JULIA KRISTEVA
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example, on Goethe, others on Rousseau, or Rimbaud; I consider myself
a contemporary of Freud. A possible wager: What about a novel that
would be cognizant of Freud? Is such a novel possible? Would it attract
readers? For my part, it is enough that the novel be disturbing.
BS: The barbarity you alluded to earlier seems to me to be essential. Part
of the opposition your book has encountered, I'm sure, has to do with its
illumination of what is unbearable in our society, with people recognizing
themselves. As I was reading the book - and what you have just said con–
firms it - I found two images of barbarity; criminality, violence, on the
one hand, and on the other what you have termed "banality." Could you
tell us a little more? To what extent does this duality reflect the distinction
suggested by Guy Debord in
Commentaire sur Ia societe du spectacle
between
the "integrated spectacular" germane to the Western democratic societies
and the archaic survival of tyrannic forms which, a short time ago,
characterized Communist societies?
JK:
The Old Man and the Wolves
is set in Santa Barbara - a city that also
evokes the violence of our own societies, their racketeering and delin–
quency. At the same time violence has become banalized, a trivialization
that is no less frightening. The psychoanalyist detects it in the speech of
certain patients. We are basically dealing with the image of a
depression
that integrates aggression but under the ruinous guise of an erasure of
meaning. That is what I depict in the character of Alba. Alba is one of
those depressed persons who considers herself to be "void of meaning."
She views her actions as neutralized, impossible to describe, even in the
extreme, murderous facets that they might exhibit. A true depression of
meaning itself takes place, and the insignificance into which the melan–
choly person sinks is not merely an individual, "pathological" occurrence.
Because of its amplitude, it assumes the seriousness of a societal event, a
civilizational crisis.
I should like to add something about the nature and the extent of that
crisis . I have just come back from Moscow, where I gave a series of
lectures at the French Studies Institute in Moscow's Lomonosov
University. I was struck by the pervasive crisis over there, the way in
which it seemed to be the very realization of the crisis I portrayed in
The
Old Man and the Wolves.
I recognized Santa Barbara. No one any longer
respects authority; no one any longer occupies the seat of power, partic–
ularly in the university, where there are students but no semblance of
rules and regulations; and no one is in charge. I am puzzled by contempo–
rary studies ofSoviet or Russian society that, knowingly or not, minimize
the extent of the catastrophe, which is not only economic but also ethical.
