic] in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the distinction between real and symbolic’. This is preceded by the remark: ‘The chora is not yet a position that represents something for someone (i.e., it is not a sign); nor is it a position that represents someone for another position (i.e., it is not yet a signifier either); it is, however, generated in order to attain to this signifying position. Neither model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularisation, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm’ (Kristeva 1984: 26). To put these formulations in perspective, John Lechte notes: ‘The chora is connotative of the mother’s body – an unrepresentable body. The mother and the body as such in fact go together for Kristeva. The mother’s body becomes the focus of the semiotic as the “pre-symbolic” – a manifestation – especially in art, of what could be called the “materiality” of the symbolic: the voice as rhythm and timbre, the body as movement, gesture, and rhythm’ (Lechte 1990: 129).

10. Habermas raised this point most forcefully in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, where he attacked Foucault’s approach as both ‘presentistic’ and ‘cryptonormative’ (Habermas 1987: 275–276).

11. On this occasion Kristeva remarks: ‘Each person has the right to become as singular as possible and to develop the maximum creativity for him or herself. And at the same time, without stopping this creativity, we should try to build bridges and interfaces – that is to say foster sharing. The religious heritage is going to lead us to rethink the idea of sharing, but without repressing singularity. This is the great challenge of the modern world’ (Lechte and Margaroni 2004: 162).

12. This volume constitutes the first volume of her trilogy on ‘female genius’.

13. For helpful synoptic statements of Arendt’s approach to Kant, according to Kristeva, see especially Kristeva (2001: 181, 220, 226–227).

14. As will become clear in the following, the present conception of ‘speech act’ as performance is more directly indebted to Helen Freshwater (2001) and to Martin Jay (2011: 20–21) rather than to J. L. Austin or John Searle.

15. Cf. Richter (2000: 21–25) and Kaulen (1987: 149–154).

16. ‘There is no revolt without prohibition of some sort. If there weren’t, whom would you revolt against? . . . But the intra-psychic limit and prohibition are the indispensable conditions for living and for the life of language and thought; the codes of modern democracies can only seek out the optimal social variants of these so they can protect us from aggressive drives and yet ensure their creative exercise all the same’ (Kristeva 2002a: 31). Cf. also her previous remark in the same volume: ‘“It’s forbidden to forbid” [a May ’68 motto] is one of the most cruel prohibitions: it makes you laugh at first but you go crazy in the end. Let’s be clear. We have a simplistic image of the severe, tyrannical father, and it’s supposed to have been invented by good old Freud. Nothing could be more schematic, though you do find this figure of paternity in the founder of psychoanalysis . . . Rather than taking on the tyranny of the paranoiac father, it seems more interesting to me to think about a complex figure of paternity. Without that we remain in a hallucinatory mother-child dyad that’s beyond civilization’ (23–24).

17. ‘The will to join private jouissance to public happiness isn’t necessarily communitarian’ (Kristeva 2002a: 40).

18. This statement is closely linked to the following passage from a book Kristeva co-authored the year before, in which she writes: ‘. . . I [Kristeva] am not speaking of secularism, understood as a battle against religion, but of atheism as the resorption of the sacred into the tenderness of the connection to the other. And that sober and modest atheism relies on the maternal’ (Clément and Kristeva 2001: 60).

19. For details concerning Benjamin’s irregular membership, see Hollier (1988).

20. In large part this ominous indeterminacy has to do with the dual nature of drives and the central role they play within Kristeva’s theoretical framework. Thus John Lechte notes: ‘The chora is a semiotic, non-geometrical space where drive activity is “primarily” located. As I see it, the chora is akin to a provisional concentration of energy, or an equally provisional pole of attraction. It is in no way any kind of position. In particular the chora is the locus of the drive activity underlying the semiotic. The drives being both positive and negative, creative and destructive, set up both stases and attacks against these. In short, the drives set up a continuous tension of energy charges and their dissipation’ (Lechte 1990: 129).

21. For ‘partial objects’, see Deleuze and Guattari (2004). Cf. Patton (2010).

22. For a good snap-shot summary of Habermas’s account and its limitations, see Dews (1999).

23. To be clear, in Kristeva’s writing the phrase of ‘stylistic strategy’ belongs to an earlier period of her intellectual production. See (Kristeva 1982: 191). In the present context, our reference to style is more closely related to Kristeva’s discussion of style in her subsequent volume Intimate Revolt. See (Kristeva 2002b: 52).

24. As Steiner (2010: 100) puts it: ‘It was not the essay on Proust, however, but the intellectually demanding and no less structurally difficult essay on Karl Kraus (1874–1936), which Benjamin singles out as exemplary of his thinking’.

25. Tillich (1987) [originally delivered as his Rauschenbusch Lectures in 1959]. Of course, Benjamin could not have read Tillich’s essay, which was published long after Benjamin’s untimely death. Speaking of ‘elective affinity’ here denotes an overlap in philosophico-religious perspective. Also, in saying that Weigel downplays vital connections to Protestantism, we are not suggesting that Weigel is oblivious to these points of contact. Rather, at certain junctures her analysis subordinates Protestant motifs to Jewish motifs in Benjamin’s writings. To some extent this is appropriate, for it reflects Benjamin’s own tendency. For instance, in one key passages to which we shall turn below Benjamin attributes to Kraus a ‘Jewish certainty’ which somehow rendered him immune to the ‘cult of language’ propagated by the George Circle (Benjamin 1999: 451). Accordingly, our approach is not meant to ‘correct’ Weigel’s reading, but to offer a counterweight to her placement of religious emphases in the course of her interpretation. This difference in emphasis notwithstanding, we have substantially benefited from Weigel’s erudite study. Cf. note 27, below.

26. Here Tillich is close to Emil Brunner’s endorsement of ‘dual revelation’ (doppelte Offenbarung). For details on this theologically complex notion, see Fischer (2002).

27. This is in keeping with Weigel’s perceptive observations about Kraus’ uneasy ‘threshold position’, which keeps the modes of Klage and Anklage, i.e. lament and accusation, in provocative tension (Weigel 2013: 25).

28. See Reitter (2008), especially Chapter 4 which offers a commentary on Benjamin’s and Scholem’s reception of Kraus.

29. (Benjamin 1999: 451). Incidentally, in the context of the ‘sanctification of the word’, Benjamin’s present critique of ‘theurgy’ marks an important thematic link between the Kraus essay (1931) and his earlier discussion of Goethe’s Elective Affinities (written in 1919–1922; published in 1924–1925). In the latter text, Benjamin notes with great emphasis: ‘[I]n Greece genuine art and genuine philosophy – as distinct from their inauthentic stage, the theurgic – begin with the departure from myth, because art is not based on truth to any lesser extent than is philosophy, and philosophy is not based on truth to any greater extent than is art’ (Benjamin 1996: 326). Interestingly, in the Goethe-essay, Benjamin associates such ‘inauthentic . . . theurgic’ tendencies with the writing of Friedrich Gundolf (a pseudonym of Friedrich Gundelfinger), one of Stefan George’s most prominent disciples. About a decade later, in the Kraus essay, Benjamin’s criticism of theurgy now takes aim at the ‘master’, i.e. at George himself.

30. Unless otherwise specified, subsequent page references for Kraus in the main body of the text refer to this volume.

31. Cf. the subsection ‘The Interruption’ of ‘What Is Epic Theater?’ in Benjamin (1985: 150–151).

32. For this characterisation, see Canetti (2005).

33. The phrase ‘merciless deglamorizer’ is taken from Benjamin’s essay ‘The Image of Proust’ in Benjamin (1985: 210). The reference to cannibalism is drawn from Benjamin’s characterisation of Kraus in the role of a great satirist who ‘devours’ his adversaries. ‘The satirist is the figure in whom the cannibal was received into civilization’ (Benjamin 1999: 448).