Motherhood: A Site of Repression or Liberation?

Kristeva and Butler on the Maternal Body

Fanny Söderbäck, The New School for Social Research

The state of the maternal has been disputed among feminists for quite some time. Julia Kristeva—whose work will be my focus of attention here—has been criticized for her emphasis on the maternal, particularly with regards to her alleged equation of maternity with femininity. Critics have suggested that such equation risks to reduce woman to the biological function of motherhood. Judith Butler, to give an example to which I will return at length, speaks of a “compulsory obligation on women’s bodies to reproduce” (Butler 1999, 115).[1] Kristeva herself has noted that “it seems . . . difficult to speak today of maternity without being accused of normativism, read: of regression” (Kristeva 2003, 207).

I will argue that Kristeva by no means reduces woman to the function of motherhood but that, rather, she returns to the maternal body in part to free women from this very reduction. By bringing the mother out of the shadows she provides women with a past (a genealogy of their own, a community of women, a history hitherto repressed) and, simultaneously, with a future (in the sense of liberating them from pre-defined roles and positions—from motherhood as the only form of subjectivity available to them). It is exactly the future that is at stake when Kristeva speaks of the maternal, and more specifically it is the possibility of temporal change that depends upon it. The maternal body to which she urges us to return must, as I see it, be understood qua temporalization: that to which we return is temporal, moving, displacing, renewing. The return is neither nostalgic nor aimed at preserving some essential notion of motherhood—it makes possible new beginnings, allowing for a future pregnant with change and transformation. Butler ends her critique of Kristeva with the following remark—one that is meant to describe what would happen if we stopped focusing on the mother the way Kristeva has done hitherto: “The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its ‘natural’ past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities” (GT, 119). I will attempt to show that these words in fact capture Kristeva’s own project, that such “open future” is exactly what she is aiming at through her continuous return to the maternal body.

The implication of this retrieval of the maternal is twofold: Firstly, it situates Kristeva within a materialist tradition and allows her to articulate and inscribe a morphological-phenomenological legacy of embodiment contra merely constructionist or discursive narratives.[2] Secondly, it gives her ground to re-articulate time as inseparable from space and thus to challenge and overcome the deep-rooted tradition that divides time and space alongside a mind-body-dualism. Surprisingly, perhaps, she establishes this ground by returning to a thinker who for many feminist scholars is the example par excellence of the very dualism that is put into question: Plato. This essay aims at carefully tracing Kristeva’s engagement with Plato, and I will argue that the breakdown of the distinction between time and space is to be found at the core of his writing. If, as I will argue here, the maternal body to which Kristeva returns must be understood not only as corporeal but also as a temporal principle, then we are forced to think through the intimate relation between temporality and materiality in ways that will come to challenge and renew the very materialist tradition that Kristeva herself most often is understood to represent.

Kristeva’s earliest thematization of the maternal appears in her doctoral dissertation, Revolution in Poetic Language. It is here that she first articulates her notion of the semiotic chora, associating it with the maternal body and early heterogeneous drives.[3]Kristeva herself picks up the Greek term chora from Plato’s Timaeus; a dialogue that more than anything deals with the question of beginnings, as it narrates the story of how the cosmos and its living creatures were created. I will turn both to the Platonic text, and to Kristeva’s engagement with it, in order to trace the meaning and significance of chora,[4] and to point to some difficulties and issues surrounding it.[5] I want to examine Kristeva’s account and description of the semiotic chora in order to clarify what I think she means by the maternal, and to tie it to the question of temporality in ways that I believe undermine the charge of essentialism raised against her on this point.[6]

The Semiotic Chora

Put most simply, chora, for Kristeva, is the articulation of primary processes and drives. We may say that it is the material from which language emerges, and yet, as I hope to show, to characterize it merely as ‘material’ is both problematic and inaccurate, on Kristeva’s as well as on Plato’s account. Kristeva explains that all discourse “moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it” (Kristeva 1984, 26).[7] It is a “preverbal functional state that governs the connections between the body (in the process of constituting itself as a body proper), objects, and the protagonists of family structure” (RPL, 27). Kristeva underlines that the subject involved in such a process is no mere subject of understanding, but one inhabited by pre-symbolic drives and, importantly, one connected to and oriented towards the mother (not yet differentiated from her). Both Kristeva and Plato characterize chora in maternal terms: Timaeus, in Plato’s dialogue, famously likens it with a ‘mother’ [meter] and a ‘wet-nurse’, drawing on female connotations distinct from the paternal demiurge and creator present from the outset of his story (Plato 2001, 49B, 50D).[8] For Kristeva, the maternal body is “the ordering principle of the semiotic chora” (RPL, 27).

One could object that such an account problematically seems to divide a pre-symbolic, drive-ridden, natural, passive, maternal mold or receptacle from a symbolic-logic, cultural, active, paternal force of creation, with the consequence that we, again, essentialize such categories along gendered lines. Many feminists have indeed responded in such a way. Such concerns, however, I see as stemming from a misconstrual of what Kristeva means when she speaks of chora, and moreover a misunderstanding of the meaning and function of this ambiguous concept as it appears already in Plato.

Let us therefore recall the function of chora in the Platonic dialogue: Timaeus has recounted the creation of cosmos (the all), as it was brought about by the good god (the demiurge, the father) in his own (perfect) image. Already at the outset, we encounter a creation rather different from that of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The demiurge does not create the world ex nihilo—his act is rather one of bringing order to that which lacks order: “the god thus took over all that was visible, and, since it did not keep its peace but moved unmusically [out of tune] and without order, he brought it into order from disorder, since he regarded the former to be in all ways better than the latter” (TM, 30A). We learn two things already at this early point of the dialogue: First, that matter existed before the creation we are about to witness. Second, that this matter moved, albeit in a disorderly manner. If matter moved and was subject to change before the demiurge began his work, then matter was temporal before the ‘creation’ of time. The world is not exactly created, but rather ordered. And similarly, time is not exactly created, but rather given a shape that can be counted or measured. The act of creation will be a matter of calculation and ordering, of mixing things together according to certain proportions, and of separating things out according to mathematical formulas.

Later on in the dialogue, when Timeaus has given a detailed account of the different steps of this calculative ordering, and consequently the coming-into-being of the universe as we know it, and the ‘creation’ of time and heaven, he stops, as it were, and recalls that the cosmos came about not only in virtue of the activity of the divine intellect, but rather through its mixing with necessity, or what he here calls “the wandering cause” (TM, 48A), and later will name chora (TM, 52A). Timaeus, who has given an extended account of the nature of the four elements and their relation to one another, here acknowledges that, in fact, “none has yet revealed their birth,” but that we rather speak of them as if we knew, without actually knowing. The question, then, remains as to what they were and how they were inter-related before the birth of heaven, i.e. before divine interference (and before the beginning of time in its measured sense).

It is important to note that the issue at hand is the extent to which we speak about things as if we knew their beginning, and that we do so by setting them down as principles. Timaeus speaks of letters and syllables—the very building stones of language. We liken the natural elements with linguistic elements—as if they were a social construct like language. And yet, Timaeus tells us that such likening is inappropriate, that there is something about the natural elements that escapes and precedes language. And, as we know from so many interlocutors of this dialogue, the deep problem concerning chora is exactly the extent to which it cannot be spoken of, the extent to which language fails when we attempt to bespeak it. To find words that are trustworthy and stable, Timaeus explains, is difficult when we try to speak of chora: “How then, once we’ve raised likely difficulties about them [the elements], should we speak about this third kind itself [chora], and in what way, and what should we say” (TM, 49B)?

This, of course, is exactly what is at stake in Kristeva’s work. She points to this very passage in Plato, in a footnote, as she raises the question of whether the receptacle in fact is “a ‘thing’ or a mode of language” (RPL, 239 n12). The ‘revolution’ that she ascribes to poetic language is really quite literally a revolution (that is, a return). She seeks out and underlines early (preverbal) traces as they emerge in avant-garde modern literature—the ways in which poetic language allows us to return to a pre-symbolic space-time, one that transcends and threatens language and yet is internal to and necessary for it to emerge and transform. She explores how linguists and philosophers, in approaching language and subjectivity, contrary to the poets tend to repress and deny these very maternal-material (and, as we will see, temporal) beginnings through a kind of repression and calculation forgetful of the heterogeneous character of the affects and drives. It is at this juncture, for Kristeva, that chora is introduced as that space-time which contains the repressed semiotic elements. Poetic language “reminds us of its eternal function: to introduce through the symbolic that which works on, moves through, and threatens it,” and in so doing, it becomes “the ultimate means” for the “transformation or subversion” of the symbolic, “the precondition for its survival and revolution” (RPL, 81).

But is chora, for Plato and Kristeva, not just a silent ground then? The condition and soil, the receptacle that passively awaits and makes itself available for a paternal demiurge or speaking subject who occupies it in order to impose its own law and name on it? And if this is so, is it not deeply problematic that both Plato and Kristeva associate such a ground with the feminine, with the maternal body? In addressing these questions, we must ask what it means for chora to be a receptacle. How can this be understood in non-passive terms, as different from mere receiving? In Plato, the term chora (translated as Space) is intimately related to (if not the same as) ananke (necessity, second cause, material elements). It signifies both materiality and spatiality. It is important to note, here, that for the Greeks, Space (capitalized here as in the dialogue to mark the distinction from what we tend to understand by that term), had little in common with the Cartesian homogenous or geometrically neutral space that we associate it with today. Matter and space, in the Greek context, cannot be thought separately. Space cannot be emptied of matter—we are not dealing with pure conceptual form. Chora, therefore, cannot be thought of as an abstraction. It is irreducible to intelligible categories—this is exactly why it is so difficult to bespeak. What is at stake is the possibility of thinking expansion in non-mathematical terms, outside of the Cartesian model so familiar to us.[9] Such a space is only ‘neutral’ insofar as it stands between the intelligible and the sensible—that it itself belongs to neither of these realms, but rather constitutes a third kind, or a third genus. Its neutrality must, in my mind, not be understood as pure availability or receptivity, but rather as that which refuses dichotomization.

Moreover, and this is crucial for my reading (and, as I see it, for Kristeva too), by virtue of being ‘materialized’ or even ‘embodied’, this kind of Space is alive, it moves, it is animated (in contrast to Cartesian space which, qua abstract, is lifeless and immobile). Timaeus himself is very careful to underline this point. While chora is introduced first and foremost as necessity, it (or she) is by no means stable or solid. She rather introduces movement into a universe perfected and self-same. With chora, difference is introduced (the causes are, importantly, two). She names the expanse, the opening implied in the act of creation or generation. The origin is abundance with regard to itself—it is that which cannot contain itself. Because the very possibility of fecundity relies on the availability of an opening: a self-contained entity cannot, per definition, be an origin.[10] This comes close to what Socrates associated with aliveness at the beginning of the dialogue—when he urged his interlocutors to give life to the city of speech (TM, 19B-C). Socrates, however, described the movement and expansion of the city in terms of struggle, contention, and war. Timaeus, at this point, offers an alternative account of movement and expansion—one grounded in generation and birth. Both accounts, importantly, tie movement and expansion to time and temporal matters such as birth and death.[11]

Contrary to what has often been assumed, and to what Timaeus himself claims, chora is therefore a morphous and morphizing Space. It orders the elements through a kind of rhythmic and sweeping movement. And as this movement is being described we begin to take note of the complex chronology with which this creation is taking place. We learn that the creative ordering of the demiurge not simply emerges out of chaos, but that the pulsating movement of chora already has ordered the elements in a certain manner “even before the all was arrayed and came to be out of them” (TM, 53A).[12] While Timaeus, at an earlier point, specifically stated that the matter present prior to the work of the demiurge “moved unmusically and without order” (TM, 30A), this new beginning and the introduction of chora sheds new light on and qualifies his previous remarks.

In her insightful reading of the Timaeus, Louise Burchill traces the appropriation and usage of chora in French philosophy from Derrida to Lyotard. Let me quote her at length here, in a passage that I think reveals the essence of my argument at this juncture, and that will allow me to subsequently turn back to Kristeva. Responding to the way in which French theorists have come to characterize and criticize the Platonic chora for being an amorphous and non-differentiated ‘originary spatiality’, Burchill urges us to pay closer attention to the Platonic text:

After all, the archaic spatial matrix that Plato describes in the Timaeus as a moving ‘irrational’ configuration, without ‘measure or order’, refractory to the dominion of the transcendental forms and ever-rebel to an imposition of geometric objectivity, is surely somewhat difficult to identify with the ‘homogeneous space’ of metaphysical ‘pure presence’—or, for that matter, with an inert, passive support docilely awaiting the impression of virile forms. Even the specific attribution of ‘amorphousness’ that Plato uses to underline the formal indetermination of a ‘space’ ever eluding a stable nomination while simultaneously displaying a constant motility and imbalance of ‘forces’, clearly cannot be equated with the homogeneity, isotropy, or ‘passivity’ proper to a space partes extra partes, but would seem, quite to the contrary, to open up a conception of ‘space’ resolutely ‘marked’ by an ontological undecidability. (Burchill 2006, 93)

Burchill continues to argue that the ultimate aim of these French theorists (Kristeva included) is to secure “their own understanding of the ‘site in which differentiation in general is produced’ in terms . . . not of an ‘originary space’ but of an ‘originary time’,” and that such ‘originary time’ has been thought through in terms of ‘the feminine’ (Burchill 2006, 93). Rather than replacing ‘originary space’ with ‘originary time’, I would argue that what is at stake, already in Plato and subsequently in Kristeva, is an attempt to think space and time together; that the proto-temporalization, as Burchill herself will come to suggest, “may be understood to carry, in a certain manner, space within itself—much as rhythm can be defined as the articulation of space and time” (Burchill 2006, 93).