Fanny S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck, <\/b>Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray.<\/i><\/b> Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019; 414 pages. ISBN: 9781438476995.<\/b><\/p>\n
Sid Hansen, California State University Northridge<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n Fanny S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck begins her 2019 text <\/span>Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and<\/span><\/i> Irigaray<\/span><\/i> with a reflection on the \u201cme too\u201d movement against sexual assault and sexual harassment. Created by community organizer Tarana Burke in 2006 and then appropriated by actress Alyssa Milano in 2017, \u201cme too\u201d was a Twitter hashtag and viral public debate. As S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck observes, the phrase expresses relational temporality and relational solidarity. \u201cMe too\u201d testifies to past events that have been silenced and ignored; it invites collective action and signals the possibility of healing and change. According to S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck, the \u201cbifurcated birth\u201d of \u201cme too\u201d in Burke\u2019s and Milano\u2019s activism is \u201ca reminder that each and every feminist beginning [\u2026] points to yet another beginning\u2014sometimes through an act of erasure or appropriation, other times through acknowledgment or mutual exchange. Feminist work is always already feminist historiography\u201d (4). In 2023, years into a global pandemic that has upended life in so many different directions, S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck\u2019s reflections on temporal politics and feminist historiography could not be more important. Today, a lack of historical reflection fuels ignorant crises. And a tendency to idealize the past as a time when things were \u201cnormal\u201d or even (in a Trumpian sense) \u201cgreat\u201d spurs exclusionary violence, especially against Black, trans, and Indigenous women and girls. One of the deepest lessons of <\/span>Revolutionary Time<\/span><\/i> is S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck\u2019s account of how different temporal forms reflect and contribute to sexist, racist, and colonialist thinking; like \u201cme too,\u201d new relational temporalities and relational solidarities offer hope for change. Out of time and extinct, timeless and unintelligible, without history and therefore without culture\u2014time is a part of so many stories of injustice. For S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck, time might yet be revolutionary.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck is clear: without revolutionary time, we are stuck repeating or repressing the past in ways that make change impossible. Western philosophy\u2019s long-standing interest in time has been hampered by the dominance of two models\u2014cyclical time and linear time. Cyclical time is associated with women and the repetitive, rhythms of the natural world; linear time is associated with men, progress and immaterial transcendence. Of course, this rigid dualist account of time is beset with as many traps as binary sexual difference itself. While some feminists hope to overcome women\u2019s association with cyclical time by seeking access to the privileges of linear time, this strategy fails to challenge the oppressive values that construct the privileged meanings of linear time in the first place. Other feminists aim to reclaim cyclical time and reject its devaluation, but they too effectively shift positions without interrogating values, allowing linear time to maintain its dominance. As S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck shows in Part II, Simone de Beauvoir\u2019s existentialist account of time demonstrates the need to critique, rather than further entrench, linear temporality. In <\/span>The Second Sex,<\/span><\/i> Beauvoir analyzes the ways that women have been reduced to objects and confined to the reproductive natural realm, while men claim agency and creativity (S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck 29). Beauvoir is right that the supposed naturalness of passive objecthood works to occlude and strengthen sexist subordination, but her call to embrace futural ideals of transcendence\u2014to become equal to men by becoming like them\u2014 does not unsettle or reimagine the masculinist meanings of spirituality, agency, or creativity. Given the ways that these ideals attempt to reduce black and indigenous peoples to the natural realm as primitive, inferior, or uncivilized, any embrace of linear time is shot through with the white reproduction of racist and colonialist understandings of sexual difference.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Against the dualism of linear and cyclical time, S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck champions revolution. Her account of revolutionary time as a perpetual, critical, enlivening return to the past draws on Kristeva\u2019s notion of psychic revolt. In the 1990s, Kristeva develops an account of psychic revolt as resistance to the violent, deadening, and emptying effects of contemporary culture. Inspired by the etymology of the Latin verb <\/span>volvere<\/span><\/i>, to turn or return, and the French meaning of revolt as reversal, detour, cycle, upheaval, and recovery, psychic revolt is a psychical event that confronts, displaces, and assimilates an authority in the psychical economy of the individual. During a child\u2019s development, the rebellious incorporation of social authority is a condition for entering the symbolic order. In adulthood revolt is a regenerative return to the past that questions and renews symbolic ties. In general, revolt reflects Kristeva\u2019s commitment to the idea that the \u201ctransformation of man\u2019s relationship to meaning […] intrinsically concerns public life and consequently has profoundly political implications. In fact, it poses the question of another politics, that of permanent conflictuality\u201d (<\/span>Intimate Revolt<\/span><\/i>, 11).<\/span><\/p>\n Like Kristeva, S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck is wary of the revolutionary ambition to establish entirely new beginnings. In her view, this goal inevitably collapses into conservatism, since worshiping the future is \u201cbound to violently foreclose the future in [the] very aspiration for and focus on it\u201d (98). By contrast, psychic revolt returns to the past in a movement of continuous interrogation. As Kristeva describes it, \u201cit is by putting things into question that \u2018values\u2019 stop being frozen dividends and acquire a sense of mobility, polyvalence, and life\u201d (in S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck 99). The heterogeneity of semiotic and symbolic is especially crucial to the radical rather than reactionary character of revolt. If the embodied past were a stable essential ground, a \u201cmystical origin or arche,\u201d perpetually returning to it would \u201clead us to repeat a tradition that not only views the body as a locus for repetition and immanence but that subsequently associates women and other minorities with temporal stasis\u201d (90). During her early Anglophone reception, Kristeva was interpreted in precisely this way, most influentially in Judith Butler\u2019s widely-read text <\/span>Gender Trouble<\/span><\/i>. Misconstruing the semiotic as distinct from and in opposition to the symbolic, and missing the movement of revolt altogether, S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck notes Butler\u2019s lament that Kristeva \u201clocates the source of subversion to a site outside of culture itself, [appearing] to foreclose the possibility of subversion as an effective or realizable cultural practice\u201d (222).<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0In Part IV of <\/span>Revolutionary Time<\/span><\/i>, S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck undertakes a thorough correction to Butler\u2019s misinterpretation of the <\/span>chora<\/span><\/i>, emphasizing the ways that it is not outside of time or culture, nor is it passive or static. Kristeva\u2019s notion of the <\/span>chora<\/span><\/i> is inspired by the term\u2019s function in Plato\u2019s <\/span>Timaeus<\/span><\/i>, a dialogue that narrates the creation of the cosmos (203). As S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck emphasizes, the<\/span> Timaeus<\/span><\/i> does not describe a Judeo-Christian act of creation <\/span>ex nihilo<\/span><\/i>. Instead, when the demiurge forms the cosmos in his own image, it is a kind of ordering of differently ordered matter, matter that, in its movement is already temporal before this so-called creation of time. While Plato describes the <\/span>chora<\/span><\/i>\u2019s role as that of a receptacle, this does not require that it is passive or static. Instead, \u201cit is the locus of birth and new beginnings. Marked by motility and ever-changing in nature.\u201d For Plato, \u201c<\/span>chora<\/span><\/i> names the expanse, the opening implied in the act of creation or generation, of beings coming into being. In the thrust of origination, the origin is no longer self-contained; it overflows beyond itself\u201d (214). According to S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck, Kristeva\u2019s <\/span>chora <\/span><\/i>shares in these characteristics. A \u201ctime-space\u201d of primary drives and processes that supports the the development of language, her <\/span>chora<\/span><\/i> is not \u201cbrute matter waiting to be penetrated and impregnated\u201d by the Symbolic (214). Instead, it is a sign of the continuity between semiotic and symbolic, a kind of \u201ctime before time.\u201d As Maria Margaroni summarizes Kristeva\u2019s borrowing of Plato\u2019s <\/span>chora<\/span><\/i>, \u201cthe beginning itself is reinscribed as a process,\u201d a historical opening that would benefit Judith Butler\u2019s own account of sex\/gender, if only they were able to encounter it in Kristeva\u2019s texts (quoted in S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck 213-214).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As <\/span>Revolutionary Time <\/span><\/i>unfolds, it becomes clear that the heterogenous relationship of semiotic <\/span>chora <\/span><\/i>and symbolic order supports a critique of the distinction between sex and gender. As Tina Chanter observes, it is \u201cunclear where sex stops and culture starts since our very definition of sex is always already bound up in cultural assumptions\u2014just as the semiotic expression is always already bound up with the symbolic order\u201d (quoted in S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck 224). Despite constructivist tendencies to treat it as the blank slate upon which gender is written, sex is not a static, passive ahistorical receptacle. Bound up with normative scientific and popular ways of knowing and always overflowing and \u201cbeyond itself,\u201d sex is something that we should perpetually return to and question, uncovering its different and differing meanings. Chanter wonders if this revolt of sexual knowledge might challenge \u201creceived ideas about the difference between nature and culture that underlie mistaken notions about the ease with which gender can be siphoned off from sex\u201d (quoted in S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck 224). With S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck we might wonder, in the siphoning of gender from sex, what is repressed and repeated? How might dualist temporalities of sex\/gender inscribe and reinscribe sexist, racist, and colonialist values?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In <\/span>Revolutionary Time<\/span><\/i>, S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck plays with Luce Irigaray\u2019s notion of sexual difference to imagine what logics might lie beyond sex\/gender dualism. Like Kristeva, Irigaray is critical of the ways that dualist thinking constructs cyclical and linear modes according to the masculinist rationalities. However, Irigaray especially emphasizes the cultural sameness that results (sexual indifference or monosexuality). To challenge monosexual time and to dismantle patriarchal reason, she calls for us to cultivate sexual difference. Differentiation is not negation or derivation which would retain an orientation to masculinist logic. Instead, it is embodied and historical. It can\u2019t be mapped in any total and masterful sense; to do so would invite predictable becomings, repetitions of the same. As Penelope Deutscher describes it, \u201cthere is no guarantee that [whatever replaces sexual indifference or monosexuality] would fit perfectly over the vacant space represented by men and men. If it is too much like\u2014identifiably like\u2014what I think of as men and women, then something is wrong\u201d (<\/span>A Politics of Impossible Difference<\/span><\/i>, 121). For Deutscher and S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck, sexual difference can only be affirmed in the paradoxical mode of the <\/span>avenir<\/span><\/i>, overflowing itself, a \u201cbeginning that points to another beginning\u201d (4). Irigaray\u2019s account of sexual difference can also be described as challenge to become again what we have never been before, an open-ended becoming again and again that traverses the limits of possibility and impossibility. Reflecting on the revolutionary time and history, Irigaray\u2019s notion of sexual difference encourages us not to flatten singularity, to reduce or impoverish what it might mean to encounter a voice or event in its difference.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck is right that new possibilities of sex\/gender appear when we center issues of time and temporality. There is a need to forge other poetic and historical methods that critique rather than replicate \u201creceived ideas about the difference between nature and culture.\u201d There is also a need to stoke curiosity in this area, rather than approaching personal and collective histories in an instrumentalizing manner. Revolutionary time cuts across this challenge, capturing the intimate, living dynamism of experiencing history and making history. In a long period of compounding political crises, during a time when people wax nostalgic about normalcy and predictability that was itself violent and oppressive, we should heed S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck\u2019s call to return to our embodied pasts for the sake of open, uncertain futures. Instead of an uncertainty frayed by isolation, revolutionary time imagines uncertain futures as an opportunity for questioning, play, and loving connection.<\/span><\/p>\n Additional Works Cited<\/span><\/p>\n Deutscher, Penelope. <\/span>A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray<\/span><\/i> (New\u00a0<\/span>York: Cornell University Press, 2002).<\/span><\/p>\n Kristeva, Julia. <\/span>Intimate Revolt<\/span><\/i> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fanny S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck, Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019; 414 pages. ISBN: 9781438476995. Sid Hansen, California State University Northridge Fanny S\u00f6derb\u00e4ck begins her 2019 text Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray with a reflection on the \u201cme too\u201d movement against […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[77,73,295],"class_list":["post-13246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-feminism","tag-french-philosophy","tag-social-and-political-philosophy","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 11:37:42","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13247,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13246\/revisions\/13247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}