طرح ایده تن‌سیاست بر اساس اندیشه‌های کریستوا

Proposing the Idea of Corpopolitics Based of Kristeva’s Thoughts

Hassan Fatzade¹, Marzieh Darabi²

1. 1.     Associate Professor, University of Zanjan, (Corresponding author) Email: hfatzade@znu.ac.ir
2. 2.     MA, Islamic Azad University, North Tehran Branch Email: marzieh362@gmail.com

Abstract

By separating the semiotic and the symbolic, Kristeva seeks to bring the semiotic chora back to the realm of politics. Chora includes the libidinal force belonging to the mother-child relationship, which at the same time that it has propagated the components of the symbolic realm, has always been suppressed. Kristeva regards this repression as the basis of all the repressions and wants to restrain the authority by returning to this suppressed affair. Here, the repressed affair itself does not return, but it should be backed up by profound psychoanalysis. Kristeva calls this a revolt and thus revealing the deep relationship between macropolitics and micropolitics by giving a political character to it. We will introduce this psychoanalytic understanding of the political affair as corpopolitics. As we will show, corpopolitics seeks to prevent matricide, and this is the most original political act; because, according to us, matricide is the root of all violence and repression. So we shall propose a new reading of Kristeva’s political thoughts.

Keywords: Chora, Libidinal Chaos, Matricide, Revolt, Corpopolitics.

Introduction

Julia Kristeva builds her views on a perception of the body as a central concept. By interpreting the subject as “subject in process”, Kristeva makes possible the introduction of an open and flexible subject for a revolution in the micropolitics. By challenging the concept of identity in modern times, he portrays a feminine interpretation of the way of formation of the subject in process, and in this picture, she uses the politics of body as a ground for the formation of a revolutionary change in public policy. Modern interpretations of reality, which are carried out in the symbolic realm and under the law of the Father, first of all, seek to stabilize identified subject, which preserves its unity through the dominance on the interpreted object. Kristeva declares, “there are political implications inherent in the act of interpretation itself, whatever meaning that interpretation bestows... [because the interpretation] is rooted in the speaking’s subject’s need to reassure himself of his image and his identity faced with an object” [1]. This constant identity has been obtained at the cost of femininity repression. In this sense, the female interpretation is fundamentally an anti-interpretation, and the real meaning of the critical reading and the death of the author is realized only with it. Only by restoring the libidinal chaos can one break apart the authority without substituting it with another authority.

“Kristeva’s notion of subjectivity could be considered as a corrective to modern identity politics, undermining the notion of a stable self” [2]. Challenging this identity and the stable self means undermining the authority. In her project, Kristeva seeks to determine the position of the subject and searches it not only in language but also in the physical domain related to language. The politics of the body, which is in her mind in the pre-discursive domain, appears through its archaic motivations and bodily effects; in a pre-oedipal semiotics space, where the sexual identity has not yet been formed and not related to the symbolic. Here, “although there is as yet no outside other, there is archaic “relationship,” marked by the absence of symbolic acts concerning another and made up, instead, of an exclusively corporeal and affective mode of responsiveness: the preverbal semiotic” [3].

Kristevn and the corpopolitics

Kristeva considers revolt to be a devastating influence on the symbolic. In the sense that the semiotic does not come from outside, but it is a layer underlying different factors in the symbolic realm, which provides their motor power. Therefore, to find the Chora, one must look directly at the eyes of the symbolic, a gaze that gradually defamiliarizes itself with its subject and creates a scary monstrosity that is nothing but a phenomenological monster. It can be said that the revolt is a kind of rewriting of Freud's Unheimliche, which shakes our temporal foundations, and allows us to access the time lost or forgotten in the normative order. In other words, this strange space is the same as the Chora, which Kristeva regards as “new encounter with an unexpected outside element”; stimulating the “images of death” or “female sex” - “Unheimliche as a crumbling of conscious defenses, resulting from the conflicts self-experiences with another” [4].

The semiotic language that is associated with Chora leads the drives and desires towards the language. In other words, the structure of language in Kristeva's thinking is in a dynamic state which is moving between the symbolic and the semiotic. With the advent of the concept of motherhood, which carries Chora's space, Kristeva is trying to find a way out of the violence that lies behind the foundations of modern culture. According to her, Chora carries a creative and rhythmic. The semiotic as fluid and diverse affair attempts to undermine the ideology of the patriarchal class society, which takes power from things such as state, order, ownership, and so on. By introducing the semiotic in language, that is somehow equivalent to a revolution in politics, Kristeva regards her work as essentially political, the policy moving between macro-politics and micro-politics, which we call Corpopolitics. Corpopolitics is a maternal policy-making aimed at returning of desire to the realm of politics, and this means a transition from psychoanalysis to politics. Kristeva is in this sense a Post-Structuralist thinker.

References

-         Kristeva, Julia (1983) “Psychoanalysis and the Polis”, trans. Margaret Waller, in the Politics of Interpretation, W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 86.

-         Sjoholm, Cecilia (2005) Kristeva and the Political, London: Rutledge

-         Beardsworth, Sara (2009) “Love’s Lost Labors: Subjectivity, Art, and Politics”, in Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Julia Kristeva, K. Oliver and S. K. Keltner (eds.), New York: State University of New York, p. 130.

-         Kristeva, Julia (1991) Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 188