In her 1979 essay Women’s Time, Julia Kristeva calls for a radical program of gender terrorism. Civilization is “bored to death” and the job of Feminism is to painfully shock society out of its stupor (Kristeva Women’s Time,193). It must first and foremost emphasize the real fundamental difference between the sexes. To a large extent the goals of feminism were accomplished—women have at least nominal equality in the political, economic, and professional spheres. Only those goals to do with sexual difference—contraception, abortion, and sexual liberation for example—seem to be still on the table. Women are forced to endure, against their will, an all-out assault on difference and specificity, sacrificed on the altar of stability and conformity. Surely, some women rise within male-dominated hierarchies, but these are mere tokens. Real change must begin with symbolic violence. To this end, she points to women from disparate nations joining terror cells such as the Red Brigade, an Italian left-wing guerilla group. This is a necessary, if unfortunate, reaction to the exploitation of women across the globe. However, she says, “the struggle, the implacable difference, the violence must be conceived in the very place where it operates with the maximum intransigence, in other words, in personal and sexual identity itself,” (Kristeva, Women's Time 209). The cell walls of identity must be smashed open, the border must be breached. In other words, abjection must be overcome.
Pioneered by Kristeva’s 1982 essay The Powers of Horror, abjection is a border, it is the fluid border between the self and what is repudiated as radically antithetical to the self, typically seen as improper or unclean. It comes in many forms, from disgust at food or corpses to the abjection of certain kinds of other people. The oldest of the latter is the abjection of the mother, as the child grows to learn that there is a distinction between the mother and the self this border becomes formative of the self. It becomes impossible to recognize the self without the border, without rejecting, repudiating that which lies across the border. Abjection becomes a safeguard, guarding the self against the assaults of that which it is not. The pinnacle of abjection is a corpse, it is death intruding into what was once a life. Abjection is terror, hatred, repudiation, and therefore any crime is abject. Above all, the abject is unambiguous. It is a “composite of judgment and affect, of condemnation and yearning” which cuts off the subject from anything which threatens the self (Kristeva, Horror 10).
Abjection, therefore, is the space of those things and people marginalized, cast aside, viewed as repugnant or criminal; it is the space of “dirty” people, acts, objects, and discourses. Finally, the abject is able to be sublimated,1 it is in fact tinged with the sublime. Here we can see that the sublime, through the process of sublimation, is something added to the abject, something that covers over it to make it acceptable. The abject is the defiled, the taboo, the border between the sacred and the profane, but not immune to purification.2
For a lesson in abjection, the sacred, and the profane, we may turn towards Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s decadent3 novel, The Story Without a Name. The story revolves around the ladies de Ferjol, Lasthénie and her mother, Madame de Ferjol, who abide in a large mansion with their servant Agathe nestled in a peasant village sheltered on all sides by the Cevennes mountains, just prior to the French Revolution. Lasthénie is a quiet, pure girl with blond hair and a pale, wan complexion. She passes each day sitting on the stair alone, doing needlework with her mother in the embrasure of the window, and going to Mass. Mme de Ferjol, always more widow than mother, hardly speaks to her daughter, caught up as she is in perennial mourning and praying. As two of the most pious ladies in the town, the ladies de Ferjol always have the pleasure of hosting a traveling priest each Lent. The day before Easter, the father they are hosting disappears. From then on Lasthénie, never a healthy girl to begin with, begins degenerating.
Eventually, to both the ladies’ surprise, it is discovered that Lasthénie is pregnant. Her mother tortures Lasthénie with endless demands to know the father is, but Lasthénie cannot, does not answer. Their relationship breaks down. What was once distant love becomes tinged with shame, anger, and hatred. Lasthénie, as a young unwed mother, is abject. Her mother torments her endlessly, prodding her with questions, self-flagellating in front of her, lacing the girl’s corset so tight she hopes it will kill the child, and most importantly, hiding her away. Mme. de Ferjol is implacable, an unstoppable force endlessly asking who the father is. Lasthénie is only allowed outside with her mother to go to church. On these occasions, the girl is covered in a thick veil such that none may perceive her shame.
When she finally gives birth, she utters not a single cry, at the behest of her mother, worried that somebody may hear. More specifically, it is not solely for her motherhood that she is shamed, she is also abject for her not being a virgin. As Kristeva argues in Stabat Mater, in the west, the Virgin Mother Mary becomes the yardstick against which women are measured, a perfect virginal source of unending maternal love. Lasthénie is neither a virgin nor fully mother–her child is stillborn–and she has no love, no affection for the child. “Lasthénie was a widow, and a widow incapable of emerging from the abjection of her widowhood,” (d’Aurevilly 191). Finally, Lasthénie kills herself slowly by plunging eighteen sewing needles into her heart over the course of several weeks.
The Virgin Mother is, in other words, a way of sublimating motherhood, of throwing a veil4 over the real, suffering, and deeply abject body of a mother, a woman. It is something added to her real materiality, something intended to veil her abjection both as woman and as mother. Woman is incapable of living up to the universal ideal of the Virgin Mother. Doubtless, she can be a virgin if she be a nun or a martyr, but unless she is Mary, she cannot also be a mother. It is no wonder, then, that Lasthénie is described with such purity prior to her fall. Lasthénie, veiled by her mother when they go out, is quite literally covered in the guise of a virgin. Her heterogeneity is sublimated into the homogenous, dark gray veil. The young pregnant mother is encouraged to hide her shame. A target of ridicule, disgust she needs to be reformed, rehabilitated. The young mother is an obviously unfit parent due to her sin, it is counted as a blessing that Lasthénie’s son is stillborn.
Finally, at the very end of Stabat Mater, Julia Kristeva calls the reader to a new ethics, a heretical ethics of embracing motherhood and mother’s love. This, though, is not enough. Kristeva calls her new ethics herethics “an heretical ethics separated from morality, an herethics, is perhaps no more than that which in life makes bonds, thoughts, and therefore the thought of death, bearable: herethics is undeath,” (Kristeva Stabat 185). Rather than cutting out, repudiating the real mother, Kristeva calls us to create those attachments, those bonds, which make life bearable. Here we leave Kristeva, take herethics, and run with it–if herethics is to be more than a forgotten note in an obscure essay, we must expand it to its limit. We must go beyond the cult of the virgin mother, we must make it an ethic that is caustic to veils not just for woman as mother, but for all women, all sexes in their multiplicity.
Luce Irigaray’s An Ethics of Sexual Difference is instructive in how to build this new herethics. Irigaray tackles the problem of the age–the issue of sexual difference–to build an ethics of thresholds, daemons,5 and mucus.6 Irigaray’s ethic of sexual difference is an ethics of love between man and woman that recognizes each other in their individuality. Woman is not loved as a mother-wife or a simple beloved–the passive object of active male love–but becomes an active lover prized for her self. As a virgin, a mother, a wife, she is little more than the vessel for social relations and the space for man’s sexual desire and personal transcendence. Through the recognition of sexual difference, she is no longer forced to act as the space for man’s becoming, but is an active agent who becomes alongside her partner in a chiasm of entering each other and returning to the self. The boundaries are crossed, the thresholds breached.
In encountering the abject the immediate reaction is to either turn away or throw a veil over it. Herethics calls us to turn back towards the abject in motherhood to embrace it and to reckon with it. Woman is shrouded with a veil that covers over her abjection and leaves a socially acceptable myth–that of the Virgin Mother. It is time to rip up the veil, to accept the abject into our hearts, to embrace it that she may no longer have to hide her scars, that she may no longer be made to feel ashamed.
Our herethics is, then, an ethics of symbolic violence. Violence in service of gender justice, not directed at this or that person, but at the discourses and institutions that underpin our world. Directed at the “Big Daddy Mainframe” of cyberfeminism,7 the conglomeration of patriarchy and technocapital which has erased the future of sexual difference and liberation.8 It is a violence against the symbolic order, a violence against the very terms of the debate, one that recognizes “each identity, each subject, each sex,” (Kristeva, Women’s Time 210). Herethics takes the xenofeminist rallying cry of “let a hundred sexes bloom” and pushes it out of the realm of ‘just’ sex and into its ultimate fruition (Cuboniks). We take Irigaray’s ethics and plug them into the multiplicity of sexes. We recognize each subject, each sex, as fruitful without forcing it under a veil.
Xenofeminism calls us to abolish all the old hierarchies–race, sex, class–herethics moves past that. Herethics calls for a general program of abolishing the borders between ourselves and those who are abject, to open our threshold to those deemed radically other, dirty, depraved. Kristeva called for a herethics, separated from morality, which includes women. Irigaray called for an ethics that recognizes the individuality of each woman. We push further, a program of casting off the veils placed over each sex, a heretical ethics of symbolic violence against abjection, a needle pushing past the dermis and into the heart of the symbolic order.
1 Sublimation is the process of turning the unacceptable impulse into a socially acceptable action or thought.
2 This is, of course, a necessarily simplified and shortened explanation of what abjection is and how it operates. Interested readers are encouraged to review chapter one of Powers of Horror should they want to know more.
3 For more on decadence, see Art for its Own Sake by Chelsea Hubble
4 This is similar to Irigaray’s and others’ idea of the “masquerade” though there are notable differences. Namely, while the masquerade is a performance femininity that a woman puts on, possibly under coercion, a veil, meanwhile. is something added to her by another, not something she performs or instantiates herself.
5 Love, to Irigaray, following Diotima, is daemonical. Properly ethical love is an agent which operates in between two lovers, leaving the one, entering the other, and returning. Daemonical love is not merely pulled from one or poured on another, but is a circular process.
6 Irigaray uses mucus as a metaphorical agent to describe the threshold between solid and liquid, between man and woman, between lover and beloved.
8 Please see Gender Realism by Chelsea Hubble
Cuboniks, Laboria. “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation: Laboria Cuboniks.” A Politics for Alienation | Laboria Cuboniks, https://laboriacuboniks.net/manifesto/xenofeminism- a-politics-for-alienation/.
D'Aurevilly, Jules Barbey, and Edgar Saltus. The Story without a Name. Brentano's, 1919.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay of Abjection. Columbia University Press, 1984.
Kristeva, Julia. ” The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi, Columbia University, New York, NY, 1986, pp. 160–213.
Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke, Cornell University Press, 2014.
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