Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 12 Number 1, April 2011

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Kristeva, Julia. The Incredible Need to Believe. New York, Columbia University Press, 2009. pp115. ISBN 978-0-231-14784-2 Hardcover $19.9

 

Reviewed by

 

Christine Boyko-Head

 Lesley University, Cambridge, MA

 

                Julia Kristeva is professor of linguistics at the Universite de Paris VII and the author of many acclaimed works and novels. These titles include Murder in Byzantium, Strangers to Ourselves, New Maladies of the Soul, Time and Sense, Hannah Arendt, and Melanie Klein. A recipient of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought and the Holberg International Memorial Prize, Kristeva is undoubtedly, one of the major thinkers of this and the last century and her texts are a staple in psychology and literary theory courses.

 

                The Incredible Need to Believe is Kristeva’s extended dialogue of her views on religion  and the “complex experience of faith”. Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic, Kristeva’s book  analyzes the psyche’s and society’s inevitable movement toward faith. This movement is evinced through the act of speaking; but, Kristeva points out in the Preface,  that the “displacement” of this act is plaguing the world and pushing society toward the death drive. The Incredible Need to Believe shows Kristeva’s psychoanalytic  shrewdness as she chronicles a version of Christianity that will delay the death drive through its openness to infinite questioning. Her aim, then, is to restore the significance of the act of speaking  by “questioning the very conditions of speech, including the need to believe” (xvi). She does this by giving us an “overview of belief” (5) that meanders across various issues such as youth culture, genius, depression, creativity, women, and the Middle East, while also examining the lives and works of individuals ranging from Aristotle to Freud, Saint Teresa of Avila to Pope Jean Paul II.

 

                The Incredible Need to Believe has a provocative mission: it aims to show us that our need to believe is a continuous motion toward a “new politics” that can restore the integrity of the human community (inside jacket).  That Kristeva is up to the task goes without saying. Whether the text accomplishes this grand feat is another matter.

 

The text contains perceptive moments that echo her other  works. In chapter one she states  the “speaking being is a believing being” (1) namely because “when I say ‘I believe’, I mean ‘I hold as true” (3). Hence, “a truth that keeps me, makes me exist” (3) whether or not that truth is real, or more to the point, provable.  This argument is what develops throughout the text into her grander vision that the need to believe is not necessarily a belief in an omnipotent being, but relates rather to Christianity’s self-questioning.  This state of perpetual reflection propels humans toward endless possibilities, and creativity.

 

She begins her “conversation” with an intriguing perspective on adolescent life and the adolescent in us all: “the adolescent . . . is a believer. All of us are adolescents when we are passionate about the absolute” (14).  From there she launches into a discussion of the global media “with all their  imaginary and financial resources” (27). Typically, such arguments always announce the entrance of the father  and everything that entails.  Through basic psychology, Kristeva makes new associations and transferences that enlighten our understanding of current situations and trends. An example of this is when she links the “fury of ethnic wars” to the psychological “truth” that “the most ferocious conflicts are those involving the smallest differences: those one wages against oneself via one’s nearest and dearest”( 43). 

 

This incredible need to believe showcases Kristeva’s extensive knowledge; her creative genius is clear. Even her incredible belief in society is confidently pronounced. Yet, the text’s form never really lives up to the work’s superlative title. She deals with humanity’s need to believe in a plausible and convincing manner. But, the book falls short of showing our  incredible need to believe. This failing may have something to do with its structure rather than its content.  

 

The text contains  an overabundance of referenced sources that slide effortlessly into one another creating a montage of voices from various personas and periods. However, the interview style structuring the book – a series of statements followed by questions – interrupt Kristeva’s thoughts. These interruptions, while allowing her to cover an exorbitant amount of issues, leaves some concepts frayed and without any opportunity for closure. “The big question mark” mentioned in the preface is the relationship between our need to believe and our desire to know.  This incredible need to believe by Julia Kristeva keeps that desire very much in the forefront as we ponder what insights an uninterrupted text would have revealed. Ironically, the book leaves us with an incredible need to believe that there was,  a significant message Kristeva wanted to convey, but that for now all we have is that belief.