Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau by Thomas Kavanagh (review)

B ook R ev iew s identify motherhood with that idealized misconception and, because it rejects the image and its misuse, feminism circumvents the real experience that fantasy overshadows” (p. 234). It does? Which feminism? Similarly, Kristeva informs us categorically in In the Begin­ ning was Love: “ there is no secular discourse on the psychology of motherhood” (p. 43). These apparently disparate remarks are connected to the theory of the imaginary father through a chapter on the representation of motherhood and the Virgin Mary, “ Stabat M ater,” which both acts out and analyzes the author’s (and, according to her, Western women’s) hostility to women. She asks why the representation of the Virgin “ was able to attract women’s wishes for identification” (Tales, p. 256), and answers that it provided a way “ of dealing with feminine paranoia,” or “ the paranoid lust for power” (Tales, p. 257) at many levels, among which: “ The Virgin especially agrees with the repudiation of the other woman (which doubtless amounts basically to a repudiation of the woman’s mother) by suggesting the image of “ A woman as Unique” (Tales, p. 258). According to Kristeva, the women’s repudiation of “ an abject mother” (Tales, p. 375) is not only the norm, but the necessary norm that contemporary culture has lost and whose loss feminism has abortively attempted to mask: “ The image of the Virgin . . . had remark­ ably subsumed the maternal ‘abject’. . . . Lacking that safety lock, feminine abjection imposed itself upon social representation, causing an actual denigration of women; this in turn gave rise to increased antifeminism but even more so to a strong reaction on the part of women who were unwilling to bear, in narcissistic fashion, the representation of their own rejection of the maternal. . . . The first feminist generation . . . countered it [the image of ‘women-as-object’] with the image of the virile activist. . . ; the second generation advo­ cated a centripetal, mitigated, soothed feminine sexuality, before unearthing, quite recent­ ly, under the guise of romances among women, sadomasochistic havoc” (p. 374). In a chain of universalizations, beginning by generalizing her own repudiation of other women and of the mother to all women, Kristeva proceeds through a neglect of the vast majority of women never inside Catholic culture and its belief in the Virgin, through a preposterously counterfactual historical cause-and-effect narrative, to conclude by enclosing the whole of feminism into one of its most miniscule, most fleeting, and most insignificant sects, which could be tenuously connected to femininism only precisely because the movement is so diverse. If failure to reject the “ abject m other” leads to psychosis, then at least one variant of feminine psychosis “ might be analyzed . . . from the standpoint of the rejection of the other sex that it comprises” (Tales, p. 261). Universalizing the necessity to reject the preOedipal mother and love the imaginary father not only gives women a normalizing model, but one that relies on one of the tenets of Freudian orthodoxy most called into question today, by such theorists as Nancy Chodorow, Luce Irigaray, and Isaac Balbus, to name only a few. This framework gives Kristeva’s theory a mustily dated aura, difficult to recon­ cile with the description of her version of psychoanalysis as “ outrageous” (Tales, p. 276), “ revolutionary” (p. 375), and as “ the most radical approach to lucidity” (Beginning, p. 19). L e s l ie W. R a b in e University o f California, Irvine Thomas Kavanagh. W r it in g t h e T r u t h : A u t h o r it y a n d D e s ir e in R o u s s e a u . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Pp. xvi + 227. The essence of Thomas Kavanagh’s monograph is contained in his reading of Rous­ VOL. XXIX, N O . 1 101 L ’E s pr it C r éa te u r seau’s Levite o f Ephraim, in which language, the individual, and society are integrated to the extent that the traditional opposition between Rousseau’s socio-political works and his literary works seems unjustifiable. Kavanagh attributes Rousseau’s rewriting of the biblical text to its gruesome central image: a...