JULIA KRISTEVA
131
vague free-for-all which uses the collapse of the communist world as an
excuse for expressing hatred of
all
people's liberations and engaging in a
rather disturbing witch-hunt?
JK: One hunts
all
kinds of witches. If not Heidegger or Celine, it is Marx
and the deluded auto workers of Billancourt. Santa Barbara, the city of
The Old Man and the Wolves,
is the city of resentment, at the antipodes of
thought. Certainly, new forms of political life need to be invented on the
basis of a genealogy of the present form of political life (particularly the
two-party system) . But isn't the part of the
writer,
as distinguished from
that of the "intellectual," as it has always been in the past and today is
more than ever, one of defining this political realm in order to reinvent it
continuously, even to circumvent it? In order to conceive, utter, and de–
scribe unusual, free, and strange bonds between irreconcilable individuals?
Writing is an anarchic act, obviously redeemable but desperately obsti–
nate. Writing is not aimed at the
political
man and woman but at their
be–
ing .
Nevertheless, it is precisely from the realm of being that the uncon–
scious disrupts the civilized spectacle and reveals us as barbarians, prey to
death. The Old Man had that vision, and he died of it - unless he was
murdered.
I am a part of his story.
Translated from the French
by
Leon S. Roudiez
