Subjectivity without Subjects (1998)

Kelly Oliver reads Kristeva’s imaginary father as a screen for an imaginary mother. In “Kristeva’s Imaginary Father” she depicts Kristeva as an iconoclast who subverts Lacanian paradigms of subjectivity:

1. Subversion of body/mind or language dualism. In Desire in Language (1980) Kristeva criticizes Lacan’s understanding of the subject’s transition from the mirror stage of the imaginary to the symbolic for ignoring how the materiality of the body subtends discursive and social formations. For Lacan the threat of castration enables the child to escape from the lure of the imaginary and thus to recognize the gap between its body and its image, the precondition for the child’s entry into the symbolic; however, in order to experience the threat of castration, the child must already be a subject within the symbolic. In contrast, Kristeva (like Irigaray) assumes that the mirror stage is already symbolic. She replaces Lacan’s body/mind dualism with a model of the maternal body as “ a bridge between the biological foundation of signifying functioning and its determination by the family and society” (Revolution in Poetic Language, 1974). Her notion of the maternal body is in my opinion similar to Spinoza’s notion of infinite substance; as Oliver says, “through jolts of matter the speaking subject is produced.”
2. Subversion of Lacanian notion of the paternal function. For Kristeva the move from the presymbolic to the symbolic is motivated not by castration threat or sense of lack but by excess and pleasure. The law of the mother, symbolized by the chora, “a nonexpressive totality formed by drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated,” precipitates material rejection; or maternal regulation set up by the mother’s body, as in the intrauterine state, lays the groundwork for the paternal function. Maternal regulation (in the intra- and extra-uterine state) precedes paternal regulation, both enables the child’s access to the symbolic order and threatens its logic. Kristeva ontologizes subjectivity by reading the relationship between mother and child before, during and after birth as a representation of the dynamics of a “subject-in-process,” a subject who is not unitary and closed but fragmented and always in the process of becoming. It is important to note both the biological and social foundations of subjectivity in Kristeva’s theory; the body of the mother is both a literal and a metaphorical one:

1) First there is the Maternal Body. (As in Irigaray’s thought) Intrauterine existence is representative of a subjectivity that is both embodied and symbolic, as the mother’s body regulates what goes in and what goes out of the fetus’ body. The infant “reduplicates” its early relationship with the maternal body through incorporating the mother’s breast; the incorporation of the breast prefigures incorporation of the other’s speech in the symbolic. Primary narcissism, then, manifests itself as the first identification of the fetus with a model or pattern of incorporation through reduplication; it is objectless and non-mimetic. Yet this identification with a model of incorporation sets in motion the logic of object identifications in all object relations, including discourse and love.

2) Then there is Birth, which represents abjection. The child is abjected from the mother’s body during birth. The infant is a not-yet- subject and the mother is a not-yet object in this transitional phase between his birth and his awareness of having been born. A narcissistic crisis is set in motion as the child seeks to separate from his mother but cannot since he identifies himself as abject, that is, identifies with the collapse of a boundary between inside and outside, experiences ontological instability and helplessness. In Powers of Horror (1980) Kristeva explains how the subject comes to identify himself with the abject. Since the mother’s desire is not given a signifier within the symbolic, the mother can only pretend to be the phallus or object of man’s desire; hence the child must take the place of no-object since the mother’s desire has no object. The child identifies with the “not I” in the space between the mother and her unattainable desire, the other.

3) Finally there is Conception, or the birth of the subject, which necessitates a loving, imaginary father. In Revolution in poetic language (1974) Kristeva explains the abjection of the mother in terms of primal repression: the Oedipal symbolic demands the exclusion of the mother’s body and her drives. The imaginary father, or mother-father conglomerate, enables the subject to abject (separate) from the mother. This father is an unattainable phallic ideal, the mother’s desire, and takes the place of the mother by giving love. Hence identification with the imaginary father (an identification that is objectless) enables the subject to separate from and remain connected to the mother, even though she is abjected. His love is what enables the subject to attain subjectivity. The imaginary father, then, serves as a bridge between pre-symbolic and symbolic realms (takes the place, in a sense, of Winnicott's transitional object), between preOedipal mother and Oedipal father: he represents the possibility of sublimating the drives, which leads to the discourse of love.

Kelly elides how Kristeva’s theory of subjectivity reinscribes Lacan’s phallocentrism; she does not ask this crucial question: If the maternal body provides a link between drives and desire, if maternal regulation precedes and provides the basis of identifications in the symbolic, then why must the mother’s body be abjected by the subject, as if it were the material excess that it regulates? Kristeva’s notion of the maternal function as constitutive of discourse and desire through repetition, the reduplication of the pattern of incorporation, is at odds with her notion that subjectivity is constituted on the basis of the abjection of the mother’s body even if the imaginary father is read as a metaphor for the imaginary mother, which is how Oliver reads Kristeva; if a paternal metaphor is bound to replace a maternal metaphor, we are back to the opposition between body and discourse or language implied in the Lacanian formulation of the subject. Sublimating the body of the mother through the figure of the imaginary father does not solve the problem. The dualism between maternal body and the symbolic can only be subverted if subjectivity is theorized from a perspective that does not demand the sacrifice of the mother or of her body. In order to bypass the mind/body split, one must think past the Oedipal to a theory of the embodied imaginary, reading the subject through the grid of multiple, embodied imaginaries instead of making one Western white imaginary inevitable, foreclosing the subject's agency. To borrow Irigaray’s metaphor, Kelly holds up a speculum to Kristeva’s corpus, reads the Kristevan trajectory of narcissism backwards and arrives at a celebration of female difference from a Kristevan account of maternal abjection made less tragic by a loving father. The split in Kristeva’s thought between a subject who is formed by her relationship with the mother’s body and a subject who is formed by her abjection of the mother’s body is foregrounded rather than repaired through Oliver’s revision, which proceeds through a series of metonymic substitutions that correspond to the position of the subject of mother’s body or breast, of birth and of conception:

1. First Oliver reads Kristeva’s notion of the imaginary father through Freud’s reading of the primal father as a father-mother conglomerate. She uses “La vierge de Freud” as evidence that the pre-Oedipal imaginary mother is implicated in the imaginary father, for in this text Kristeva argues that a “prehistoric, unforgettable, imaginary” maternal function is present on Freud’s text on da Vinci. Oliver then identifies Kristeva’s imaginary father as a “paternal” mother. The child identifies not with a substitute for the mother, but with the mother in disguise. Since the mother is a speaking subject, a symbolic mother even when the “other” is in her womb, then the imaginary father who will later take her place is really her in disguise.

2. The imaginary father is then likened to the mother’s desire for the phallus. Now the paternal mother is read as the maternal father, a combination of the mother and her desire for the phallus. Kelly conflates the psychoanalytic meaning of “phallus” with the more feminist notion of the “other”: “”The imaginary father is the maternal desire for the phallus. It is the other already within the mother, not only in the real sense during pregnancy but also in the imaginary and symbolic senses. The other is, after all, primarily a speaking being.” (70) Since the child occupies the space between the mother and her desire and is not yet a subject, the imaginary father is merely perceived as what mother desires, “not I.”

3. The imaginary father shifts from being a site of the mother’s desire to a screen for an imaginary mother whose love the subject identifies with, enabling her to make a transference to the symbolic. She uses Kristeva’s characterization of the mother’s love as “the facsimile of the third person” (71) in “The Father, Love and Banishment” as evidence to support her own position and juxtaposes this with Kristeva’s definition of love in Tales of Love as: “(not) a narcissistic merger with the maternal container but the emergence of a metaphorical object—in other words, the very splitting that constitutes the psyche and, let us call this splitting “primal repression,” bends the drive towards the symbolic of an other.” Since the mother must be abjected from the symbolic, her love is preserved through the love of an imaginary father, who is now the substitute for the mother, her replacement. The child identifies with the love of the imaginary mother qua imaginary father. Oliver asks, “Could the father of the law be wrong? Perhaps primary identification is not with the mother’s body but with the mother’s love.” (76) However—and this is how Oliver fails to read Kristeva—if the literal body of the mother is sacrificed in the making of metaphor of love, then how can she be seen as a bridge between semiotic drives and symbolic discourse?

Kelly’s reading then moves from an intrapsychic to an intersubjective one. Drawing from Kristeva’s “Stabat Mother” in Tales of Love (1987), she considers the mother’s subjectivity as well as the child’s and puts the mother’s mother in the place of the imaginary father: “If the mother loves an other, it is her own mother, and she loves her mother not only as an other but also as herself, now the mother.” (73). Kristeva’s notion of loving the other as/in oneself, an alternative to the identity/difference binary, is similar to Irigaray’s identification of “the neither one nor two” of the mother/daughter dyad as the logic of a potential female symbolic. Oliver emphasizes that the mother’s experience of the child as other is NOT a relation to the phallus or unattainable desire; instead, “the mother’s other is a natural other.” (75)

Oliver’s misreading of Kristeva’s corpus is productive. By offering a trajectory of the position of the imaginary father, from “paternal” mother to maternal desire to love for the mother, Oliver attempts to bridge the gap between the two contradictory notions of subjectivity in Kristeva’s thought; and although she fails (for the literal mother is in the end sacrificed to the metaphor of love qua the imaginary father as ground of sublimation), she also produces from this failure the possibility of theorizing a different relation to the imaginary mother. In addition, Oliver perform her own fantasy of Kristeva as the ideal mother of psychoanalysis while revealing Kristeva’s fantasy of herself as the ideal “son” of Freud, establishing her difference from Kristeva while setting up an idealizing identification with her. Bloom’s reading of the anxiety of influence between the fathers and sons needs to be revised when it comes to female writers and theoreticians: rather than define themselves against their predecessors, I argue, they seek connections that imaginatively reconfigure their predecessor’s corpus. So when Oliver suggests that Kristeva deflects her own desire for a union with an imaginary mother though her invention of the imaginary father, she identifies in Kristeva her own desire for a place within theory for an embodied female imaginary. Oliver’s adoption of Kristeva as an imaginary ideal mother of psychoanalysis is preferable to abjecting Kristeva’s notion of abjection, for she needs Kristeva as a support for her own theory of the imaginary mother. Hence she identifies with the “other” within Kristeva, the one who could abject the logic of the phallus from her thought; and this identification leads her to the notion of an imaginary mother which I will adopt for my own purposes, mapping it onto the dynamics of twentieth-century female-authored texts within which love functions as a metaphor for a selfhood that is always linked to a m(Other) who, although abjected from the dominant male symbolic, is still a positive presence in the real and imaginary lives of women.

Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971)

Winnicott is perhaps the only post-Freudian psychologist who is interested in the ontology of the self. He posits the existence of a third “potential” creative space in between internal and external reality through which the infant makes the transition from what Freud would call “primary narcissism” (state of undifferentiated fusion with the mother) to a sense of the self as separate but linked with the external world. The transitional object “belongs to the realm of illusion which is at the basis of experience. This early stage in development is made possible by the mother’s special capacity for making adaptation to the needs to her infant, thus allowing the infant the illusion that what the infant creates really exists” (19). Winnicott perceives of the infant’s ego development in terms of stages:

1. Oneness. Self= breast. This exists prior to the transitional stage.
2. Illusion created through symbolization. No sense of inside/outside, me vs not-me. Transitional stage. The transitional object is located in between inner and outer reality, as it is perceived as belonging neither to his body nor to the external world. Although the transitional object is a symbol for the mother- breast, its not being the mother-breast is just as important for the infant’s purposes.
3. Passage from object-relating to object-use (“playing with reality”) through destruction and survival of the object. A sense of separateness, of me and not me boundaries, evoves, resulting from the mother’s failure to always meet her child’s needs and from the child’s impulses; the infant can now relate to the mother as an object of projective identifications. If the mother “survives” (does not retaliate against) the child’s destruction of her subjectivity qua fantasy, then the child internalizes the “good enough mother” and develops the capacity to creatively use objects, which is the foundation of creative living and culture. This implies, on the part of the subject, an ability to play with the boundary between fantasy or fiction and reality.

*“Destruction” then does not mean rage at the mother in a Kleinian sense, whereby the infant resents the breast for failing to always satisfy his needs, but is coextensive with object-relating, projective identifications.

*Object-use incorporates but goes beyond object-relating; it involves an awareness of the mother’s separate subjectivity and of the externality of phenomena. At the same time, the subject can represent narcissistic fantasy (e.g., idealization, destruction) in play. In Winicott’s words: “Object-relating is an experience of the subject that can be described in terms of the subject as an isolate. When I speak of the use of an object, however, I take object-relating for granted and add new features that involve the nature and behavior of the object. For instance, the object, if it is to be used, must necessarily be real in the sense of being part of shared reality, not a bundle of projections. It is this, I think, that makes for the world of difference that there is between relating and usage.” (118)

Earlier Winnicott writes that “in object-relating the subject allows certain alterations in the self to take place, of a kind that has caused us to invent the term ‘cathexis.’ The object has become meaningful. Projection mechanisms and identifications have been operating, and the subject is depleted to the extent that something of the subject is found in the object, though enriched by feeling. Accompanying these changes is some degree of physical involvement (however slight) towards excitement, in the direction of the functional climax of an organism.”

Hence, with this notion of a third potential space, Winnicott revises Freudian/Kleinian assumptions and adds an intersubjective dimension to the intrapsychic one, exploring how the mother-environment affects the development of the ego:

1) aggression as innate to the subject, resulting from the clash of instincts with reality principle. Winnicott writes: “There is no anger in the destruction of the object to which I am referring, though there could be said to be joy at the object’s survival” (125). Destructive impulses do not arise when the reality principle frustrates instinctive drives; rather, the reality principle is created out of destruction (of the subjective object).

2) of narcissism as an intrapsychic, destructive phenomenon. Winnicott places importance on the responsiveness of the environment to the child’s need to find himself through creative processes. Narcissism (both primary and secondary, in Freudian parlance) must be encouraged in order for the self to acknowledge alterity, otherness; it is the basis of creativity, which involves playing with reality (rather than a retreat into fantasy).

3) of the death drive as primary. If the transitional space is what provides the foundation for the drives, then it would be anachronistic to postulate an innate death drive (Trieb).

Limitations of Winnicott’s work:

1. Ahistorical notions of what constitutes “good enough mothering,” that stress the importance of breastfeeding and the infant’s need for a constant maternal presence.
2. Ontologization of gender: associates “male” with doing (object-relating) and “female” with being (equation of me with not me, baby with mother’s breast).
3. Failure to consider the mother’s point of view, to incorporate it into his explanation of the holding environment. This failure undermines the intersubjective aspect of his work.

Kristeva's "Tales of Love"

Chapter 1: “Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents”

Focusing on the trajectory of Freud’s theory of narcissism, Kristeva shows how it is constructed as a screen over an emptiness that is a consequence of the self’s ontological instability. However, she takes for granted the primacy of the death drive and the Freudian/Hegelian premise that the existence of an other can only be problematic for the self. Unlike intersubjective feminist theorists like Jessica Benjamin, she does not acknowledge the mother’s subjectivity and hence can supplement “the autoeroticism of the mother/child dyad” with a “third realm” that “chronically and logically precedes that of the Oedipal ego” (22). Her notion of Einfuhling (involving the assimilation of other people’s feelings) as what installs and protects the screen of emptiness is based on the baby's identification with a metaphorical object, the Imaginary Father. In this archaic stage, what the baby incorporates is what she becomes; having is tantamount to being. This is not an objectal identification, as the baby identifies with a model instead of an object; it is not so much mimetic as reduplicatory, involving an identification “which sets up love, the sign, and repetition at the heart of the transference” (25). She relates this relationship to the transference in the analytic relationship based on the baby’s immersion in the world of language prior to her capacity to symbolize: “when the object that I incorporate is the speech of the other—precisely a nonobject, a pattern, a model—I bind myself to him in a primary fusion, communion, identification” (26).

Hence objectless identification with an imaginary father (a "father-mother conglomerate" in Kristeva's reading of Freud) on the part of the not-yet subject proceeds through an immediacy of the child's identification with the maternal desire of the Phallus, which eventually becomes the child's identification with the imaginary father and the Phallus, for the "Third Party' is a space of metaphoricity that involves "a condensation of the semantic with the unrepresentable drives that sustain them." Three aspects of Kristeva's understanding of Einfuhling make it resemble Winnicott's formulation of transitional space as a fluid space between child and mother in which the child perceives himself as neither separate from nor identical with his mother: 1) Kristeva's description of an undifferentiated self, or of a not-yet subject, who already is a part of the symbolic order; 2) concomitant with the idea of a not-yet subject, the notion that there is no distinction between having and being, or of an identification that does not set up a boundary between being and having the other; 3) description of love for imaginary father as objectless, and of the "Third Party" (associated with the Phallus in Kristeva's thought) as a metaphorical and as an embodied space in which desire begins to take on signifiers. This subversion of subject-object boundaries presumed within Kristeva's description of preoedipal dynamics and the assumption of an unconscious that is embodied as well as linguistic has led contemporary theorists like Kelly Oliver to read Kristeva's imaginary father as a screen for the imaginary mother; however, Kristeva's relation of maternal desire to the phallus and her theory of maternal space as founded through a relationship of abjection, as well as the idealization of the imaginary father, has Campbell conclude that she is complicit with the psychoanalytic tradition of abjecting the maternal body from its considerations of the subject and of privileging the father over the mother. Both contradictory readings are true.

“Male Eros, Sublime Eros: On Male Sexuality”

Kristeva offers a history of discourses of love to illustrate how the erotic—relating to the preoedipal configuration of subject, mother and imaginary father-- is always sublimated into amatory love or Psyche. She writes that “at the very base of philosophical discourse love and soul can not be dissociated” (63). In philosophical discourse “phallic domination is elevated and metamorphosed into an apprenticeship of the Good and the True” (67). Platonic discourses emphasize the struggle between erotic and amatory impulses, between “painful, exorbitant possession, on black masses of shameful nights and bodies deriving pleasure from being ridiculed” and “superhuman effort or the part of the soul which, within the same phallic dynamics, leans itself away from the allurement of having to accede to the dignity of knowing and being” (68). Whereas in Phaedrus Plato displays pederastic love, its libidinal economy, in The Symposium, with the figure of Diotima, ann intermediate figure that enables sublimation, love is feminized, desexualized, “presented along the lines of an idealized object relationship that it takes for granted” (71). For Kristeva Diotima is the Phallus, presenting an “immediate vision” that is “an intellectual transposition of a pagan jouissance.”

Kristeva distinguishes between a manic homosexual Eros that “does not touch the mother” and the melancholy abject state of the soulosexual who “fashions a crown to a real or imaginary Diotima” (80), who abjects the mother and thus preserves a fascination for the morbid in the area around the “hole” (called the abyss, Kristeva notes, by Mann’s Aschenbach): “the adored and abhorred maternal sex”….(79)

More controversial is her identification of Eros with male homosexual libido and of lesbian desire as a “parenthesis,” “a neutralized, filtered libido, devoid of the erotic cutting edge of masculine sexuality” that is destined to miscarry.

“Holy Madness: He and She”: Training her analysis on the Song of Songs, Kristeva continues with her theme of how the erotic is transposed into the sublime. Here the heterosexual couple is what legitimizes erotic passion.

“Narcissus: The New Insanity”

Plotinus rehabilitates Narcissus, purges him of guilt; he turns speculatory love into a love of speculation, of an ideal Self that is conflated with an Other, the Supreme Good. In Kristeva’s words: “To the narcissistic shadow, a snare and a downfall, it substitutes autoerotic reflection, which leads ideal Unity inside a Self that is illuminated by it. Narcissus has been transcended and beauty becomes embodied in inner Space” (109). This entails a turning away from the eye (I) towards an identification with the light by which the soul “becomes a pure gaze towards the One” (Sun).

Narcissus is insane in the Ovidian account because he does not perceive that the other whom he wants to merge with is his self, that there is no object. This accords with Kristeva’s notion of identificatory love as objectless. Kristeva writes that “the object of Narcissus is psychic space; it is representation itself, fantasy. But he does not know it, and he dies. If he knew it he would be an intellectual, a creator of speculative fictions, an artist, writer, psychologist or psychoanalyst. He would be Plotinus or Freud” (116).

Reading Ovid’s Narcissus through Plotinus, Kristeva concludes that Narcissus’ error resides in mistaking his eye/I for the solar source of the one. For Plotinus, the loving soul must surrender its otherness and “give in to the sameness of the single light where it loses itself as other or as nonbeing.” Plotinus makes of Plato’s discourse a nondualistic metaphysics.

The mythical Narcissus is a modern character much closer to us, according to Kristeva, owing to the death of the One God. This is why images of psychological or esthetic Narcissi accompany the crises of salvation religions.

“Our Faith: The Seeming”

By making the libido narcissistic, Freud rehabilitates narcissism, inscribing it within “a new psychic action,” her reference to the imaginary father. Both libido and ego are dependent on the Other. Freud distinguishes between identificatory and object love and then, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, emphasizes hate as foundational. One is not born but becomes narcissistic, when instinctual autoeroticism becomes object love, following paternal identification, which produces the ego ideal. (One must become a subject in order to be narcissistic). Observing the primacy of the death instinct in Freudian theory, Kristeva concludes that “Narcissus kills himself because he realizes that he loves a fake.” One rarely succeeds in identifying fully with the ego ideal; instead of having to create what will enable him to equal it (a work or an idealized object), Narcissus fabricates an ersatz. This narcissistic seemingness “entails a modification of language” because it is fixated in the oral-anal stage prior to identification with the paternal ideal.

Kristeva continues with her theme of Narcissus as counterfeiter in her reading of Dante’s The Comedy, specifically of Master Adam (who alters currency) and with Sinon (deserter from the Greek camp who deceives the Trojans, invented by Vergil). She reads Myrrha as a third forger; her incest with the father conceals an original desire for the mother. Dante the poet’s ascent to Paradise is Dante’s way of rehabilitating the “seeming” aspect of narcissism: “only the feminine-maternal presence of Beatrice allows him, in canto III, to overcome the error that is the opposite of Narcissus’s (Dante the poet disavows the images produced by the sun as unreal and rushes towards the dazzling light) and to invest in the seeming of bodies in the quest for truth.” Hence for Kristeva The Comedy reconciles seeming with truth.

Like Dante the symbolist poets justify narcissistic seeming, or the creation of a source of narcissistic jouissance that is a substitute for the One. She contrasts the position taken up by Mallarme with the one taken up by Gide: whereas the former transforms Narcissus into empty psychic space, the latter sees “the full completeness of symbolic meaning” in appearances. The former’s version of Narcissus is ironic and de-centered; Narcissus is an empty feminine terrain onto which the artist/poet plays with images, meanings. The latter restores Narcissus to a god-like stature that he did not have since Christianity. Hence “esoteric art is the culmination of Christianity, which had removed Narcissus’s guilt.”

The history of Narcissus in Western discourse, his transmutation from Ovid in which he embodies (homosexual) Eros/mapping of this discursive representation of Narcissus onto Freudian theory--

Plotinus: the One/Sun becomes a substitute for the illusory image/eye in Ovid’s myth. Turning away from body to soul. Fusion with imaginary father. Sublimation.

Dante: the One is privileged over the image/eye as in Plotinus, yet it is incorporated into quest for spiritual perfection, One/Sun (Son). Sublimation that acknowledges the necessary presence of that which is sublimated. More dialectical, a justification for the Book.

With the death of the One God comes acknowledgement of the death drive

Mallarme: evokes instability, the anti-Oedipal, a regression through the mother’s body, through the screen that narcissism conceals; or a suspension in the emptiness of the narcissistic structure between pre-oedipal mother and father. It is necessary for the poet to wander here and play with word-significations related to the bodily drives, the semiotic.

Gide: Worship of the eye/image, fetishization of the Word-thing. Poet’s capacity for representation renders him the One God. This conception of Narcissus cannot be placed within the Freudian notion of the death drive as there is no separation between essence and appearance, symbol and idea.