Julia Kristeva’s Murders: Neoliberalism and the Labor of the Semiotic

Abstract

“Gloria was lying in a pool of blood with her head cut off” (1998: 3). So begins the second volume—entitled Possessions—of Julia Kristeva’s three-volume detective series. Picking up on Kristeva’s philosophies of femininity, her parental themes and psychoanalytic orientations, the novel, in its matricidal indulgences, traces how detachment from the mother and its effects on language explain the production of subjects. Matricide, Kristeva has said multiple times—and, most importantly, the beheading of mothers—, explains the origin of representation in the West.1 Kristeva’s emphasis on the production of subjects is a revisionary challenge, along feminist lines, to New Left Marxist and semiotic philosophies that were concerned about the production of objects, or commodities, and signs, or objectified, structured language systems.2 Anticipating the focus on socialization that would become prominent within neoliberal critique (see chapters 4 and 5 ), Kristeva’s interest in the production of subjects in the novels mixes her discourse on motherhood and on motherhood’s loss of its head, on representation and aesthetics, with an incipient narrative of labor’s feminization. In contrast to a psychoanalytic reading of maternal language that Kristeva traces in her philosophical work, the novels imply that femininity takes its particular psychical form historically: that the maternal language function is embedded in fields of circulation, not only psychic ones but also economic.KeywordsPolice ChiefMaternal FunctionDetective StoryDetective FictionGender WorkThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.