Introduction to Julia Kristeva's "Women's Time" Author(s): Alice Jardine Source: Signs, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Autumn, 1981), pp.

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Introduction to Julia Kristeva's "Women's Time"

Alice Jardine

That this rupture can be in complicity with the law or, rather, that it can constitute a point of departure for even deeper changes: that is the major problem.' The Future Perfect: for an action/event which at a given time in the future will be in the past.2 Julia Kristeva writes in a kind of "future perfect"-a modality that implies neither that we are helpless before some inevitable destiny nor that we can somehow, given enough time and thought, engineer an ultimately perfect future. She often uses this term herself, particularly in reference to the poetic text; a literary text is always before or after its time (because of the negativity forcing the rejection of all theses) but also of its own time to the extent that it represents a certain linguistic and ideological configuration.3 In the following article, she evokes the future perfect to characterize a new social formation now in the process of rediscovering what part of it has forgotten. I am not suggesting that Kristeva's theoretical writings are texts (in the strong sense that word has acquired in France) or even that they are only there to remind us of what we have "forgotten" for the present. Rather, her thought reveals such a complex stratification of predictions and echoes, progressions and regressions, that even readers most familiar with her work find themselves wondering, What will have to have happened before she can be read?
1. Julia Kristeva, La Revolution du langage poetique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1974), p. 494. The "rupture" here refers to the experiments in poetic language at the end of the nineteenth century. But the question remains Kristeva's principle focal point when thinking about all major forces of change. 2. A. J. Thomson and A. V. Martinet, eds., A Practical English Grammar (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). 3. Ibid., pp. 364-68.
[Signs:Journal of Womenin Culture and Society 1981, vol. 7, no. 1] ? 1981 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/82/0701-0001$01.00

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Introductionto Kristeva

This becomes a vertiginous and difficult problem for American readers of Kristeva who are drawn through her texts into a multiplicity of temporal spaces often quite foreign to them: the time of French thought (and its massive recent present), the time of importation and exportation of French thought to the United States (about ten years), and the time of the United States, "so far ahead of France" and yet assuming fundamental truths that French thinkers have long since rejected. The American feminist reader of "Women's Time" may experience this multiple time/space shuttle in an almost physical way: alternating, sometimes from sentence to sentence, between strong affirmation ("Yes, this is important and promising for the future") and violent rejection ("But this was said about women a hundred years ago!"). In fact, the article was published only two years ago, but in a theoretical time and space totally alien to most American feminist itineraries. At the same time, it is important for it represents a certain number of configurations which American feminists are only now having to come to terms with.4 In the space allotted here, I can only try to schematically situate "Women's Time" in its local time, its time of writing. What its American time might be remains a question for the future. Published in 1979 (between La Folle veritt and Pouvoirs de l'horreur), "Women's Time" is, in some ways, Kristeva's most extensive and direct analysis of feminism as an international movement in the 1970s.5 It
4. This reading is further complicated by the fact that Kristeva writes within a conceptual vocabulary, a "metalanguage," which even those French feminists most familiar with the lexical paradigms find irritating-sometimes to the point of saying that it is not "the way a woman should write." Ironically, the strong reactions provoked by her writing often involve a form of judgment at the core of the very ego/identity she wants women to help explode. 5. Julia Kristeva, "Le Temps des femmes" in 34/44: Cahiers de recherchede sciencesdes textes et documents, no. 5 (Winter 1979). Kristeva's major publications include Semiotike: Recherchespour une simanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969); Le Texte du roman (The Hague: Mouton, 1970); La Revolution du langage poetique;Des Chinoises (Paris: Editions des femmes, 1974), translated by Anita Barrows as About Chinese Women (New York: Urizen Press, 1977); La Traverseedes signes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975); Polylogue (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977); Folle verite (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1979); and Pouvoirs del'horreur: essai surl'abjection (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980). A selection of articles from Semiotikeand Polylogue have been translated in Desire in Language: A SemioticApproachto Literatureand Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Translations of individual articles have appeared in various American journals including Diacritics,October,and Substance.Articles in English on Kristeva's work include Verena Andermatt, "Julia Kristeva and the Traversal of Modem Poetic Space," Enclitic 1, no. 2 (Fall 1977): 65-77; Josette Feral, "Antigone or the Irony of the Tribe," Diacritics 8, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 2-14; Alice Jardine, "Theories of the Feminine: Kristeva," Enclitic, in press; Philip E. Lewis, "Revolutionary Semiotics," Diacritics 4, no. 3 (Fall 1974): 28-32. To help situate Kristeva within recent French feminist thought, see these books: Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, eds., The Future of Difference (Boston:

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appeared in a small, modest, but excellent research journal to be read (obviously) first in Paris. This is not a negligible observation (as I have tried to suggest above) and, if nothing else, helps account for some of the more polemical points of the article. The argument, first and foremost, revolves around a certain definition of "historical time," which may prove to be the first stumbling block outside of Paris. Indeed, this definition (slightly pejorative here, more so elsewhere, but whose force is never denied) and the ensuing extrapolations can seem out ofjoint to many American readers who continue to see the site of their major battles as the lack of "historical consciousness" in much American thought. We cannot even summarize here the major revolutions this word "history" has been through in France over the past twenty years. Suffice it to say that Kristeva's shorthand definition should be understood in the context of an entire "new (re)generation" of French philosophy. This (re)generation has taken place within what Vincent Descombes (rather unhistorically, but at least clearly) has termed the passage from the generation of the "Three H's" (Heidegger, Hegel, and Husserl) to the generation of the "Three Masters of Suspicion" (Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) and, most important, beyond.6 It has been pointed out that the resultant "relativization" of historical modes of thought (and, essentially, of dialectical thought), has also taken place within the heritage of Russian formalism and continental structuralism.7 Pointing out this local history is very different from marketing it. Much of the most heterogeneous work written throughout the 1960s and 1970s "against" both phenomenology and structuralism (not to mention the rediscovery of Anglo-American analytic philosophy) has rapidly become a "package deal" for nonspecialists. This "false historicization" of twenty years of writing flourishes particularly well in America and England under the anachronistic paperback label of "structuralism," adding an extra twist to any foreign reading.8 This overall interrogation of various systems of historical thinking and their mutual dependence on certain fundamental conceptions of language-the speaking subject and religious structures-is essential to
G. K. Hall & Co., 1980); Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds.,New French Feminisms (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980); and these articles: Elaine Marks, "Women and Literature in France," Signs: Journal of Womenin Culture and Society 3, no. 4 (Summer 1978): 832-42; and Carolyn Burke, "Report from Paris," ibid., pp. 843-55. 6. Vincent Descombes, Le Mime et l'autre: 45 ans de philosophiefrancaise (1933-1978) (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979), soon to be published by Cambridge University Press. One of the historians (per se) of the latter period is Michel Foucault; see, e.g., Foucault's The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1970). 7. See FredricJameson, The Prison-Houseof Language (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972). 8. See, e.g., almost any current TimesLiterarySupplementreview on "new French criticism."

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Introductionto Kristeva

all of Kristeva's thought. This is not to say that the following article cannot be read without this "background," only that it is once again important to evoke the place from which Kristeva is speaking: a Europe disillusioned with and closer to what seem to be the ultimate "reality principles" of traditional-and some not so traditional-approaches to history.9 Kristeva's definition of "historical time" as teleology and project (whether elaborated in a "Marxist" or "idealist" structure-but again, those are dangerously generic terms) operates, however, within at least one generally accepted consensus: The West is approaching or has already traversed the ending of a certain strictly delimited history, that of Judeo-Christianity. To analyze this culture and society in crisis, Kristeva always keeps in sight, on her intellectual and temporal horizon, two limits: Stalinism and fascism (and thus, inevitably, anti-Semitism). This recent acceleration in the historicization of our history and its limits thus leads to a set of accelerating extrapolations (analogies elsewhere in question): History is linked to the cogito, to the paternal function, representation, meaning, denotation, sign, syntax, narration, and so forth. At the forefront of this rethinking is a rejection of what seem to be the strongest pillars of that history: anthropomorphism, humanism, and truth. Here again, the American feminist reader is immersed in a strange temporality, for feminism is necessarily about women-a group of human beings in history whose identity is defined by that history's representation of sexuality. It is hardly necessary to point out to American feminists, faced daily with the self-conscious task of unraveling patriarchal history, that our ways of thinking about feminism are already overdetermined; that they are based-sometimes consciously, more often unconsciously-on systems of inherited thought. In most cases, they are based on empiricism or (we must not forget) on imported existential/ concrete thinking; but in translation from one culture to another, these assumptions at least must be specified in order for there to be any dialogue at all. In any case and in whatever form, there is an insistence by feminists (myself included) on reality, on realism: a pragmatic definition
9. Our time machine can again seem out of kilter. E.g., French intellectuals have only recently, in a massive way, "discovered the Gulags." This is absurd to most American intellectuals. The ensuing emotional attacks on the Soviet Union sound astonishing-like an echo-to any American who was alive and living in the United States in the 1950s. On the surface, the utterances are the same as those fed to us then (and again now) under the banner of anticommunism. But many of these French denunciations are coming from an intelligentsia who is, was, or might have been either the established or the far Left and are, in any case, in dialogue with Marxist theory/practice in a way impossible to those who live in the United States. Traditional notions of Right and Left in France have been confused to such an extent that one has been speaking, for some time, of a total intellectual crisis. All of this is to say that an American cannot simply take an eight-hour flight to Europe and qualify "anti-Marxist thought" as rightist, fascist or, more fashionably, anarchistic. Neither can all of those tendencies be denied as factors.

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of truth or, as Descombes writes in reference to Sartrean humanism, "the true is the result." This (among other things) has led to the rejection of the word "feminism" by some French women as simply the other side of humanism, or else it has culminated in an attempt to live in two times: political time (realism) and written time (elsewhere). An increasing majority, however, retains the word "feminism"; they admit there are problems with it but insist on using it now, concretely (i.e., existentially). "If humanism was about putting the word 'man' where 'God' had been used before, and if therefore feminism is nothing but another humanist gesture in that it replaces 'man' with 'woman,' so be it-for now." Some have suggested that the "End of History" and the "Death of Man" are nothing but paranoid reactions on the part of male thinkers to the concrete changes brought about by women's massive awakening. They no doubt are, as Kristeva hints in this article, but.... In analyzing the logic(s) which belong to this long but presently out-of-sync history, Kristeva concentrates on its crises, on what has always threatened it, and, thus, inevitably, on "woman."10 She often situates herself as a woman-subject-theorist-foreigner-in-France-still, like women in the past, being forced to say what that history has either effaced or concealed. However, faced with the choice between (1) addressing/rediscovering what women-subjects have always said about that history from within it and (2) investigating what has functioned within that history as "the feminine," she has obviously and for multiple reasons chosen the latter. Kristeva's "feminine" is, in a sense, the glue that has held our history (or holds any system) together. She minutely analyzes the ways in which this "feminine" (and thus women?) has been sublimated, made a fetish, exalted, or liberated by male writers. At the same time, she emphasizes how this "feminine" is inexorably linked to both the "Mother" and mothers within the classic Western oedipal structure. Kristeva is very consciously aware of the difficulties inherent in an analysis of this "feminine." For example, in the following condensed passage she first supports the necessity for locating the position(s) of women-subjects in language; second, she adds, however, that (at the same time) the woman-subject is as much a product of language as the man-subject; third, she posits that only through this latter recognition can we short-circuit the cycle of the eternal feminine; and yet, fourth, she emphasizes that the "feminine" cannot, in turn, simply be left out of our analysis, for it is intrinsic to metaphysics:
10. In Anglo-American feminist theory, "woman" and "women" are often used to distinguish between the abstract and the concrete, with the former relegated either to poetics ("Such is Woman!") or used to designate, negatively, the concept of "the eternal feminine." While the same semantic choice is valid in French, this distinction is less widely used. "La femme" continues to be used by women theorists side by side with "les femmes" which, in the concrete plural, is consciously put forward in countereffect. For the use of the term "feminine," see also n. 5 in "Women's Time."

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One could then situate the woman-subject within the complexity of these parameters [of language] without reducing her to the state of the slave-excluded-from-the-linguistic-system. Here, I am obviously maintaining the notion of subject for women (the metaphysical implications of this are in no way inhibiting if, at the same time, its roots in significance are recognized) and am thereby avoiding the, in effect, fetishistic reification of a 'feminine in and of itself.' [ ... ] If, on the contrary, we could just understand by 'feminine' that which provides an approach to 'non-being'-to that which is impossible to say and yet is posited by metaphysics.... 1 and the The "woman-subject," the "feminine-in-and-of-itself," "feminine" as redefined by Kristeva are caught in a series of semantic networks difficult (if not impossible) to untangle fully from within the "identity" and "difference" paradigm bequeathed to us by our history... This is perhaps the point where it becomes important to remember that "feminism," as a generic term, is just as semantically complex and conceptually hazardous as "woman" or the "feminine." Generally seen as a movement "from the point of view of women," it covers enormous ground and becomes particularly dangerous across the border. In the present case, involving France and the United States, any generic description of "French feminism(s)" from afar immediately homogenizes and neutralizes the specificities of struggles that, at least in Paris, are of epic (and often violent) proportions. Even the attempt to specify contexts and assumptions, as I have done above, can run into the dangers of a comparativeness rooted in nineteenth-century thought which, in turn, can lead to a bizarre, modern form of "white woman's burden." Suffice it to say here, therefore, that when one speaks of "feminism" in France, no one is quite sure who or what is meant.'2 Kristeva, while extraordinarily
11. Julia Kristeva, "II n'y a pas de maitre a langage," Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse,no. 20 (Autumn 1979), pp. 134-35. 12. I will risk but a few examples: The group Psychoanalysis and Politics has legally taken on the name "MLF"(Mouvement de liberation des femmes: marque d6posee). Thus, recently, when their group came out in support ofJian Qing during her trial, the entire Parisian journalistic machine launched into praise or blame of "feminism" in general without ever mentioning that it was only a question of this one group. This is, at the very least, ironic, given that Psychoanalysis and Politics has rejected feminism completely. Another group of women (Questions feministes) initiated the term "neofeminism" to designate, specifically, the theories of Psychoanalysis and Politics. Since then, this term has come to mean something close to what Kristeva calls here "the second generation," although many who would place themselves in that generation are diametrically opposed to Psychoanalysis and Politics. For many, feminism has no meaning outside of activism. For others, feminism is simply the "final hysterization of middle-class women." Academic feminists can be counted on one hand. And so forth. All of this is complicated by the fact that any one group tends to center itself around one or two thinkers whose work nevertheless continues to circulate in other completely different contexts.

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11

attuned to feminism outside of France (in the United States particularly), is necessarily in an ongoing dialogue with "feminism," local time. At the most polemical points in the article, she is often referring to a form of fetishism which, I think I can safely say, most American feminists would also be among the first to reject. But there is much more here than polemics. Kristeva quietly and consistently rejects any thought that desexualizes (or, as we would put it, minimizes the gender differences intrinsic to) the structures forming us and our thought.13 At the same time, she forcefully draws our attention to those moments when womensubjects rejoin with or valorize the same feminine whose function she so minutely analyzes in Western culture. For Kristeva, the moments when women deny culture, reject theory, exalt the body, and so forth are moments when they risk crossing over the cultural borderline into hysteria. While recognizing hysteria as potentially liberating and as one of the major forms of contestation throughout our history, she also relentlessly emphasizes its very real limits: the fantasy of the phallic, allpowerful mother through which women reconnect with the very Law they had set out to fight.... "... A symbolic (social) system corresponds to a specific structuration of the speaking subject within the symbolic order."14 This, then, has been and still is Kristeva's theoretical starting point. To change the system, we have to change the speaking subject, but changing its gender or its cause alone is not sufficient. The subject must be thought in entirely new ways. She takes her distance from those modern French philosophers who reject the (human) subject altogether (by replacing it with traces, modalities, forces, or numbers): "Those who refuse to think the subject-inprocess/on-trial risk becoming the object of a trial."'5 She also steps back from all those who see Western history as operating on an Exclusion Model-where "what" or "who" has been left out of history can be gathered together as a basis for a new social contract. She shows how both the Law and all that has been silenced by the Law are inseparably bound in the logic and history of Judeo-Christianity. Now, if that historical temporality is coming to an end (but to speak of an "end" and "beginning" is, again, already to adhere to a certain logic)-what might henceforth perform the function of religion-and "woman"-with the least religiosity?
13. E.g., Jung's argument against Freud about the sexual neutrality of the libido. Foucault caused a stir last year when he maintained that rape is a social and not a sexual crime. 14. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l'horreur,p. 82. 15. "Ceux qui refusent de penser le sujet-en-procis risquent de devenir le sujet d'un proces." A statement made in Kristeva's 1980-81 seminar "Catharsis" at the University of Paris. For a definition of Kristeva's "subject-in-process/on-trial," see the first section of La Rivolution du langage poetique, the glossary to Desire in Language, or Jardine, "Theories of the Feminine: Kristeva."

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Here is where Kristeva's major passion breaks through: the poetic text, what, since the nineteenth century, we have called "literature." She once wrote, "What has not become law is poetic."'6 Literature as a replacement for the religion which has bound us together for hundreds of years? No, not exactly. (Kristeva's thought, whatever else it is, is never utopian.) But perhaps a place-a space-where new borders between what can and cannot be said can find the time to form. Kristeva ends her most recent book (where the "feminine" finds a new and frightening contemporary resonance) in this way: "Am I only reserving for myself the calm banks of contemplation by bringing to light, from under the deceitful and policed surfaces of civilizations, the nourishing horror they are busy putting out of sight through their constant purifying, systematizing, thinking: the horror they supply themselves with in order to grow and function? I see it rather as a work of deception, frustration, emptiness... possibly the only counterbalance to abjection. The rest-its archeology and its exhaustion-is nothing but literature...."17 The following article will be judged by many as antifeminist. I cannot possibly deny that it is. But if one is willing to follow Kristeva into the labyrinth she is exploring, I think they will find a thread of that "search for the woman-non-mother, the only radical other, the sister."18Kristeva is alone-almost like the artists she describes writing in the future perfect-in reminding us that any hope for a radically new ethics may be up to women. We have certainlyheard this before,but never while standing in a place (and time) from which we might finally be able to speak: the now and here where "our species finds itself exposed to madness under an empty sky."19 Paris, France
16. 17. 18. 19. Kristeva, Semiotike,p. 53. Kristeva, Pouvoirs de I'horreur,p. 248. Kristeva, Semiotike,p. 314. Kristeva, "II n'y a pas de maitre a langage," p. 140.