Kristeva and the Trans-missions of the Intertext: Signs, Mothers and Speaking in Tongues

Abstract

Although published in the same year, these two responses to Julia Kristeva’s work offer a résumé of the complex, positive-negative reception which her oeuvre has generated both outside and within specifically feminist circles. The key to both quotations is their antinomic structure; advances in one area are counterbalanced by regress in another. In the light of Kristeva’s own and repeated denial of the label ‘feminist’ (Au risque de la pensée 117–118) in spite of her iconic status within (French) feminism, it seems timely therefore to investigate whether Kristeva’s work still has a part to play in shaping feminist debates of today, in this nexus of fertile exchanges about a ‘new’ or ‘third wave’ of feminism. While her contributions to feminist psychoanalysis and the maternal as ‘subject-in process’ have already been ruled out of court by many feminists, such as Janice Doane, Devon Hodges and Diana Meyers, Kristeva’s work on language, including the pre-semiotic, continues to elicit positive support from critics of a no less feminist hue such as Toril Moi and Anne-Marie Smith. Kristeva’s example-in-writing thus positions her both outside feminism of whatever wave, yet directly within the aegis of feminist concerns of all waves. This chapter does not try to settle the question of Kristeva’s ‘feminist’ credentials, but asks how far her ‘feminist-postfeminist’ position and politics make her work, at the very least, a whetstone to sharpen contemporary third wave feminist theory and practice.

Kristeva’s thought is peculiar: it is transparent enough that it tends to be reduced very quickly to a set of bipolar opposites by her critics (and thereby criticized as being everything from ultraanarchistic to ultraconservative); but at the same time, it is opaque enough to be uncritically idealized by her most fervent admirers. (Jardine, The Poetics of Gender)

With respect to feminism, then, Kristeva leaves us oscillating between a regressive version of gynocentric-maternalist essentialism, on the one hand, and a postfeminist antiessentialism, on the other. Neither of these is useful for feminist politics. In Denise Riley’s terms, the first overfeminizes women by defining us maternally. The second, by contrast, underfeminizes us by insisting that ‘women’ do not exist and by dismissing the feminist movement as a proto-totalitarian fiction. (Fraser, Revaluing French Feminism: Critical Essays on Difference Agency, and Culture; emphasis in original)