Julia Kristeva’s Sacrificial Murders

Abstract

Gloria was lying in a pool of blood with her head cut off.' So begins second volume - Possessions - of Julia Kristeva's three-volume detective series. Picking up Kristeva's philosophies of femininity, her parental themes and psychoanalytic orientations, novel, in its matricida! indulgences, traces how detachment from mother and its effects language explain production of subjects. However, in contrast to a purely psychoanalytic reading of maternal language that Kristeva traces in her philosophical work, novels also imply that femininity takes its particular psychical form historically, in response to circulating needs, economies, and identities of paid women's work. They demonstrate how new forms of paid women's work correspond to changing political organizations, social relations, and material contexts. Kristeva thus places historical narrative of neoliberal subject's production within a psychoanalytic paradigm that reduces causal explanation of its historical origins to a dehistoricized story of development and language acquisition. Despite her interest in place of femininity within artistic revolt, Kristeva's focus femininity reveals a fundamental connection between femininity and specifically economic transformation: in this instance, neoliberal ideas - ideas about privatization, immaterial labor, and a weakening of public's representational authority, for example - are conveyed, partly, by means of a logic of maternity. In other words, as Gloria's death leads into a marketing of maternal and socializing functions, Possessions makes legible how Kristeva's theory of subjective splitting describes and even affirms new forms of alienation that increasingly dominant and exploitative forms of labor, under neoliberalism, are producing. Feminist critics have addressed how premises of Second Wave feminism have promoted certain ideals that are favorable to building of a neoliberal ideology, ideals that, as Hester Eisenstein outlines, emphasized women as self-sufficient individuals,2 opposed regulated and protected labor markets, dismissed gender roles, insisted on a changed language,3 and encouraged women into corporate jobs in name of emancipation. Nancy Fraser, for example, has noted that such aspects of Second Wave have a disturbing convergence . . . with demands of an emerging new form of capitalism - post-Fordist, 'disorganized', transnational.4 This essay shows how feminist philosophy's work language and subject has laid groundwork for its neoliberal appropriation. Goodbye, Gloria! On surface, Kristeva's fictional writing quite transparently produces narratives adopting her philosophical concepts as characters, plots, settings, themes, resolutions, and descriptive voice. Linking sign to violence of primary repression, beheading of mother at start of Possessions, for example, does not stray far from violent beheading of sacred mother that Kristeva describes in Giovanni Bellini's paintings of sacred mother and child in Desire in Language, where the mother is only partially present (hands and torso), because, from neck up, maternal body not covered by draperies - head, face, and eyes - flees painting.5 The beheading or exclusion of mother's head here gives Kristeva a pictorial allegory of birth of secular humanism, end of sacred, and continuation of sacred only via violence and fragmented forms that break through into secular subject. As in psychoanalysis, repression of access to mother prepares way for child's entry into culture. In Kristeva, this primary repression is never complete, and this results in a constant movement of what she calls semiotic - or prelinguistic noise, intonations, gestures, rhythms, and gutturals, linked to drives - within what she calls symbolic, or meaning.6 The semiotic does not dismantle symbolic, nor is it strictly oppositional. …