Julia Kristeva Interviews

1. Julia Kristeva Interviews The Ethics and Practice of Love conducted by Francoise Collin Anna JC Chen/04-29-2011

2. Main points • Dependency and maternal love (mother and child) • Women’s dependency vs. Men’s dependency • Lover’s discourse: religion, women’s writing, psychoanalysis • Contemporary phenomena on social bond and psychoanalytic bond • Literary as sublimation

3. Opening introduction • My thoughts on love in Tales of Love are based primarily on maternal love, which I believe is at the heart of all loving relationships. I believe that maternal love is also at the base of the nuclear relationship of dependency. (p62)

4. The relationship between mother and child • I believe it’s a reciprocal relationship,… • (the child is dependent ) …on the mother that Winnicott calls a “transitional space”, and then on the “object” of love and hate that she becomes. • …the mother relives her own childhood and finds herself dependent again on the ideal object, that is, on the narcissistic mirage of her child. (p62)

5. The link of dependency and suffering • Two strains of dependency: primary dependency and secondary dependency. • When this (dependency) goes too far, however, we run the risk of complete submission, a renunciation of the same for the other, and total enslavement. In that case, dependency becomes a slow death that can be quite painful. (p62)

6. Submission apply to a woman • A vestige(遺跡) of the mother can be found in every passionate relationship. When a woman is in a passionate relationship with a man, her dreams or fantasies often depict a ghost of her mother hovering over him. …she is reliving her infantile dependency on her mother’s body, the jouissance that this body gave her, and the suffering that frustration…of the mother’s body can provoke in the child. (p63)

7. Men’s dependency vs. Women’s dependency • Men’s dependency on the erotic object is extremely important,… • Men’s servitude(奴役狀態) to their erotic objects is thus complete and fundamental. Their servitude even includes an element that offers a way to become free of it: male perversion. Perversion also gives men an opportunity to change objects easily, … So the man becomes a slave to the woman, although he still does not feel a need to carry out the erotic act through desire. (p63)

8. Female dependency has more to do with narcissism, which paradoxically makes it seem more psychological. • Narcissism is a modality that precedes object relations, desire, and the ensuing oedipal struggle. Women’s addiction to the core of this dependency…; it is more archaic and less erotic than men’s. It is archaic in the sense of an archeology of one’s own image, of many parts fused into a whole. (p64)

9. Female dependency be more radical and more dangerous than men’s • Perversion is an attempt to stabilize a narcissism disturbed by the discovery that the mother has no penis. • …male sexuality and the social process of sexualization clearly offer men a greater opportunity to amass fetishes and substitutes capable of replacing the fundamental lack and offering a hope of satisfaction– a satisfaction that may be only temporary but is satisfying both phallically and narcissistically. (p64)

10. Sociohistorical factors • As soon as we speak about dependency, we must face narcissism and acknowledge that our self-image is dependent on someone else. When this other fails to present us with a satisfactory image, our dependency becomes so great that we break down. Social discourse, then, is quite essential to the narcissistic structure. Narcissistic vulnerability entails an ambiguous relationship to language and an unstable, ambiguous symbolic bond. (p65)

11. Women’s writing and literature • … “women’s writing”, however inconsistent they may be, have relied on the very transverbal or preverbal elements I discussed earlier. (p66) • These elements characterize Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropismes(向性), Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and Duras’s somewhat pallid discourse… when women have the impression that they can no longer access language and when they say that language is phallic, they believe they are more closely identified with this archaic register. (p66)

12. Lover’s discourse • …the Christian religion is a religion of love and that churches are filled with people who go there to hear that God loves them;…(p68) • I believe we are experiencing a disintegration of “Our” civilization, and thus of the social bond in general and lover’s bond in particular….There is no more religion, which once served as a lover’s discourse but is currently breaking down….All that remains are traces of prior lovers’ codes, which tend to return in women’s literature and to attract women readers. (p68-69)

13. Psychoanalysis has given shape to a lover’s discourse striving to be new; it is the only place laid out explicitly in the social contract that allows individuals to speak about their loves, to find a discourse appropriate to their amatory(愛情的) experiences, and to construct it through a relationship that is itself a loving relationship with their analyst. （p69)

14. Mother (maternal substitute)in contemporary phenomena • Since the female structure has been partly subsumed by the male structure, the difference between the sexes may appear less clear-cut today. Yet the dependence on the mother we spoke of earlier has not disappeared. (p71) • So the sudden importance of women, who were once believed to be interchangeable and who have obtained a power and an independence never seen before, is accompanied by a challenge to their own male jouissance and narcissism. (p72)

15. Love relationship between analyst and analysand • …the analytic bond is a contract with another person requiring that I recognize his rights and thus forgo some of my own desires. This relationship could be said to be one of desirable dependency. (p73) • …analytic work requires countertransference（反移情）, that is, it requires that the analyst be needy and weak. (p73) • Role reversals can also occur in which the analyst plays the role of an object for the analysand, who becomes the subject. (p74)

16. If the analyst does not love his patients, he should give up his efforts to treat them. This love is an imaginary one, and that is where Lacan’s genius comes into play.(p74) • I may be very well aware that the couch and the armchair are merely a device and that strictly speaking I don’t really love this patient or that patient, but my adventure consists in participating in the imaginary of love, which exposes my discourse and my personality to the joys and sorrows of love. Therein lies the source of the effect my discourse has on the other person: transference. (p75)

17. Human condition: separation • Religion is rooted in our inherent separation.(p75) • …separation is a place of suffering. (p75) • The analytic contract presumes that someone comes along who is suffering because he is separated. He enters into a new relationship to remedy this prior and traumatic separation and must be able to separate himself in a less painful way. In effect, he must learn how to separate. (p75)

18. Pleasure-pain • The “pain” can be the pleasure of “getting your hands on it.” This pleasure-pain is a need for authority and for the mother’s presence– a need that is altogether blissful. We may need it in a purely erotic way, in which case we lose our attraction to the freedom we were discussing earlier. Because of this “pain”, which acts as a true narcissistic screen, independence may become very trying and intolerably lonely. (p76)

19. Literature as sublimation • …the imaginary of a literary work is the most extraordinary and most troubling vestige of the dependency between mother and child.…A work of literature represents an independence that has been conquered through the force of inhumanity. It breaks off natural relationships; it is patricide and matricide, and it is eminently alone. If you look beneath the surface, however, as analysts do, you will find a dependency and a secret mother that provide a bedrock for this sublimation.(p76-77)

20. Questions • According to Kristeva, do you agree that men’s dependency is more on the erotic object and women’s dependency is more on the narcissism? • Do you agree that the lover’s discourse made between analyst and analysand works the similar way as the love contract between men and women ?