In Search of Kristeva's Imaginary Fa(Mo)ther: A Study of Love, Desire and Christianity through some Renaissance Images

One of the three important figures of the Holy Trinity that propounded Écriture feminine, Julia Kristeva as a practicing psychologist, semiologist, and feminist, has forged seminal discursive strategies that reexamine critical theory itself. Her early writings are particularly enabling for studying phenomenology and linguistics. Séméiotiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (1969), Le Texte du roman (1970), La Révolution du langage poétique (1974), Polylogue (1977), all form the bulk of Kristeva's efforts to create, what she terms, 'Semanalysis' - a combination of psychoanalysis and semiotics. Challenging the prevalent notions in phenomenology and linguistics, Kristeva has sought to bring in the speaking body and the 'drives' back into language. Positing the material body with the power of birth, of being a law before the Law (the Lacanian Mirror stage), as well as by foregrounding the role of the bodily drives, Kristeva has reworked the process of signification, emphasizing the oscillating roles of the semiotic and the symbolic. Studying literature, society, art, laws, religion, among other aspects of life and living, the feminist develops a critical oeuvre that is unprecedented by any standards. The focus on the maternal body, language and psyche, fittingly make her critical ideas a crucial part of the feminist discourse of our times.

In the following discussion, I attempt to bring together the aspects of motherhood, desire, separation, banishment and love within Kristeva's analysis of Christianity. Drawing upon Stephen Bann's suggestion of studying Kristeva's work with Renaissance paintings, I re-examine Giovanni Bellini's painting Madonna and Child, Nicholas Hillard's painting of Elizabeth I and Piero della Francesca's painting St. Augustine, with a view to investigate some of the crucial elements of Kristeva's 'Semanalysis', her attempt to build an alternate conceptualization of love and negotiate the Law of the Father.

I

Critics like Leon S Roudiez go back to Kristeva's book La Révolution du langage poétique (1974) for referring to most of the linguistic/semiotic/psychoanalytic concepts of the Bulgarian feminist. Underlining the split nature of the speaking subject- its motivations being conscious and unconscious, Kristeva classifies the signifying processes into the categories of "semiotic" and/or "symbolic". As Roudiez explains in the 'Introduction':

The semiotic process relates to the chora, a term meaning "receptacle", which she borrowed from Plato, who describes it as "an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible."…it is the aim of Kristeva's practice to remove what Plato saw as "mysterious" and "incomprehensible" in what he called "mother and receptacle"…The symbolic process refers to the establishment of sign and syntax, paternal function, grammatical and social constraints, symbolic law…The speaking subject is engendered as belonging to both the semiotic chora and the symbolic device, and that accounts for its eventual split nature (7).

The integration of theory and practice has always been a fundamental feature of Kristeva's work. In In the Beginning was Love (1987), Kristeva goes beyond the Saussurean linguistic model that is based on a division of the verbal sign into "signifier" and "signified", to enumerate at least three kinds of signs that enable representation in analytic language: "representations of words …representations of things…, and representations of affects (labile psychic traces subject to the primary processes of displacement and condensation, which I have called semiotic as opposed to the symbolic representations inherent in, or derivative of, the system of language)" (5).

Affects are that which provide connection between the body, world and psyche in the process of signification. As Kelly Oliver explains in the essay 'The Crisis of Meaning': "Our words and our lives have meaning by virtue of their connection to affect…The meaning of words (in the narrow sense of the symbolic element of language) is charged with affective meaning (in the broader sense of the semiotic element of language) through the movement of drive energy within psychic space" (The Kristeva Critical Reader, 41). Psychoanalysis, as Kristeva conceives it, brings together the soma and psyche, body and soul. By opening up the psychic space through these verbal/non-verbal signs, it tries to give meaning to language, as well as to life. The connection between body and the word and between the feminine/masculine, which are simultaneously present in each male and female like the symbolic/semiotic in art and language, shall be taken up later with regard to the earlier-mentioned paintings.

In the Beginning… is also crucial for Kristeva's discussion of translinguistic modalities of psychic inscriptions, like drives and affects that connect to the semiotic element, taking it back to Plato's concept of Chora. Kristeva surmises: "Plato, recalling the work of the atomists, spoke in the Timaeus of the chora, an ancient, mobile, unstable receptacle, prior to the One, to the father, and even to the syllable, metaphorically suggesting something nourishing and maternal" (5). The infralinguistic/translinguistic elements of signification (semiotic), according to Kristeva, are reflected in physical expressions. The dialectical relationship between the symbolic (the structure of grammar) and the semiotic (the infra/translinguistic elements like bodily drives) is what makes signification possible. Thus a hemorrhage, an attack, a paralysis, a headache are all connected to what she terms "the somatic return of an unsymbolized repressed object" (In the Beginning…, 6). This leads to an emphasis on the body, a union of the flesh and the word that also furthers Kristeva's feminist critique. Showing how language operates at the material level of bodily expressions and symptoms, and also the presence of bodily drives in language, Kristeva brings the body back into discourse. Taking up Freud's theory of the drives, Kristeva reworks Freudian ideas by describing them as "material…not solely biological since they both connect and differentiate the biological and symbolic within the dialectic of the signifying body invested in practice" (as quoted in 'The Crisis of Meaning', 39). This connection between the soma and psyche, flesh and word, renews focus on the maternal. Not only does the connection of body and psyche established in the process of analytic transference, enable the opening up of a space for idealization of love and renewal of the anlysand's self-image, it also forms a means through which Kristeva challenges some vital Freudian and Lacanian notions. Kelly Oliver in 'The Crisis of Meaning' emphasizes the fact that one of the primary motivations behind Kristeva's foregrounding of the body is to provide an alternative to Lacanian ideas of acquisition of language. While Freud and Lacan uphold the fear of castration as the reason for the child's entry into the socially ratified world of symbolism/language (the Mirror Stage in Lacan and Oedipal situation in Freud being experiences that require a separation from the desire for the mother), Kristeva opines that this separation from the mother is an ambiguous one, involving pain and pleasure. On entering the world of law and language, the child not only comes to terms with paternal threats, but also begins to experience paternal love towards the figure of the imaginary father.

II

The father, mother and child relationship also becomes crucial to an understanding of Kristeva's critique of Christianity that later comes to fore in the analysis of the Renaissance paintings. Kristeva observes how the position of the maternal body is a paradoxical one, establishing prototypes for later relationships, as well as standing as a threat to the child's social relations. According to Kelly Oliver, Kristeva believes that the reduction of procreation to a purely biological activity and the comprehensive neglect of the role of the body in signification, make the son/mother relationship outside the ratified/social one, existing on a blatantly physical plane ('The Crisis…' 45). In Powers of Horror too, Kristeva exemplifies how the maternal body comes to denote danger, as the individual subject realizes that it was born of another body and must renounce it for achieving a social identity of its own. With its secretions of blood and milk, (almost always associated with defilement) the maternal body is in need of social/cultural boundaries and regulations. The paradox is powerfully summed up by Kristeva in the essay 'Motherhood according to Bellini' where she says: "So, if we suppose that a mother is the subject of gestation…if we suppose her to be master of a process that is prior to the social-symbolic-linguistic contract of the group, then we acknowledge the risk of losing identity at the same time as we ward it off…she warrants that everything is, and that it is representable" (Desire in Language, 238).

Juxtaposed against this complex figure of the mother is the father of traditional psychoanalytic theory. Patriarchy carried through the father is what provides social ratification, laws and principles. His societal role is what makes the father absent from the family circle, making him a disembodied, abstract figure, incapable of love. Psychoanalysis views the father as the authority that threatens and regulates the child with the fear of castration. In Tales of Love, Kristeva speaks of this loss/erosion of the loving father as the reason for psychotic discontent. Pointing out to the exaggerated discussion of the crisis in paternity in psychoanalysis, Kristeva aims at recovering a loving father, particularly by focusing on the absent paternal body.

The move from father, mother, child relationship to the Father, Son and Virgin Mother relationship is tempting and inevitable. Psychoanalysis has long attempted to address aspects of Christianity. In In the Beginning… Kristeva establishes a connection between Christianity and the word/body/mind analysis of the analysand by the psychologist. Bringing in Freud, Kristeva says: "This mobilization of two people's minds and bodies by the sole agency of the words that pass between them sheds light on Freud's famous remark in The Future of an Illusion, that the foundation of the cure is "Our God Logos." It also recalls the words of the Gospels: "In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1) and "God is love" (1 John 4:8)" (4). Christianity and love come to perform crucial roles in a set-up where the mother is seen as a defiled entity and the absent father, an authoritative patriarch threatening the child with castration. In the attempt to move out, circumvent this stifling scenario, Kristeva comes up with the figure of the Imaginary Father. The coming together of the word and flesh in psychoanalytic transference enables the flow of love and the creation of psychic space in Kristevan thought. This in turn allows the analysand to rework his self-image and to achieve some kind of idealization. Kristeva has often pointed how one of the vital causes of psychotic tendencies is a loss of this psychic space. In her Tales of Love Kristeva speaks of love as a support to fragmented subjectivities. Love also provides a bridge between words and affects, soma and psyche. In In the Beginning… too Kristeva sees love as vital to the psychoanalytic process and views its transferential discourse as "a love-story" that enables a linking with faith (4).

Taking forward the interlinking of Christian and Psychoanalytic themes, especially, the need to affirm faith in a God, Kristeva in In the Beginning… goes back to an early Credo known as the "Symbol" of the Apostles", said to have been practiced in Christendom around the tenth century. She observes:

As an analyst I find that the Credo embodies basic fantasies that I encounter every day in the psychic lives of my patients. The almighty father? Patients miss one, want one, or suffer from one… Patients aspire to nothing else, and the process is at once essential to psychic maturation and a source of pleasure…More than any other religion, Christianity has unraveled the symbolic and physical importance of the paternal function in human life (18).
This alignment with Christianity is carried forward in the death/banishment motif that Kristeva explores in 'The Father, Love, and Banishment'. Here, death becomes a way of concealing barred incest, as the son in banishment derives his social reality and meaning through the fact of the father's death. Similarly, the mother sidelined, is the Virgin mother who must remain pure for dispelling any shocking presumptions against the faith. Kristeva views the Virgin mother as a trope through which Christianity successfully bypasses issues of procreation and of the maternal function.

Coming back to Kristeva's critique of Freudian and Lacanian ideas, the feminist suggests that the reduction of the mother to a body and of the father to that of a distant, social authority leaves the child bereft of love. In an attempt to combat this erosion of love, the feminist constructs the figure of the imaginary father. The imaginary father allows the child to dissociate itself from its mother and yet remain loved by this imaginary father. Far from being an embodiment of paternal Eros, the imaginary father is the antidote to the stern father of the law, who could now be given up without the fear of psychosis. In Tales of Love she observes that such a figure would in fact "reveal(s) multiples and varied destinies for paternity…one that can also be playful and sublimational" (as quoted in 'The Crisis…', 45).

Interestingly, though aimed at bringing the child out of the sphere of love for the mother, the imaginary father stands for an imaginary union of the maternal and the paternal. Having already pointed out "the heterogeneous nature of conscious and unconscious representations" in In the Beginning…, Kristeva defines the imaginary father only in relation to the maternal (5). This also implies a kind of dependence of the procreative role of the maternal for building the imaginary figure. A loving union between the paternal and the maternal comes to guarantee love for the child. As Kelly Oliver points out, Kristeva's Imaginary father is much inspired from Freud's concept of the father of pre-oedipal history. In Freud, this father parallels the pre-oedipal, imaginary mother. Kristeva's Imaginary father comes to assume a heterogeneous/heterosexual role as the Phallic mother.

It is this "debt to the maternal body and/or motherhood's entry into symbolic existence" as Kristeva calls it in her essay 'Motherhood According to Bellini' that I attempt to investigate through the three paintings earlier mentioned. Making use of the Renaissance paintings of Giovanni Bellini, Nicholas Hillard and Piero della Francesca, taken up by Stephen Bann in his essay for chartering the turns in Kristeva's work, I try integrating body, love, and religion to bring out the heterosexual nature of the figures portrayed, figures constructed for the sake of love.

III

In her essay 'Motherhood According to Bellini', Kristeva foregrounds her analysis of Renaissance paintings by revisiting the tradition of the times:

Not only is a considerable portion of pictorial art devoted to motherhood, but within this representation itself, from Byzantine iconography to Renaissance humanism and the worship of the body that it initiates, two attitudes toward the maternal body emerge…On the one hand, there is a tilting toward the body as a fetish. On the other, a predominance of luminous, chromatic differences beyond and despite corporeal representation…integration of the image accomplished in its truth-likeness within the luminous serenity of the unrepresentable (Desire in Language, 243).

Aligning Bellini to the second lot that desired representing the unrepresentable, Kristeva, credits Bellini with ushering in the Venetian Renaissance. She calls him a "painter of motherhood above all other topics". (246). The feminist sheds light on Bellini's much-debated parentage, as her focus in the essay remains on studying the oeuvre of Bellini's work, while investigating the complex relationship that the mother figure assumes in relation to the child in all the paintings. Taking a cue from Stephen Bell's essay 'Three Images for Kristeva: From Bellini to Proust' , I attempt to focus on Bellini's Madonna and Child painting, dated around 1512 A.D. and part of the Samuel H. Kress Collection at the High Museum of Modern Art, Atlanta, Georgia. The painting shows a seated Madonna carrying the Child on her knees. With an arm around the Child, Madonna looks straight, away from the seated Child. The Child too looks sideways, in the direction away from the Mother. The similarity between the Child and Madonna lies in the almost-stern expression on their faces. The background is marked by heavy draperies on one side and a far-off natural scene, with storm clouds and a dead tree. Both Kristeva and Stephen Bann in their analysis of the painting speak of the profusion of color in the background and of the possibility of a jouissance that the displaced on color and space of the natural scene and curtains suggest. Bann's essay brings in Kristeva's comments on the facial expression, as well as his own take on the color scheme and objects:

…Mother 'dreaming of an unsignifiable experience', with the Child 'parallel and close to her body' but 'appearing more easily separable'…one has to say that with this particular work, there is a new note which comes into play. The landscape bounded by a blood red sunset under storm clouds. The clouds which you see are scumbled by the painter and form a rare plastic incident in Bellini's otherwise very beautifully smooth facture…('Three Images…', 59).

As Kristeva has shown in her analysis of the Madonna and Child paintings, one could trace a psychoanalytic movement in Bellini's work, from the love of the Child and Madonna to the subsequent play of ideas like separation and banishment. Examining a series of paintings that cover almost the entire span of Bellini's work, Kristeva brings art, psychoanalysis and biography together to show the way the Child comes to terms with the complex relationship he shares with his Mother. The painting at Atlanta, Georgia is however, not taken up for a detailed analysis by Kristeva.

I intend to shift the focus back to Madonna and Child painting at Atlanta, Georgia and analyze it in terms of the figure of the Imaginary father that Kristeva comes up with in works like Tales of Love. As mentioned earlier, one sees how the Imaginary father, conceived as the loving father who would address the child's lack of love, is after all the phallic mother, defined only in terms of the maternal. Kristeva had also in In the Beginning… stressed on the heterogeneity of unconscious subjects. In addition to this, as Kelly Oliver exhibits in 'The Crisis…', this "father-mother conglomerate" is in fact identified with the mother's desire for the Father's Phallus (46). Oliver also views the creation of the Imaginary father as an ultimate return to the Lacanian symbolic father.

The Madonna and Child painting stands out for anticipating this "father-mother conglomerate" through the figure of the Mother. The stern-faced and yet resolute Madonna looks out at the viewer/painter, challenging not just the fetishistic gaze that Kristeva earlier refers to, but also posing a challenge to the power of the Phallus, in terms of the possession she still has over the Child, through the complex relation she would share with it, forever. The tense Child is loveless still and though with the Mother, he feels only the coldness of this Phallic mother.

Nicholas Hillard's name is synonymous with miniature paintings in 16^th century England. Hillard is also counted as one among the important artists who recreated the power and the glory of Queen Elizabeth, spreading the cult of the Virgin queen. Interestingly, at the age of barely ten, Hillard found himself removed from the paternal home. Attached to the house of leading Exeter Protestant John Bodley, father of Thomas Bodley (founder of the Bodleian Library), Hillard was exiled to Europe with the Bodley family. Records show him to be one of the eleven Bodley family members in Geneva, presided over by John Knox.

Hillard's most well-known work is his oil on wood Portrait of Queen Elizabeth. Dated around 1574 A.D., the portrait is at the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside. In discussing the portrait in his essay, Stephen Bann quotes from the famous speech Queen Elizabeth made to her troops at Tilbury: "Although I have the weak and feeble body of the woman, I have the heart of a King, and of a King of England too" ('Three Images…', 64). Antonia Fraser in her essay 'Half Woman, Half Goddess', chooses Hillard's Portrait as the best image of Elizabeth-I in that it reflects the queen's steely and commanding visage at its most powerful. The queen in Hillard's portrait has an expression of royal indifference, of pride. The heavy costume, laced with pearls and the unimpassioned face make for an odd emblem of the Virgin queen still pursued, who is simultaneously, the stern monarch, crafty and resolute. Most critics also observe the Pelican emblem on the bodice of the queen. While Bann notes it as a religious emblem associated with Christ, Antonia Fraser makes the following observation about it:

…the emblem of the phoenix which can be seen on Elizabeth's breast in the Hilliard picture, just above her famously long white hand, is in itself a deliberate boast of dynastic strength. As Roy Strong has made clear in his masterwork on the portraits of Gloriana, the phoenix in its application to Elizabeth ran the full range of meanings…but "it was above all a vehicle in dynastic mysticism asserting the perpetuity of hereditary kingship and royal dignity (1).

With both its religious and dynastic implications, the emblem adds to the conscious and constant attempt made by Elizabeth to be a man and a woman. She is the mother, the monarch, the father and the Virgin Queen. Her image here, with her challenge to male power and proclamation of dynastic kingship comes very close to the Phallic mother, as well as to the Imaginary father, the space created with the possibility of obtaining paternal love of the Father/monarch.

Italian Renaissance was spearheaded by figures like Piero della Francesca. Born in Sansepolcro (Borgo), Piero travelled all over the country learning and painting, not returning home until the death of his mother in 1459. Piero obtained the surname della Francesca who is believed to have raised him. Though much is not known about Piero or his parents' lives, biographers conjecture that Piero's mother was widowed while pregnant with the child Peiro. A skilled geometrician and a perspectivist, Piero's works are known for their simplicity, an unfinished modern look and perspective beauty. Christianity emerges as the single-most important theme in all of Piero's work. The painting St. Augustine that is our focus here is dated around 1454 A.D. and is presently at the Museum of Antique Art, Lisbon. The painting took over eight years and remained incomplete. Stephen Bann in his analysis of the painting speaks of the "opacity of the body" in the painting, as well as "the grave manner" of the saint here ('Three Images…', 69). Carrying an almost transparent crozier, the saint also wears a heavy robe that carries on it episodes from Christ's life. With his solemn expression, narrative of Christ's life and symbols of office and religious authority, St. Augustine clearly emerges as a sincere messenger of God's words, a harbinger of Christian love.

With a gestation period that included the death of Piero's mother, the painting opens itself up for some interesting readings. Piero's role of the banished son, who returned only with the Mother's death and of the child that arrived with a literal death of his Father, makes for a psychoanalytically rich backdrop. Love once again comes to the foreground as an important element, borne by none other than the Imaginary father conceived to heal the child's psychosis. In the amalgamation of the humble love that he stood for and the earnest role he played as a follower of God, St. Augustine comes to occupy the space on the artistic panel, as well as on the unconscious.

Kristeva's concept of the Imaginary father is an attempt at recreating love away from the biases of traditional psychoanalysis. Her collating of the embodied, loving father and the active, strong mother is an effort to address the loss of love, and psychic space, which is much-needed for the analysand's recovery. A serious examination of Kristevan strategies reveal the ways in which Écriture feminine challenges masculinist discourses, while revisiting/reconstructing emblems of Western cultures, such as the famed Renaissance paintings.

Works Cited:

Bann, Stephen. 1998, 'Three Images for Kristeva: From Bellini to Proust.' in The Kristeva Critical Reader. (ed. John Lechte and Mary Zournazi) Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Francesca, Piero, della: Painter. http://www.artist-biography.info/artist/piero_della_francesca/ 30^th September, 2015
Fraser, Antonia. 'Half Woman, Half Goddess: Antonia Fraser on Nicholas Hillard's Elizabeth-I', http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/half-woman-half-goddess 30^th September, 2015
Kristeva, Julia. 1980, Desire in Language. (ed. Leon S. Roudiez. trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon S. Roudiez) Blackwell Publishers, Oxford: Basil.
-------------------. 1987, In the Beginning was Love. (trans. Arthur Goldhammer) Columbia University Press, Oxford and New York.
-------------------. 1987, Tales of Love. (trans. Leon S. Roudiez) Columbia University Press, New York.
Oliver, Kelly. 1988, 'The Crisis of Meaning.' The Kristeva Critical Reader. (ed. John Lechte and Mary Zournazi) Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Roudiez, Leon.S. 1980, 'Introduction'. Desire in Language. (ed. Leon S. Roudiez. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon S. Roudiez) Blackwell Publishers, Oxford: Basil.