From Nature in Love - The Problem of Subjectivity in Adorno and Freudian Psychoanalysis

From nature in love: The problem of subjectivity
in Adorno and Freudian psychoanalysis

Sara Beardsworth
Published online: 30 November 2007
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Abstract This paper investigates the potential of the concept of sublimation for
thinking subjectivity at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory. I rst
rehearse a recent argument by Whitebook that Freuds notion of sublimation presents a
nonviolent integration and expansion of the ego, which can mediate the modern
dichotomy between the rational subject and nonrational impulse and desire. On this view,
sublimation turns subjectivity into a site of possibility in the context of modern, ratio-
nalized thought and society. I then argue that the concept of sublimation offered to critical
theory in this form is insufciently developed. Both Freud and Adorno analyze a deep-
seated destructiveness of the modern subject, which turns up right at the heart of attempts
to mediate the dichotomies of rationalized modernity. What is needed to counter this
problemis a theoryof love inwhich love is not separated from, but, rather, correlatedwith
drive and desire, and can thereby get on a level with the unconscious or unacknowledged,
impulsive nature of death-bearing subjectivity in enlightened modernity. A central con-
ception in Kristevas development of Freudian psychoanalysis, the idea of transference
love, delivers such a theory and thereby develops the concept of sublimation in the way
that is needed at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory.
Keywords Adorno Freud Kristevan Sublimation
1 Introduction
This paper contends that a Kristevan development of the concept of sublimation
overcomes the obstacles that turn up in claiming that Freudian subjectivity is a site
of potential for countering the problem of modern rationalized thought and society.
Part 2 of the paper rehearses a recent argument by Whitebook (2004) that makes this
claim by offering to critical theory a conception of subjectivity grounded in Freuds
S. Beardsworth (&)
Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL 62901-4505, USA
e-mail: beardswo@siu.edu
1 3
Cont Philos Rev (2007) 40:365387
DOI 10.1007/s11007-007-9068-z
concept of sublimation and Loewalds expansion of it (1988).
1
The problems of
Adornos classical bourgeois subject and its dissolution are said to be surpassed by
this conception of subjectivity. Part 3 argues that the concept of sublimation offered
to critical theory in this form is insufciently developed owing to a lack of
confrontation with what I will call the problem of the negativefor Freud, the death
drivethat turns up at the heart of his theory of sublimation. Moreover, there is a
convergence between Freud and Adorno on this point where Adornos writings
attest to an attitudinal contribution to the appearance of the National Socialist form
of anti-Semitism (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). That is to say, I show that
Adornos thought overlaps with Freuds where the former encounters the problem of
the negative turning up in subjectivity in what he calls the mimesis of death. Part 4
responds to the question whether psychoanalytic theory has any resources for
getting on a level with and countering the upsurge of the death drive in sublimation
confronted by Freud. I turn to Kristevas extensions of the Freudian theory of
narcissism in order to show that her idea of transference love begins a development
of the concept of sublimation in a manner that supports its recommendation to
critical theory. This is because, rst, it illuminates the subjective conditions under
which the death drive comes to prevail and, second, it is itself correlated with those
conditions in a way that has the potential for countering the sway of death and
destructiveness.
2 Adorno and Freud: Whitebooks recovery of the concept of sublimation
In Whitebooks view, there is a skeletal but unnamed theory of sublimation in
Adornos theoretical writings but he polemically deprived himself of the idea in
his culture critique and aesthetic theory (Whitebook 2004, p. 59). The analysis of
subjectivity therefore stopped at the critique of the classical bourgeois individual.
Adorno left to art the capacity for surpassing the problem of identity thinking, a
notion that captures the connections between the character of modern reason, on the
one hand, and the fate of subjectivity in enlightened modernity, on the other.
Identity thinking is a mode of rationality that is concomitant with the apotheosis of
the subject in modern philosophy. It operates as a coercive synthesis in relation to
the cognized object, diminishing both the subject and the object. The Freudian
exploration of the problem of the obsessional ego discovers the same fate of the
relation of subject and object. For Whitebook, Adornos search for and articulation
of our possibilities in relation to this diagnosis of modernity restricts them to a
single site: the advanced work of art understood as the performance of a nonviolent
synthesis of the manifold. Whitebook seeks to overcome this restriction by
showing that a development analogous to the performance of the artwork is revealed
in the psychoanalytic investigation into sublimation, a subjective process that yields
a nonviolent integration and expansion of the ego. Critical theorys abandonment of
subjectivity as a site of our possibilities therefore deprives us of important resources
1
Whitebooks essay Weighty objects: On Adornos KantFreud interpretation is a development of his
earlier thought on sublimation in Perversion and utopia (1995).
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coming from Freudian psychoanalysis. Changed socio-historical conditions and
advances in Freudian thought allow us to recover these resources, according to
Whitebook.
We begin with the diagnosis of modernity on which this argument rests. As
Whitebook species, the problematic of identity thinking refers, rst, to a mode of
cognition that subordinates the particular to the universal and constitutes the unity
of the object through the forced synthesis of the manifold (2004, p. 59). That is to
say, in identity thinking the synthesizing activity of thought imposes a coercive
unity on the manifold. Adorno found this to be the fundamental propensity of
modern reason, exemplied, moreover, in the tendency to disconnect self-reective
thought from empirical inquiry. Although this tendency is most evident in
philosophy in the appearance of positivism, which aligns its own theoretical
reection with scientic method, it also gains ground in Kants idealism. Idealism
and positivism, seemingly opposed philosophical standpoints, are united in their
perpetration of the division of the self-reective and the empirical moments of
thought. The division becomes xed in Kants transcendental/empirical distinction.
Whitebooks development of this problem begins with the appearance of this
distinction in Kants practical philosophy, which establishes the original separation
of (transcendental) philosophy from (empirical) psychology. This, in turn,
corresponds to the dichotomy between Kants transcendental subject, which is
universal, rational, and moral, and his empirical self, which is contingent, impulse-
laden, nonrational, and nonmoral (2004, p. 60). For Whitebook, Adornos critique of
Kant deploys psychoanalysis because Freuds method catches hold of and presents
the genesis of the distinction that is made original and absolute in Kant. In brief,
Freud tracks the fearfully majestic a priori, the transcendental subject, back to
psychological conditions (Adorno 1990, p. 232; Whitebook 2004, p. 66).
On its own terms, Kants philosophy is a critical self-reection undertaken by
modern reason, one that secures the eld of expansion of theoretical knowledge by
limiting knowledge to objects of possible experience (Kant 1985). In the act of
cognition the manifold given in sensory experience, or intuition, is organized under
pure intellectual concepts: the categories of the understanding. Kant dispels the
perennial modern philosophical problem of securing the conformity of our
knowledge to objects by imposing the conformity of objects to our knowledge
and by conning what is knowable to a natural world subject to causal
understanding. As a result of the transcendental turn, what had for much of the
philosophical tradition been the realm of contingencythe sensible world
becomes the realm of necessity since the pure concepts endow the object world with
its lawful nature. Kants innovation involves a distinction between Verstand and
Vernunft. The understanding (Verstand) becomes the faculty exercised over nature,
which is to say, the knowable realm coinciding with the realm of sensible
experience. Vernunft or reason is restricted in this context to reection on the
possibility of knowledge. Reason itself has no content. It is without issue in the
realm of experience. Subject (reason) and object (sensible world) are therefore
unconnected. Reason acquires a content only in the second Critique, where the
intelligible but unknowable rational subject is the pure source of universal laws that
it gives to itself through willing them (Kant 1993). By determining moral action,
From nature in love 367
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reason establishes a connection between rational subject and object world, the realm
of experience. Yet freedom and morality are rescued in a world of causal
understanding by means of an inexible distinction between the autonomy of the
rational subject on one side and the rule of heteronomy, applying to outer and inner
nature, on the other. As a result, impulse and desire are dispatched to a nonrational,
nonmoral sphere that would be the domain of empirical psychology as distinct from
transcendental philosophy. In distinction from the transcendental subject, inner
nature has become the self-as-object: part of the knowable world of causal
understanding.
Whitebook concludes that reason retracts into abstraction just where it sought to
maintain the heights it gained in the rst Critique as transcendental reection
yet also acquire a content. Practical reason is so puried of sensible attachments that
it is without content. The self-examination of reason is therefore arrested at the
aporia of freedom and necessity. The aporia corresponds not only to an
unbridgeable gulf between rational subject and outer object but also to a chasm
inscribed at the heart of a subject now irreconcilably divided between the rational
and moral a priori, on the one hand, and self-as-object or inner nature, on the other.
For Adorno, this sets the task of submitting the Kantian critique itself to critical self-
reection, an undertaking that will reveal the continuity between the apotheosis of
the rational subject in Kant and the formation and withering of the bourgeois
individual in enlightened modernity. The endeavor owes much to Freuds genetic
approach, according to Whitebook. Freuds approach is taken up in Adornos
development of the thought of spontaneity in the transcendental philosophy.
From the genetic perspective, the opposition of rational subject and nature is the
result of the egos act of repression: an extrojection of nature through which the
ego establishes a boundary between itself and internal nature as its inner foreign
territory (Whitebook 2004, p. 66; Freud 1933, p. 57). Repression is a defensive
action on the part of the ego that goes unrecognized by it and establishes the
opposition between itself (ego) and unconscious impulse or desire (id). The concept
of spontaneity then undergoes a split. On one side, the spontaneity of nature is
reduced to a merely unconscious, involuntary, and reexive phenomenon. On the
other, the spontaneity of the ego, now differentiated from nature, is made purely
intramental and is seen as the highest moment of freedom, namely, the Is ability
to initiate thinking without itself being determined by prior conditions (Whitebook
2004, pp. 6667). Purely intramental spontaneity devolves on the transcendental
unity of the subject (Vernunft) and on empirical thinking consciousness in its
capacity freely to initiate chains of thought (Verstand). The genetic standpoint on
purely intramental spontaneity, which nds it to be the result of a process and
therefore dependent on prior conditions, attacks the belief that reason is self-
initiated and develops independently. It attacks the belief in reasons autonomy. It
therefore undermines the transcendental support for and one side of the unbridge-
able gulf between subject and object. As yet, however, there is no indication of the
movement of overcoming that gulf.
According to Whitebook, Adorno could have taken steps toward overcoming it
on the ground of subjectivity itself if he had adopted from Freud the concept of
sublimation. He deprived himself of the idea, however, partly for socio-historical
368 S. Beardsworth
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reasons that need not hinder us and partly because he was leery of a concept that
continued to think the subject in terms of the integrated ego. Nonetheless, he could
have gone further thanks to his own notion of the addendum, identied by him with
the archaic impulse not yet steered by any solid I (Adorno 1990, p. 221;
Whitebook 2004, p. 66). The addendum in Adorno is the eliminated moment of
nature: the impulse expelled to the zone of unfree bondage to nature. It sets the
dialectic of spontaneity in motion because the extrojected nonrational is not
securely held in place by the majestic a priori. That is to say, the addendum is the
return of the repressed within the rational subject. This claim reconsiders the
intramental spontaneity identied with the transcendental subject by reviewing
characteristics that it shares with excised nature. The intramental spontaneity of the
subject lies in the unication of our experience, which cannot itself become an
object of experience. First, this functioning is, like archaic impulse and desire,
unconscious and involuntary (Adorno 1990, p. 230; Whitebook 2004, p. 67).
Second, the capacity to unify and organize experience, enabling mastery of self and
object, does not represent freedom but, rather, serves the exigencies of self-
preservation. In sum, Adorno nds an echo of the drives in Kants transcendental
subject (Whitebook 2004, p. 66).
To extrapolate from Whitebooks argument, the import of Freuds conception of
the drive for the critique of Kant lies in Freuds discovery and articulation of the
nonrational that no aspect of causal understanding can reach. Inner nature is opaque
to self-reection. It escapes from the domain of Verstand that encompasses the self-
as-object. As a fundamental element of the Freudian conception of the uncon-
scious, then, drive theory seizes hold of the extrojected impulse in its failing to
abide by the boundary that upholds the opposition of rational subject and self-
as-object. The inner foreign territory deposited by the transcendental/empirical
distinction, impulse and desire, strays from the realm of the knowable self and
world. The drives nd their echo in the unconscious and involuntary act of the
transcendental subject. Thus, with Adorno, Freuds genetic perspective rst shows
modern reason to be the coercive unity that expels the nonrational, turns nature into
merely involuntary and unconscious reexiveness, and leaves the subject both
absolute and unknowable. It then discerns migrating nature at the heart of modern
reason itself, hinting at the possibility of alternatives for the modern subject.
Without an alternative, Kants rigidly self-maintaining rational subject is reduced
to the identity thinking that corresponds to the rigidity of the obsessional ego, as is
revealed by the theory of repression. For the egos unconscious repressions establish
and safeguard the ego, to which consciousness is attached, as the coherent
organization of mental processes. Ego is that which is sovereign in the eld of its
own integration: the eld it controls through what it (already) knows. Identity
thinking is Adornos term for the analogous sovereignty of a rational subject whose
acts of cognition are acts of recognition in a concept: the imposition of the unity
of cognition on particulars through subsumption under a universal, in abstraction
from their specic qualities. Cognition is the identication of an object in which the
subject itself remains unchanged. The integrated ego upheld by repressions is thus
the counterpart in Freud to identity thinking in Adorno. According to Whitebook,
Adorno left subjectivity at the point of this rigidity of the coercive and obsessional
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ego, unable to contemplate the genesis of ego integration in any other way. He did
not avail himself of the notion of sublimation that provides an alternative fate for
subjectivity than that of the unmoved ego, having failed to follow through the
thought in Freud that sublimation is identication not of an object but with the
object. Sublimation is a psychic act that does not abstract from but, rather,
internalizes the objects specic qualities. At the same time, it is a process that
reconciles the ego with desire or inner nature. Identication with, not of, the object
is therefore a mediation of ego and id, or rational subject and inner nature, which
alters the subject.
Following Whitebook, one nds Freuds concept of sublimation by tracking the
development of his theory of internalization. First, in the 1918 theory of loss and
melancholy, internalization is a pathogenic mechanism, one in which a mental
illness develops. Freud nds that in melancholia the subject has identied with a lost
and ambivalently loved object. Internalization is the process in which the ego takes
over the relinquished objects characteristics. It is a pathogenic mechanism insofar
as the subject remains tied thereby to the lost object and suffers its own incapacity to
be set free from the past. The ego becomes immobile. This version of internalization
is captured in Freuds statement the shadow of the object falls across the ego
(Freud 1917, p. 249; Whitebook 2004, p. 71). Second, in 1923 in The Ego and the
Id, Freuds introduction of the new structural theory of the mindego, id, and
superegoappears together with an expansion of the idea of internalization.
Internalization now becomes a universal path of ego formation. As Whitebook
species, this means that the ego, the subject, is formed through the internalization
of objects that are then transformed into psychic structures (2004, p. 72). The new
position is captured in Freuds statement the ego is a precipitate of abandoned
object-cathexes (Freud 1923, p. 29; Whitebook 2004, pp. 7172).
The expanded theory of internalization delivers the psychoanalytic concept of
identication strictly speaking. Ego is a result of identications with others, the
libidinal ties with whom have been relinquished. Ego is formed through the
assumption of the features of the object. Moreover, Freuds thought that internal-
ization presupposes and relinquishes erotic attachment to objects means that libido is
withdrawn from the object and turned toward the ego. In his terms, object-libido is
transformed into narcissistic libido. For Freud, this process is a sublimation of desire
because it inhibits the instinctual aim of satisfaction that the object is used to fulll
(Freud 1923, p. 45). The merely involuntary and unconscious reexivenessblind
natureno longer prevails. Libido has become displaceable, that is to say,
available for deployment toward other aims. Sublimation is, then, an alteration of the
ego in and through the assumption of features of the relinquished object and, at the
same time, a transformation of desire through withdrawal of libido from the object
and its absorption in the ego. Freud therefore has a dialectical notion of desire since
repression, the negation of desire, is lifted in sublimation, the negation of the
negation. In his words, this transformation of an erotic object choice into an
alteration of the ego is also a method by which the ego can ... deepen its relations with
it [the id]. He conjectures whether this might not be the universal road to
sublimation ... through the mediation of the ego (1923, p. 30). In conclusion, for
Whitebook, if Adorno had followed through on the addendum, he would have
370 S. Beardsworth
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discovered an alternative to the integrated ego in its obsessional or rigid and
unchanging form since the growth of an expanded and more differentiated ego takes
place through the internalization of the object, which, at the same time, is a
sublimation of desire (2004, p. 72). Thus, Freud is taken to have laid the ground for
overcoming the scene where Adorno abandoned subjectivity. Moreover, a develop-
ment of this ground in a manner relevant to the concerns of critical theory is already
begun insofar as Loewald has articulated implications of the alteration of the subject
for object relation. Whitebook launches this claim at the close of his essay.
Loewald argues that the ego, which has been transformed by this process, is
now mimetically closer to the object and stands in a new relation to it. The act
of sublimation-identication thus results in a new object-relationa new
constellation between subject and object, to use Adornos language. Indeed,
going further, Loewald maintains that this new object relation also represents a
form of reconciliation between subject and object. Expanding on Freud, he
argues thus: Equally, the shadow of the altered ego falls on objects and
object relations. Sublimation is a kind of reconciliation of the subject-object
dichotomy... and a narrowing of the gulf between object libido and narcissistic
libido, between object world and self (Whitebook 2004, p. 72; Loewald
1988, p. 5; second emphasis added).
With Whitebook, the act of sublimation-identication that gives us the nonviolent
integration and expansion of the ego involves a narrowing of the gulf between subject
and object but never an ultimate reconciliation of the two, which would be
tantamount to psychic death (2004, p. 72). What is more, the mediation reaching
across this gulf has afnities with or is even the counterpart to mimesis in Adorno.
One might quibble with Whitebooks appropriation of Loewalds conclusions to
the extent that Adorno would remain unsatised without a demonstration of the new
relation of subject and outer object that is asserted. We recall from Freud that
sublimation is a replacement of the object tie by a subject tie. Is the object, then, not
precisely what has departed? How does it return? How does Loewalds addition to
the shadow metaphor show that the new object relation is internal to or a
consequence of sublimation-identication? Freud maintains of course that the
withdrawal of object libido may perhaps go on to give [libido] another aim. New
object ties are possible on the ground of displaceable libido. In sum, eros is no
longer extrojected, blind nature, the inner foreign territory, but is, rather, raised
through the lifting of repression to become the very form of the relation of
subject and object. That is to say, sublimation can be understood as the
transformation of eros from unconscious and involuntary impulse into the life of
desire. Without denying that eros runs into difculties, this conclusion underlines
the classical psychoanalytic view that the libidinal object tie is the ground of
subject-object connectedness and that the life of desire is equally that of alterations
in the subject and in object relation. Thus, if one accepts the psychoanalytic
standpoint on desire, the quibble with Whitebook seems to be settled. This is not the
end of the problems, however, for it is precisely on the terrain of these vicissitudes
of eros, the ones internal to sublimation itself, that Freud encounters the problem of
the negative.
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3 Freud and Adorno: The problem of the negative
My contention is that the concept of sublimation unfolded thus far is insufciently
developed to overcome the problem of the modern subject known to critical theory
and to Freud. With Freud, consistent with his dialectical conception of desire,
obstacles to the life of desire turn up within it. One of the most dramatic locations of
this recognition appears in the discussion of sublimation in The Ego and the Id.
Freud nds that the process of identication in which libido is withdrawn from the
object leads to a defusion of the drives, even a marked emergence of the death drive
(1923, pp. 4142, 54). Whitebook has quietly overlooked the confrontation in the
later Freud with the two faces of impulse: the erotic and destructive components of
the drive. His acknowledgement that extrojected impulse has a fate must apply to
both the life drive and the death drive. Indeed, it is when Freud is most sensitive to
the intertwinement of eros and destruction in history that he comes closest to the
kind of reections on subjectivity that contribute to Adornos analysis of
rationalized modernity, including the development within it of rationalized power
in the form of fascist totalitarianism. This is illuminated below.
First, however, we must stress that Freuds later theory of the dual nature of the
drive contains the view that the two major groups of drive are neither two substances
nor two parts of a substance but, rather, two tendencies that form the instinctual
dimension of mental life. They represent the binding force of eros in the life drive
and the destructive force of thanatos, the death drive. The two major drive-
components are always found blended or fused in relationship to the external world
when the drive is outer-directed. However, where a withdrawal of libido from the
external world replaces the object tie with a subject tie, Freud nds that the blending
cannot be maintained. After sublimation, says Freud the erotic component no
longer has the power to bind the whole of destructiveness that was combined with it,
and this is released in the form of an inclination to aggression and destruction
(1923, pp. 5455, emphasis added). The transformation of object libido into
narcissistic libido sets free the destructive wave of the drive. The important
implication for our purposes is that thanatos remains dissociated from erosremains
pure, unbound, and ascendantprecisely insofar as libido is displaceable, precisely,
that is to say, insofar as desire is raised through the lifting of repression to become the
relation of subject and object. The negation of the negation is, at once, a surge of
aggressivity and destructiveness. The much needed mediation of ego and id therefore
leaves the death drive, in its condition of withdrawal from the external world, to
converge on the third instance in Freuds topography of mental life: the superego.
2
2
Freuds theory of the defusion of drives and the death drives convergence on the superego provides an
economic account of the vicissitudes of drive within sublimation. This account is left unsupported by any
explanation of the dynamic factors. It sounds implausible for this reason: the experiential ground for the
marked emergence of the death drive is lacking. The lacuna is lled by Kristevas extensions of Freudian
thought when she shows the correlation between primal loss and the upsurge of death drive at the outset
of subject formation. Death drive is, rst, a drive response to a fundamental loss of self, as happens where
an autonomy achieved in mastery over nature is undone through the mediation of ego and the excised
impulse. This mediation is what has dened sublimation thus far and, with Kristeva, one can see that it is
the condition for a loss of self. Her correlation of loss and death drive is discussed at length in section 4.1
below.
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That is to say, the mental functioning hitherto equated with judgment and morality or
conscience now becomes, Freud says, a pure culture of the death drive (1923,
p. 53). In other words, the inner moral surveillance of the ego on the part of the
superego becomes utterly tyrannical, conning the ego to fear of its dictatorial master
and an unconscious sense of guilt. Of the deepened relation between ego and id by
means of identication, Freud says that the ego is punished for ... [this] by the
instrumentality of the aggressiveness which was mixed with the libido (1923,
p. 55). In this way, sublimation, far from providing a mediation of the Kantian
oppositiona reconciliation of rational and moral subject with excised nature, and
so a burgeoning of the life of desirebrings the moral subject and extrojected nature
to collapse into one another. The superego comes to act with the impulsive and
unconscious tyranny that hitherto characterized the id. It can be supermoral and
then become as cruel as only the id can be (1923, p. 54). The defusion of the drives
through the sublimation of desire implies, therefore, an immediate vanquishing of the
gain from sublimation: the eclipse of the life of desire. Sublimation, which has been
recommended as a way of surpassing the rigidities or closed nature of identity
thinking, seems to result in a worsened situation in and through the very attempt to
bring life back into formalized reason and the obsessional ego.
Whitebook holds that Adornos detection of the echo of the drives in the
transcendental subject can lead us toward the Freudian concept of sublimation,
which is understood as the possibility of mediations of the modern gulf between
subject and object. Yet we have seen, rather, that the echo of unconscious and
involuntary impulse becomes fully realized through sublimation. In the very process
of alteration of the ascendancy of the rational subject, the latter reasserts itself by
means of the migrating drive. The abandoned deposits of the rational subject now
show their full power as the mighty a prioris intimate counterfoil. The echo of the
drives in the rational subject is transformed into a full-blown impulsion to
ascendancy: death-bearing subjectivity. It seems that the subject is unable, through
the mediation of ego and id, to renounce the prized spontaneity and autonomy of
reason without striking a deathly blow at the prompt to and path of the renunciation:
the subject and/or object of identication itself. In Civilization and its Discontents
Freud gestures toward what this collapse of moral subject and extrojected nature
into one another portends for culture.
We turn now to the question of the overlap between Freuds and Adornos
thought on the appearance of the negative in subjectivity. We saw, above, that
Loewalds development of Freud is taken by Whitebook to mean that sublimation-
identication brings the subject mimetically closer to the object, so that it stands in a
new relation to it. Yet it needs to be recalled that, just as Freud found death at the
heart of the mechanism of identication, so Adorno found it at the heart of mimesis.
Mimesis is not untainted by the genesis of the modern rational subject and the fate
of enlightenment. Dialectic of Enlightenment underlines this in the nal chapter,
where Horkheimer and Adorno investigate National Socialist anti-Semitism as an
attitude: an exemplary sickness of the mind. The uncontrolled mimetic response,
which is banned by enlightenment owing to the bondage to nature that it represents,
reappears as the mimesis of death. The following recapitulation of Dialectic of
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Enlightenments philosophico-historical account of mimesis is made for the sake of
showing the overlap with Freud on the thought of death-bearing subjectivity.
First, original or uncontrolled mimesis is presented by the authors as an
archaic pattern of self-preservation: the attempt to become like nature in order to
ward off fear, an attempt in which the self is not master of its reactions. This is an
organic adaptation to inorganic otherness, the motionlessness of surrounding nature
relationships. At the same time, organic adaptation begins the opposition to nature.
The ambiguity marking archaic relationship, in which the attempt to become like
nature begins the opposition to it, is intertwined with another one. In and through its
attempt to preserve existence by the redoubling of immobile naturethe most
external spatial relationships (inertia, Freud would say)mimetic behavior proper
brings death into the heart of the act of living. Where the human seeks to resemble
nature, at the same time it hardens itself against it. Protection as petried terror is a
form of camouage. These numb human reactions are archaic patterns of self-
preservation: the tribute life pays for its continued existence is adaptation to death
(Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, p. 148). Dialectic of Enlightenment then refers to
the inheritance and transformation of mimetic behavior in civilization: rst, in a
magical phase that manipulates the blind act of living and, second, in a historical
phase that comes to replace bodily adaptation to nature with formalized reason and
technical mastery of nature. The enlightenment attempt to outstrip what mimetic
behavior means to ita blind biological prehistoryreenacts the fearful aversion,
which then becomes the perpetually disavowed ground of enlightened modernity.
Conceptualization, science, and society cohere in the organized compulsion to
sameness. This is a constellation that remains terror (2002, pp. 148149).
Second, then, enlightenment is a ban on original mimesis, turning against the
horrors of archaic patterns of self-preservation. Banned mimesis is repeated in
rationalized shape, preserving in this form only the hardening against nature that
prevails in formalized reason and in rational praxis (work). That is to say, reason
reduced to the re-cognition of the same (identity thinking) and bent on control of the
nonrational, itself acts out the repetition and compulsion that enlightenment had set
itself against as the condition of bondage to nature. This is how Adorno and
Horkheimer detect the operation within rationalized modernity of what, above, we
called migrating nature. The reviled bondage to outer nature rebounds on the
rational subject, whose rationalized thought and work are propelled, without
acknowledgment, by extrojected and blinded inner nature. Adornos constellation
of enlightened modernity describes a continuous cycle. Society perpetuates the
threat from nature as the permanent, organized compulsion which, reproducing
itself in individuals as systematic self-preservation, rebounds against nature as
societys control over it (2002, p. 149).
Third, and nally, the cycle can open onto the new conditions of rationalized
power: fascist totalitarianism. A new shape of mimesis, constituting the attitudinal
core of National Socialist anti-Semitism, is formed. The fascist form of mimesis
comports perfectly with the surrounding conditions of formalized reason and rational
praxis, never showing any open infringement of the reality principle since it
restricts itself to the use or mimesis of mimesis, a technique of control (2002,
p. 152). Controlled mimesis takes shape in relation to reminders within the
374 S. Beardsworth
1 3
rationalized context of enlightenments banned mimetic response. The use of
mimesis structures the relation to an object that excites the banned response,
responding to it as the evil that threatens: for National Socialism, the Jew. In
Adornos psychology an object of this kind is not one that calls up archaic behavioral
patterns. It is, rather, one that displays past and present suffering, not through
protestactivitybut in unvoiced form. The contagious gestures of those
themselves blinded by civilization express the painful echo of overwhelming
power, violence which nds utterance in complaint (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002,
pp. 149150). Gesture that vividly animates a situation or feeling is an indirect
complaint against superior power or force. In rejoinder, the National Socialist
mimesis of mimesis embraces the banned response by transforming it into a
technique of control. From klaxon howling to bellowing orators, the cry of terror
which announces terror is mechanically switched on (2002, p. 150). Horkheimer
and Adornos thought is that the whole discipline of the fascist cult brings into action
the adaptation to death at the core of uncontrolled mimesis. The horrors of ancient
patterns of self-preservation are brought down on the reminder of freedom where the
painful echo of overwhelming power is heard. Adorno and Horkheimer therefore nd
the attitudinal component of fascist anti-Semitism in the mimesis of death.
Once Adorno places mimetic responsiveness at the core of death-bearing
subjectivity, it is no straightforward task to pare his culture critique off from his
theoretical writings or assign his theoretical hesitations to surpassed socio-historical
conditions or habits of thinking. There are deep-seated tendencies of the modern
subject that are not conned to the classical bourgeois individual of sociological
theory or the period of Adornos writings. This is not to deny that Adorno himself
stresses the import of the mimetic moment in language and cognition for a
restoration of the preponderance of the object. Mimesis is, for him, the element
of elective afnity between the knower and the known, contrasted, as sublimation-
identication is in psychoanalytic thought, with the identication of the object or
identity thinking (Adorno 1990, p. 45). Nonetheless, the concept of mimesis is no
less merged with and recovered from its historical fate than any other concept is in
Adorno. Its positive signicance is promoted only insofar as a recovery of it from
that fate can be performed and shown. In Adorno this performance is the province of
art insofar as the artwork can, in exemplary instances, undermine the abstractions of
identity thinking. We do not, however, wish simply to return Whitebooks thought
on subjectivity to its point of departure, even though we are left at this juncture
without a positive conception of subjectivity to offer at the intersection of
psychoanalysis and critical theory.
Our question nowis whether there is any discovery in Freudian theory to showwhat
can get on a level with and counter the ascendancy of death-bearing subjectivity and
allow for a development rather than abandonment of the concept of sublimation. We
will proceed from an observation of two gaps left by Freuds investigation of
identication and drive. The rst appears in Freuds uneasy conclusion to Civilization
and Its Discontents. This essay returns in 1930 to the problem of the emergence the
superegothe inner moral surveillanceinfused with death drive, which torments
the ego, immobilizes the life of desire, and harbors the downfall of the subject. Freud
also appears to countenance the possibility that the collapse of the self can be averted
1 3
through the release of pure aggressivity into the external world, which would be on the
order of an explosion of destructiveness in culture. A nal sentence added later in
1931, which has been taken as a reference to the appearing menace of Hitler, shows
Freud expressing the hope and expectation that deaths equally immortal adversary,
heavenly eros, will return against the sway of destruction (Freud 1930, p. 145). Yet
he leaves it undetermined in what manner eros could counter deaths dominion in
culture. This is not only because he avoided a teleology of hope, such that the
possibility of the resurgence of eros against the ascendancy of thanatos is admitted but
any articulation of what it might be would have to await its actuality. The possibility of
the return of heavenly eros is not entirely intelligible for reasons beyond this
because Freud articulated neither how there could be a powerful enough remainder of
eros to return against unalloyed thanatos, once the latter has eclipsed the life of desire,
nor, if there were such a remainder, how eros could get on a level with thanatos in its
unalloyed shape where the collapse of selfhood or the outward release of thanatos
outer destructionloom.
Turning to our second gap now, the one that turns up within Freuds theory of
sublimation in The Ego and the Id, we have seen that an essential aspect of
sublimation, the transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido, leads to the
freeing and marked emergence of the death drive. Yet it was not specied just why
narcissistic libido is so powerless to hold onto the thanatic drive-component. What
is the ground of this defusion of the drives, which clearly takes place at the point of
a reassertion of narcissism in the subject? Closer attention to the narcissistic
structure will throw light on this issue, turning now to Kristevas extension of the
theory of narcissism in order to ll in both these gaps. In Kristevas thought we will
discover not only the missing link that makes intelligible the surge of thanatos or
death-bearing subjectivity in sublimation but also the element in subjectivity that
can get on a level with the drive to destruction and, thereby, allow for a
development of the concept of sublimation. This element is transference love.
4 Freud and Kristeva
4.1 Primal loss
Taking the gap in Freuds theory of sublimation rst, my objective is to show that
restoring the thought on loss to his theory of identication will illuminate the
marked emergence of the death drive in sublimation. Doing this amounts, in effect,
to bringing about a synthesis of the two stages of his thought on internalization: the
earlier one focusing on the melancholic attachment to the lost object and the later
one nding that internalization is the universal path of ego formation. This synthesis
is in fact an accomplishment of Kristevas expansion of the theory of narcissism in
her 1980s writings.
3
Her specic contribution to the advancement of Freudian
3
See Julia Kristeva, Powers of horror: An essay on abjection (1982), Tales of love (1987), and Black
sun: Depression and melancholia (1989). See also Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and
modernity (2004) for a detailed treatment of Kristevas thought on narcissism.
376 S. Beardsworth
1 3
theory in these texts is the hypothesis she develops of archaic moments in subject
formation that center on an early experience of loss within the life of corporeal
attachments to the mothers body. The early loss of the mother builds an instinctual
and affective core of the infantile trials of separation, before these components of
psychic life are modied and overlain by later developments. For our purposes in
this paper, the central point is that Kristevas focus on the early and most emphatic
life of drives situates the death drive, rst of all, in relation to the archaic experience
of loss. According to psychoanalysis, of course, early experiences leave traces in the
unconscious that are undoubtedly modied in manifold ways, through both
unconscious and conscious processes, but which can also be reactivated with much
of their original force. Our aim here, then, is to show that Freudian sublimation can
lead to the emergence of a death-bearing subjectivity because it presupposes a self,
the rational subject, which is then faced with loss of self in the undoing of its
supposedly unbreachable autonomy and its cherished mastery over nature. The
experience of loss of self incurs a thanatic response patterned on the early and most
emphatic life of the death drive. We need therefore to return to the psychoanalytic
theory of child development in order to illuminate this eventuality.
As is widely known, child development is seen by psychoanalysis as beginning,
after birth, in a condition of infantile dependence on an other. From a third-person
perspective, mother and child separate at birth. Viewed internally, however, early
infantile life is a condition of having an anatomical complement or, put otherwise, a
condition of dependence on a kind of prosthetic otherness: the mothers body. The
individuated subject is therefore the result of a formation in and through separation
from that condition. Freud noted the function in separation of what he called
frustration in early infantile life. Frustration is a correlation between the infantile
demand put on the mothers body to be a perfect nourishing environment, on the one
hand, and the impossibility of the fulllment of this demand, on the other. Kristeva
will stress that what is covered by the familiar term frustration is therefore,
fundamentally, the inscription of a hiatus in the corporeal relationship of mother and
child. The latter is no faultless symbiosis but, rather, contains an exposure to
exteriority. That is to say, although early infantile life has no relationships to an
outside other, there is already an experience of exteriority or otherness within
corporeal dependence on the mother. This means that the dual relationship of
mother and child is no mere biological connection. It is a matrix of responsiveness,
albeit lacking the kind of connections to others provided by linguistic symbolism.
Prelinguistic responsiveness contributes nonetheless to the path of individuation or
becoming two.
On this view, subjecthood depends, in sum, upon a formation that, rst, begins in
radical dependence on a nondifferentiated otherness (the anatomical complement),
second, involves an evolving exposure to exteriority or otherness and, third, requires
a gradated taking up of otherness and separateness in and through a changing
relation to (the responses of) otherness. The trials of separation therefore encompass
the initial dual relationship of mother and child and not only the later relation of the
child to its others (plural). For Freud, of course, separation proper requires an
intervention in the symbiosis of mother and child and so a relation between three.
Separation is established only in and through the central moment of the Oedipus
1 3
complex and its dissolution, in which a judging and separating thirdthe paternal
functionprohibits the erotic attachment to the object of infantile desire. This is the
biggest blow amongst all the infantile disappointments, for Freud. It remains, for
him, the prototype of internalization insofar as the withdrawal of libido from the
paradigmatic object of desire, the mother, is accomplished by taking the father as a
model and internalizing the features of the paternal object that are specic to oedipal
triangulation. The internalized features are, above all, the judging and prohibiting
aspects of this model, including both the general feature of surveillance and the
specic injunctions against the instinctual impulses: erotic wishes in relation to the
mother and murderous ones in relation to the father as rival and threat.
Internalization of these features takes place in and through the separation of a
part of the ego from the rest, the former coming to stand over the latter in the shape
of an inner moral surveillance. Freud has specied the provenance and formation of
the moral function in mental life known as conscience, which he calls, in line with
its manner of formation, the superego. The superego is therefore the deposit in the
psyche of a socializing and individuating law deemed to converge on the paternal
apex in oedipal triangulation. In sum, morality and judgment are an inheritance
taken over from the paternal function in oedipal relationships. For Freud, then, the
Oedipus complex and its dissolution situates instinctual lifehowever unstablyin
relation to the path of autonomous individuality and social behavior. It therefore
stands as the keynote of civilization in his thought.
Kristevas concern with subject formation does not focus on oedipal triangulation
or the primacy afforded to the paternal function in individuation and socialization.
This primacy is challenged in her thought owing to her focus on the traditionally
overlooked civilizing role of the early mother, together with the implications this
early relationship has for the nature of social and symbolic life. The responsiveness
that belongs within the dual relationship of mother and child is a primitive but
complex building of what Kristeva calls semiotic capacities in contrast to strictly
symbolic or linguistic capacities. These are corporeal and affective modes of
separateness from and connectedness with an as yet undifferentiated otherness: the
mothers body as prosthetic extension of the childs body. Semiotic capacities
exclusively corporeal and affectivecan never be found in fully isolated form but
appear only as a level of experience bound into symbolic life. Nonetheless, the
developmental perspective provides a reconstruction of presymbolic relations in
which early infantile life is viewed as a drive-based condition for which Kristeva
formulated the term the semiotic chora, whose activity in relation to a primitive
exposure to otherness and separateness commences further articulations and
modications of the drive-animated condition (Kristeva 1984). The chora develops
into a veritable structuring of corporeal and affective responsiveness that is both the
precursor to symbolic and social capacities and, given crucial modications, the
necessary lining of their livingness. The elaboration of this thought in the 1980s
gives us Kristevas expansions of the narcissistic structure of subjectivity.
When Kristeva considers the appearance of primary narcissism as a phase of
subject formation, her view on the instinctual components of infantile life is that the
death drive has a certain primacy over eros in the archaic matrix of corporeal and
affective relationship. As a formation in and through trials of separation, psychic life
378 S. Beardsworth
1 3
rst emerges within the most vulnerable condition of vital attachment to the
mothers body. This is of course a condition without independent motility or care of
ones own life and without language to come to the aid of the dependent being. It is
the vulnerability of having the fewest resources available for responses to events.
Nonetheless, this poverty of resources is also fundamental to the conguration of
events-and-responses that begin the trials of separation. The most important of such
events in infantile life, what Freud called frustration, is developed by Kristeva into
the thought that the withdrawal of the mothers body must impress itself on
corporeal dependence as the impact of loss and an exposure to externality. Given
that life is a life of corporeal attachments, maternal absence is a sudden exposure
to everything. Lacking further resources, infantile life must negotiate the impact
of loss in the only terms available, that is to say, in the form of corporeal and
affective responses. Her psychoanalytic position is, of course, that corporeal life in
the form of drive animation and affect formation just is a matrix of responsiveness
that is not merely reexive but, rather, builds the semiotic conditions and supports
for individuation and connections with others.
We stress that, with Kristeva, the very meaning of the death drive is given, rst of
all, in this context. That is to say, taking the developmental perspective, the
destructive wave of the drive is, primarily, the instinctualmost immediate and
most impulsiveconguration of the impression of maternal absence and the
response to it. This is by no means a merely biological event. Freud asserted that the
drive is a concept at the border of psyche and soma and Kristeva views it as the
transfer from the biological to the psychical register. Death drive is the paradigmatic
mark of externality on a being whose close links to its environment undergo radical
changes. It is the mark of what is, newly, a coordination with otherness at the outset
of a long process of manifest separation from the environment. Drive is therefore
the most archaic psychic and somatic imprint of externality, which therefore
underlies self-, other-, and world-relation. In the perspective of individual
maturationin Freuds terms, ontogenesisthe exposure to externality just is the
experience of the withdrawal of the mothers body. There is a crucial ambiguity
here in respect of the distinction between the active or passive nature of this
experience. For what the triggering of the death drive means, in this context, is both
the registering of the impact of loss and the most immediate response to it. This
ambiguity is captured in the term the thanatic rebound. Kristeva recalls that the
triggering of the death drive had been understood by Freud as a thanatic reaction to
a threat that is in itself thanatic (Kristeva 1989, p. 18). Thus the impact of loss rst
inscribes in subject formation an inclination to aggressivity and destructiveness, a
thanatic reaction that is oriented, in conditions of infantile dependence, to the
anatomical complement, remembering that the vital threat issued from the latter
owing to its incompleteness as a perfect vessel for infantile life. The thanatic
rebound returns that threat in an aggressive impulse that is aimed against the
intruding otherness in an attempt to ward it off. The drive is therefore a charnie`re or
articulation at the level of the corporeal relation of mother and child: an archaic,
psychic and somatic, mode of connectedness and separateness that Kristeva has
called the semiotic chora. In its earliest form the destructive wave of the drive
operates, in her terms, as the drive re-jection of the mothers body. Although it can
1 3
by no means establish separation as such, drive rejection is one of the infantile
semiotic capacities that contributes to the trials of separation. Thus, in this context
death drive works, paradoxically, in the service of life by giving an instinctual or
impulsional (pulsionnel) support to individuation. For our purposes, what is
particularly signicant about Kristevas most deep-seated drive is that it is rst
coordinated with an archaic loss and unmediated exposure to otherness: a primal
loss in subject formation.
Our next step is to consider how Kristevas correlation of loss and death drive
shows that primal loss, now seen to be a condition for the possibility of the advent of
self, is actually an experience of the loss of self precisely because it inscribes itself
within corporeal dependence and does not mark its conclusion. That is to say, the
loss occurs where there is as yet no possible subject/object distinction. Psychic life
has not yet developed to the point of the appearance of the identity of a self in
relation to a distinct outside object. For this reason, experience and object of loss are
indistinguishable. The anatomical complement falls away, not as an object does,
leaving the subject apart from it, but as the very crucible of (ones) being. The
sudden and disturbing impression of maternal absence is a loss of the other from a
third-person perspective but viewed internally it is the loss of self. In sum, the
advent of self just is, rst, the loss of self. Kristeva calls this the impact of loss/
emptiness. Thus, we have here an experience of loss so thoroughly intertwined with
a vital threat and the thanatic reaction to it that death drive becomes the primary
subjective mark of the trials of separation. It is fundamental to the psyche.
At this juncture, light can be thrown on the possibility of the marked emergence
of the death drive that Freud found as an outcome of sublimation. We have isolated
the experiential element in sublimation that calls up the destructive wave of the
drive. On the psychoanalytic premise that early experiences in subject formation are
not extinguished by later developments but, rather, leave traces much of whose
original force can be reactivated, we may conclude that later experiences of threats
to selfhood can call up the powerful impression of primal loss: the mark of thanatos.
In other words, the thanatic rebound can be reactivated by later experiences, above
all ones that put the subject in process of alteration. Thus, what is crucial about
Freuds concept of sublimation as it appears in The Ego and the Id is not just its
presentation of a general concept of the alteration of the subject butand this has
been the thesis from the outset of this paperthat the mediation of ego and id in
question alters and expands the ego in respect of the rigid ascendancy of an
obsessional ego or rational subject in opposition to nature. In other words,
Freudian sublimation is a concept developed in relation to the actual encounter with
the modern subject. Recalling the earlier discussion of Dialectic of Enlightenment,
this is the subject of rationalized modernity or formalized reason and the technical
mastery over nature, who unwittingly reenacts the numb human reactions of archaic
patterns of self-preservation. The fearful aversion to nature forms the perpetually
disavowed ground of enlightened modernity and its rational subject. Psychoanalysis
itself arises and develops in and through the encounter with this subject that is so
deceived over its own constitution and has, in the form of the sufferings confronted
in the therapeutic setting, run into this deception. Sublimation in Freud therefore
presupposes a selfthe modern subjectthat encounters its own demise. It would
380 S. Beardsworth
1 3
appear to be the saving path, yet, pace Hegel on the travails of self-consciousness
understood as the way of despair (1977), sublimation is rst of all a vital threat:
a loss of self. The surge of destructive drive that Freud discovered here is the most
immediate response to an experience that entails the loss of my being (Kristeva
1989, p. 5). Given the self-conception of the modern subject as pure autonomy and
mastery over the object and inner nature, sublimation thwarts a self in ascendancy.
The reassertion of the rational subject at the limits of its self-conservation will tend
to follow the pattern of the thanatic rebound. We now better understand the
possibility of the scene witnessed earlier. The reassertion of the ascendancy of the
rational subject in the shape of a full-blown destructive impulsion to ascendancy
is seen to be a reaction of the loss of self.
4.2 Transference love
It remains for us to ll in the second gap in the Freudian thoughts at issue in this
paper. We have arrived at the question that is ultimately our central concern here:
the question of what can get on a level with and counter the death-bearing
subjectivity that appears, against all hopes, to arise in and through the Freudian
process of sublimation. We are asking whether psychoanalysis has discovered any
trend or psychic act that can correlate with the condition of a subject overcome by
the sway of thanatos in confrontation with the loss of self, can get on a level with the
drive, and can countervail it. Freud, we recall, did not provide us with any way of
discerning the possibility of the return of heavenly eros at this point. Kristeva, in
contrast, nds this possibility owing, once again, to her focus on the earliest and
most emphatic life of the drives and affects. This enables her to develop the
conception of transference love, which is an affective connectedness to emergent
otherness whose paradigmatic form is correlated with primal loss, allowing it,
thereby, to get on a level with the thanatic rebound. In the process of explicating this
notion of love, we will nd that Kristeva is recovering the ego ideals place in the
earliest stratum of ego formation, where it was initially placed by Freud in his
theory of primary narcissism (1914). Later, Freud considered the ego ideal to be
formed through an identication with the father-in-individual-prehistory (1921
and 1923). This is an earlier appearance than that of the oedipal father whose
internalized features form the superego. Nonetheles, Freud made the ego ideal and
the superego simply two sides of the same function. Kristeva surpasses this central
problem in Freuds thought, clearly showing that ego ideal and superego are two
separate functions, with the former, surprisingly, coming earlier. This is both a
signicant step in psychoanalytic thought and vital to her ability to develop the
concept of sublimation, as we will now show.
Thus far, the discussion of primal loss might have led to the impression that
Kristeva has made the void or loss/emptiness and destructive tendencies the very
essence of subjectivity. This is not so, however, because as a psychic phenomenon
primal loss just is the set of responses in infantile life built up around the central
deprivation. These responses form the above mentioned semiotic capacities, which
are features of primary narcissism and therefore of the narcissistic structure of
1 3
subjectivity. We must remember, then, that the latter comes to the fore in
sublimation, given the withdrawal of object libido and its transformation into
narcissistic libido. That is to say, Freudian sublimation involves a kind of
reassertion of or regression to the narcissistic structure of subjectivity. Amongst the
features of primary narcissism in Kristevas thought, that is to say, amongst the
semiotic capacities, there is found the one she calls transference love. In unfolding
its meaning, Kristeva stresses Freuds recognition that there must be something
added to autoeroticisma new psychical actionin order to bring about
narcissism (Freud 1914, p. 77; Kristeva 1987, p. 22). In other words, although
the thanatic rebound is the most immediate psychic mark of and response to primal
loss, a special action is required to establish narcissism as a structure of subjectivity.
We underline the fact, vital to our purposes of developing the concept of
sublimation, that Kristevas treatment of the psychic act in question expands the
psychoanalytic theory of identication. Her conception of transference love is
developed through a reconsideration of an identication process that Freud found in
crowd psychology. Kristeva recovers the Freudian thought that its major features
belong, rst, to an archaic identication that establishes primary narcissism. Primary
identication is therefore the paradigm for the adult regression investigated by
Freud. Kristeva sets forth elements that offset the negative features classically
associated with the narcissistic structure: the love of self whose tightly drawn
borders are tted to the fantasy of omnipotent control over the object. The new and
positive features of the narcissistic structure appear in Kristevas ontogenetic
paradigm for transference love: primary identication.
In Freuds thought on crowd psychology the crowd members identify, en masse,
with an idealized gure or leader. This is a direct identication, for Freud: an
immediate relinquishing of the ego for the idealized image of the leader. Crowd
psychology therefore indicates a revocation of the separateness and distance of the
object. Freud, of course, underlines the risk of this for the subject and for the life of
groups. It implies the relinquishment of individual judgment, an abdication of the
ego. Kristeva reiterates, rst, the two central features of the identication: it is
objectless and immediate. Second, she underlines the emotional quality that, for
Freud, lay in the very nature of the collective tie with the leader: Einfuhlung
(empathy), whose general meaning is the assimilation of other peoples feelings
(Freud 1921, p. 108). Kristeva herself stresses the basically affective tone of primary
idealization and makes Einfuhlung the limit of the advent-and-loss of the subject
(Kristeva 1987, p. 28). Situating these features of objectlessness, immediacy, and
Einfuhlung within the paradigm for the adult regression, she nds them operating
there in a way that helps to build the ego, serving therefore the advent of self. The
psychical action founding primary narcissism is presented as an archaic idealizing
identication. This becomes the paradigm for the subject-tiewhich must, after all,
involve some mode of relationshipthat replaces the libidinal object-tie in
sublimation. Freud investigated the subject-tie only as a secondary formation
resulting from withdrawal from the object-tie but he acknowledged its primacy,
nonetheless, when he called the regression to narcissistic self-love secondary
narcissism (1914). The question for Kristeva in respect of primary narcissism has
therefore been: what is a subject-tie before there is an object-tie?
382 S. Beardsworth
1 3
Freud himself sought the developmental prototype for the egos model in crowd
psychology in the ego ideal, formed by an early identication with the father-
in-individual-prehistory. Since the ego ideal is, for him, a precursor to the superego,
he tended to focus on the identication in prehistory only in terms of its signicance
in relation to the later identication with the father as an object properly speaking.
That is to say, he tended to focus on the primary identication only where it gave
way to oedipal identications. The meaning of the ego ideal is therefore barely
considered apart from the superego, which is thought to take over from it, leaving
the ego ideal simply as a substructure of the superego. As a result, at the point where
the moral and critical function of the superego is found to have merged with a pure
culture of the death drive, there is no possibility of conceiving of the ego ideal as a
possible resource for countering the sway of the destructive drive. In contrast,
Kristevas focus on the maternal role in subject formation restores a differentiation
between the ego ideal and the superego in such a way that the former never fully
blends with the latter. The ego ideal is formed in an archaic identication, which
turns up in the early relation to the mother, and is quite distinct in her thought from
the prohibiting and judging paternal function that Freud nds in oedipal
identications.
The features of Freuds direct identication in crowd psychologyobject-
lessness, immediacy, and Einfuhlungnow characterize a primary identication in
early infantile life, understood as an affective transference that is the rst emotional
tie. Given its localization in the pre-objectal condition of early infantile life, it is a
tie without an object. Idealization is directed simply to a pattern to be cathected,
a receding presence that draws the exorbitant, unifying affect. Thus, with Kristeva,
the ego ideal builds ones own ideal image, not through the internalization of
features of an object but, rather, through an affective transference toward a looming,
recessive otherness. The ideal image is taken for the self and becomes its own,
making the rst emotional tie the very nucleus of the ego. This is how there can be a
subject-tie prior to the object-tie. Kristeva reminds us, moreover, that archaic
identication cannot be on the level of having, where eroticism has been located,
but locates itself on the level of being like (1987, p. 26).
We might at this point venture to ask what connections, if any, lie between
Adornos notion of original mimesis and Kristevas archaic identication. In both
cases this is a relation prior to any function that bridges two distinct and opposed
positions. It is the movement of becoming like what is not yet distinct and opposite
but becomes so on the basis of this relation. Adorno found the attempt to be like
nature to be a conguration of fear since it is a way of dealing with the fearsome
intrusion of the incommensurable. Given the afnity between mimesis and primary
identication as forms of becoming like, one might expect that Kristevas
elaboration of primary narcissism would draw out the problem of fear. We will
make a small detour through the parallels between primary narcissism and
uncontrolled mimesis in order to illuminate the corollary in infantile life to the
intrusive otherness of Adornos original mimetic object.
On psychoanalytic ground, the overintrusiveness of nature is that of maternal
entity. The beginnings of otherness turn up in the relation to the anatomical
complementthe maternal bodywhere otherness is nondifferentiated otherness.
1 3
Not set apart from the emergent infantile ego, it is intrusive. The problem of
overintrusiveness appears, rst, where the psychic space out of which an ego is to
come into being is upheld by an inside/outside border that is yet unstable. The
alterity that would otherwise lie beyond the subjects borders protrudes within in
the form of that unstable border where mother and child are not yet two. The
overintrusiveness of maternal entity in this form is a psychic phenomenon named
the abject.
4
The infantile response to the problem of the abject appears in the
semiotic capacity of driving out, a capacity that was formerly introduced as drive
re-jection and is now called abjection of the mothers body. The semiotic response
to the abject sets the destructive wave of the drive against the intrusion. As we have
said, the death drive functions here in the service of life insofar as it supports
separation from the mothers body, whose nondifferentiation in the form of the
anatomical complement is also an overintrusiveness for the psychic space of the
emergent ego. A second form of overintrusiveness turns up, moreover, in what
Kristeva names the Thing in distinction from the object proper. The Thing arises in
the shadow of despair that primal loss throws on the emergent subject, which clings
to what is lost. The Thing is therefore what is not lost and cannot become an
object. It is the sole companion of a primal or narcissistic melancholy. It is notable
that in both these modalities of corporeal and affective relationship the response to
overintrusivenessthe semiotic responsivenessclosely resembles the form the
intrusiveness takes. Abjection simply displaces and multiplies the abject as an
unstable inside/outside border (thus the re- in re-jection) without, however, being
able to set the borders of the subject up as such. Melancholic attachment to the
Thing, for its part, just is an attachment to the affect marking primal loss:
a fundamental sadness. In neither of these forms of responsiveness, however, is this
resemblance of the response to what elicits it the process of becoming like the latter.
That is to say, in neither is it an identication.
What is especially notable about primary identication is that, unlike original
mimesis, it is not fear that reigns here but love. The ego ideal stands between the
abject or the Thing and the object. Here we have neither overintrusive externality,
together with the nexus of drive and affect that gathers to it, nor the object at a
distance. We have, rather, what conveys the subject from the former to the latter.
Primary identication is a becoming like in the form of an immediate transfer
toward and interiorization of an otherness that is not yet an object and would
otherwise be unassimilable overintrusiveness. Kristeva emphasizes, rst, its
constitutive function in subject formation: the loving identication differentiates
and forms psychic space. She then introduces the term transference love for this
loving identication, in recognition of its ephemeral appearance in the analytic
setting, where it supports the transference, the very crucible of analysis (Kristeva
1987, p. 31). From the developmental perspective, as we have seen, transference
love presupposes primal loss and the exposure to externality that it inscribes at the
heart of the dual relationship. In contrast to the corporeal and affective responses
that struggle either to ght off or to cling to the maternal vessel, transference love is
oriented, not toward maternal entity but, rather, toward a nonintrusive otherness, the
4
See Kristeva 1982, chapter 1.
384 S. Beardsworth
1 3
possibility of whose emergence is opened up by loss. The affective transference is
therefore a predisposition for attachment to an other. In contrast with the classical
view, then, Kristeva does not contrast narcissistic relationship with object relation.
Instead, she combines them. No substitution of object for self is necessary in loving
relationship insofar as love of other in Kristeva deploys and builds upon the ego
ideal. The lover is a narcissist with an object, she says (1987, p. 33). The beloved
returns the lovers own ideal image yet is nonetheless other. Love of other deploys
love of selfnarcissistic structurebecause self or ego is formed ex-orbitantly in
the primary affective transference. In sum, the subject is both born in and borne on
love. Ego is, rst, the being(-affected) of love.
5
It is set up in and through an ex-
orbitant transfer toward a drawing power. More in terms of twentieth-century
philosophy, transference love shows the identity of the ec-stans, the ex-orbitance of
the transfer, and what might be called the in-stans, the instantiation of the ego as
such.
6
The beginnings of self are therefore no longer equated with an enclosed and
brittle self-love together with illusory omnipotence, the classical features of
narcissism, but arise instead in the loving transference toward an ideal and
indeterminate otherness.
Given that our basic element of the semiotic chorathe driveis triggered
simply by the impact of primal loss, how does Kristeva now envisage the eliciting of
transference love that is made possible by loss and coordinated with it but is surely
not a direct response to it? For her, primary identication corresponds to maternal
love in infantile life but it is neither some kind of mirroring of it nor does it have the
mother as object. It stems, rather, from maternal relationship to what is other than
the child (1987, p. 34). Maternal desire and, beyond it, loving any other one,
brings the drawing power into the condition of early infantile life because the site of
maternal relationship is indeterminateelusiveand for this reason acts as a mere
withdrawing presence that Kristeva calls the signier of the Other (1987, p. 37). The
signier of the Other is the mothers gift. In primary identication there is neither
the repelling of maternal entity in the shape of the abject nor clinging to the
(non)lost in the form of the depressive affect. There is, rather, an expanded, elusive
outside: the drawing power that elicits, not the drive and not eroticism, but the rst
emotional tie. A not-yet-identity (of the child) is transferred or rather displaced to
the site of an other who is not libidinally cathected as an object but remains an Ego
Ideal (1987, p. 41). Transference love is simply a movement toward the
discernible, a journey toward the visible, which becomes the primary meaning of
5
See the chapter Ego Affectus Est: Bernard of Clairvaux, Affect, Desire, Love, in Kristeva 1987.
6
Although it is more common to contrast the thought of Irigaray and Kristeva, particularly where the
relation to Freud is in question, there is a point of commonality in their respective projects here. Irigaray,
too, stresses the need of a movement of subjectivity that remains in me, which she calls enstasy rather
than ecstasy. Irigaray distinguishes enstasy as the movement of I and other that nonetheless remains in
me... but [is] available for meeting with the other from the movement of an ecstasy that goes beyond I
and other, leaving the self for an inaccessible absolutely other beyond sensibility, beyond the earth.
The enstasis is the condition for recognition of the other (2004, p. 9). In Tales of love Kristeva introduces
an original exorbitance of the ego, a loving transference toward otherness, which forms what I am calling
the instans and makes this dimension of the narcissistic structure of subjectivity elemental to the self in
love. In Kristeva, one might say, the ecstasis of the alienated absolute is resorbed in the ego ideal, the
instans, which then becomes the elemental component of and support for loving relationship.
1 3
metaphor at this point in Kristevas writings (1987, p. 30). Finally, the psychic act
that founds narcissism also makes of narcissism a defense against emptiness. It
presupposes, as we have seen, the impact of loss/emptiness but is also a special
response made possible by and standing in relation to it. Emptiness is therefore both
barely covered abyss and shielded interior of the loving spring toward otherness.
Narcissism and emptinesseach upholding the other (1987, p. 24)confer on
the dual relationship of mother and child, she says, an archaic differentiation.
We have been in search of the possibility of an element of psychic life that could
countervail the upsurge of death-bearing subjectivity where sublimation founders on
the loss of self, given its signicance for the ascendancy of the rational subject in
enlightened modernity. This possibility is now found, thanks to Kristevas
demonstration that transference love is, equally with the thanatic rebound,
coordinated with the impact of loss. It can get on a level with the unalloyed drive,
returning as the immortal adversary of thanatos and so the alternative path for a
subjectivity threatened by the sway of drive. Transference love can counter the
potential release of heightened aggressivity into the external world with the pos-
sibility of the conveyance of the subject from potential collapse toward the object. It
provides the much needed deection from the pure culture of the death drive in
subjectivity toward a rebinding of aggressivity with heightened eros in object
relation. But it is not itself the libidinal object tie, for the affective transference sets
up a loving othernessthe identifying idealat the heart of the subject before there
is an object and in deferment of erotic desire. What is so striking about Kristevas
treatment of the early life of drives and affects is, then, that she is able to present an
idea of the unifying affect, which gets at something about affect as other than but
not without drive, giving cohesion to the manifold and fragmentary drives and
affects. In the thought on transference love, the affects supports or builds the ego
insofar as it is a kind of carrier wave toward the other, underlying and outlasting
object cathexes. Of course it forms the ego ideal insofar as I can desire it as me, but
it is also the exorbitant tendency at the heart of that ideal, going toward the other
and sustaining this outreach of ego even where desire has run into difculty, and
thereby paving the way for desiring attachments classically speaking. In sum, the
unifying affect in Kristeva is a kind of rst sublimation of drive. Thus, transference
love, never fully expended in erotic desire but rst deferring and then subtending it,
can be the strength lent to subjectivity just where the mediation of ego and id
founders in drive and destructiveness. This power or potency of transference love is
precisely what is needed if the concept of sublimation is to be offered to critical
theory as the one that extends its thought on subjectivity without failing Freuds and
Adornos shared recognition that death-bearing subjectivity shadows and can
submerge attempts to move the overcoming of the modern gulf between subject and
object.
In conclusion, my objective in this paper has been to show that the Kristevan
supplementation of the psychoanalytic concept of desire with the idea of
transference love has opened the way for a development of the concept of
sublimation offered at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory.
Transference love is neither a triumph over rationalized power nor a nal cure for
the rationalized conditions of enlightened modernity that can open the way to
386 S. Beardsworth
1 3
rationalized power. Such are not the powers of psychoanalysis. But transference
love is the countertrend to the surge of destructiveness in subjectivity that may
encroach on the mediations of these rationalized conditions, mediations that seek to
bring life back into subjectivity and thinking where possible. A slender but powerful
hold over the sway of drive, transference love may bloom where shadows fall across
the subject.
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