On “New maladies of the Soul”
Women’s Time
I wasn't sure how best to relay a summery and questions of Kristeva's essay. What I am presenting here is a mix of notes, ideas, introjections, and questions. I hope that any part of this is helpful.
Kristeva in this essay seems to be trying to understand woman’s history as the history of women involved in feminism for the past century. Through inquiry into time. Find a middle ground with which to talk to people-
How the feminist movement has inherited a notion of time but how it is in the process of being altered.
In this essay, Kristeva attempts to distinguish three types of feminism in regards to time. The first “wave” of feminism attempted to localize women within a kind of linear time or history previously available only to masculine subjects. While this kind of feminism made several important moves ( suffrage, professional equality, etc), she disagrees with its attempts to universalize or essentialize what women’s time actually means. She sees it’s disregard for motherhood as particularly problematic. Rather, she sees its rejection of cyclical (maternal) time as a kind of ignorance to the particularities of women in their singularities.
Grounds her argument in Baudrillard-in the end of the gold standard, and so the dominance of the role of the symbolic order to maintain cohesion and exclude change from the unity; it is a type of public sphere in which difference amounts to dystopia. Unlike the territorial demarcations that once defined a nation giving its cohesion a definite inside and outside, the type of universalism that Kristeva is arguing from universalizes through language displacing the demarcation, making it a problem of subjectivity.
Universalism was limited by the universalism of the nation.
Second phase- It went through its modernism in that it concentrated less on the symptoms of a system of representation that seems bent on exclusion and more effects of subjectivity, primarily the way in woman come into their subjectivities through language and psychology. Kristeva mimics the second generations style by confounding the movement of feminism with the change in individual woman (255).
The next section of the essay seeks to draw out the ground on which the phase for a third type of feminism of involving the popular multiplicity which emerges in juxtaposition to the concentration of a trans-movement. At this point in the essay, she teeters dangerously close to asserting a structuralist notion of the movement and the they of superstructure.
Now that we are dealing with the symbolic, we travel through Lacan and then Freud to understand our position as subjects invested in/with language to the symbolic.
-She argues that the phallic is the complete/”full meaning” of the symbolic. That it is the central referent seems to reinstate us before the end of the gold standard. Perhaps she is referencing Derrida’s phallogocentrism in which all meaning is derived from a masculine notion of an origin that proliferates all other meaning.
She asks, “what is our place in the social contract” given membership through castration or sex sacrifice?
What she seems to be getting at is the problem of the limits of the symbolic. The points at which the imaginary is not only a compromise but a sacrifice.
More subjective women/women who express themselves through terms which re more subjective? The new group then is countering the symbolic contract which asks us to sacrifice the realness of the paticularity of encounters in the world with our bodies.
In contesting this social order, Kristeva fears that a new division emerges dividing the sexes. Here by sexes it seems she means both women who derive their womanhood from the phallus and woman who are trying to articulate woman on different terms. She asks, “what occurs when they reject power but create an analogous society?
There is the vapid illusion of change when a woman is installed in a position of the same power filling it with the right parts.
There is the possibility that a movement might emerge in which power is conserved but the terms used in describe it-man-woman are revered.
“Like all societies, the counter society bases itself upon the expulsion of an already excluded element. The scapegoat deemed responsible for evil thus keeps it away from the established community which is therefore exonerated of any responsibility for it.”
She works out that in light of this possible division between what it seems she wants to term radicalism and the rest, she writes, “Although we can only offer a partial adherence o Freud’s belief that the desire to have a child is the desire to have a penis, and is thus a placement for phallic and symbolic power, we still must pay close attention to what today’s women have to say about this experience.” This seems to allow a continuation to the sacrificial order and an opening up to the elements of maternity utilized in the sacrificial to be commuted to a radical politics. She goes on to say that the possibility of exonerating the figure of the maternal comes in affirming the creative act of learning how to love differently. It seems this, “on the other hand” that Kristeva retains the symbolic order that she tried to parse in the making of the distinction of types of motherhood. Learning to love as mother, is this not the only type of love relegated to women through the realm of the symbolic?
-dan
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7 comments:
I cannot help but think of Nietzsche's "On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life" while reading this essay. Kristeva is calling for a recognition/understanding of creative (maternal) cyclical time. Which, for me, has components of both "critical time" and the "eternal return" (yeah, diff. N). She is definitely rejecting "antiquarian time" and "monumental time" as limmiting and authoritative (in that phallocentric way...). Critical time (mixed with a little eternal return), on the other hand, combines the cyclical creative/maternal with the ability to understand (see/recognize) what came "before," and the ability to rupture the trajectory (destruction/creation in a Kali kind of way).
I am concerned with this focus on the maternal. Kristeva writes, "The majority of women toady fell that they have a mission to put a child in the world." (364) The way she puts it, it seems as though all women have this desire to have a baby. I'm not sure if this is necessarily true, even of the majority of women. She comes back to this statement because apparantly, feminist have met with too much disapproval when they argue for the rejection of motherhood. Is Kristeva saying that motherhood is inextricably linked to being a woman? And motherhood in the sense of creating a baby in the world?
The concept of hysteria (of the subject "'who suffers reminiscences,' according to Freud") isolates a time of returning incompatible with teleological time. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera writes about experiencing a kind of creaturely connection with Hitler while looking at biographical photos. He writes, "several members of my family perished in Hitler's concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost peiod in my life, a period that would never return? This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted." This type of rupture has the authority of multiple moral accountancies (individual responses), and perforates the infinite moral attitude of everything necessarily being "pardoned in advance". The First Wave rejection of cyclical time consists in creating a consistant narrative for these diverse ruptures.
I think of the threat of hysteria in terms of the desparateness with which it has been treated, from bed rest to legislated masturbation (article: "The Clinical Orgasm" Cabinet Magazine #21), both of which can inadvertantly create ruptures in a national narrative.
I got stuck on that line too; "The majority of women today feel that they have a mission to put a child into the world" (p.364); but more because of the language used than the content. I don't know if it is a translation problem or not, but calling it "a mission" seems so contrary to Kristeva's earlier claim that female subjectivity poses a problem only with respect to a conception of time as planning, as teleology, as linear... (p.353) I don't think she is saying that all women have a desire to have babies, but she is rather trying to understand "what lies behind this desire to be a mother" (364) since so many women become mothers. This is a question earlier feminists have shied away from because they feared motherhood would in fact become inextricably linked to being a woman. But calling it a mission... I don't know, it doesn't seem as if we have yet "furnished our societies with a freer and more flexible discourse".
In response to Jenny's post: I guess what I was also trying to say is that the desire to become a mother may not even play a role in the woman becoming a mother. I think there are many things that might explain why women become mothers, and that "the desire to become a mother" might not be at the top of the list.
In response to Carolynn: You are right about that. I guess it is quite revealing that Kristeva focuses on women who wants to have kids and not on the ones who don't or get pregnant by accident. That is why I'm curious how this "mission" sentence was phrased in French.
If language requires a particular objectivity for communication, how can this objectivity remain in practice according to Kristeva if one begins to "demystify the idea that the community of language is a universal, all-inclusive, and equalizing tool," if there is in fact "diversity of our identifications and the relativity of our symbolic and biological existence (367). If Feminism is not to become a religion of Woman and "support instead the singularity of each woman, her complexities, her many languages" (366)could not the world then be imagined not as Men and Women divided into factions, but all men and all women separated as completely individual? By maintaining this intrinsic evil "the other is neither an evil being foreign to me nor a scapegoat from the outside, that is another sex..."(367).
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