Maternal Authority
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This concept page does not yet have synthesis content. The extractor flagged it as a load-bearing concept; a future synthesis pass will populate it. The All Occurrences section below shows every place it appears in the corpus.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (2)
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#01
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.81
POWERS OF HORROR > MATERNAL AUTHORITY AS TRUSTEE OF THE SELF'S CLEAN AND PROPER BODY
Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that both excrement and menstrual blood as defilements share a common root in maternal/feminine authority, which operates as a pre-symbolic "semiotic" mapping of the body—a binary primal charting of clean/unclean, orifices and surfaces—that language and culture must repress in order to constitute the symbolic order; this repression of maternal corporeality is the structural precondition of the paternal/phallic/linguistic register.
Maternal authority is the trustee of that mapping of the self's clean and proper body; it is distinguished from paternal laws within which, with the phallic phase and acquisition of language, the destiny of man will take shape.
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#02
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.82
POWERS OF HORROR > DEFILEMENT RITE—A SOCIAL ELABORATION OF THE BORDERLINE PATIENT?
Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that defilement rites function as a "scription without signs"—a translinguistic inscription of the archaic border between the semiotic (maternal authority) and the symbolic (paternal law), and that the ambivalent remainder in Brahmanism exposes a non-totalizing logic that challenges mono-logical symbolics by perpetually positing a non-object at once polluting and generative.
an emphasis placed not on the (paternal) Law but on (maternal) Authority through the very signifying order.