JULIA KRISTEVA
95
- as
estrangement
of the natural being. The transition of the
thought-consti–
tilted substance
to
concrete actuality
is thus effected, as, conversely, that of
determinate individuality
to its essential constitution.
This argument came to a head with the Enlightenment. It relies on
Rameau's Nephew
to illustrate the notion of culture as estrangement of
the individual into the universal, and vice versa. The strangeness collected
at Diderot's font takes on three aspects: Individuality becomes stable only
by giving up the self for the universal: that is the role of
Myself
the
philosopher. Still relying on the Nephew's experiences, particularly the
episode at Bertin's house, while trying to extract from them a dialectic
of abjection between patron and client, Hegel brings out the logic of
the French monarchy as another illusion of self-estrangement. Finally, the
"distraught utterance" is the major representation of cultural estrange–
ment. Through an ultimate reversion, it does not become frozen into
the "placid consciousness" of a self that is unaware of its underlying
contradiction but on the contrary abolishes the distinction between
"noble" and "base," confronts wealth with the inner abyss, expresses a
"rebellion that repudiates its own repudiation," knows its naturalness, its
flattery, or its abjection; in short, to each of its moments it attaches its
opposite. "The distraught and disintegrated soul is, however, aware of
inversion; it is, in fact, a consciousness of absolute inversion."
This sort of strangeness, which Hegel also describes as "self–
transparent" and "distracted" or as "a universal deception of itself and
others," becomes the "greatest truth" on the very account of the
"shamelessness manifested in stating this deceit." One is struck by Hegel's
faithfulness to that cynical polyphony of culture embodied by the
Nephew. He raises it above "that simple, placid consciousness of the
good and the true," characteristic of the philosopher
Myself,
who can
"say nothing" and is "merely an abstraction," barely capable of gathering
"into a trifling form the meaning of what spirit said." Nevertheless, this
strangeness of culture, even though it be highly appreciated, remains yet
with Hegel a "perversion" that, as scintillation of the spirit and all the
more so of witticism, must be transcended. The polyphony of Hegel, a
careful reader of Diderot, gives way before the triadism of his dialectic.
Out of the many implications of remarks on cultural estrangement
as opposed to moral and religious conciliation, one might consider a few
concerning the novel, the imagination and their present shape - the mass
media. The perversion that sets up the opposites in human signification
facing each other, with neither synthesism, nor internalization, nor
supercession - that is indeed novelistic culture in the polyphonic sense of
the French eighteenth century. It still underlies the great imaginary syn-
