When Combat Speaks: Eruption of Kristeva’s the Real
Updated: February 27, 2024
In a particular case vignette read recently about a Vietnam war veteran, Peter, who seemed to have not yet come to terms with the atrocities he committed; ordering the firebombing of a village, setting mothers, children, and infants on fire, the shooting of elderly unarmed women and men in guerrilla warfare, being shot at by enemy snipers, his men being killed by landmines. He himself was blown up, hospitalized for months, the loss of his right foot and part of his right leg. He had a prosthesis, phantom pain, and a crutch. Athletic discipline restored his ability to walk again. He returned from the war as a guiltless man of modest desires and he came to therapy because he wanted his wife to love him like she had done when they were first married.
In this man there is no conflict over history, no registry of regret, and there is no real perception of self or other. He lives in a state of war mythology as the heroic soldier to which metals and scars have been bestowed upon by a country that was, in all likelihood, in the same denial. Erasing the bestiality of combat and replacing it with war rhetoric mythology. Unable to grasp the “I-Thou” relation. Each morning he resuscitates his former youthful war soldier Adonis, an officer who did not die, who will never die, and the gap between himself and his real aging wife widens. This soldier’s life story has no elasticity, no evolving new perspective; it admits no grief or moral or political complication. This position does not respond to time or distance, to changing gender roles or new historical/cultural epochs; nor to aging, or fatherhood, or to any other kind of intimate experience. Soldiering has a hyper-masculine phantasm linked to hyperbolic splits — to “gooks” and men and the necessity for “purifying violence.” When he looks at his own grandchildren he never sees the children he killed in Vietnam. When he looks at himself, he never sees the young boy inside himself. There are no depths to his mirror. Looking is a condition of blindness (Grand, pg. 223–224).
When nations prosecute these foreign wars, our war rhetoric always conjures this mutual silence and blindness. To manipulate the U.S. population toward war, the conversation must be foreclosed. Humane empathy towards responsiveness to enemy causalities interfere with necessary mass violence. “To diminish empathy and tragic guilt, our ideologies direct our gaze toward what the enemy is doing to us (Grand, pg. 225).” We are prevented from seeing what the war is actually doing to us. How it is harming us as a nation, as a society, and as individuals. As a result, most of us, but not all, become complicit in what is known in psychoanalysis a, “malignant dissociative contagion.” It is here I implore you to think about the 2020 Presidential election and the defeat of Donald Trump by Joe Biden and the accusations of “voter fraud.” “When multiple perspectives appear, malignant dissociative contagion breaks-up. We become able to relinquish our faulty heroic mythologies, and we begin to see an “I-Thou” relationship (Grand, pg. 225).” In what Mahler (1968) described as an omnipotent autistic orbit, the malignant dissociative contagion becomes a field of the totalizing knowledge and our war rhetoric transforms the whole of society into a field of perception that is manipulated by the media in regard to what we are “allowed” to see and read. Thus, the wholesale consumption of what we know about the war, controls our perceptions, knowledge, and vision on what we see and hear about the war. All circumscribed by our own zones of blindness and inattention.
When citizens are caught in the predicament of a foreclosed conversation. We are not permitted to see truth on either side. It’s a one-sided conversation that manipulates our gaze.
In many ways this dialectic foreclosure has been my relationship with my own family. Kept away from relatives and family functions via the induction of wireless electronic assault torture (frequency sedation during the gathering). It was impossible on either side to know what the truth really was and to what extent. Had I really become a full-blown alcoholic like many people claimed? Or had I been made to avoid family and family events via what can only be described as Pavlovian conditioning, moving me away from a space? When an individual is isolated from others in the group, and the group is isolated away from the individual, the “authority figure” at the center controls the narrative. This is exactly what police investigators do when interviewing accomplices. Instead of attending family events and functions, I was supplied a small amount of alcohol, while at the same time granted a reprieve from the wireless electronic assault torture. That is to say, as long as I stayed away, it was turned off. What was behind this sinister evil lurking in the shadows? Did extended family know what was transpiring? Or was this the technique of propaganda in war rhetoric promoting a malignant dissociative contagion? In short, warmongering.
In gangs, mafias, the Taliban, malignant dissociative contagion is the technique used to recruit new member to the “cause” in a reproduction of evil. It is how ideologies regulate what their members can and cannot see because it’s a foreclosed conversation, a one-sided conversation, that seeks to manipulate our gaze away from truth and the narrative is implicitly accepted by others because of their own blindness and inattention to the facts that tell the individual otherwise which are so frequently ignored. This cultural predicament makes individuals unable to direct or redirect their own vision because they’ve vested interest in an “authority that appears to know and it someone they trust.” Thus, individuals are unable to know they are not regulating their sight. We imagine we see through our own eyes, but our critical capacity is bewildered. We act as a collectivity of unthinking bodies, who cannot think about other bodies that are wounded. Think about how social media influences recruit new members to their ideology. Ruby Franke, a parenting host on YouTube received up to 60 years in prison for her disciplinary ideologies involving the maltreatment of her own children. She spent several years dishing out “parenting advice” but when Franke’s malnourished son escaped out a window with obvious signs of physical abuse, she was arrested and imprisoned.
The Maternal Symbolic and the Return of the Repressed. Kristeva’s the Real.
In the opening case vignette about the Vietnam War veteran named Peter, he reports a series of dreams to his analyst. He has similar reoccurring dreams:
He is at home in his bedroom. The room with the mirror. A woman is just there: gloved, demur, coifed. Eyes obscured by the black mesh veil of a pillbox hat. A 1960s, white, ladylike presence, reminiscent of Jackie Kennedy’s elegance. At first he barely notices that she is in the room. But her presence is both fixating and obscure. She sits, and she is silent. He doesn’t know her. He cannot see her eyes behind the veil. The dream recurs, and his dread seems to increase with every repetition.
To the war veteran the woman seems to represent Jackie Kennedy at JFK’s funeral. “Jackie the aristocrat of motherhood whose own children were half orphaned by violence. Whose husband was sanctified by his assassination Inserted into history as another “profile in courage.” In a condition of eternal youth, like the war veteran’s image in his own mirror. In 1960s America, Jackie’s widowhood was grace: her dignity and fortitude was used to confirm the man’s heroic honor (Grand, pg. 233).
But now, to the war veteran, Jackie Kennedy’s image has become to his unconscious a warning of disapproval. As a grieving wife, she watches the war veteran. She remains silent and poised, doing nothing, except to cast an “evil eye” on his “badness.” His dread is shapeless and wordless and insistent. He says, “She knows what we did.”
Dread is a feeling connected with empathy remorse and guilt. We feel dread because we fear reprisal. When dialogue is foreclosed, reflection can only be guided by a third perspective. In this case when the maternal symbolic allows us to feel dread and experience grief for the first time from which it was previously cut-off.
In war rhetoric, we find an idealized and sacrificial mother, this maternal symbolic. Her loins have yielded the hero: she has relinquished him to destiny; she wait; she mourns his remains. In maternal surveillance, another set of eyes appear as the “all seeing mother.” Her appearance functions as a perfected projective object. She has the all-seeing eye of loss and grief. Her eyes always registered that which we could not see. She maintains the sacred claim to truth.
Referring my analytic reading to the philosophy of Julia Kristeva in the writing of Michelle Boulous Walker’s “Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading silence” and in “naming the problem”:
Poetic language simultaneously affirms and negates symbolic function. It contests the symbolic order by freeing “the subject from certain linguistic (psychic, social) networks. Because it re-introduces negativity within language, the poetic marks the return of what the symbolic order has repressed. Kristeva is adamant that this repressed space is in fact the maternal chora. For [Kristeva] the chora is the maternal locus of the poetic subject. It is the site that constantly subverts the stability and coherence of the symbolic. It appears to be at odds with paternal authority of the symbolic (Walker, pg. 115).
The signal to the maternal chora is a rather ambiguous “space” formed in Plato’s work Timaeus. He emphasizes that the “space” is a receptacle, a receptacle that is face-to-face with reason that is necessary, unstable, uncertain, ever changing and becoming according to Elizabeth Grosz. Is this “receptacle” a “thing” or “a mode of language?” In the Platonic space, the receptacle is a mother and wet nurse. (*)
Grosz writes: “She is thus the consequence of a masculine fantasy of maternity, rather than woman’s lived experience of maternity.” The issue that Grosz raises here is an important one. It forces us to question the implications of Kristeva’s maternal in the light of some very real feminist concerns. We need to ask whether this transgressive maternal space can be useful for any feminist analysis given that, according to Grosz, it ultimately rests upon, and stands in for, a phallic paternal fantasy. This is why the image of the maternal symbolic is always represented as an idealized and “perfect” image of a mother. Has this space have anything to do with women and their real voices?
Poetic language of the maternal body in dreams can prompt our thinking about our own subjectivity.
(*) “Mother writes in white ink.” The white ink of breast milk and nurturance. It’s important to mention that in dreams when masculine desire to have oral sex performed on him can converge on the maternal space of the mother as wet nurse and caregiver. In the war veteran’s erotic transference with his heterosexual female analyst, he had previously unconsciously conferred upon her the role of “able bodied, capable soldier” through an unexpected altercation with another patient’s angry and aggressive husband. Thus, his homosexual erotic dream of having oral sex performed on him by another man was really the unconscious desire in fantasy to be in sexual union with his female analyst.
SOURCES:
First Do No Harm: The Paradoxical Encounters of Psychoanalysis, Warmaking, and Resistance. Adrienne Harris and Steven Botticelli (editors.) New York. Routledge. Relational Perspectives Book Series Volume 45. Chapter 11, Combat Speaks: Grief and tragic memory by Sue Grand.
Michelle Boulous Walker. (1998) Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading silence. New York. Routledge.
