Presented at the Kristeva Circle Conference  2017

Pittsburg, PA. USA

Preface

A discussion about difference and dependence within Kristeva’s theoretical framework, leads us to reconsider the ultimate nature of dependence. Her concepts can be used to address this restatement about the interplay between our differences and the nature of our deepest dependence.

Chora, a concept Kristeva borrows from Plato’s Timaeus (Plato, 1977), and that of Heterogeneity are primary in her formulation of the interplay between the semiotic and symbolic in language, human development, relationships as well as the struggles for meaning in religion and aesthetics.  Additionally, the concepts of subject-in-process or subject-in-trial, the imaginary father of individual pre existence and the critical relation between heterogeneity and access to the Imaginary, will also help us articulate the transformative dynamic between difference and dependence in Kristeva’s thinking.

Introduction

Difference and dependence are the bifocal dialectic of differentiation. They are the interminable vortex of the separation-differentiation process within our community of shared relations. Their inseparability is testimony to the absolute fact that nothing exists outside of relation.

In her groundbreaking work, Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), Kristeva replaces a reified notion the subject with that of the speaking being – a conception of dialectics between heterogenetic semiotic/symbolic processes: singular, inseparable, interdependent and interactive. She sets the concepts of semiotic and symbolic within a dynamic instability captured via her concept of Chora.

The possibility for meaning occurs within the Chora’s heterogenetic semiotic/symbolic dialectic (Kristeva, 1984. notes 12 & 13). In its motility Chora is the fountain of the Imaginary (1989). It holds the pre-articulate affective possibility for meaning – prior to any formulation. It is the psyche’s space for Kristeva’s imaginary father of individual preexistence: a pre-proscriptive possibility for an affective sense of meaning and connection beyond but including the mother/child dyad.

Difference

Kristeva points out in Revolution in Poetic Language that the unique heterogeneous dialectic in the processes of signification between the semiotic and the symbolic generates different presentations of language. So also does the dynamic of this process lead to different presentations of singular subjects in dialogue with themselves and each other (1984, 1995).

The differences we experience between each other evidence the variations in these dialectics. They are the fluid and unstable fluctuations of the semiotic/symbolic within each of us.  These differences play out within specific histories and living networks of speaking, thinking, feeling and behavior in our relationships and shape each and all within our communities. They evidence how processes of signification in actual speech and behavior are enacted.

These hidden differences in the dialectics within our reality as speaking beings are more radical than the names we apply to each other and ourselves: “… the peerless singular in others and oneself”(Kristeva, 2009).

Our encounters with differences between us potentially disturb and challenge current reconciliations of these dialectics within ourselves and our networks of significant relations (Kristeva, 1991).

Kristeva elaborates how the dawning of difference occurs through processes of differentiation of the infans from the mother’s body. The disturbance in that primordial sense of mutual presence is the infans’ primary experience of heterogeneity in relation: the first fragmenting within the infans’ Chora. It is also re-experienced within the mother/infans body as a mutual experience of abjection (Kristeva, 1982,1991). In this process, the infans’ abjection of the mother/infans body creates and challenges its developing capacity for a psycho/sensual formulation of that space of possibility for a separate related subjectivity.

There are critical factors that influence the experience of these affective ruptures: the vicissitudes of infans’ innate psychophysical pressures of development, variations in parental caring activities or affective dissonance between the infans’ and the mother’s body. These ruptures are suffered by the infans within the timing of parental and environmental response. The vicissitudes of these factors impact and direct the infans’ innate and increased capacity to freely access the semiotic Imaginary.

Kristeva acknowledges her formulation resonates with those of Winnicott, citing his article on the Capacity to be alone and concepts of transitional phenomena in Playing and Reality (Kristeva, 1998; Winnicott, 1965, 1971).

However, the differences are striking. Kristeva’s sensibility is palpably material, physical and minutely reflective of the turbulent psychophysical realities within the maternal-infant dialogic of differentiation. As Kristeva explores the abject in The Powers of Horror (1982), this rupture holds concurrent possibilities for development and destruction, life and death, love and hate. These are the indelible marks of the sustaining yet incomplete and unstable character of our psychophysical materiality.

Dependence

Jettisoned precipitously into the space of life’s raw realities, upon what is this infans dependent – Biology? Mother? Father? Family? Community?

The logic of Kristeva’s investigations leads us beyond relational need and drive satisfaction between mother and infans (Kristeva, 1984). These realities in their wordless dialogue abide within the wider relational field of this child’s pre-articulate experience. We address the network of the semiotic/symbolic dialectics alive within the parental, family and communal environment. The ways these dialectics are acknowledged, addressed, denied, vitalized, or allowed to actually challenge parental and communal identities, relationships, and institutions, significantly impacts upon each infans’ own inner and relational dialectic of the semiotic/symbolic in language and action.

Within this wider sense of relational possibility, I understand Kristeva’s concept of the imaginary father of individual pre existence (Kristeva, 1987, 1989, 2009). It translates as the existentially available reality of possible mutuality in relation; a mutuality that includes the suffering of heterogeneity. This possibility wordlessly sustains relationships within an affective sense of community beyond the linguistic, emotional and behavioral proscriptions operating within the infans/mother interaction, family and community norms. It is a “direct and immediate” activated capacity to imagine, sense (or hear) non-object specific possibilities for relation (Kristeva, 1987).

The various ways these assumptions and proscriptions are continuously questioned and challenged – in thought, speech and action – allows or disallows the reality of heterogeneity between the semiotic and symbolic in the wider relational field.

In other words, it is how meaningful relationships are sustained while enduring the incomplete and unstable possibilities challenging the communal and personal norms in their lives (Kristeva, 1991)

As the infans experiences the allowance of heterogeneity within the love between its parents – a love that includes the challenge of the infans’ singularity and difference – so does that infans touch upon its own inherent, subjective, wordless possibility for relation.

The infans can be safely placed in the cot to the degree that in their loving each other, both parents inclusively love their child (Kristeva, 1987,1987a, 2009; Oliver, 1991).

The possibilities of such parental love are sustained in their acknowledgement and acceptance of their radical dependence. Parental disallowance of this dependence disrupts the triangular nature of their love and feeds a distorted intensity in the Oedipal phase.

It is this radical dependence that Kristeva’s theory articulates: dependence upon the universal processes of signification that constitutes the speaking being  (Kristeva, 2009).

In our struggle to allow this dependence abides possibilities for discovering meaning in genuine encounters with our differences.

Difference and dependence

This understanding of dependence leads us to consider the central role disturbances of difference holds in Kristeva’s work (1984,1991).  She posits the experience of difference between us as the gateway to possibilities for meaning held within our fundamental dependence on the ever-present processes of differentiation.

We have already looked at difference in terms of individual and communal allowances of heterogeneity in the dialectics between the semiotic and symbolic – the undefined ‘other’ within and between us.

Looking now at the dynamics of intersubjectivity and the intrinsic mutuality of our psychophysical reality, there are two characteristics of Kristeva’s subject-in-trial that help us understand realities and possibilities available within the differences we experience within ourselves and with each other.

First: the subject-in-trial is essentially mutually constituted and unstable; no subject – though singular – is discrete, stable or complete if seen within the heterogenetic semiotic and symbolic processes that create it. We are subjects-in-trial. The heterogeneous ‘other’ is within the core of subjectivity. There is no subject outside the dialectics of transference.

Second: based upon that reality, every encounter of difference between and within us, which actually acknowledges and allows that instability, is the underpinning of a continuously rediscovered sense of possibility for meaning in relation. Such encounters realize and accept the unsettling necessity of difference as essential for our personal and communal sense of intersubjectivity.

Suffering the abject and the risks of heterogeneity validates the reality of loss within the experience of difference between and within us. It opens access to the rediscovery of meaning in the Imaginary – the unstable creator and dissolver of transference (Kristeva, 1989). In other words, allowance of a mutual surrender to the fundamental nature of our dependence paradoxically transforms the possible disruptions that experiences of difference provoke.

This is the heart of the psychoanalytic discovery, sympathetic therapeutic silence and any therapeutic process.

Meeting this challenge opens for us, personally and communally, access to the Imaginary, the unstable creator of our pasts, present and futures. The cyclic creation and unraveling of transference releases the possibility of continuous rediscovery of meaning and reformulation of the identities wrapping our subjectivities. Every encounter with difference within and between us presents an invitation through a kind of death for a new beginning (Arendt, 1958; Kristeva, 1987a, 1989, 1998).

The material physicality of our bodies’ psych soma inscribes our unique, unstable and singular differences (Arendt, 1958; Kristeva, 1998, 2009). At the same time, it harbors within those very bodies our mutual and irreducible dependence upon the semiotic/symbolic heterogeneity within and between us as the indispensible reality of our being in relation.

This formulation of the necessity, validity and power of our differences takes us beyond simply negotiating and accommodating our differences. It brings us to realize the transformative power of embracing our inter-subjectivity.

As indicated in Kristeva’s works, this transformative power of our intersubjectivity allows the possibilities of love (Kristeva, 1987, 1987a, 2009).

This possibility takes us beyond sadomasochistic self/object domination. We are released within the instability, ambiguity, contradictions and messiness of our shared fundamental dependence – dependence upon the processes that can create, sustain and destroy us.

L’ Herethique

Kristeva’s explorations of difference and dependence lead us to reconsider the basis for ethical behavior beyond reified symbolic communal and personal norms; norms held safe from the vitality, turbulence and ambiguity of the semiotic Chora. Beyond preconceived ‘obligation’, it is an ethic that centers upon the vitality and profound access to meaning discovered in the challenge and risk of meeting the ‘other’ within and between us (Kristeva, 1984, 1987a, 1991).

She replaces a teleological ethics, based on conformity to norms, with an ethic of fidelity to processes discovering meaning through the risks of authentic intersubjectivity.  It is an ethic of the discovery of truth in the trials of authentic speech between us. For Kristeva, it is an ethic demonstrated, discovered and realized in the psychoanalytic experience of relation and discussed in her explorations of maternity (Kristeva, 1998, 2009). The ethical, so defined and enacted, is a mutual and continuous revelation of our shared dependence.

Authentic dialogue’s volatile dialectics

The dialectic process of dependence and difference form the heterogenetic axis around which our lives revolve. They hold and create the central dilemmas of our reality as speaking beings. Kristeva throughout all her writings holds us to the unresolvable discomfort necessary to continuously meet self and other in the creative spaces of instability and uncertainty between us.

These are the spaces of love, play and death – and are the moments of imagining and realizing unforeseen possibilities for relation with each other and our selves.

***

Reflection

what we look for in each other

cannot be found

for all we are

is the searching for our being

for a while we deceive ourselves

to see in each other

containers

for what we need and want

and feel we lack

but in the end

after the excitement and the dance

we are left again

with the pain of our questing

that, perhaps,

is grace

and an opportunity to know

that our questing must be

with each other

not in and for each other

then in the freedom

of that letting be

we can join in the pain of our questing

to search for our being

in the right place

that at least can be

the beginning

of compassion

and making way for our loving and being

to become

even more apparently

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