영원히 지워지지 않는 흔적:줄리아 크리스테바의 모성적 육체

Indelible Traces: Julia Kristeva's Maternal Body

This paper analyzes how Julia Krsiteva's Powers of Horror throws new light on the psychoanalytic account of the maternal body. Throughout her works, Kristeva focuses on the maternal body in and prior to the child's entry into the symbolic. Contrary to Freud and Lacan, who rarely pay attention to the maternal function within their psychoanalytic theory, what Kristeva deeply explores in her work is the archaic, pre-oedipal mother cannot be successfully covered over, continually haunting the subject's psyche. In Powers of Horror, concentrated on the concepts of 'abject' and 'abjection,' Kristeva argues that the delimitation of the 'clean and proper' body is a condition of the subject's constitution as a speaking subject. She examines Freud's position in Totem and Taboo, where he claims that civilization itself is founded on the expulsion of impure incestuous elements. Further, influenced by Mary Douglas's work, Purity and Danger, Kristeva studies various taboos and abominations cited in Leviticus. Describing the association of the personal disgust with the social taboos, Kristeva mentions that the abject maternal threat comes from what has been prohibited by the symbolic, what has been prohibited so that the symbolic can be. In this paper, I argue, what is important is Kristeva's assertion that what is excluded can never be completely obliterated but hovers at the borders of our existence, threatening the apparently settled unity of the subject with disruption and possible dissolution. Abjection attests to impossibility of clear distinction and complete division stressed by the symbolic logic of separation. In particular, for Kristeva, the maternal body symbolizes the impossibility to exclude these psychically and socially threatening elements with any finality. The blurring boundary between pre-oedipal mother and the subject engenders the horrify ing po\Ver of the abject maternal. Finally. I point out that Kristeva's abjection transgresses the limits of the symbolic logic of separation on the one hand and the romantic mystification of the pre-oedipal mother-child symbiotic dependence on the other.