Kristeva, Julia
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (a lecture of about 25 minutes; the English auto-captions are garbled in places, especially names and technical terms, and unclear passages are omitted or paraphrased cautiously)
Core ideas
Kristeva answers her title with a deliberately subjective, non-systematic reflection: European culture, she says, is a "cradle of the identity quest," whose characteristic is a "fondness for the question mark." Europe offers a counter-current to the "cult of identity" found elsewhere in the world (Russians, Americans, Chinese, Arabs, Jews, Muslims): an identity that is indefinitely reconstructable, open-ended and always in construction and deconstruction. She grounds this in personal experience: she left Bulgaria 44 years earlier on a scholarship from the government of de Gaulle, and says that nobody then imagined Bulgaria joining the European Union; her own "futile" identity (futile in the sense of open to the infinity of others) was confirmed by her life in France.
She presents European civilization as a confluence (Greco-Roman, Jewish, Christian, then humanism, and a growing Muslim presence) that did not reduce itself to a "Harlequin coat" or a "grinder" of strangers, though xenophobia and antisemitism have plagued it, and she cites the Crusades as an example of dogmas of identity pushed to crime. She links European identity to multilingualism: she cites the 2005 UNESCO convention on the diversity of cultural expressions, and sees emerging a "polyphonic" subject, a polyglot citizen who is plural in psyche, as opposed to a global-English speaker. She traces a history of the European subject: Saint Bernard's loving "traveling man" (with the ambivalence of love and war), Descartes's "ego cogito," the singular individual of the 18th century, and now the "polyphonic" subject; she draws on her own bilingual experience (French and Bulgarian) and the "matricide" of leaving a maternal language. She also warns about national pride and national depression, comparing the depressed nation to a patient who needs restored self-image before analysis and opening to others.
On freedom, she contrasts two models: the Kantian one (freedom as self-beginning, but subordinated to a moral or rational cause and tending, in a technological world, toward adaptation) and a Greek, Socratic, Heideggerian one (freedom as the encounter in which the speaking being delivers himself to himself and to others), linked to revolt as "turning back" in the Freudian transference. She sees the second as protecting the singularity of each person. She ends with the transvaluation of religious tradition and a "new humanism where transcendence is immanent": she answers the 2004 debate between Habermas and Cardinal Ratzinger, who proposed faith as a normative source, by arguing that post-structuralism and psychoanalysis integrate the "irrational" and a pre-symbolic "semiotic" level of language, and that artistic experience covers part of what religion covers. She closes with a warning about threats (automation of species, ecological apocalypse) while affirming a "bet for Europe" not made of facile optimism.
Excerpts
“It is an indefinitely reconstructable and open-ended identity quest that acts as a counterpoint to the modern cult of identity. [...] Europe would best respond not with certitude but with what I call a fondness for the question mark.”
“A new species has been emerging: "ego affectus", ego cogito, and now the polyphonic subject, a polyglot citizen of a multinational Europe. Will the future European be a singular subject with an intrinsically plural psyche, because he or she is trilingual, quadrilingual, multilingual, or will she be reduced to a global speaker?”
“Freedom is not, negatively speaking, an absence of constraints, but positively the possibility of self-beginning. [...] There is another freedom [...] which unfolds in the speaking being who delivers himself, presents himself to himself and to others, and in doing so liberates himself.”