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At the beginning of £ thieve de la. difference sexuelle, Irigaray writes:

For the work of sexual difference to take place, a revolution in thought and ethics is needed. We must re-interpret the whole relationship between the subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic, the microcosmic and the macrocosmic...In order to live and think through this difference, w e must reconsider the whole question of space and time.'1 *

Irigaray links the reconsideration of these categories with the possibility of thinking through sexual difference in a more productive way. Her sceptical strategy is intended to arouse doubt as to the certainties of apparently foundational structures by questioning their neutrality, but simultaneously to evoke new potentials in the rupturing of such categories. In this chapter I will consider the attempts made by Kristeva and Irigaray to unsettle these relations in such a way that the association of the feminine with negativity is itself put into question, in order to prevent it being cancelled out. To refuse the cancellation of such a force is, for Kristeva and Irigaray, to refuse the tmowKlisation or incorporation of the feminine as a disruptive, but ultimately directionless force. What is required is a re-thinking of space and time, a nd of the body, such that other possibilities might emerge.

In the previous chapter we saw how the characterisation of the feminine as other is metaphorically aligned with heteronomy and negativity, an alignment which engenders the disruption of subjectivity from 'within'. However, to indicate that this force is not merely nihilistic, it will be necessary to consider how Kristeva and Irigaray link such a notion with the

future of sexual difference and see this rupture as ethical. The positioning of the feminine/matemal as the 'eternal irony of the community' expresses the ambivalent position that women occupy, simultaneously essential and threatening to the formulation of ethical precepts.

In the final parts of this chapter 1 will discuss the way that Kristeva and Irigaray examine notions of therapy, borrowed from the psychoanalytic session, to explore the ethics of sexual difference. Such a notion of therapy is intended to open up more fruitful symbolic relations, to generate 'an ethics of love and of the passions'^), without reproducing either the dangers of essential difference or the obliteration of difference in a more general horizon. Both Kristeva and Irigaray locate an ethics of the passions in the context of an excessive experiential dimension.

Recent readings of Kristeva^) suggest significant difficulties with her theorisation of maternity and the feminine. These difficulties concern firstly, her apparent c o m i t m e n t to a dissolution of metaphysical identities, the collapse of 'male' and 'female' as homogeneous entities into the process of signification, a freeing of essentialism, which echoes Lacan's pronouncement that 'Woman does not exist' ^ (in the sense of the cumbersome ideal existence which, in applying to the whole sex, fits no woman in particular). Despite the fact that some post-modern theoreticians see this as a liberating gesture, the endless dance of positionalities in a future not dominated by any particular sexual mark, it has a disturbing side. This is the loss of the specificity that feminist theory has sought

for the establishing of political identity, into a non-specific and therefore neutralised space of sexual in-difference.

In Edith Wyschogrod's book Saints and Post-modernism, she echoes this concern of the loss of identificatory markings in ethical terms. She is critical of what she identifies as a strand of the 'metaphysics of nihil' in post-modern thinking. She is seeking a means of presenting a possibility of ethics in the face of, as it were, the apocalyptic tones of post-modernism, a possibility which does not reinstate categories shown to b e problematic, but equally does not cede to the apparently 'pandemic character of d e s i r e ' . T h i s is a legitimate concern, since it seems that the notion of the unconscious initiates an unleashing of forces which are resistant to the legislative jurisidiction of the social self as 'there can b e no vantage point other than desire itself for acquiring purchase against desire'.(7) The anonymity produced in this anti-foundationalist move is antithetical to the recognition of difference and the opening of a radical kind of ethicality. However, it is not clear that Kristeva is to be so clearly conscripted into thinkers with 'pernicious consequences for ethical existence' as Wyschogrod seems to think. Wyschogrod's accusation is formulated thus:

By adhering to the postmodern 'canons' of limitless desire and the indistinguishability of moral from literary discourse, Kristeva can neither endorse nor excoriate the racist work of Celine, to which she appeals on other grounds. (8)

For Wyschogrod, this leads to 'moral ambiguity', occasioned when the commitment to radical difference falters. In passages such as the

following, it might seem that Kristeva is suggesting a loss of discrimination, and so a loss of ethical judgement and also of sexual difference: 'No reference point in the unconscious...No present, no past, no future. No true or false either. It displaces, condenses, distributes'.

But Wyschogrod, in basing her reading of Kristeva upon one text alone (Powers of Horror) fails to capture the subtleties of her later texts (eg. Tales of Love and In the beginning was Love; psychoanalysis and faith), which are, ironically enough, precisely focussed on radical readings of 'saintliness'; the conjunction of ecstasy and religious ethicality. The misreading of Kristeva is based on seeing her notion of the abject^®) as a

'black mysticism', an apocalyptic flushing out of the sacred into the despair of a secularised amoralistic world, leaving it bereft of any means of discriminating or judging. Literature seems to become the only sanctuary in this nightmare vision, and then to abort its own santity, since the flow of signification provides no place to hide. Hence for Wyschogrod, Kristeva becomes a thinker of not only subjective annihilation but also the attempted denial of the abject, as it is theorised in conjunction with the sacred, and also with the figure of the mother (this view of Kristeva is also echoed in Mark C. Taylor's book Altarity)* My concern is not merely to defend Kristeva, but to expand upon her complex theorisation of otherness to indicate how, in fact, she is a thinker who is precisely articulating the ethical and (post-)theological preoccupations of Wyschogrod and Taylor. In the passage itnnediately following the one quoted above, Kristeva writes:

...what the father doesn't say about the unconscious, what sign and time repress in their impulses, appears as their truth (if there is no absolute, what is tenth, if not the unspoken of the spoken?) and this truth can be imagined only as a woman. A curious truth: outside time, with neither past nor future, neither true nor false; buried underground, it neither postulates nor judges. It refuses, displaces, breaks the symbolic order before it can re-establish itself.

This 'curious' version of truth corresponds to Wyschogrod's own notion of post-modern ethics, the anchorage she proposes to rescue from the infinite regress of 'limitless desire'. Kristeva suggests three ways in which this curious truth may be understood: 'Jouissance, pregnancy, and marginal speech: the means by which this 'truth', cloaked and hidden by the symbolic order and its companion, time, functions through w o m e n .'(*3) Here Kristeva is linking 'a vigilance, call it e t h i c a l ' , w i t h the figuration of the feminine and the maternal as 'other'. It is a critical and disruptive kind of ethicality, linked to a capacity to resist the fixation of subjectivity and to remain critical, but also seeking a means to express such 'otherness'.

...to refuse all roles, in order, on the contrary, to surmon this timeless 'truth' - formless, neither true nor false, echo of our jouissance, of our madness, of our pregnancies - into the order of speech and social symbolism. But how? By listening; by recognising the unspoken in speech; by calling attention at all times to whatever remains unsatisfied, repressed, new, eccentric, incomprehensible, disturbing the status quo.^1-*'

Kristeva's characterisation of this 'other' truth is heterogeneous, bodily and questioning of the status quo. It rescues an attentive and listening vigilance from the demand for an ethics of the community as consensus, but also from the uncontrollable circulation of polysemy and desire.

Wyschogrod's exposition of heterogeneous alterity which allows it to be called ethical, in contrast with the unruly and apparently amoral forces of desire that she wishes to condemn? This is a crucial question as it lies at the heart of the distinction between the post-modern theorists of difference who are concerned to think difference in a productive and positive way, and those who maintain a critical or sceptical perspective. We might also question what is at stake in Wyschogrod's wish to keep separate the categories of moral and literary discourse, if this is one of the fundamental dualisms that post-modernist writers have already questioned, a questioning which she has already subscribed to.

Despite Kristeva's characterisation of the subject as 'an open system', she is in no way committed to the denial of sexual difference or the 'erasure' of the subject. Her project is an unsettling of the vicious dichotomies w hich sustain violence; which, in Lacanian terms, tear us from bliss and fatally foreclose on the possibility of reconcil iation by fundamentally splitting us in language, creating the space of desire which is lack. The division which places women symbolically on the wrong side of the divide means the totalising aspect of Lacan's theory demands sacrifice and suppression of difference. Kristeva's work is seeking to allow for the possibility of pleasure and the opportunity for dialogue.

...another relationship arises out of sexual difference and the impossible element it infers on both sides...A painful laboratory that entails mistakes, failures, victims. But if you want to talk.about it... you find yourself once again face to face, two by two...' '

The configuration of a notion of temporality as chronological progression and division apparently allows and guarantees conmunicability and the positioning of a subject in language. It also appears to present, in respect of the above, the possibility of ethicality, if ethics is seen to reside in a network of pre-distinguished social/intersubjective relations. The notion of externality which is implied in this conception of ethics is, however, what is being opened to question, since it seems to render homogeneous not only those subjects who are under discussion as moral agents, but also relations between them, and to imply a presentation of the time of the moment as conmunicable, with an implicit telos to this time's unfolding. As Kristeva and Irigaray suggest, the occlusion of difference in these contexts amounts to a 'forgetting' of sexual difference as well. The presentation of ethics in this external mode rests upon certain assumptions about comnunicability, socialisation and presentation which, while seeming to open emancipatory possibilities (since they appeal to a conmon sense of shared experience and the possibility of dialogue) in fact reinscribe dogmatic principles even as they seek to break from them.

In her essay 'Women's t i m e ' , ^ ^ Kristeva indicates a positioning of women in respect to a different or alternative conception of time - cyclical time (repetition) and/or monunental time (eternal). This positioning is intended to pinpoint a symbolic equation not a literal one, but one which is meant to act as a form of critique of the above 'external' notion of time. But such a positioning of women suggests an identity i) inessential to the progression of time as universal and teleological, and so to the formulation of ethical agendas, and ii) essentialised, in the figure of the maternal woman, given an ideal, whole identity, but as such seen as a

symbolic object and frozen in this role. What this sugests is that if space a n d time are already conceptually outlined as neutral (even though this neutrality is elided with the social and psychical significations of masculinity), there can be no such thing as 'women's time', except within a hypothetical space outlined by feminist speculations. The implications of this hypothetical space will be developed in later chapters.

Kristeva's identification of these 'alternative' modes of time is b o m of a quite specific analysis of cultural formations and so does not echo a victimology of women - it does n ot deny that women can and d o accrue power i n the symbolic realm, but that a deeper level of exclusion and censorship operate to recuperate any s u c h gains. It is the models of exclusion which need to be analysed a n d identified to negotiate such recuperations. The establishment of s u c h models is an historical process, an accretion of meanings which can be subject (and subjected to) immanent disruptions of their determinations.

Kristeva articulates this question for women: 'What can be our place in the symbolic contract?' Or, to put it another way, 'How can we reveal our place, first as it is bequeathed to us by tradition and then as we want to transform i t ?'^®^

She a nalyses the establishment of the social contract as a violence; demanding the sacrifice of women. In this she shares the perspective of Irigaray who also characterises the present economy as a sacrificial one; w h a t is sacrificed is a certain potential for creativity metaphorically expressed in the relations between mothers and

daughters. (^0) T h e sacrificial order, which has hitherto driven women to be 'nostalgic, ecstatic or mad', is now the subject o f feminist analysis.

The new generation of women is showing its major social concern has become the socio-symbolic contract as a sacrificial contract.. .women of today are affirming... that they ..are forced to experience this sacrificial contract against their will*'21 ’

Kristeva argues for the necessity of 'active research' on the part of women which is 'hesitant b u t undoubtedly dissident' to 'break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions'.(22) T h e nature of this 'specific discourse' will be examined shortly.

Kristeva makes explicit connections between the 'feminine' conceptions of time she outlines in contrast to 'the time of linear history', and 'mystical' notions o f time in other civilisations a nd experiences, characterised as o t h e r to Western traditions. (^3) In this respect feminine time is much more convergent upon a kind of 'space' than an order of linear clock time. This 'other' time is

... the problematic of space, which innumerable religions of matriarchal (re)appearance attribute to woman', and which Plato...designated by the aporia of the chora, matrix space, nourishing, unameable,.anterior to the One, to God, a nd consequently defying metaphysics.

This alternative n otion of space/time, which corresponds to an encounter with otherness, is Kristeva's attempt to reconceptualise women's relation to the social contract in other than a sacrificial way. She argues that in order to understand such a possibility it is necessary to examine religious

discourses, not only because, as in poetic discourse, there is a moment of excess and transgressive jouissance, nor even that as part of her analysis she is impelled towards those ' mythico-religious threads that have woven our lov e s '^ 5 ) £n order to dissect the Judaeo-Christian tradition as a patriarchal network of power. I think it is primarily a search for a counter-balancing discourse to sacrifice which will herald new and less violent relations which propels h e r to look again at the processes of idealisation and the means of codifying ethical possibilities. 'We thereby find ourselves in face of a religion that is no longer essentially premised on sacrifice'.(26)

Although Kristeva expresses fears that the development of a 'feminist variant' of such languages may be exposed to the same risks of 'violence' and 'terrorism' as its preceding (masculine) forms, as well as the ossification of an Ideal in the persona of a kind of Woman goddess, she also sees it as presenting a r e a l challenge to the ordering of social relations. This is because it c ould occasion not only an enrichment of the relations of sexual difference, but also a 'space' which could be other enough to allow difference to b e creative in generating 'aesthetic practices'. Such enriched understanding and creative practices could also stave off increasing tendencies towards uniformity and the circulation of information in increasingly technological forms. Kristeva sees the radical possibilities she outlines as a means to combat sexism as well as combatting the anthropocentric tendency which sees sexual difference as a problematic of materialism alone. If sexual difference denies such a possibility it is relocated in the impasse of the same, and will reduplicate the role of 'scapegoat victim as foundress of a society and a counter-society'(22) which is g i v e n to women. Kristeva writes:

The fact that (this possibility) might quickly become another form of spiritualism turning its back on social problems, o r else a form of repression ready to support all status quos, should not hide the radicalness of the process. This process could b e sunmarised as an intériorisation of the founding separation of the socio-symbolic contract, as an introduction of its cutting edge into the very interior of evejr^g^dentity whether subjective, sexual, ideological or so

Kristeva is gesturing here towards an understanding the formation of the individual in respect of a notion which exceeds such a process and yet is itself in constant process. In proposing an understanding of the individual which she has attempted to free from the repressive stranglehold of totalising thinking, (which has often taken extreme measures to prevent w hat it sees as the anarchy of relativism), a return to the anomic individual is not necessarily implied. Instead, the singularity of