Susan Ingram
How can the loss be witnessed or exposed, rather than repressed, but in such a way that at the same time the healing process and political transformation can begin?[1]
In Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times, Elaine P. Miller probes ‘what it might mean to forge a new head, a head that replaces the one we are born with.’[2] She does so to illustrate the power of Kristeva’s uniquely balanced theoretical and aesthetic understanding of the horrors confronting contemporary subjectivity. Taking to heart Kristeva’s argument ‘that we, at least in the West, live in a depressed or depressive time, that is, that Western culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries itself, and not just the individuals within it, is depressed,’[3] Miller champions the thrust of the cures Kristeva proposes: first, that they have to happen at the level of the individual: ‘Kristeva believes that to heal society, one must first heal one’s own inner wounds, which alone will render one capable of effective social action;’[4] and second, that healing can take place through an encounter with art: ‘she agrees with the ancient Greek idea of art as the source of a potential catharsis, in this case of very “sick” states of mind that it might seek to expose or mimic, and adds to this the idea of art as a “sublimation for the ‘borderline’ [psychic] states in the broadest sense of the term, that is… those characterized by fragility,” in particular perversion and depression.’[5] While Kristeva may follow Debord in critiquing ‘the increasingly explicit violence of the spectacle,’[6] arguing that ‘violent images in newspaper reports and on movie screens are today’s “opiate of the people,” a way of cathartically exhausting aggressive and perverse drives,’[7] she has also pursued artistic projects that seek to demonstrate how art can transform this ‘pulverization of identity’ into something with less power to hurt us,[8] most obviously in her novels but also in the Visions capitales (Severed Heads) exhibition she curated at the Louvre in 1998, which in confronting audiences with ‘artistic representations of severed heads from antiquity through the present’[9] sought to substitute for the loss of a head ‘a capital vision… imagination, language, beyond the depression: an incarnation?’[10] As Miller underscores, decapitation here is ‘not an expression of lack so much as a condition for the possibility of creativity,’ a way of successfully navigating and emerging from depression.[11]
The two series of photographic portraits I am interested in here represent such a creative condition in ways that are explicitly Kristevan in both their medium and thematics. Indeed, it was their explicitness that provided me with the impetus to compare Bettina Flitner’s 2004 Frauen mit Visionen: 48 Europäerinnen (Women with Visions: 48 Female Europeans) and the accompanying exhibition Europäerinnen. Starke Frauen im Portrait. Ein Fotoprojekt von Bettina Flitner mit Texten von Alice Schwarzer (Female Europeans: Portraits of Strong Women. A Photography Project by Bettina Flitner with Texts by Alice Schwarzer) with Annie Leibovitz’s 1999 Women, a photography collection with an essay by Susan Sontag, which was also accompanied by an exhibition, from 27 October 1999 to 3 April 2000 in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and which Leibovitz updated in 2016 as the traveling exhibition Women: New Portraits, which went on a ten-city global tour.[12] Given Leibovitz’s standing as one of the most influential photographers at the end of the twentieth century, it is hard to imagine that Flitner had not been aware of the Women volume, and that it had not had any impact on the project on European women she began working on in 2001. However, whether Flitner was deliberately responding to the Leibovitz collection or not, the two projects offer intriguingly parallel Kristevan responses to their nation’s struggles to deal with issues of identity and sexuality, something I am tempted, following Miller’s following of Kristeva, to call head games. In order to get at the dynamics of these cases, I first introduce the projects comparatively and then show how Miller’s reading of Kristeva helps to identify the formal and thematic aspects that contribute to the potential power to heal, or at least ‘mitigate… melancholy and death,’ that these collections of female portraits offer.[13] While Kristeva’s work encourages us to approach the headshots in them as severed, this analysis also makes their phallic maternal qualities palpable. Miller cautions that: ‘Historically, this kind of “decapitation” might depict the conception of successful women as “heads” that strive to substitute for the phallus, where the feminine is rendered wounded and decapitated, “the threatening antithesis of the phallus.”’[14] In these two photography projects, however, there is not only a lack of wounding but a re-embodiment, one, I contend, that results from what Miller notes is “the most positive version of the Kristevan account, into the effort to find ‘a kind of face that has not yet found its face,”’[15] one, moreover, that takes the form of an explicitly phallic maternal.[16]
European/ Women
Europäerinnen (Female Europeans) was Flitner’s tenth official photography project. Like Leibovitz, whose father was in the US Air Force, Flitner experienced an international childhood, attending schools in Hannover, New York, Cologne, and Perugia. Also like Leibovitz, who pursued studies in not photography but painting, at the San Francisco Art Institute, Flitner’s studies at the German Film and TV-Academy in Berlin were not in photography but film, after which she trained as a film editor at the West German Broadcasting Corporation (WDR). However, the initial success of her first films was soon eclipsed by that of her first photography projects, and so, again like Leibovitz, she found herself increasingly devoting herself to photography. Among those early projects were Reportage aus dem Niemandsland (Report from No Man’s Land) on the initial contacts of those from East and West Germany after the fall of the wall; Nachbarn (Neighbors) on the aftermath of the Hoyerswerda riots in 1991; Sextouristen (Sex Tourists), a reportage from Thailand that marked the beginning of Flitner’s work with Alice Schwarzer’s EMMA on a topic she followed up on with a reportage for Stern entitled Freier (Johns), about ten days she spent in the ‘Wellness’ bordello in Stuttgart; and Stolz, ein Rechter zu sein (Proud to be Rightwing) about teenage skinheads from Berlin’s outskirts, which scandalized ART Cologne when it debuted there in 2001, just as Mein Feind (My Enemy) had when its large-format photos had been displayed there almost a decade earlier.[17]
For Europäerinnen Flitner set out to photograph the ‘most important, most interesting’ women in Europe: ‘Künstlerinnen, Schriftstellerinnen, Wissenschaftlerinnen, Politikerinnen, Aktivistinnen in ganz Europa’ (female artists, female writers, female scientists, female politicians, and female activists from all of Europe).[18] In developing her project and touring it through Europe, Flitner created a narrative of, and gave visibility to, the accomplishments of a grouping of women that made them available as a category for canonization. Unlike Leibovitz’s Women exhibition, which ended up being more about Leibovitz than any of her subjects and which is more than twice the size of Flitner’s despite the fact that Leibovitz took only one picture of each subject and has several images with multiple subjects,[19] the Europäerinnen Flitner chose for her project are all links in an accomplished chain. Six black-and-white headshots grace the cover, with Alice Schwarzer, Flitner’s partner, in the top-left corner. Almost a third of these women are German (15.5 to be precise, with Herta Müller counting as half as she is listed as German-Romanian), while another five are Austrian and one Swiss (Laure Wyss). This percentage is well over Germany’s percentage of either the EU GDP or its population, which are roughly a quarter and a fifth respectively.[20] It is also instructive to compare the volume’s lack of diversity with that of European parliaments, which remain markedly lower than their North American counterparts. In 2007, for example, the percentages for France, Germany, and Britain were 0.4, 1.3, and 2.3 respectively, while Canada and the United States stood at 7.8 and 15.9%.[21] It is therefore perhaps to be expected that Flitner’s Europäerinnen are white, with the striking exception of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born, anti-Islamist political activist who made the controversial short film Submission (2004) with Theo van Gogh and was included in Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world list in 2005 but then fled Holland for the US the following year to avoid van Gogh’s tragic fate – he was shot multiple times when setting off to cycle to work by a Dutch Moroccan Islamist, who then tried to decapitate his dead body with a large knife.[22] Given that the percentage of ethnic minorities in the Dutch Parliament in 2007 was much higher than its European neighbors, and at 8.0% even higher than Canada’s, one can appreciate the tensions Hirsi Ali faced there. One can also appreciate the effect in such an environment that protracted public displays of oversize headshots of Flitner’s women would have had, something to which I will return. Images reveal that the exhibition’s extensive European tour made a point of establishing a strong outdoor presence, emphasizing that these were women who had established themselves in the public sphere.[23]
Figure 1 Bettina Flitner, Europeans, Biblioteca National, Madrid, 2009. Image courtesy of Bettina Flitner.
In contrast Leibovitz’s collection was initially displayed only once, in one of the nation’s oldest private art museums and the one in DC with a specifically didactic, democratizing mandate to make ‘the historic art in its collections and the emerging art of the times accessible and understandable to the broadest possible audience through innovative exhibitions and educational programming, systematic research and rigorous scholarship.’[24] Nor is Women about the most important and influential women in the US. Rather, the point of Leibovitz’s collection was to show the extraordinary range of women living in America at the end of the twentieth century, and the extraordinary range of opportunities now open to them. As Sontag notes in her introductory essay ‘A Photograph is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?’: ‘the ensemble says, So this is what women are now – as different, as varied [my emphasis], as heroic, as forlorn, as conventional, as unconventional as this.’[25] Leibovitz’s collection indeed showcases variety, containing, in Sontag’s enumeration: ‘Dentist, orchestra conductor, commercial pilot, rabbi, lawyer, astronaut, film director, professional boxer, law-school dean, three-star general…’[26] The photographed individuals are thus not as important for the collection because of who they are as much as what they represent. As Sontag’s essay underscores, and as is reinforced by the powerful images of the performance artists in the volume – Jennifer Miller, ‘a naked gender-bending bearded woman’[27] reclining on a leopard-skinned chair; the equally naked Diamanda Galas hanging crucified on a cross, and the bald Rachel Rosenthal (1926-2015) buried up to her shoulders in the cracked mud of California’s Soggy Dry Lake –, Leibovitz is not as interested in women per se as she is in the gendered history of their artistic representation. Women, then, is not actually about women as much as it is about their being photographed and what that act has meant in terms of trapping women in certain ideals of beauty. As Sontag notes: ‘The imperial rights of the camera – to gaze at, to record, to exhibit anyone, anything – are an exemplary feature of modern life, as is the emancipation of women,’ a tension to which I will also return.[28]
In the first instance, then, a comparison of Europäerinnen and Women establishes the different directionality of the personal and the political in different national contexts. Leibovitz’s American project masquerades as political, featuring Hillary Rodham Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Barbara Bush, and Betty Ford, but on closer examination proves personal, while Flitner’s German one contains personal elements but is first and foremost a resolutely political project, brought home by the fact that a special edition was issued in 2006 with the then newly elected Chancellor Angela Merkel’s picture on the cover (Merkel served as German Chancellor from 2005 to 2021). As Sontag reminds us in ‘A Photograph is Not an Opinion. Or is it?’: ‘We assume a world with a boundless appetite for images, in which people, women and men, are eager to surrender themselves to the camera. But it is worth recalling that there are parts of the world where being photographed is something off-limits to women. In a few countries, where men have been mobilized for a veritable war against women, women scarcely appear at all.’[29] Recognizing the power of photography as political, as capable of making women visible in the face of oppression was a key aspect of the progress of modernity for Sontag, but she was also aware that ‘just as the granting of more and more rights and choices to women is a measure of a society’s embrace of modernity, so the revolt against modernity initiates a rush to rescind the meager gains toward participation in society on equal terms with men won by women, mostly urban, educated women, in previous decades.’[30]
This revolt against modernity continues to make itself felt both in and beyond Flitner’s Germany and Leibovitz’s US. Both nations have had to contend with the violent ethnonational forces of intolerance that Kristeva began to tackle in her 1988 Étrangers à nous-mêmes (published in English translation in 1991 as Strangers to Ourselves), ‘as Le Pen’s xenophobia was emerging.’[31] That book’s concluding chapter ‘In Practice…’ points to Kristeva’s prioritizing of the need to both move beyond theory and understand such a move as interminable (hence the ellipsis). In the year before the fall of the Berlin Wall she already foresaw the emergence of a paradoxical multinational society ‘made up of foreigners who are reconciled with themselves to the extent that they recognize themselves as foreigners.’[32] In Germany, that lack of reconciliation markedly manifested itself in intolerance to the ‘multikulti’ public policy efforts that Chancellor Merkel declared in 2010 to have failed miserably, while in the United States it took the form of a disturbing growth in radical intolerance that led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the context of Leibovitz’s Women: New Portraits world tour. It is therefore from a Kristevan perspective regrettable but not surprising that the question she posed at the outset of Strangers to Ourselves – ‘Can the “foreigner” who was the “enemy” in primitive societies, disappear from modern societies?’ has been answered not with the disappearance of ‘foreigners’ but with the disappearance of ‘modern’ societies, which is to say with the increasingly uncivil character of still nominally democratic societies, making it all the more urgent for them, which is to say us, to find ways, to speak with Miller, to forge ahead. It is in this regard that the potential of Flitner’s and Leibovitz’s projects is worth unpacking, with Flitner’s, as we have seen, packing a particular punch on account of the form of its exhibitionary practice: the public display of headshots of mature female subjects with calm, determined gazes.
Mothers and/in Phallic Photography
It is striking that Kristeva’s Severed Heads exhibition at the Louvre featured ‘displays of decorated Neolithic skulls, Byzantine mandylions, representations of John the Baptist, portraits by Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, and others,’ but not any in Flitner’s and Leibovitz’s métier of photography.[33] In Head Cases Miller identifies photography as a privileged medium to illustrate Kristeva’s ideas about the potential of aesthetics to heal. Unlike other forms of art, photography ‘actually records exactly a moment in time,’ forming ‘as Walter Benjamin says, a kind of crime scene in which often we must or can decipher the meaning only from the remaining fragmentary evidence, when the context is long past. As such, the photograph can be a cipher for the psychoanalytic concept of Nachträglichkeit, or afterwardness.’[34] Miller seems to have opted for afterwardness, and not deferred action or belatedness (cf. Eickhoff 1453-1454), to underscore that there is a particular ‘after’ of relevance to Kristeva’s diagnosis of depression as a pathology, namely, ‘the necessary developmental stage of separating from the mother.’[35] Referenced here is Melanie Klein’s ‘articulation of the “depressive position” at the origin of the subject’s entrance into language and culture,’[36] which Kristeva expounds upon in Severed Heads and Miller glosses as follows:
Depression, in this version of standard child development, is caused by the child’s gradual and necessary separation, as it grows older, from its ‘mother,’ or primary provider, and its subsequent assumption of a subjective identity in the ‘father’s’ realm of language and social interaction […] Because in order to function in the world we necessarily assume a position within the universal sphere of language and law, there is no going back, for the child, to the intimate fused sphere of maternal love. Such closure is both exhilarating and anguish provoking. The individual cannot return to the position of fusion with the mother, but she can and does attempt to recuperate her, along with other objects, in imagination and, later, in words. The depressive position, as Klein named this transition, is thus necessary, but, in the course of normal development, its anguish is also possible to overcome.[37]
This overcoming takes place via sublimation. As Kristeva puts it in Severed Heads, ‘the depressive phase marks a shift from sexual autoeroticism to an auto-eroticism of thought: grieving is dependent on sublimation.’[38] In other words, it is as the child realizes ‘the gratuity and impermanence of the mother’ and is forced to reckon with the loss of maternal dependence that it enters language.[39] What Miller draws our attention to are the stakes of this entry in Kristeva’s theory. There are no guarantees that the subject will find its way out of this melancholy; that remains only a possibility to be realized:
The future speaker’s sadness is, in the end, a good omen: it means that henceforth one can count on oneself alone, that grief for the other casts one into indelible confusion, but it is not impossible to compensate for that separation… by taking control. By concentrating on one’s own ability to represent, by investing in the representations one can make, one’s own representations of that other, the abandoner…[40]
That is why in following Kristeva, Miller notes that one productive way to ‘forge ahead’ is ‘through aesthetic activity that engages with and through, rather than trying to suppress, anxiety and depression, those two cornerstones of neurosis.’[41] To see how such art can provide a productive working-through of ‘the melancholia that characterizes the necessary separation from the maternal body and the depressive phase that is the condition for the possibility of symbolic life,’ let us return to Flitner’s and Leibovitz’s photography collections, keeping in mind that their very form is a cipher for afterwardness.[42]
As we have seen, the two projects are celebratory in rather different senses. While Flitner’s celebrates the increasing influence of women in the European public sphere, as properly public figures, which is to say as model modern citizens, Leibovitz celebrates how women in America have been able to exercise agency as individuals in the face of the punitive beauty ideals Sontag takes apart in her essay, and underscores what a difficult struggle that has been by including seductive, sprawling images of celebrity actresses with a reputation for having a daring, independent streak, such as Sigourney Weaver, Susan Sarandon, Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, Drew Barrymore, and Christina Ricci. A windblown Elizabeth Taylor appears with her equally windblown dog Sugar, while Gwyneth Paltrow is photographed with her mother, Blythe Danner, who is the one allowed to look at the camera, not Gwyneth, whose downcast eyes are a match for the dress strap that has slipped off her shoulder.
Mothers feature in both projects, but in contrasting ways. Almost all the mothers in Women wear black. In addition to Danner, in a long-sleeved, high-necked black turtleneck that contrasts starkly with Paltrow’s Bardot-esque white evening dress and matches the starkness of her gaze, a sultry yet regal Jerry Hall in gold stilettos and a tiger-striped fur wrap over her LBD is seated in a red plush armchair breastfeeding her fourth and last child with Mick Jagger, Gabriel Luke (born 1997).[43] A more casually clad Melissa Etheridge romps on the couch of her Brentwood home with her then partner, filmmaker Julie Cypher, and the two children that Cypher had conceived with the help of celebrity musical sperm donated by David Crosby (of Crosby, Stills and Nash fame), with both women in black and both children in the buff. The young daughter Vegas showgirl Narelle Brennan is holding in her arms is also as topless as her mother is in the accompanying shot of her blue Aladdin-esque costume in the Stardust Casino, which contrasts to her off-duty black-and-white striped top and jeans and to her other daughter’s bathing suit. Another woman holding her daughter in her arms, farmer Trini Campbell, is wearing a black sweater that serves as a backdrop for the little one’s red and white sundress. Comedian Rosie O’Donnell appears resolute, hands on hips, in a raggedy Charlie Chaplin-esque black suit and hat while her small blonde son Parker looks on. The only mother in white in the collection is identified as a follower of the Yoruba religion in Miami, Asabi Romera, who is depicted with her four children, all of whose black skin provides a photogenic contrast to their white sundresses or shorts and the sandy beach they are walking along.
In contrast, it is the daughters in Flitner’s Europäerinnen who are clad in that power-conveying phallic color. When Flitner discovered that Body Shop founder Anita Roddick’s mother lived in a nearby village in the house that Roddick had grown up in, she suggested driving there for a group portrait, which was taken in a homey living room on an almost sepia-lit couch. Roddick’s mother is nestled under her daughter’s outstretched left arm knitting, and both are looking down demurely at the knitting.[44] In Alice Schwarzer’s accompanying text, we learn that Roddick’s mother, Gilda de Vita, and her husband were Italian immigrants who brought their daughter Anita into the world in 1942 in Littlehampton, a seaside resort town in West Sussex that became the world headquarters of The Body Shop. It is not only The Body Shop’s success that made Roddick a candidate for Flitner’s collection but also the feminist thrust of her company’s advertising. The slogan on its twentieth anniversary packaging is included in the text – ‘There are three billion women that don’t look like supermodels – and only eight women that do’ – and described as ‘ein feministischer Appell’ (a feminist call to arms).[45]
The second mother-daughter pair in Flitner’s volume consists of a young Elfriede Jelinek and her mother.[46] Given that the photo was taken in their Viennese home in 1987, over a decade before the project’s conception, which in turn was three years before Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature, it seems that her inclusion can be attributed to the fact that Flitner happened to have taken striking pictures of her that Jelinek approved of and allowed her to publish. There is no indication in the volume or its virtual paratexts that Flitner tried to take updated images. However, given that Jelinek explained to a FAZ reporter that she did not attend the Nobel award ceremony because ‘“Ich kann das nicht ertragen,” sagt sie, “dieses Angeschautwerden. Irgendwann ist einmal der Punkt dagewesen, wo es einfach nicht mehr ging”’ (I can’t stand this being looked at, she said. At some point the point came when it simply wasn’t possible anymore), it is to be presumed she would not have been keen to be photographed again.[47] Yet she did allow, or could not prevent, images accompanying the FAZ story that seem to have been shot in the same location as Flitner’s, a living room with two glass-paned doors in the background as stark as Roddick’s is made cozy with photos on the walls and throws over the couch. As in the Roddick photograph, Jelinek is behind her mother, and while Roddick’s mother’s dress and knitting wool provide that image with its color, it is Jelinek’s mother’s white hair, light blouse, and bird-like stance that capture the light, just as her gaze captures the camera’s. Unlike Danner, who is pictured with her arms around her daughter Gwyneth’s waist, as though she were trying to imprint herself on her daughter from behind, Jelinek’s stands at a slight but discernable distance from her daughter, who stares resolutely off camera with her arms crossed as firmly across her chest as her black belted jeans are buckled.
These mother-daughter compositions reveal much about Flitner’s and Leibovitz’s identificatory subjectivities, which is confirmed in their later work. In her first project after Sontag’s passing, Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990–2005, Leibovitz’s interest in and representation of ‘her own “belated” motherhood’ was on prominent display,[48] while Flitner’s identification as a daughter comes through strongly in her recent literary effort, Meine Schwester (My Sister), which offers a sensitive working through of her elder sister’s suicide. A Kristevan approach asks us to notice that these projects demonstrate Flitner’s and Leibovitz’s willingness to give aesthetic shape to their experiences in their familial constellations, that is, to sublimate them into a form of portraiture, thereby providing opportunities for the powerful subjects in these works to gaze out at those who gaze at them and in the process to potentially awaken long-buried melancholic memories.
In Flitner’s case, as we have seen, these interactions were orchestrated to take place in public spaces. The image of the Europäerinnen photos displayed on the gates of the Biblioteca National in Madrid in 2009 shows how a middle-aged female passerby’s attention is caught by a headshot of Pina Bausch, whose phallic nature is underscored by the presence of a cigarette. Using headshots strategically in the public displays of Europäerinnen confronts viewers with the memory of their early depressive phase, when they were forced to reckon with ‘the gratuity and impermanence of the mother’ and the loss of their dependence on her as they entered language. How have they compensated for that loss? To what uses have they put their ‘auto-eroticism of thought?’ Contemplating these headshots thus presents an opportunity to work through residual depression and anxiety, rather than resorting to numbing it with products from the pharma or sports and entertainment industries.
One also notes in the Madrid image that not all pedestrians return the photographed subjects’ gazes. Not all are in a headspace to be able to respond to the photos’ invitation to contemplation, just as Theo van Gogh’s murderer was incapable of making any type of contact with his victim that was not violent: ‘At the trial, Bouyeri spat at Van Gogh’s mother: “I don’t feel your pain. I don’t have any sympathy for you. I can’t feel for you because I think you’re a non-believer.”’[49] Indeed, the revolt against modernity Sontag remarked on at the end of the last century continues to pick up its pace in lockstep with modern liberal societal advances of the kind that Leibovitz’s photography has contributed to. As Pridmore-Brown demonstrates, Leibovitz ‘has not only photographed American culture but also changed it,’[50] in the case of A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005 by showing how having children in her fifties in the circumstances she was able to was a queer intervention in the institution of motherhood that helped to shift ‘social and cultural sensibilities on the subject of what is appropriate.’[51] However, that empowering of LGBTQ+ and other minorities to pursue alternative family arrangements has resulted in violent backlashes against those groups, something Flitner and Schwarzer’s marriage in 2018 also engendered.
That such backlash continues underscores the ongoing nature of social struggles in places where it is still possible for them to take place in public.[52] To effectively intervene in the reproduction of hetero-patriarchal capitalism, whether of the postmodern techno or premodern religious varieties, it will take more than establishing an awareness of the need for acceptance of all forms of difference both within and beyond national boundaries. As Kristeva writes in Severed Heads, ‘Writing by itself will not be enough to force open the void of this barbaric time, it will take the agony of the whole body to finally grasp the truth of it.’[53] But grasp it we can in projects that ‘imagistically represent or “write out” a decapitation, thereby effecting a rebirth that provides an alternative to the tradition where only the complete sacrifice of the maternal body gives rise to paternal language.’[54] Viewing projects such as Flitner’s and Leibovitz’s as Kristevan head cases helps elucidate why the bros in the hegemonic complexes, whether sports-entertainment, pharma, fin-tech, or military-industrial, may be too psychically damaged to be able to contemplate their photographs or to engage, or even express themselves, aesthetically, and why, in practice…, heading off further descent into global fascism could be aided by providing an aesthetic education, not to mention decent, modest living conditions, to as wide a swath of the population as possible as early on as possible. In creating photography projects that lend themselves to a different type of viewing experience than mere consumption and voyeurism, Flitner and Leibovitz have established that they are indeed women with visions.[55]
[1] Miller, Elaine P. Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 16.
[12] ‘“Women: New Portraits” by Annie Leibovitz to Launch in Japan in February,’ PR Newswire Europe Including UK Disclose, 18 January 2016, https://www.proquest.com/docview/1757801750/citation/9474FE90FB7E4039PQ/1. Accessed 14 June 2023.
[13] McLennan, Matthew R. ‘Book Review: Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions,’ Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, 21:1, 2013, 193.
[14] Miller, Elaine P. ‘Julia Kristeva on the Severed Head and Other Maternal “Capital Visions,”’ in Beardsworth, Sara G. (ed.). The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva (Chicago: Open Court, 2020), 366.
[16] Boué-Widawsky notes in no uncertain terms that ‘Kristeva’s argument debunks the prevalent Lacanian phallic symbolic order by claiming that the maternal junction of the physical and the psychical provides the space for the development of prelinguistic forms of symbolization… For Kristeva, motherhood might be experienced as a phallic substitute, the desire of which is supposed to be pre-oedipal and stimulated by and within the mother. The phallic desire appears at first “because of the maternal desire for the father (her own and the child’s),” she explains in The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt.’ (629, 634). Boué-Widawky’s reading of the phallic nature of maternal eroticism drew Kristeva’s attention and praise: ‘The reading Boué-Widawsky proposes of my interpretation of the “father of individual prehistory” is remarkable. She specifies that this imaginary and loving father, preceding the oedipal father of prohibition and law, “modifies the narcissistic mother-child dyad” – but not only that. Endowed with the qualities of both parents, the primary identification with the “father-mother” also implies… the maternal itself in the phallic assumption: “the infant’s first phallic fantasy… [is] the result of the mother’s intercession”’ (Kristeva in Beardsworth. 658).
[17] Information about Flitner’s projects is available on her website: https://www.bettinaflitner.de/portfolio-1.
[18] Flitner, Bettina. Frauen mit Visionen – 48 Europäerinnen. Mit Texten von Alice Schwarzer (Munich: Knesebeck, 2004), 8. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are mine.
[19] 153 names are listed in the final biographical section of Women, beginning with Leibovitz’s mother, Marilyn Heit Leibovitz, and not including the person in the volume’s final image, Leibovitz’s partner Susan Sontag. Leibovitz began work on the volume after Sontag was diagnosed with a uterine sarcoma in 1998. Sontag ‘had already survived stage IV breast cancer in 1975 that had spread into the lymph system, despite her doctors having held out little hope of her doing so’ (Rieff, David. ‘Why I Had to Lie to My Dying Mother,’ The Guardian, 18 May 2008, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/18/society. Accessed 14 June 2023) and published Illness as Metaphor in 1979 about the experience and how it motivated her to compare how tuberculosis was seen in the nineteenth century with how cancer patients were seen in the twentieth.
[20] In 2020 Germany contributed 25.1% to the EU GDP (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20211220-1), while its population, at 83, 166, 700 was 18.6% of the EU total of 447, 706, 200 (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/11081093/3-10072020-AP-EN.pdf/d2f799bf-4412-05cc-a357-7b49b93615f1).
[21] ‘Minorities and Legislatures: Must the Rainbow Turn Monochrome in Parliament?’ The Economist, 25 October 2007, http://www.economist.com/node/10024517. Accessed 14 June 2023.
[22] Hari, Johann. ‘Ayaan Hirsi Ali: My Life Under a Fatwa,’ The Independent, 27 November 2007, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/ayaan-hirsi-ali-my-life-under-a-fatwa-760666.html. Accessed 14 June 2023.
[23] One can find other examples of these displays on the exhibitions page of Flitner’s website:
https://www.bettinaflitner.de/exhibitions.
Direct links are at: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/608adc3950b2b36b4bd16533/17b84412-e76a-4fdb-b8c3-3d7b86cac320/DSC_8248.jpg?format=1500w; https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/608adc3950b2b36b4bd16533/c65446ab-ab9e-4741-89e6-28ab7a9cafe1/Tampere+aussen-8.jpg?format=1500w;
[24] ‘About the Corcoran,’ The Corcoran Gallery of Art, http://www.corcoran.org/about. Accessed 14 June 2023.
[25] Leibovitz, Annie. Women. With an Essay by Susan Sontag (New York: Random House, 1999), 20.
[27] Shepperd, Josh. ‘Women,’ Post Script, 26:2, Winter 2007, 146.
[28] Sontag in Leibovitz, 1999, 23.
[31] Nivat, Georges, Olivier Mongin, and Patsy Baudoin. ‘The Individual Person at the Center: An Interview with Julia Kristeva,’ Los Angeles Review of Books, 19 March 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-individual-person-at-the-center-an-interview-with-julia-kristeva/. Accessed 14 June 2023.
[32] Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 195.
[33] Hansen, Sarah. ‘The Severed Head: Capital Visions by Julia Kristeva (Review),’ PhiloSOPHIA, 5:1, 2015, 145.
[38] Kristeva, Julia. The Severed Head: Capital Visions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 6.
[43] Hall and Jagger’s other three children are: Elizabeth Scarlett (born 1984), James Leroy (born 1985), and Georgia May (born 1992).
[47] Diez, Georg. ‘Hausbesuch bei der Nobelpreis-Erträgerin,’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (faz.net), 11 October 2004, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/elfriede-jelinek-hausbesuch-bei-der-nobelpreis-ertraegerin-1192899.html. Accessed 14 June 2023.
[48] Pridmore-Brown, Michele. ‘Annie Leibovitz’s Queer Consumption of Motherhood,’ WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 37:3/4, Fall–Winter 2009, 81.
[50] Pridmore-Brown, 2009, 81.
[52] Too many examples of backlash could be cited. As this goes to press, yet another ‘senseless act of hate’ (Shetty)/ ‘“hate-motivated” attack’ (Tucker and Sutton) was carried out on June 28, 2023, at the University of Waterloo: a 24-year-old former international student entered a classroom with two knives, inquired about the topic of the class, and when it was confirmed to be on Gender Studies, stabbed the 38-year-old female Associate Professor and two of the students who attempted to intervene.
[55] I dedicate this piece to Sehrish Malik, a woman of great vision to whom I am immensely grateful for drawing my attention to the importance of the maternal in Kristeva’s life and thought through her dissertation research.
Susan Ingram is Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University, Toronto, where she coordinates the Graduate Diploma in Comparative Literature. She is the general editor of Intellect Book’s Urban Chic series and co-author of the volumes on Berlin, Vienna, and Los Angeles. A past president of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association and its current web systems administrator, her research interests revolve around the institutions of European cultural modernity and their legacies.