ile Kristeva agrees (with Freud) that the idea of belief conducts
wishful idealizations, she also points to it as an essential feature of
symbolization, needed to engage reality: Our very first efforts in language
depend on a belief that the world can persist in symbolic form in spite of
the inevitable loss of material relations (such as the mother/baby dyad)and the immediate gratifications afforded there. This is a world that
exists in symbolic form and that serves as a placeholder for the actual,
but is no less real for it. Belief is on these terms a condition for making
language from loss, and is not far away from Jacques Derrida’s
discussion of testimony as a pledge beyond concrete evidence: “For one
can testify only to the unbelievable. To what can, at any rate, only be
believed; to what appeals only to belief and hence to the given word,
since it lies beyond the limits of proof, indication, certified
acknowledgement [le constat], and knowledge” (0000a, p. 00). As the
grounds for symbolization, belief is needed not to sustain illusion (as
Freud would have it), but rather to face a truth of loss that is forcibly felt
beyond the realm of “concrete evidence.”