In Approaching Abjection Kristeva reimagined the abject as an element of subjective formation and reformation and as a discursive device within psychoanalytic and other theories of subjectivity. In From Filth to Defilement it seems that this project is extended into another perspective, that of the social function of abjection. The determination of what is filth will be immediately connected to the determination of what is sacred and this epistemology will facilitate the rituals of defilement, such as sacrifice, that society establishes for its maintenance. The essay treats this topic within the domains of psychoanalysis and anthropology.
Kristeva begins with Freud's thoughts on the totem and taboo, indicating the two primary taboos are incest (presumably with the mother) and murder (of the father). Kristeva suggests that this incest dread is a mother phobia.
-What does Kristeva mean by this connection? What is the fear that motivates this prohibition?
The Sacred is a two-sided formation. One side is a defensive and socializing aspect, murder and guilt. The other side demonstrates fear and undifferentiation, an identity that is more primordial than the separation of subject from object.
Kristeva does make clear that she is not interested in the social production of the incest taboo, but in what subjective alterations it suggests in the confrontation with the feminine, and with "the way in which societies code themselves in order to accompany as far as possible the speaking subject on that journey"(250) .
So what is the feminine that is being confronted? Kristeva states that the feminine is not a timeless essence but rather a nameless other. The confrontation with this other will take place from the foundation of the paternal function.
Kristeva uses Freud to characterize the taboo as not merely sacred and consecrated but also dangerous and forbidden; and, as a prohibition it concerns in large part matters that are enjoyable. Kristeva will seek explanation for the imperative of the taboo in the condition of primary narcissism which is hostile and unlimited.
This primary narcissism makes the distinction between inside and outside unclear, this nondistinction is unnamable thus aligned with the feminine. It is here that the question of pleasure and pain takes importance. The distinction between these two will introduce language and found the separation between inside and outside.
In the following sentence Kristeva makes a compelling and complicated claim. "If the murder of the father is that historical event constituting the social code as such, that is, symbolic exchange and the exchange of women, its equivalent on the level of the subjective history of each individual is therefore the advent of language"(252).
-What is Kristeva suggesting here? What is the parallel between the establishment of a social code that facilitates the exchange of symbols and women and the establishment of language in the individual subject?
Kristeva, again reading through Freud, will recall his proposition that the beginning of libidinal drives in childhood are not directed towards an object. Autoerotism is the stage at which object-choice is fixed. The condition of narcissism is said to require an ego, but not an outside object.
Kristeva will find two consequences to this narcissistic structure: first, the ego will be unstable without differentiating itself from an other; and second, the topology of this narcissism will affirm the generative position of the mother-child dyad.
-How does Kristeva arrive at these consequences?
-What kind of valuation does Kristeva offer for this primary narcissism? Is it a good option?
Kristeva, now reading Levi-Strauss makes a crucial claim on page 254: "If it be true, as Claude Levi-Strauss has demonstated, that the prohibition of incest has the logical import of founding, by means of that very prohibition, the discreteness of interchangeable units, this establishing social order and the symbolic, I shall maintain that such a logical operation is carried out owing to a subjective benefit derived from it on the level of libidinal economy".
-An excellent question to pose is what is this libidinal economic benefit that is so instrumental to social order?
Kristeva will suggest that rituals of defilement effectively address a threat that is implicit in the sacred epistemology they operate within. She will engage this epistemology in regard to the place of the maternal and the threats that are invested in it.
From Levi-Strauss to Bataille, Kristeva will here grab another effective consideration on this topic. Bataille linked abjection to the lack of capacity to exclude. Thus we may understand that societies codes threats they cannot abolish as abject and establish practices of defilement to confront these apparent threats. Again, it is the mother that Kristeva wishes to consider in relation to these ideas.
Kristeva next takes up the work of Mary Douglas in anthropology to explicate the process by which filth becomes defilement and founds the sacred.
-Kristeva will here call upon the domain of language to indicate the manner in which anthropologists have connected the symbolic to the universal. (257)
-what are the conequences of this linkage?
By page 258, Kristeva's investigation has led her to suggest of abjection that it "...is coextensive with social and symbolic order, on the individual as well as on the collective level". And later, "But abjection assumes specific shapes and different codings according to the various 'symbolic system'".
-What is the logic of prohibition that Kristeva describes on this page?
How is filth defined on pages 258 and 259 and what are dangers that filth presents to the subject?
How does Kristeva locate maternal authority in the two coded abjections, excrement and menstrual blood? (260-1). Further, how does locating maternal presence in these abjections lead to the repression of maternal authority for the establishment of the social order?
Finally, in the last section, what is the relationship between defilement and borderings?
-Anderson
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Kristeva explains that excrement and its equivalents symbolize dangers to identity from without, while menstrual blood stands for danger issuing from within the identity (260). She provides several examples of excrement: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, and life threatened by death. She then elaborates that “menstrual blood threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference” (261). She continues to hold that “maternal authority is the trustee of [the] mapping of the self’s clean and proper body” (261). She says that language then sets up a separation and an order by repressing maternal authority and this corporeal mapping (261). It is likely that excrement and menstrual blood are distinguished from one another in order to maintain inside/outside distinction, thus safeguarding against the undifferentiated (feminine) state. Although, if the undifferentiated state is feminine, and maternal authority represents corporeal mapping, doesn't the mapping encourage differentiation?
In From Filth to Defilement, Kristeva brings our attention to the phase which Freud calls intermediate: the narcissistic stage. It seems as if she wants to erase its preliminary status to the autoerotic stage by showing how narcissism precedes, explains and even motivates the incest prohibition. She thinks that there are two moods, passive and active, constituting the subject. The passive is overshadowed by the stressing of language and the installation of the symbolic order through the paternal law. As a result, the semiotic, the precondition of language which takes form in the narcissistic stage, is neglected.
My problem with squeezing in a preceding maternal authority in the freudian psychoanalysis, is that the feminine once again gets relegated to the passive, the irrational and the body... Kristeva talks about how the maternal authority shape the body into "a territory, having areas... surfaces and hollows" where the symbolic order is then impressed and exerted. This maternal space is then linked to Plato's chora in New Maladies of the Soul (NM p.352). She seems to embrace the idea of attributing to "woman" this nourishing, unnameable matrixlike space "prior to the One and to God". I have a hard time accepting this idea, not because I devalue passivity and nourishing qualities, but because it seems like K. grabs whatever pieces are left over by a phallocentric psychoanalysis.
How open to change is the semiotic and the primary mapping of the body? The symbolic is described as one "possible variant" and not a pre-established harmony or divine order (From Filth p.257). Are there different variants of the semiotic as well? Or is that a ridiculous question all together since the semiotic is change; a sort of constant chaos that needs to be ordered? It looks like K. is saying that the paternal function and the symbolic order is needed in order to ease the anxiety that the confrontation with one owns unstable and fragile identity brings. Without the paternal law the door is wide open to perversion or psychosis (FF p.254), whatever that means.
So where is she going with all this? What I hear her saying is that there is a fundamental sexual difference but it is a difference that should arise out a network of multiple, female perspectives and preoccupations (NM p.353). This idea of multiplicity within sexual difference is attained by recognizing "an irreducible and self-sufficient singularity that is multifaceted, flowing, and in some ways non-identical" (NM p.355). Freudianism ascribes to this perspective since it both explores sexual difference and the individuality of the subject. What is needed is not the erasure of sexual difference, like in the egalitarian and socialistic project, but a clarification of "the differences between men and women as concerns their respective relationships to power, language, and meaning" (NM p.356-7), i.e the relation between subjects and the social contract. First, we must discover the specificity of the feminine and then the specificity of each woman.
This specificity of the feminine seems to come out of a communal feeling women have of being rejected from language and the social bond (NM p.359). Women seem to have communal affects and meanings of the relationships with "nature, their bodies, their children's bodies, another woman, or a man" that can't be expressed in language. This sounds very essentialistic to me (which means bad!) but on the other hand K. is saying that the dichotomy between men and women "as an opposition between two rival entities is a problem for metaphysics." (NM p.366) She wants to challenge the very notion of "identity" and metaphysical categorie and turns to spiritualism as a way of confronting the other: "From that point on... I am at once the attacker and the victim, the same and the other, identical and foreign." (p.367) It is not the eradication of differences K. envisions but ways to accept them and live with them. But I still have a problem with the intimate, ontological connection between woman and mother in K.'s analysis, and the attribution of passivity, irrationality, corporeality, etc, to a female specificity...
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