Julia Kristeva: Womens Time (1979)

Translated by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake (1981)

Women have been understood in terms of space rather than in terms of time or becoming:
that is, in terms of history. Hysteria, for example, was linked to place for Freud. Or think
of the chora in Plato, that which constitutes an anterior. Like many French feminists,
Kristeva does not reject psychoanalysis but recasts it, reading Freud against the grain.

She begins the article observing that the nation has become weak. Economic homogeneity
has made way for interdependence, while historical tradition and linguistic unity have
become a cultural and religious memory, in effect, a symbolic denominator. This has
enabled a strange temporality for the nation, it lived in future perfect where a deeply
repressed past creates a logical modernity.

Kristeva argues that a nations economic profile alters under pressure from this symbolic
denominator, which is concerned with reproduction survival of the species, life and death,
sex and symbol. This gives the nation both, a character of solidity by way of a mode of
reproduction, but fragility as well, because Europe in its universal character, must contend
with other contained universals, Latin America or North America. So identity that is formed
by historical sedimentation (the history of the nation) must also contend with a loss of
identity (this is where history meets anthropology) because memory or the symbolic
denominator is what connects different geographies. Hence, Kristeva posits two temporal
dimensions - the time of linear history or cursive time according to Nietzsche, and another
history monumental time which is encompasses supranational entities.

This is the setting within which Kristeva attempts to think of how the feminist movement
inherits and modifies time.

How is the symbolic formed? Maternal love constitutes the first spatial experience for a
child which eventually leads to sign and syntax that would be the initiation into language.
The sentence (noun+verb, beginning and ending) is one more illustration of linear time.
Linear time, however, rests on the stumbling block of that enunciation, death. The hysteric
lives in reminiscences, a time that is cyclical or monumental. This is the crux of the article,
that this antinomy is really about the problematic of a space-time

If the term woman has been used interchangeable with mother and hysteric, Kristeva
believes that it is in the interaction of these differences and multiplicity that we may be able
to see a fundamental difference between the sexes more truthfully

If a female self consciousness only emerges in the nineteenth century in Europe, it follows a
logic of identification with the nation. Like the nation, it is also universalist in scope, and so
it globalizes the womens problem, and it creates a Universal Woman. The second
generation of feminists who came out of the 1968 movement (this is not so much a mark of
chronological time as a signifying space where other movements also interweave) refused
linear time and many of them had psychoanalytic experience. Kristeva says, It also means
that, by demanding recognition of an irreducible identity, without equal in the opposite sex
and, as such, exploded, plural, fluid, in a certain way nonidentical, this feminism situates
itself outside the linear time of identities which communicate through projection and
revindication. Such feminism rejoins, on the one hand, the archaic (mythical) memory and,
on the other, the cyclical or monumental temporality of marginal movements (those of
spiritual or mystical persuasion)... it is the admixture of the two attitudes insertion in
history and the radical refusal of the subjective limitations imposed by this historys time on
an experiment carried out in the name of the irreducible difference.

While early demands of political, economic and professional equality have been
implemented to varying degrees, the fourth demand of sexual equality is what defines the
new generation. But instead of focussing on equality, the demand is articulated in terms of
difference and specificity. . Sexual difference is translated by ad translates a difference in the
relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social contract: a difference,
then, in the relationship to power, language and meaning.

Freuds Notion of Castration
Kristeva says that the fear of castration or penis envy is an imaginary formation perceived in
the discourse of neurotics of both sexes. These are hypotheses or a priori assumptions are
logical necessities to make his theory intelligible, even if nothing renders them present in
reality itself. This is not altogether surprising. The Big Bang theory is also an article of faith
that makes the phenomena of life explicable.

Meaning gets constituted with a separation from nature as an initiation into a network of
differences. Meaning is produced in language that is syntactical and binding. Conditions may
often cause women to be termed hysterics and men obsessionals, when they magnify the
denial of this separation. The psychoanalytic situation shows that the penis becomes the
major referant in this operation of separation, and gives full meaning to the lack or to the
desire which constitutes the subject during his or her insertion into the order of language.

The social contract then is based on sacrificial relationship of separation. What can womens
place in this symbolic contract be? Kristeva is sceptical of a pure womens voice or a counter
society (Europe witnessed a number of violent womens groups) because it too will be based
on an excluded element, a scapegoat charged with evil in order to fend off evil(Rene Girard).
Yet, she says, sacrifice orders violence and tames it. To refuse the social order is to be out of
its control and pose a risk

What else orders the woman? The difficult process of separating from her mother (a
vulnerable debt) to enter into the world of signs compounded with never being able to
restablish this contact, except through motherhood or the already frowned upon
homosexuality presents the conundrum for her. Why conform to a symbolic contract that
she is already foreign to her? No return to a pure utopia will diffuse the violence mobilized
by the countersociety. Instead, the productive myth of the archaic mother has to be
challenged. ..in Lacans scandalous sentence There is no such thing as Woman. Indeed, she
does not exist with a capital W, possessor of some mythical unity a supreme power, on
which is based the terror power and terrorism as the desire for power.

What might the desire for motherhood still present among the new generation correspond
to? Is it a return to an old, religious idea? Is it the desire for the penis, or do we see in
pregnancy a radical splitting of the subject accompanied also by a narcissistic totality, where
the birth of a child enables a love for another, an attentiveness and forgetting of self.

However, it appears that affirmation is manifesting itself in literary creation. Is it because
literature reveals something about the repressed, by exposing the uncanny and the unsaid?
What will women write that is new?
Kristeva identifies the present womens movement as somewhat like a religion: a
phantasmatic necessity on the part of speaking beings to provide themselves with a
representation in place of what constitutes them as such, in other words, symbolization. But,
at a time when human beings attempt to live without religion, can the idea of difference
that feminism activates can spread to enable a fluid and free subjectivity?

Is to pose the question already to answer it?

Where might this take us? Kristeva, like many of those working in continental theory, is
trying to think of the subject in terms of ethics and ontology. For her, woman can only be
subject to ethics if feminism is considered but a moment in the thought of an
anthropomorphic identity. The work of feminism is, then, to critique and go beyond the
socio-symbolic order but it is also necessarily limited to it.