Frequently cited by feminist philosophers such as Rosi Braidotti, Kristeva’s ‘Women’s Time’ critically examines the relation between time and the problematic of women, while reminding the risk of being trapped by a dual-essentialism of a rigid theory of sexual difference. For Kristeva, the ‘maternal time’ of repetition and cycle is to be reconciled with the ‘linear time’ of history and politics. She adopts a dialectical position on the issue of identity formation, conceiving it as neither the ‘semiotic’ nor the ‘symbolic’ but being in transit between the two.
According to Kristeva, “we confront two temporal dimensions: the time of linear history, or cursive time (as Nietzsche called it), and the time of another history, thus another time, monumental time (again according to Nietzsche), which englobes these supra-national, socio-cultural ensembles within even larger entities.”
An inquiry on time, in Kristeva’s text, is means to situate the problematic of women in Europe. She distinguishes two phases or two generations of women. They are both universalist and cosmopolitan in their demands, but also different: the first generation is marked by the national problematic, whereas the second is more engaged with its place within the ‘symbolic denominator’ and is European and trans-European.
In regards to female subjectivity there are two types of temporalities marked by repetition and eternity: Cyclical (repetition) and monumental (eternity).
There are cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature and imposes a temporality whose stereotyping may shock, but whose regularity and unison with what is experienced as extra-subjective time, cosmic time, occasion vertiginous visions and unnameable jouissance” and there is a massive “monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time (which passes) that the very word ‘temporality’ hardly fits: all-encompassing and infinite like imaginary space.
Cyclical and monumental types of temporalities pertaining to female subjectivity problematize the view of time as lineer and teleological. The women’s movement (suffragists and existential feminists) aimed to gain a place in linear time — in history (their political demands being fight for equal pay, for equal work, for taking power in social institutions; alongside their rejection of the “feminine” or “maternal” attributes that are incompatible with entering into that history –these are for Kristeva the part of “the logic of identification” with certain values: of the rationality of the nation-state.
The second phase involve the younger feminists of the period after May ’68 and also women who had an aesthetic or psychoanalytic experience: these women rejected linear temporality and exhibit a distrust in the political dimension. This current, for Kristeva, sees itself as belonging to another generation different from the first one in terms of how it views its own identity and temporality. They are mostly writers and artists, are interested in female psychology and its symbolic realizations, and want to create novel language, exploring the dynamic of signs. With a new generation, more subtle problems were added to the demands for socio-political identification, and also, with the demand for the recognition of their irreducible identity, “exploded, plural, fluid, in a certain way non-identical,” this second feminism posited itself outside the linear/teleological time. This feminism joins the archaic (mythical) memory and also the cyclical or monumental temporality of marginal movements. Kristeva next speaks of the mixture of these two attitudes: “insertion into history and the radical refusal of the subjective limitations imposed by this history’s time on an experiment carried out in the name of the irreducible difference.”
The symbolic contract is based on a sacrificial relationship of separation and articulation of differences, and this is how it produces communicable meaning. Kristeva questions our place in this order of sacrifice and of language. We don’t want to be excluded or we are not content with our functions in it, or not content with what is being demanded of us (perpetuate this socio-symbolic contract as mothers, wives etc.). How can we reveal our place and then transform it?
Kristeva observes two types of counterinvestment of the socio-symbolic contract: “trying to take hold it, enjoy it, subvert it” or more self-analytically, without refusing or sidestepping the social order, to explore its formation and operation one a more personal level.” This leads to active research aiming to shatter language, to find embodied discourse, and to the unnameable repressed by the social contract.
Other more radical feminist currents refuse homologation to identification with existing powers and want a counter-society. Kristeva writes that thus a ‘female society’ is constituted as an alter ego of the official society, “in which all real or fantasized possibilities for jouissance take refuge. Against the socio-symbolic contract, both sacrificial and frustrating, this counter-society is imagined as harmonious, without prohibitions, free and fulfilling.” This counter-society is founded on the expulsion of an excluded element, “a scapegoat charged with the evil of which the community duly constituted can then purge itself; a purge which will finally exonerate that community of any future criticism.” Kristeva says that modern protest movements have often repeated this logic of locating the guilty one to fend off criticism (capital, religion, the other sex), and asks if feminism when it follows this logic to its conclusion becomes an inverted sexism.
Kristeva also touches on Lacan’s “scandalous sentence”: “There is no such thing as Woman.” And interprets it as meaning woman with a capital ‘W’, possessor of a mythical unity does not exist.
Another important theme Kristeva focuses on is ‘religion’ — as a phantasmic necessity of the speaking being to find a representation (animal, female, male, parental, etc.) in place of what constitutes him/her as a speaking being –to find a symbolization. The current practice of feminism demonstrates aspects that constitute such a representation that makes up for the frustrations imposed on women by the Symbolic order. Kristeva sees this ideology as part of the broader anti-sacrificial current. She questions if feminism in its present form, is not in the process of becoming a religion.
There is a third generation that is forming, not as a mass movement, but as an attitude. They don’t exclude the parallel existence of all three attitudes in the same historical time, or that they be interwoven one with the other. Kristeva strongly advocates for this third attitude, where the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics. She asks what becomes of identity when it is challenged in a new theoretical and scientific space, observing an attitude of retreat from sexism and from any kind of anthropomorphism. She defines this process as “an interiorization of the founding separation of the socio-symbolic contract.”
She emphasizes bringing out the singularity of each person and the multiplicity of each person’s possible identifications, the relativity of their symbolic and biological existence, according to the variation in their symbolic capacities. She believes that at this level of interiorization, ‘aesthetic practices’ are the modern reply to the eternal question of morality.
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