Kristevas teorier i en återvändsgränd

Abstract

Julia Kristeva has been ver)' populär in the Scandinavian countries among feminist literary critics because of her subverting the essentialist definitions of woman by talking about 'the feminine', not as related to sex but as a linguistically and psychoanalytically founded term. But what is she actually saying about woman as a temporal and social being, the kind of being feminists are dealing with? And where in her theories floes the woman author fit in? In spite of woman's closeness to the semiotic and revolutionary aspects of language, due to her marginalized position in the phallocentric structure, she suffers from great difflculties, even psychically threatening ones according to Kristeva, when exploring this kind of language in her writing. The first article of some length which Kristeva has written about a female author cleai ly discloses an ambivalent stance: when discussing Duras she finds that Duras' language is not able to transcend her depressive melancholia in the way Dostoievski's is. On the whole, niale authors are able to use the semiotic aspects of language and tum it into an artistic ttiumph whereas women authors, like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and Maria Tsvetaeva, grapple with their mothers and thence are threatened by either madness or suicide. This is in accordance with Kristeva's view of the mother/- daughter-relationship where separation is all but impossible, whereas the little boy is taught to look upon himself as a distinct and separate being. According to Kristeva, woman is able to express herself mainly through her body, especially through her pregnancies, but this only leaves her where she was positioned long ago, as the sacred object of procreation. Kristeva is critical to feminism in many respects and therefore introduces an alternative of her own, namely tlie so called 'third generation' of feminism. As a solution to what she terms 'the war of the sexes' and the implacable difference that separates them. Kristeva proposes a deconstruction of the subject, down to its very nucleus, but in doing so removes ever\' trace of a politically and socially anchored feminism. The problem also is that the acomplishments of the former generations of feminism vanish. And what is the starting point of feminism once we have been told that the sexual differences belong to metaphysics, as Kristeva claims? After having left feminism with this ultimate deconstruction, there is hardly any possibilitiy of construction: the subversion of Kristeva's has been too thoroughgoing.