Subjectivity without Subjects (1998)

Kelly Oliver reads Kristeva’s imaginary father as a screen for an imaginary mother. In “Kristeva’s Imaginary Father” she depicts Kristeva as an iconoclast who subverts Lacanian paradigms of subjectivity:

1. Subversion of body/mind or language dualism. In Desire in Language (1980) Kristeva criticizes Lacan’s understanding of the subject’s transition from the mirror stage of the imaginary to the symbolic for ignoring how the materiality of the body subtends discursive and social formations. For Lacan the threat of castration enables the child to escape from the lure of the imaginary and thus to recognize the gap between its body and its image, the precondition for the child’s entry into the symbolic; however, in order to experience the threat of castration, the child must already be a subject within the symbolic. In contrast, Kristeva (like Irigaray) assumes that the mirror stage is already symbolic. She replaces Lacan’s body/mind dualism with a model of the maternal body as “ a bridge between the biological foundation of signifying functioning and its determination by the family and society” (Revolution in Poetic Language, 1974). Her notion of the maternal body is in my opinion similar to Spinoza’s notion of infinite substance; as Oliver says, “through jolts of matter the speaking subject is produced.”
2. Subversion of Lacanian notion of the paternal function. For Kristeva the move from the presymbolic to the symbolic is motivated not by castration threat or sense of lack but by excess and pleasure. The law of the mother, symbolized by the chora, “a nonexpressive totality formed by drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated,” precipitates material rejection; or maternal regulation set up by the mother’s body, as in the intrauterine state, lays the groundwork for the paternal function. Maternal regulation (in the intra- and extra-uterine state) precedes paternal regulation, both enables the child’s access to the symbolic order and threatens its logic. Kristeva ontologizes subjectivity by reading the relationship between mother and child before, during and after birth as a representation of the dynamics of a “subject-in-process,” a subject who is not unitary and closed but fragmented and always in the process of becoming. It is important to note both the biological and social foundations of subjectivity in Kristeva’s theory; the body of the mother is both a literal and a metaphorical one:

1) First there is the Maternal Body. (As in Irigaray’s thought) Intrauterine existence is representative of a subjectivity that is both embodied and symbolic, as the mother’s body regulates what goes in and what goes out of the fetus’ body. The infant “reduplicates” its early relationship with the maternal body through incorporating the mother’s breast; the incorporation of the breast prefigures incorporation of the other’s speech in the symbolic. Primary narcissism, then, manifests itself as the first identification of the fetus with a model or pattern of incorporation through reduplication; it is objectless and non-mimetic. Yet this identification with a model of incorporation sets in motion the logic of object identifications in all object relations, including discourse and love.

2) Then there is Birth, which represents abjection. The child is abjected from the mother’s body during birth. The infant is a not-yet- subject and the mother is a not-yet object in this transitional phase between his birth and his awareness of having been born. A narcissistic crisis is set in motion as the child seeks to separate from his mother but cannot since he identifies himself as abject, that is, identifies with the collapse of a boundary between inside and outside, experiences ontological instability and helplessness. In Powers of Horror (1980) Kristeva explains how the subject comes to identify himself with the abject. Since the mother’s desire is not given a signifier within the symbolic, the mother can only pretend to be the phallus or object of man’s desire; hence the child must take the place of no-object since the mother’s desire has no object. The child identifies with the “not I” in the space between the mother and her unattainable desire, the other.

3) Finally there is Conception, or the birth of the subject, which necessitates a loving, imaginary father. In Revolution in poetic language (1974) Kristeva explains the abjection of the mother in terms of primal repression: the Oedipal symbolic demands the exclusion of the mother’s body and her drives. The imaginary father, or mother-father conglomerate, enables the subject to abject (separate) from the mother. This father is an unattainable phallic ideal, the mother’s desire, and takes the place of the mother by giving love. Hence identification with the imaginary father (an identification that is objectless) enables the subject to separate from and remain connected to the mother, even though she is abjected. His love is what enables the subject to attain subjectivity. The imaginary father, then, serves as a bridge between pre-symbolic and symbolic realms (takes the place, in a sense, of Winnicott's transitional object), between preOedipal mother and Oedipal father: he represents the possibility of sublimating the drives, which leads to the discourse of love.

Kelly elides how Kristeva’s theory of subjectivity reinscribes Lacan’s phallocentrism; she does not ask this crucial question: If the maternal body provides a link between drives and desire, if maternal regulation precedes and provides the basis of identifications in the symbolic, then why must the mother’s body be abjected by the subject, as if it were the material excess that it regulates? Kristeva’s notion of the maternal function as constitutive of discourse and desire through repetition, the reduplication of the pattern of incorporation, is at odds with her notion that subjectivity is constituted on the basis of the abjection of the mother’s body even if the imaginary father is read as a metaphor for the imaginary mother, which is how Oliver reads Kristeva; if a paternal metaphor is bound to replace a maternal metaphor, we are back to the opposition between body and discourse or language implied in the Lacanian formulation of the subject. Sublimating the body of the mother through the figure of the imaginary father does not solve the problem. The dualism between maternal body and the symbolic can only be subverted if subjectivity is theorized from a perspective that does not demand the sacrifice of the mother or of her body. In order to bypass the mind/body split, one must think past the Oedipal to a theory of the embodied imaginary, reading the subject through the grid of multiple, embodied imaginaries instead of making one Western white imaginary inevitable, foreclosing the subject's agency. To borrow Irigaray’s metaphor, Kelly holds up a speculum to Kristeva’s corpus, reads the Kristevan trajectory of narcissism backwards and arrives at a celebration of female difference from a Kristevan account of maternal abjection made less tragic by a loving father. The split in Kristeva’s thought between a subject who is formed by her relationship with the mother’s body and a subject who is formed by her abjection of the mother’s body is foregrounded rather than repaired through Oliver’s revision, which proceeds through a series of metonymic substitutions that correspond to the position of the subject of mother’s body or breast, of birth and of conception:

1. First Oliver reads Kristeva’s notion of the imaginary father through Freud’s reading of the primal father as a father-mother conglomerate. She uses “La vierge de Freud” as evidence that the pre-Oedipal imaginary mother is implicated in the imaginary father, for in this text Kristeva argues that a “prehistoric, unforgettable, imaginary” maternal function is present on Freud’s text on da Vinci. Oliver then identifies Kristeva’s imaginary father as a “paternal” mother. The child identifies not with a substitute for the mother, but with the mother in disguise. Since the mother is a speaking subject, a symbolic mother even when the “other” is in her womb, then the imaginary father who will later take her place is really her in disguise.

2. The imaginary father is then likened to the mother’s desire for the phallus. Now the paternal mother is read as the maternal father, a combination of the mother and her desire for the phallus. Kelly conflates the psychoanalytic meaning of “phallus” with the more feminist notion of the “other”: “”The imaginary father is the maternal desire for the phallus. It is the other already within the mother, not only in the real sense during pregnancy but also in the imaginary and symbolic senses. The other is, after all, primarily a speaking being.” (70) Since the child occupies the space between the mother and her desire and is not yet a subject, the imaginary father is merely perceived as what mother desires, “not I.”

3. The imaginary father shifts from being a site of the mother’s desire to a screen for an imaginary mother whose love the subject identifies with, enabling her to make a transference to the symbolic. She uses Kristeva’s characterization of the mother’s love as “the facsimile of the third person” (71) in “The Father, Love and Banishment” as evidence to support her own position and juxtaposes this with Kristeva’s definition of love in Tales of Love as: “(not) a narcissistic merger with the maternal container but the emergence of a metaphorical object—in other words, the very splitting that constitutes the psyche and, let us call this splitting “primal repression,” bends the drive towards the symbolic of an other.” Since the mother must be abjected from the symbolic, her love is preserved through the love of an imaginary father, who is now the substitute for the mother, her replacement. The child identifies with the love of the imaginary mother qua imaginary father. Oliver asks, “Could the father of the law be wrong? Perhaps primary identification is not with the mother’s body but with the mother’s love.” (76) However—and this is how Oliver fails to read Kristeva—if the literal body of the mother is sacrificed in the making of metaphor of love, then how can she be seen as a bridge between semiotic drives and symbolic discourse?

Kelly’s reading then moves from an intrapsychic to an intersubjective one. Drawing from Kristeva’s “Stabat Mother” in Tales of Love (1987), she considers the mother’s subjectivity as well as the child’s and puts the mother’s mother in the place of the imaginary father: “If the mother loves an other, it is her own mother, and she loves her mother not only as an other but also as herself, now the mother.” (73). Kristeva’s notion of loving the other as/in oneself, an alternative to the identity/difference binary, is similar to Irigaray’s identification of “the neither one nor two” of the mother/daughter dyad as the logic of a potential female symbolic. Oliver emphasizes that the mother’s experience of the child as other is NOT a relation to the phallus or unattainable desire; instead, “the mother’s other is a natural other.” (75)

Oliver’s misreading of Kristeva’s corpus is productive. By offering a trajectory of the position of the imaginary father, from “paternal” mother to maternal desire to love for the mother, Oliver attempts to bridge the gap between the two contradictory notions of subjectivity in Kristeva’s thought; and although she fails (for the literal mother is in the end sacrificed to the metaphor of love qua the imaginary father as ground of sublimation), she also produces from this failure the possibility of theorizing a different relation to the imaginary mother. In addition, Oliver perform her own fantasy of Kristeva as the ideal mother of psychoanalysis while revealing Kristeva’s fantasy of herself as the ideal “son” of Freud, establishing her difference from Kristeva while setting up an idealizing identification with her. Bloom’s reading of the anxiety of influence between the fathers and sons needs to be revised when it comes to female writers and theoreticians: rather than define themselves against their predecessors, I argue, they seek connections that imaginatively reconfigure their predecessor’s corpus. So when Oliver suggests that Kristeva deflects her own desire for a union with an imaginary mother though her invention of the imaginary father, she identifies in Kristeva her own desire for a place within theory for an embodied female imaginary. Oliver’s adoption of Kristeva as an imaginary ideal mother of psychoanalysis is preferable to abjecting Kristeva’s notion of abjection, for she needs Kristeva as a support for her own theory of the imaginary mother. Hence she identifies with the “other” within Kristeva, the one who could abject the logic of the phallus from her thought; and this identification leads her to the notion of an imaginary mother which I will adopt for my own purposes, mapping it onto the dynamics of twentieth-century female-authored texts within which love functions as a metaphor for a selfhood that is always linked to a m(Other) who, although abjected from the dominant male symbolic, is still a positive presence in the real and imaginary lives of women.

Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971)

Winnicott is perhaps the only post-Freudian psychologist who is interested in the ontology of the self. He posits the existence of a third “potential” creative space in between internal and external reality through which the infant makes the transition from what Freud would call “primary narcissism” (state of undifferentiated fusion with the mother) to a sense of the self as separate but linked with the external world. The transitional object “belongs to the realm of illusion which is at the basis of experience. This early stage in development is made possible by the mother’s special capacity for making adaptation to the needs to her infant, thus allowing the infant the illusion that what the infant creates really exists” (19). Winnicott perceives of the infant’s ego development in terms of stages:

1. Oneness. Self= breast. This exists prior to the transitional stage.
2. Illusion created through symbolization. No sense of inside/outside, me vs not-me. Transitional stage. The transitional object is located in between inner and outer reality, as it is perceived as belonging neither to his body nor to the external world. Although the transitional object is a symbol for the mother- breast, its not being the mother-breast is just as important for the infant’s purposes.
3. Passage from object-relating to object-use (“playing with reality”) through destruction and survival of the object. A sense of separateness, of me and not me boundaries, evoves, resulting from the mother’s failure to always meet her child’s needs and from the child’s impulses; the infant can now relate to the mother as an object of projective identifications. If the mother “survives” (does not retaliate against) the child’s destruction of her subjectivity qua fantasy, then the child internalizes the “good enough mother” and develops the capacity to creatively use objects, which is the foundation of creative living and culture. This implies, on the part of the subject, an ability to play with the boundary between fantasy or fiction and reality.

*“Destruction” then does not mean rage at the mother in a Kleinian sense, whereby the infant resents the breast for failing to always satisfy his needs, but is coextensive with object-relating, projective identifications.

*Object-use incorporates but goes beyond object-relating; it involves an awareness of the mother’s separate subjectivity and of the externality of phenomena. At the same time, the subject can represent narcissistic fantasy (e.g., idealization, destruction) in play. In Winicott’s words: “Object-relating is an experience of the subject that can be described in terms of the subject as an isolate. When I speak of the use of an object, however, I take object-relating for granted and add new features that involve the nature and behavior of the object. For instance, the object, if it is to be used, must necessarily be real in the sense of being part of shared reality, not a bundle of projections. It is this, I think, that makes for the world of difference that there is between relating and usage.” (118)

Earlier Winnicott writes that “in object-relating the subject allows certain alterations in the self to take place, of a kind that has caused us to invent the term ‘cathexis.’ The object has become meaningful. Projection mechanisms and identifications have been operating, and the subject is depleted to the extent that something of the subject is found in the object, though enriched by feeling. Accompanying these changes is some degree of physical involvement (however slight) towards excitement, in the direction of the functional climax of an organism.”

Hence, with this notion of a third potential space, Winnicott revises Freudian/Kleinian assumptions and adds an intersubjective dimension to the intrapsychic one, exploring how the mother-environment affects the development of the ego:

1) aggression as innate to the subject, resulting from the clash of instincts with reality principle. Winnicott writes: “There is no anger in the destruction of the object to which I am referring, though there could be said to be joy at the object’s survival” (125). Destructive impulses do not arise when the reality principle frustrates instinctive drives; rather, the reality principle is created out of destruction (of the subjective object).

2) of narcissism as an intrapsychic, destructive phenomenon. Winnicott places importance on the responsiveness of the environment to the child’s need to find himself through creative processes. Narcissism (both primary and secondary, in Freudian parlance) must be encouraged in order for the self to acknowledge alterity, otherness; it is the basis of creativity, which involves playing with reality (rather than a retreat into fantasy).

3) of the death drive as primary. If the transitional space is what provides the foundation for the drives, then it would be anachronistic to postulate an innate death drive (Trieb).

Limitations of Winnicott’s work:

1. Ahistorical notions of what constitutes “good enough mothering,” that stress the importance of breastfeeding and the infant’s need for a constant maternal presence.
2. Ontologization of gender: associates “male” with doing (object-relating) and “female” with being (equation of me with not me, baby with mother’s breast).
3. Failure to consider the mother’s point of view, to incorporate it into his explanation of the holding environment. This failure undermines the intersubjective aspect of his work.

Kristeva's "Tales of Love"

Chapter 1: “Freud and Love: Treatment and Its Discontents”

Focusing on the trajectory of Freud’s theory of narcissism, Kristeva shows how it is constructed as a screen over an emptiness that is a consequence of the self’s ontological instability. However, she takes for granted the primacy of the death drive and the Freudian/Hegelian premise that the existence of an other can only be problematic for the self. Unlike intersubjective feminist theorists like Jessica Benjamin, she does not acknowledge the mother’s subjectivity and hence can supplement “the autoeroticism of the mother/child dyad” with a “third realm” that “chronically and logically precedes that of the Oedipal ego” (22). Her notion of Einfuhling (involving the assimilation of other people’s feelings) as what installs and protects the screen of emptiness is based on the baby's identification with a metaphorical object, the Imaginary Father. In this archaic stage, what the baby incorporates is what she becomes; having is tantamount to being. This is not an objectal identification, as the baby identifies with a model instead of an object; it is not so much mimetic as reduplicatory, involving an identification “which sets up love, the sign, and repetition at the heart of the transference” (25). She relates this relationship to the transference in the analytic relationship based on the baby’s immersion in the world of language prior to her capacity to symbolize: “when the object that I incorporate is the speech of the other—precisely a nonobject, a pattern, a model—I bind myself to him in a primary fusion, communion, identification” (26).

Hence objectless identification with an imaginary father (a "father-mother conglomerate" in Kristeva's reading of Freud) on the part of the not-yet subject proceeds through an immediacy of the child's identification with the maternal desire of the Phallus, which eventually becomes the child's identification with the imaginary father and the Phallus, for the "Third Party' is a space of metaphoricity that involves "a condensation of the semantic with the unrepresentable drives that sustain them." Three aspects of Kristeva's understanding of Einfuhling make it resemble Winnicott's formulation of transitional space as a fluid space between child and mother in which the child perceives himself as neither separate from nor identical with his mother: 1) Kristeva's description of an undifferentiated self, or of a not-yet subject, who already is a part of the symbolic order; 2) concomitant with the idea of a not-yet subject, the notion that there is no distinction between having and being, or of an identification that does not set up a boundary between being and having the other; 3) description of love for imaginary father as objectless, and of the "Third Party" (associated with the Phallus in Kristeva's thought) as a metaphorical and as an embodied space in which desire begins to take on signifiers. This subversion of subject-object boundaries presumed within Kristeva's description of preoedipal dynamics and the assumption of an unconscious that is embodied as well as linguistic has led contemporary theorists like Kelly Oliver to read Kristeva's imaginary father as a screen for the imaginary mother; however, Kristeva's relation of maternal desire to the phallus and her theory of maternal space as founded through a relationship of abjection, as well as the idealization of the imaginary father, has Campbell conclude that she is complicit with the psychoanalytic tradition of abjecting the maternal body from its considerations of the subject and of privileging the father over the mother. Both contradictory readings are true.

“Male Eros, Sublime Eros: On Male Sexuality”

Kristeva offers a history of discourses of love to illustrate how the erotic—relating to the preoedipal configuration of subject, mother and imaginary father-- is always sublimated into amatory love or Psyche. She writes that “at the very base of philosophical discourse love and soul can not be dissociated” (63). In philosophical discourse “phallic domination is elevated and metamorphosed into an apprenticeship of the Good and the True” (67). Platonic discourses emphasize the struggle between erotic and amatory impulses, between “painful, exorbitant possession, on black masses of shameful nights and bodies deriving pleasure from being ridiculed” and “superhuman effort or the part of the soul which, within the same phallic dynamics, leans itself away from the allurement of having to accede to the dignity of knowing and being” (68). Whereas in Phaedrus Plato displays pederastic love, its libidinal economy, in The Symposium, with the figure of Diotima, ann intermediate figure that enables sublimation, love is feminized, desexualized, “presented along the lines of an idealized object relationship that it takes for granted” (71). For Kristeva Diotima is the Phallus, presenting an “immediate vision” that is “an intellectual transposition of a pagan jouissance.”

Kristeva distinguishes between a manic homosexual Eros that “does not touch the mother” and the melancholy abject state of the soulosexual who “fashions a crown to a real or imaginary Diotima” (80), who abjects the mother and thus preserves a fascination for the morbid in the area around the “hole” (called the abyss, Kristeva notes, by Mann’s Aschenbach): “the adored and abhorred maternal sex”….(79)

More controversial is her identification of Eros with male homosexual libido and of lesbian desire as a “parenthesis,” “a neutralized, filtered libido, devoid of the erotic cutting edge of masculine sexuality” that is destined to miscarry.

“Holy Madness: He and She”: Training her analysis on the Song of Songs, Kristeva continues with her theme of how the erotic is transposed into the sublime. Here the heterosexual couple is what legitimizes erotic passion.

“Narcissus: The New Insanity”

Plotinus rehabilitates Narcissus, purges him of guilt; he turns speculatory love into a love of speculation, of an ideal Self that is conflated with an Other, the Supreme Good. In Kristeva’s words: “To the narcissistic shadow, a snare and a downfall, it substitutes autoerotic reflection, which leads ideal Unity inside a Self that is illuminated by it. Narcissus has been transcended and beauty becomes embodied in inner Space” (109). This entails a turning away from the eye (I) towards an identification with the light by which the soul “becomes a pure gaze towards the One” (Sun).

Narcissus is insane in the Ovidian account because he does not perceive that the other whom he wants to merge with is his self, that there is no object. This accords with Kristeva’s notion of identificatory love as objectless. Kristeva writes that “the object of Narcissus is psychic space; it is representation itself, fantasy. But he does not know it, and he dies. If he knew it he would be an intellectual, a creator of speculative fictions, an artist, writer, psychologist or psychoanalyst. He would be Plotinus or Freud” (116).

Reading Ovid’s Narcissus through Plotinus, Kristeva concludes that Narcissus’ error resides in mistaking his eye/I for the solar source of the one. For Plotinus, the loving soul must surrender its otherness and “give in to the sameness of the single light where it loses itself as other or as nonbeing.” Plotinus makes of Plato’s discourse a nondualistic metaphysics.

The mythical Narcissus is a modern character much closer to us, according to Kristeva, owing to the death of the One God. This is why images of psychological or esthetic Narcissi accompany the crises of salvation religions.

“Our Faith: The Seeming”

By making the libido narcissistic, Freud rehabilitates narcissism, inscribing it within “a new psychic action,” her reference to the imaginary father. Both libido and ego are dependent on the Other. Freud distinguishes between identificatory and object love and then, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, emphasizes hate as foundational. One is not born but becomes narcissistic, when instinctual autoeroticism becomes object love, following paternal identification, which produces the ego ideal. (One must become a subject in order to be narcissistic). Observing the primacy of the death instinct in Freudian theory, Kristeva concludes that “Narcissus kills himself because he realizes that he loves a fake.” One rarely succeeds in identifying fully with the ego ideal; instead of having to create what will enable him to equal it (a work or an idealized object), Narcissus fabricates an ersatz. This narcissistic seemingness “entails a modification of language” because it is fixated in the oral-anal stage prior to identification with the paternal ideal.

Kristeva continues with her theme of Narcissus as counterfeiter in her reading of Dante’s The Comedy, specifically of Master Adam (who alters currency) and with Sinon (deserter from the Greek camp who deceives the Trojans, invented by Vergil). She reads Myrrha as a third forger; her incest with the father conceals an original desire for the mother. Dante the poet’s ascent to Paradise is Dante’s way of rehabilitating the “seeming” aspect of narcissism: “only the feminine-maternal presence of Beatrice allows him, in canto III, to overcome the error that is the opposite of Narcissus’s (Dante the poet disavows the images produced by the sun as unreal and rushes towards the dazzling light) and to invest in the seeming of bodies in the quest for truth.” Hence for Kristeva The Comedy reconciles seeming with truth.

Like Dante the symbolist poets justify narcissistic seeming, or the creation of a source of narcissistic jouissance that is a substitute for the One. She contrasts the position taken up by Mallarme with the one taken up by Gide: whereas the former transforms Narcissus into empty psychic space, the latter sees “the full completeness of symbolic meaning” in appearances. The former’s version of Narcissus is ironic and de-centered; Narcissus is an empty feminine terrain onto which the artist/poet plays with images, meanings. The latter restores Narcissus to a god-like stature that he did not have since Christianity. Hence “esoteric art is the culmination of Christianity, which had removed Narcissus’s guilt.”

The history of Narcissus in Western discourse, his transmutation from Ovid in which he embodies (homosexual) Eros/mapping of this discursive representation of Narcissus onto Freudian theory--

Plotinus: the One/Sun becomes a substitute for the illusory image/eye in Ovid’s myth. Turning away from body to soul. Fusion with imaginary father. Sublimation.

Dante: the One is privileged over the image/eye as in Plotinus, yet it is incorporated into quest for spiritual perfection, One/Sun (Son). Sublimation that acknowledges the necessary presence of that which is sublimated. More dialectical, a justification for the Book.

With the death of the One God comes acknowledgement of the death drive

Mallarme: evokes instability, the anti-Oedipal, a regression through the mother’s body, through the screen that narcissism conceals; or a suspension in the emptiness of the narcissistic structure between pre-oedipal mother and father. It is necessary for the poet to wander here and play with word-significations related to the bodily drives, the semiotic.

Gide: Worship of the eye/image, fetishization of the Word-thing. Poet’s capacity for representation renders him the One God. This conception of Narcissus cannot be placed within the Freudian notion of the death drive as there is no separation between essence and appearance, symbol and idea.

Towards a Black Female Imaginary

While white psychoanalytic theorists have thoroughly engaged with psychoanalytic paradigms in order to rethink the position of the female subject, black feminist thinkers have, for the most part, steered clear of Freudian and Lacanian rhetoric (Hortense Spillers and Evelyne Hammonds are the only exceptions I have found so far). The easy answer to the question of why black female critics are uneasy with a psychoanalytic methodology is that the black female subject does not exist in classic psychoanalytic thought, which presumes a white, middle-class subject, and that psychoanalysis has a history of neglecting to historicize subjectivity which poses unique problems for black feminism. However, given the special attention that has been paid by white feminist critics to black women's literature since the nineties, given the fetishization of the black woman as Other who, in Valerie Smith's perspective, functions as a sort of "mammy" to rematerialize white women's discourse, I relate the reluctance of black feminist critics towards psychoanalysis to the skepticism of my black students in an English Composition class to the institutionalization of black English (or ebonics, a term that is preferred because it neutralizes racial connotations): a wariness of being reified, reduced to a body of knowledge that can be mastered by (predominantly white) academic critics who can further their careers though their own (mis-)interpretations. Even when the ostensible goal is to level the playing field, include the African-American subject in discourses traditionally reserved for white, middle-class subjects, what Foucault would have called "technologies of power/knowledge" are always at work.

Black women have ignored psychoanalysis not only because of their uneasy relationship with white feminists, who have neglected their work until it became politically convenient for them to "discover" it, but also because of their difference from black male critics, who have adopted a psychoanalytic corpus and made of race a metaphor: for instance, Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker. As Margaret Homans has noted in " "Black Composition'" black male critics have borrowed from the Lacanian view of the (universally male) subject who must distance himself from his mother, reduced to the body, in order to acquire a subjectivity at all. The adoption of race as metaphor, or a view of race that insists that race has nothing to do with the body, reproduces the gender bias within psychoanalytic thought: the body of the black mother is left behind so that the universal black male subject can ally himself with white male thinkers indebted to Derrida and Lacan for their "discovery" of the illusion of a stable subject. If the "black" man is an illusion, he too can occupy that neutral yet universal position of the subject of enunciation that the white man has occupied for centuries. Hence, by refusing to engage with psychoanalysis, black feminist thinkers affirm their difference both from white feminists and from black male critics who have, for the most part, ignored the intersection of race and gender in their theories of the subject that was the subject of Barbara Smith's essay "Towards a Black Feminist Criticism" (1975).

There's another possible reason for the uneasiness of black feminist critics with psychoanalysis: that it may not be possible to theorize the black female subject through the lens of much psychoanalytic feminist theory, or to revise psychoanalytic feminist theory to "fit" the black female subject. An intersectional approach, of which Valerie Smith has written about, does not work well with paradigms of sexual difference: one simply can not add "gender" to "race" in order to understand the position of the black female subject. This renders problematic a theory of the female imaginary that ontologizes and thus prioritizes the feminine, linking it with the fluid and relational. The "female" cannot act as an umbrella term to include all deviations from a heterosexual, white, class-privileged male standard. Thinking gender and race through an embodied imaginary, however, enables us to see the mutual dependency of cultural constructions of white and black femininity and to re-imagine our imaginary embodiments of each other (as monster or mammy, little girl or witch).

Should black women preside over a critical investigation of the black female imaginary? Though as a white woman I risk undermining my authority as a reader of black women's texts and open myself to the too-familiar charge of essentialism, I will say yes: theories of black female subjectivity should carry more weight when the theorists are black women who have experienced the double burdens of racism and sexism and who have acquired more than an abstract notion of what it means to "talk back," to borrow from bell hooks. If white feminists were to listen to black feminists theorize their own subjectivity instead of trying to make reparations for not listening, which is where they are at now, they would open up a playing field that, despite the twenty five-year-old trend towards a politics of inclusiveness, has never really been leveled. Even in "Female Subjects in Black and White," an anthology whose title holds out the promise of dialogue and debate between black and white psychoanalytic feminists, the dominant "voices" are those of white women who censer themselves and each other for their own misreadings of black women's literature. Such circular self-correction may function as a strategy of self-concealment, an easy way of appeasing race guilt; at any rate, it is not enough. Only if more black female critics become willing to creatively engage with psychoanalytic feminism could the potential for a cutting-edge dialogue, for a union of psychoanalysis with gender and race theory that transforms the terms of all three discourses, be actualized.

If black female critics have, for the most part, remained silent on the way race and psychoanalysis can inform each other, the works of twentieth-century African-American women novelists invite this critical re-appropriation. The novels of Hurston, Morrison and Walker anticipated the embodied imaginary of post-feminist thought, representing figural and imaginal imaginaries that connect black female subjects on an unconscious bodily level: Hurston portrays Janie's awakening to her desires through the image of the blossoming pear tree; Morrison explores the creative, erotic space between Sula and Nel through dream imagery that confounds the boundary between seer and seen. Identificatory bonds between black female subjects are forged on the basis of a shared pleasure in constructing a self that exceeds the categories of race and gender, reflecting the complex patterns of intertextuality among black female novelists as they rewrite each other's textual bodies, "play" with each other's "reality." The dialogic relationship between black women writers distinguishes them from Anglo-American counterparts, who have been more interested in revising male narratives (Don Quixote, Madame Bovary). What this suggests is a genealogy specific to the black female literary tradition: black women writing for each other, forming homosocial alliances in their mothers' gardens rather than locking themselves in their rooms to argue with their fathers' ghosts.

Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love

Jessica Benjamin is a feminist psychoanalyst who is interested in reconciling intersubjective theory with intrapsychic theory, in challenging the bias in psychoanalytic thought towards gender complementarity and in finding a space within theory for tensions and contradictions that have traditionally been foreclosed in psychoanalytic thought. In her words, intrapsychic and intersubjective theory must complement each other because "without the intrapsychic concept of the unconscious, intersubjective theory becomes one-dimensional, for it is only againstthe background of the mind's private space that the real other stands out in relief" (21).

In The Bonds of Love (1988) she puts forward a theory of sadomasochism that departs both from a drive-oriented Freudian account of masochism as aggression turned inward and from feminist accounts of women as unwilling victims of male domination. Instead, she insists that women are complicit with their own subordination and views sadomasochism through the lens of intersubjectivity (which asks us to think in terms of simultaneity rather than linearly, to see the self-other dyad from two different perspectives at the same time), as rooted in an imbalance between assertion of self and recognition of otherness. Our paradoxical dependence on others for our own sense of self is the core of the problem: if we destroy the other, there's no one left to recognize us but there's no way of avoiding the danger that the other can destroy us. For Benjamin the solution for the paradox of recognition is for it to continue as a constant tension.

The first chapter "The First Bond" focuses on the tension between recognition of self and other for both subjects of the preoedipal mother-child dyad. Some of her concepts here are useful to a new understanding of the imaginary, namely:

1) Her critique of the Hegelian notion of master-slave relations as inevitable, resulting from the clash of two self-consciousnesses. In Subjectivity without Subjects Kelly Oliver critiques Hegel on similar grounds, using Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of vision to argue that there is no split between a subject and an object, no gap between the seer and the seen; that the eye touches, is connected to the things of the world. Seems both Oliver and Benjamin reject the Hegelian dualism implied in Aufhebung, his notion that tensions between subjects cannot be sustained but must break down and polarize. In other words, for both Oliver and Benjamin identification does not have to be alienating and narcissism does not have to be pathological. Intrinsic to the Hegelian subject and to the classical subject of psychoanalysis is a subject who forms his ego from the external world, and who wants to assimilate otherness to himself (internalization) or whose identity is formed through a negative relation to another who is "not-me" (abjection). For Benjamin, the self is neither wholly formed by nor the sole creator of external reality.

Although Hegel acknowledges reciprocty, asserting that "they (the two subjects) recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another," he posits a self who experiences himself as absolute, whose goal is to be cut off from the other, an omnipotent "I." Benjamin posits a subject who can "be" with the other or share similar states without demanding that the other give up his or her difference as other; she borrows this concept of being with the other that allows room for mutuality and difference from Daniel Stern and from Winnicott and defines it as follows:

"To transcend the experience of duality, so that both partners are equal, requires a notion of mutuality and sharing. In the intersubjective interaction both partners are active; it is not a reversible union of opposites (a doer and a done-to). The identification with the other person occurs through the sharing of similar states, rather than through reversal. "Being with" breaks down the oppositions between powerful and helpless, active and passive; it counteracts the tendency to objectify and deny recognition to those weaker or different-- to the other. It forms the basis of compassion, what Milan Kundera calls "co-feeling," the ability to share feelings and intentions without demanding control, to experience sameness without obliterating difference." (48)

While Benjamin's intersubjective notion of recognition allows for sameness and difference to co-exist, Kelly Oliver challenges a notion of space and vision that is presupposed in neo-Hegelian theorists from Lacan to Butler, for "what our eyes cannot see are the elements that fill the space between ourselves and our objects and link us in the circulation of light and air that make circulation possible" (155). She uses the fetal-maternal body as a metaphor for an intersubjectivity that is very much like the one described by Benjamin and that is reminiscient of Irigarayan metaphors of placenta, angel and threshold to describe a mother-daughter relation that is "neither one nor two." Jan Campbell reads these as metaphors of a female imaginary that connects the real with the symbolic, body and language, history and psychoanalysis. The female imaginary is predicated on a notion of connection rather than of unbridgeable alienation between subjects, on a radical reconfiguration of postmodern subjectivity which assumes a gap between signifier and signified and a subject who has had to distance herself from the mother's body in order to be a subject at all. With the notion of the female imaginary subjectivity itself must be thought of in a new framework: narcissism, desire, recognition, the relationship between body and language, Oedipal dynamics, the death drive, Eros/Thanatos, etc.

Unlike Benjamin, Oliver privileges the notion of witnessing" to that of mutual recognition, which she still views as "presupposing a recognizer who has the power to determine who is in and who is out" and which risks reinscribing master-slave dynamics by excluding the other. She also writes that "what is recognized in the act of recognition is sameness, which continues to reinscribe the position of mastery by requiring that the other be assimilated in order to be recognized at all" (173). This conflation of recognition with identification precludes the simultaneity of two dynamic subjects in process which Benjamin's intersubjectivity incorporates and contradicts her theory of vision as fluid, mobile and traversing a network of sensory relations between subjects.

2) Benjamin also critiques Mahler's (an ego psychologist) theory of separation/individuation with its delineation into the three phases of differentiation, practicing and rapproachement (refers to phase in child development in which toddler has to reconcile grandiose ambitions with reality). For Mahler the internalization of the mother as a structure inside oneself resolves rapproachement by creating a sense of object permanency: one ventures out into the world as a separate subject, but with the mother "inside her." Since the mother's subjectivity is not considered in his account, the child's subjectivity is also incomplete. As Benjamin notes, the internalization of mother as a constant object "does not tell us how the toddler comes to terms with the difficulty that his own freedom depends on the other's freedom" (36).

Benjamin borrows Daniel Stern's "discovery" in the eighties that the infant is never totally undifferentiated (symbiotic) from the mother, but can distinguish from the very beginning itself from the world of others and reunites this with Winnicott's notion of "using" (creatively benefiting from) the object by destroying it in fantasy, which she sees as a solution to the Hegelian problematic: if the object is destroyed inside, then we know it to have survived outside. You destroy your fantasy of the object in order to come to terms with its otherness. For Benjamin Winnicott's theory of destruction "suggests a reality principle that is a positive source of pleasure, the pleasure of connecting with the outside, and not just a brake on narcissism or aggression. Beyond the sensible ego's bowing to reality is the joy in the other's survival and the recognition of shared reality" (41).

Winnicott's notion of the transitional space goes beyond internalization; during this phase the child uses transitional objects "as a passage towards the awareness of otherness, towards establishing a boundary between inside and outside" when that boundary (a linguistic one) has not yet hardened" (41). In this space the child "can play and create as if the outside were as malleable as his own fantasy." This turning of the real into an imaginary space is the precondition for agency, a sense of self; here the child knows the objects she plays with to be "outside," separate from the (mental, inner) self, yet suspends this belief in the otherness in order to enter the realm of play, creating as well as discovering the object. Intrapsychic dynamics exist in tandem with intersubjective ones: the self can not be located inside or outside the fiction of play, but on the boundary between the two, where they (the world of representations and the otherness of the objects) exchange places. This is where I locate the quixotic subject of women's fiction, at the meeting place between intrapsychic and intersubjective, where she does not have to choose between the inner world of mental representations and the outer world of real objects; this is our phenomenological reality before we enter the symbolic order and the polarities it sets up between inner and outer, representation and object.

Benjamin sees Winnicott's transitional space as a re-engagement with reality rather than a retreat into a fantasy realm. There is no opposition between reality and play in this realm; this opposition (false) is only set up when we enter the symbolic. If we take the transitional space as conceptualized by Winnicott to refer to the space of the female imaginary, then the imaginary in Benjamin's reading involves a creative engagement with reality rather than an identification with static mirror images that do not correspond to anything in the "real" world.

3) Benjamin defines Eros as "a life force that aims at creating unities" and contends that Freud's neglect of Eros accounts for a missing links in theories of domination and subordination. A return to Eros, conversely, enables us to understand how the otherness that cannot be reconciled to the self can be a source of freedom (she takes this up in Like Subjects, Love Objects in more detail, postulating Eros as "the striving towards the other, the process of recognition").

How does this imaginary implied in Benjamin's work play itself out with the quixotic subject of women's fiction? The books written by twentieth-century women writers seem to illustrate the negative consequences of a masculine imaginary at the same time that they point towards an alternative (female imaginary). I'm thinking in particular of de Cespedes' Dalla parte di lei, in which there is a breakdown between recognition of self and of other like the one Benjamin describes. Reversing Winnicott's formula in "The Use of an Object," for instance, Alessandra kills her husband to preserve him in fantasy, rather than killing her fantasy so that her husband can survive in reality. However, since the book is framed as the autobiographical account in the aftermath of her trial, the "I" who writes the book is at a remove from the "I" as subject who can not distinguish between fantasy and reality; this "I" is aware of the otherness of Francisco and of her mother, a like subject whom Francisco replaces. If the murder of her husband is the result of a breakdown when she is confronted with the violence of a negative masculine imaginary, she undoes splits in her subjectivity by representing them (another way in which what I call the female imaginary manifests itself), creating a textual space that holds open the tension between recognition of self and of other. Also, within the frame of her fiction de Cespedes' narrative subject creates an erotic imaginary that connects with her mother and with Francisco on a bodily level.

In "Master and Slave" Benjamin relies on Winnicott's theory of destruction and survival to further develops a theory of masochism and of sadism from an intersubjective perspective which she juxtaposes against Hegelian and Freudian account of masochism. Winnicott, as we've seen, opens up a productive space within psychoanalytic thought for thinking about the imaginary, although she does not use this term: her notion of transitional space and transitional objects presumes a third intermediate space exists in between fantasy and reality, inner and outer, in which the baby who is moving towards rapproachement (differentiation of self from mother which Benjamin sees as present from the beginning but realized consciously by the subject through his or her entry into the symbolic) experiences herself as neither separate from nor one with the mother, an extension of her body. This third space is creative, as the child symbolizes through play a relationship with the mother that moves from destruction (rooted in the desire to be recognized by her) to joy in her survival (she neither imposes her will on the child or assimiliates herself to her child's will; she is made to appear to the child as a separate but similar subject). Benjamin argues that we destroy the m(other) in fantasy so that she can survive in reality. Unlike the Freudian model which posits aggression as inherent in the subject, Benjamin sees the joy of connection with a subject who is unlike me as the driving force behind civilization: tensions result when the other does not survive the self's destruction or the self is made to disappear through the other's assimilation of it. Both masochism and sadism, then, stem from a need for recognition and to be recognized (the two are intricately linked). The sadist needs the masochist to survive his destruction of her to be recognized; the masochist needs the sadist to destroy her in order that she might survive. It is not the pain itself she enjoys but the connection she experiences with her lover who witnesses her in her most vulnerable state, who releases her from her inauthentic self. Polarized master-slave relations result from breakdown in tensions of recognition also becomes a search for self and other, a vehicle for bringing foreclosed tensions back into play. But this vehicle (sadism or masochism) fails to accomplish any life-affirming drive towards otherness, since the polarized relationship never allow the tensions to be sustained. The masochist becomes a thing and thus cannot satisfy the master's need for her to survive her; rather than acquire a subjectivity, she loses more and more of herself until she is his no-thing (the trajectory of The Story of O).

Reading this chapter I became confused by her adaptation of Winnicott's notion of destruction and survival to the notion of masochism and sadism. I took Winnicott (whom I have yet to read) to be referring to a destruction that takes place only on an imaginary plane, that is symbolized but never really lived in relation to the mother; in other words, sublimated destruction. But here Benjamin is referring to "real" destruction which takes the form of violence against/upon bodies. If in the former case the other survives because I do not violate him in reality, only in fantasy, how can the other survive when violence is experienced on a corporeal level? In other words, how does the masochist survive the other's violence?

In Like Subjects, Love Objects she revises her account of masochism and sadism to reconceptualize the relationship between Eros and Thanatos. Eros is no longer the goal of Thanatos, Eros and Thanatos exist side-by-side and the tension between these polarities is never resolved. If with Eros (desire for connection with an other who is unlike me) comes Thanatos (aggressive energy which desires to destroy otherness, either incorporating it into the self or abjecting it) the play between the two is a never-ending dialectic. Neither the shared desire to connect with an other nor the desire to destroy otherness is originary in this revision of the Hegelian/Freudian account. This seems to make more sense given the direction of history; it can also be recast as a sustained tension between "masculine" and "feminine" imaginaries.

I like the fact that she de-pathologizes masochism and sadism while emphasizing its danger for subjectivity, but I also felt she needed to historicize them more. In exploring the association between gender and master-slave relations, she at times conflates femininity with masochism and masculinity with sadism, particularly through her habit of returning to parenting styles (authoritarian vs. permissive) in early childhood for explanations of the masochistic or sadistic adult. The need to be recognized by the other means something different in an individualistic culture like the one we have in the U.S. and this was only vaguely addressed; she dismisses the idea that we internalize modes of relationality way too readily and universalizes what is a culturally determined desire.

Chapter 4: “The Oedipal Riddle”

Benjamin deconstructs Freud’s reading of the Oedipal myth to show how it is predicated on binary oppositions that preclude the recognition of difference: if we do not acknowledge the mother as a separate subject on a theoretical and a practical level, Benjamin argues, then we cannot come into being as separate subjects either; for the self if dependent on the mother for the recognition she seeks, and if that mother does not survive, the self does not survive either. (“Survival” to Winnicott means not repudiating or withdrawing from the child). The repudiation of femininity that is written into the Oedipal complex by Freud as the incest taboo—the Oedipal injunction that one must not be like the mother in order to possess her, or the splitting off of identificatory love from object love, the latter of which reduces the other’s subjectivity to a thing—has disastrous consequences for the boy’s development of selfhood and agency. Benjamin focuses her critique on two aspects of Freud’s reading of the Oedipal myth:

1) His idealization of the Oedipal father, which for her conceals masculine anxiety about the aggressive aspect of the primal father, who would rather kill the son than have the latter succeed him and inherit his kingdom (think Laius). According to Benjamin, this violence is projected onto the mother, who represents a dangerous narcissistic regression, a siren.

2) His neglect of the role of the Oedipal mother, who is eroticized by the child, and of the role of the rapproachement father in the development of early narcissism. Benjamin calls for a distinction between maternal and paternal ego superego and ego ideal that does not polarize the mother into a representative of fusion and the father into a representative of the exciting outside, the principle of separation, and makes the case for a healthier narcissism by referring to the boy’s need for a “playful, secondary identification with femininity.”

She argues for a New Oedipus, a “rereading of the story as a confrontation with the knowledge of self and other” that “presumes the possibility of a postoedipal separation in which individuals are able to turn back and look at their parents, to critically assess their legacy rather than simply identifying with their authority” (180).

My critique of Benjamin’s reading (which is also Campbell’s critique): Why not think outside the Oedipal altogether in the sense of creating symbolic space for imaginaries that do not, have never adhered to an Oedipal framework, while acknowledging the persistence of the Oedipal as a cultural imaginary?