Abstract
This investigation of the religious implications of the work of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva presents a number of basic ideas concerning their evaluations of the nature of God in patriarchal cultures. It involves the insufficient attention – to the point of exclusion – of women and the “feminine” from all that is associated with the divine and absolute ideals. It then explores their respective suggestions to remedy this situation and the repercussions that could result from such changes.
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Notes
- 1.
Kristeva observes: “Psychoanalysis is an experience of sexuality and thought, and a experience of love.… Transfer/ counter-transfer is nothing else than a loving relation between patient and analyst. It’s a love story …” (2002a: 77).
- 2.
“Otherness” or alterity has become a shorthand term for intersubjectivity or for what was formerly termed “love of one’s neighbour.” As Emmanuel Levinas has observed, traditional codified ethics, with its summary directives, appears to have been singularly ineffective in preventing the disastrous European wars, and the Holocaust during the last century. These occurred in countries that were regarded as predominantly Christian and “Enlightened.” While neither Irigaray nor Kristeva will unreservedly accept Levinas’s proposed remedy of an ethical orientation where one places one’s responsibility for neighbour, or the other, in a place of primacy, thus supplanting one’s own interests – and where ethics thus replaces ontology as first philosophy – they acknowledge ethical relationships need to be drastically “re-envisioned.” In Levinas’s case, the other person is the means by which the absent Other/God – who cannot be named or known directly, is witnessed to.
- 3.
Yet, a caution needs to be added that such a “herethics” (as it has been translated into English) does not necessarily involve an unqualified endorsement of a type of maternal or “feminine” love as a prototypical ethics, but rather seeks to discern a disposition that is sensitive to the exclusions and rejections of women as the negative version of “the other.” In particular, this negative other indicates for Kristeva those unacknowledged dimensions, not simply other human beings, that constitute our psychic make-up, and that have been repressed in order to become, as Freud termed it, “civilized.”
- 4.
“Abjection” is a term used by which Kristeva indicates the act of separation from the mother. It is acted out specifically in relation to the mother’s body – which is abjected or “ab-jetted,” as it is sometimes translated. The maternal body both attracts and repels, and such necessary abjection in orthodox psychoanalysis is prescribed as the only way in which the (male) child achieves autonomy. She has elsewhere defined it accordingly: “Abjection is something that disgusts you, for example, you see something rotting and you want to vomit – it is an extremely strong feeling that is at once somatic and symbolic, which is above all a revolt against an external menace from which one wants to distance oneself, but of which one has the impression that it may menace us from the inside” (Kristeva 1996: 118).
- 5.
This indicates a distinct problem in both Freud’s somewhat mechanistic description of the functioning of libido, as well as Lacan’s neglect of this vital aspect of the drives. Insofar as Kristeva’s depiction also aligns the semiotic with creative facets of the female – particularly maternity – it does draw attention to the somewhat typecast role of women as symbols of both lack and necessary loss in Freud and Lacan’s work.
- 6.
- 7.
Oliver finds something of a problem with the logic involved here: “This identification with the imaginary father is a transference between the semiotic body and an ideal other who lacks nothing. It is called father in spite of the fact that it is also a mother, because, following Lacan, Kristeva identifies the Symbolic with the Father. She explains this curiosity by arguing that even though the child’s first affections are directed at the mother, these archaic ‘object’ relations are already ‘symbolic’ and therefore associated with this father. This is to say that the logic of the symbolic is already within the maternal body” (Oliver 1993:78). This anomaly will be discussed further later in this chapter.
- 8.
In both her own texts and in interviews, Kristeva unquestioningly relates the basic elements of Freud’s scenario of Totem and Taboo where the primal horde murders the alpha male who alone has had access to the women as the basis of the need for such authority. The resultant internalized guilt resurfaces in the need to propitiate this sacrifice both in ritual observances of totem-figure re-enactments, and regulatory laws that prohibit a repetition of this act and other untoward antisocial activity. Kristeva acknowledges the need for such a communal mode of authority and regulatory procedures. As she states: “This [Totem and Taboo] is the origin of the social contract, a set of symbolic laws that represent authority. Where there was murder and there will now be a set of rules: rules governing the exchange of women, alimentary or moral prohibitions, and so on. Tyranny and execution are transformed into a set of symbolic nouns that constitute the basic of morality, religion, and ultimately, civilization” (Kristeva 2002b: 12).
- 9.
Kristeva provides graphic descriptions of these maladies – which she also describes as stemming from narcissistic disorders. “When psychic representation is in default, it takes the form of psychosomatic illnesses, drug abuse, or acting out – from botched actions to perverse violence, like paedophilia and social vandalism. What can’t be represented is abreacted in a violent act or else goes deep down inside where eventually everything self-destructs – organs, self-awareness and life itself” (Kristeva 2002b: 32).
- 10.
There is not the space to explore the Eastern explorations in the work of Irigaray in this paper, but I have dealt with it elsewhere. See Chapter 6, Joy (2006).
- 11.
I use the term “symbolic staus” both with reference to Lacan’s postulate of the symbolic and, with more precision, to the realm of religion where women have been denied a specific form of symbolic status. This is because they have until recently, women have not been accorded the right to preside at rituals or holy ceremonies, to learn the sacred scriptures in their original language and comment on them, or to be respected as able to attain what is regarded as the highest state of spiritual perfection.
- 12.
The Imaginary, from a Lacanian perspective, refers to false projections, impelled by desire, by which one attempts to fulfil one’s own illusory fantasies of plenitude, such as experienced in the symbiotic relationship with the mother, especially her loving gaze, which confirms the child’s narcissism.
- 13.
See Conkey and Tringham (1993) for one example of such criticism.
- 14.
For Irigaray’s exposition of this dimension of Eastern religions see her work Between East and West (Irigaray 2002a).
- 15.
Irigaray makes a distinction between two different understandings of nature. “Patriarchal cultures, especially of late, often interpret the meaning of nature in accordance with a human nature that they have themselves defined. Yet in the first instance nature means earth, water, fire, wind, plants, living bodies, which precede any definition or fabrication that tear them away from roots and origins that exist independently of man’s transforming activity” (Irigaray 1993a: 129).
- 16.
Irigaray explains her position in I Love to You: “Without doubt, the most appropriate content for the universal is sexual difference. Indeed, this content is both real and universal. Sexual difference is an immediate natural given and it is a real and irreducible component of the universal. The whole of human kind is composed of women and men and of nothing else” (Irigaray 1996: 47).
- 17.
In this Tantric discipline of spiritual transformation, Irigaray also acknowledges that the breath/air/spirit connection as the most primal of elements is of utmost importance. The role of breath, as associated with the life source and the mother, has featured in Irigaray’s previous work, especially in connection with the work of Heidegger.
- 18.
Certain of these disagreements include: (1) An insistence on a virtual normative heterosexuality; (2) Prescriptions of idealized “feminine” characteristics; (3) An uncritical and selective appropriation of eastern religions; (4) A romanticized depiction of nature.
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Joy, M. (2011). The Challenge of Love: Kristeva and Irigaray. In: Joy, M. (eds) Continental Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion. Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0059-8_5
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