Justice,Injustice and the Work of Julia Kristeva

Justice as Impossibility

The initial difficulty faced in these deliberations is that, as is well known, an exact definition of justice is elusive. It is one thing to view justice being neutrally dispensed by the courts (cf. the idea that justice is blind: it is dispensed without favour and is focused on the individual ³ ); it is quite another to understand what is meant by a demand for justice. Whatever the case with regard to the latter, the notion of justice as a pure calculus (retributive justice) is not adequate, most notably because the application of the law is never perfect. Justice as equity stumbles at the hurdle of how one’s due might be established, given that each case is entirely singular.

Moreover, in the early 1980s, Carol Gilligan’s psychological study of women’s development opened the way for a debate on the differences between men and women with regard to justice and caring (Gilligan, 1993). Thus, in wake of Gilligan, Held, for example, has argued that: ‘The perspective of justice conceptualizes persons as autonomous individuals; that of care sees persons as relational’ (Held, 2015: 21). Justice, then, is presented as being separate and distinct from caring, from love, from relationality – that is, separate and distinct from qualities exhibited predominantly, if not exclusively, by women. Indeed, such qualities have been designated as private, while justice would be essentially public – and therefore, traditionally, a matter for men. Justice as a universal value is thus disputed. All the more so when thinkers such as Rousseau and Freud are invoked in order to point out that, historically, women’s capacity for justice has been deemed problematic at best, and non-existent at worst (Pateman, 1980; Gilligan, 1993: 7).

Today, one can perhaps more readily argue that if justice is not universal, it is not justice. Nevertheless, it still remains the case that ‘justice’ is a contested concept. In a manner that only heightens the sense of its contested nature, Derrida, in his famous oration, ‘Force of Law’ (1990), renders justice as something indefinable and separate from law. Derrida thus claims that it is necessary to distinguish between law as a calculus and justice, which is incalculable. And: ‘the decision between just and unjust is never assured by a rule’ (p. 947, translation modified). Further: ‘Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists. Deconstruction is justice’ (p. 945). General rules and principles, as we have noted, cannot then take account of the singularity that justice implies:

How are we to reconcile the act of justice that must always concern singularity, individuals, irreplaceable groups and lives, the other or myself as other, in a unique situation, with rule, norm, value or the imperative of justice which necessarily have a general form, even if this generality prescribes a singular application in each case? (p. 949)

Moreover: ‘There is an avenir [future, to come: à venir] for justice and there is no justice except to the degree that some event is possible which, as event, exceeds calculation, rules, programs, anticipations and so forth’ (p. 971).

The problem arising is that the ‘purity’ ⁴ of justice is such that existence (whether as act or law) tells against it ever being realized. Intuitively, Derrida seems to recognize the problem here and concedes that a form of law does play a part in the manifestation of justice, but it is law that is not simply the application of a rule, a principle, a program, a prescription or a precedent; it is not the law as a mechanical apparatus primed to spit out a ruling. Consequently, justice can only occur in the just decision, a decision made in all urgency, yet in freedom, a freedom that would radically separate the just decision from one that is entirely formulaic and out of touch with the singularity of the case at issue. This, Derrida claims, is a decision that is also undecidable: ‘A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process. It might be legal; it would not be just’ (p. 963). Ultimately, a decision must be made. Indeed, it must not be delayed! If it is not to be another idealist dead-end, justice has to appear; and it does this by way of the – or a – law. Derrida acknowledges this in as far as, according to him, the decision-maker must claim a law – provided it is not merely the application of a rule – in which the decision is couched: ‘this freedom or this decision of the just, if it is one, must follow a law or a prescription, a rule’ (p. 961).

As revealed by the discussion thus far, justice, despite appearances, is not necessarily the outcome of the programmed actions of any pre-existing institution – although it may be. It is not certain that justice, if we followed Derrida’s influential account, could ever appear, even if it becomes law in its own right. Indeed, Derrida could not, as he sees it, put the difficulty pertaining to justice more strongly: ‘Justice is an experience of the impossible’ (p. 947). ⁵ The latter is what accrues in the outcome of events, an outcome that is always governed by singularity and contingency – that is, by difference and time.

Julia Kristeva also works with the notion of singularity, both in her psychoanalytic work and in relation to disability and social theory. ⁶ Singularity is connected to vulnerability revealed in the unconscious by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis thus puts each individual in touch with their singularity. In the wake of Derrida’s argument, justice (if it could appear) would have to do with enabling singularity. As such, psychoanalysis is indirectly bound up with justice and more directly bound up with a notion of injustice.

Although in everyday parlance, the notion of justice is often invoked as though it were quite unproblematic, the fact is that rather than being open to definition, justice is only open to debate. Consequently, although a consensus on the meaning of justice might be out of reach, scapegoating as an instance of injustice is much more clear-cut. Thus, anti-Semitism as an instance of scapegoating is clear-cut. Scapegoating, we will see, locks into the Kristevan notion that the negative (hatred, abjection – original murder) is the founding element of psychic space; the latter exists within a socio-political context. Today, that context, in Kristeva’s view, is dominated by the images of the ‘society of the spectacle’.

To clarify what is at stake concerning the scapegoat, the better to grasp how an understanding of injustice is opened up by the Kristevan oeuvre, I will refer to the work of René Girard. For it is Girard, more than any other thinker, who has elaborated in depth on the nature and significance of the scapegoat and the sacred and who has influenced Kristeva in this regard. ⁷ Before coming to Girard in more detail, however, let us consider Kristeva’s notion of the ‘need to believe’. The reason for this is that belief also plays a key role in Girard’s reading of persecution texts, texts that refer to the killing of a scapegoat.

The ‘Need to Believe’ and Fundamentalism

Kristeva’s thinking is opposed to the often-jaundiced view secular society has of religion, or, more precisely, of belief, particularly of the fervent kind. She also opposes what she sees as an outcome of extreme secularism: ‘the management via technology of the human species’ (2009: 29). With regard to belief and Christ’s passion, Alain Delaye has proposed that ‘Kristeva’s approach is similar to that of René Girard’ (2020: 542 n27). Were this to be the case, it would mean that the Crucifixion is a repudiation of the scapegoat mechanism and the designation of it as unjust. According to Girard, then, the crucifixion of Christ is not a sacrifice; ⁸ nor is Jesus a scapegoat whose death will bring an end to violence. Rather, Christ’s death reveals the innocence of the scapegoat and the injustice that is committed in the killing of the victim. Girard argues that every society hitherto, where the scapegoat mechanism has been invoked by the community to end violence, is based on a lie. Christ’s death is equivalent to the exposure of this lie. His death also stands for putting an end to the violence that supposedly ends violence. ‘Turn the other cheek’, is the message. Does Kristeva’s thinking on belief really gel with Girard’s approach, as Harvey suggests, or does she pursue a different trajectory? Such is the question that I seek to answer in what follows.

The text This Incredible Need to Believe (2009) ⁹ proposes a theory of belief as being crucial to the foundation of subjectivity. Perhaps the belief that is in play here is part of the ontology of the subject, as expressed by the notion of a loving father: the ‘Father of individual prehistory [. . .] transmits to me the conviction of “being”. “I” does not stop seeking these primary constituents of his identity in his incredible need to believe’ (p. 11). Moreover, ‘the need to believe is part and parcel of the speaking subject “before” any strictly religious construction and of course within secularization itself’ (p. 12). However, we should note that, even if what is being proposed is foundational for the psyche, there is also a drive aspect encapsulated in ‘need’. It is as though one were driven to believe, that there is a predisposition to believe, that the need to believe is, in the first instance, part of the make-up of the subject prior to what is believed. Thus, even if belief can be about the return of religions, Kristeva is concerned to distinguish particular beliefs from the founding ‘need to believe’. In short, the belief in question is ‘prereligious’ (p. 11): ‘It is a truth which keeps me, makes me exist’. It is the point at which it is impossible not to believe: ‘If this need “to hold true” [believe] is not satisfied, my apprenticeships, convictions, loves, and acts just don’t hold up’ (p. 3).

The need to believe adds a new insight into the working of the psyche and subjectivity and has a clinical correlate, especially in the treatment of adolescents suffering from being unable to give vent to ‘the deep need to believe that nourishes adolescent culture’ (p. 18). More than anyone, perhaps, the make-up of the teenager includes ‘an aptitude for belief’ (p. 17). Implicitly, a signal is being sent to other psychoanalysts, to youth workers, parents and teachers to the effect that contemporary youth’s malaise, brought on in part by ‘romanticism to the point of fanaticism’ (p. 17), will only worsen – the likelihood of injustice will only worsen – if the need to believe is not addressed.

Thus outlined, then, is the theoretical and clinical picture with regard to the ‘incredible need to believe’. Supplementary to this is the notion that the incredible need to believe adjoins the social and judicial picture. Here, the consequences of the impossibility of imposing authority, plus the fact that the ‘“sublimations” Freud called for are no longer encouraged’ (p. 12), can well lead to violence. The analyst thus points out that:

Jurists are asked to come up with just solutions to conflicts, including religious conflicts, forgetting that jurisprudence gets its authority from a general consensus on essential moral principles. But it is precisely this consensus that our multicultural and recomposed societies lack, deprived of moral bases because incapable of federating heterogeneous beliefs around mere ‘human rights’, perceived as ‘abstract’. (2009: 12)

Consequently, we can conclude that socio-political factors do have an impact on the subject’s need to believe. Indeed, Kristeva asks, ‘Is it not surprising that our secularized societies have neglected this incredible need to believe?’ (p. 11). By this she means that secularism has failed to recognize that the need to believe is both ontological/anthropological and historical (related to the evolution of forms of belief). But if the need to believe is, at the clinical level, equivalent, for example, to a belief in the power of words, and more generally, in language and signification (a belief that severely depressed patients are incapable of), then is it not surprising that it would pass unremarked upon?

What, then, are the implications of the need to believe for injustice when we consider what is believed in? Almost everything a subject takes for granted could be understood to be the result of the need to believe. Things taken for granted include prejudices (that can give rise to fundamentalism) that do not necessarily reveal themselves as such except under certain circumstances – e.g. German anti-Semitism as revealed by the ascendancy of the Nazis. Seen in this light, Kristeva’s psychanalytical meditation could well lead to insights into the phenomenon of scapegoating. Indeed, these ‘so-called values [. . .] often capture destructivity, taking the form of a fascination for evil that is sought in the other, and which leads to searching for the scapegoat to get rid of him mercilessly, in favor of the Sovereign Good, my very own Good, my religion’ (2018: 289, emphasis added). This destructive aspect of the psyche that leads to scapegoating becomes all the more evident if we are prepared to marry the Kristevan ‘need to believe’ to René Girard’s invocation of belief in his interpretation of scapegoat myths.

The Scapegoat as the Epitome of Injustice

René Girard is known for the view that an exhaustive study of myths from around the world will reveal a common thread, namely, the scapegoat mechanism and facts about the persecution of victims. Although this insight is not always available at the level of the manifest content of the myth, interpretation based on the analysis of many myths will show that the ultimate message of the myth is about the sacrifice of a surrogate victim as a means of limiting violence and about the actual persecution of victims, such as Girard demonstrates in relation to the Middle Ages in The Scapegoat (1989). The judicial system as it has evolved in the West, says our author, ‘serves to deflect the menace of vengeance’ (Girard, 1979: 15). Vengeance, like sacrifice, inevitably involved the killing of a scapegoat – of one who, in the broader scheme of things is not, from a judicial perspective, responsible for – is not guilty of – the wrong that has supposedly been committed. A profound injustice thus occurs every time a scapegoat is killed or injured. If it is not clear what justice is, the killing of the scapegoat is revelatory of injustice. What is more, the scapegoat is assuredly a victim. In Girard’s view, the whole of Greek tragedy may be subsumed under the problem of the control of violence – a control that will often unfold through the killing of a scapegoat. What Girard attributes to historical reality Kristeva would, psychoanalytically, see as at least partly deriving from the negative basis of psychic reality. But whether historically or psychically inflected, the persecution of the scapegoat is an injustice.

Oedipus – Scapegoat

In Kristeva’s reading of Sophocles’ plays about Oedipus – Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus (1982: 83–9) – the notion of scapegoat and abjection are brought together. Girard had engaged in a similarly oriented reading that emphasizes the role of violence. It thus remains to be seen as to how this compares to Kristeva’s interpretation. And, indeed, when, in addressing Oedipus the King the analyst asks: ‘does it not sum up the mythic variant of abjection?’ (p. 84), it is Girard’s reading that seems to be recalled even if, unlike Girard, there is far less emphasis on the relation between the sacred and violence.

As scapegoat, Oedipus is ‘abjection and pharmakos’ (p. 84) – both poison and cure. But, above all, to be ‘pharmakos’ is to be a victim, to be one whose death will bring an end to a sacrificial crisis suffered by the community. For her part, Kristeva focuses a number of times on Oedipus as pharmakos. However, rather than see Oedipus’ fate as being tied to that of the community, she implies that Oedipus is the human writ large, the human ‘as mortal and speaking’ (p. 88). As a result, the statement: ‘“There is an abject” is henceforth stated as, “I am abject, that is mortal and speaking”’ (p. 88). It is, then, a matter of doing justice to the human. And in terms of the focus presented thus far, this means countering the abjection that leads to persecution – that is, it means countering injustice.

Poetic Language and Injustice

As is now well-known, in 1974 Kristeva published her doctorat d’état, La Révolution du language poétique, that focused on the avant-garde poetic language of Lautréamont and Mallarmé. ¹⁰ Of course, the notion of poetic language opens out onto the division in signifying between the rhythmical, drive-based semiotic and the rational and ordered symbolic. The latter gives rise to the Law understood as prohibition. Although it is far from being an exercise in political theory, and thus a text that has justice or injustice as its focus, the sections of the thesis (still largely untranslated into English) contain a lengthy and informative meditation on the historical (the Paris Commune, the Third Republic, colonialism, etc.) and social and political context (family, marriage, class, nation, state, etc.) of avant-garde poetic practices in France at the end of the 19th century. Here, at this point, the contact between poetic language and injustice is intimate, particularly as concerns Mallarmé’s poetic practice. With the Dreyfus affair (1894–1906), where Dreyfus is clearly a scapegoat, even though Mallarmé does not (unlike Zola) publicly pronounce his support for Dreyfus (or, for that matter, take an anti-Dreyfusard stance), ¹¹ the Mallarméan practice of poetic language counter-acts the extreme nationalism (verging on xenophobia) then in vogue, and evokes cultural experiences (e.g. German music and philosophy) beyond national frontiers. Rather than being translated directly into the symbolic, ‘the Mallarméan Idea is polymorphous: rhythm, danse, numerical plurality’ (Kristeva, 1974: 537). In short: the intellectual avant-garde (which included Lautréamont and Mallarmé) ‘showed the suffocating limits of the nation, whether this be ideological, religious or linguistic’ (p. 529). Furthermore, Kristeva is careful to point out that this ‘going beyond nationalism’ of the poetic avant-garde is to be ‘radically distinguished from syncretist ideology’, which, although pretending to be progressive, was in fact ‘racially’ based and ‘openly spiritual’ (p. 531). Syncretism calls on an ‘Aryan spirit’ to combat ‘the Semitic spirit’: ‘race replaces the nation’ (p. 532). Against this ‘type of ideology, avant-garde texts represent both a riposte and a counterweight’ (p. 532).

Injustice cannot be opposed directly in poetic language, but as a practice poetic language can constitute an obstacle to the free reign of scapegoating and racism, both of which are in evidence in the Dreyfus affair. As Kristeva points out: ‘At the time of the Dreyfus affair, the antinationalist and antimilitarist attitude of Mallarmé seems, ultimately, not to be in doubt’ (p. 533). Although there is not, regarding poetic language and injustice, a lot to go on, it seems clear that the effectiveness of poetic practice as a political endeavour depends on the context in which injustice takes place. It is not that the practice of poetic language is essentially just, but that in the context of the French colonialist and racist fervour at the end of the 19th century – a fervour from which the socialists were not excluded – Mallarmé’s composure and avant-garde signifying practice that gave vent to the semiotic were precisely what was required to shake a nationalist complacency exemplified by political agitation and an academic approach to the French language.

Céline: Abjection and Injustice

In a text first published in 2005 ¹² (that is, sometime after Pouvoirs de l’horreur [1980]), the abject is not only clearly distinguished from an object (Kristeva, 2012: 184) but is equated with hate and more generally with ‘the symptoms of psychical negativity that explode in paranoid hatred’ (p. 184). Abjection and hate are more ‘original’ than the object and love. As against Girard’s founding notion of subjectivity in mimesis, Kristeva says that, ‘[b]efore being like, I am not’ (p. 187). The way out of abjection is, the analyst says, through forgiveness. ¹³ Vengeance can even be mitigated through forgiveness. Before turning to the case of Céline, let us say that forgiveness would be charged with the not inconsiderable task of countering the hate and negativity that produce the scapegoat – that produce, in effect, injustice. Humans are thus prone to produce injustice. This seems to be what we are being alerted to.

More directly, the issue of injustice is raised by Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s writing and by Kristeva’s analysis of it within her theory of abjection and horror. As a number of commentators, including this author (Lechte, 1990: 165–7), have already shown, the analyst demonstrates that Céline’s writing is the product of the failure, psychoanalytically speaking, to separate entirely from the mother. Language – to the extent that it can be articulated at all and not be drowned in an emotional well – here manifests the signs of this non-separation: ellipses, exclamations, onomatopoeia (‘crack!’), staccato sentences, argotic phrasing that heightens the emotional force and, finally, evocations of horror as such. Thus, Kristeva refers to: ‘Céline’s narrative of suffering and horror’ (1982: 140), where ‘[o]ne thus reaches that extreme Célinian situation where the most objectal, the most sparing description is blended with the most affective charge’ (p. 202). Such an emotional well gives rise to the most intense hatreds that can barely be acknowledged (the latter being the first stage in the dissipation of hatred), let alone soothed. It is out of such hatred that anti-Semitism arises. But why anti-Semitism? Before drawing some consequences from this question, let us look at this scenario from another angle – that of the scapegoat.

Céline’s anti-Semitism clearly demarcates a scapegoat, namely the Jew. How is this possible? Why is this necessary? From wallowing in horror at all levels, and thus going against the common trend – which is to avoid (that is, repress) such things – Céline, remarkably, goes along with a certain crowd – along with certain ‘stereotyped themes’ (p. 174): the anti-Semites are those who are clear in their own minds about the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. Here, of course, the Jews become the modern scapegoat par excellence. Popular culture, at a certain historical moment, believes fervently in this conspiracy. How does such a conspiracy relate to horror and the abject, given that, despite its odiousness, it exhibits a certain lucidity? To cite the analyst: ‘That object [compared to the abject], the Jew, gives thought a focus where all contradictions are explained and satisfied’ (p. 178). Thus, the ‘function of the Jew in the economy of Célinian discourse’ operates as a tool to oppose the symbolic in the first instance, and in the second instance to ‘substitute another Law for the constraining and frustrating symbolic one, a law that would be absolute and reassuring’ (p. 178).

In Kristeva’s view, Céline writes against the symbolic (the domain of everyday discourse) in order to pursue a writing that incarnates emotion and, ultimately, the abject. The Célinian anti-Semitic pamphlet thus becomes the product of a delirium, ‘that is the nature of all anti-Semitism’ (p. 180). Although the Jew was, as we saw, depicted as an object (and thus, potentially, as the subject of a coherent discourse), the same figure becomes, in Céline’s text, ‘abjection itself’: ‘The Jew: a conjunction of waste and object of desire, of corpse and life, fecality and pleasure, murderous aggressivity and the most neutralising power’. ‘The Jew becomes feminine [. . .] hence an Object of fear and fascination. Abjection itself’ (p. 185).

Here there is much riding on the distinction between ‘object’ and ‘abject’. ¹⁴ At the risk of sounding formulaic, to the extent that the Jew is abject, all emphasis comes to centre on the author of the pamphlets and his psychic state (delirium, hatred, but in general, emotion). The actual and potentially devastating effect of anti-Semitic texts arises when the Jew is object; for then attention is more or less unswervingly directed to what is exterior to writing. Here, it is important to add that an anti-Semitic utterance is a performative utterance: it is doing something with words. Words as such become weapons and produce tangible effects. One of the effects (perhaps the most injurious) is to treat Jews as scapegoats for the world’s real or imagined problems. The notion of a Jewish conspiracy derives from this. Such anti-Semitic writing is a clear instance of injustice. The result is that the author of the anti-Semitic text becomes abject – at least for those opposed to the anti-Semite project.

Whether Céline’s writing is – as Kristeva proposes – primarily the mark of a delirious and fixated individual who has a problem with the feminine – in which case, the reality of actual anti-Semitism is muted; or whether, on the contrary, an object (the Jew) is clearly distinguishable in Céline’s pamphlets, in which case anti-Semitism is revealed in all its performative force, is what remains to be debated. And, in my view, consequent to this debate is the question of the relation of the abject to language and representation.

I have claimed elsewhere that ‘the abject is what problematises the very possibility of an art object’ (Lechte, 2016: 19). I would add that abjection problematizes the possibility of representation, presentation or signification. These conclusions may be derived from the fact that the abject is the equivalent of ‘the instability of the symbolic function’ (Kristeva, 1982: 14) and from the fact that the abject is not an object. Nevertheless, with a figure like Céline is it really unlikely – if not impossible – that the abject could appear in his writing, or in the writing of any author, whether major or minor? Is it thus not plausible to say – and Kristeva shows the way here – that Céline’s ‘narrative stance seems controlled by the necessity of going through abjection’ (p. 140)? Do not the examples the analyst extracts from Céline’s writing not go to the very heart of the matter? For instance, before a dead body: ‘“Some kind of pouch bursts [. . .] The juice pours out [. . .] it gushes all over the place [. . .] all full of brains and blood [. . .] splashing”’ (Death on the Instalment Plan, p. 560, cited in Kristeva, 1982: 150). From this and other examples from other authors, it is deduced that there ‘is’ abjection and ‘literature is its privileged signifier’ (p. 208). But at the beginning of her study, Kristeva had said when defining abjection that the latter ‘does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine’ (p. 1). On this basis, Céline’s writing, would, as I see it, give rise to abjection – if at all – in the breakdown of writing, a ‘writing’ that, qua abject, becomes increasingly incoherent. Abjection would not be in the description of situations and objects, would not be manifest in images of any kind, so that cinematic horror, because it is imaged, is a fake horror – the frisson of horror, not real horror as evoked by the Nazi death camps. It is in its not being an object that the full force of the abject comes to pass.

Abjection and real horror go inextricably together. The emotion that bursts forth under no law, giving rise to violence – the killing of the scapegoat – is the manifestation of injustice. We thus know that the Nazi death camps are one embodiment (perhaps the most horrendous in the modern era) of the greatest possible injustice. In revealing the vicissitudes of abjection, the analyst also reveals – albeit implicitly ¹⁵ – just how misguided a political philosophy such as Giorgio Agamben’s is when it proposes that the death camps are, ultimately, the outcome of law – albeit the law of a state of emergency: the law become fact, ¹⁶ so that what happens in the camps can still be equated with law. In confirming his argument that the Nazi camp is an instance of the Nomos (law) of the modern era, Agamben asserts that: ‘The state of exception [. . .] ceases to be referred to as an external and provisional state of factual danger and comes to be confused with juridical rule itself’ (1998: 168). And the political philosopher further states that: ‘The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception has become the rule’ (pp. 168–9). While the argument presented here has been that injustice reigns where there is no law, Agamben claims that victims derive from a particular configuration of law. ¹⁷

But even if it is true that the camp had a legal status, this only makes more abject the activities that took place in it. The situation is evoked by Kristeva when she gives an example of abjection: ‘Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of fragility’ (1980: 4). Kristeva recalls ‘a heap of children’s shoes’ in the Auschwitz museum. And she reflects that ‘[t]he abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death [. . .] interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things’ (p. 4).

Some may find subtlety in Agamben’s notion that law becomes fact. But really this is a way of obscuring abjection. For whatever the apparent complexity evoked in law becoming fact, law is still present. In the end, the result of Agamben’s tarrying with the law is the diluting of the horror the camps incarnated, so that ‘no act committed against them [the prisoners] could appear any longer as a crime’ (p. 171). If this is accepted the law in itself has become abject; but the greater horror is the actual physical obliteration of human beings for reasons based in pure phantasy based in fanatical belief (cf. the ‘Jewish world conspiracy’). At some stage, Agamben’s project to put horror into words ¹⁸ needs to be re-evaluated in terms of the erasure of the abject – that is, of real horror. Even if this horror cannot be said or depicted, it can be experienced and evoked. As such, it undermines every identity: we are literally ‘blown away’. Injustice, as a reality, is abject.

The Foreigner

Kristeva addresses the foreigner, as the one who is other, who is the focus of ‘fascination and abjection’ (1988: 140). Immediately, it is clear that the foreigner is set up to be the scapegoat with which we have all become only too familiar in recent times, both in the West and elsewhere.

The foreigner is not part of the group that is the product of a certain configuration of power. Rights – human and civil – become an issue. From Arendt’s perspective it is a matter of the ‘right to have rights’; but for the political theorist these cannot be enforced unless one already has some sort of civil status. Even more: historically, there is no clear agreement as to whether a being without civil status is truly human. Arendt’s own formulations go in this direction (see Arendt, 1968: 181–2).

Ever the psychoanalyst, Kristeva insists that the opposition, foreigner/native, loses its force once it is conceded that one is a ‘foreigner to oneself’ (1988: 269). Here, the past familiar (Freud’s ‘heimlich’: ‘homely’) is understood to be the harbinger of a certain strangeness (Freud’s ‘unheimlich’: ‘unhomely’). What we have, is, in Kristeva’s neat expression, ‘this immanence of the strange in the familiar’ (p. 270), and this ‘other’ becomes one’s own unconscious (p. 271). Thus if, in a certain sense, the other – the foreigner – is in me, how could this being be treated unjustly as a scapegoat? Such a question calls on us to consider the possibility that psychoanalysis might be able to intervene positively at a socio-political level without thereby becoming purely ideological. As the outcome of this deliberation on Freud’s notion of the uncanny and the foreigner, we find that because the ‘foreign is in me [. . .] we are all foreigners’ (p. 284). Thus is the ethic of psychoanalysis revealed, an ethic that gives rise to a politics based on a new type of cosmopolitanism, ‘which, transversal to governments, economies and markets, works for a humanity whose solidarity is founded on the consciousness of its unconscious – desiring, destructive, empty, impossible’ (p. 284). In such circumstances justice for the other becomes possible because it ceases to be (in the manner of religions) equivalent to the realization of a high-flown ideal mortgaged by the sacrifice of the ego-self. The other, then, initially deposes the ego from its position of ascendency and in making the unconscious manifest entails that the ego-self is also the beneficiary of justice – or is at least protected from injustice. Such is the insight to which Kristeva’s theorizing gives rise.

Literature as the Forgiveness of . . . Injustice?

In her study of Dostoyevsky’s writing of suffering, sorrow and forgiveness, the analyst offers the following lines: ‘Forgiveness makes up for the lack, it is an additional, free gift. I give myself to you, you welcome me. I am within you. As neither justice nor injustice, forgiveness would be a “fullness of justice” beyond judgment’ (1989: 216). Within the Christian frame of Dostoyevsky’s writing, only God can dispense justice. In a sense, justice is not something that can be realized within the context of the human. On the other hand, Dostoyevsky, the writer, shows that forgiveness is achievable, God’s mercy is accessible to humanity: forgiveness ‘attempts to mold itself after the latter’s image’ (p. 216).

To be sure, within a psychoanalytical frame, where, ostensibly, it is also a matter of ‘neither justice nor injustice’, forgiveness opens the way to a renewal of the depressed psyche. Through Dostoyevsky we – like him – travel hell (suffering and hatred) in order to experience a ‘resurrection’. The greater the depths of suffering, the more exhilarating is the renewal of resurrection. To show the realization of the latter in Dostoyevsky’s writing, however – to spell out the psychoanalytical implications – Kristeva indicates that the nature of Orthodox Christianity (an integral part of Kristeva’s biography) must be addressed. In orthodoxy, the Father is dominant (Per Filium = the spirit descends through the Son), whereas in the Latin church, the Son is equal to the Father (Filioque). The Son, seemingly, is more forgiving than the Father. Thus, we recall that when on the cross, Jesus says: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ (Luke 23:34).

But, for his part, Raskolnikov commits a ‘gratuitous crime, which involves the killing of an insignificant woman’ (1989: 187). On the face of it, we have a clear instance of an injustice, one that is compounded by the killer’s pretention that as someone willing to kill for its own sake, he places himself in the category of extraordinary people. The police officer, Porfiry, summarizes the key idea of Raskolnikov’s article, published in a legal journal: ‘The ordinary people must lead a life of stricter obedience and have no right to transgress the law because, you see, they are ordinary. Whereas the extraordinary people have a right to commit any crime they like and transgress the law in any way just because they happen to be extraordinary’ (Dostoyevsky, 1967: 275–6). No wonder Nietzsche was so enamoured of Dostoyevsky!

Such an argument relates crime solely to the person committing it, not to the crime itself. Ultimately, Raskolnikov reveals himself to be one of the ‘ordinary’ people because he suffers from his crime. Through suffering, the hero qualifies for forgiveness, which occurs in Dostoyevsky’s novel through the agency of the loving Sonia.

On this basis, Kristeva argues that Dostoyevsky appropriates forgiveness for aesthetic purposes. Nevertheless, in doing so he shows that ‘the solemnity of forgiveness – as it functions in theological tradition and is rehabilitated in aesthetic experience, which identifies with abjection in order to traverse it, name it, expend it – is inherent in the economy of psychic rebirth’ (1989: 190). Forgiveness does not ‘cleanse actions’ (p. 207), let alone erase them. It is not a matter of denying what has occurred, but of accepting it in a certain way. Can this acceptance really take place through fiction? While fiction gives access to aspects of Dostoyevsky’s psyche, the latter, Kristeva argues, is formed within a broader context: the ‘Eastern conception of the Trinity’ (Per Filium), for example, but also in the context of Dostoyevsky’s relationship with his father: ‘One cannot overemphasise the harshness of Dostoyevsky’s father who was held in contempt by his muzhiks’ (p. 182). Psychical reality is then open to external reality, a fact that is emphasized in Kristeva’s Tales of Love (1987) through the concept of the psyche as an ‘open system’ (p. 14), where ‘opening up to the other plays a decisive role in the evolution of the species as well as the maturing of each generation, or in every individual’s particular history’ (p. 14). Although, as has been noted, psychic reality is Kristeva’s main focus, this ‘reality’ has also been shown to be modulated differently, depending on the context (historical, social, cultural, political).

Hannah Arendt and Anti-Semitism

When reading Hannah Arendt on anti-Semitism and the historical assigning of Jews to the place of ‘scapegoat’ (Kristeva, 1999: 208), the analyst says that Arendt neglects to address with any profundity the question of ‘how individual and collective desires might avoid the traps of melancholic destruction, maniacal fantasies, or tyrannical paranoia’ (p. 212). All of the psychic states invoked play a role in the history of anti-Semitism and the scapegoating of the Jews – which is to say that such states give rise to the most profound injustice. It is precisely in this context, Kristeva adds, that ‘[t]he lack of a psychoanalytic anthropology here is quite patent’ (p. 212). This statement, as my foregoing reflection implies, underestimates how Kristeva’s analytical work does open up ways in which injustice can be addressed.

In ‘Desire for Law’, a paper composed in 2004 (see Kristeva, 2012: 170–1) after her volume on Hannah Arendt (1999), Kristeva gives what would hitherto be the most explicit analysis as to how the psychoanalytic concept of Law might inform an intervention into the current political environment – to the point, indeed, where the issue addressed is torture in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Rather than a jurist’s notion of law, ‘the Law we are talking about’, says Kristeva, ‘is a symbolic act that prohibits, slows, and limits, while at the same time inaugurating a new psychical action’ (2012: 171). Through the aegis of the symbolic Law, moral, political and spiritual actions become possible to the extent that the Law gives form to these, that is, sets limits, prohibitions and specifies borders that must not be transgressed. All of this is only possible, however, if the Law retains its authority – that is, continues to be accepted as just. Once the Law’s authority is diminished – which, it is argued, is increasingly the case – the result is ‘abject transgressions’ exemplified by torture, amongst other things. Let me suggest that from this perspective, scapegoating, as injustice, would seem to be a clear case of the diminishment of the Law, meaning that it goes ‘unheeded’. Stemming from this are clear political and social consequences. As Kristeva expresses it: ‘I am convinced that certain deviations in modern society, known as the “society of the spectacle” and the “deculpabilization of transgression,” risk increasing the number of “lost sheep” [i.e. those who operate outside all prohibitions]’ (p. 175). In short: desire must not become detached from Law. This is Law, the analyst adds, that is not reducible to sets of ‘regulations’, a form of law that turns people into robots (p. 176). This Law must, we can only suppose in the wake of Kristevan thought, be kept in vigour, lest injustices be allowed to flourish, amongst the most heinous of which is the indisputable persecution of the scapegoat.

By Way of Conclusion

In the foregoing reflection, I hope to have shown the richness of Kristeva’s thought by revealing its hitherto unrecognized complicity with the theme of justice as evoked by injustice and the scapegoat, as the latter is theorized in the work of René Girard. If one had to sum up what has been demonstrated, it would be that while justice might be endlessly debated, the scapegoat as the incarnation of injustice is irrefutable. And this is what key works by Kristeva clearly bring into view. What has been presented is, nevertheless, little more than a foretaste of further possible implications stemming from Kristeva’s original theories of language and subjectivity viewed through a psychoanalytic frame in a given context. This context could be late 19th-century poetic practices or it could be the 21st-century version of the ‘society of the spectacle’ as proposed by Guy Debord. It is the latter that comes to contribute to the atrophying of psychic space at the same time as it plays a role in the diminution of the authority of the symbolic Law, a diminution that contributes to the rise of injustice through the creation of scapegoats, be these foreigners, Jews, people of colour, or indeed, women. Through the notion of the abject in particular, and horror as its correlate, it has been possible to indicate how hate (cf. Céline) becomes the trigger of scapegoating and injustice. In my view there is so much more to be thought with regard to the abject. The latter evokes horror and at the same time problematizes representation. It facilitates the passage to reality while initially arising in psychic reality.

It has not been the contention of this paper (far from it) that Kristeva offers a matchless theory of justice, one that might counter Derrida’s contribution in the ‘Force of Law’. Reference to Derrida on justice reinforces the point that justice is a contested concept continually open to debate. By contrast, injustice as manifest in the treatment of the scapegoat demonstrates what results from an absence of law and of the jurisprudence that gives the law its vitality. And so, in moving our focus in her key works towards the experience of injustice, Kristeva shows that it is not essentially justice that is absent from law, but that in the absence of law there will be injustice.