© koninklijke brill nv, leiden,  | doi:./- Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion  () – brill.com/jcpr Kristeva’s Rewriting of Totem and Taboo and Religious Fundamentalism Kelly Oliver Vanderbilt University kelly.oliver@vanderbilt.edu Abstract With the upsurge in various forms of religion, especially dogmatic forms that kill in the name of good versus evil, there is an urgent need for intellectuals to acknowledge and analyze the role of religion in contemporary culture and politics. If there is to be any hope for peace, we need to understand how and why religion becomes the justification for violence. In a world where religious intolerance is growing, and the divide between the secular and the religious seems to be expanding, Julia Kristeva’s writings bridge the gap and once again provide a path where others have seen only an impasse. Her approach is unique in its insistent attempt to understand the violence both contained and unleashed by religion. Moreover, she rearticulates a notion of the sacred apart from religious dogmatism, a sense of the sacred that is precisely lacking in fundamentalism. Keywords religious fundamentalism – psychoanalysis and religion sublimation – Kristeva – Freud In her discussions of religion, Julia Kristeva often draws a distinction between the sacred and the religious in order to highlight the ways the sacred can oper- ate as an antidote to religious fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism fixes the sacred and makes it dogmatic, and by doing so, can become the justification for religious violence. As we will see, Kristeva calls this perversion of the sacred, the malady of ideality. Only by holding open the possibility of questioning and reinterpretation, and the constant process of binding, unbinding, and rebind- ing affects to words, do we avoid fundamentalism. The embrace of ambiguity