MORNY JOY
There are two anomalies that need to be observed before there can be any detailed examination of the life and work of three women scholars—Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—who feature as exemplars of “French feminism.” These are that (1) none of these women was born in France, and (2) none of them subscribes to the term “feminism.” There is also one further discrepancy that is crucial to any consideration of the relevance of their work for religion. This is that none of the three women can be regarded as religious in the traditional sense of the term. Yet their early lives, though varied, did provide them with exposure to diverse religious orientations. Cixous, from a Jewish Algerian family, spent her formative years in Algeria. Irigaray is from a Belgian Catholic background, while Kristeva, in an autobiographical reminiscence, tells of her adolescent rebellion against her Eastern Orthodox upbringing in Bulgaria. What is remarkable is that the work of all three resonates with religiously related discussions about the nature of god or the divine, with notions of the sacred, with questions regarding the “feminine” and the debased role of women in religion. Most especially, however, they inquire into the nature of love, with its extravagant desires and displacements. For all three scholars, religion’s symbols and representations continue to have long-lasting formative emotional and psychic effects.
Religion, then, still features as a potent and pervasive phenomenon in twentieth-century secular Europe. This is especially evident in their discussion of maternal and paternal figures, of both divine and human provenance, whose focal influence continues even after their psychoanalytic exposure. God’s guise as an omnipotent Father and his Virgin Mother/Bride have been demonstrated to be lavish projections of human beings’ deepest needs and longings, stemming from unrequited infantile love. Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva all concur that these symbolic representations reinforced certain behavioral and psychological patterns at the same time that they mediated deep emotional traumas. These patterns now need to be “reprogrammed”: the psychic pain involved should be assuaged by other, more conscious means. Thus, these scholars’ respective explorations can only be comprehended through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. Nevertheless, their work is extremely interdisciplinary, ignoring the boundaries and methodologies that are usually associated with specific disciplines. The following presentation can only highlight a selection of their extremely rich and, at times, provocative reflections on the subject of religion.
Perhaps the reason for the recent appeal of their work lies in their respective investigations and evaluations, in the wake of the death of God, of the search for satisfactory therapeutic substitutes. All three, from different perspectives, are preoccupied with the elaboration of an ethics of intersubjective relationships. Though each thinker has her own distinctive position, all three seek to articulate the ways that love can find expression, once freed from instinctive urges and unconscious fantasies of fulfillment. All emphasize the rehabilitation of women—who are all too often obscured or relegated to an inferior position by traditional religious doctrines and practices. The reaction to their work has been mixed. Though acclaimed by many feminists, they have also been criticized for having introduced either a feminine essentialism or a maternal/gynocentric ethics. Yet a closer look at each of their principal concerns is extremely instructive as it provides three very different options for appreciating the tasks of women within a renegotiated understanding of religion.
JULIA KRISTEVA
When she came to Paris from Bulgaria in 1965 at the age of twenty-five, Kristeva’s early training had been in linguistics, but this changed after her arrival. She became part of a circle of scholars associated with the avant-garde group Tel Quel, which produced a journal featuring the work of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Philippe Sollers (later her husband). She also became interested in psychoanalysis. (At that time, Jacques Lacan’s seminars and writings were having a dramatic influence on French intellectual thought.) In 1978, Kristeva qualified as an analyst herself, with a particular interest in object-relations theory. She then began to write about religious texts in which she detected a type of latent revolt against constricting ideologies, as was the case in the communist Bulgaria of her youth. There she witnessed religion as providing emotional solace, if not psychic survival tactics, even if she did not accept its tenets. Such a thesis was not particularly attractive to the secular scholars of Europe who interpreted this turn in Kristeva’s work as basically nostalgic.
In 1976, Kristeva gave birth to a son, which stimulated her interest in the maternal role—a central focus of object-relations theory. All of her previous interests coalesced in a unique manner in one of Kristeva’s most important works, “Stabat Mater,” originally published as “Héréthique d’amour” in Tel Quel (1977).1 Kristeva divides each page of this text into two distinct columns. The two columns represent what she appreciates respectively as the semiotic and symbolic dimensions. The term “semiotic” is derived from the Greek work semion, meaning a “trace, mark or distinctive feature.”2 It indicates those traces of the maternal voice that have been muted in the official structures of Western culture. (This latter dimension of culture is named by Lacan the “symbolic” and is also associated with linguistic competence.) Thus, the left-hand column, with its impressionistic images and expressions, is basically a semiotic evocation of a woman’s (possibly Kristeva’s) experience in giving birth to a child. This is juxtaposed with a highly theoretical text that examines the symbolic cult of the Virgin Mary. It describes the cult’s seeming exaltation of women that, at the same time, negotiates a domestication of the anguish, love, and hatred that are associated with the primal mother/child relationship. Although she allows that the semiotic and symbolic realms are not absolutely separate, Kristeva indicates that the “semiotic,” when aligned with maternity/women, indicates a repressed yet potentially disruptive force that can interrupt the civilized surfaces of the symbolic, including religion.
Kristeva’s work, however, contains a somewhat mixed message for women. It would seem that, on the one hand, she is advocating the rehabilitation of the maternal role, yet, on the other, she still endorses the Freudian necessity of the rejection of the mother—which she terms “abjection.” Kristeva advocates interruption of the maternal symbiosis by the classic third, a father figure. She nonetheless introduces a revision of this Freudian postulate with the “the father of individual prehistory,”3 who is described as a phantasm of a father who is the object of the mother’s love. She even proposes a merger of the two as a loving mother/father composite. The transference to this “Other” love object, in the guise of a paternal God, is graphically described by Kristeva in her book In the Beginning Was Love (1987).4 This study is a reworking of Freud’s The Future of an Illusion.5 Here she posits that Christianity’s message reenacts, even remedies, the dynamics of a problematic initial transference in the switch to this loving mother/father composite: “God was the first to love, God is love.”6
Given the death of God, however, Kristeva is concerned about the growing manifestation in contemporary society of the narcissistic wounds caused by the absence of such religious means of compensation. These involve problems of self-representation and personal relationships that stem from a defective transference. Kristeva’s solution is to propose the psychoanalyst as a substitute for the original transference object who, as a surrogate loving parent, allows a therapeutic enactment of unresolved conflicts. Such a process liberates a space that encourages conscious imaginative reconstructions. Yet religion is not entirely banished. In New Maladies of the Soul (1995), Kristeva even suggests the reading of the Bible.7 This is not to reawaken the religious impulse itself but to introduce an educative process for the impoverished contemporary secular imagination. By illuminating the way that religion and the biblical narratives can provide retrospective cathartic relief through their “necessary fictions”—either as revolt, as in communist Bulgaria, or as a resolution of residual Oedipal conflicts—Kristeva encourages the redirection of the energies that were formerly invested there into creative alternatives. In this way, interpersonal relationships of love are fostered, without illusions and without excessive demands or expectations of others.
LUCE IRIGARAY
Luce Irigaray came to Paris from her native Belgium in 1960. Her education and interests are multifaceted, embracing psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, social thought and politics, and religion. She is famous for having been expelled by Jacques Lacan from his École Freudienne, where she trained, after the publication of her doctoral thesis, Speculum of the Other Woman.8 This was a major study of the exclusion of women from participation in those institutions and practices of Western culture that decided matters concerning their own identity and destiny. Such institutions are associated by Lacan with the symbolic, which he also calls the Law of the Father, and which Irigaray aligns with a God made in man’s image. Irigaray’s work primarily concerns critical discussions of such a God and of alternative constructive modes of the divine, and the ensuing implications for women.
In the development of her ideas on God, Irigaray takes different approaches. First, in both Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One, she attempts to subvert the absolute ideal of the transcendent male God and father figure that has dominated Western religious traditions.9 To achieve this, in the essay “La Mystérique,” which appeared in Speculum, Irigaray deliberately adopts the role of a female mystic/hysteric and implies that women may share a mode of affinity with God in a dimension that exceeds the capabilities of language and expression—tools that are necessary for communication. She explores this extraneous zone of jouissance—suggestive of both excess and eroticism. The female mystic is portrayed as not sexually repressed, but as protesting by means of her body against religious regulations that have excluded women from full participation in religion’s official institutions of learning and in public sacred rituals.
In continuing her eulogy honoring women’s eccentricity, Irigaray introduces her infamous motif of the two lips of women’s sexuality as indicative of nonduality or a fluidity that allows women to resist traditional philosophical maneuvers such as objectification and appropriation. Irigaray also intends to use the two lips as an emblem of women’s alternative constructive abilities that are infinite in their possibility. In time, however, Irigaray became dissatisfied with this strategy. She came to believe that, if women are to effect religious and social change, their expressions cannot remain restricted to the nonrepresentable realm of mystical experience.
In “Divine Women,” an essay in Sexes and Genealogies,10 Irigaray depicts a new mode of relationship of women with God, whom she now refers to as the “divine.” Her project is to propose that women should themselves become divine. For Irigaray, God can no longer continue to be located on high as a remote authoritarian figure or as an unknowable Other. God must be appreciated as an integral part of a process of becoming, instead of confined to the static metaphysical categories of Being. The modes of the divine that Irigaray seeks to express will be both incarnate and inherent in creation. She proposes that, by abandoning a transcendent God, as well as the primacy of faith and dogma, “a new chapter in history”11 will thus be born, involving an intimate relation with the natural world.12 At the same time, Irigaray advises women to undertake an exercise of conscious self-reflexivity that questions definitions of “femininity” inculcated by patriarchal religious norms. Irigaray later elaborates on these ideals to include consciously disciplining one’s instinctual reactions and curbing one’s desires—what has been named women’s “natural immediacy.”13 Such practices have definite spiritual implications.
It soon becomes obvious, however, that Irigaray holds some rather explicit ideas about what mode of divine might now be realized by women. This is because Irigaray has become fascinated with a purported gynocratic age that predated patriarchy. Irigaray identifies this mythological period as a time of love, peace, and tenderness, where there was respect for the body and nature, and where people lived in communion with the divine. It is such virtues that Irigaray now endorses as appropriate for contemporary women to incorporate in their process of becoming divine. In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray affirms that, if she cultivates these virtues and disciplines her impulses, a woman will also be able to experience spirituality as a form of transcendence, or become divine, in her physical body.14 In this same work, however, Irigaray takes a somewhat unexpected step in delineating another new manifestation of the divine. She introduces a model of irreducible sexual difference that will take on ontological proportions in her work.15 Irigaray recommends that once a woman has attained a state of personal integrity, she can enter into a relationship with a male in a manner previously not possible. Such a relationship will also foster a realization of embodied human love as divine. It will also usher in “a new epoch of History.”16 Irigaray expands on this vision of divine love in I Love to You, where she proposes that this new era will be one that honors the couple. Thus, after the respective ages of the Father (the Jewish religion) and of the Son (Christianity), there is “the era of the spirit and the bride.”17
This suggestion should not be understood to imply only a revival of Christianity, as Irigaray has also turned toward Eastern religions. Since I Love to You, Irigaray has described her own personal spiritual quest.18 Her various practices of yoga and breathing, as well as an attitude of detachment, have been informed by selective readings of Hindu and Buddhist texts. One can appreciate Irigaray’s adoption of the tantric symbol of male and female figures in an embrace of disciplined sexual ecstasy as a fitting symbol of the divine love she advocates—a symbol lacking in the Western religious repertoire. The spiritual discipline that Irigaray now prescribes consists of an intriguing amalgam of Eastern and Western religious elements.
Unfortunately, however, Irigaray does not question the place of women in Eastern religions as critically as she engaged with Christianity. As a result, it appears that she may be simply reintroducing exalted ideals of womanhood that reinforce typical stereotypes. Irigaray will also make some unsubstantiated sweeping generalizations regarding women’s close relations to myth, to Eastern religions, and to the Buddha, “who venerates the feminine spiritual.”19 Perhaps the most questionable aspect of Irigaray’s advocacy of this path occurs when she proclaims the spiritual superiority of women. The consequence of such a romantic idealization of women is highly debatable.
Thus, while Irigaray’s work in Speculum and This Sex Which Is Not One was a critical denunciation of the injustice enacted upon women in traditional religions—most dramatically in the delimitation of women’s potentiality to be divine—her solutions are problematic.20 The introduction of a worldview based on a dualist sexual differentiation, the emphasis on heterosexual relationships as the ideal locus of a new era of spiritual history, as well as the recommendation of specific values and conduct for women to become divine all have a prescriptive tone. These elements diminish the fine achievement of her diagnosis of the continuing plight of women in religion—most especially Christianity.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS
Hélène Cixous grew up in French-occupied Algeria, appreciating her own situation as that of an outsider in multiple senses—as a Jew, as a women in Judaism, as a colonial. She recognizes this state, referring to herself as a “Jewwoman.”21 Her family came to France at the outbreak of the Algerian war in 1956, where she pursued her studies, completing a doctorate on the work of James Joyce in 1968. Her subsequent academic career has been mainly in English literature at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes. From her first writings, a collection of short stories titled The First Name of God,22 religious themes have suffused her work, as a “constant ‘poetico-philosophical’ companion.”23 Cixous coined the phrase écriture feminine to describe her own style of writing, influenced as much by Derrida as by psychoanalysis. This style, employed in many genres of literature (poetry, prose, and drama), is at once allusive and evocative. It is also visceral and finely attuned to nuances that have barely come to consciousness. While not entirely in a “stream of consciousness” form, this style of writing allows for associations and interruptions in a train of thought that avoids the logic of binary oppositions with its exclusions and closure. Cixous views the latter type of presentation as symptomatic of a “masculine” mode of thought, although she allows that men also use écriture feminine—Joyce himself being a prime example.
In Cixous’s work, the themes of the father, God, divinity, and religion interweave in complex patterns that constantly reformulate her preoccupation with attaining a state of integrity that is faithful to her own sense of openness to others and an affirmation of her own existence as a woman. In Cixous’s view, traditional religion, with its unitary God, imposes a rigidity that obscures, even denies, her own more fluid orientation. In her writing, Cixous seeks to discover another understanding of God, or gods, who reveal the multiple possibilities of “our own divinity.”24 For Cixous, such a notion of God is redolent not just of repressed memories, but “of what escapes us and makes us wonder. Of what we do not know but feel.”25
It is in her work Promethea, a feminine retelling of the myth, that Cixous presents a portrait of a mode of human relationship that is in keeping with her vision.26 It is a love between women that she presents as escaping the constraints of possessive and exploitative desire. Instead, love is an invitation to a noncalculative form of exchange that is open to extemporaneous variations from the basic expectation of recompense, characteristic of most gift giving. Above all, in its rejection of projections, and in its fostering of the unpredictable, such love summons each person to surpass their own previous assumptions and complacency. Such a love is in harmony with Cixous’s earlier evocation of God. Ultimately, for Cixous, God is a love or yearning that impels a human being to venture into the perilous unknown—be it in writing, in life, or in relationships. Such divine love is at once the impetus and gift of Cixous’s own writing.
NOTES
1. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” in Tales of Love, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 234–64.
2. Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, trans. A. Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 5.
3. Ibid., 25.
4. Ibid.
5. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: Norton, 1975).
6. Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love, 25.
7. Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
8. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
9. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter with C. Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
10. Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. G. C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
11. Ibid., 72.
12. Ibid., 52.
13. Luce Irigaray, I Love to You, trans. A. Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996), 64.
14. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
15. Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 98–99.
16. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 98.
17. Ibid., 148.
18. Irigaray, I Love to You.
19. Irigaray, Between East and West, 79.
20. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One.
21. Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing, and Other Essays, trans. S. Cornell et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 101.
22. Hélène Cixous, Le Prénom de Dieu (Paris: B. Grasset, 1967).
23. Sal Renshaw, “The Thealogy of Hélène Cixous,” in Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives, ed. M. Joy, K. O’Grady, and J. Poxon (London: Routledge, 2003), 173.
24. Cixous, Coming to Writing, 129.
25. Ibid.
26. Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea, trans. B. Wing (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).