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Review Essay

From the Sacred to Radicalism:

The Collge de sociologie,
Kristeva, and iek
R P D
(Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Carleton University)

Economy and Society, Volume 32, Number 1, Special Issue: The Collge
de sociologie, edited by Frank Pearce. London: Routledge, 2003. 158 pp.
$113.00 (paper four issues). ISSN: 03085147.
Revolt, She Said, by Julia Kristeva. New York: Semiotext(e), 2002. 128 pp.
$9.95 (paper). ISBN: 1584350156.
iek: A Critical Introduction, by Sarah Kay. Cambridge and Malden: Polity
Press, 2003. 195 pp. $22.95 (paper). ISBN: 0745622070.
Introduction: The Sacred and Politics in Durkheim
The link between politics and religion is more than noticeable today
it may even be denitive of the ideological climate of contemporary
North American political culture. In this light, it seems pertinent to reconsider what a theoretical problematic of the sacred, in the Durkheimian
tradition, which formed the basis of his mature theory of politics, might
contribute to a critical analysis of this circumstance. The three gures
of contemporary social theory discussed below Pearces edited issue of
Economy and Society on The Collge de sociologie (2003), Kristevas Revolt,
She Said (2002), and Kays iek: A Critical Introduction (2003) each
Critical Sociology, Volume 31, Issue 4
2005 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden

also available online

www.brill.nl

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revolve around the question of politics and religion and the place of the
sacred in both. In addition, while each of these theoretical viewpoints
retain Marxist sensibilities, even if attenuated, they are united by a concern with the radical transformation of subjectivity, be it individual or
collective, and with oering a model to account for this process. What
is interesting about developing a theory of radicalization through a problematic of the sacred is that the sacred, can be both viewed as the
problem (e.g., of ideological mystication, of being the crystallized form
of ideological hegemony in the normative sphere, etc.) and a solution, a
radical discontinuity wrought in the very heart of social existence that
is radical in relation to the normal/normalized course of social life even
to the point of revolution.
Each of the works reviewed here attempts to think the linkages between
the sacred and the transformation of subjectivity. However, as these
pieces show, this is no small task: The diculty of theorizing subjectivity or, more precisely, of subjectivization (the process of becoming a subject)
perhaps explains why each of these theoretical approaches engage quite
explicitly with psychoanalysis indeed, it is the main point of reference
for Kristeva and iek since psychoanalysis arguably presents the most
sophisticated theoretical terrain for thinking about subjectivity. Yet, even
while psychoanalysis took into account the social relationships surrounding
analysands, Pearce et al., Kristeva and iek, turn to more explicitly
social scientic discourses in order to think the political.
Intended or not, the reference point for all three gures for linking
the sacred and politics is the work of the French sociologist Emile
Durkheim. Durkheim argued that religion needs to be dened in terms
of the collective representations and practices that establish, refer to, and
reproduce a radical dierence in a society, i.e., the sacred as that which
is set apart and forbidden (Durkheim 1995: 44). The sacred is radically
heterogeneous from profane, utilitarian life and hence communication or
movement between either, in the absence of elaborate rituals like initiations and sacrices, is baneful to both sacred and profane spheres. The
paradoxical character of the sacred rests in the circumstance that it is
at once the originary stu of social life while at the same time being
excluded from much of it: the sacred is something like a constitutive
absence within the social and hence also within the individual qua social
being. This is because the realm of the sacred, as the originary instance
of sociality, is an eect of collective social forces that transcend and overcome the egoistic and utilitarian orientations of individual persons: from
the point of view of the individualized subject, the sacred is a transcendental absence that nevertheless concretely actualizes the social agency

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of individuals. To interpret Durkheim in contemporary terms, the emergence of the sacred is the necessary condition for subjectivization.
The sacred is produced in moments of collective eervescence that
are then expressed as totem-like collective representations. As such, representations of the sacred make social life, its structuring and its reproduction through sacral authority possible. The sacred, as the fundamental
reference point constitutive of the social, also orients the three main types
of judgments: cognitive, normative and aective. Sacred representations
provide the cognitive materials for systems of classication and orientation (spatial and temporal), provide individuals with a sense of identity
and dierence and provide the nodal points of aective life such as
awe and respect, or terror, fear and dread, each of which accompanies the experience of the sacred (Pearce 2003b: 55). But, what is most
compelling about Durkheims theory of the sacred and collective
eervescence is that it serves as the basis for his account of the power
of the French Revolution: moments of collective eervescence that produce the sacred and the eects of sacralisation are radically heterogeneous
instances in history. Thus, in an ironic twist, Durkheim, conventionally
regarded as a conservative and apologist for social order, becomes the
most explicit classical theorist of revolutionary collective subjectivization
and radicalism, in contrast to the conventional acceptance of Marx on
this point, and in contrast to Freud who viewed politics, religion and
crowd psychology as pathologies.
Durkheims master narrative in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is,
however, incoherent because it is caught in a tension between the sacred
as deployed within religious institutions that stabilize social life, and the
sacred as a pure, radical, volatile and dynamic dierence that can potentially destabilize and transform the routine functioning of collective and
individual life. Nevertheless, throughout his career, Durkheims writings
on religion and politics were more concerned with actively constituting
a new secular sacred, in which individualism and socialist democracy
would operate as sacred collective representations to be respected, thus
fostering the normative framework for an egalitarian, socially democratic
and dynamic organic society. (In this respect, Kristevas normative position is very Durkheimian indeed.) It was this normative commitment that
fueled Durkheims interest in the French Revolution of 1789. For him,
the French Revolution was a moment of creative collective eervescence
that was sociogonic in nature. It unleashed social forces with the power
to destroy older forms of social organization, and the forms of subjectivity accompanying the ancien rgime and provided new coordinates for
social life in France. The problem facing the France of the Third Republic,

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Durkheims contemporary world, was how to remain loyal to the promise of the French Revolution in the face of clericalism, simplistic utopian
socialism, and an increasingly pathological division of labor.
Critical sociologists should welcome these texts because each of there
attempt to form an adequate theoretical problematic concerned with rule,
subjectivity (and with it, ethics) and politics. Putting the question of the
radical transformation of subjectivity that is, subjectivizations that break
from the acceptable forms of cognitive, normative and practical orientations dominant today is a pressing issue in a world caught between
the acceptance of capitalism as the only form of social and economic
organization. These texts, in the end, are quite optimistic: the presence
of the sacred in political life seems to indicate that the potential for radical transformations of subjectivity are always an immanent possibility.
Such questions are also timely because of the colonizing tendencies of
the religious right that threaten to polarize even further the terrain of
normative debate. And, both capitalism and the religious right are accompanied by the post-political circumstances in which politicians and lobbyists seem more intent on minor modications to the ways and means of
social administration than they are in fostering more egalitarian an democratic forms of social organization.
The Collge de sociologie
The collection of articles edited by Frank Pearce introduces a radical
Durkheimian notion of the political eects of sacralization. While the
existence of the Collge de sociologie has been acknowledged in French
academia, little about its program was known before 1979 when Denis
Hollier collected and edited the works of this group (see Hollier 1988).
The Collge was comprised of a number of academics, intellectuals, writers and artists that met in a bookshop in the Latin Quarter of Paris
between October 1937 and June 1939. Among the participants were
individuals who later became well-known theorists in France in the postWar era; notably, gures that went on to lay the groundwork for what
is now known in the English speaking world as poststructuralism. They
include Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, Pierre Klossowski,
Alexandre Kojeve, Jacques Lacan, Jean Wahl, Jean-Paul Sartre, George
Dumezil, Claude Levi-Strauss, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and
Walter Benjamin. The key gures in the Collge were Bataille, Caillois
and Leiris.
The central reference point of the Collge was Durkheims social ontology as developed in his sociology of religion. They used this in order to

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deal with questions of power and politics in the modern world. According
to the Collge, contemporary society was characterized by utilitarian and
egoistic orientations of life under modernity, capitalism and fascism. They
put to work a religious analytic of power in contrast to economic or
legal ones. This aspect alone warrants the attention given to the Collge
by the contributors of Pearces volume. In their programmatic statement
the members gave the name sacred sociology to their collective intellectual endeavor: The precise object of the contemplated activity can
take the name of Sacred Sociology, implying the study of all manifestations of social existence where the active presence of the sacred is clear
(Pearce, p. 1). Fascism according to Bataille and Caillois represented a
utilitarian form of collective life and festivals whose hubris attempted to
do away with the inherently tragic element that the sacred brings to collective life. For members of the Collge, social life is born, dies, is renewed
and, crucially, is structured by its failures, a sensibility radically excluded
from the instrumentalism and militarism of fascism since the latter only
uses religious forms rather than being constituted by the sacred and the
tragic (Caillois in Hollier 1988: 125-136). To be social, according to
Richman in her article in the Pearce collection (Myth, Power and the
Sacred), is to be confronted with the truth that society is founded on
a crime (p. 44) and that human existence is inherently bound up with
the meaning of ones mortality, a problem that the rite of sacrice
attempts to come to grips with. Yet, while religious life was waning in
the modern world, the members of the Collge were generally favorable
to the Durkheimian thesis that this did not mean that the sacred had
disappeared along with it.
Pearces introduction to the special edition of Economy and Society provides a brief and accessible summary of the concerns of the Collge and
a necessary discussion of its parallel organization, Acephale. This was a
secret society comprised of several members of the Collge, formed for
the specic purpose of putting into practice the rituals they thought were
required to constitute a radical, sacred collective existence. One of the
rituals they actually contemplated was a human sacrice of one of their
members. Pearces discussion of this problematic plan is important since
he shows how, according to French theories of sacrice, there had to be
a willing victim and a willing executioner (sacricer). Apparently, Leiris
was a potential victim and Caillois a potential sacricer. The plan was
never executed. If the logic of sacrice was followed by Acephale, through
sacral contagion, all members would have had to have been either a
victim or a sacricer, who would in turn have sacriced himself. As
Pearce notes, [u]nder these circumstances there might have been no

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record of Acephale at all and, for that matter, no further intellectual output of any kind produced by any of its members who were also members of the Collge de Sociologie (Pearce, p. 5).
Fuyuki Kurasawa opens Pearces collection with an essay titled
Primitiveness and the Flight From Modernity where he oers a discursive excavation of the critical role that primitiveness played in French
social science from the n de siecle onward. The ethnographic imagination provided resources for exploring other possible forms of social
organization (Pearce, p. 8). However, Kurasawa notes that this dierence
between primitives and moderns was mythical, a construct of French
academia. The reason for turning to primitiveness as a way of criticizing European modernity, Kurasawa argues, was that it provided an
alternative imagination of social life freed from the dominations of
rationalization, purposive-instrumental action and from simplistic rationalist conceptions of humanity, knowledge and the world (Pearce, p. 11):
Rationalization had shackled human beings to what is rather than
opening up what could or ought to be. Bereft of morality or spirituality, modern individuals had become resigned to living in an eternally
recurring present (Pearce, p. 13).
In pointing out the role that the ethnographic imagination played
in French sociology and in the Collge specically Kurasawa neglects
the role played by the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious as
a non-rational radical dierence: the unconscious too is a dierent
space in which one attends to the otherness in ourselves (Pearce, p. 11),
that also suggests a way out of modernity, hence the projects of surrealism and the surrealist sensibilities of the Collge. Also, Kurasawa seems
to elaborate a Weberian account of modernity and hence misses the distinctiveness of the Durkheimian account developed by the Collge. For
the Collge, the world was still enchanted, but dierently so from either
the Europe of Christendom or that of the primitives. Durkheims concept of the cult of the individual as a necessary sacred thing in the
modern world is crucial to acknowledge in this regard and Durkheims
stance on individualism, be it conceptually, methodologically, empirically
or politically, radically distinguishes the critical approach of his sociology from that of the liberal pessimist Max Weber, a point that seems
lost on Kurasawa. Thus, in Durkheimian terms, and contra Kurasawa,
the new god of individualism needed to be reborn, precisely as a response
from modern societies toward the monstrous new god, the Fuhrer (Pearce,
p. 24). This problem was not lost on Durkheim, especially given his
interventions in the Dreyfus Aair of 1894-1905 (Durkheim 1973).
Michele Richman follows a similar line of investigation as Kurasawa,
noting in particular how the study of myth, central to the Collge, resulted

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in a paradox endemic to the Collge: the more it explores and reveals

societys sacred origins and its own specicity within that particular
perspective the more it threatens itself with self-destruction as a scientic
discipline (Pearce, p. 30). This discursive tension is thus mimetic of the
equally destructive tensions between utilitarian expenditure under capitalism and useless expenditure under economies of excess. The study of
myths were important to the Collge because the mythic form represents and communicates the totality of the cosmos, in contrast to modern knowledge that thinks in terms of disciplines and segments of the
world partitioned o from each other. Modern science, unlike myth,
obscures the general forms of communication and volatile movement
constitutive of sociality as an inherently interconnected and interdependent
mode of existence. Studying myth thus allows moderns, cut o from
the tragic experience that relinquishes fate and chance and measures life
in relation to death, a measure of the sense of the sacred (Pearce, p. 34).
Both Bataille and Caillois highlighted the role of rituals in constituting
the bodily experiences of the meaning of myth, thus providing a critique
of a purely representational account of either myth or the social life it
represents. Richmans article contains a cogent explication of the consequences of Cailloiss treatment of myth for psychology: through myth,
individuals can envision the passage from Satanic isolation and inertia
to a Luciferian acquisition of force, and ultimately power (p. 40). As
such, Richman highlights the critique of liberal, utilitarian models of
human subjectivity subtending the Collges work (Pearce, pp. 32, 43).
Pearces O With Their Heads: Public Executions With Klossowski,
Caillois and Foucault, oers a rigorous and detailed re-theorization of
Foucaults account of power in the ancien rgime, in particular, the mirrored subject positions of the King (right sacred) and executioner (the
left sacred compliment) within it. Drawing on Caillois and Klossowski,
Pearce oers an account of the theoretical and political problem of how
to think about the constitution of a new body politic and the role that
sacrice plays within it. Pearce attends to the arguments for and against
the execution of Louis XVI/Citizen Capet since, as Robespierre and
others were well aware, it would lay the normative foundations for the
founding of the French Republic. The problem this raises is that if the
execution of the King is a sacrice, then the King would again be cast
in the role of the founder of the Republican body politic, thus undermining the normative rationale of Republicanism. At the same time, the
King as symbol of authority in the ancien rgime, had also to be destroyed.
Pearce notes how, for Bataille at least, there was an elective anity
between the death of God and the beheading of Louis XVI thus indicating a discontinuity lying at the heart of modern existence (Pearce, p. 51).

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Pearces critique and reformulation of Foucaults account of the ancien

rgime, especially its juridical apparatuses, is worth taking note of. It is at
this point that Pearce calls upon a more radical reading of Durkheim
and the Collge to help re-theorize Foucault, addressing in particular
the limitations of his account of punitive law in contrast to the Durkheimian
version oered by Klossowski and Caillois. In oering a detailed account
of the problematique of the execution of Louis XVI and a careful analysis of the social structures of the sacred and the sacrice that render it
intelligible, Pearce oers a compelling contribution to the sociology of
killing and, most importantly, an analysis of what might need to be
thought about in theorizing a new body politic today.
Gary Genosko, in his The Bureaucratic Beyond, draws upon Cailloiss
theory that the modern world (including its myths) tends toward desacralization, in oering an analysis of modern myths of the afterlife as represented in American lms of the late 1930s and 1940s, and in funeral
parlors. Cailloiss analyses of lm provide modern sociology with an application of a Durkheimian approach to collective representations in modern (as opposed to primitive) society. The supposedly sacred afterlife
has become rather profane, a veritable bureaucratic beyond (Pearce,
p. 75). The problem of death was central to the work of the Collge
and Caillois uses the means by which a culture represents death to
itself, including all the negotiations, education, emotions and comportment involved in facing it, as well as images of the afterlife, as a means
to dene American culture (Pearce, p. 77). By comparing traditional
images of death and the afterlife found in folklore with American lm,
Caillois could argue that the representations of the afterlife represent the
best that a society thinks of itself. In this sense, it could be said that the
myths of the afterlife are literally eu-logic. Cailloiss diagnosis of American
culture is that it has embraced the profane, even in the afterlife where,
as depicted in the lms On Borrowed Time (1939) and in Heaven can Wait
(1943) both heaven and hell are highy bureaucratized. In the end, there
is little dierence between this life and the next. Genosko, following
Caillois, contends that these cinematic representations of life, death and
afterlife even though they resemble the collective gatherings of festivals are akin to the dierence between sacred holidays and the modern family vacation, or the dierence between myths recounted in a
gathering and novels that are consumed in private modern rites are
anti-communitarian.
Marina Gallettis intellectual history The Secret and the Sacred in
Leiris and Bataille, explores the relationship between Leiris and Bataille.
Galletti oers some insightful comments on the politics of language and
its relationship to radical communication. Language, even if misunderstood,

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still communicates, still provides a movement of forces. It is this movement that provides the basis for challenging the social body of language and shows how secrets and passwords allow for the possibility of
a second language . . . of keywords endowed like the exotically resonating words or false-bottomed boxes of language evoked by Leiris
in his lecture The Sacred in Everyday Life (Hollier 1988: 24-31)
with the magical value of a password (Pearce, p. 97). What is deemed
non-sensical by dominant systems of representations, functions to constitute new forms of subjectivity and new forms of sociation that then
become the referent for non-sense representations. Gallettis piece thus
returns us to the positive and transformative eects of positing the sacred
(e.g., passwords set apart and forbidden except to initiates) as constitutive absences lying at the core of subjectivational processes.
In Undelivered: the Space/Time of the Sacred in Bataille and
Benjamin, Paul Hegarty explores his concept of a perversely grounded
sacred (Pearce, p. 101). Hegarty has a strong sense for the project of
the Collge as a whole and evokes their sense that Western society is
based on the exclusion of eroticism, of death, of excess (Pearce, 101).
Hegarty argues that Batailles sacred diers from the sacred as traditionally conceived of in that it does not have a space; rather it brings a
space for itself to be in, through transgression (remembering that the
holy is itself a transgression of the profane and vice versa). As a result,
the sacred never is, it never fully comes to be what we have instead
is an attempt to bring the sacred as bringing (Pearce, p. 102). On this
point Hegarty is quite correct: The sacred must be thought of in terms
of an eect of the eects produced by the dierences instantiated by
rules and taboos and as such, the sacred is inherently perverse. Hegarty
oers a compelling account of the links between the sacred and time as
rst introduced by Durkheim in his discussion of collective eervescence.
By bringing Walter Benjamin into the mix, Hegarty is able to demonstrate how Benjamin, in contrast to Bataille, is more concerned with
sacralizing the profane in the modern world. This is made possible by
the role played by sacrice in messianic time that refers, not to progress
but to the breaking of ordinary time, a time which exists only within
the broken time of now (Pearce, p. 110). And, the divine violence
of messianic time, also, like the sacred, has a relation to the destruction
of the subject of the law, thus producing a new form of subjectivity.
William Ramp examines the relationship between Durkheim and Bataille
on the question of the dualism of the social condition (Pearce, p. 119).
Ramp argues that the Collge has stronger Durkheimian roots than generally recognized since the fundamental orientation for both is the oppositional duality obtaining between totality and particularity. This totality

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however is not an oppressive one that subjugates individuals; rather it is

the other way around: particularity is what subjugates and dominates
individuals in their xity (a sensibility echoed by Kristeva). Thus, for
Durkheim, Mauss and Bataille,
[a]ll three point to a fundamental dualism between totality and dierentiation
at the core of social and personal existence: a dualism expressed in oscillations between the particular limits of everyday life and moments of eervescence
or excess which energize and transgress the daily order. This excess is present in the highest (and lowest) forms of social expression, and haunts society with the dual possibilities of renewal and catastrophe. (Pearce, p. 120)

Ramp develops a compelling case for considering the revolutionary impetus in Durkheimian sociology. The most interesting implication of this is
that Durkheims social ontology provides the basis for the normative
justication for sociology as a moral science. The social has primacy
(Pearce, p. 123) rst ontologically, then epistemologically in the collective scientic enterprise of sociology and then normatively: collective
scientic work of a culture sociologique inherently challenges the arrogance
and hubris of the Cartesian subject (Pearce, p. 124). The somewhat
understated thesis in Ramps discussion is that the normative dimension
justifying any critical and emancipatory sociology lies in its willingness
to embrace a heterological sensibility, being open to the experience, thought
and practice of radical dierentiation, found in the sacred, that allows
us to break from mundane, homogenized science (Pearce, pp. 131-2).
Now, if Ramp stresses the commonality of the normative problematic
shared between the Durkheimians and the Collge, Jean-Christophe
Marcel in his Bataille and Mauss: A Dialogue of the Deaf ?, stresses
the disagreements between Mauss and Bataille and why Mauss sought
to distance himself from the Collge. However, the importance of Mauss
to the Collge cannot be understated. It was Mausss famous essay on
the gift that provided the Collge with its program of attending to
total social fact[s], by which was meant certain sets of practices that express
the essential nature of a society because in certain cases they involve the
totality of society and its institutions . . . and in other cases only a very large
number of institutions. They reveal a set of phenomena that are at the
same time juridical, economic, religious, and even aesthetic and morphological, etc. (Pearce, p. 146)

The crux of Mausss rejection of Batailles sacred sociology lies in Mausss

commitments to rationalism, both epistemologically and politically (p. 150).
As such, he did not agree with the phenomenological turn in Batailles
work (which in my view is one of its strengths). Bataille was an iconoclast
of modernity; Mauss an apologist for a renewed rationalist, Enlightenment

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project: Mauss would have nothing to do with Batailles appeals to the

dark powers of the irrational as a basis for bringing about a social democracy. In taking this position, Mauss failed to appreciate, as did Bataille
and the Collge, and later Levi-Strauss, that the unconscious must be
considered in any account of the social (Pearce, p. 151). This justies
the Collges use of psychoanalytic discourse as a way to understanding
the subjective eects of the non-conscious determinants of social life, for
example taboos and the unrepresentable force of the sacred.
As a whole, Pearce and his contributors provide a useful introduction
to and use of the Collge de sociologie and the problematic of the sacred
in the modern world as a way of analyzing and explaining how the normative reference points that constitute and orient social subjects may
become radicalized. It is disappointing that the contributors do not take
up two fundamental concerns of the Collge, namely, capitalism and
fascism (or militarism). I also would have liked to have seen contemporary accounts of the contemporary world developed within a Collegian
problematic.
Nevertheless, these articles indicate how collective representations, be
they rules, myths or buildings and hence the routinized subjects of
them are inherently subtended and determined by a volatile eld of
social forces, the penultimate one being the sacred. The problematic
of the Collge hinged upon analyzing the eects of and challenging the
fundamental exclusions at the core of Western civilization, namely erotism, madness and art, death, crime, excess, and waste. For them, contact with these instances provides the means for transforming normal
individual and collective subjectivity and at the same time, means of
destabilizing and potentially transforming the dominant, utilitarian social
structures reliant on their exclusion; in a word, a heterology. Exploring
the radical dierences between the right and left sacred (as determined
by a dominant normative order) provides means of new subjectivizations.
In constrast to the subjection of individuals to the particularizing, segmenting and homogenizing forms of social organization characteristic of
modern societies, the Collge argued that the presence of the nonreligious sacred in the modern provides a way out and potentially a way
of destroying the dominant normative order. The sacred, as nonconscious communication of social forces, forms the real social substrate
that can never be fully captured in rational, homogenized, utilitarian
discourse, hence their optimism: new subjectivizations, radically distinct
from the egoistic, utilitarian models oered to us in the modern world,
are made possible by entering into sacred communion.

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Kristeva: The Sacred and the Ethics of Revolt

If the Collge was concerned primarily with collective subjectivity, Julia
Kristevas Revolt, She Said oers a compelling account of how individual
life is aected by the sacred and its political consequences. For Kristeva,
an ethic of revolt needs to become something constitutively sacred for
an emancipatory, genuinely democratic and perpetual subjectivization: it
is the means for achieving and sustaining a radical subjectivization that
does not fall prey to either the facile pursuit of mere happiness, nor to
the anti-democratic ossications of dogmatic revolutionaries.
Kristeva is a Bulgarian born psychoanalyst and cultural theorist, living and working in Paris since 1965. Her work is richly inuenced by
Bataille. Surprisingly, the Bataillean notion of the sacred-as-abjection
for which she is well known, does not gure in her discussions in this
work. Instead, this accessible collection of interviews is based on her theoretical reections on the state of political culture in France since the
1968 uprisings. It includes discussions of her relationships to feminism,
psychoanalytic practice, immigration, Gilles Deleuze, and more. The core
of Kristevas normative argument is the claim that politics today is about
individuals reclaiming the sacred of jouissance (enjoyment), dened as the
art of living (Kristeva, p. 41) as distinct from the facile happiness oered
by consumerism. In order to achieve this, she calls for revolt by which
she means, a perpetual and radical questioning of ones experiences of
the social world, including oneself, as distinct from revolutions. Revolt,
she claims, provides us with a chance to avoid ossifying into the mere
act of managing business. Without that, the only promise we have is the
freedom of simply adapting to the laws of production and the markets
(p. 86). Furthermore,
[t]he events of the Twentieth Century, however, have shown us that political revolts Revolutions ultimately betray revolt, especially in the psychic sense of the term. Why? Because revolt, as I understand it psychic
revolt, analytic revolt, artistic revolt refers to a state of permanent questioning, of transformation, change, an endless probing of appearances. This
history of political revolts shows that the process of questioning has ceased.
(Kristeva, p. 120)

The crux of the matter for Kristeva is this: The telling moment in an
individuals psychic life, as in the life of societies at large, is when you
call into question, laws, norms and values (Kristeva, p. 12).
Her diagnosis of the political present in France and America is rooted
in her experience of Paris 1968 which she interprets in Bataillean terms
as a struggle for a non-religious sacred, a kind of radical atheism which

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is perhaps the only non-vulgar or dogmatic form of atheism: exhausting

transcendence in its own terms by liberating speech through erotism
(Kristeva, p. 40). While there has been a rise in religious practice as
found in, for example, World Youth days, the problem facing revolt is
that there has been a signicant waning of authority (especially in the
family) and a corresponding increase of permissiveness. This has lead to
new maladies of the soul, (anomie, Durkheim might say), caused by a lack
of normative reference points for individuals (Kristeva, p. 32). This leads
to the problem of an ethics of revolt since, Who do you rebel against
if nothing is forbidden, or it has become so complex that you wouldnt
know where to start? And wholl rebel if human people are either undervalued or dont value themselves, or where the self has fragmented so
you cant bear it? (Kristeva, p. 84). Moreover, the dominant form of
authority today is more abstract: the new world order confronts us
with the uctuating authority of banking capitals, or rather with their
virtual scripture; compared to this, the authority of the politician is a
ction and, increasingly, a caricature (Kristeva, p. 33). This diagnosis
echoes ieks analysis in The Ticklish Subject (1999: 311.). New maladies
of the soul, depression in particular, are also argued to be at the core of
reactionary, neo-fascist politics (Kristeva, pp. 56-57). Kristevas sense of
radical politics recognizes the just demands of the destitute (Kristeva, pp.
13, 52) for the impossible (Kristeva, p. 36) and that a form of associationism today provides some possibilities for reinvigorating public/
political life (Kristeva, p. 58) a Durkheimian sensibility through and
through.
There is a tension and between what Kristeva means by the sacred
and what she means by revolt. The sacred for Kristeva implies some
positive representation to which subjects refer in making their world and
their existence meaningful in the deepest way. But this seems to indicate an ossication of the sacred, precisely a congealing of what one
could call the sacred moment of revolt into a sterile quasi-religious
authoritative representation. As such, Kristevas work could well benet
from the more nuanced conception of politics, subjectivity and the sacred
found in the works of the Collge de sociologie. For the Collge, the
sacred is inherently ambivalent, is unstable, volatile and dynamic it is
an illusion of religious homogenization that the sacred can be xed as
a transcendental representation that gives the world meaning. Rather,
the sacred is that tragic movement of society, which is also constitutive
of human existence that destabilizes transcendental representations. Also,
Kristeva equates society solely with laws, norms and authority, thus
missing the more nuanced sense of the social in Durkheim and the

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Collge; namely, of how social life enables and constrains the capacities
of actors, including the power of the sacred to radically transform the
fundamental coordinates of collective and individual life. Moreover,
Kristeva herself seems to indicate that it is in the social, and in collective eervescence, that the power to become a radical subject is made
possible. But, and here Kristevas problematic is well taken, the work
cannot stop there: the work of founding a new normative, democratic
order does not simply and unproblematically unfold from the moment
of collective eervescence. It is for this reason that Kristeva attends to
the question of what form of subjectivity should follow and how it can
be constituted.
Kristeva is caught in a productive discrepancy between the individual
and the collective and how these are brought to bear on the movement
from radical political events to an ethics of revolt or vice-versa. For example, while Kristevas own recounting of the history of radical politics in
France from 1968 to the present constantly makes reference to the social
and collective nature of these events and sees them as revolutionary, she
fails to adequately theorize the link between these social conditions and
the constitution of the radical subjectivization made possible by an ethic
of revolt. The key question that must be posed then is: Under what
social conditions (what social forces) make possible the emergence of the
subject of revolt? At the same time however, Kristeva makes a crucial
and necessary contribution to a radical sociology of the sacred. In contrast to the somewhat dark meditations on death, destruction and excess
found in the Collge, Kristeva oers a positive gure of subjectivization.
The concern with an ethic of revolt attending to the destitute and
associationist forms of democratic political organization that remains
faithful to the sacredness of the revolutionary qua sacred event. Of
the three pieces reviewed here, Kristeva contributes, more so than the
others, a necessary reection upon, and prescriptive proposals about,
how an ethic of revolt and an ethic of the sacred can contribute to
something that one could call a authentically sacred form of perpetual
subjectivization.
iek: From Subjection to Enjoyment to
Fundamentalist Political Acts
The work of Slavoj iek, a Slovenian social theorist, has become the
dominant reference point for contemporary critical social theory, in a
sense displacing Foucault and Deleuze. Since 1999 iek has drawn upon
a religious model of politics which, in contrast to the Collge, is critical

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of transgression and sacrice as transformative acts, but still engages in

a consideration of politics, religion and the sacred as found in, for instance,
his The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (iek 2003).
This serves as his basis for conceptualizing a form of radical subjectivity that can challenge the stultifying eects of liberal democracy and capitalism. He is scathingly critical of the relativism of postmodernism and
cultural studies; liberalism, and political correctness. His answer to the
ideological impasses of the present is to adopt the subjective consequences
of a fundamentalist, atheistic, commitment to the radicality of democratic revolution. Doing so constitutively excludes the trite solutions of
liberal democracy and capitalism and makes an atheistic religion of revolutionary breaks with the dominant normative order.
Sarah Kays critical and comprehensive introduction provides a highly
useful resource for those interested in further exploring ieks contribution to contemporary social theory. To her credit, Kay takes great
care in rigorously dening and illustrating the central concepts, categories
and theorems found throughout ieks works (up to 2002), thus explicating the rationale behind his critical assessments of contemporary
Western society. ieks central theses are clearly reconstructed and hence
the reader is not at a loss as to what is at stake in ieks work. It is
impeccably organized, helping the reader in gaining a quick summary
of some of ieks more complex points. This book also contains a glossary of ieks main concepts as well as a very useful bibliography. As
such, I will nd it extremely useful as a reference book and a continuing resource for my own research. Kay also oers us a more critical
look at ieks various positions, often challenging his elitist analyses of
culture, his critiques of feminism, his political brinksmanship, and a discussion of the ongoing debate between iek and Judith Butler.
ieks work employs Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist political
economy to show how the real of enjoyment ( jouissance) is a fundamentally political factor, creating the impasses of subjects happily trapped
in ideology: the real of enjoyment subjugates individuals to hegemony
and the ideological organization of enjoyment; enjoyment is what maintains the subject as the subject of hegemony. Moreover, jouissance is compulsory in society, an example of which is the presence of a laugh-track
in sit-coms we are compelled and expected to laugh and enjoy on
cue, as a marker of our social membership. Subjectivity can be transformed rst and foremost by symptomatic readings of ourselves and our
reality, by traversing the fantasy, in which we glimpse that what we
had taken for reality was all along an illusion masking the space of the
real, and so have an opportunity to build reality afresh (Kay, p. 5).

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In his more recent work, iek contends that daring to act in such a
way that we willingly give up the privileges oered to us by our current
position, and accepting the consequences of this loss, allows subjects to
recongure their subjectivity.
ieks central contribution to social theory lies in his elaboration of
how subjects become attached to the social world, i.e., subjectivized, in
and through desire. The social is understood as being comprised of the
eld in which social beings qua signicatory or speaking beings by
denition submit to certain laws and prohibitions that organize how subjects are able to have access to enjoyment. For example, racist, reactionary ideology works on the belief that the other is stealing enjoyment
from us (Kay, p. 138). However, subjectivity in Lacanian terms is not a
positive entity but rather is the absent center. In this respect, there are
some resonances between Lacans concept of the subject and Durkheims
sacral theory of social existence made possible by a constitutive absence
(i.e., what is sacralised). In a manner resonant with the Collge, iek
argues that the subject is produced by the failure of fantasy, speech and
language (the materials from which ideology is composed) and this failure produces both desire for a particular object (the objet a) and requires
the work of fantasy to cover over the traumatic fact that as social beings
we are subjugated to the requirements of social norms and prohibitions
(the big Other/grand Autre) and cannot have direct access to enjoyment we pay a price, the price of what can be called enjoyment-initself for admission into the social world and this price is so profoundly
traumatic that it causes primary repression (Kay, p. 99). In this sense,
enjoyment in-itself is the constitutively sacralised and founds social
existence.
Subjects come into existence through the unconscious positing of a
fundamental fantasy that allows them to cope with this trauma (Kay,
p. 68). The fundamental fantasy is a structure that produces what can
be called a mode of production of enjoyment, by positioning the subject in relation to an object (objet a, the little other/autre), which is both
the object and cause of the subjects desire. The objet a provides for a
little piece of left-over enjoyment. ieks best know example of the
objet a, is found in his analysis of the it in Coke is it: This it (as
in the dreaded question Was that it?) gestures to an it beyond representation to which our deepest desires are pinned. The it that is CocaCola is thus a nothing-remainder in reality of an impossible real
enjoyment (Kay, p. 59).
As Kay is careful to stress, a key distinction in iek is that between
the real and reality . The real is that, which through a structural necessary eect of the limits of language, cannot be symbolized; whereas

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reality is what is experienced by subjects who are constituted through

fantasy and ideology, which is to say by their passionate attachments to
objets a. Importantly, the Lacanian real is not the substance of some
banished content, but the violence of its repression [. . .] This violence
continues to haunt our fantasies [. . .] (Kay, p. 147). As Kay aptly states,
The real is the disgusting, hidden underside of reality which we cannot fail but step on, however much we imagine that our minds are on
higher things. [. . .] And just as we cant keep ourselves from sning at
it whether with titillation or revulsion so it lls us with jouissance, or
enjoyment: the thrill of the real (Kay, p. 4). For example, the real
emerges when one says to ones lover, I feel so deeply for you . . . words
cannot adequately express how I feel, this feeling referred to is the real
of enjoyment that emerges because words (the Symbolic) fail us, not the
other way around. Our positing of demands, our articulation of them
in speech, produces the gap lled in by the real of jouissance. This structure forms the basis for ieks Lacanian reading of Hegels three modes
of reection: positing, external and determinate. Thus, what appears,
to external reection as an impediment, is in fact a positive condition of our
access to Truth: the Truth of a thing emerges because the thing is not
accessible to us in its immediate self-identity (iek in Kay, p. 36).
Again, ieks formulations resonate with the Collges problematic of
the sacred: the real, like the sacred involves constitutive exclusions, attraction and repulsion.
The result of this processes of subjectivization is the subject chasing
after the objet a. It is the structured relationship or position of the objet
a that maintains subjectivity in its place. The objet a is like a token that
allows us a little piece of jouissance, after having rendered unto Caesar
what belongs to Caesar. As such, as Lacan, and iek following him,
argue that this form of enjoyment is homologous with Marxs concept
of surplus value: our castration that is the inevitable eect of being a
speaking subject (and thus subjected to the social world/Symbolic order/Big
Other/Autre) is the price we pay to reproduce ourselves as social beings.
The jouissance we get after having paid this price is the surplus ( plus
de jouir) to which we gain access through our relationship to objet a, a
relationship that tends towards fetishism.
The characteristic form of fetishism is the subject who says, I know
very well . . . but all the same . . .: The cynicism of, for example, Nazism
towards itself is by no means a reason to take it less seriously on the
contrary, the fetishistic structure whereby we know very well that the
Jews are not responsible for all social ills and yet we believe that they
really are is exactly what led to the Holocaust (Kay 2003: 134). ieks
point here is to stress the material eects of ideology: even if we do

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not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still
doing them (iek in Kay, p. 135).
ieks more recent attention to political subjectivization as a means
for going beyond the stiing impasses of a post-political world of ddling
with social administration, justied by liberal democracy, is premised on
the position that it is necessary to endorse a radical, materialist, atheistic fundamentalism (Kay, p. 126). ieks contemporary position then is
committed to a positive valorization of politics (Kay, p. 147). iek oers
two ways out: traversing the fantasy and the act.
Traversing the fantasy works by rigorously adhering to the letter of
the law as found, for example, in working to rule: If a work-force takes
its regulations literally, the institutions grind to a halt, because it in fact
relies on there being unspecied supplementary demands on their labor.
Working to rule exposes the fantasy structure of loyalty, commitment,
etc. (i.e., exploitation) on which the rule relied (Kay, p. 136). Revealing
this lack in the Big Other, is a heroic act, which is why ieks heroes
are hysterics, women and theorists (Kay, p. 165). As such, traversing the
fantasy reveals the lack and pretense of Social order, revealing that it
relies on a violent supplement that it disavows: traversing the fantasy
brings to light how things really work, not how they are represented
as working.
An act, as distinct from the hysterical acting-out of symptoms, is
the only one which restructures the very symbolic co-ordinates of the
agents situation: it is an intervention in the course of which the agents
identity is radically changed (iek in Kay, p. 155) a very Leninist
position. These two praxes are oered as an alternative to sacrice which
merely perpetuates the illusion that there is such a thing as substantive
moral law (Kay, pp. 108-9) and transgression. In this respect, iek is
drawing heavily upon St. Pauls critique of the reciprocal structure of
law and sin. Moreover, the act leads to a state of subjective destitution in which the subject is de- and re-subjectied by an acceptance
of their reliance on some symbolic framework and their being something
of an object of their drives, those forces within them that go beyond
them they keep the subject going. Subjective destitution thus allows
the subject a way out from the super-ego injunction to enjoy! (the way
you are supposed to) and adopt the consequences of acting. The act is
freeing because it repeats our entry into the symbolic but in this case,
the subject chooses to do so and accepts the consequences, even if this
choice is unavoidable since the subject cannot choose to not be a subject (of the symbolic). The state of subjective destitution is similar to that
of collective eervescence as discussed by the Collge. In collective

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eervescence, a preceding collective subjectivity is emptied and what is

left is the experience of the force/drive of social existence.
The main limitation of Kays book is that it does not read like an
immanent critique of iek, of working within the terrain of ieks
Lacano-Marxism. As such, Kay repeats a fundamental error of much literary appropriations of psychoanalysis: Lacans fundamental concern
throughout his career was not to elaborate a social theory, or a theory
of ideology, but to understand what takes place in the psychoanalytic
situation itself, i.e., what transpires between the analyst and analysand
(the patient) in the course of the analysand puzzling through his or her
life (frustrations, pains, joys, anxieties, fears, etc.) that block the analysand
from experiencing love (on this account, Kristeva is much more faithful
to Lacanian psychoanalysis). Now, they might reply that since both the
analytical situation and the world outside of the clinic both consist of
subjects constituted through the Symbolic, and materials from the outside inevitably are brought into analysis, that the extension of psychoanalysis into a broad social theory is justied. But Kay does not make
this argument. iek too is guilty of this and it leads to the odd conclusion that reading social theory comes to be seen as a clinic without
the clinic. But how then can analysis actually take place since the fundamental, concrete social mechanism that makes analysis work, the transference between subjects, is absent? As such, and whatever iek may
claim to the contrary, he is too much an (implicit) adherent to the conventional belief in the Enlightenment, reasoning subject/reader: self-analysis has its limits, signicant ones (we cannot by denition see our blind
spots/determination by the unconscious, we only see the eects of them
once we crash into something).
Furthermore, while I am highly appreciative of how iek has put the
problem of subjectivity back at the center of theoretical debate, it is at
the same time its chief weakness. Indeed, it is the linkage between subjectivization and dialectics that forms the core of ieks concerns and
hence the question of materialism becomes the theoretical real of
ieks epistemology. As Kay herself notes, iek is often quite weak in
his accounts of historical contexts he skips all too quickly to the analysis of the fantasy subtending a cultural artifact or a political ideology.
As such, and like much post-Marxism, too much emphasis is placed on
discourse and the symbolic as the substance of politics and subjectivity.
ieks materialism is thus more about dialectics in the literal sense
(through words) than it is about materialism. Take for example ieks
Lacanian interpretation of capital: Thus there is a sense in which capital is the real which determines what we understand by reality (Kay,

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p. 146). This theorem indicates that iek has reached the limits of
Lacanian epistemology and needs a Marxist epistemology in order to
clarify the link between real-concrete social conditions, the real and
reality. Moreover, posing the question of the real-concrete of capitalist
relations of production would require that iek think about how the
capacities and incapacities of subjects are constituted by real-concrete mechanisms and not simply by the materiality of discourse. Coupled with
this limitation inherent to his dialectical materialism is the rather facile
equation of the social world with prohibition and signication. This
conception of the social is perhaps best understood not as a theory of
the social but rather a neurotic analysands beliefs about it as understood by psychoanalytic theory. And, while ieks work has become
almost exclusively concerned with the question of how radical politics
might today be possible, his advice still tends to displace the political
with the ethical: it all seems to come down to individual acts. The question that I ask in this regard, is why not think about, as radical sociologists have been doing for more than a century, how collective subjects
with the power to transform social organization are constituted: we could
modify and proliferate counter-hegemonic discourses but without the constitution of a powerful, radical, collective subjectivization, the real-concrete terrain of politics will not change. What is more surprising is that
ieks work increasingly makes reference to collective subjects, be it the
collective subject of the Christian church as envisaged by St. Paul, or
the revolutionary subject envisaged by Lenin. So the problem again
becomes theorizing the linkages between individual and collective subjectivizations and the need to give ontological, and hence in my view,
politico-strategic priority to the latter.
Conclusion: Radical Collective Subjectivity and Social Power
Each of these theoretical terrains grapples with the question of a radical ethics and politics by engaging with sacral conceptions of power and
subjectivity. They each stress how the sacred, as captured in political
ideology (e.g., fascism, liberalism) religion, norms, values, as positive
representations and social forces, attach us to normal, everyday social
life by providing the coordinates of cognition, normativity and aects,
thus subjugating subjects. They also stress the fundamental role played
by exclusion in founding Western societies, be it excess and waste (the
Collge), the trauma of violence (iek), or the destitute (Kristeva). At
the same time, they recognize that transforming normal subjectivity
requires the transformation of the coordinates of normal social life and

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they each seek out how such a desubjectication that would constitute
a radical break from the social order is possible. For the Collge, such
a transformation can come through collective eervescence, which can
potentially constitute a radically heterogeneous moment in collective existence. For Kristeva and iek, it is through a perpetual, hysterical questioning that challenges our entrapment in the symbolic/normative order.
To this iek adds the act, leading to the desubjectication of subjective destitution. However, the psychoanalytic terrain of Kristeva and
iek reveals its political limitations by failing to adequately consider the
constitution of collective social power. It is here that the radical
Durkheimianism of the Collge oers a materialist conception of collective radical acts. That is to say, the concept of collective eervescence,
as the birth of a new sacred, is grounded in the objectivity of collective
social power that is able to destroy previous forms of subjectivity with
its cognitive, normative and passionate attachments. Radical social power
thus emerges at points where there is an immense concentration of collective forces accompanied by a commitment to that moment of the
break from egoistic, utilitarian, homogenized social life. At the same time
however, the problematic of the Collge could well benet from the contributions of Kristeva and iek towards an understanding of how subjectivization, through discursive battles, indicated to a degree in Pearce,
occurs after the destructive and creative moment of eervescence and
how it might be possible to avoid authoritarian ossications of the sacred.
This would require conceptualizing collective subjectivization beyond the
psychoanalytic problematic of the transformation of individuals.

References
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1973
Individualism and the Intellectuals. In Robert N. Bellah, ed., Emile
Durkheim on Morality and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
1995
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press.
H, D, ed.
1988
The Collge de sociologie. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
ek, S
1999
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London: Verso.
2003
The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge: MIT
Press.