Revolutionary Time

On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray

Fanny Söderbäck, Fanny Soderback

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781438477008, 9781438476995
• eBook ISBN: 9781438477015
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Examines the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of French feminists Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.

This book is the first to examine the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Because of their association with reproduction, embodiment, and the survival of the species, women have been confined to the cyclical time of nature-a temporal model that is said to merely repeat itself. Men, on the other hand, have been seen as bearers of linear time and as capable of change and progress. Fanny Söderbäck argues that both these temporal models make change impossible because they either repeat or repress the past. The model of time developed here-revolutionary time-aims at returning to and revitalizing the past so as to make possible a dynamic-embodied present and a future pregnant with change. Söderbäck stages an unprecedented conversation between Kristeva and Irigaray on issues of both time and difference, and engages thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, and Plato along the way.

PART I

WHY TIME?

Introduction

Time for Change

Around noontime on October 15, 2017, American actress Alyssa Milano took to Twitter and encouraged people to use the hashtag #MeToo in an effort to raise awareness about the magnitude of sexual assault and harassment experienced by girls and women around the world, and to let others know they are not alone in what can otherwise be an extremely isolating experience. To say that it “went viral” is an understatement. Within twenty-four hours, the phrase had been tweeted by half a million people and had appeared in twelve million Facebook posts. Since then, it has been used in at least eighty-five countries, and has instigated heated public debate about the experiences that have surfaced, the power dynamics they reveal, and the pervasive nature of sexual offenses that they attest to—cross-culturally, cross-generationally, and across social and professional strata.

But this was not the first time these words had been used for the purpose of empowering survivors of sexual violence. Over a decade earlier, in 2006, the activist and community organizer Tarana Burke had begun using the phrase on MySpace, following a conversation she had had with a thirteen-year-old girl at a summer camp confiding to her about having been sexually assaulted. At the time, Burke had not felt ready to offer advice or support to the girl, and later, she recounts, the guilt she felt became a refrain, a repeated question: “Why couldn’t you just say ‘me too?’ ”1 A movement was born, and since then Burke has been hard at work to help women and girls—particularly women and girls of color—who, like her, had endured sexual abuse.

Why do I begin here, in the bifurcated birth of the MeToo Movement, as I set out to examine the role of time in the work of two French feminist thinkers? On the one hand, because it is a story about a moment in very recent feminist history that mirrors just about every story about feminist moments and movements. As Abby Ohlheiser puts it, “a viral hashtag that was largely spread and amplified by white women actually has its origins in a decade of work by a woman of color.”2 It serves as a reminder that each and every feminist beginning (and of course not only feminist beginnings but, as I will argue in this book, all beginnings) points to yet another beginning—sometimes through an act of erasure or appropriation, other times through acknowledgment or mutual exchange. Feminist work is always already in some sense feminist historiography, and feminists have had a lot to say about history, beginnings, and birth.

But much more specifically, the MeToo Movement brings attention to the complex ways in which feminist concerns tend to be embedded in temporal questions and considerations, even when these are not explicit. Burke’s inability to say “me too” to the young teenage girl who came to her for advice, and her subsequent ability to do so loudly and publicly in a heroic effort to support women and girls throughout her community and eventually across the world, each speaks of different temporal modes of existence and response, and of the gendered nature of temporal experience. “Me too” are words meant to communicate identification, solidarity, affinity, and support—what Burke calls “empowerment through empathy.”3 As such, they signal a relational temporality of sorts—the “too” is pronounced with reference to a claim made by an other (or others)—but through its current usage it has also come to function as an assertion that opens up the possibility for certain forms of relationality and solidarity (“me too” not as a response to what another confides to me, but rather as a statement that invites for collective action and public conversation). As such, these two words reverse a linear temporal order requiring that “this happened to me” comes before “it happened to me too,” and open up for an alternative temporal and relational order.

At the same time, “me too” inevitably tells the story of a past to which the speaker must return in order to utter those words, most likely not without pain, and at the risk of having traumatic memories from that past resurface. Pronounced here and now, in a present marked by a flood-wave of Hollywood scandals and everyday abuse, the words “me too” open up a passage to a past that is singular and collective both at once (it tells of my story, but also of a story shared by many, and this juncture between the singular and the globally shared is what gives it its power). By pronouncing those words we partake in the act of acknowledging and giving voice to past events (and those that are still ongoing) that by and large have remained silenced and suppressed through the pressures of social taboos and mechanisms of shame. This has happened. To you. To me. To us. And once a movement is born, there is a sense that things could be different. That healing is to come. That there can be change.

While this book is not about the MeToo Movement, it is about change. And it tries to lay bare the temporal structure that allows for change: a temporal movement of return, from the present of our here-and-now, to a past that by and large has been silenced and repressed, into a future that might be otherwise.

French Feminism and the Problem of Time

In her essay “Women’s Time,” Julia Kristeva defines the different waves of the feminist movement in terms of their respective relationship to time.4 My own task, in this book, is to continue the trajectory of that essay, and to focus specifically on two of the most important feminist thinkers of our time—Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray—as I offer the first extended reading of their work that systematically unearths the role of time in their corpus. While I acknowledge profound differences between these two thinkers, I argue that the particular issue of time is one that brings their respective work together in ways that should shed new light on the particularities of each of their thinking.5 The objectives of my project are twofold: On the one hand, I trace a dialogical relationship between Kristeva and Irigaray, suggesting that their respective projects are structured around and driven by a common interest in questions of time and temporality. On the other hand, I look at the broader political implications of this re-articulation of time—most importantly its capacity to formulate a useful critique of patriarchal presuppositions about sexual difference.

My ambition is thus to show that by bringing the issue of time to the forefront, we can highlight some hitherto neglected aspects of the thought of these two thinkers—aspects that connect them in perhaps unexpected ways. Despite the fact that temporal questions are present throughout their texts—from the earliest to the most recent ones—few serious engagements with this aspect of their thought have emerged, and no book-length reading of this kind exists.6 This might in part be due to the fact that neither Kristeva nor Irigaray has published a comprehensive text where their own “theory of time” is spelled out: there is nothing like Aristotle’s examination of time in the Physics; no engagement as sustained as the one Saint Augustine presents in his Confessions; nor do we find in Kristeva or Irigaray any claim to a radical reinterpretation of time like we see in Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, or Jacques Derrida.7 The question of time is, instead, raised throughout their texts: it appears in almost all of them, at times explicitly, more often as an implicit subtheme.8

While Kristeva’s and Irigaray’s works differ significantly, I argue that the question of time stands at the heart of both of their writing, and that it functions as that which organizes and motivates their respective feminist projects.9 I claim, moreover, that a feminist critique of identity thinking relies on a re-articulation of time as it has been conceived in the Western tradition. Feminist scholarship has up until recently tended to focus on issues of spatiality and embodiment—both of which are typically associated with femininity—but I argue that a philosophical critique of time and temporality is essential for an adequate discussion of questions of sexual difference and female embodiment and subjectivity.10

Time has, of course, been a central philosophical concern for millennia. The early ancients and Plato associated it with the movement of the celestial bodies, thus framing it in cyclical terms and modeling it upon the cycles of nature. Aristotle conceptualized time as an infinite series of now-points that constantly are coming in and going out of presence. We then see a trajectory from Augustine to G. W. F. Hegel, where time becomes conceptualized as an “extension of the soul” (Augustine) or “the form of inner sense” (Kant); a tradition, in other words, that associates time with the internal, non-corporeal mind and that, since René Descartes, posits a transcendental subject or ego capable of temporal synthesis.11 Heidegger famously suggested that temporality should be seen as the fundamental structure of the existential analysis of Dasein, and in so doing he transformed our very conception of time and the inquiry into our own temporal experience, and set the stage for a revitalization of the question of time within the framework of phenomenological, existentialist, and poststructuralist critiques of Western metaphysics.12

But if to exist, as Heidegger claims, is to project oneself toward the future and to resolutely seize hold of ecstatic temporality, what, Elaine P. Miller asks, happens if there is a fundamental, historically determined structural difference in the ways in which the sexes are able to carry out this existential project? What if, for certain subjects, the possibility of taking hold of the present, releasing the past, and anticipating the future were from the outset prevented or brought to a halt?13 It is this structural foreclosure of the possibility of embracing existential temporality that feminists, queer theorists, and decolonial thinkers alike have subjected to critical analysis. I will introduce this problem by turning to the account provided by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. I will proceed, however, to point to some problematic aspects of her analysis, as I argue that the works of Kristeva and Irigaray allow us to better address the question of time with this set of problems in mind. I will then go on to elaborate an analysis of temporal experience that acknowledges and sheds light on the relation between the question of time and that of sexual difference.

What do I mean when I say that there is a relation between the question of time and that of sexual difference? Let me address this question by making a rather general claim about the way in which time and temporal movement have been perceived. By and large, two models of time have been made available: cyclical time, and linear time.14 Each of these has been associated with its own particular mode of subjectivity. Women, so often relegated to the natural realm and to embodiment, have become the bearers of cyclical time, while men, who have taken upon themselves the task of subordinating nature and the body in the name of culture and reason, have come to lay claim on linear time and the progress associated with it. Historically speaking, the two models thus correspond to the conception of woman as an embodied creature and man as a rational subject not bound to his body.15

On this view, female (cyclical) time is associated with temporal stasis, while male (linear) time reaches forward into the transcendent future. Man becomes associated with time (with progress, futurity, and forward-thrusting movement), while woman is reduced to spatiality and repetition (the eternal recurrence of nature and the docile receptive materiality that regenerates life without itself being capable of creativity or agency). Woman, as Beauvoir has noted, gives life, while man transcends or risks it.16 Western patriarchal society, we might say, depends on a sexual division of temporal labor. The question of time—even as it has been treated in the Western philosophical canon—is in other words intimately linked to the question of sexual difference. But this link has remained unacknowledged, and my task in this book is not only to draw attention to this link as such but also to show that the covering over of this relation has led to a disfiguring of both time (and the relationship between the different modes of time: past, present, and future) and sexual difference.

To deconstruct the Western patriarchal distinction between nature-woman-immanence and culture-man-transcendence, we must therefore undertake to deconstruct the temporal division between cyclicality and linearity, offering instead a temporal model that moves beyond such dichotomies. While some feminist scholars have attempted to recuperate and valorize cyclical time, and while others have attempted to grant women access to linear time, I argue in this book that neither cyclical nor linear time carries true potential for liberation and change. Building on the work of Kristeva and Irigaray, I seek to develop my own concept of revolutionary time, which is modeled upon the perpetual movement of return that is meant to retrieve the very body that was repressed in order to construct the linear-cyclical dichotomy and paradigm. When Kristeva and Irigaray urge us to return to the body, what is at stake, I argue, is not an essentialist tendency to imprison us in our bodies. Rather, we can trace in their work the effort to construct a model of time and transcendence that neither represses the body nor confines women and other oppressed groups to the realm of embodiment, but which recognizes embodiment as the condition of possibility for futurity. In developing the concept of revolutionary time, I aim to make this implicit effort explicit, and to lay the groundwork for a politics of futurity and change.

My concern with time is threefold: First, I am interested in looking at the ways in which Kristeva and Irigaray seek to establish a view of presence that remains grounded in the past and open towards the future (what I call a living present or co-presence). Second, I want to look at the past by examining what it would mean to retrieve what they see as forgotten histories, and critically think through the relationship between what they call maternal beginnings and what has traditionally been articulated in terms of a single paternal origin. Third, I wish to address very briefly a set of questions about the future—briefly precisely because the future remains elusive. I argue that both Kristeva and Irigaray are devoted to the possibility of the not-yet, the new, and the unforeseen, but that such an unpredictable future fundamentally depends on an initial return into the past and a vitalization of the present. The future is, in other words, not a break with the past, but rather a result of our perpetual and active return to and tarrying with the past, and this movement of return can only take as its point of departure a living present. I am thus attempting to establish a dynamic link between the three modes of time (much like Heidegger did when developing his notion of ecstatic temporality), while (and here, to be sure, I depart from Heidegger) bringing life back to each of them by linking ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Part I. Why Time?
• Part II. Revolutionary Time
• Part III. The Present
• Part IV. The Past
• Part V. The Future
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover