Kristeva's Theory Research Articles

M. F. K. Fisher and the Embodiment of Desire: A Study in Autobiography and Food as Metaphor

Drawing on Kristeva's theory of the foreigner as other, this article explores how M.F.K. Fisher's exposure to European culture helped to form her tastes, desires, and views of the United States. An examination of her culinary metaphors reveals the way that food, symbolic of culture and personal taste, creates Barthe's "system of communication," signifying the symbiotic relationship between Fisher's writing about food and writing her life.

On Castration and Miscegenation

In Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (1995), Lewis Gordon offers a sustained analysis of antiblack racism in phenomenological or, more specifically, Sartrean terms.1 Part III of Bad Faith advances a critique of the metaphysics of presence; Gordon exposes the faulty identitarian logic that underpins the equation of "darkness" with the excluded "Other" of Western reason in an antiblack world. Like feminist and other poststructuralist critiques of Hegel, Gordon sees the reified structure of antiblack values as rooted in a failure to contend with difference in general; that failure effectuates "the ossification of human reality into a monadic entity identical with one aspect of its assumed duality" (94). For Gordon, the antiblack world is Manichean in that it reflects an ossified value system that assumes an "identity relation between whiteness and [humanity]" (103).2 Although strongly reminiscent of Irigaray's critique of Hegel's logic of identity, parallels between Gordon and post-structuralist feminist theory may well be more of an "intersection of different roads than a shared route on a common highway" (165). In his effort to decode the symbolic sources of antiblack racism, Gordon faces the same, very difficult theoretical task that confronts feminist social theory: how to avoid a reductionist methodology that isolates one kind of oppression and its sources as the primary cause of all other kinds of oppression.3 Yet Gordon's phenomenological approach to symbolic practices rejects the Lacanian-based thesis that the phallus is primarily masculinely coded. At first glance, Gordon's pivotal counterclaim that the "phallus is white skin," appears to entangle his analysis in precisely the reductionism he thinks inheres in Lacanianinfluenced accounts of phallocratic symbolic systems (128).4 It appears to lead to the conclusion that black men are always worse off than white women. In this essay, I wish to accomplish two goals. First. in Part I and throughout this essay, I will press a constructive reading of Gordon' s proposal that gendered and racialized values coalesce in the symbolic sources of both antiblack racism and misogyny. This reading suggests that any assessment of Gordon's hermeneutic as reductionistic would be premature and inconsistent with his primary intent. That intent is to explore race and gender as coextensive features of symbolic reality, while nonetheless refusing to disregard empirical differences between forms of oppression. Second, I will give a programmatic suggestion for how to reconcile Gordon's claim, that being black renders people materially worse off than other kinds of oppression, with the fact that every oppressed group is equally vulnerable to the most radically violent reaction from at least some people. Toward this end, Part II explores two possible meanings of Gordon's thesis, not only the weak claim that the phallus is "white masculinity" but also the strong claim that the phallus is "white skin." Although I show that Gordon offers a viable critique of Lacanian-influenced models of identity-formation, I will nonetheless argue that only the weak version of this thesis allows us to account for multiple group experiences of hatred toward them. I conclude by suggesting that Kristeva's semiotic theory can supplement Gordon's existential analysis of the symbolism of castration and miscegenation in a way that allows us to account for the equally phobic reactions people have to multiple marginalized social groups, without implying that some groups do not suffer greater material exploitation than others. I also propose that Gordon, in spite of his intent to the contrary, cannot avoid a third brand of hermeneutic reductionism if he does not allow that multiple symbolic registers exist and that these overlap in non-simple ways. This form of reductionism, by subsuming the symbolism of femininity under blackness, begins to contradict his main premise that race and gender are coextensive features of reality. …

L’écriture limite: Kristeva's Postmodern Feminist Ethics

In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of “the subject in procession trial” from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this “subject in procession trial” as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.

The Abject: Kristeva and the Antigone

The Abject: Kristeva and the Antigone Clifford Davis Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject provides an illuminating and interrogative hermeneutic technique for Sophocles' Antigone. Kristeva has demonstrated the applicability of this theory to the Theban saga (although, perhaps, with mixed results) in her reading of Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrranos and Oedipus at Colonus (Powers of Horror 83-89). Her interpretation of Oedipus Tyrranos not only reinforces Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, but also situates the concept of the abject, as an extension of Lacan, within the ancient text as the agos, defilement of Oedipus. Kristeva argues that the new king, as agos, represents the source of the abject and embodies its purification as pharmakos: scapegoat. The structural and the­ matic oppositions in the Antigone between patriarchal, institutional uniformity in the polis and the more antiquated, chthonic obliga­ tions of the heterogeneous dead mark this drama, too, as extraordi­ narily well-suited for reinterpretation as a confrontation between an archaic, Greek Symbolic and the abject. In this paper, I use Kristevan theory to elucidate and reinterpret the primary opposi­ tions in Sophocles's Antigone and demonstrate how such a reading differs from the structuralist interpretations of C.W. Oudemans and J.P. Vernant. Instead of reducing the antagonism of Antigone and Creon to a Hegelian or structuralist reading of binary opposi­ tion between equally legitimate claims, I demonstrate that the conflicts in the Antigone reflect the psychological tension between nascent patriarchal institutions and the excluded, but sanctified, feminine Other. First, however, it is necessary to present the main tenets of Kristeva's theory of the abject. I. Lacan and Kristeva Julia Kristeva's work is deeply indebted to Jacques Lacan and his reinterpretation of Freudian principles in terms of post-struc­ turalist discourse theory (Lacan, Ecrits; Television). Lacan's theory of the symbolic order (or Symbolic) describes the indoctrination of the child into the phallocentric system of cultural institutions. The Symbolic is a monolithic, unitary system that pervades language and, therefore, all cultural institutions because they are conceived

The Fallacy of False Dichotomy in María de Zayas's La traición en la amistad

Maria de Zayas's comedia, La traición en la amistad , a play about the exploration of gender roles and role reversals, subverts traditional comedia endings in which the dominant (masculine) order reestablishes itself, forcing women to return to their feminine (passive) state, and allowing men to recover their masculine (active) dominance. Because of its exploration of gender roles, the play defines itself in terms of the binary opposition masculine/feminine. The end of La traición bears this dichotomy out. Different from the final scenes in other comedias , in which one of the male characters pronounces who will marry whom, in this play the female characters make these decisions. Even though they switch gender roles, the gender construct controls the behavior of almost all the characters and disallows the possibility for individual development beyond the dichotomy. Julia Kristeva calls that possibility the "presupposed excluded middle." In La traición , Fenisa represents the "excluded middle"—an active woman, in charge of her circumstances, but forced into passivity at the end of the play by the now dominant female characters. Kristeva argues that the only resolution in a work structured on a bipolar opposition is negation of the middle. La traición plays out Kristeva's theory; by structuring her play on the male/female opposition, María de Zayas negates the "excluded middle," Fenisa, thus underscoring the double standard inherent in the comedia and 17th-century Spanish society.

The System and the Speaking Subject in the Hebrew Bible: Reading for Divine Abjection

AbstractWhat appears to be self-evident in biblical studies—what "can be assumed"— may in fact be quite problematic. Invariably and unquestionably, scholars of Micah 1:8-9 identify its speaker as the prophet rather than YHWH. Yet when one tugs at a few loose threads, that supposedly self-evident reading unravels. After problematizing that identification, this paper argues for reading YHWH as the profoundly unstable speaking subject of this abjectionable dirge. As such, the divine subject of this prophetic discourse is rendered entirely ambivalent, sweeping through and among the people with all the rage and all the grief of absolute disorientation. Understood thus, the book of Micah opens with a theophany of, in Julia Kristeva's terms, a "subject on trial," brought about by the "fracture of a symbolic code which can no longer 'hold' its (speaking) subjects" (1986a:30). This reading, which draws inspiration from Kristeva's theories of textuality and the construction of the speaking subject in discourse, is placed in intertextual tension with Kristeva's own reading of the biblical God in The Powers of Horror (1982), which, ironically, depicts that divine subject as the stable, univocal Guarantor of patriarchal order. Thus this paper is intended to problematize Kristeva's reading of the divine subject of biblical discourse, even while it depends heavily on her theoretical work to evolve a new reading of the text.

Actor as Refusenik: Semiotics, Theatre Anthropology, and the Work of the Body

‘Theatre’, Eugenio Barba has said, ‘is a possibility of shaping revolt’. Barba touched upon this belief in NTQ16 (1988), and he professed it again with considerable passion at the conclusion of the seventh public session of the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) in April 1992. Directed by Barba and hosted by the Centre for Performance Research (CPR), the ‘Brecon ISTA’ was held in two parts – Working on Performances East and West, a practical exploration at Christ College, Brecon, from 4 to 10 April, being followed by a conference on 10 and 11 April at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, on Fictive Bodies, Dilated Minds, Hidden Dances. In the following exploration of the particular possibilities which theatre anthropology creates for revolt, Nigel Stewart, Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, considers Barba's direction of work in progress at the Brecon ISTA in terms of Derrida's and Kristeva's theories of the sign. Integral to this is an analysis of the relation between bios and logos – the ‘pre-expressive’ work of the body and the meanings which that work can produce – which is relevant to body-based performance theory and practice in general.

An I for an Eye: “Spectral Persecution” in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Coleridge's theory of “creative Imagination” and his description of The Rime as “a poem of pure imagination” have usually encouraged critics to search for the work's unity. This endeavor represses the text's manifest disjunctions of form and content, as well as slighting Coleridge's use of Gothic conventions. Freudian commentary, while addressing The Rime's irrational, dreamlike qualities, cannot account for the poem's emphasis on linguistic inadequacy or for the horror of the female that pervades the Mariner's tale and his identity. Julia Kristeva's theories of poetic language and of how the subject “abjects” the maternal in attaining the symbolic suggest that The Rime narrates the unspeakable process through which the symbolic is reached. From this perspective The Rime describes the creation of imagination.

Julia Kristeva's Feminist Revolutions

Julia Kristeva is known as rejecting feminism, nonetheless her work is useful for feminist theory. I reconsider Kristeva's rejection of feminism and her theories of difference, identity, and maternity, elaborating on Kristeva's contributions to debates over the necessity of identity politics, indicating how Kristeva's theory suggests the cause of and possible solutions to women's oppression in Western culture, and, using Kristeva's theory, setting up a framework for a feminist rethinking of politics and ethics.

"Do I Contradict Myself?": Progression through Contraries in Walt Whitman's "The Sleepers"

Employs Julia Kristeva's theories to read Whitman's "The Sleepers" as a progression through dichotomies which justifies the "life affirming" final two sections that other critics have regarded as "contrived."

At the Limits of Discourse: Heterogeneity, Alterity, and the Maternal Body in Kristeva's Thought.

This essay situates Kristeva's theory of semiotics in the context of the controversial debate about the status of the maternal body in her work. I argue that, if we rethink the opposition between the semiotic and the symbolic as the relation between the trace and the sign, it becomes clear that the maternal semiotic is irreducible either to the prelinguistic plenitude or to the alternative symbolic position. The second part of the essay develops the connection between Kristeva's linguistic theory and the alterity of the maternal body, articulated here as the in-fold of the other and the same.

Seeing through a mask's confession

Yukio Mishima's autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no Kokuhaku) raises significant questions concerning the nature and function of inscribed truth. This essay draws upon Julia Kristeva's theory of poetic language and methodology for semanalysis as a way of explicating Mishima's text. It argues that poetic truth resides in intertextual movements generated by the reversible relation between autobiography and novel, truth and lie, and confession and mask. Insight into this reversibility provides a context for understanding the dialectics between Mishima's text and his final performance of ritual suicide.