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This incredible need to believe / Julia Kristeva; translated by Beverley Bie Brahic.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Publication details: New York, NY : Columbia University Press, 2009.Description: XVI, 115 SISBN:
  • 0231147856 (pbk)
  • 9780231147859 (pbk)
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 843.912 KRI
Subject: The big question mark (in guise of a preface) -- This incredible need to believe : interview with Carmine Donzelli -- From Jesus to Mozart : Christianity\'s difference? -- Suffering : Lenten lectures, March 19, 2006 -- The genius of Catholicism -- Don\'t be afraid of European culture.
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Standard Loan LSAD Library Main Collection 843.912 KRI (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 39002100560524

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

"Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of 'frightening' either the faithful or the agnostics, that the history of Christianity prepared the world for humanism."

So writes Julia Kristeva in this provocative work, which skillfully upends our entrenched ideas about religion, belief, and the thought and work of a renowned psychoanalyst and critic. With dialogue and essay, Kristeva analyzes our "incredible need to believe"--the inexorable push toward faith that, for Kristeva, lies at the heart of the psyche and the history of society. Examining the lives, theories, and convictions of Saint Teresa of Avila, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Hannah Arendt, and other individuals, she investigates the intersection between the desire for God and the shadowy zone in which belief resides.

Kristeva suggests that human beings are formed by their need to believe, beginning with our first attempts at speech and following through to our adolescent search for identity and meaning. Kristeva then applies her insight to contemporary religious clashes and the plight of immigrant populations, especially those of Islamic origin. Even if we no longer have faith in God, Kristeva argues, we must believe in human destiny and creative possibility. Reclaiming Christianity's openness to self-questioning and the search for knowledge, Kristeva urges a "new kind of politics," one that restores the integrity of the human community.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The big question mark (in guise of a preface) -- This incredible need to believe : interview with Carmine Donzelli -- From Jesus to Mozart : Christianity\'s difference? -- Suffering : Lenten lectures, March 19, 2006 -- The genius of Catholicism -- Don\'t be afraid of European culture.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

  • The Big Question Mark (in Guise of a Preface)
  • This Incredible Need to Believe: Interview with Carmine Donzelli
  • From Jesus to Mozart: Christianity's Difference?
  • "Suffering": Lenten Lectures, March 19, 2006
  • The Genius of Catholicism
  • Don't Be Afraid of European Culture
  • Index

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Excerpt from: This Incredible Need to Believe (Interview with Carmine Donzelli) "I am not thinking of a substitute for religion: this need must be sublimated." -- Sigmund Freud, letter to Jung, February 13, 1910 Can one speak of the "need to believe" from a secular point of view? For the analysis of this basic phenomenon of human life, I'd like us to begin, not with specifically religious arguments, but with considerations that are more in the domain of anthropology or psychoanalysis. What a great deal you ask of me! Vast undertaking, to try and come to terms with a need to believe that I call prereligious and which brings us up against neither more nor less than the history of humanity: the speaking being is a believing being. We must take the history of religions into account and take some side trips into anthropology and psychoanalysis . . . a tall order! Furthermore, you invite me to embark on this adventure before this Italian audience, which embodies two thousand years of history, without accounting for what came before that, under the gaze of a Europe that is the bearer of both hope and peril. Fine, I've attached my seatbelt: ready for takeoff! "I travel myself," says Stéphanie Delacourt, the heroine of my metaphysical detective story Murder in Byzan tium . Your question makes an appeal to the humanities, today more than ever confronted -- beyond their "regional" problems concerning the meaning of discourses -- with the challenge of different kinds of fundamentalism and the wars of religion, a challenge that I choose to define, in a somewhat peremptory manner, as a pressing need to radically reform humanism. I count myself in effect among those who think that in the great crises the West has undergone -- particularly during the Renaissance but also in the eighteenth century and, in another way, today -- men and women have managed to elucidate and recompose this need to believe with which they were confronted, to one side of and differently from the way religions do. Did the mystics not, right from the outset, attempt such an experiment, in a kind of internal exclusion from the "canon"? More directly, your question reminds me of the humanists of the Renaissance who, beginning with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ficin, and Pica de la Mirandola, by way of Erasmus, Montaigne, Thomas More, and even Nicolas de Cues, to mention just a few, no more abolished the need to believe than they confused it with that of the established religions. The French Enlightenment and the Encyclopedists -- Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, right up to and including the scandalous Marquis de Sade -- thoroughly studied and radicalized this path, going from deism to atheism. The "God of the philosophers," need we repeat, gets reduced to the "a priori proof," which rests only on "the fact that something is possible" (Kant). From Parmenides to Leibniz and Heidegger, the "divine" gives way to being (" being is, nonbeing is not"; "why is there something rather than nothing ") and the subject thinking in it (in the being; Descartes' "I think therefore I am "). "White theology" or "apple juice'? The juicy expression is Freud's who, for his part, was to seek another way. An outgrowth of the dissolution of ontotheology, the humanities in turn have not hesitated to grapple with variations on the religious and the sacred. As early as the end of the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim examined the elementary forms of religious life, while Marcel Mauss analyzed prayer, the gift, and the sacrifice; closer to our own time the works of Lévi-Strauss have examined myth, those of Mary Douglas impurity . . . on the horizon of these kinds of thinking, is the Freudian discovery of the unconscious and the founding of psychoanalysis that still guides my thought, which I should like briefly to recall as we begin our conversation. To believe . . . This is not the "I believe" in which I often hear an "I suppose," as in the sentence: "Reading these e-mails, I don't believe he loves me; hearing his voice, I believe he loves me." The "believe" that concerns us today is that of Montaigne, for example, when he writes: "For Christians recounting something incredible is an opportunity to believe" ( Essays ); or the "believe" of Pascal: "The mind believes naturally, and the will loves naturally; so that, lacking real objects, they have to cling to false ones" ( Pensées, 2.81); or again that of Voltaire: "My interest in believing in something is not a proof of this thing's existence" ( Twenty-fifth Letter on the Thoughts of Monsieur Pascal ). Whether I belong to a religion, whether I be agnostic or atheist, when I say "I believe," I mean "I hold as true."... Psychoanalysis and mysticism: resemblance/difference Up until the end of his life, Freud was to maintain the vis-à-vis between psychoanalysis and mysticism; so as to oppose them, of course! Psychoanalysis aims at "the perception by the ego of the id" ( New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis ), echoing the statement "Where it was, shall I be" ("Wo Es war, soll Ich werden"); whereas Mysticism is the "vague self-perception of the realm, beyond the ego, of the id" (states the ultimate Freudian apothegm of 1938). The path of mystical belief plunges the ego into the id by means of a sort of sensual autoeroticism that confers a kind of omnipotence on the id: revelation and absence, pleasure and nothingness. The analytic cure is addressed to the same pleasurable encounter of ego and id, but allows these two psychic apparatuses to circulate, by means of the transference words, from the id to the ego and back, from the ego to the id. Resemblances? Absolutely. But no confusion! Easier said than done! I call it incredible, this prereligious "need to believe," for it is not a question of making of it an absolute, flattering it and using it as a basis for this or that order or hierarchy -- neither is it one of ignoring it, at the risk of mutilating the individual capacity to think and create, at the risk of harming that which does not want the social bond itself to congeal into constraints but to be a bulwark, an optimal condition for democratic debate. Is it not surprising that our secularized societies have neglected this incredible need to believe? By this I mean they deny the necessary paradox that consists in responding to the anthropological need to believe, without reducing it to the historical forms that the history of beliefs confers upon it but by sublimating it (as Freud says) into diverse practices and elucidations. In thus scrutinizing the foundations of individuation, analytical listening does not claim to lay flat the complexity of religious experiences. It is content to open some perspectives for observations and theorizations that, in allowing a more complex understanding of the psychic apparatus, reveal how much the need to believe is part and parcel of the speaking subject "before" any strictly religious construction and of course within secularization itself. A "site" barely hinted at and whose edification it is our task to pursue. For I am convinced that by taking this prereligious need to believe seriously, we could confront not only religions' past and present fundamentalist off-course drift but also the dead ends of secularized societies. Particularly the incapacity of these to establish some kind of authority, an incapacity that leaves the way clear for violence on the one hand and the automation of the species on the other. How to claim, in effect, to impose an authority in which no one believes if the problematic of belief itself is annulled and if, as a consequence, these "sublimations" that Freud called for are no longer encouraged? 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." When we attempt to create this consensus now and again in the "political debate," we quickly see that the "democracy of opinion" is wide open to the freedom of judgment of each "quid," of " who you are," writes Hannah Arendt, to be differentiated from the "quod," of " what you are." The living political bond, understood and practiced as a sharing of creativity, calls upon the singularity of each person: had "one" forgotten this? This brings us back to subjective autonomy, that is, to the preconditions of liberty and/or of individuation, the raw wound of the . . . need to believe. The least one can say is that secularized societies fail to take any of this into account. If the denial of the need to believe leads to the collapse of authority and the absence of moral foundation, do you agree with those who postulate that totalitarian crimes are induced by the loss of religious feeling? That secularization leads to the Shoah? Perhaps even to this demoralization that fundamentalist religions wish to fight? I'll come back to the possibility of a link between secularization and Shoah. But, to remain for a few moments in the realm of current events, I should like to come back to your question on the "need to believe" in the light, dare I say, of the fires that have recently devastated some of the outlying neighborhoods [ banlieues ] of French cities. Whatever may be the economic or legal reasons for this crisis, which concerns, at bottom, the failure to integrate adolescents "from immigrant populations," I think the unrest is much more widespread, that it touches adolescents of all social milieus and is related to a very serious denial by secularized societies, which refuse to admit that adolescence is ill from ideality. How to make sense of that. The adolescent is a believer The child-king asleep in the "infantile" in each one of us, comes into the world with a "polymorphous perversity" (as Freud writes in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905), not to be confused with adult perversion. So seductive is this perversity -- for the parents but also for theoreticians of all ilk -- that it has come to gloss over the characteristics of the adolescent, who has become the forgotten -- or should I say the sacrificed? -- category of modern societies. Precisely because there is no such thing as an adolescent without the need to believe. Shall I expand on this? The polymorphously perverse child , still according to Freud, is dominated by drives that are inevitably polymorphous because dependent upon the satisfaction of the erogenous zones, of the primary incestuous relationship (maternal seduction or mère-version , and of the ultraprecocious oedipal stumbling block or père-version ). The tumult of the drives is satisfied and worked through via fantasizing activity in the form of a denial-Verneinung ("I don't desire mummy" = "I desire mummy"); in the wake of this negativity identified by Freud, language, with its grammatical and logical synthesis, fashions itself. Thus "armed," the polymorphously perverse child wants to know where he comes from: he creates sexual theories in response to his key question "where do babies come from?" In other words, infantile polymorphism is at the junction of the autoerotic drives and a quest for some object relation; the polymorphously perverse child is a subject of epistemophilic curiosity, of the wish to know; the polymorphous ly perverse child is a seeker after knowledge. Nothing of the sort during adolescence, or, more precisely, the "polymorphously perverse seeker" gives way in adolescence to a new kind of subject who believes in the existence of the erotic object (object of desire and/or love). He only looks for it because he is sure it must exist. The adolescent is not a lab scientist ; he ' s a believer. All of us are adolescents when we are passionate about the absolute. Freud didn't devote much time to adolescents because he himself was the most unbelieving, the most irreligious human ever to live. Faith implies a passion for the object relation: faith is potentially fundamentalist, like the adolescent. Romeo and Juliet are its blazon. However, since our drives and desires are ambivalent, sadomasochistic, our belief that the Ideal Object exists is forever being threatened or even brought up short. Then the passion in search of an object shows its other side, the side of punishment and self-punishment. With, to go along with them and keep the adolescent company, their cortege: namely, disappointment-depression-suicide; not to mention, in a more regressive and somatic mode, the anorexic syndrome; or even, should the political context lend itself, the urge to destroy oneself-with-the-others that I've called the kamikaze syndrome. Because the adolescent believes in the object relation, he suffers cruelly from its impossibility. In effect, during adolescence we idealize the parent-couple while wishing to remake it, only much much better, and as a consequence we belittle and disparage it; we cut ourselves off from it so we can replace it with a new model, promise of absolute satisfaction for the adolescent subject we have become. Thus impelled, the narcissism of the ego, tied to its ideals, overflows into the ardently sought love object, making room for the amorous passion that, with the partner, idealizes the drives and their satisfactions. Let me sum up: from a biological and cognitive evolution, the polymorphic perverse child is capable of enacting a decisive mutation: this is the junction between his libidinal impulses and the phantasm of some absolute libidinal satisfaction, thanks to a new object, onto which he projects his narcissism, shored up by the ideal of the ego: "the object is treated like the ego itself"; in other words, "in the amorous passion an important quantity of the narcissistic libido overflows onto the object" ( Group Psychology of Masses and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921). This junction between the ego and the object (we are not far from the baby's "oceanic feeling," but henceforth reshaped and rediscovered by the idealizing of the amorous bond) goes hand in hand with the belief of being invested with the duty and the power to surpass the parental couple, and even to abolish it, so as to escape it into an idealized, paradisial variant of total satisfaction. The Judeo-Christian paradise is an adolescent creation: the adolescent takes pleasure in the syndrome of paradise, which may also become a source of suffering, if absolute ideality takes a turn toward cruel persecution. Since he believes that the other, surpassing the parental other, not only exists but that he/she gives him total satisfaction, the adolescent believes that the Great Other exists, which is bliss [ jouissance ] itself. The least disappointment in this syndrome of ideality hurls him into paradise's ruins, in the form of punitive behavior. Here the polymorphously perverse child is back, but "under the lash of paradise, that pitiless tormentor," to paraphrase Baudelaire. The innocence of the child gives way to necessarily sadomasochistic satisfactions that draw their violence from the very strictures of the ideality syndrome, which command the adolescent: "Your pleasure shall have no bounds!" Belief and nihilism: the maladies of the soul We can understand that, structured by idealization, adolescence is nonetheless a malady of ideality: either the adolescent lacks ideality or in a given context his ideality doesn't adapt to his postpuberty drive and the need to share with an absolutely satisfying object. Whatever the case may be, adolescent ideality is necessarily demanding and in a state of crisis, all the more so as the drive/ideality pair is forever threatening to come undone. Adolescent belief inevitably goes hand in hand with adolescent nihilism. Why? Remember that adolescence breaks out of childhood at the very moment the subject is convinced that there is another ideal for him -- partner, husband, wife, professional-political-ideological-religious ideal -- and that this ideality is already present in the unconscious; the adolescent unconscious is structured like this ideality. There cannot not be an absolutely satisfying other: such is the faith, the passion of the adolescent unconscious. This phantasm, of course, neither meets the test of reality nor the assault of the drives, which weaken the aforesaid belief or, worse, overturn it. Since it exists (for the unconscious), but "he" or "she" lets me down (in reality), I hold this against "them" and I get back at them: vandalism follows. Or, on the other hand, since it exists (in the unconscious), but "he" or "she" disappoints or fails me, I have only myself to blame and to take my disappointment out on: mutilations and self-destructive attitudes follow. This fanatical belief in the existence of the absolute partner and total satisfaction blocks the movement of the representations between the various psychic registers that characterize what I have called the "open structure" of the adolescent, owing to the relaxing of the superego under the pressure of these desires; and it stabilizes the subject. An extremely dangerous stabilization, nonetheless, if it is true that belief, according to Kant, is a "sufficient assent only from a subjective point of view, but which we hold to be insufficient from an objective viewpoint" ( Critique of Pure Reason , 2.2, chapter 2). One might as well say that a belief is a phantasm of maximal satisfaction and inexorable necessity, fatal (a term recurrent in fiction about adolescent passion) for the life of the subject: in other words, halfway between the imaginary scenario that depicts both desire and delirium, belief is not itself delirious but has the potential to become so. The drive/ideality amalgam comes apart under the increased force of the drives, and this disintegration augments the potential for delirium. It should not surprise us that, structured by this aptitude for belief, the adolescent is easily carried away by enthusiasm and romanticism to the point of fanaticism. But he is also exposed, not only because of the relaxing of the psychic apparatus but also because of the stimulation of the drives by the ideality syndrome, to the defensive explosion of speech and acting out that is, in the strictest sense of the word, delirious and that plunges the subject into schizophrenia. Now, since the adolescent is the first to believe that an Ideal Object of Love, in capital letters, naturally, exists -- since he believes this heart and soul -- since he is a mystic of the Love Object, well then the breakdown of the paradisial syndrome, when the phantasm fails to find its way toward a process of sublimation (school, profession, vocation that balances or replaces the Ideal Object of satisfaction), leads inevitably to depressiveness in the guise of ordinary boredom: "If I don't have Everything, I'm bored." And makes for punitive types of behavior that are just so many ways of compensating for boredom and are rooted in polymorphous perversity. Here it is back again, whipped up by the pitiless paradisial desire and its punitive modes of behavior. These modes of behavior are, indeed, merely the seamy side of the malady of ideality that persists and supports them, not allowing itself to be shaken and even less abolished. Drug addiction abolishes consciousness but renders belief in the absolute of orgasmic regression real in a hallucinatory kind of pleasure. Anorexic behavior breaks with the maternal line, and reveals the battle of the young woman against femininity, but brings about an overinvestment in the pureness-and-hardness of a body, which tends to connect with the phantasm of a spirituality, it too absolute: by this phantasm, the whole body disappears into a Beyond with strong paternal connotations. A contrario, the perpetuation of the paradisial syndrome, notably in the idealization of the bourgeois couple, as portrayed by TV soap opera cliché, or by people magazine-type glamorizing of the life of the couple, has become a pillar of global morality. These show business, commercial, or vulgar variants upon an excessively secularized paradise are intrinsically religious; they are the visible secular face of the deep need to believe that nourishes adolescent culture. It took the recent crisis of ideologies and the Middle East conflict to make this religiosity, now globalized, burst into the light of day, although it has long been inherent in social organization. It has been shown how, since Rousseau notably, the "couple" has become the magic formula destined to create a bifaced subject, at once guarantor of the parent-child bond and of the state-citizen bond: I come back to this in the conclusion of my triptych Feminine Genius. The Rousseauian ideal is, to be sure, untenable; but it can only be contested through debauchery, perversion, and crime -- this is how Sade unmasked the repressiveness of the "social contract." And it is what adolescent "gore," in its desperate fashion, attempts when the dead end of the paradise complex incites to gang rape or vandalism. The impregnation of the id with ideality differs from one individual to another and according to family or cultural contexts: we are familiar with the superegolike severity of certain adolescent models, sources of guilt and heroism, as well as with others' absence of reference points, which pushes them to regress or transgress. But, whatever their differences, in all of them the biological clock inexorably sets this particular phenomenon in action, I insist: the shadow of the ideal has fallen over adolescent drive and crystallized into the need to believe. The purity of Adam and Eve, Dante's encounter with Beatrice in Paradise, Romeo and Juliet as ideal, because impossible, couple are important clues to this ideality throughout our civilization. And it is not because these mythic remains are in abeyance that they do not go on working upon adolescence underneath the variants modern marketing does its best to impart. Symbolic authority deprived of credibility This is where the analyst gets taken in, for he has a tendency to cling to the erotic or thanatic symptom, and overlook the ideality in control of the symptom from the unconscious. How take into account the fact that the adolescent believer's unconscious is constructed as a high-risk ideality? So-called primitive civilizations had rites of initiation, in which, on the one hand, symbolic authority (divine for the invisible world, and political for this world) was affirmed, and during which, on the other hand, so-called initiatory sexual practices took place, permitting acts that would today be considered perverse. In our Western culture, especially in medieval Christianity, the impact of mortification rituals as well as excessive fasting in the anorexic behavior of girls and the sadomasochistic acting out of boys has been noted and made to seem either banal or heroic. Looking at this in a different way, secular this time--and this strikes me as an imaginary elaboration of the adolescent crisis -- I've suggested we consider the birth of the European novel takes shape around the character of the adolescent. The young page in the service of the Lady is the pivotal point of courtly love around which a gamut of homosexual relations, more or less elaborate, is deployed. The novel as genre is constructed around adolescent figures: enthusiastic idealists in love with the absolute, ravaged at the first misstep, depressed or perverse, sarcastic by "nature," eternal believers and as a result perpetually in revolt and potentially nihilist. You know them: from the courtly romance to Dostoyevsky and Gombrowicz, they murmur their credo . This is a journey that terminates, in the bourgeois novel, in the stabilization of the couple in marriage's highly provisional happy ending. Even today best sellers mine this sort of narrative logic, put in place in the Renaissance, which rough sex doesn't make a dent in, into which, quite the contrary, it is easily absorbed. Compared with other modes of "taking charge of" adolescents, is the psychoanalytic sort of listening cure at all innovative, and, if so, how? The analyst's job is to hear the adolescent's need to believe and to authenticate it: adolescents come to us to have the existence of their ideality syndrome acknowledged. If we do not formulate and share this acknowledgment, we cannot properly understand and interpret the punitive types of behavior of the acme of adolescents in crisis as a place of extreme pleasure, as a "simili-paradise." Only at a third stage should the analyst venture to indicate the negative value, the oedipal or orestean revolt, of such forms of behavior. In other words, only the capacity of the analyst to know and recognize the pleasure-seeking, idealizing path taken by adolescent drives allows him to be a credible and efficient site of transference and to metabolize the need to believe that he will have shared into the pleasure of thinking, questioning and analyzing. In sharing the syndrome of ideality particular to the adolescent, the analyst may eliminate resistances and help the adolescent along the path to an analytical process that the adolescent is often recalcitrant about. The religious need, relayed throughout the twentieth century by ideological enthusiasm, has proposed and continues to propose to legitimize the ideality syndrome. It is not by chancethat adolescent malaise, which is a source of concern for modern society (to the point of its providing fat subsidies to inaugurate with much pomp this or that Home of the Adolescent), goes along with a return of the religious, very often in bastardized (sects) or fundamentalist (which in the name of ideals encourage an explosion of the death drive) forms. In this context, adolescence may also be an opportunity, if we can reflect upon it in such a way as to better attend adolescents in their need to believe and its mirror image, the impossibility of such belief. We would then be better able to interpret the variants of this new malaise of civilization that surrounds us and is expressed by the return of the "need to believe." And that we take part in through our own eternal adolescence. Let's return to the crisis, in France , but also elsewhere, of the young who live in "suburban ghettos [banlieues] ." Isn't this a failure of the French model of secularism, of laicity? Is this the fault of the "French model"? Or its dreadful advantage? Contrary to what some of our closest friends in the world say, not only is France not "lagging behind" in this crisis involving adolescents with roots in the immigrant population, but it is "ahead" compared with analogous situations elsewhere. This even explains why the malaise is felt here as more serious: its roots go deeper. Although religious manipulation of the pyromaniacs is not to be excluded, and although community-related reflexes ostensibly underlie the need for recognition shown by the incendiaries, the crisis of our "suburbs" is not religious; nor is it aimed a posteriori against "the not-displaying-any-signs-of-religious-affiliation rule." Religious authorities disapprove of the violence; parents do not support their delinquent children; this is not an interethnic and interreligious clash as it was in other countries. Everybody firmly denounces the failure of the processes of integration to which these youth aspire; the objects torched are symbols of envy: cars, supermarkets, warehouses--so many marks of "success" or "wealth," so many "values" for relatives and adults -- schools, crèches, police stations, so many marks of a social and political authority they wish to be part of. Do people want to destroy secular and republican France when they boo the minister of the interior, only yesterday so popular? Do they mean to attack Christianity when they set fire to a church? "Blogs" invite us to "fuck France" in a rage of excitement without any clarifying discourse, any program, any demands. On the political level, this need of ideals, of recognition and respect crystallizes into a single battle, and it is a huge one, considering the suffering it reveals and the extent of the changes needed: the battle against discrimination. After and underlying the "clash of religions" Is the "clash of religions" yet to come? Are our adolescent pyromaniacs unable to clothe their need of ideality in religious dress? Some would have it so and go so far as to point their finger once more at French secularism, which stands accused of having done away with the guardrails of religion. I don't share this opinion. I think that the delinquency of " disadvantaged teens " reveals a more radical phase of nihilism, a phase that comes along after and goes deeper than the " clash of religions. " This kind of delinquency is more serious because it grapples at a deeper level with the inner workings of civilization in this prereligious need to believe that is constituent of the psychic life with and for others that we are trying, in today's conversation, to highlight. This is where parents, teachers, and intellectuals are called upon. While politicians must be pragmatic and generous, it is up to us to propose ideals adapted to modern times and to the multicultural soul. Adolescent nihilism abruptly reveals that henceforth religious treatment of the revolt is discredited, useless, incapable of assuring the paradisial aspiration of this paradoxical believer, this nihilistic believer, necessarily nihilist because pathetically nihilist, this disintegrated adolescent, cut off from society in the pitiless global migration. Indignant, we reject him--unless he threatens us from within. The French Republic faces a historical challenge: can it deal with the crisis of belief religion no longer keeps the lid on that affects the very foundations upon which human bonds are built? The anguish paralyzing the country at this decisive moment is an expression of its uncertainty before the size of the stakes. Are we capable of mobilizing all the means at our disposal, police as well as economic, not overlooking those who offer their knowledge of the soul, in order to accompany with the necessary, fine-tuned listening process, with appropriate education and with generosity, this poignant malady of ideality expressed by our outcast adolescents that threatens to submerge us? Put in these terms, the "French crisis" cannot not concern you. I have tried to tell you how it concerns me and how it concerns the intellectual as I understand her or him. Am I optimistic--too optimistic? I prefer to define myself as an energetic pessimist who only appreciates intelligence active in its thinking processes, or the actuality of the intelligence. How do you see the growing power of religions today? I have just emphasized the denial of the prereligious and prepolitical need to believe in secularized fields of knowledge and ideologies. How not also recall, above all, the various political and religious manipulations the world powers have employed in their desire to dominate globalization, which have fanned the flames of dormant fundamentalisms? Show business society, for its part, encourages hypnotic regression and drunken emotionality, along with the calculating kind of thinking that predominates as technology expands, to the detriment of critical thinking, to a questioning kind of thought. However, and much closer to my own area of expertise, let us question the responsibility of the social sciences, and the humanism that inspires them, in this "growing power of religion" that you point to. Forms of knowledge that upset conventions Relaying theology and philosophy, the social sciences have replaced the "divine" and the "human" by new objects of investigation: social bonds, kinship structures, rituals and myths, the life of the psyche, and the genesis of languages and works. We have acquired unprecedented knowledge of the richness and risks of the human mind, and this knowledge is unsettling, it encounters resistance, provokes censure. Still, promising as they may be, these territories fragment human experience; the heirs of metaphysics, they keep us from discovering new objects of investigation. The intersections between these compartmentalized domains do not by themselves suffice as bases for the necessary new humanism. Right from the start the thinking subject must get involved in the world, by an affective, political, and ethical "transference." My work as a psychoanalyst, the writing of my novels, my interventions in the social domain are not "engagements," but arise from this mode of thinking that I seek and that I conceive of as an energeia in the Aristotelian sense: a thought in action, the actualizing of the intelligence. Furthermore, the interpretation of texts and behavior, notably -- for my part -- in light of semiology and psychoanalysis, allows a new approach to the religious continent. The discovery of the unconscious by Freud has shown us that, far from being "illusions," though all the while being illusions, the different beliefs and kinds of spiritualities accommodate, encourage, or make use of precise psychic movements, which allow the human being to become a speaking being, a seat of culture or, inversely, of destructiveness. To take only a few examples, I shall evoke the importance of the law, the celebration of the paternal function, or the role of maternal passion in the sensory and prelinguistic support of the child. My work as an analyst has convinced me, furthermore, that when a patient embarks upon the analytical experience, he comes to ask for a sort of pardon, not in the sense of the effacing of his misery, but in the sense of a psychic and even physical rebirth. It is the possibility of this new beginning, made possible by transference and interpretation, that I call a par-don [ by-gift ]: to give and give oneself a new time, another self, unforeseen bonds. We are now able to recognize the complexity of the inner experience that faith cultivates, but also to flush out the hate beneath the appearance of the loving discourse along with the death drive used for purposes of political vengeance or in pitiless wars. Another conception of the human is therefore being constituted thanks to the contributions of these new Humanities in which we share, where transcendence is immanent. This conception is called desire of sense and is itself inseparable from the pleasure that has its root in sexuality and that controls the sublimity of culture as well as the brutality of acting out. Clearly the intellectual today faces a difficult, historic task worthy of the crisis of civilization: the task is neither more nor less than to help this new type of knowledge gradually emerge. To make use of technical terms unhesitatingly, but without getting locked into their significations, always too narrow. In positioning ourselves at the interface of diverse "disciplines," we may have a chance to elucidate, even in a small way, that which remains enigmatic: psychosis, sublimation, belief and nihilism, passion, the war between the sexes, maternal madness, murderous hate. A radical reformation of human existence is underway I hear your question: is there still a place for this knowledge in a world caught in a vise between the wars of religion and technology? After noting that totalitarianism was the end of rationalist humanism in the twentieth century, and announcing that economic and biological automation would be the end of the species in the twenty-first century, two distinguished interlocutors, Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, recently got together to declare ("Prepolitical Foundations of the Democratic State" ) that our modern democracies are disoriented because they lack a trustworthy "higher" authority, the one thing capable of regulating the mad dash toward liberty. This convergence of philosopher and theologian gives us to understand that a return to faith is the last chance, our one and only possibility, face to face with the perils of liberty, of creating some sort of moral stability. In other words, since constitutional democracies need some "normative presuppositions" on which to base "rational law," and since the secularized state has at its disposition no "unifying bond" (Böckenförde), they suggest the necessity of constituting a "conservative conscience" that will be nourished by faith (Habermas) or that will "provide a correlation between reason and faith" (Ratzinger). As a counterpoint to this hypothesis, I would like to suggest that we are already confronted, in advanced democracies in particular, with experiences that render null and void any call for a "normative conscience" and the reason/revelation duo, given that advanced democracies are already well on their way to a radical reformation of the humanism of the Aufklärung without any recourse to the irrational. It is precisely at this sensitive point of modernity that the literary experience is located -- and the theoretical thinking from which it cannot be separated -- and the Freudian discovery of the unconscious. I am aware, we are aware, that their respective contribution to the increasing complexity of Enlightenment humanism remains insufficiently perceived, in its pre- and transpolitical scope, as being capable of forming the "unifying bond" that secularized political rationality lacks. Such, however, is the hypothesis -- an alternative to the chorus of Böckenförde/Habermas/Ratzinger -- that I defend in my writing, and here today. Contrary to what some would have us believe, the clash of religions is but a surface phenomenon. The problem of this beginning of the third millennium is not the war of religions but the rift and void that now separates those who want to know that God is unconscious and those who would rather not know this, the better to enjoy the show that proclaims He exists. Global media, with all their imaginary and financial resources, support the latter preference: not wanting to know anything, the better to revel in the virtual. In other words: get pleasure out of seeing promises and be content with the promises of goods, guaranteed by the Promise of a higher Good. This situation, because of the globalization of the denial that goes along with it, is unprecedented in the history of humanity. Saturated with seductive and deceptive initiatives, our television civilization shows itself propitious to belief. And in this way it encourages the return and revival of religions. Nietzsche and Heidegger warned us: modern man suffers from "the absence of a sensual and supersensual world with the power of obligation." This annihilation of divine authority and, along with it, any other authority, state or political, does not necessarily lead to nihilism. Nor to its symmetrical opposite, which is fundamentalism up in arms against impiety: in making the divine a value , even the "supreme value," the transcendentalists link up with nihilistic utilitarianism. But how to know this today without deluding oneself with a narrowly rationalist humanism or a romantic spirituality? I claim that the alternative to the rise of religiosity, as to its opposite, narrow-minded nihilism, comes already from precisely those thought loci that we are attempting not to occupy but to bring to life. Who we? We whose attachment to the vast continent of the social sciences comes from our involvement in languages and literature. Literature, writing, constitute an experience of language that cuts across identities (sexual -- gender -- national, ethnic, religious, ideological, etc.). Whether they be in league with or hostile to psychoanalysis, literature and writing work out a risky kind of knowledge, singular and sharable, concerning the desire for sense rooted in the sexual body. In doing so, literature -- writing -- shake up the metaphysical duo reason versus faith, around which scholasticism was formerly constituted. They invite us to shape an interpretive, critical, and theoretical discourse that follows up upon the advances in the human and social sciences and has the capacity to involve the interpreter's own subjectivity. How? Those who are open to experience through literature and, in a different but related fashion, open to psychoanalytic experience -- or who are merely attentive to what is at stake in these kinds of experience--are aware that the reason/faith or norm/liberty opposition is no longer tenable if the speaking being that I am ceases to think of himself as dependent on a supersensible world and, even less so, on a sensible world "with the power of obligation." They are also aware that this I who speaks unveils himself to himself inasmuch as he is constructed in a vulnerable bond with a strange object or an ek-static other, an ab-ject: this is the sexual thing (others will say: the object of the sexual drive whose "carrier wave" is the death drive). This vulnerable bond to and within the sexual thing -- which underpins and shores up the social or sacred bond -- is none other than the heterogeneous bond, the very borderline between biology and sense on which our languages and our discourses depend, which are modified by it or, running counter to it, modify the sexual bond itself. In this way of understanding the human adventure, literature and art are no more an aesthetic decor than philosophy or psychoanalysis claim to bring salvation. But each of these experiences, in their different ways, offer themselves as laboratories of new forms of humanism. Understanding and accompanying the speaking subject in his bond with the sexual thing allows us to confront the new barbarities of automation, without falling back on the sorts of guardrails that infantile conservatisms hold up, and freed from the shortsighted idealism with which trivializing and on-its-last-gasp rationalism likes to delude itself. Yet if the venture that I sketch here, attuned to literature and the human sciences of the twentieth century, allows us to predict a recasting and even a radical reformation of humanism, putting this into operation and the consequences of so doing can only be, to paraphrase Sartre, "harsh and long-term." I belong to the generation that objected to soft humanism, this fuzzy "idea of man," devoid of substance, bonded to a utopian fraternity, which harked back to the Enlightenment and the postrevolutionary contract. Today it seems to me not just vital but possible to refashion these ideals, for I am convinced that what we call modernity, so often disparaged, is a crucial moment in the history of thought. Not hostile to religions, and even less indulgent with them, this school of thought that I am part of is perhaps our last chance to deal with the rise of obscurantism and its other face: the management via technology of the human species. It is probably even more difficult in the United States than it is in Europe to plead for the reformative role that the "Humanities" might play in a social and political field threatened with disintegration, such as we experience it, differently but similarly, in all the countries of the world today. Still, I plead, not only because this conviction underpins and shores up my own intellectual endeavors but also because I am convinced of the necessity to be aware of it, proudly aware, and in this way counteract the depressive temptation that can overcome the researcher, the intellectual, the writer in this empire of calculation and show business. And also to shout out the need for a more courageous sort of participation, more appropriate to the general public, in this "democracy of opinion" that modern showbiz society has become. **** COPYRIGHT NOTICE : Published by Columbia University Press and copyright (c) Bisogno di credere: Un punto di vista laico (c) 2006 Donzelli Editore Roma. Copyright (c) 2009 Columbia University Press. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. For more information, please e-mail or visit the permissions page on our Web site. Excerpted from This Incredible Need to Believe by Julia Kristeva All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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Julia Kristeva is professor of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII and the author of many acclaimed works and novels, including Murder in Byzantium , Strangers to Ourselves , New Maladies of the Soul , Time and Sense , Hannah Arendt , and Melanie Klein . She is the recipient of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought and the Holberg International Memorial Prize.

Beverley Bie Brahic is a translator and poet living in Paris and Stanford, California. In addition to the writing of Kristeva, she has translated the works of Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and Francis Ponge.

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