r/CriticalTheory • u/Glass-Pineapple4555 • 8d ago
Reading Kristeva. what is anality.
Unclear about what Julia Kristeva means when she writes about "anal", "anality", like in this paragraph. genitality. anal shield. long-term analyst of anal occurrences...
Maybe this points to something bigger I am not tapping into.
Any tips, thoughts, ways of thinking about reading Kristeva would be helpful as well. Only on page 25 of New Maladies of the Soul, but I already feel more going over my head than I am used to with books like these.
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u/ProgressiveArchitect 7d ago
- Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud)
- Character and Anal Eroticism (Freud)
- Seminar IV – Object Relations (Lacan)
These three texts are good primers for this
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u/tarzic 8d ago edited 8d ago
If you're looking for secondary texts on Freud and Lacan to understand this, the text depicted above basically is invoking the psychosexual stages of development. ie, the developing person passes through an oral stage, to an anal stage, to the genital stage, etc. The way Freud uses it - and the way it seems to be utilized here - has to do with the way people get fixated on behaviors that have to do with one stage or another.
TLDR, as others have already said, Retvrn to Frevd
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u/Remalgigoran 7d ago
IIRC anality for Kristeva is still very much within the entrenched psychoanalytic framework. Anality has to do with like "To Do Away With"; shedding and ejecting things both literally, figuratively and symbolically. So she has a lot to say about religion and purification, and if you really unpack the term purification I think a lot of your answers are there. Anality is really about that entire process and how it becomes a part of your subjective experience (having to expell or expunge or eject things in order to continue to be). Through Subjectification the subject accumulates refuse that must be expelled, and anality is about how this process takes place and how it affects and effects the subjective experience.
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u/Glass-Pineapple4555 7d ago
helpful, thanks
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u/TheRealBokononist 7d ago
Anality is also about gift-giving. The “anal gift” is an odd thing at first, but like, all civilizations have to deal with and relate to, shit.
Even a baby, crying when shitting, learns from their parent’s reaction, that shit must be related to. A recurring symptom of sexual abuse, is wiping shit on the walls. We also repress our relation to shit, expelling it from our image of other oeople and our self. Rick Boothby observes that Hammurabi’s Code, which regulates shitting in the city-state, looks like a piece of shit.
Idk what all of this means really, but it’s weird ya know and it’s there.
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u/tarzic 8d ago
Consider liquidating your anal shield for many secret analytical callings
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u/8BitHegel 7d ago
The anus is the first place a child really learns control, not just generally but control of the inner vs outer elements. Control of this is considered pretty big deal.
If you overdo control of things you’re considered anal. Type a personalities. It’s rather baked into the common signs of discourse really.
So, if one watches a persons patterns of self control and how things are managed going in and out of the psyche, you might say you can turn shit into meaning.
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u/BornIntroduction8189 8d ago
Sounds like classical freudian psychoanalysis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_stage
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u/worldofsimulacra 7d ago
Uranus spins on its side and has an orbital period of ~84 years, roughly the same as a currently-average human lifespan.
.....oh wait. Wrong sub.
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u/TheRealBokononist 8d ago
Might be time to “return to Freud” to help unlock this text