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Kristeva's Rewriting of Totemandtaboo and Religious Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion 1 (2019) 232–257 brill.com/jcpr 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 rebind- ing 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 dog- matic, 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 lan- guage, 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 product- ive 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 psycho- analytic 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 chal- lenges 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 sadomas- ochistic drives and thereby inaugurate our entrance into language and soci- ety, 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 rep- resentation. 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). 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 235 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 sadomas- ochistic 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 funda- mentalism 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 sadomas- ochistic 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 ideal- ization and sublimation that initiate religion, civil society and representation.
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