Kristeva Circle Conference
California State University Northridge in Los Angeles
October 26-27, 2018
Chora (χώρος), which is everlasting, not admitting of destruction; providing a situation for all things that come into being, but itself apprehended without the sense by a sort of bastard reasoning, and hardly an object of belief. This indeed is that which we look upon as in a dream and say that anything that is must needs be in some place and occupy some room.
Plato
Timaeus, 52a- 52b
Indeed we may fittingly compare the Recipient to a mother, the model to a father, and the nature that arises between them to their offspring. …
Plato
Timaeus, 50d
***
Kristeva came to Paris in the 1960’s ready to become actively engaged in the ‘political theology’ debates of that time; an engagement clearly outlined by Sjoholm (2005), Oliver (1993,2009), Keltner (2011), Hansen (2013), Beardsworth (2004) and others. Through her explorations of Mao – and confronted with the realities of Maoist China, a watershed realization occurred within her own thinking. That disruption moved her deeply to question the missing link between political theory and social action.
Rooted in her groundbreaking analysis of language and the processes of signification – and informed by her unique insights into the psychoanalytic experience, Kristeva (1984, 2002) redefined revolution. The essence of this new revolution was to risk living dialogue; dialogue between embodied subjects held within the heterogenetic spaces in language and in every encounter with each other and our selves.
Throughout her writing, Kristeva (1984, 2002, 2009) remains fiercely committed to the discovery of meaning in our actual bio-psycho-social encounters, an approach that some have found frustrating. She avoids preconceived constructions of meaning as a solution to address women’s or other social justice issues (Kristeva, 2010. Kristeva et al. 1981). Whether in therapeutic practice or political engagement, Kristeva’s response does not focus primarily on what action to take but rather how one willingly enters into the risks, contradictions and unknowable possibilities in our meetings with each other in any action (Kristeva et al. 1981).
The what, of any personal or social formulation, if not always held within a living awareness of its heterogenetic essence, is in Kristeva’s thinking an avoidance of the realities of the death drive. Such avoidance undermines the possibilities of genuine meaning in the meetings between us. What-ness (quiddity) incorporates in Kristeva’s (2010) writing This-ness (haecceitas): the uniqueness of each subject within the uniqueness of each encounter.
Dis-heterogenetic fixed macro solutions are ultimately destructive of communal and individual life and meaning (Kristeva et al. 1981).
The destabilizing reality of heterogenetic space in speech and relation is a constant challenge to identity politics of any kind. Paradoxically, Kristeva’s (2002, 2010. Kristeva et al. 1981) heterogenetic politics addresses issues without reifying prescribed solutions. Hers is a politics of continuous being-in-question as essential to our being together.
Exploitations of power impose an ultimate destruction of the experience of meaning in human society (Kristeva et al. 1981). Kristeva’s imperative is to address and hold in question in all relationships, individual and communal, the flawed operating assumptions skewing solutions to the problematic realities of the human condition; assumptions that hide and ignore the discomfortingly intrinsic instability of being human.
Kristeva (2002. Kristeva et al. 1981) acknowledges the apparent limits of her micro approach to combat the negative forces of self-interest in society. She defines true power more radically than the coercive and destructive force of oppression or opposition. True power and reliable hope of meaningful living in society abides outside the assumed social contract and within the trials of authentic, open psychosomatic dialogue between whole persons.
Binding the heterogenetic core of the speaking being in structures that do not allow the self-in-trial is the engine of social injustice.
In this arena, there are strong resonances between Kristeva (1981, 2009) and Arendt (1958). Paradoxically, neither fit the mold as activists. Neither proposes ideological solutions to the misalignments seemingly inherent in the human condition. They hold the tension of the inherent question in every human encounter that awaits, not imposes, an answer … no more, no less.
Kristeva’s heterogenetic philosophy requires bringing the truth of being in question into every intimate, social or political encounter.
Kristeva (1991, 2009) affirms the paradoxical power and necessity of personal suffering when encountering our differences. It is a suffering of compassion that enables us to discover actual and open spaces of engagement, faith, hope and love between us – in any struggle. It releases the potency of our intersubjective reality to rediscover unforeseen inclusive realities in any of our what activities. Kristeva (1987) asserts that the infusion of this experience by whatever means is the only sustainable hope for a meaningful and just society.
In Kristeva’s (1991) writings, the power of our engagements with difference, both within and between us, is the nuclear reactor that addresses injustice and the need for change. The never stabilized dialectic between semiotic and symbolic must constantly be addressed and engaged – but with a personal allowance to suffer, struggle and keep faithful to our common heterogenetic reality:
Inherent singularity and diversity is the foundation of our common humanity.
The sufferings and joys of embracing our diversity together conserve the realities of justice and mercy among us.
Through a review of Kristeva’s (1984) concepts of chora (borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus, to describe a receptacle or space of creative motility and paradox – a dynamic sourcing the capacity for open and meaningful language) and heterogeneity (a discontinuity between the semiotic/biological and the symbolic/meaning in the process of signification), this presentation would hope to demonstrate that the heterogenetic transformative power within a community is in fact, anchored in the power of the feminine chora. It underlies all articulate difference, including the sexual, between the nominal male and nominal female.
Framed this way, social injustice in society can be seen as the radical suppression of the feminine.
***
The lens, through which Kristeva addresses any issue, including that of feminist theories and movements regarding the place of women in society, is via her seminal insights explored in Revolution in Poetic Language. These insights develop, rearticulate and are applied to the variety of issues addressed throughout all of her works. The concepts of the chora and heterogeneity, and their elaboration and transformation within the Freudian psychodynamics of human development and differentiation, establish Kristeva’s foundational premise.
Heterogeneity, the quality or state of being diverse in character or content, is the essential characteristic of the chora’s instability. By placing this concept at the center of language of the ‘speaking being’, Kristeva expresses her conviction of the inherent instability and physicality of our being human. Heterogeneity in her writing expresses this instability within the dialectic between the semiotic and symbolic in human speech, as well as in the processing of experience within and between us.
This frame for language reflects Kristeva’s statement of paradox at the heart of the human condition:
Our experience of meaning, between and within us, can only be realized through embracing the heterogeneity of choretic existence itself inherent in the physical realty of the mother’s body and through her, all human bodies which are the experiential sites and access to the reality of the unstable chora (Kristeva, 2010).
Within this frame is Kristeva’s (2009, 2010) restatement of the Freudian death drive as the intrinsic drive towards dissolution and transgression inseparable from the drive for connection. Both are intrinsic to the inherent mutuality in relation. They are the primordial carriers for the occurring of new possibilities.
In my own efforts to understand Kristeva’s concepts of chora and heterogeneity, I struggled with this paradox by framing existence (chora) as possibility-for–relation (Donnelly, 2016). Defined in this manner, existence holds the paradoxical characteristics of being inherently sustaining, unstable and incomplete; that is inherently heterogeneous. It drives the articulating evolutionary process itself. In language as in existence there is the inseparable dialectic between possibility and contextually unstable form: reflected through the dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic within the experience of being human.
Holding the tension of this paradox without splitting is central to Kristeva’s (1984) use of these concepts in language and in life. She insists on their heterogenetic integrity. Semiotic and symbolic are inseparable but heterogenetic in a dynamic dialectical relation. Within her exploration of the Freudian frame, they are the ever present and dynamic dialect, communally and individually, between unconscious and conscious in development and expression of our physical being. Failure to hold the tension of that contradiction in language and in living undermines the ongoing possibility for the continuous articulation of meaning between us. In her use of Freudian terms, it disrupts the dynamic inseparability of Eros and Thanatos (Kristeva, 2009, 2010).
Essential to these elaborations is Kristeva’s commitment to the materialism of consciousness, heterogenitically intrinsic to our psychosomatic reality. Any effort to separate, rather than differentiate, mind from body denies the dynamic fluidity of evolutionary reality and its heterogenetic core. Realizations of genuinely inclusive meaning between us are anchored in an acceptance and commitment to the paradox of our unfolding, heterogenetic, incomplete reality.
Within this paradigmatic dynamic is Kristeva’s (1981, 2010) understanding of the need to create transgresive spaces within the human community through addressing women’s sexuality and motherhood; the denial and suppression of which reifies the social contract and the repression of women.
***
Kristeva (2010) addresses the apparent incongruities intrinsic in the processes of a child’s differentiation – differentiation from within the mother’s body through the reality of development and separation and the inherently differentiated connectivity of the social reality of our species. It is a reality that is maintained in a uniquely human way by our capacity for language and imagination.
Our capacity for language and imagination evidences this innate operating awareness:
Every uniquely singular subject exists only as a biologically connected member of an articulating group of uniquely heterogenetic subjects – within an individual and communal connection with both semiotic and symbolic aspects.
In her descriptions of the maternal, Kristeva (2002, 2009, 2010) adapts and transforms the use of Freud’s imaginary father of individual pre existence. This concept places the intimacies of child/mother differentiation within a lived experience of communal participation for both mother and child – participation within the familial and community context.
Through this use of Freud’s concept, Kristeva addresses the differences between the sexes, male and female, and the shared parental function of both, within the necessary realization of the choretic possibility-for-relation in the broader communal social context.
Kristeva’s (2002, 2009, 2010) imaginary father of individual pre existence is not the father of the law, but a loving and subjectively available reality of meaningful participation beyond the maternal-infant dyad and within the wider community – present in the reality of the mother’s mutually experienced desire for another beyond the child. It is the possibility-for-relation inherent in existence that acknowledges plurality and includes the necessity of difference. It addresses the complexities and innumerable possibilities for creating and exploring relation in communal life prior to any actual social articulation. Foundational and prior to the Freudian Oedipal father and mother is the broader parental function of both in the creation and nurturing of new life – and, therefore, new possibilities.
The different reality of male and female in society is not defined as much as it is continuously discovered; discovered by father, mother and child within the current realities of their engagement and within their straining of the definitions of the social contract (Kristeva et al. 1981).
There is not only the father of imaginary individual pre existence, but also the mother, child and diverse communal reality as well.
By inserting the concept of heterogeneity into our understanding of language for the ‘speaking being’ – the dialectic of the symbolic/semiotic inherent to the unstable dynamics of the chora – Kristeva links human consciousness, community and the capacity for language and imagination to the indeterminate and unstable evolutionary processes in all material existence.
Chronic deficiencies in the perception of this reality are communal as well as individual. These perceptions are recurrently deficient and inherent to the unstable, heterogenetic core of the evolutionary process itself. They must be addressed and rediscovered in an ongoing process of sacrifice and rediscovery of all identities. Thus, stands the importance in Kristeva’s (1982, 1989) frame of the death drive.
There is an intrinsic lack or undefined void within the nature of reality itself. Kristeva (2009, 2010) captures this inherent lack and reframes Freud’s castration complex with her use of the concepts of chora and heterogeneity.
Thus, attempts at articulating these realities are beyond resolution through any defined frame, positive or negative.
Given this frame in Kristeva’s writing, whatever difficulties we experience in defining or engaging the different realities between the sexes is secondary to experienced threats to our personal and communal self-definitions (Kristeva et al. 1981). These complexities arise from our unwillingness to perceive and acknowledge the inherent inconsistencies of existence in our being and in our relating to each other and ourselves.
Thus, Kristeva’s zen-like Mu! when responding to questions of how her theories relate to the injustices in society towards women. Her philosophy is not a political or sociological philosophy, but one of the reality of personal transformation intrinsic to the perception and experience of meaning (Beardsworth, 2004). Her philosophy addresses the “raw wound of the need to believe” (Kristeva, 2009), the validity, need and allowance of a sense of transcendence despite or in the face of the loss of religion in Western European society. Her use of heterogeneity in speech and relation provides a window to the experience of an undefined transcendent process within our participation of the evolutionary material world itself.
***
Within Kristeva’s (1982) frame is the indispensable experience of the abject. The abject, defined by Kristeva, refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between subject and object or between self and other. It is our inherent, internal awareness of destabilizing heterogeneity in our personal existence. It is central to Kristeva’s formulation.
Not only is the abject unavoidable, it is absolutely necessary as the invitation to confront and engage the experiences of difference in our existence with each other and within our selves. It is an engine of evolution. The unavoidable experience of the abject is intrinsic to all human relationships – with each other and with ourselves. Allowance of encountering, engaging and suffering with the abject is essential to the possibility of love, desire and learning between us: mother-father, parent-child, partner, lover, friend or neighbor.
In Kristeva’s frame, this is the sense in which the reality of our existence is fundamentally feminine:
Being together is an unavoidable invitation to engage, allow or deny mutual birthing of possibilities at the core of our relationships; a mutual re-birthing of selves and meaning revealed within our encounters between each uniquely singular person.
It is not surprising, then, that gender disparities and the denial of this reality are at the root of social injustice.
***
The settings for the experience of relation that Kristeva (1989, 2002, 2009, 2010) emphasizes and that articulate access to possibility for relation (chora) are: authentic dialogue, the psychoanalytic experience, art, aesthetics, literature and genuinely religious experiences.
The psychoanalytic experience, if faithful to Freud’s rule of free association and suspended attention is a breakthrough in therapeutic epistemology. It is a conscious attempt to establish a heterogenetic space in relation – a choretic womb. It fosters and allows a transferential space of speech and phantasy wherein a lived mutual imagining of new possibilities for relation can occur.
For Kristeva (1981), as it was for Arendt, this realization can be expressed in political engagement, but is not found in political movements or ideologies. Movements and ideologies remain within the operating premises of the social contract that must be engaged. However, the transformative power of that engagement resides always outside the current definitions within that contract. The fixed unwillingness to allow and experience that fact is the corruption of language and the source of injustice in personal as well as social relationships.
***
One may well ask, then, where and what is social justice in Kristeva’s theory?
For my reading of Kristeva, justice is not a pre-arranged conformity to beliefs or rules. The reality and validity of justice is continuously rediscovered and redefined in our encounters with each other; encounters that chance mutual self-questioning. It is the risk of allowing the unique singularity of the subject-in-trial within an acceptance and awareness of the heterogenetic center of any relational experience.
Justice is the allowance of heterogenetic spaces in law and custom – the spaces of mercy. As with the heterogenetic dialectic of semiotic and symbolic, mercy and justice are intrinsically inseparable. The heterogenetic space in justice is different from a symbolic place in the law. That heterogenetic space is the space of authority, sublimation and the capacity for love between us (Kristeva, 2009, 2010).
Paradoxically, justice, as with truth and meaning, is rooted in allowing the transgressive reality of the feminine chora.
The fall
through pain
of first love lost
i was delivered
you were my mother
and i touched you
i was your friend
and you taught me
though i well knew
how to fly
how to walk
then on your way you stumbled
the dark November night
enclosed you
far beyond my reach
and cries
i wanted you to need me
but you didn’t
whirlwinds tore me
from the web of my desires
to see
your silence gave us both
our freedom
and love abides the wind
through letting be
and surrender of its dreams
from: Love and Knowledge: The quest for personal meaning.
Southgarden press.
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© 2018 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW
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