Kristeva's Rewriting of Totemandtaboo and Religious

Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion 1 (2019) 232–257

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Kristeva’s Rewriting of Totem and Taboo and Religious Fundamentalism

Kelly Oliver Vanderbilt University [email protected]

Abstract

With the upsurge in various forms of religion, especially dogmatic forms that kill in the name of good versus evil, there is an urgent need for intellectuals to acknowledge and analyze the role of religion in contemporary culture and politics. If there is to be any hope for peace, we need to understand how and why religion becomes the justification for violence. In a world where religious intolerance is growing, and the divide between the secular and the religious seems to be expanding, Julia Kristeva’s writings bridge the gap and once again provide a path where others have seen only an impasse. Her approach is unique in its insistent attempt to understand the violence both contained and unleashed by religion. Moreover, she rearticulates a notion of the sacred apart from religious dogmatism, a sense of the sacred that is precisely lacking in fundamentalism.

Keywords religious fundamentalism – psychoanalysis and religion sublimation – Kristeva – Freud

In her discussions of religion, Julia Kristeva often draws a distinction between the sacred and the religious in order to highlight the ways the sacred can oper- ate as an antidote to religious fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism fixes the sacred and makes it dogmatic, and by doing so, can become the justification for religious violence. As we will see, Kristeva calls this perversion of the sacred, the malady of ideality. Only by holding open the possibility of questioning and reinterpretation, and the constant process of binding, unbinding, and rebinding affects to words, do we avoid fundamentalism. The embrace of ambiguity

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/25889613-00102005Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:21:45AM via free access kristeva’s rewriting of totem and taboo 233 and ambivalence is difficult but necessary to avoid religious fundamentalism. In psychoanalytic terms, we find nonviolent ways to sublimate violent drives through creative representations. But when those representations become dogmatic, then we risk dogmatism and fundamentalism, which in turn can become the justification for acting on our violent impulses. In this essay, I attempt to think through how Julia Kristeva might describe the difference between representations of violence that perpetuate violent desires and actions versus representations of violence that sublimate violent desires and thereby prevent violent actions. Kristeva’s many discussions of language, representation and visual arts, along with theatre, dance, poetry, music, and installation pieces, suggest that artistic representation, and certain kinds of signifying practices, are sublimatory, and that they can become productive homes – if only temporarily – for aggressive drives.1 Yet, exactly how and why some representations sublimate violence and others stimulate it is not so clearly delineated. This distinction becomes especially vexed when Kristeva criticizes the society of the spectacle in works such as New Maladies of the Soul and The Sense and Nonsense of Revolt.2 There, she argues that media spectacles are flattening psychic space and threatening to kill off the psyche or soul once and for all. This leads me to ask: what distinguishes representation as spectacle from representation as transformative? Kristeva’s work begins to answer these questions by turning to the psychoanalytic field. Representations affect not only our conscious lives but also our unconscious lives; and the effects of images and words on our unconscious are the ones that incite deep-seated passions. When considering the relationship between representations and violence, it is necessary to consider unconscious fears and desires and how they are fed or quelled by different types of rhetoric and images. From Sigmund Freud’s origin story of a civil society initiated by the murder of the father and subsequent representation of him with a totemic animal in Totem and Taboo, the psychoanalytic account of representation is inherently tied to violence. Throughout her writings, Kristeva extends and challenges Freud’s account of the origins of human society, particularly the relationship between representation and violence. Specifically, as we will see, she challenges the patriarchal focus on the violent killing of the father and ensuing

1 For insightful discussion of art and violence in Kristeva’s writings, see: Beardsworth, Sara. 2004. Julia Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Modernity. Albany: SUNY. 2 Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, [1996] 2000) and New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (NewYork: Columbia University Press, [1993] 1995).

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded 1 (2019) from 232–257 Brill.com09/27/2021 05:21:45AM via free access 234 oliver guilt among the brothers as the incentive for entering into the social pact and accepting representations of violence as substitutes for violent acts. On her account, the emphasis is not on the violence of the totemic feast by which the brothers consume the body of the father and thereby incorporate his power, but rather on the joy of the festival and the role of the mother who operates behind the scenes of Freud’s totem and taboo. As we will see, Kristeva focuses on the ways in which totems (representations) and taboos (civil laws) revolve around both the paternal and maternal agencies. In sum, I argue, Kristeva’s rereading of Freud’s Totem and Taboo provides insight into the expression of violence in religious fundamentalism today. In terms of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, the question of what distinguishes forms of representation that incite or quell violence becomes the question of what distinguishes forms of representation that work through the sadomasochistic drives and thereby inaugurate our entrance into language and society, from forms of representation that participate in merely acting out those aggressive instincts. Can representation in language and art prevent violence towards others and violence towards oneself? My attempt to answer these questions will focus on two pivotal moments in Kristeva’s corpus: Kristeva’s 1998 catalogue that accompanied the exhibit of decapitated heads that she curated at the Louvre, entitled Capital Visions (translated for an English-speaking audience with the more graphic and spec- tacular title The Severed Head), and a talk that she gave at Columbia University in 2006 at a conference on the Dead Father, entitled “A Father is Being Beaten to Death,” which is reflected in parts of her books This Incredible Need to Believe and Hatred and Forgiveness, written around that same time, and published in Passions of Our Time (2018)3 My argument is that Kristeva rewrites Freud’s totem and taboo story with an emphasis on the maternal, bodily drives (which I associate with the tension inherent in human animality), and the joy of representation.

3 Kristeva, The Severed Head; Julia Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, [2005] 2010); Julia Kristeva, This Incredible Need to Believe, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, [2006] 2009); and Julia Kristeva, “A Father Is Being Beaten to Death,” paper presented at Columbia University Press (2006).

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1 Kristeva’s Rewriting of Totem and Taboo

In part, both The Severed Head and “A Father is Being Beaten” are Kristeva’s reworking of Freud’s Totem and Taboo,4 particularly in relation to the sadomasochistic origins of subjectivity and signification. Kristeva puts sadomasochistic violence at the heart of signification itself, which for her can be a safeguard against violent acting out; but only if it doesn’t become a new form of fundamentalism in the name of which we act out our most violent fantasies on the bodies of others (or ourselves). On my reading of her writing, it is the precari- ous and interminable process of working through our sadomasochistic origins that determines whether or not we represent or act out, and whether or not our representations transform our violent impulses or merely feed them. Since at least Powers of Horror,5 Kristeva has repeatedly returned to Freud’s Totem and Taboo in order to retell the story of the primal horde, which not only inaugurates civil society with its taboos against murder and incest, but also inaugurates representation in all of its forms. This is a story of the violent origins of the primary processes of condensation and displacement that make signification possible and brand us as human beings. In a sense, it is Freud’s answer to the most primal, yet most profound, of questions: where do we come from? Here, I suggest that in Kristeva’s retelling of the story of the origins of the speaking subject, Freud’s murdered father becomes the beaten father, while Freud’s forbidden mother becomes the beheaded mother. The father beaten to death and the beheaded mother not only inaugurate the prohibitions against murder and incest, as the Freudian story goes, but also open up the possibility of sublimating the violence necessary to become speaking subjects; a sadomasochistic violence that Kristeva insists is still necessary on both the individual and the social levels. To set the stage for Kristeva’s latest revisions of the Freu- dian origin story, which revolves around the beaten father and the beheaded mother, first I will sketch some of her earlier engagements with Totem and Taboo in Sense and Nonsense of Revolt, and before that in Powers of Horror. As we know, Freud gives a provocative explanation for the origins of idealization and sublimation that initiate religion, civil society and representation. This is a story of the body giving way to the law, and of the animal giving way to humanity. In this story, what he calls a “band of brothers” kill and eat their “father,” and afterwards totemize the father out of guilt. After the murder, the brothers institute prohibitions against murder and incest in order to prevent

4 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1913). 5 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, [1980] 1982).

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded 1 (2019) from 232–257 Brill.com09/27/2021 05:21:45AM via free access 236 oliver any one of them taking over the powerful position of the father who hordes all of the women and thereafter risk meeting his fate. On this account, there was one superior male (the father) who hoarded the females and shunned the other males (the sons or brothers). Individually none of the other males could over- power the superior male; but one day they banded together to kill him and assimilate his power through their cannibalistic feast. At this point, they are not much different from a pack of wolves ripping into the alpha-dog. What distinguishes them from wolves, however, is that they subsequently idealize their “prey,” the superior father, to the point that “[t]he dead father became stronger than the living one had been.”6 Thus, they not only assimilate his power and restrict that power through internalized prohibitions or laws resulting both from their guilt but also from their submission to the ideal or symbolic father that now replaces the real one. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva’s most significant revision of the Freudian narrative is her insistence on the primary role of the maternal body in the cannibalistic, and subsequent ritualistic, meal. Here, it is the joy and not guilt of the primal feast that fascinates Kristeva. And along with the prohibitions against murder and incest, she focuses on the prohibition against cannibalism at the dawn of humanity. This concern leads her to an analysis of food prohibitions in general, which she maintains always take us back to the maternal body, the first source of nourishment and the first source of frustration, pleasure becomes anguish. Or, in the terms of Melanie Klein, the good breast becomes the bad breast, an ambivalence that Kristeva attempts to capture with her notion of the abject, which is both fascinating and horrifying. Unlike Freud, Kristeva emphasizes the role of the maternal in the origins of civil society. Like Freud, Kristeva bases her analysis on anthropological literature, particularly Mary Douglas’s study of filth and defilement. She suggests that fear of the generative power of the mother makes her body abject and inedible, and thereby makes all bodies abject and inedible.7 She says “I give up cannibalism because abjection (of the mother) leads me toward respect for the body of the other, my fellow man, my brother.”8 Through the ambivalent struggle with the maternal body and the incest taboo, all human bodies become inedible. On the level of the individual, Kristeva argues that an oral aggression related to both food and speech revolves around a fear of loss of the mother aggrav- ated by threats of punishment by the father.9 The child feels aggression in

6 Freud, Totem and Taboo, 501. 7 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 78. 8 Ibid., 79; parentheses in the original. 9 Ibid., 39.

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded from 1 (2019) Brill.com09/27/2021 232–257 05:21:45AM via free access kristeva’s rewriting of totem and taboo 237 response to its fear both of the loss of maternal satisfaction and of paternal prohibition instituted by the incest taboo. Kristeva sees a pre-objectal aggression that comes from bodily drives and latches onto totemic symbols that stand in for, rather than represent, everything threatening and scary in the child’s young life: “Fear and the aggressivity intended to protect me from some not yet localizable cause are projected and come back to me from the outside: ‘I am threatened.’”10 The child responds to both deprivation and prohibition with aggressive impulses, which in the case of the maternal body may literally include the urge to bite or devour, to incorporate, the maternal body in order to hold on to it.11 The child’s own aggressivity, then, is projected onto something outside of itself, for example a phobic animal, as a shield not only against the deprivation and prohibition exercised toward it by its parents but also against its own violent impulses. At this stage, these impulses revolve around incorporation as an attempt to devour and thereby possess the parental love (not-yet) object. At the same time that the child is learning language and incorporating the words of its parents, it is trying to incorporate them. For the infant, the mouth is the first center of bodily cathexis associated with pleasure, deprivation, and language acquisition. Words, like breast-milk and food, pass through its mouth. Kristeva interprets the phobic’s fantasies of being bitten, eaten, or devoured by a scary animal as a projection of its own aggressive drives, particularly the urge to bite, eat, or devour the maternal body. As we will see, in The Severed Head, the mother’s face becomes the quintessential figure for the condensation of the abject scary devouring mouth and the radiant reassuring loving smile. In Sense and Nonsense of Revolt, Kristeva reads Freud’s Totem and Taboo in terms of the assimilation of authority through cannibalism, or the assimilation of the body, and representation, or the assimilation of language. But, now she adds an emphasis on the break between the timelessness of animal instincts and bodily drives and the linear temporality of signification onto, and into, which they are discharged. She suggests that the institution of memory in the totemic rituals represses timelessness, the timelessness of the drives. Her invocation of archaic timelessness gives us another motive for the repetition of rituals that assimilate the authority and power of the primal father. Rather than just repeating the crime as a reminder of lack and debt on the one hand, and of the mobility of power on the other, repeating the timelessness of animal experience become bodily drive also frees us from prohibition and guilt and puts us

10 Ibid. 11 cf. Ibid.

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded 1 (2019) from 232–257 Brill.com09/27/2021 05:21:45AM via free access 238 oliver in touch with the rhythms of the body and its pleasures and pains outside of linear time. Rather than merely repeat guilt and prohibition, idealization opens the space for a repetition of timelessness within linear time, a repetition that Kristeva identifies with the celebratory excess, joy or jouissance, of the feast. The origin story is not just the story of fixed totems or taboos, but also the story of how bodily drives become meaningful through signifying rituals even as they exceed those rituals. It is the story of animal instincts turned human drives; ultimately it is the story of the fluidity of desire. Desire is not conceived of as the flip side of prohibition; rather, desire rever- berates with longing for an archaic timelessness of our embodiment. On the level of the social, this timelessness is associated with animality and the transition from animal to human, while on the level of the individual, it is associated with the infant’s relation to the maternal body, and the transition from dependence to independence. In a sense, this timelessness is the absolute unity of being and meaning – what Freud might call the death drive, and later what Kristeva associates with the timelessness of death itself, which is outside of time and invisible, but can be rendered visible through artistic representation: “Death exists outside time: we can’t see it; we must be content with varying our capital visions of it. Absolute cult or ultimate revenge?”12 I will return to this question, but for now we can describe sublimation not only as a process of redirecting sexual and aggressive instincts à la Freud’s totem and taboo, but also as a process of discharging the timelessness of the drives (of the animal and of the preoedipal subject) into time (the temporality of the human and of the individual). Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, we can go further and diagnose Freud’s account of the killing that becomes murder and subsequent guilt that becomes prohibition as a displacement of this archaic timelessness into taboos – Thou Shalt Not – that take the form of Universal Principles, Eternal Truths, or Divine (timeless) Commandments.13 This operation is the displacement of the timelessness of bodily drives into the Eternal through which Absolute Good becomes an unforgiving Ideal opposed to its abject opposite Absolute Evil. The ideals of Good and Evil are beyond the realm of our embodied finite animality, and thereby deny everything bodily and finite in life; which, of course, is the process that Freud describes in Totem and Taboo as the violent beginnings of religion. In terms of psychoanalysis, this form of idealization becomes a harsh and punishing super-ego that makes extreme demands as a defense against con-

12 Kristeva, The Severed Head, 123. 13 See Kelly Oliver, The Colonization of Psychic Space: Toward a Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2004).

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded from 1 (2019) Brill.com09/27/2021 232–257 05:21:45AM via free access kristeva’s rewriting of totem and taboo 239 tamination by its disowned and abjected otherness, which it must exclude to define itself as clean and proper. Kristeva associates this form of idealization and abjection with fundamentalism and the self-righteous violence to which it can lead. She says:

The pure and absolute subject – call him the purifier – defends himself against the maternal from which he is separating through anti-taint rituals while at the same time defending himself against the murder of the father through feelings of guilt, contrition, repentance. Therefore what appears to be purity in the eyes of the religion and the purifiers is only an obsessional surface that conceals a veritable architecture of purity … to fight the various forms of fundamentalism and violence that appear to be the sorry privilege of this end of the century [we need to take] into consideration what produces it, namely, the disgust with taint and the consequent contrition, repentance, and guilt that present themselves as qualities of religion but also profoundly constitute the psychical life of the being capable of symbolicity: the speaking being.14

InThis Incredible Need to Believe, she calls this type of religious idealization that leads to violence the “malady of ideality.” We have now come full circle, back to a more nuanced version of the question with which we started: namely, what determines whether repetitions of the primal festival will take the form of violent acting out or sublimation of violence? Can we determine what rituals or signifying practices discharge the sadomasochistic drives at the heart of subjectivity by inflicting violence on others versus those that sublimate those drives and thereby transform the desire for violence and death into something creative? Within Kristeva’s terminology, another version of our question is: what distinguishes perversion from sublimation? Certainly, the answer to this question has everything to do with the processes of idealization and representation that Freud describes in Totem and Taboo, and Kristeva elaborates throughout her work, as the move from animal to human on the social level, and on the individual level, the move away from the maternal body and towards the paternal law – what in everyday language, we call “weaning.”

14 Kristeva, Sense and Non-Sense, 22.

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2 A Mother is Being Beheaded

Tracing our fascination with decapitation, beheading, and severed heads from prehistoric cave paintings through Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe diptych, in The Severed Head, Kristeva repeatedly argues that all of these detached heads represent both the mother’s face – that primal lost loving gaze – and representation itself insofar as we associate thought with the head. The figure of the head brings together our most archaic fears and desires along with our most effect- ive means for sublimating them. Relating early cannibalistic rituals and skull fetishes to Freud’s narrative of the primal horde, Kristeva once again transfers the originary founding violence from Freud’s paternal figure to a maternal one. She claims,

the skull and the face, primary targets for the gaze, appear to us as priv- ileged stations in the loss of maternal dependence. To assimilate the head of the other, to absorb the mother’s milk of the brain … the cannibalistic ritual is as much if not more an appropriation of the mother’s power than a devouring of the father-tyrant …. Thus we may read in [the totemic feast] a double celebration: that of the rival phallic father and that of the mother who abandoned us … From this totemic perspective, the assimilation of the head also seems to be a possible archaic equivalent for incest …15

Indeed, she calls the phallic cover up of maternal power a “construction ‘after the fact’ (Nachträglich).”16 Thus, she concludes: “To eat, to kill, to possess, to represent.”17 On both the social and individual levels, we become speaking subjects by moving away from literal killing and eating and towards their metaphorical analogues in representations, assimilation and substitution. Rather than eat the primal father or the mother’s milk, we assimilate their words; and rather than kill them, we substitute symbols that represent our violent impulses, for example, images of severed heads. Yet, Kristeva insists that these representations are sublimatory only insofar as they do not merely represent aggressive drives, but rather discharge them, and more importantly, transform them. In The Severed Head, she uses words like alchemy, transubstantiation, transformation, transfiguration, passage, modulation, osmosis, metabolization, compens-

15 Kristeva, The Severed Head, 16–17. 16 Ibid., 82. 17 Ibid., 17.

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded from 1 (2019) Brill.com09/27/2021 232–257 05:21:45AM via free access kristeva’s rewriting of totem and taboo 241 ation, and at the extreme, resurrection, salvation and rebirth, to describe the process by which representation sublimates bodily drives, particularly primal urges for cannibalism, incest, and murder. As she does when describing the revolution in poetic language in her early work, she insists that the intimate revolt, as she now calls it, which she associates with becoming an individual and that is repeated in each sublimatory representation, is not mimesis or a copying of drives in language.18 Bodily drives are neither the objects represented nor the referents of those objects (or images or symbols as the case may be). Rather, through what she calls an imprint, an infiltration, an inscription of the body, a sign replaces the absent body, which always takes us back to the absent maternal body. The missing body, and at some level any missing object, including the phallus threated with castration, is always the mother’s missing face, source of joy and terror. Kristeva claims that we hallucinate her, see her image, and then fabricate word-signs. We thereby compensate for our separation from her, for the cut, by taking control through representation: “For capital disappearance of mother’s face, I substitute capital vision – images words language,” which is another form of “incarnation.”19 As always, Kristeva emphasizes the materiality of representation, which brings us back to the maternal. In The Severed Head, she discusses the mater- ial elements of drawing, painting, and sculpture. Through art, we can get distance from our wounds and give them meaning that allows us to work through trauma and protects us from the worst violence: “No bombast, no savagery, you are distanced and sheltered from the cannibals, the terrorists.”20 Through art, she says, “slaughter turned to image assuages the violence, more or less repressed or mastered, of individuals and nations.”21 Representing decapitation can turn grief over the loss of the mother into the joy of creativity. The idea is that rather than decapitate, we draw or paint severed heads. Kristeva goes so far as to say that these visions of severed heads are the opposite of acts of decapitation. Discussing the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, she begins a chapter on the guillotine, saying, “Vision and action are polar opposites here, and the revolutionary Terror confronts us with that revolting abjection practiced by humanity under the guise of an egalitarian institution of decapitation.”22 She concludes that chapter, “the profusion of images and symbols has a chance of thwarting the temptations of real actions …

18 Ibid., 50–51. 19 Ibid., 5–6. 20 Ibid., 86. 21 Ibid., 75–76. 22 Ibid., 91.

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After all, if art is transfiguration, it has political consequences.”23 Thus, Kristeva insists that art can prevent violence, and that art is itself a nonviolent act of binding our violent drives to representation. At this point, then, Kristeva answers our original question with a resound- ing affirmation, namely, that representations quell rather than incite violence; indeed, representations may be the only way to prevent the worst violence. And, although the question of whether all representation prevents violence is still an open one, we have begun to get some clues as to how representation sublimates violent drives. First and foremost, representation transforms drives into something else (words, painting, sculpture) through which they are discharged without resorting to violence. Second, representation takes the place of the missing maternal face and thereby compensates for the absence and loss that incites violence and thereby softens and counterbalances the paternal prohibitions against cannibalism, murder and incest that allow us to live together without eating each other. Third, art – and we could add psychoanalysis – allows us to get distance from the loss and pain and this detachment protects us from its crippling effects. In Hatred and Forgiveness, she likens this detachment to a mother’s love for a child that she must let go for the sake of her child. Kristeva calls this process “depassion,” or “de-passioning,” which is also a de-eroticizing necessary for sublimation of sadomasochistic drives that simultaneously threaten and inaugurate speech. In addition, artistic representation transforms the artist from a passive victim of trauma into an active agent of creativity. Thus, art transforms its subjects, in both senses of the word “subject,” the subject matter of the work and the creator of the work.24 This de-passioning is also a form of re-passioning insofar as it is necessary for the rebinding or reliance that Kristeva associates in her later work with maternal eroticism. At this point, it is necessary to take a detour through maternal reliance to consider the function of binding and rebinding in Kristeva’s theory of sublimation. Considering her notion of maternal reliance or the maternal bind highlights her shift from the Freudian emphasis on the paternal to the maternal. In addition, her theory of reliance as a rebinding of affect illuminates how she understands sublimation as a rebinding rather than merely a binding. In other words, with Kristeva’s notion of reliance, we will emphasize the process of re-presentation as the presentation again of our experience only now in language or art. Signification is the re-presentation of experience; and it is sub-

23 Ibid., 101–102. 24 cf. Ibid., 63.

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded from 1 (2019) Brill.com09/27/2021 232–257 05:21:45AM via free access kristeva’s rewriting of totem and taboo 243 limatory when bodily drives and affects are transferred into symbols. Again, this transfer of the body into symbols is a retelling of the story of totem and taboo. Unlike Freud’s version, however, Kristeva’s elaboration gives us signification (totem) as a joyous compensation for giving up the mother rather than as ritualized guilt for killing the father (taboo). Furthermore, the mother’s passion for her child as a depassioning becomes a model for sublimation that informs Kristeva’s theory of representation and her aesthetics. Thus, in order to fully appreciate the novelty of her turning away from the Freudian and Lacanian father of the law and towards the face of the mother and maternal affect, we need to explore Kristeva’s latest thinking on the maternal hold, not just the maternal hold on the child, but also the maternal hold on our culture. In some sense, we could say that for Kristeva, sublimating the affective bind to the maternal is the fundamental task of all representation, which operates as a re-binding of that affect into signification, which for Kristeva is a hallmark of our humanity.

3 Maternal Reliance as the Rebinding of Affect

The prefix “re-” – as in re-presentation – forms a central axis of Kristeva’s writing and thinking. She emphasizes rebirth, revolt, return, re-pulsion, representation, rejection, among other renegotiations and repetitions of the past. One of the latest such terms to emerge in her writing, is the notion of reliance, specifically maternal reliance, as a rebinding of maternal eroticism. Maternal reliance is a return to the very beginnings of subjectivity and representation. It is the rebinding to the mother’s passion or what Kristeva calls “maternal eroticism.” The mother’s passion or maternal Eros is what supports the child’s entrance into language. Already immersed in signification from birth, the child learns language proper through the support of the mother’s love. But, on Kristeva’s account, the mother’s love is a kind of circuit that returns to the child through the paternal function, specifically what she calls the imaginary father. Here, I would like to consider what it means to return and rebind – that is to say, the significance of the “re-” for Kristeva’s thought, particularly in relationship to the process of sublimation of drives. Kristeva does not just talk about binding or birth, or unbinding or death, but rather about rebinding and rebirth, suggesting that a retrospective return rather than an original moment. Already, we see a radical change of focus from the Freudian origin story. The most significant moment, then, is not the moment of imaginary plenitude (ala Freud), nor the moment of originary loss (ala Lacan), but rather the moment of rebirth that comes through rebinding. Indeed, Kristeva’s insistence on re-

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded 1 (2019) from 232–257 Brill.com09/27/2021 05:21:45AM via free access 244 oliver turning suggests that there is no originary moment of plenitude, nor of castration or loss, but rather a constant movement of compensation for a recurrent loss. By emphasizing rebinding and rebirth, she underscores not the loss as cutting wound but rather the healing power of signification, always already inherent within loss. The flipside of separation is reattachment. And rather than just focus on the separation or cut, Kristeva looks to that which allows us to rebind and reattach in order to create relations that sustain us. Again, rather than focus on the loss and guilt that inaugurate society and the child’s entrance into it, she looks to the joy of creative signification that results from that loss. Rather than focus on punishment or loss, she looks to what we gain by joining together through representation or signification. Both unbinding and binding are necessary for rebinding. Thus, by focusing on rebinding, Kristeva insists on the process of unbinding and binding, and the oscillation between them. One reason that Kristeva focuses on rebinding rather than binding or unbinding may be the fantastic status of what Freud calls the primal scene. If there is no originary experience, then all experiences are repetitions of an imaginary scene that continues to haunt the psyche. Psychic energy can become attached to a foundational fantasy that drives it. This fantasy will be repeated in various forms throughout the life of the psyche. And yet, Kristeva remains optimistic that these patterns of repetition can be interrupted and new forms of revolt are possible through rebinding psychic energy. The repetitive nature of psychic experience is another reason that Kristeva emphasizes the return as retrospective rebinding. Binding is never once and for all but rather a continual process of binding, unbinding, and rebinding. The time of the psyche as described by Freudian psychoanalysis is one of repetition and return. And, Kristeva insists that psychoanalysis must follow the lead of psychic time by interminably turning back on itself through analysis. Rebirth and rebinding, then, are interminable processes through which the speaking subject negotiates and renegotiates the wound at the center of the psyche, the split between being and meaning. Insofar as we are beings who mean, we are cut off from our being in-itself, always searching for ways to reunite with our own being in-itself. This search to heal the wound or split between being and meaning takes us back to Freud’s myth of totem and taboo. In that story, as we’ve seen, homo sapiens move beyond their animality (being) to become human and social through meaning (representation). As we have also seen, for Kristeva, this move is always tinged with a melancholy longing to return to our animality, the loss of which is compensated for by language. As beings who mean, for Kristeva, we can take pleasure in signification in a way that animals cannot.

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In Freud’s terminology, our lost animality is associated with the death drive. Freud postulated the death drive to explain why human beings – and perhaps all living beings – tend toward stasis rather than tension, even when that tension is pleasurable. In other words, both the tension inherent in pleasure and in displeasure is overcome by stasis or a steady state devoid of tension. In human beings, one way to view the death drive is as the drive toward being, which is always in conflict with the drive for meaning. The idea is that to “just be” would be without tension, while the search for meaning is the essence of tension. Of course, this assumes that mere beings or animals are not self-conscious and therefore do not experience psychic tension. Another way to interpret Kristeva’s insistence on rebinding is through Freud’s theory of cathexis in terms of bound and unbound drive energy, which he introduced in “Project for a Scientific Psychology” as an economic theory of the drives and developed later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle in relation to the repetition compulsion.25 In the “Project,” Freud describes binding as the inhibition of free psychic energy linked to neurons firing in the brain as they become associated with concrete ideas or memories and therefore “bound” to them. Free energy is associated with the instincts or drives while bound energy is drive energy put in the service of stabilizing the ego. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, bound and unbound energies are not neces- sarily linked to biological processes in the brain, but rather to the primary and secondary processes of the psyche. There, Freud discusses the binding process not only as continually taking place, but also as the motor of psychic func- tioning. Unconscious drives are constantly being bound to ideas, images and memories, which make their way into consciousness to varying degrees. In analysis, the repetition compulsion can make manifest these psychic connections through which a particular drive is linked over and over again to a certain idea. Within the economy of the psyche, repetition strives to alleviate tension and return to a steady state (the aim of the death drive), but instead, repetition as acting out rather than working through leads to an increase in anxiety rather than a decrease.

25 See Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud, The Vol. 18: “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, “Group Psychology” and Other Works v. 18. New Ed edition. London: Vintage Classics. See also “Project for Sci- entific Psychology.” In Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud, The Vol. 1. New Ed edition. London: Vintage Classics. And see also “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis.” In Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud, The Vol. 23: “Moses and Monotheism”, “An Outline of Psycho-Analysis” and Other Works Vol. 23. New Ed edition. London: Vintage Clas- sics.

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Given that the repetition compulsion repeats traumatic and unpleasant experiences, the project of analysis is to unbind and rebind this drive force into something more positive and less painful for the analysand. Again, this process takes us back to the sublimation of aggressive drives insofar as sublimation requires the binding and rebinding of affect and drive onto signification. In her early work, Kristeva insists that this process is not one of representing the drives or affects in signification but rather of discharging them. Kristeva puts an emphasis on the rebinding operation of analysis. In light of Freud’s remarks on binding and unbinding in his later work, Kristeva’s focus on re-binding can be interpreted as attention to how the unbound energy of the death drive can be rebound and put into the service of life. For, as Freud describes them, bound energy is the result of Eros and serves life, whereas unbound energy is the result of Thanatos and serves the death drive.26 Bind- ing helps establish unity while unbinding destroys unity, which is why binding is associated with stabilizing the ego. Binding is also necessary for sublimation and the discharge of violent drives through various forms of representation. Extending Freud’s theory of bound and unbound energy to Kristeva’s notion of “new revolt,” rebinding or reliance appears as the re-binding of drive energy, particularly of the death drive, to more productive sublimatory creations and forms of signification in order to avoid the extremes of either falling into the death drive and identifying with it (embracing it with a wish for death) or dis- avowing the death drive by fixing an ideal and denying change. The later of these extremes easily topples over into the former; and therefore, they go hand in hand. Kristeva describes “the malady of ideality” as either of these – the nihilist who believes in nothing or the suicide bomber who kills in the name of an absolute ideal. The nihilist position risks violence because nothing is at stake, whereas the fundamentalist position risks violence because everything is at stake. Kristeva identifies this fundamentalism of belief with adolescence. Beyond the childish wonder at the world with its continual questioning “why,” the adolescent looks for something to believe in. The adolescent wants to believe in an absolute truth or eternal love, a soul mate, something to replace its parents, who have proved a disappointment. The adolescent, says Kristeva, is a true believer, who either embraces an absolute ideal or gives up all ideals and embraces the death drive. Both extremes can amount to the same thing if the adolescent turns to violence in the name of one extreme or the other. The

26 See Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, in The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, volume, XXIII 148, ibid.

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded from 1 (2019) Brill.com09/27/2021 232–257 05:21:45AM via free access kristeva’s rewriting of totem and taboo 247 adolescent cannot move beyond the need to believe and is doggedly fixed there rather than risk questioning and uncertainty. As we will see, questioning and embracing ambiguity and ambivalence are crucial to the process of sublimation of violent drives. Kristeva associates the need to believe with sensation, a sort of trust in one’s senses. She describes belief not as a supposition but rather as an unshake- able sensorial certainty. Before Oedipus, before language, before representation, there is the need to believe, which is supported by the imaginary father. Kristeva identifies the imaginary father with “paternal listening” that “gives meaning to what would otherwise be an inexpressible trauma,” most especially the separation from the maternal body.27 This father is the one whom the mother loves, or the one whom the child imagines the mother loves. This father is the object of the mother’s desire such that, not only is the child forced to separate from the mother, but also it sees that it too is an object of her affec- tion. Because she loves another, she is capable of loving me. Kristeva adds that the imaginary father also provides positive representations for the child. This father, loved by the mother, also loves and supports the child, if only indirectly through the mother’s love. Signification, representation, and language are possible because of the connection between love and belief, so long as that belief does not become fundamentalist. Loving support in the circuit between the mother and the father (real and/or imaginary) enables the child to separate from the mother in order to love her. In “New Forms of Revolt,” Kristeva postulates the need to believe as separate from the desire to know. She maintains that although the need to believe is primary, a meaningful life also requires the desire to know. It is noteworthy that Kristeva uses the terms need and desire here, given their history within Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, desire is what is left over once we subtract need from demand. This is to say that desire is the remainder between having to ask for what you want or need and actually getting it. Given that what the child wants is to have its needs met automatically without having to ask, the necessity of making a demand (or asking) insures that its needs will never be met completely, and therefore, it will become a desiring subject, always exper- iencing as much loss and lack as satisfaction. For Kristeva, we need to believe just as we need to eat and sleep. But we desire to know because of the gap between our belief (or ability to believe) and the satisfaction of that need through signification; this distinction once again takes us back to the origin story of animal needs turned human desires. Because we

27 See 2014. “New Forms of Revolt.” This Volume. Cited as NFR throughout my essay.

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded 1 (2019) from 232–257 Brill.com09/27/2021 05:21:45AM via free access 248 oliver can never say completely once and for all what we mean when we try to express our beliefs, there is always a remainder when we subtract what we mean from what we say. Language never fully captures experience, which is why we keep speaking. The remainder between experience and language corresponds to the gap between need and desire once demand enters the scene. In other words, because we must express our beliefs in language, they are always already put into doubt. And yet, in order to take the first step, we must believe – we need to believe. We need to believe we can say what we mean, and that what we say can be understood by others. This is a matter of faith that founds the possibility of communication. Of course, certainty of knowledge is impossible and therefore desire is always the oscillation between lack and satisfaction. Kristeva calls this movement the “eternal turnstile” of the need to believe and the desire to know. We are always moving back and forth between belief and desire, between certainty and questioning. The adolescent is stuck at the need to believe stage to the point that the desire to know may seem threatening. No longer comfortable questioning everything, the adolescent needs certainty and security. Kristeva claims that the analyst must convince the adolescent that there is pleasure in questioning, which she associates with revolt. This is to say, adolescent violence is not a new form of revolt. Protests in the street are not what Kristeva has in mind when she says revolt. Indeed, in Kristeva’s terms, this is the opposite of revolt insofar as it forecloses questioning, and is too often the result of belief in an absolute ideal or fixed idea. When this happens, representation risks inciting violence rather than quelling it. The ability to revolt through questioning tra- ditions and norms is threatened by what Kristeva calls “adolescent gangster fundamentalism.”28 It is important to note that she also says that everyone is a perpetual adolescent insofar as we all need to believe and we all crave certainty. And yet, she finds contemporary revolt (new forms of revolt) that not only dwells with questions, but also evokes pleasure in continually questioning. What she calls “this new species of rebels” share something if not new, then only recently acknowledged, namely that meaning comes from “a radical inner experience” rather than from something outside or located in the social, historical or political. This inner experience is related to what she calls “intimate revolt.” Inner experience is psychic life or psychic space, which is where intimate revolt takes place.

28 “New Forms of Revolt,” in Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy. Vol. XXII. No. 2, 2014, pages 1–19.

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In New Maladies of the Soul, she described intimate revolt as a way of making the clichés of one’s culture one’s own.29 Intimate revolt is an engagement between inner experience and the outer world. In this way, intimate revolt is an engagement between the deeply personal or this radical inner experience and the social, historical and political. Kristeva is clear, however, that intimate revolt is different from political revolt. Whereas most political revolt seeks to overthrow the old and establish something new in the name of some absolute ideal, intimate revolt neither dispenses with the old nor postulates something new, and certainly not in the name of an absolute ideal, unless that ideal is constant questioning and interminable analysis. In a sense, then, we could say that the value of values is in questioning them, and only through interminable questioning do we avoid the dangers of fundamentalism. It may seem odd that Kristeva is attempting to articulate what is new about contemporary revolt while simultaneously chastising contemporary culture for fetishizing the new. She is critical of the constant clamor for newness even while she seems to bemoan the lack of greatness in art and literature today. Newness, she seems to suggest, like revolt, has become intimate. No longer the grand social, historical and political gestures of political revolutionaries and great artists, revolt and newness have taken a turn inward to occupy psychic space. And yet, Kristeva tells us, perhaps it has always been the case that true revolt happens in the imagination; true revolt has always been intimate revolt. In any case, she concludes that grand revolt is no longer possible for us, inund- ated, as we are, with the society of the spectacle that levels everything and overwhelms with quantity over quality. We are left with what she calls a “dec- orative ghetto,” which could mean that we are left with poverty of meaning and mere decoration, or that we valorize the ghetto, and that ghetto aesthetic has become the new art form. Either way, she suggests that there is a crisis of meaning caused by the society of the spectacle that can be addressed through the reformation of intimate revolt – that is to say, reforming a meaningful life through questioning and analysis that is intimate and personal. Given that the crisis in meaning is caused in part by the inability of religion to fill the void left in the wake of constant screen time, we might be temp- ted to say that in the place of new age Christianity with its turn to a “personal knowledge,” Kristeva offers us a personal revolt in the form of intimate revolt, which takes place in our personal inner experience. Revolt has become personal rather than global. Meaning has become intimate rather than universal.

29 See Kristeva, Julia. 1997. NewMaladiesof theSoul.Translated by Ross Guberman. NewYork: Columbia University Press.

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And what is unique or new in contemporary life is our ability, or willingness, to admit it. Straddling old and new, personal and political, Kristeva’s new revolt could be interpreted as embracing the ambiguity of a space in between, embracing the fluidity and ambivalence of psychic space with its intimate revolt, or more precisely, its interminable intimate revolts. What we learn from Kristeva is that in order to avoid fundamentalism and dogmatism, we must embrace ambivalence and ambiguity.When we don’t, we risk the malady of ideality with its concomitant violence.

4 Preventing Violence or Inciting Violence?

Once again we’ve come full circle. Our original question of how to sublimate rather than repeat or act-out violence has taken us through various Kristevean notions, including maternal reliance, the need to believe, and intimate revolt. What these notions have in common as they move us away from Freud’s punishing father and towards the mother’s love, is the necessity of embracing the ambiguity and ambivalence – or more simply the fluidity – inherent in all experience. Thus, in Kristevean terms, our motivating question has become how to avoid the malady of ideality or dangerous fundamentalism, on the one hand, and how to embrace ambivalence and ambiguity, on the other. More specifically, how can we maintain fluidity and embrace ambivalence to avoid dogmatism and fundamentalism? Following the Kristevean trajectory, we are making progress in our exploration of how to distinguish between representations that sublimate or prevent violence and those that act-out or incite violence. Certainly we have seen enough inflammatory rhetoric, particularly from religious fundamentalists of all sorts, to know that not all representation quells violence but rather some exhorts it. Let’s continue to follow Kristeva in her rewriting of totem and taboo through the figures of the beaten father and beheaded mother, noting that while the beaten father fantasy has promin- ent historical antecedent in the Passion of Christ, Kristeva’s beheaded mother fantasy underlines the innovative nature of Kristeva’s thought, particularly in terms of the role of the maternal in the Western imaginary. In The Severed Head, Kristeva suggests that in order to be sublimatory, representation has to avoid becoming dogmatic, ideological, or fundamentalist. Conversely, when it becomes dogmatic or ideological, it risks perpetuating rather than preventing violence. Indeed, it can become the ideal in the name of which we commit violent acts. Kristeva suggests that we need to continue to question to “avoid[s] the fetish … through the invention of an unprecedented form, which doesn’t shrink from abjection but reshapes our vision so that

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded from 1 (2019) Brill.com09/27/2021 232–257 05:21:45AM via free access kristeva’s rewriting of totem and taboo 251 we see it with new eyes.”30 The object of art, or representation in any form, cannot become a fetish; rather it must always be a passage, a transition, and fluid rather than fixed. We must concentrate on the work of art, in its double meaning, rather than the artwork as an object. It is the process of figuration, particularly the drive force or primary processes that motivate it that make art sublimatory, not the object of art per se. This is why one and the same artwork or art object can aggravate or alleviate violence. And, why Kristeva maintains that we must be persistently “faithful[ness] to the cut,” which simultaneously does both. We must leave open the wound, trauma or loss, the horror, out of which creative representation is born, and through which it offers us rebirth, as she would say.31 The difference, then, between spectacle that incites violence and art that sublimates it is that spectacles reinforce one way of seeing the world while works of art open up new ways of seeing; they are an “anti-metaphysical meta- physics,” which constantly questions the foundations of all fundamentalisms: “abandon the spectacle and find a kind of face that has not yet found its face, that never will, but that never stops seeking a thousand and one ways of seeing. This is the intimacy they make us imagine, sensual seekers of the visible incarnation, the path of incarnation.”32 The process that Kristeva describes is an ongoing one of cathexis and de-cathexis that leads to more questions than answers. For, without constant questioning, any interpretation or belief risks becoming fetishized fundamentalism in the name of which we kill and “eat” each other.

5 A Father is Being Beaten

In the essay “A Father is Being Beaten to Death” – along with This Incredible Need to Believe – Kristeva continues to delineate the difference between forms of belief that open up questioning from those that close it down. There, she describes her analysis of the child’s identification with a beaten and suffering father as a rereading of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, inflected by his theories in “A Child is Being Beaten,” where the guilt that underlies the beating fantasy is the underside of desire for the father. Following Freud, she argues that the beaten fantasy is at the origin of individuation and subject constitution, and of sexual difference, now described in terms of differential relations to the beaten

30 Ibid., 108. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 127.

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded 1 (2019) from 232–257 Brill.com09/27/2021 05:21:45AM via free access 252 oliver fantasy. If, in The Severed Head, sadomasochism is “the secret of the unconscious,” as Kristeva calls it, here, sadomasochism takes center stage as the flip side of sublimation. Language is both derived from, and sublimates, sadomasochistic desires for incest and murder of both parents, on the one hand, and the superego’s pleasure in self-punishment for those very desires on the other. Both the desires and their prohibitions are simultaneously channeled into representation. This, of course, is the familiar story of Freud’s totem and taboo. The guilt in killing the primal father comes from identification with him and his suffering, which is an essential part of the dynamic of substitution initiated by totemic rituals. In order for a symbol to substitute for the dead father, the son (or daughter) must first be able to identify with him and his suffering. And for Kristeva, the first substitution for the mother as object of incestuous desire is a narcissistic one, wherein the infant’s own body takes the place of the missing maternal body, through autoeroticism. But in order for the next stage in the process of substitutions to take place, the intensity of the eroticism connected to sadomasochistic desires for both parents must be transferred to language. Representation itself becomes a new love object that enables us to survive the loss of the maternal body and skirt the punishment of the paternal law.33 We could simply say that through representation we cope with all loss, guilt and punishment, whether the traumatic loss of the mother’s face and our infantile connections to our first caregivers, or the big and small losses and victimiza- tions that we suffer throughout our lives. Indeed, in order to survive them, we must take pleasure, even if perverse pleasure, in representing our melancholy experiences. Kristeva postulates, that “In addition to masochistic perversity (“I take pleasure in the fantasy of being beaten”) is the sublimatory jouissance of my own capacity to say and to think for and with the beloved/loving. I want to emphasize that from the beginning sublimation accompanies this perverse defense, and perversion acts as sublimation’s double.”34 The sadomasochistic identification with the beaten father is a defense against the father of the law and his punishment and thereby an essential part of the process of idealization that enables the intimate revolts necessary for individuation. The suffering father is the latest incarnation of Kristeva’s imaginary father introduced in Tales of Love as the necessary support of the move away from the maternal body and towards the paternal law. Here, the suffering father plays the role of bridge between the two. His incarnation and victimiz- ation allow the subject to bond with a paternal most like itself; that is to say,

33 Kristeva, “A Father is Being Beaten.” 34 Ibid., 4.

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded from 1 (2019) Brill.com09/27/2021 232–257 05:21:45AM via free access kristeva’s rewriting of totem and taboo 253 the infant or child as victim of the paternal law can find an alternate ideal in the father as victim. This identification supports the intimate revolt against the paternal authority that, in a paradoxical move, authorizes the subject and its entrance into the symbolic. An identification with the beaten father counter-balances the punishing paternal super-ego by allowing the girl or boy sadomasochistic pleasure in punishment, which is doubled by sadistically turning the tables on the punishing father of the law and subjecting him to a beating, and then in turn masochistically identifying with his victimhood and what becomes sweet suffering. Kristeva says, “Beaten, I join my father once again; we are united by these nuptials under the whip … we are both in love and guilty and both deserve to be beaten.”35 The passion of the Christ is Kristeva’s prime example of the “a father is being beaten to death” fantasy.Substituting the Christian fantasy of the suffering Christ beaten to death, for the Freudian father murdered and eaten by the primal horde, Kristeva goes on to describe how identification with him supports the possibility of sublimation and the transfer of erotic intensity to symbolic activity itself: “The resexualization of the ideal father as Man of Pas- sion brings about an unprecedented resexualization of representation itself, of the very activity of fantasizing and of speaking.”36 Here again, Kristeva emphasizes incestuous desires and their taboos as the primary motivators for becoming speaking subjects. Representation not only compensates for the loss of these first loves, but also transforms desire for them into desire for language. Moreover, it transforms the passive victim of parental love and punishment into an active agent, while also turning the threatening parents into passive victims. The punishing father becomes the beaten father and the castrating mother becomes the beheaded mother. The perpetrator becomes the victim – but one with whom we identify; and, with these sadomasochistic fantasies we find both revenge and reunion through imaginary and symbolic satisfactions. In this way, we not only separate from our parents to become individuals, but also we cope with the pain of that separation, the separation that prefigures all others. But, as we have seen, Kristeva also insists that imaginary and symbolic identification with suffering is a depassioning; so it is at once the transfer of erotic drives into representation and the transformation of those drives from passion to depassion, from eroticism to de-eroticism. And it is this transformation that allows us to embrace them, that puts them beyond the taboo, and provides us

35 Ibid., 5, 6. 36 Ibid., 7.

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded 1 (2019) from 232–257 Brill.com09/27/2021 05:21:45AM via free access 254 oliver with sublimatory jouissance. Ultimately, with and against the death drive, representation makes the primary separation – which comes to stand for all pain, loss, trauma, and the very meaninglessness of life – into something meaningful, even sacred. Kristeva says, “understood as a traversal, by thought, of the unthinkable: of nothingness, uselessness, the vain and the mad” we are con- fronted not with religion but with the sacred.37 This distinction between religion and the sacred brings us back to the fragile distinction between dogmatism and sublimation. When the sacred becomes fixed in religion, it becomes dogmatic and risks becoming fundamentalism through which we justify violence. It becomes the malady of ideality. But, if the process of idealization necessary for a meaningful life is held open to constant questioning and reinterpretation through new forms of representation, then there is the possibility for sublimation of the sadomasochistic drives, which might prevent such violence. Rather than latching on to the ideal and becoming fanatical about it, we open it up to new ways of seeing, new fantasies of death and rebirth. This is what Kristeva does in her own work, signaled by her use of questions that provide different ways of interpreting the same phenomena. For example, when inTheSeveredHead, she asks, “What is the power of representation? Does the image succumb to the violence of death, or does it possess the gift of modu- lating it?”38 This style of constant back-and-forthing, of either-or, of both/and, is also what sometimes makes her work frustrating and difficult to pin down. But also it is what opens it up to interpretation. Through the use of questions throughout her writing, she leaves open possibilities and complexities rather than closing them down or resolving them. Kristeva maintains that the challenge to continually question our own investments in violence is unique to psychoanalysis. In her introduction to This Incredible Need to Believe, entitled “The Big Question Mark,” she argues that speaking in analysis becomes a questioning that “renders us capable of new bonds … the bond of investment in the process of symbolization itself.”39 With its constant reinterpretations of our losses and frustrations, the “talking cure” allows us to take pleasure in the pain of separation and of reunion over and over again in language. “The founder of psychoanalysis,” she says, “began by making love lie down on the couch. In order to return to the love of the father and the mother, and on taking the gamble … that ‘I’ am capable of going beyond my genitors indeed beyond myself and my loves, on the condition of being subject

37 Ibid., 8. 38 Kristeva, The Severed Head, 10. 39 Kristeva, This Incredible Need, xv.

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded from 1 (2019) Brill.com09/27/2021 232–257 05:21:45AM via free access kristeva’s rewriting of totem and taboo 255 to perpetual dissolution in analysis, in transference and counter-transference. This presupposes that there is not only a Dead Father, but also figures of patern- ity and of loves, in the plural, in which I take pleasure, which I kill and which I resuscitate when I speak, love and think.”40 Even more than art, psychoanalysis allows us to kill and resuscitate in speech as protection against the pain and suffering caused by our violent drives. Psychoanalysis acts as a counterbalance to the deadly force of fundamentalisms by offering “a space for reflection in which the effort of clarification takes precedence over the deadly confrontation between a tendency for regression on the one hand and the explosion of the death drives on the other, which together now threaten our globalized humanity.”41 By so doing, with and against religion and its too often deadly call for violence, psychoanalysis opens up psychic space and thereby the life of the mind. Psychoanalysis adds elaboration to artistic forms of sublimation. If creative representation can discharge bodily drives, analysis can understand them, if always only provisionally. Psy- choanalysis helps us to develop narratives or stories that allow us to live with ourselves and others in a interminably negotiated and renegotiated peace. In sum, I began with the question of how to distinguish forms of representation that incite violence from those that quell it. Traveling through Kristeva’s writings, particularly her rewritings of Freud’s story of the origins of representation in the totem and taboo myth, I argued that Kristeva turns the focus from the punishing paternal agency and guilt towards a loving maternal agency and joy in representing. She develops an erotics of representation through which she describes the process of signification as a bodily investment in language and other signifying practices, including painting, music, and dance, that opens onto jouissance or ecstasy. In conclusion, for Kristeva, the difference between signifying practices that incite versus quell violence – or in more psychoanalytic terms, practices that repeat or act out versus those that work-through for sublimate our aggressive drives – is determined by whether or not these practices open up or close down questioning. If representation or signification inspires us to question our own commitments, desires, and fears, then it promises the possibility of new forms of revolt defined in terms of making the clichés of culture our own. On the other hand, when representation closes off questioning, it risks becoming dogmatic and fundamentalist and thereby encouraging acting on violent impulses. Psychoanalysis can help us elaborate and analyze the unconscious forces at

40 Kristeva, “A Father is Being Beaten,” 11. 41 Ibid.

Journal for Continental Philosophy of ReligionDownloaded 1 (2019) from 232–257 Brill.com09/27/2021 05:21:45AM via free access 256 oliver work in signifying processes, along with the ways in which they open up or close down the possibility of renewed narratives through which we explain the meaning of our lives. Even so, there is always a fine line – a hair’s breadth – between signifying practices that sublimate or quell violence and those that act out or incite it. And, insofar as signification is living, breathing, and constantly evolving, valuations that attempt to distinguish between violent and nonviolent, healthy and unhealthy, good and bad, must also always open themselves up to further questioning, to facilitate binding-unbinding-rebinding of affects, and prevent dogmatism and fundamentalisms that become justifications for violence.

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