Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray

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.

Fanny Söderbäck is Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She is the coeditor (with Henriette Gunkel and Chrysanthi Nigianni) of Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice and the editor of Feminist Readings of Antigone, also published by SUNY Press.