What ‘revolt’ today?

The term ‘revolt’ is usually given a broadly political meaning, related to ‘revolution’ and ‘rebellion’. In the work of Julia Kristeva it is radicalised, however, and shown to be integral to the lives of all people who can claim to be autonomous ethical beings. This may not be immediately apparent, but the following excerpt from Kristeva’s ‘Revolt, she said’ (2002) illustrates what she means:

‘In contemporary society the word revolt means very schematically political revolution. People tend to think of extreme left movements linked to the Communist revolution or to its leftist developments. I would like to strip the word ‘revolt’ of its purely political sense. In all Western traditions, revolt is a very deep movement of discontent, anxiety and anguish. In this sense, to say that revolt is only politics is a betrayal of this vast movement … Therefore if we still want to conquer new horizons, it is necessary to turn away from this idea and to give the word revolt a meaning that is not just political. I try to interpret this word in a philosophical and etymological sense. The word revolt comes from a Sanskrit root that means to discover, open, but also to turn, to return.’

Revolt in this sense is what is at stake when one has one of those rare experiences of anxiety or dread, which has the effect of alienating you from everything that is familiar. It is a matter of becoming aware, as Heidegger points out in Being and Time, of the groundlessness of your own existence, or in Sartre’s parlance, the fact that you are ‘de trop’, redundant, not really ‘necessary’ – that without you, the world would pretty much go on as usual.

But this realisation is not really all bad. On the contrary, it is a stark reminder that a meaningful life does not come ready-made, conveniently packaged for you – one has to work at it to make it so. By associating ‘revolt’ with the etymological meanings of ‘return’, ‘open’ and ‘discover’, she indicates that such acute anxiety could give rise to a creative ‘return’ to something fundamentally valuable, a life-giving stocktaking of oneself and one’s place in the world. And the point is that a periodic ‘re-turn’ to the question of what it is that gives sense to your life, has the capacity of revitalising you in the face of what may have seemed insurmountable until that moment of profound anxiety.

The revolt in question could therefore be a purely personal one, where someone ‘revolts’ against his or her own complacency and smug, self-satisfied inertia, and ‘returns’ to, or ‘rediscovers’ the joy of having a self-initiated project of sorts, one that differentiates between yourself and all other people.

On the other hand, it could be that revolt involves and is directed against others – a dictatorial manager or school principal, a dominating marriage partner or sibling, an illegitimate or oppressive government, for instance. In such cases, Kristeva points out, revolt serves the indispensable function of restoring ‘satisfaction’ or ‘pleasure’ in the specific psychoanalytical sense to your life. ‘Pleasure’ here means the psychic satisfaction that one experiences when you have legitimately challenged a source of oppression or subjugation of some kind, like when you reach the limits of your patience, or endurance, in the face of downright inhuman treatment from people in positions of supposed authority, and you take a stand against such maltreatment. This need not be dramatic or done in public (although it could well be the case); it could be toned down, person to person, but firm, and in either case it would represent a ‘re-turn’ or ‘turnaround’ that is justifiable in ethical terms, and therefore brings satisfaction of an ethical and psychical kind, albeit not necessarily in concrete or material terms. It might turn out, for example, that your ‘revolt’ against an unjust or unfair dispensation does not succeed in changing circumstances for the better, and yet the fact that you have revolted already brings with it the kind of ethical-psychic satisfaction which is at stake here.

Interestingly, Kristeva seems to question whether people living in today’s society are still capable of revolting in significant numbers. Perhaps I should say that she questions whether we live in a society where the prevailing social, cultural and political conditions are conducive to ‘revolting’ in the sense she imparts to it, namely confronting an unjust ‘authority’ or power. Why should this be the case, one may wonder? Following Guy Debord, she talks about the society or culture of ‘the spectacle’, where there is hardly any sense in looking for a ‘centre’ of authority, because ‘normalisation’ has taken the place of legitimate authority. People ‘know’ what to do and how to act, not because they recognise a specific authority or its representatives, but because the hegemonic media disseminate images of ‘normality’ as sites of identification.

Needless to say, Kristeva laments this state of affairs and it is not difficult to surmise that her various books on ‘revolt’ are intended to rekindle in her readers a receptivity to the idea, as well as a readiness to engage in acts of legitimate revolt as she understands it. As long as people are kept docile by entertainments and shows, she says, they lack the wherewithal to revolt, in this way reneging on the essential need to renew themselves and their culture, to ‘return’ to a more fulfilling way of living. As a result they often turn to fundamentalist movements in an effort to find an alternative to a society where there is no authority worthy of respect as well as of periodic questioning in the guise of ‘revolt’.
(Anyone interested in a more thorough-going examination of Kristeva’s notion of ‘revolt’ and its implications in specific contexts, might want to read my papers: ‘Communication and revolt.’ Communicare, Journal for Communication Sciences in South Africa, Vol. 25 (2) 2006, pp. 1-12; and
‘Dada and the ethical need for revolt in art.’ South African Journal of Art History, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2006, pp. 89-100.)