'Maternal Space' and Intellectual Labor: Gramsci versus Kristeva and Žižek

Despite their theoretical and ideological differences, Lacanian psychoanalysts Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek have in common authorship of a psychoanalytic geography of the Balkans as their shared maternal space. Both pathologize their desire for their maternal space and simulate oedipal rejection by abjecting their “maternal space” as the prerequisite for speaking the language of the cosmopolitan, global intellectual. In the process, they produce a new type of intellectual labor, that of the manager of symbolic normality. Considering the importance of the relation of intellectual labor to geography at the very moment in which the manual labor of global capitalism is being fragmented and marginalized, this essay conceptualizes their intellectual production more broadly. In doing so, it invokes some basic Gramscian concepts such as the geographic and historical specificity of intellectual labor and the internal plurality of the subject in order to remedy the radical conservatism of Kristeva—s and Zižek—s psychoanalysis of the Balkans.

Available online: academia.edu (Accessed July 8, 2016)