Kroppar utan gränser. Om Kristevas omförhandling av det sociala kontraktet

Abstract

In her essay "Women's time" from 1979, Kristeva asks why so many women have become attracted to terrorism. The reason seems to be, she argues, a rejection of the sacrificial logic implicated by the sociosymbolic contract defining the modern state. In choosing between "the terror of power or the power of terrorism" however, women find themselves caught in an impossible situation. Terrorist groups do not oppose themselves to terrorist regimes but rather against liberal systems. The actual accusation, then, is not that these are too oppressive but rather too weak. The motive of terrorism is the belief in and longing for a kind of supreme, absolute power, undoing the necessity of sacrifice. Many feminists have criticised the fact that there is no social context in Kristeva's theory, and no possibility to form new identities and solidarities. I would argue that there are, but these identities cannot be reduced to social ones. Kristeva's notion of the political and of identities could be seen in relation to a problem formulated by Moira Gatens: the necessity to find a way of embodying the modern notion of a body politic, a notion that has been constructed around the notion of disembodiment and rationality. The dualism between body and a modern body politic, which is exclusionary and restrictive, must be overcome. Kristeva also argues that European ideology promotes a logic of identification which is consistent with rationality. This calls for a consistent, irreducible and unquestionable kind of identity, which in turn rests on a sacrificial logic: part of the subject must, in this way, be foreclosed and made inaccessible. This calls, according to Kristeva, for a renegotiation of the social contract. She proposes a Freudian, "internalised" contract rather than a social one, a move aiming to recover the relevance of the body, and discourses such as literature which involve the corporeal subject, for a modern notion of the political.