The Maternal Metaphor: Kristeva

Part V: Maternity, Feminism, and Female Sexuality

Charity Liu

Desire in Language

"Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini"
-- Published in 1975 when Kristeva was pregnant with her son who was born in 1976
-- A theory of maternity with which she goes on to analyze some of Bellini's paintings of the Madonna and Child

The Maternal Body (295-6, 303)
-- Within the maternal body, "there is an other."
-- No one is present within this simultaneously dual and alien space.

Two discourses of maternity—science and Christianity—are inadequate to explain maternity

Gestation, becoming-a-mother, can possibly be accounted for by two discourses:
(1) Science: Completely negle course, not concerned with the subject.
-- Maternal as natural and therefore presocial, biological process
-- Mother as site of her proceedings
-- Science cannot account for the splitting of subjectivity in the maternal body

→ If we confer identity on the process then we are "positing an animism that reflects the inherent psychosis of the speaking Being." Yet at the same time, we cannot take solace in the fantasy of the "Phallic Mother," presuming that the mother is "mastering" the process, for if we do, " it is prior to the social-symbolic-linguistic contract of the group, (and) we acknowledge the risk of losing identity at the same time as we ward it off".

(2) Christian theology (canonical theology)
-- Defines maternity as an "impossible elsewhere, a sacred beyond", establishing "a sort of subject at the point where the subject and its speech split apart, fragment and vanish."
-- Address the move from nature to culture in the maternal body with the image of Virgin Mary, but the maternal body is reduced to silence

→ Apart from these extreme poles of science and spirituality, at some point the mother is acknowledged to be the master of the process of gestation if only in order to guarantee symbolic coherence.(304)
→ Thus a 'phallic' mother is assumed, in order for every speaker not to conceive their being in relation to a void, a nothingness.(304) But to maintain the social symbolic linguistic contract of the group, this acknowledgement of subjecthood of the mother is at the same time denied. The result leaves the maternal body as "the place of a splitting which remains a constant factor in social reality."

Maternal body: A place of splitting (biological and social; nature and culture)

-- Through the body, destined to insure reproduction of species, the woman-subject like a filter, where nature confronts culture

The fantasy of Phallic Mother:
If she were not phallic, then every speaker would be led to conceive of its Being in relation to some void, a nothingness asymmetrically opposed to the Being→ a permanent threat against its mastery and its stability

Desire for motherhood

-- The psychoanalytic discourse of analysis assumes the desire for motherhood to be anchored within the paternal symbolic order regarding it either as a transformation of penis envy or anal drive.

"a desire to bear a child of the father (a child of her own father); the father here is assimilated to the baby itself and thus returned to its place as devalorized man, summoned only to accomplish his function" (that's is, to originate and justify reproductive desire)

→ But, Kristeva proceeds, "motherhood seems to be impelled also by a nonsymbolic, nonpaternal causality.(305)

Pregnancy and childbirth can be experienced as a reunion with one's own mother

-- Primal regression can be phantasmatically experienced as the reunion of a woman-mother with the body of her mother
-- By giving birth, the woman enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own mother; they are the same continuity differentiating itself. Actualizing the homosexual facet of motherhood, through which a woman is simultaneously closer to her instinctual memory more open to her own psychosis, and more nugatory of the social, symbolic bond. (305)

A. The symbolic paternal facet

-- Having feminine aphasia within the desire to bear the father's child
-- The appeasement turn to melancholy as soon as the child becomes an object, neither self nor part of the self, an object destined to be a subject, an other.
-- Melancholy readjusts paranoia that drives to action and to discourse the feminine, verbal scarcity.

B. The homosexual-maternal facet

-- Whirl of words, a complete absence of meaning and seeing; it is feeling, displacement, rhythm, sound, flashes, and fantasied clinging to the maternal body.

Enceinte and elsewhere

-- Mother is within an enceinte separating her from the world of everyone else
"Enclosed in this 'elsewhere,' an enceinte woman loses communital meaning, which suddenly appears to her as worthless, absurd, or at best, comic—a surface agitation severed from its impossible foundations" (306)

Art

-- Woman also attains it by split symbolization (threshold of instinctual drive, of the "symbolic" and the "semiotic") of which the act of giving birth consists
-- It causes childbearing women to cathect the physiological operations and instinctual drives.
-- The maternal body slips away from the discursive hold and immediately conceals a cipher
-- The ciphering of the species, the pres- and trans-symbolic memory, makes the mother mistress neither begetting nor instinctual drive
-- The maternal body is the module of a biosocial program.

Motherhood: (307)

-- This instilling the subjectless of the symbolic biological program into the very body of a symbolizing subject
-- From the point of view of social coherence (which is where very body is made homologues to a male speaking body), Motherhood would be nothing more than a phallic attempt to reach the Mother who is presumed to exist at the very place where identity recedes. (307-308)

Language of Art

-- Follows maternal jouissance arising, the sublimation taking place at the very moment of primal repression within the mother's body,

*Through aesthetic activity the individual structures a sense of self and world in order to overcome melancholia and restore a degree of happiness, value and purpose. Kristeva refers to this process as sublimation,

*Sublimation is a matter of finding the language that connects with the non-symbolized trauma of mother loss and its affects and brings them to articulation in the interpersonal realm."

-- Artists speak from a place where she is not, where she knows not.
-- Existence of aesthetic practice shows mother as subject is a delusion.
-- Through symbiosis of meaning and nonmeaning, artists live in language, and through his identification with the mother (fetishism or incest), he owns jouissance.
-- Through and across secondary repression (founding of signs), aesthetics practice touches upon primal repression (founding biological series and the laws of the species)

Translibidinal jouissance:
-- eroticism taken over by the language of art
-- Artist's debts to Maternal body/or motherhood's entry into symbolic existence

Two attitudes towards maternal body, prefiguring two destinies within the very economy of western representation:

-- Leonardo Da Vinci and Giovanni Bellini
(1) body as fetish
(2) predominance of differences beyond and despite corporeal representation

*On one hand, Da Vinci's Madonnas, evidence the overprotective mother's role increasing Leonardo's narcissism; on the other hand, the hostile mother type is observed in some of the Bellini's Madonnas, in which feelings of distance-anguish between mother and son are depicted.

Kristeva vs. Freud

Kristeva	Freud
Pregnancy and childbirth reunite a woman and her mother and bring back primal homosexual bonds	Childbirth is motivated by penis envy
Maternal body locates its jouissance in femininity and maternity itself	The maternal body is always defined in relation to masculine sexuality and a phallic economy of desire

Tales of Love

Maternal Function

-- unlike Freud and Lacan—attribute language acquisition and socialization to the paternal function and ignore the function of the mother as anything other than the primary object or partial object

"The law before the law"

-- A regulation and structure in the maternal body and the child's relationship to that body
-- Before the paternal law is in place, the infant is subject to maternal regulation
-- Language acquisition and socialization have their foundation in the maternal function ( prior to the law of the father of traditional psychoanalysis)

→ She thinks Freud's account of motherhood is merely a masculine fantasy (an attempt to satisfy penis envy (baby=penis) or a reactivated anal drive (baby=feces))

Reconceived maternity

-- We need an image of maternity that can find the social relationship.
-- Western images of maternity, "cult if the Virgin Mary," do not allow for an image of the mother as speaking social being.
-- Call for reconceived notion of maternity and a heretical ethics, based on a reconceived maternity → a heretical ethics that does not reduce women to "milk and tears"

Pregnancy and identity

-- The only way available for women to reestablish their identities with the maternal body is through becoming mothers themselves.
-- Allows for an identification with an other
-- Pregnancy not only identifies a woman with her own mother, but also requires a new notion of identity a neither the mother nor the fetus controls pregnancy.
-- The maternal body operates between nature and culture, between biology and sociology.
-- Neither the mother nor the fetus is a unified subject. But maternal body is an example of subject-in-process.

Maternal and paternal functions:

-- Distinction between these two necessary functions is breaking down.
-- Both functions can be performed by various people in an infant's development.

New Maladies of the Soul

"Women's Time"—a mixed response from feminists in US.

-- First (prior to 1968) feminism is the feminism of suffragettes and existentialists. It is struggle over the identity of woman as rational citizen, deserving of the "right of man." The ideal "woman" contains the same characteristics of the ideal "man" and struggle to inset her in man's linear history.

-- Second (after 1968) feminism is the feminism of psychoanalysts and artists. It is a struggle against reducing the identity of woman to the identity of man by inserting her into his linear time. Assert a unique essence of woman or the feminine which falls outside of phallic time and phallic discourse.

→ She rejects them both and identifies herself with a third generation of feminists who challenge notions of seamless identity in general, and notions of man and woman in particular.

Interview with Elian Hoffman Baruch
-- She discusses the notion of abjection developed in Power of Horror . The abjection of the maternal body applies only to the experience of the male infant. The female infant has a different relationship to the maternal body.

Black Sun

-- She suggests that sexual difference is a result of differing relations to the maternal body. She explores a melancholy element of feminine sexuality that cannot be completely explained in terms of either the notion of a phallic mother or the notion of a castrated mother.
-- She describes feminine sexuality as a melancholy sexuality because female infant cannot abject the maternal body without abjecting herself.
-- "Matricide is our vital necessity"; the infant must be weaned from the maternal body.
-- Weaning requires that the infant abject the maternal body, not as the desiring body of woman, but as the container that meets its needs.
-- Males can abject and eroticize the maternal body in order to develop a heterosexual sexuality; females can neither abject nor eroticize the maternal body in order to develop a heterosexual sexuality.
-- Because girl's first love object is her mother, in a heterosexist culture, this primary homosexual feminine sexuality remains repressed and we lack ways of describing loving relationship between women, homosexual or otherwise.
-- Feminine sexuality is melancholic because to identity as women, female must identify with an abject maternal body.

Hannah Arendt: Volume one of Female Genius: Life, madness Words

-- The genius is an antidote to massification
-- Genius represents originality
-- Genius becomes what she is through an interaction with her environment and with others

"The singularity of every woman"
-- The genius of everyday life is women's genius, particularly a mother's genius.
-- In creating new human beings, mothers are each singularity innovators, reinventing the child anew every time.
-- Mother may represents the "only safeguard against the wholesale automation of human beings"
-- Each mother, and each mother-child relationship, is unique.

Reference

Stanton, Domna C. "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva." in The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 157-181.