ABSTRACT
For Julia Kristeva, the postmodern age is a post-religious age. Whilst she finds traces of their historical monotheism still in evidence in the structure of Western societies, and whilst she sees the religious tendencies of humankind at work in the construction of various substitute religions, for Kristeva a living religious faith is no longer a real intellectual possibility. According to Kristeva, the Christian church was a community founded upon a series of acute psychological insights, which provided its members with a corresponding series of psychological satisfactions and benefits. The rituals of purification which mark Israel as God's community are, in Kristeva's view, expressions at the social level of the process of the abjection of the maternal pre-object at the individual level. The identity of Israel as the community of God is constituted by reinforcing the dissociation each of its members has already undergone from his or her mother, whose body threatened precisely such identity.
