"Have you been saved?" Models of Identity for Maladies of the Soul: Evangelicalism and Feminist Performance Art

Abstract

Jimmy Swaggart exhorting his audience to forsake dastardly dark sins of secular society and Karen Finley doing unmentionable things with canned yams are at opposite ends of shamanistic spectrum. The evangelist is coiffed, impeccably groomed, acutely aware of his always already converted audience. The other (literally Other) is, quite simply, messy. She smashes unboiled coloured eggs in a plastic bag, smears them all over her naked body using stuffed animals as applicators, and then sprinkles herself with glitter and confetti as her audience watches in a state of bemusement, or confusion, or disgust.1 He proclaims and displays truth of Word in a predictable narrative of salvation whereas she performs story-telling on body, in exaggerated, gross gestures which ironically bespeak her eternal damnation. Although ideologies motivating performers and salvations they offer differ wildly, evangelists and feminist performance artists use some remarkably similar techniques and even enact similar spiritual missions: they both offer solutions, in divergent models of identity, for malaise of in postmodern era. According to Julia Kristeva in New Maladies of Soul, blocked, inhibited and destroyed (8) psychic of contemporary society has contributed to displays of states (8) at root of which is the inability to (9), and which can be cured through establishing a logos of (26). Within this paradigm, models of identity presented by individual evangelical preachers such as Billy Graham and Jimmy Swaggart, and enacted at phenomenon of Toronto Blessing, can be compared to those models of identity displayed in work of feminist performance artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Karen Finley, and Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan. In New Maladies of Soul, Julia Kristeva pursues intersection of psychoanalytic study and spirituality by examining soul as psyche. For Kristeva, soul is a necessary part of existence: You are alive if and only if you have a psychic life (5-6). It is this psychic life, more specifically Kristeva's interpretation of Freudian psychic apparatus, which constitutes her working definition of registers representations and their meaningful values for (8). The effect of neglect of this psychic apparatus is dire: Held back by his aloofness, modern man is a narcissist-a narcissist who may suffer.... He manifests his suffering in his body and he is afflicted with somatic symptoms (7). Without a template of identity, individual is tormented: left without a sexual, subjective, or moral identity, this amphibian is a being of boundaries, a borderline, or a `false self' (7-8). Kristeva goes on to describe what she calls maladies of soul: wounded `narcissisms,' `false personalities,' `borderline states,' or `psychosomatic conditions' (9). As an example of this condition, Kristeva describes a patient named Didier, whose is manifested in his laconic speech (11), and is played out on his body. His denial of preoedipal conflicts produces somatic symptoms: the thin autoerotic layer gave way to a metaphor, symptom of dermatitis (15). In another case, Kristeva describes a patient who is indistinguishable from his mother (51). The patient manifests this borderline condition: when faced with collapse of absolute prohibition, [he] lost his means of defense and symbolization, and quite literally negated himself in a spastic, demented and aphasic jouissance (50). This state of being, as Kristeva makes clear, is a logic of inversion (the subject becomes object and vice versa) (51). The boundary between self and other is blurred. No matter what kind of borderline is displayed, common denominator, says Kristeva, is the inability to represent ... inability to symbolize (9). It is her task as a psychoanalyst to help cure patient by means of an analytical process which fosters a bridge between patient and false self or condition that is suffered. …