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PARTISAN REVIEW
books, it is somewhat self-analytical, like- I am going to make a
pretentious comparison - Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams.
ERE:
Your subtitle is
Essai sur ['abjection.
How would you translate
the term
['abjection
in English?
JK:
It
may be impossible.
L'abjection
is something that disgusts you,
for example, you see something rotting and you want to vomit - it
is an extremely strong feeling which is at once somatic and sym–
bolic, which is above all a revolt against an external menace from
which one wants to distance oneself, but of which one has the im–
pression that it may menace us from the inside. The relation to
abjection is finally rooted in the combat which every human being
carries on with the mother. For in order to become autonomous,
it is necessary that one cut the instinctual dyad of the mother and
the child and that one become something other.
ERE:
There are two rather well-known books in the United States
right now; one by Dorothy Dinnerstein, called the
The Mermaid
and the Minotaur,
and the other by Nancy Chodorow called
The
Reproduction ofMothering.
Their thesis is that the exaltation and the
degradation of the woman stems from the fact that mothers rear
children, and that if fathers or men were to have equal respon–
sibility for the rearing of infants all of our sexual malaise would be
eliminated, all of the problems having to do with women's inac–
cessibility to culture would be ended. How do you feel about this
idea?
JK:
If
there is a sort of rage against mothers, it is not only because
they take care of the child, but because they carry it in their
bodies . And that is something which men, even if they handle the
diapers, can't do . I think it is here that is rooted a certain desire, a
certain negative desire, a certain rejection of the maternal func–
tion - a fascinated rejection. Moreover, the fact that men do the
same work as women with regard to the education of children or
their early upbringing will certainly change things in the psychic
functioning of children, but I don't know if it will do so in the way
foreseen by these feminists. In fact, it will decimate the paternal
function. I mean that it will render ambiguous the paternal role .
Up to the present, in the division of sexual roles, the mother takes
care of the child, the father is farther away. The father represents
the symbolic moment of separation.
ERE:
And you feel that that should be retained?
JK:
If
we do what they call for, that is, if the fathers are always pre-
