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.