Abstract
Julia Kristeva, an influential 20th- and 21st-century thinker, adopts an approach to religion that distinguishes between Islamic and Christian belief systems. She argues that, unlike the Christian God, the God of Islam is preeminent and abstracted from worldly affairs and human experience. This thesis reinforces a general notion that Europeans typically defend Western culture against the assumed assault of others/Muslims. This article examines Kristeva’s acclaimed universal and ethical positions and their relevance to other cultures, particularly Islamic cultures. Notwithstanding the fact that Kristeva’s approach is informed by postmodern psychological and religious terms, she continues to refashion an orientalist discourse that colonial powers utilized in the era of high colonialism to rule and disempower others/Muslims. The inconsistencies in many of her statements show that the transcendentalism she unfavorably attributes to Islam is germane to many aspects of her thought.
Introduction
In an interview by Nelly Las in Paris in November 2003, Kristeva states, This heritage (of feminism) is something that we should be able to convey to the young Maghrebi girls of the suburbs. To work with the young Arabs of the suburbs in order to get them to turn their backs on fanaticism. To talk about religion at school in order to deconstruct religion. To do this, outreach—almost missionizing [emphasis added]—is required. (In Las, 2010, p. 22)
Kristeva’s above quote inspired me to write this article. In what seems to be a salvaging tone, Kristeva seeks to proffer to the young Maghrebi girls who live in the French suburb the necessary educational apparatus to dismantle religion with their own hands. The underlying sentiment is that young Maghrebi girls in France are potential fanatics; Islam, their religion, is an inherent source of violence. As such, rehabilitating the girls is imperative. The host country should bear the responsibility for “missionizing” the girls and curbing their imminent danger by giving them access to the “master’s tools.”
Even though Kristeva mentions that Islam is “polymorphous,” she insists on providing evidence about Islam that leaves her with “the impression of horror.” She narrates the story of Sabrina, a journalist of Algerian origin, who was devastated by a visit she made to a hospital in Algeria to interview women who had survived having their throats slit by Islamists in the name of Allah. For Sabrina, religion is no more than a tool that sentences women to the “wall of the head scarf.” Kristeva tries to defend the Qur’an against her interlocutor Sabrina by alluding to Eva-de-Vitray Meyerovitch, a specialist in Islamic mysticism, and expressing her admiration for what she calls “the Islamic idea of a poetics of beings in time.” Kristeva tries to calm Sabrina by seeking the “good sides” in the Qur’an. Kristeva does this because she feels that she has to be “cautious in the face of the horror produced by the blind dismissal of this [the Islamic] tradition.” The “horror” that Kristeva mentions needs to be seen side by side to “the impression of horror” that Sabrina shares with her. Nevertheless Kristeva asserts that “my atheism is not impermeable to her anger” (Clément & Kristeva, 2001, pp. 165-167).
In the majority of her works, including Tales of Love (1983), Black Sun, Depression and Melancholia (1992), In the Beginning Was Love, Psychoanalysis and Faith (European Perspectives) (1988), Strangers to Ourselves (1991), Nations Without Nationalism (1993), The Feminine and the Sacred (2001), This Incredible Need to Believe (2009), Hatred and Forgiveness (2010), Teresa My Love, An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila, A Novel (2014), “Freud and Love” (1986a), and many others, Kristeva presents her psychoanalytical project as a discourse of love that places itself in the space previously filled by religion. Prima facie, Kristeva’s oeuvre reveals an unequivocal interest in the delineation of “universal” ethics through a rigorous and protracted engagement with psychoanalysis. Kristeva’s ethics is firmly rooted in a process of reconciliation with inner strangeness (Kristeva, 1991; see Beardsworth, 2004). Coming to terms with the stranger/otherness inside or outside the self, Kristeva affirms, is indispensable for nurturing artistic creativity and for bringing diverse people together in a multinational society. She asserts that only by reviving psychical life can a worthwhile form of human freedom emerge (see Kristeva, 2002). Boer maintains that Kristeva (2009) moves “from individual to global society with ease” (p. 260).
This article aims to examine whether Kristeva’s claims to universal ethics are viable in various cultural contexts and for non-Western groups. Rather than reading her viewpoints exclusively in the light of a particular theory, I look at the statements she makes on different occasions and her overall ethical stands, especially as they pertain to her perspective on the assimilation of strangers/foreigners, the veil, and Islamic theology. In doing so, I also verify the degree to which Kristeva’s preoccupation with psychoanalysis as the structural domain for locating “universal ethics” proves useful to different subjectivities. For Kristeva, the assimilation of foreigners is essentially an ethical a priori, yet obliterating differences that foreigners bring to the host country is a precondition for their acceptance. The terms of assimilation she sets for the other/foreigner and the comparison she draws between the Christian faith and the Islamic faith, I will argue, refashion older orientalist and colonialist notions. Her postmodern techniques, linguistic approach, sophisticated jargons, and relentless appeal to humanism continue to inhere hierarchical relations and essentialist perspectives of Muslims.
In Intimate Revolt (2002) and other works, Kristeva assumes a dissident position by allying herself with those who spoke the truth to power as a necessary ethical pursuit (Kristeva, 1998b; see Gambaudo, 2013). Utilizing debates and theories held by Western philosophers and psychoanalysts like Slavoj Žižek, Western feminists like Christine Delphy, and Third-World feminists like Gayatri Spivak, I will examine how truthful her claim to nonconformity with patriarchal power is and how sensitive she actually proves to ethics of global feminism. These queries are needed considering that the voluminous new corpus of criticism on the philosophy of ethics has not seen a parallel increase in ethical consciousness in the broader political and economic world. Is this widening gap caused by reasons immanent, albeit partly, to the nature of the discourse of ethics itself? While it is impossible to explore in one article dimensions of unethicality in all “ethical” discourses, this article takes as an example instances in Kristeva’s psychoanalytical project.
Discovery or Recovery
Kristeva in Nations Without Nationalism (1993) demands that “the respect for immigrants should not erase the gratitude due to the welcoming host” (p. 60). The “abstract” advantages of French universalism, she emphasizes, may prove to be superior to the “‘concrete’ benefits of a Muslim scarf” and that the values of freedom that France “obtained at the cost of long and painful struggles” should not be abandoned for what she calls “false humility on the part of the hosts” (p. 47). She thus asks bitterly “why accept [that daughters of Maghrebin immigrants wear] the Muslim scarf [to school]!” (p. 36). Laborde (2008) finds that Kristeva’s thought about the Muslim scarf is indicative of her resentment of immigrants’ desire “to publicize their Muslim identity” and that this “ostentatious veiling” occludes true assimilation (p. 197). A few years later she views the hijab of schoolgirls in France as “a psychic catastrophe, schizophrenia, and states of violence.” It is a stark violation of the French laïcité [separation of church and state] and of “the universal values such as freedom, women’s freedom, and sexual freedom” (in Wajid, 2006; see Kristeva, 1993).
The statements Kristeva makes on the veil are worth considering not only because of the debate that the veil/hijab/burkini has aroused in France but also because of their controversial ethical implications. They reveal discrepancies in Kristeva’s own discourse due to their exclusionary nature that opposes the discourse of love and otherness that Kristeva elsewhere upholds. By emphasizing that veiled girls in France should be taught how to deconstruct their own religion through introducing them to a French secular pedagogy, Kristeva gives herself the right to act as the ethical agent of those girls, enacting Karl Marx’s old colonial statement “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented” (Marx, 1852). Feminists and postfeminists have commonly defended women’s right to choose; they see in the confiscation of this right a relapse into a patriarchal code. However, the recent polemic over the veil in France has shown that patriarchal modes of thinking continue to feature in the discourse of many “vehement” feminists.
Kristeva demands of Arab Muslim women in France to adopt French values if they are to be accepted by French communities. The demand is reminiscent of the French colonizer who saw the colonized subjects in Africa as generally inferior to the Europeans, notwithstanding the fact that the French, unlike the Colonial British, did not deny the Africans the right to French citizenship provided they embraced the French values and education. 1 After the military occupation of northern France by Germany during World War II, Vichy France (1940-1942), which represented the southern part of metropolitan France and French North Africa, became more authoritarian, racist, and repressive. Jules Ferry reiterated that the superior races “have the duty to civilize the inferior races” (Ginio, 2006, p. 185). The African was looked at as a “a tamed savage who was no longer frightening but still had a long way to go before becoming civilized” (Ginio, 2006, p. 186). 2
In 1880, the republicans carried out a mission civilisatrice on the pretext of educating and liberating France’s new colonial populations, capitalizing on the “spirit of the French Revolution and the specifically rational, secular ideals of the Enlightenment” (Daughton, 2006, p. 6). While republicans used their “liberal” and “universal” ideas as the central ideology behind colonizing other nations, pious people “believed that God had chosen France to deliver Catholicism to the world” (Daughton, 2006, p. 9). Leroy-Beaulieu declared that “Savages and barbarians emigrate sometimes . . . only civilized people colonize” (Daughton, 2006, p. 25). Missionaries sought territorial expansion “to save souls by converting people to Catholicism,” while their secular republican fellow-citizens used their secular values “to ensure the expansion of France’s overseas empire” (Daughton, 2006, p. 24). Expansion, nevertheless, was the final goal of both. In Exterminate all the Brutes (1996), Sven Lindqvest shows how expansion has always meant that non-European lower races “were by nature condemned to extinction: the true compassion of the superior races consisted in helping them on the way” (p. 150). Lindqvest confirms that the educated general public have always been aware of the horrendous crimes committed against colonized people “in the name of Progress, Civilization, Socialism, Democracy, and the Market” (p. 171).
By calling for secularizing Muslim women and handing them tools that render them part of the French educational system, Kristeva promotes a still-vital republican commitment to the ideals of the Enlightenment. In the early 1900s, the radical colonial republicans opened secular schools in places like Indochina and Polynesia “to ensure their commitment to laïcité by way of challenging Catholic missionaries and religious education.” In Algeria, however, “the Catholic missionary efforts across Islam had long been frustrated by what they considered the spiritual intractability of Muslims” (Daughton, 2006, pp. 16, 22), then and now. While the bigotry of the French “civilizing mission” has been alleviated in the postcolonial era, France continues to claim a political and “moral” duty toward its former colonies. The desire to maintain cultural and intellectual hegemony over former colonialized subjects in France continues, notwithstanding the change in hegemonic strategies and apparatus.
An active French feminist since 1966 and a representative of materialistic feminism, Christine Delphy resents the fact that women’s issue has been “instrumentalized in a shameful way, and continues to be so, by the imperial war (‘the war on terror’)” (2015, p. 3). Her feminist ethics leads her to be very critical of feminists who are “putting being white above being women” (p. 41) and who are conjuring racist stereotypical images about the inferiority of the indigenous North African Muslim men for treating women badly. She shows how denigrating Islam has a long tradition going back to the age of the Spanish Reconquista and the Crusades. In the contemporary history, she recalls how in October 2001 Bush and Blair made the liberation of Afghan women their excuse for invading Afghanistan. Embarrassingly, “few feminists stood up to denounce this . . . and their interest in Afghan women suddenly vanished” (p. 132).
Kristeva (1998a) proclaims that foreigners and natives “can build something from this solidarity because we all belong to a future type of humanity which will be made entirely of foreigners/strangers” (p. 323). How can this quote be reconciled with her affirmation that the polyphonic notion of culture is a French one and culture itself might be French (Kristeva, 1991)? Her attitude toward the Muslim headscarf in French schools and the rise of xenophobic politics in France make it hard to accept Kristeva’s absolute idealization of a culture in which difference is both rejected and disdained. Kristeva’s intervention into an Islamic practice like the veil, with all of its complex political, sexual, and sociocultural semiotics (see Ahmed, 1992; Al-Mahadin, 2013; Delphy, 2015; Laborde, 2008), and her engagement with Islamic theological polemics, as I will show in another section of this article, illustrate that her knowledge of Islamic theology and history is reductionist and her view of Islam and Muslims is patronizing and orientalist.
Kristeva and Feminist Ethics
The political and ethical implications of the kind of “universality” Kristeva envisions reverberate with Western universalism constructed via domination–subjugation relations and secularism–Islamism polarity (see Said, 1994). By expressing skepticism of the kind of universalism Kristeva depicts, I am not opting for an absolute dismissal of universalism in favor of localist categories that may embolden and sustain oppressive local cultural practices against Muslim women, cultural exclusivism, and essentialism. A localist view that is indiscriminately indifferent to all universal human values hampers constructive change. Many Third-World feminists for decades now have debated the issue of universal/white feminism versus indigenous feminism. This has considerably led feminists from both worlds to be generally more aware of the specific and different struggle of women. Kristeva’s ethical awareness of the other’s lot, it seems, remains confined to the realm of her “trendy” theory.
Spivak, one of the most influential postcolonial and feminist critics in the last three decades, shows in her works that feminism is inseparable from issues of history, geography, race, politics, and class. In an interview with Elizabeth Grosz in August 1984, she acknowledged that a universal feminist discourse can be used strategically by Third-World women to avoid “inhabiting the spaces of absence.” A dismissal of universalism or essentialism altogether can immobilize political action (in Grosz, 1990, p.10). However, in 1993, she announced that strategic essentialism for Third-World women “served its purpose and . . . my feminism now takes a distance from that debate” (Spivak, 1993, p. 19). Spivak remains consistent in her working out the heterogeneous construction of sexed subjects. In “French Feminism in an International Frame” (Spivak, 1981), she makes it clear that talking about the other woman should not be a nationalist privilege in the sense that “only a native can know the scene.” Rather, she asserts that “the immense heterogeneity of the field must be appreciated, and the First-World feminist must learn to stop feeling privileged as a woman” (pp. 156-157). She aspires for nurturing “a sense of our common yet history-specific lot” (p. 184). Spivak (1981) is discontent with Kristeva’s portrayal of Chinese women as a homogeneous entity and a docile other. Rather than seeing them as subjectivities with individual stories, Kristeva projects on them an imaginary/orientalist model. Thus, Spivak urges “the investigator of the other women” not to ask “merely who am I? But who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me?” (p. 179).
In another interview with Mark Sanders, Spivak warns against the potential risks entailed by a dogmatic adherence to one doctrine or cause and emphasizes the importance of acknowledging difference and “the regulative psychobiographies that constitute the subject-effect of women differently and differentially” (Sanders, 2006, p. 106). In “French Feminism, Ethics and Politics Revisited” (Spivak, 1992), she calls for an “exchange between metropolitan and decolonized feminisms” (p. 5), clarifying that “the radical element of the postcolonial bourgeoisie must most specifically learn to negotiate with the structure of enabling violence that produced her” (pp. 57-58). She is open to dialogues even if she asserts in the same article that this is a “historical burden” (Spivak, 1992, p. 69)—a legacy of imperialism which decolonized women have to bear. While it is crucial to understand the ethicopolitical dimension of all women’s stories, it is not tenable to theorize the political or politicize the theoretical for sake of prescribing universal ethics—a situation which Spivak (1992) describes as “the impossible intimacy of the ethical” (p. 81). The stories of women are much more complex and diverse than Kristeva envisions, given the fact that the fragmented cultural contexts produce the subject as well as her critique.
Likewise, Delphy is attentive to the entangling relations between feminism and issues of race, politics, history, and class. The “population of women,” she confirms, “is brought together by one oppression and also divided by another [racial oppression]” (Delphy, 2015, p. 134). When the French colonizer pitied the indigenous woman for being oppressed by the Algerian man, the former was oblivious of the far more important patriarchal commonalities between him and the Algerian man. Racism oppresses both men and women. Delphy shows how racist anti-sexist actions can oppress women and single them out from their own communities. At the same time, there is no guarantee that the host country will grant them full acceptance (Delphy, 2015). Third-World feminists like Spivak, Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Leila Ahmed, and Chandra T Mohanty resist white feminism and seek discourses and strategies that enable them to confront simultaneously local sexism and racism of women of the dominant group (see also Delphy, 2015).
Third-World Feminists and Western feminists such as Delphy, Miriam Cooke, and Margot Badran have contributed significantly to the configuration of a global feminist ethics attentive to historical, religious, racial, and cultural specificities. To abandon one’s own cultural values and beliefs as a precondition for assimilation, as Kristeva demands, is inconsistent with feminist ethics. It does not take only a Third-World feminist to unfold the oppression of Third-World women. Delphy, a Western feminist, has shown a great interest in exposing dynamics of dilemmas of Muslim women in non-Muslim countries, particularly in France. She was more motivated by a strong ethical sense to speak the truth to power than by the mere jouissance derived from some trendy and bizarre rhetoric.
Jasper (2013) calls Kristeva “a reluctant feminist” (p. 283). Evy Varsamopoulou (2009) maintains that Kristeva’s sophisticated jargon should not prevent us from realizing that she has a simplistic vision that undermines the complexity of interracial communities. Varsamopoulou describes Kristeva’s political endeavor as no more than a touristic fantasy. Kristeva’s crude dismissal of what she views as inferior values of the immigrants creates a situation where the dominated is placed “on edge” (see Delphy, 2015, p. 18). In her book Separate and Dominate (2015), Delphy elaborates cogently on the painful dilemma of being “on edge.” Although she does not make any reference to Kristeva in her book, Delphy offers a complex political and ethical analysis of the veil and dominated groups in France. Utilizing Delphy’s argument on the veil, I will show how Kristeva’s stands refashion a colonialist and racist notion that is complicit with a French desire to sustain a sociocultural and political hegemony.
The Dilemma of the Veil
Delphy argues that the official French narrative of the veil is symptomatic of a broader unethical relation between the dominated and the dominant (see also Fanon, 1963, 1965). Delphy (2015) talks about three feminist attitudes toward the law banning the headscarf in France: Many feminists came out in support of the bill, a few against, but many fell silent, undecided . . . troubled by the fact that on the one hand the law was meant to protect young Muslim girls from family constraints forcing them to wear the headscarf and yet on the other hand it is a discriminatory law stigmatizing a whole population . . . More than one feminist had the painful feeling of . . . having to choose to sacrifice either the victims of sexism or the victims of racism. (p. 138)
By urging authorities to pursue measures to prevent Muslim girls from violating the laïcité principle in France, Kristeva allies herself with the official narrative and proves insensitive to Muslim women’s choices and cultural specificities. The rhetoric she deploys in her denunciation of the headscarf is not basically different from the rhetoric that the Stasi commission 3 has used to reinforce the law banning the headscarf in France. Élisabeth Badinter, 4 a pro-ban feminist, and a supporter of the Stasi commission, told L’Arche magazine, “This struggle [standing up for women] is aimed at the young women from the first generation of new arrivals, and indeed girls of North African descent. It’s for them that we have to fight this battle” (in Delphy, 2015, p. 170). Kristeva’s attitude toward the Muslim headscarf is very similar to Badinter’s attitude. Pro-ban feminists, according to Delphy, “trade in one patriarchy for another. Without noticing it, here, too—just like the colonists in the Maghreb, and using the same arguments about the indigènes’ barbarism” (see Delphy, 2015, p. 163).
French feminists are still campaigning against different modes of patriarchy—an indication that patriarchy still sustains itself. This is why Delphy (2015) is frustrated by feminists who “adopt colonial and orientalist stereotypes that are the stock in trade of the very people they’re meant to be fighting against” (p. 166). Such inconsistent practices threaten the very survival of feminist movements. It is only through becoming “truly universal, taking all women . . . into account,” and abandoning “the premise of Western superiority” that feminists in France are not cut off from feminisms “of colour” or “Third-World” feminisms. The racism that the debate over the veil in France has bared should be taken seriously. It is the nature of this debate that demonized Muslim countries and Islam and “made it possible for a national political figure overtly treat millions of French citizens as potential terrorists” (Delphy, 2015, p. 169).
The discrimination against Muslim women has led more women to veil and thus relay the following message: “you have marginalized us . . . you tell us we’re different, well, look, now we are different.” The headscarf provokes the French not only because it challenges “the French integration model” but also because it makes the Muslim woman more visible and shows “so-called ‘sexual liberation’ for what it is, the obligation for every woman to be ‘desirable’ at each and every moment” (Delphy, 2015, p. 120). Much earlier, in A Dying Colonialism (1965), Fanon elaborated on the antagonistic and complex relationship between the French and the Muslim women’s veil during the colonial era. Unveiling Algerian women before 1954 was part of a colonial plan that aimed at destroying the originality of the Algerian people. Fanon maintained that “winning [the Algerian woman] over to the foreign values . . . was at the same time achieving a real power over the man and attaining a practical, effective means of destructuring Algerian culture” (p. 39). By way of analyzing the historic dynamism of the veil in Algeria, Fanon asserted that “it was the colonialist’s frenzy to unveil the Algerian woman, it was his gamble on winning the battle of the veil at whatever cost, that were to provoke the native’s bristling resistance” (pp. 46-47). Also, in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), Fanon described the French colonial urge to “occupy anything more than the sum total of the land. The Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees and the camels make up the landscape,” for, “colonization is a success when all this indocile nature has finally been tamed” (p. 250).
Notwithstanding the ongoing debate regarding the religious legitimacy or illegitimacy of the veil (see Mernissi, 1991), the veil continues to invite different social, political, historical, and psychological interpretations. In Women and Gender in Islam (1992), Leila Ahmed adopts a view of the veil that is not essentially different from Delphy’s view. She shows how colonial powers and colonial figures like Cromer claimed that “improving the status of women entails abandoning native customs” (p. 166) including the veil. This claim, she contends, was intended to serve political and colonial ends. Like Delphy and Ahmed, Žižek’s (2012) reading of the veil is anything but simplistic. He sees that the polemic over the veil is one more battle against the global war on terror, which is in fact a war against the Arab and Muslim world. He provides a shrewd interpretation of the veil phenomenon and of the administrative measures taken by the French State to prohibit the veil in schools. More than being an Islamic marker in a non-Islamic state, the veil is a source of horror in “its very nature as the traumatic-subversive-creative-explosive power of feminine subjectivity” (Žižek, 2012, p. 126). Woman, he adds, is “such a traumatic presence for Islam, such an ontological scandal that it has to be veiled” (p. 123). Furthermore, the veil is indicative of “an extremely sexualized universe . . . Repression has to be so strong because sex itself is so strong” (p. 116). The veil in France “qualifies as an erective exposure, a too-strong-to-be-permissible sign of one’s identity that perturbs the French principle of egalitarian citizenship—wearing a veil is, from this French republican perspective, also a provocative ‘monstration’” (p. 121). Žižek’s aim is to offer an interpretation of the veil phenomenon without being condescending to the other woman, in this case the veiled woman in France. On the contrary, he exposes how the veil is potentially a threat to patriarchy, whether male patriarchy or political patriarchy.
Kristeva and pro-ban feminists urged Muslim to revolt against their own families to join the outside world. By demanding of them what they cannot possibly demand of Western girls, they “tend to depersonalize” Arab women. The girls who wear the headscarf “suddenly came to stand for the ‘Orientalism’ described by Edward Said” (Delphy, 2015, p. 149). They see them “through a filter of ‘otherness,’ making any empathy or identification with them impossible . . . treating them as colonial subjects” (pp. 160-163).
Kristeva envisions a revolution through a language that can subvert patriarchal ideology and deconstruct totalizing systems of bourgeois individualism (Kristeva, 1984; see McAfee, 2004). Recasting Jacques Lacan’s assumption that it is through an analysis of the symbolic order that one can understand subjectivity she has argued that the imaginary enjoys a structure that can reveal more about subjectivity. However, the modern routes that Kristeva explores through the maternal body, that is, the repressed relationship to the mother, the semiotic chora, and syntactical transformations as a locus for ethical practices, have not proved successful in exonerate her of some prejudices that refashion older imperialist politics of superior–inferior/central–marginal nature. Similar hierarchical prejudices feature in Kristeva’s comparison between Christianity and Islam, privileging the former over the latter.
Kristeva’s Relation to Christianity
Kristeva’s critique of religion aims to relocate transcendence within the immanent body, specifically the maternal (Kristeva, 1991, 2001; see Bradley, 2008). The role of the maternal in the development of the subject is Kristeva’s main contribution to psychoanalysis. For her, Christianity offers to reposition the transcendent determinedly back within the body so that psychoanalysis becomes a secular religion and a substitute of Christianity (Kristeva, 1987; see Bradley, 2008). Kristeva does not believe in a transcendental Father/God; according to Bradley (2008), she is “a self-professed atheist” (p. 281). Like Freud, she calls religion an illusion that nevertheless helps to alleviate the subjective predicament inherent in all human beings (Kristeva, 1987). As she maintains, “It is by traversing Christianity that the free subjectivity of men and women flourishes” (in Clément & Kristeva, 2001, p. 165).
In “Women’s Time,” Kristeva (1986b) confirms that religion is “this phantasmic necessity on the part of speaking beings to provide themselves with a representation” (p. 208). Kristeva, like other feminists, denies the transcendental dimension in religion. Kurzweil, for example, considers religion as “pie-in-the-sky,” and Morny Joy maintains that secular feminists are “indifferent or hostile to religion” (in O’Grady, 2002, p. 44). Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland incorporate many Christian symbols in their narrative, only to deconstruct religion from within and pursue new feminist politics. Arab feminists like Nawal El-Sa’dawi and Hanan El-Sheik were also persistently critical of observant Muslims in their writings and called for liberating Arab Muslim women from the constraints imposed by Islam (see Ibrahim, 2000). Alison Jasper (2013) confirms that “some forms of locational or situated feminisms in a Western context, use the term ‘religion’ as a short-hand, ideological marker for oppressive forms of ‘father rule’ illustrated in Christianity” (p. 288).
Nevertheless, Kristeva has invested a great deal in Christianity, drawing upon Biblical details, mystics, icons, saints, and theologians. For her, the Christian concept of love is based on a euphoric blend/unity between the transcendental (the son), which she identifies with the self, and the intranscendental (the father), which she identifies with the other/stranger within ourselves. The continuous desire for this unity reflects the semiotic desire between the mother and the other. Because Islam lacks such unity, Kristeva, influenced by a Hegelian view of Islam (see Bradley, 2008; Kristeva, 2009, 2010; Robinson, 2007; Ulary, 2011), relegates Islam to an inferior position. Hegel argues that Christianity offers humanity what the other two monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam, do not (see Bradley, 2008; Khair, 2002; McAfee, 2004). The Christian God embodies “essentiality and universality and particularization together with their reconciled unity” (in Kristeva, 2010, p. 55). In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel stated that the God in Islam is the absolute One and is indifferent to human life; therefore, “the religion of Islam is essentially fanatical . . . With its absolute insistence on the gulf separating the human and the divine, Islam represents a competing monotheistic universalism, and a total negation of the historical path Hegel describes” (in Robinson, 2007, pp. 164-165).
Christianity, Kristeva acknowledges, is the backbone of Western culture and has had a significant impact on the formation of the Western subject. She envisions Christianity as a “macrofantasy” (macrofantasme) that projects psychic desires in the form of a major mythology. Psychoanalysis, on the contrary, is a “microfantasy” (microfantasme) that furnishes for those desires in the unique life of every subject (Kristeva, 1987, pp. 43-44). Kristeva (2009) defines psychoanalysis as a subject that helps people to understand their need to believe in a power that is beyond them. Roland Boer (2009) argues that, despite Kristeva’s obvious interest in Marx, she has sought to draw parallels between Christianity and psychoanalysis when she identifies the taboos in Leviticus with the taboos of the mother (p. 259). This process of identification continues in her description of religion as a poetic language or an esthetic activity that assists in healing melancholia (the subjective crisis) caused by the primordial separation from the mother (Dicenso, 1995; Jasper, 2013; Kristeva, 1987, 2009, 2010; O’Grady, 2002).
Christianity is the reservoir from which Kristeva picks her allusions and attempts to ensure an inspirational, eminent, and recognizable position for her psychoanalytical speculations. Whether in the “secular” Christian West or “religious” Islamic East, people generally continue to venerate religious sentiments and symbols. Kristeva (2009) recognizes that Christianity “demonstrated an ‘extraordinary awareness of psychic life’ through narratives of ‘unparalleled subtlety’” (p. 82) and as such has been intent on incorporating its power into her intellectual venture, considering the inherent relationship between religion and ethics. Her use of religion allows some to accept many of her notions that can be debunked on the basis that they lack scientific, empirical, and physical evidence. Notwithstanding the fact that people have not borne witness to any of the constituents of the Sacred Trinity, Kristeva reminds us, they still continue to embrace the Christian faith. Why should they not, by the same token, embrace hers?
In This Incredible Need to Believe (2009), Kristeva is preoccupied with the ontological significance of Biblical stories, doctrinal concepts, and other Christian issues. The main question she explores is how Christian theology has affected Western culture and contributed to the formation of humanism. Through her discussion of the work and experiences of people like Saint Teresa of Avila, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Hannah Arendt, and others, she concludes that God is an embodiment of the human desire to believe—a desire that manifests itself differently in each human phase beginning with the pre-Oedipal through the adulthood. Her reading of Christianity reveals that openness and coexistence with difference are immanent values to Christian ethics. Through a comparison between Islam and Christianity, Kristeva endeavors to show how codes of behavior, psychic conditions, and cultural and political practices are essentially informed by religion.
Islam Versus Christianity
In Crisis of the European Subject (2000) and The Severed Head, Capital Visions (2012), Kristeva draws upon the Orthodox, the Protestant, and the Catholic traditions. In her talk about icons, in particular, she is wholly dependent on the Orthodox tradition. In Crisis of the European Subject (2000), she discusses Protestantism, Catholicism, and the Orthodox tradition, stressing the liberal and imaginative space that each tradition allows. Because all the three traditions are important, Kristeva suggests that a dialogue among them is indispensable. Kristeva (2000) seems to favor Catholicism only when she discusses the Orthodox “per filium” versus the Catholic “filioque” controversy (pp. 138-146). She also maintains in her article “A Meditation, a Political Act, an Art of Living” that “Catholicism—to my eyes the most aesthetic of all religions—in its genius, has perfectly understood this new phase of History [globalization]” (Oliver, 2009b, p. 20).
Kristeva is very impressed with many of the images/paintings/statues she finds in Orthodox places. She elaborates on their ontological connotations, their vibrant relevance to the human psyche and to the formation of human subjectivity, and most important of all, on the esthetic value and the potential space of freedom they generate. Furthermore, she finds them exceptionally useful for confronting the nihilistic tendencies of modernity in which technology gradually subdues spiritual and esthetic values. According to her, Islam lacks this privilege, because it bans images and statues. 5
Kristeva’s preference of Christianity over Islam stems from her belief that the Bible yields itself to different interpretations/readings. While a historical reading of the Bible hampers creativity and breeds dogmatism, an interpretive engagement helps human subjectivity to flourish and remain in a state of perpetual revisionism and emergence (see Clément & Kristeva, 2001; Robinson, 2007). Kristeva claims that the interpretive approach that readers of the Gospel adopt is determined by the nature of the Gospel itself, just like the restrictions imposed on the interpretations of the Qur’an are immanent to the Qur’an itself.
Kristeva (2009) explores the links between theological concepts as laid down in both the Bible and the Qur’an and some cultural practices and phenomena characteristic of Christians and Muslims. Thus, she traces back the banality of evil and totalitarian tendencies that declare “the superfluity of human life” (p. 62) to values and concepts originated in religion, in this case Islam. On the contrary, “the fascinating secret of European culture, of European humanity in all its diversity” originated in “the infinite resurrection of the Dead Father” (Kristeva, 2009, p. 64). The resurrection or the “atomized” Dead Father takes place every time a new interpretation, creative activity, or a new door opens (Kristeva, 2009, p. 63). Kristeva does not seem to be aware of the verses in the Qur’an that say interpretation is an indispensable approach to the Quran and other verses that underscore how meanings of God’s words are infinite: “from Him, ayats (verses) containing clear judgements—they are the core of the Book — and others which are open to interpretation” (3: 7); “If the sea were ink for (writing) the Words of my Lord, surely, the sea would be exhausted before the Words of my Lord would be finished” (118: 109).
In This Incredible Need to Believe, while Kristeva (2009) expresses her reluctance to accept a total identification of Allah of the Muslims with the Aristotelian divine, she also admits the utter transcendentalism of both and their status as “moving without being moved” (p. 65). The Aristotelian divine nevertheless exposes the limits of the human wisdom; unlike Allah, it is not an unapproachable theocracy. Allah requests obedience and is nothing like the loving Christian God (Kristeva, 2009). Kristeva maintains that the Qur’an not only denies the death of the Son but also restores the One God/Allah. This, she argues, limits the human creative potential inspired by the murder of the Son. The loss of the Son—an event that Kristeva often identifies with the separation from the mother—teaches Christians how to experience love through pain and continue to approach theocracy through the Son’s (partly human) link to the divine (Holy Father). The “unloving” Allah in his absolute sovereignty and detachment from his creation leaves, in a metaphorical sense, his Muslim subjects fatherless/orphans.
Kristeva (2009) states that “Islam cuts itself off from the Jewish and Christian monotheism, in ruling out any idea of paternity in its idea of the divine” (p. 67); she also says, “Jesus dies on the cross only to resurrect by and for the love of the father” (p. 66). There is a persistent restoration of the one great Original Father in Islam and that its rigid features “make an Islamic theo-logy improbable if not impossible” (p. 68). Verses in the Qur’an that encourage dialogue and constructive interaction are many; one of which reads, “O people of the book, come to a common understanding between us and you, that we shall worship no one except One God” (3: 64).
The specter ensued by Kristeva’s remarks above are worth considering. She confirms that theological details “structure the subject differently in each of the three monotheistic religions” (Kristeva, 2012, p. 67). In other words, unlike the Christian people who are capable of loving like their Father, Muslims are, like their Allah, incapable of loving. The essentialist stand in this inference recalls features that are intrinsic to an orientalist discourse in which the colonizer seeks to devise demeaning and inferior stereotypical images of the others and their religion to justify his prerogative control over others’ lands and creeds.
Is Kristeva’s Love in the Air or Is It on the Earth?
Emphasizing an essential link between the Christian God and Christian people and the God of Islam and Muslim people, Kristeva establishes a superior–inferior relationship between Christians and Muslims in favor of the former. This hierarchy forms a real challenge to the limitless love she has adamantly advocated. In her review of Julia Kristeva’s This Incredible Need to Believe, Rubenstein (2010) says that the book “is deeply disappointing,” given that it offers “gross mischaracterizations” about Islam (p. 660). As Kristeva (2009) describes, unlike Christianity, Islamic theology is devoid of deep psychic structure to support creative thinking, and therefore yields “barbarism founded on the denial of malaise” (p. 97). Rubenstein (2010) observes that “For all of the rigor and sophistication we have come to expect from Kristeva, then, the argumentative core of this book is that the problem with the world today is Islam, and the solution is Christianity” (p. 666). Without citing any specialists in Islamic theology, whether Muslims or Christians, Western or non-Western, Kristeva (2009) judges Allah in Islam through Christian lenses and Christian terms of reference to conclude that the “loving God of Christians” is much better than “the omnipotence of the Islamic legislator who exacts obedience” (p. 65). It is in the light of Christian theology firmly rooted in a hierarchical logic that Kristeva interprets the God of Islam and ethically judges Him and His followers. She even uses this theology to elevate Christian art and culture at the expense of denying Muslims their distinctive cultural, intellectual, and artistic legacy.
In “A Glance into the Archives of Islam,” Slavoj Žižek (2012) presents an astute account of many aspects of Islam. He states that Islam is a vibrant religion and that “Allah is not a father, not even a symbolic one—God is one, he is neither born nor does he give birth to creatures” (p. 104). The Christian God allows his Son to die on the cross, but the God of Islam is “the impossible-Real outside the father” who appears when the biological father fails to perform his paternal subject (p. 105). Kristeva, influenced by Freud, assumes that the “genealogical desert” between God in Islam and man renders Him detached from humanity and not utterly empathetic. As Žižek (2012) maintains, “perhaps, it is this “orphanic” character of Islam which accounts for its lack of inherent institutionalization” (p. 105). Accordingly, because Islam “lacks an inherent principle of institutionalization,” overlaps of the religious and the political can occur “either in the guise of statist co-option or in the guise of anti-statist collectives” (p. 106). Žižek pursues a theological comparison between God in Islam and God in Christianity to point out some conceptual differences between the two. His interpretation of God and his knowledge of Islam are based on his own interpretation of verses in the Qur’an, the primary text of Islam, and a comprehensive view of world politics.
Žižek’s engagement with Islamic theology is not intended to introduce a crude evaluation of two rivalry Gods and two divine texts (one is more humanist than the other). His knowledge of the Qur’an and astute reading of Islamic history lead him to challenge stereotypical images of Islam and women in Islam as held by Westerners and often non-Westerners. He, for example, asserts the insufficiency of the standard image of Islam as an “an extreme masculine monotheism” (p. 116). He comments on Taliban’s prohibition of metal heels for women by saying that “what kind of a society is this in which the click of metal heels can make men explode with lust?” (p. 116). Žižek (2012) argues that Western people commonly are not content to hear Islamic stories or practices that disturb their standard notion about Islam and Muslim women. Yet he contends that to “simply oppose the “good” Islam (reverence of women) and the “bad” Islam (veiled oppressed women)” is naive and misleading (p. 120). He tells the story of Muhamad’s prophecy and the part that Khadija, his wife, had in saving Mohamad “from this unbearable uncertainty, as well as from the fate of being a social outcast.” Khadija was the first believer in his message, the first Muslim, and a woman . . . she is the Lacanian “big Other,” the guarantee of the Truth of the subject’s enunciation, and it is only by way of this circular support, through someone who believes in him, that Muhammad can believe in his own message and thus serve as a messenger of Truth to believers. (pp. 118-119)
In this context, some questions emerge: What is the ethical viability entailed by Kristeva’s comparative approach between God in Christianity and God in Islam in the first place? To what extent does the nature of the Originary Father as described in Christianity and perceived by Christians or Allah as described in Islam and perceived by Muslims has actually contributed to the formation of an ethical sense of the followers of each of the two religions? How successful has Kristeva been in utilizing religion as merely a metaphor to project a communicable structure for her psychoanalytical project and as a tool to mythologize religion to advance her secular principles or psychoanalytical project? From my perspective, Muslims/secularists and Christians/secularists throughout history have transgressed (and still do) codes of ethics, notwithstanding the fact that there have always been Muslims, Christians, secularists, and nonbelievers with a strong “ethical” sense and “moral” responsibility.
In contemporary history, specifically in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Muslims and Christians and believers and nonbelievers cannot be absolved of bloodshed and uprooting millions of civilians at the hand of ousted regimes and their “Western” 6 allies (consider the situation in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and many other countries). The anarchy and the absurd civil wars in those counties are by no means more ruthless or unscrupulous than the manslaughter and deprivation of Muslim lands at the hand of Western colonizers and their Arab Muslim allies. The millions of deaths in Europe in the First World War alone bear witness to the ethical deterioration that pragmatic politics and totalitarian governments/people can bring about. Where does Kristeva’s Originary Father fit into this formula? Why does the excess of His love for humanity not touch the consciousness and hearts of perpetrators of atrocities to prevent evil? The answers to these questions can only prove that Kristeva’s attempt to trace the mannerism of Muslims and Christians back to the nature of the God of each is not devoid of naivety and does not work out, as there is abundant evidence in history that debunks her assumption.
Kristeva wants to prove that the nature of Allah in the Qur’an is responsible for producing Muslims with terrorist mentalities. Unlike Kristeva, who adopts a rigid view of the Qur’an, Boris Gunjević (2012) confirms in Every Book Is Like a Fortress—Flesh Became Word that the Qur’an, a text that Westerners “love to hate,” has been manipulated by Christian fundamentalists who read it “as if it were a terrorism handbook” and Islamic fundamentalists who want to “have monochromatic control of the text, and with their literal, superficial, ultra-modern interpretations they intend to mutilate it” (p. 36). Gunjević (2012) argues that, in the Middle Ages in Europe, Islam was subject to a fierce theological and political attack and that the disdain for Islam continues now, just as it did in the colonial era. Obviously, Kristeva’s love is selective. The “other” is its object, provided that this other is not a Muslim. Boer (2009) is overtly critical of Kristeva’s biblical readings and sociopolitical stands, describing her statements as “naïve” and “cringingly awful, notably her pronouncement that ‘Love will save us’” (p. 261). According to Boer (2009), Kristeva has sweeping social analyses based on anecdotes and personal encounters, whether they be of France or Europe or America or Bulgaria—they represent efforts to pinpoint a global social malaise and offer a cure. When reading these analyses or those vast sweeping books, I find myself dubbing her “The Analyst of the West,” or indeed “Earth’s Analyst.” (p. 261)
Kristeva’s projection of Allah and His followers as potential terrorists is imbued with essentialist tendencies. Many writers allude to instances of essentialism in Kristeva’s thought. McAfee (2004) maintains that the term essentialism refers to the practice of making false generalizations and offering a biological explanation for a psychological trait. Feminists like Toril Moi, Judith Butler, and others, have already charged Kristeva with the above types of essentialism, especially in relation to the inherent link she envisages between the semiotic and maternal mother. Abstracting all aspects related to motherhood and separating them from their sociopolitical and cultural context to erect “her own essentialist stereotype of femininity” is an awkward part of her work (McAfee, 2004, pp. 77-78; see Beardsworth, 2004). By arguing that the stranger primarily exists within one’s self, or is an essential constituent of the self, Kristeva not only universalizes and homogenizes the concept of the other but also suspends his or her specificities, hereby negating differences outside this whole self. In Strangers to Ourselves (1991) and in the majority of her work, Kristeva is keen to link ethics of psychoanalysis with political action. She falls into a trap of essentialism that restricts political action and sustains forms of oppression. In Nations Without Nationalism (1993), she mentions that immigration assimilates diverse peoples who nevertheless continue to assert their religious and cultural specificities. This can negatively affect the image and uniqueness of the host country (France). Assimilation is healthier for Kristeva if immigrants, especially Muslims, work to transcend their “inferior” religious particularities and merge with the larger French nation, being one that has better claims for universal truths.
Conclusion: Horror Versus Imperceptible Impoliteness
Global community is not jeopardized by the kind of cosmopolitanism that does not deny one’s cultural, sexual, or religious specificity. Kristeva’s view of Muslim women’s headscarves and Islam reflects her limited knowledge of the Islamic philosophical, spiritual, cultural, and civilizational legacy. The assimilation of the other is also conditional and subject to rules that she designates only to reinforce the hierarchical relationship between the West and non-West, or Muslims and non-Muslims. In “Experiencing the Phallus as Extraneous, or Women’s Twofold Oedipus Complex,” Kristeva (1998b) states that those people who manage to access powerful positions are “often most phallicised and those extending the luminosity of this ethical position are pushed to the margins” (pp. 40-41). Revolution, she asserts, is always resisted by political apparatus and those who talk ethics to power face suppression (Kristeva, 1984). She has always endeavored to present herself as a subject who owns a dissident project that anchors universal ethics based on its support of the other, the marginalized. By assuming a custodial role of the other (Muslims), her “dissidence” eventually proves complicit with one of the most powerful political apparatuses that the West has been increasingly utilizing for centuries to sustain its hegemonic power over the Islamic world, Islamophobia, and the demonization of Islam and Muslims. Just like her depiction of the maternal and semiotic, Kristeva’s concept of love and the other is limited by “her own situatedness within the Western Christian tradition and a specifically Freudian tradition of analysis” (Jasper, 2013, p. 291; see also Kkona, 2012).
Exploring complex dynamics of the Islamic world’s abrupt exposure to Western modernization is a necessary endeavor to understand Islam in its present version. Žižek (2012) explains how this sudden exposure creates a traumatic impact that leads the Islamic world to clasp “a superficial modernization, an imitation destined to fail.” The failure results in “the violent Real, an outright war between Islamic Truth and the Western Lie” (p. 108). Kristeva’s biased depictions of Islam, on the contrary, continue in the manner by which she raises the following question: “What about Islam in this journey through the sacred? Islam, whose fundamentalist version horrifies the modern world . . .” (Clément & Kristeva, 2001, p. 165). Islam, she presupposes, has a fundamentalist version (another term for terrorism). There seems to be no interest on her part to differentiate between the theology of Islam and the complex repercussion of an unjust global politics that has led to the emergence of both Islamic and non-Islamic terrorist/fundamentalist groups (see Ibrahim, 2014). Furthermore, as discussed in an earlier part of this article, Kristeva uses her biblical interpretations to reinforce an orientalist depiction of Islam as inferior to Christianity and Muslims as impulsive terrorists, overlooking the fact that Muslims are currently experiencing the highest rate of deaths from terrorism, wars, evacuation, and poverty worldwide. 7 Delphy shows how “Je Suis Charlie” which has become a slogan for “freedom of speech” in fact “had reserved their most frequent and vicious attacks for Islam . . . the religion or the culture of the most underprivileged and loathed people in France.” She holds that “it does not take much anti-conformism . . . to draw cartoons packed with racist jokes that Muslims–and Arab-looking people . . . must suffer in silence every day of their lives” (Delphy, 2015, p. xiii).
Kristeva (2010) describes late modernity as one of the countless acts of almost imperceptible impoliteness that leads to national depression, terrorism, fundamentalism, and right-wing intolerance. The depressed subject either commits suicide or tries to find relief in a manic reaction, including the pursuit of an imaginary enemy or an engagement in holy wars. Abu Ghraib is a symptom of the new malady of civilization insofar as violent sadomasochistic cruelties are performed and even photographed as “just having fun.” “The desire for the other is deviated into a manic jouissance that is sustained by the sexual victimization of others” (Kristeva, 2010, p. 176). The horror and sexual abuse enacted on detainees—some of whom were not even tried—is seen as no more than a “sadomasochistic behaviour” or moments of “manic jouissance” (in Oliver, 2009, p. 51)! The late modernity of the West is no more than “imperceptible impoliteness” (in Ulary, 2011, p. 31). Obviously then, if the secular tools she wants to hand to Maghrebi girls have not proved an ethical panacea to non-Muslims, how could they yield better results with terrorist Muslims?
Kristeva’s postmodern approach, persistent claim to universal ethics, and trendy jargons have not been successful in preventing older Western hegemonic/orientalist ideas from surfacing. The cosmopolitanism she calls for is a chimera, for it is based on denying the other her cultural and religious specificity. The question of who qualifies as a reliable agent to decide whether this specificity can prove detrimental is yet another thorny issue requiring in-depth study.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.