Matricide in Language: Writing Theory in Kristeva and Woolf

Introduction: Matricide and Language

The nexus of psychoanalytic, literary, and philosophical approaches in this book focuses on an intertextual reading of Virginia Woolf and Julia Kristeva. Its goal is to address the enigma of the persistent depletion of women’s contributions to culture. The claim that emerges is that, in spite of the huge efforts of feminist theory and history to turn the tide, this process is with us still. Its tenacity can be illustrated through the history of centuries of attempts to remove Diotima, the wise priestess who offers the crucial speech in Plato’s dialogue the Symposium, from the site of the birth of Western philosophy. As David Halperin (1990) put it, Depleted by Socrates, [Diotima] vanishes, but Socrates’s erotic wisdom and his entrancing speeches endure (p. 148). Diotima vanishes because of Socrates’s speeches? Because of Plato’s writings? Or because of Platonic commentary and its strange need to retroject the vanishing of Diotima at the very place of her appearance?

The intertextual approach to Kristeva and Woolf will bring to light matricide as the silent engine behind this vanishing, which is not a given but which is constantly resumed. The reason we do not heed sufficiently this constantly resumed vanishing process; the reason we can even afford to assert the redundancy of theory for addressing the problems of women, problems, presumably, that are always reducible to the mundane and the everyday, is the specific cunning of the depletion. The maleness of all wisdom with its entrancing speeches is a retroactive phenomenon: it produces the illusion that the present, any present, is always far more generous than the past in terms of its recognition of women’s names. The past was unfair, the present is full of promise, and the future will set things right. The driving force behind this perennial optimism is the work of forgetfulness.

—

I am the first of a new genus (Mary Wollstonecraft). When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me (Mary Shelley). I look everywhere for grandmothers and find none (Elizabeth Barrett Browning). Why isn’t there a tradition of the mothers? (Virginia Woolf). Women have no past, no history (Simone de Beauvoir). I look for myself throughout the centuries and I don’t see myself anywhere (Hélène Cixous).¹ As Woolf (1958) noted, strange spaces of silence (p. 77) separate the solitary female utterances throughout history. The brutal vicissitudes of the contemporary reception of feminist thinkers, so carelessly read and so prematurely dismissed, the repeated waves of resentment with feminist theory, crushed between the traditional academia and a misosophy that describes itself as activism, the war waged on the so-called French feminists who, unlike their male counterparts, have been persistently marginalized on the American scene, the attacks on difficult writing from the platform of an anti-intellectualism that all women are supposed to crave—all these are symptoms of the fact that the conditions that produced the strange spaces of silence and made the repetitive generic loneliness from Wollstonecraft to Cixous possible are still operative. They have found their way into the present age reactionary conformity that manages to discredit any notion of feminine specificity or freedom that is not based on seduction—which means not based on reproduction and consumption (Kristeva 2001a, p. xiii).

MATRICIDE

In the hope of uncovering the structural dimensions of what is, in effect, a diachronic phenomenon, I turned to Julia Kristeva’s interdisciplinary study of the figure of the mother. Beginning with Powers of Horror (1982; published in French in 1980), Kristeva’s explorations of the maternal figure repeatedly return to the problem of the phantasmatic matricide as the necessary condition of individuation. Since, in phantasy, separation and loss appear as death, the most fundamental psychic problem that the would-be speaking being has to solve—separation from the archaic mother—appears as murder. Kristeva evolves this problematic out of Melanie Klein, in whom, paradoxically, the cult of the mother is transformed into an imaginary matricide. The loss of the mother—which for the imaginary is tantamount to the death of the mother—becomes the organizing principle for the subject’s symbolic capacity (Kristeva 2001b, pp. 129–130). The necessity of matricide faces the would-be speaking being as the only way toward subjectivity and language.

There is something drastically irrevocable about this necessity that both sexes share (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1989, p. 25, Wieland 2000, pp. 13–14). The extreme nature of matricide is emphasized by the impossibility of incorporation or integration of the murdered mother (in the way the father, in Freud, is incorporated by the murderous brothers through eating the totem). Matricide, on the contrary, is realized as rejecting or even vomiting the maternal body. This rejection—out of which the abject with its powers of horror will be formed—draws the first boundary between inside and outside, it is the first line separating a still fragile I from an everything else. I feel like vomiting the mother (Kristeva 1982, p. 47): this metaphor of ungiving birth to the mother against the stream of time names an archaic creative act that establishes the first boundary, the first precarious measurement of space, and the primal irrecoverable loss.

Fear of the archaic mother turns out to be essentially fear of her generative power. It is this power, a dreaded one, that patrilineal filiation has the burden of subduing (Kristeva 1982, p. 77). Phallic power, in the sense of a symbolic power that thwarts the traps of penial performance, would in short begin with an appropriation of archaic maternal power (Kristeva 1987b, p. 75). And: Phallic idealization is built upon the pedestal of a putting-to-death of the feminine body (Kristeva 1987b, p. 357). The concept of matricide uncovers the dark lining of Gilbert and Gubar’s (1988) concepts of anxiety of authorship and female affiliation complex, which they set against Harold Bloom’s (1973) anxiety of influence. There is no symmetry between patricide and matricide. Patricide produces lineage; matricide is perpetuated as erasure of the name of the mother.

THE LANGUAGE OF POETS IS ALWAYS A DEAD LANGUAGE

The poet and the thinker of the void have a privileged access to the awareness that the Mothers are dead (Agamben 1999, p.74). The psychoanalytic perspective, however, offers access to a knowledge that both poetry and philosophy try to short-circuit: the knowledge that, in language, the mother is not simply dead but murdered, and that the murder has gendered repercussions for the speaking subject. Kristeva’s elaboration of this psychoanalytic access involves the methodological mobilization of two opposing poles. On the one hand, there is the exploration of the practice of the rebel subjectivity which allows the individual to live at the frontiers of pleasure and death and society to transcend its necessary limits (Kristeva 2002b, p. 7). The rebel subjectivity summons the figure of the poet, the artist, the deviser of new territories and new languages, the producer and reconstructor of culture. On the other hand, there is the study of the space vis-à-vis reason, requiring the frameworks of different disciplines: linguistics and poetics, psychoanalysis and semiotics, epistemology and metaphysics, anthropology and the histories of art, religion, or political ideas. This joining of theory and art in search for the dead mother aims at uncovering the dynamic factor in both the generation and the transgressive exceeding of the subject and its languages.

To describe this dynamic, Kristeva’s work invokes a number of concepts (the chora of Plato’s ontology, the Negativität and Kraft of Hegel’s dialectic). Among her various attempts to name the void and its unsettling powers, the abject is certainly one of Kristeva’s most engaging masterstrokes. Her book Powers of Horror (1982) introduces the abject at the crossroads of Mary Douglas’s anthropological study of abjection and Freud’s psychoanalytic study of phobia. It takes us to Melanie Klein’s problematization of the early sadistic phantasies directed toward the interior of the maternal body, from which the primary relation to the external world will be constituted. The abject thus names the disquieting and unstable division preceding the subject-object dichotomy. The fact that the phantasmatically murdered and rejected maternal body lurks behind this concept as well as behind the Thing of the melancholic was often perceived as questionable from a feminist point of view. Even if we leave aside Kristeva’s profound writing on the feminine—as distinct from femininity and as opening new vistas for our understanding of society and thinking²—we can see in Kristeva’s work a theoretic rehabilitation of the maternal figure. The tale/history of maternal loss emerges as the destiny of the speaking being—horrified, persecuted, mournful, and therefore creative. As abject, Thing, semiotic, chora, the maternal void shakes and pulverizes meanings, it shatters and produces them. Yet it also opens a bifurcating path for the gendered speaking being and presents the lures of specific hazards for the feminine positioning in language. These lures have not bypassed the feminist discursive field. The representations of this field, torn between the idealizations offered by its proponents and the denigrations characteristic of its opponents, tend to screen the brutality of its inherent functioning between fusion and murder. If we address this immanent dynamic theoretically, we can, I believe, enhance our understanding of the internal and external difficulties that made so many thinkers—Woolf and Kristeva included—dissociate themselves from feminism, and which have led to the repeated proclamation of feminism itself as dead.

KORE

Some cautious remarks are warranted before I move on: some inescapable qualifications and restrictions to the matricidal theme. It is true that, as Kristeva (2001b) points out apropos Klein, without matricide the internal object cannot be formed, the fantasy cannot be constructed, the reparation, as well as the redirection of the hostility into the introjection of the self, is foreclosed (p. 130). And yet, both matricide and the cult of the mother offer salvation. Hence the necessity that both sexes share came through in Kristeva’s theory with its halo of a lost paradise. Although throughout her work Kristeva always insisted on the presence of the third party, of the paternal inscription in the early stages of development, and in spite of the frequent criticism that she privileged the mother–son relationship through the figure of the male artist (in her most recent writing, she has emphatically reversed this tendency), Kristeva conceptualizes the early mother as a hallucinatory osmosis between mother and daughter. In an echo from Freud, she calls this figure a Minoan-Mycenaean mother. This early mother refers to a modality where the son is also a girl or—to put things once again in the language of ancient myth—a Kore, the forever lost-and-found daughter of Demeter (Fairfield 1995). In the vein of the Minoan-Mycenaean phantasmatics, therefore, of the skin-to-skin osmosis, of the in-betweenness of barely distinguishable identities, the reduplicating goddess Demeter-Kore represents an early stage of primary identification with the mother. Thus unlike the mother who is phallicized by the son and hence a mother-and-son, the Minoan-Mycenean mother is a mother-and-daughter—and an echo, perhaps, of the irrepresentable transphalic jouissance of a prelinguistic sensory fusion. Kristeva relates this aspect of her writing on maternity to Freud and distinguishes it from Klein’s darker vision (Kristeva 2001b). It is worth noting at this point, however, that the prevalence of this idealization is very typical of Bulgarian folklore and Bulgarian women’s literature.³

FEMALE LIBIDO

In To the Lighthouse (1927), Virginia Woolf situates the creativity of her protagonist, Lily Briscoe, under the sign of a striking convergence between the dead mother and the enticements of osmotic bliss. In a compelling transmutation of the Symposium, Plato’s dialogue on love, the dissymmetries and inequalities, the tensions and anxieties, the violent oppositions and the agonistic extremities that characterize the master–slave dialectic of the Platonic Eros, and that surface in Freud’s conceptualization of the libido, disappear into the image of liquids uniting without remnant and becoming inextricably the same. In an intense scene with Lily Briscoe pressing against Mrs. Ramsay’s knee, no words are exchanged between Mrs. Ramsay and Lily: they do not speak, they touch. Body and mind intermingled, boundaries blurred, liquid identities become indistinguishable, murmurs and stirrings dissolved in the sharpness or sweetness of the air: we are in the perilous and jubilatory realm of feminine erotic.

This erotic is conceptualized in Kristeva’s work as female libido.⁴ Female libido is a term that Kristeva evolves out of Winnicott and Klein; that is subtended (like most things in Kristeva) by the death drive; and that designates a specific type of correlation between drives and the symbolic. In the 1990s, Kristeva elaborated the idea of a relentless fusional libido (Kristeva 1996, p. 77) through Proust’s theory of homosexuality and of the distinctiveness of Sodom and Gomorrah. Like Freud’s male libido, which is common to men and women and informs any erotic relationship, the female libido is not applicable to only certain groups of people. It is an amorous space approachable from any gender position. Freud insisted that there is one libido only, male, and referred its predatory sadomasochistic dynamic to the Platonic concept of Eros. Kristeva’s elaboration of female libido—which, in her latest work, she prefers to designate as an other libido—transforms Freud’s concept in the manner in which Woolf transforms Plato’s Eros. Fusional and osmotic, rather than dialectic, female libido acts as an erotization without residue that permeates the universe with an amorous glow and ushers in mystic and ecstatic merging—the Schopenhauerean relinquishment of will, the Oriental Nothingness of Nirvana.

Both libidinal economies spring from a crux of destructiveness and generation that is as yet ignorant of the dramas of sex and gender. Freud, as Kristeva (1987b) reiterates, anchors the morbid, manic, and destructive aspects of Eros in the prehistory of matter that propagated by means of scission before having acquired an organ with erotic and procreative functions (p. 79). Kristeva, on her part, relates the lethal, depersonalizing tendency of the feminine erotic to the loving dialogue of the pregnant mother with the fruit, barely distinct from her, that she shelters in her womb (p. 81). Violent and destructive to begin with, the male libido immediately presents to life the task for its shackling. According to Kristeva’s reading of the Symposium, it is feminine love that becomes a mediator in the dramaturgy of male libido by providing the turning point from destruction to idealization, from pleasure to knowledge. The problem with female libido in its pure form, however, is its alluring deceptiveness: it appears as the promise of an ecstatic deathless universe. This promise then, may turn out to be the grinding death of the refusal of separation. Through the traps of the lost paradise, therefore, through the ecstasies of fusion that support the phantasy of a mother eternally living in the flesh, we may come back to murder. If Mrs. Ramsay is the object of Lily Briscoe’s osmotic longings, then keeping Mrs. Ramsay sufficiently dead is Lily Briscoe’s paradoxical problem in To the Lighthouse.

ABJECTIVITY AND MERGINALITY

I offer my exploration of matricide and female libido in this book as an entry into the cultural ramifications of a language that wavers between hypnotic passion and murder. In a striking account, Joan Scott (2001) presents the oscillations between phantasies of uniqueness and phantasies of fusion as characteristic of women’s movements. My claim is that these phantasies are linked to the matricidal phantasmatics, and that they can explain extreme discursive practices that are characteristic of the debate in and around feminism, but that are, for sure, not restricted to this debate and can be encountered in any discursive field. Margaret Whitford (1994), who observes this phenomenon with regard to the reception of Irigaray, describes it as a vacillation between the Scylla of idealization and the Charybdis of denigration (p. 23).

Before I turn to the two rhetorical forms that Scylla and Charybdis assume, those mythical monsters that crushed any navigator who tried to maneuver between them, I need to introduce yet another term. The zone demarcated by the female libido has, according to Kristeva (1989), its proper language: reduplication. Reduplication, carried out as a jammed repetition (p. 246) is the direct expression and the immediate language of female libido. Referring to the outmost limits of our unstable identities, reduplication unfolds as a stammering of temporality that forever struggles to pronounce one and the same petrified moment. It is an eternal return of the same, but, unlike the return that is rippled out in time reduplication is a reverberation outside of time. It is, therefore, a spatial occurrence, yet even its spatiality is unstable and tends to collapse in a play of mirrors lacking perspective or duration. Its medium is the