Separation from the forgotten vagina (Kristeva and Irigaray)
Kristeva begins the chapter "Semiotics of Biblical Abomination" by proposing two arguments for what impurity means in the Bible. It is either something immanent to the divine, an extension of divine will, or it is a force transcendent of God and wielded by demons. While the latter has always been the most intuitive reasoning behind the everyday observance of Abrahamic religions, theologians have often made logical arguments for the former. One that I've heard maybe a hundred times is the metaphor of light and dark. Everything that light shines upon must also cast a shadow; as much as darkness is the lack of light, evil is only the lack of good.
"Semiotics of Biblical Abomination" makes a much more interesting argument for the immanence of impurity. In the process of rejecting or abjecting impurity to transcend it, it becomes necessary and inherit to the definition of purity: something pure is something that is separated.
"In other words, the place and law of the One do not exist without a series of separations that are oral, corporeal, or even more generally material, and in the last analysis relating to fusion with the mother." (95)1
Psychoanalysis has observed this same separation in the separation from the mother, an infantile formation of the ego resulting from the inheritance of paternal law. Luce Irigaray in her "Speculum of the other woman" more abstractly refers to this imperative of separation as metaphor. Sexual difference begins when the mother is no longer an undifferentiable substance but a woman "like" man, when "differences are measured in the terms of sameness," when the physical thing becomes only an illusive copy of (metaphor for) an Ideal thing.
Kristeva traces the first biblical separation to that of the forbidden fruit. The knowledge of good and evil must only belong to God, and so we have a division between man and God that would make man impure if he were to cross it. This later becomes a dietary restriction -- not only metaphorically -- when man is forbidden from eating animals and allowed only to eat vegetables (thou shalt not kill). The logic of sacrifice begins here; the living beings that belong to God are not to be killed to eat but to be sacrificed to him. However, God notices that the observance of sacrifice does not satiate man's fixation with murder. After the flood, certain meats become permitted for consumption. The new separation between what is pure and impure to eat becomes flesh and blood.
Now that God has surrendered some living beings to man, sacrifice alone cannot enact a strict separation of what belongs to the two. An attempt by Moses and Aaron to present a burnt offering leads to two men dying to the fire, and now sacrifice may only be successful if done in holy places.
"The sacrifice has efficacy then only when manifesting a logic of separation, distinction, and difference that is governed by admissibility to the holy place, that is, the appointed place for encountering the sacred fire of the Lord Yahweh." (99)
These separations only become more and more elaborate. If you've read the Old Testament, you would know for how long God can go on listing prohibitions to Moses. They can seem incredibly arbitrary. However, they really do serve a purpose; it was simple enough when animals and blood were what were avoided only to respect the property of God, but when divisions are split between animals with cloven hooves that eat cud and animals that also eat cud but have undivided hooves, it is about making pure anything that we are capable of differentiating from other things at all.
"The pure will be that which conforms to an established taxonomy. The impure, that which unsettles it, establishes intermixture and disorder." (100)
This is the point where a religion of the sacred becomes a religion of abomination. What is impure is no longer what is rejected and sacrificed because it makes men humble before God, but because it's very rejection is what makes binaries, differentiations and ultimately Meaning possible. You must first be impure to be purified, you must be dirty to be cleaned, and it is this process that introduces the paternal law and allows men to rise over women because they are what separate from the feminine "intermixture" of the bleeding mother.
"What you sacrifice by swallowing, like what you suppress by rejecting, nourishing mother or corpse, are merely pre-texts of the symbolic relation that links you to Meaning. Use them to give existence to the One, but do not make them sacred in themselves." (113)
While Kristeva finds the logic of sexual difference and maternal separation in the Bible, Irigaray discovers the same in Plato's allegory of the cave. The "impure" is here what's projected on the walls of the cave, or even the "womb." Like what happens when Eve unsettles the binary of man/God to eat the forbidden fruit, the shadows in the allegory contain no essence or permanence, only disorder and lies. The Idea is truthful and it is clear, and men must escape the attractions of that undifferentiated place in Mother Earth to attain what is solid, timeless, and pure.
However, what does not have clear boundaries is just as essential to this Platonic search for truth as impurity is to purification: the cave's prisoners must exit through the passage in-between the cave and the outside. Irigaray calls this the "forgotten vagina," an essential transition on the path to truth but which must be ignored in order to validate that truth. My words: "the forgotten vagina makes metaphor possible. the symbolic highway saves us the time of those ephemeral, ungraspable transitions, sensations that resist intellectualizing and disturb a clear one and another, allowing for hopping between dichotomies."
The maternal clearly cannot be done away with. Men want to separate from their mothers, and they want to separate from women, but there will be nothing to separate from and rise above without us, and there would be no meaning to be produced from the distinctions of the symbolic order which provide order and law. So, they settle to make feminine that which is "like" man, mere representation of man: woman is a mirror. The horror of the maternal body that blurs the distinctions of the "I" by growing an "other" inside of her until its violent and bloody ejection is neutralized by becoming only a distorted image of man, an image that can be safely, reasonably put back together if only the right calculations and adjustments are made. A false image, just like an idol.2
"The impure will no longer be merely the admixture, the flow, the noncompliant, converging on that 'improper and unclean' place, which is the maternal living being. Defilement will now be that which impinges on symbolic oneness, that is, sham, substitutions, doubles, idols." (105)
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