JULIA KRISTEVA
93
"There is not the slightest difference between a wide-awake physician and
a dreaming philosopher," as long as both scrutinize the strange.
Surreptitiously, strangeness is also political. A rhetorician with
peculiar nerves, the Nephew could not have come from a single place, a
single side, a single country. From the very outset he regrets - which is
to say, admires - that men of genius "don't know what it is to be citi–
zens"; and they are precisely the ones he wants to resemble, they are an
exceptional model not to be imitated by the crowd. Putting citizenship
aside, what would then be the vessel for the unrestrained pantomime
performed by such a convulsive harpsichord player?
He:
"I look about me
and take my positions, or else I entertain myself watching others take
theirs." The stance is temporary, movable, changing - if steady, it is arti–
ficial; provisional, it is wandering. Original, it strays from the origin, it
knows neither root nor soil, it is traveling, foreign. "In the whole
country only one man walks - the King. Everybody else takes a posi–
tion." The strange Rameau is surely not the King. But is the King still
sovereign at the time the dialogue takes place? "One has a homeland,
under a good king, none under a bad one," Voltaire asserted.
Myself,
who often really embraces at full tilt the logic of
He,
and even forestalls
it, believes that even the King postures before his mistress and before
God. But in such a case, would there even be a king? Would there be a
kingdom, since it would lack a king? Would anything, when there is no
sovereignty, beginning with the kingdom? The strange man, spasmodic
and pantomimic, would be the inhabitant of a country without power,
the sociological symptom of a political transition. Would it not also
mean that the political institutions that are undergoing a crisis no longer
insure the symbolic identity of the power and the persons?
Myself
the
philosopher generalizes human instability, which he suspects lies with all
as soon as there is dependency on the other. More pragmatic, however,
the Nephew comes out with it: the king must walk if the kingdom is to
be. Or else - and
Myself
confirms the royal poverty - there is no longer a
kingdom whereon to stand. Relieved of political power, the posturing
man is the same as a man without kingdom.
A
"lumpen-intelligentsia" thus emerged above nations, refusing to
belong to phantom kingdoms and ravaged countries. "Cosmopolitan"
reverberates like a challenge, if not like a mockery. Jancourt's article in
the
EtlCyclopedie
points out that "cosmopolitan" or "cosmopolite" is
used sometimes jokingly to refer to one "who has no fixed abode" or
one "who is nowhere a foreigner." The first text to bear the title
Le
Cosmopolite ou Ie citoyen du Monde,
in 1750, is signed by Fourgeret de
