In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith by Julia Kristeva, and: Tales of Love by Julia Kristeva (review)

L ’E s pr it C réa te u r Julia Kristeva. I n t h e B e g in n in g W a s L o v e : P s y c h o a n a l y s is a n d F a it h . Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Pp. 63. Julia Kristeva. T a l e s o f L o v e . Trans. Leon S . Roudiez. N e w York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Pp. 414. Fans of Kristeva’s early work in translation— The Revolution in Poetic Language, the Bakhtinian essays in Desire in Language—may find these new works disturbing companion pieces to an already disconcerting Powers o f Horror. This last mentioned book located the roots of borderline psychosis in the failure to separate from an engulfing pre-Oedipal mother as “ abject,” a not-yet-object for a not-yet-subject, “ magnet of desire and hatred, fascination and disgust, . . . an infection” (Tales, p. 374). Tales o f Love and a shorter, summary version, In the Beginning fVas Love, locate the foundation of the subject’s loving relation to the Other in a pre-Oedipal father, an “ imaginary father” (Tales, p. 311). It is not the pre-Oedipal mother, but this loving father, distinguished from the stern, tyrannical Father of the Law, who acts as object of primary identification. Kristeva thus revises the Freudian narrative by having the father rescue the subject from the stifling maternal body even before entry into the Symbolic Order. These two books take the twenty-year odyssey of Kristeva’s increasingly complex and problematic relation to psychoanalytic and feminist theory one step further. Here, however, that relation can be read not only in the new theoretical model, which does not approach the thrilling rigor and explanatory power of Revolution in Poetic Language, but also through the question: who has imagined this “ imaginary father” and why? Instead of answering this question, which would require a lengthy analysis and something like psycho­ analyzing the author, this review can only open it for further exploration. The analyses of philosophical and literary texts from the Western Canon in Tales o f Love, and the comparison between Catholic faith and the psychoanalytic transference in In the Beginning Was Love grow out of the concept of this loving father as furnishing the earliest structuring conditions, not for desire, but for relations in which the speaking being identifies with an idealized Other. The varieties of intersubjective structures resulting from this identification are traced in religious thought, imaginative myth and literature, metaphoricity as the “ linguistic correlative” of “ amatory experience” (Tales, p. 275), and, most pertinent here, successful transference relations in psychoanalysis. In writing these analyses, Kristeva occupies the “ position of the analyst” (Tales, p. 274). If “ amatory dis­ course” combines narcissism and idealization of the Other, then Kristeva’s discourse allows her to idealize this position and open it to narcissistic investment. In Tales o f Love, Psychoanalysis marks, in this history of the subject, the ‘first time love and, with it, metaphoricalness have been removed from the authoritarian domination of a Res externa, necessarily divine or deifiable” (Tales, 276-77). In In the Beginning Was Love, it is the liberation of theology: “ analysis begins with something comparable to faith, namely, transferential love,” but ends by giving the subject “ full awareness” of the nature of his/her fantasies and desires (Beginning, p. 52). Best of all, transference makes the analyst him/herself into that “ father having a maternal character” (Tales, p. 48). As a figure in the pre-Oedipal drama where “ there is no awareness of sexual dif­ ference,” the father who saves us from the Oedipal-mother “ is the same as ‘both parents’ ” (Tales, p. 26). For the writer of these texis, this position at once masculine and beyond or before sex­ ual difference seems to affoid a privileged, external view of feminism. The critique of feminism assumes the explicit form of a stream of apparently casual remarks, tossed off as seeming asides, often breathtaking in their sweeping oversimplification and naivete. For example: “ Now, when feminism demands a new representation of femininity, it seems to 100...