Antigone in Front of the Dead Polynices by Nikiforos Lytras, National Gallery, Athens, Greece (1865)
Woman is the guardian of the blood. But as both she and it have had to use their substance to nourish the universal consciousness self, it is in the form of bloodless shadows-of unconscious fantasies-that they maintain an underground subsistence. Powerless on earth, she remains the very ground in which manifest mind secretly sets its roots and draws its strength. And self-certainty-in masculinity, in community, in government- owes the truth of its word and of the oath that binds men together to that substance common to all, repressed, unconscious and dumb, washed in the waters of oblivion. This enables us to understand why femininity consists essentially in laying the dead man back in the womb of the earth, and giving him eternal life. For the bloodless one is the mediation that she knows in her b eing, whereby a being-there that has given up being as a self here passes from something living and singular and deeply buried to essence at its most general. Woman can, therefore, by remembering this intermediary moment, preserve at least the soul of man and o f community from being lost and forgotten. She ensures the Erinnerung of the consciousness of self by forgetting herself.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman.
Luce Irigaray, engaging with Hegel, questions his interpretation of Antigone to demonstrate how the community establishes itself through exclusion of the feminine.[1] She critiques how, for Hegel, man is active, outward, and rational, and woman is passive unity tied to blood, conception, and the cyclical body. As Whitford notes, in Hegel we encounter the process of naturalization: “Women, symbolically, remain part of the in-itself (en-soi); only men are allowed to be for-themselves (pour-soi). In Hegelian terms, women belong to the plant world – they are vegetates; only men have an animal life.”[2]
Woman thus embodies divine law (kinship, burial, and continuity of life) while man enacts human law (abstraction, and universality). Antigone’s revolt dramatizes this divide, as her fidelity to divine law and the dead turns into self-burial, sealing female desire in a crypt: “She is merely the passage that serves to transform the inessential whims of a still sensible and material nature into universal will.”[3] The State, embodied by Creon, survives as a bloodless sovereignty built on the repression of the maternal and the sensible. Woman becomes the unconscious ground of the community as the nourishing but forgotten substrate that sustains masculine memory (Erinnerung): “She ensures the Erinnerung of the consciousness of self by forgetting herself.”[4] Irigaray exposes the melancholia of this dialectic: this is a culture that achieves universality only by draining the living blood of its feminine source.
Woman has no gaze, no discourse for her specific specularization that would allow her to identify with herself (as same) -to return into the self- or break free of the natural specular process that now holds her-to get out of the self. Hence, woman dies not take an active part in the development of history, for she is never anything but the still undifferentiated opaqueness of sensible matter, the store (of) substance for the sublation of self, or being as what is, or what he is (or was), here and now.[5]
In Irigaray’s rereading, the shift from the matrilineal to the patriarchal order demands the daughter’s severance from her maternal bonds. Hegel acknowledges that the woman who remains faithful to the “red blood” of the mother, symbolizing kinship and female genealogy, must be excluded from the polis. This exclusion, embodied by Antigone, is not through death but through confinement and deprivation. She is denied light, air, love, and posterity. For Irigaray, this marks the founding gesture of patriarchy: the daughter’s forced betrayal of the maternal tie as the price for entry into the social and symbolic order.
As Whitford notes, Irigaray reads Hegel’s treatment of Antigone as revealing both his awareness and repression of woman’s role in sustaining the community.[7] Hegel imagines the brother-sister bond as a moment of reciprocal recognition (neither hierarchical nor sexual) but Irigaray exposes this as a fantasy meant to ease the guilt of women’s exclusion from the polis. But, the relation is not reciprocal: Antigone acts as the “living mirror” for her brother’s deeds and becomes guardian of the blood that nourishes society, but no one recognizes her act. Her devotion and burial of the dead mark the feminine as the hidden foundation of ethical life, confined to the family and sacrificed for the universality of the State. For Irigaray, Hegel’s dream of balance masks the fact that the very order of law and reason depends on the silencing and burial of the feminine.
[1] Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 214.
[2] Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991), 95.
In Mind’s World, Alexander Schlutz demonstrates how imagination evolves from a vague mediator in ancient thinking to a doubtful but necessary function in modern knowledge to a space of metaphysical opening and political risk. Imagination can be viewed as a threshold between sense and thought, spontaneity and receptivity, law and freedom. As such, it poses a threat to the order of systems, the authority of reason, and the coherency of the subject.
From the ancient idea of phantasia to Kant’s schematism and the transcendental subject, imagination never really fits into the categories reason ascribes to it. It is first deemed an activity between sense and thought, later becoming limited with the rise of modern subjectivity, and reappearing as a foundational and destabilizing force in metaphysics. Rather than being a passive mirror, it appears as a battleground where the definitions and demarcations of subject, reason, and freedom are at stake.
In ancient Greece, “phantasia” was not the same as the modern idea of imagination. Instead of being a creative force, it served as a bridge between sensation and thought. Plato viewed phantasia with suspicion; it belonged to the world of shadows and illusion and needed rational control for the subject to reach true knowledge. On the other hand, for Aristotle, phantasia was an important activity; it was neither purely sensory nor rational. It helped create the internal images (phantasmata) necessary for thought, yet it remained subordinate to reason.
It is in rhetorical traditions and later Stoic thought that phantasia starts to look more like the current understanding of imagination. Orators used it to create vivid images in their audience’s minds. Artists like Phidias were thought to access divine forms through phantasia, but this was still rooted in a Platonic hierarchy where philosophy ruled and imagination was its subordinate.
Descartes’ philosophy, representing the rise of the modern subject, largely depends on repressing imagination. He viewed imagination, linked to the senses, with doubt; as a realm of illusion, not knowledge. For Descartes, the thinking self must separate from everything imagined in order to find certainty. Yet, this separation isn’t straightforward. Descartes’ early writings and dream narratives show his deep interest in inspiration, intuition, and imaginative vision. He introduces his scientific methods through a “fable”, and his radical doubt relies on imagination’s ability to create and pretend. Thus, while the cogito excludes imagination, it also depends on it. This contradiction creates a space, a “return of the repressed”, where imagination haunts the very certainty it is supposed to challenge.
Kant attempts to resolve this tension by placing imagination within a transcendental framework. Imagination becomes the faculty that connects intuitions from the senses and concepts from understanding. Without it, cognition cannot happen. Thus, it is essential, but also risky. Kant raises and lowers imagination. In his Critique of Pure Reason, imagination is central to cognition, yet it must be controlled by reason and understanding. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, the dangers of imagination become much clearer: it is connected to fantasy, madness, and political chaos. The “Phantast” is not just a madman; he poses a threat to rational discourse and social order. Kant recoils from not just insanity but revolution and unchecked desire.
However, for all his efforts to constrain imagination, Kant’s system depends on it. His version of the cogito hinges on the synthetic powers of imagination, even if it fails to acknowledge them completely. For Kant, freedom exists because of the gap that imagination creates: the subject must choose to follow the moral law without certainty.
Heidegger sees this gap and does not shy away. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, he argues that Kant nearly recognized imagination’s foundational role but held back. For Heidegger, imagination is more than a thinking tool; it is the essence of being, where human finitude meets the question of Being. He redefines Kant’s transcendental faculties as part of the structure of being: imagination unites sensibility and understanding, opening up the horizon of Being. For Heidegger, imagination is no longer dangerous because it might be chaotic. It poses a risk because it reveals the truth of human existence. However, Schlutz warns that Heidegger may fall into the same trap he critiques Kant for: not fully addressing the radical potential of imagination.
Slavoj Žižek takes up that radical potential. He rejects both Kant’s repression and Heidegger’s metaphysical revival. For Žižek, imagination is not mainly a unifying force; it ruptures the status quo. It enables us to break reality apart and challenge the continuity of the symbolic order, allowing us to consider the impossible. This dives into the heart of subjectivity as radical and sometimes violent freedom. Žižek’s critique shows how both Kant and Heidegger tried to tame imagination either through moral law or metaphysical support. But for Žižek, imagination exposes the split within the subject and its inherent conflict. This isn’t a flaw in philosophy; it rather defines freedom itself.
Engaging with imagination is not about escaping philosophy. Instead, it reveals its limits and possibilities, and leads us to envision radical alternatives.
Alexander Schlutz, Mind’s World: Imagination and Subjectivity from Descartes to Romanticism (University of Washington Press, 2009)
“There is no self-understanding which is not mediated by signs, symbols and texts; in the last resort understanding coincides with the interpretation given to these mediating terms.”
What does it mean to understand oneself in a world saturated by symbols, stories, and signs? For Ricoeur, self-understanding is never a direct reflection of a pure inner core. It is always mediated and always interpreted. We don’t access meaning by staring inward but by taking a hermeneutical detour through world –culture, history, and language. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology begins with a decisive break from the Cartesian cogito, as he replaces the transparent self with a subject whose identity unfolds through symbols, texts, and narratives. Meaning is never immediately given but, instead, always arrived at indirectly through interpretation.
Suspicion and Interpretation
Drawing on phenomenology and existentialism, Ricoeur develops a “hermeneutics of suspicion”, a term he uses to categorize thinkers such as Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. Each, in their own way, shows how surface meanings hide deeper structures: desire, ideology, and repression. Ricoeur agrees that interpretation must sometimes be critical and dig beneath dominant narratives to expose distortion. But unlike reductionist critiques, he underlines his belief that interpretation can also be reconstructive. “There is no master discourse that settles our quest for univocal meaning once and for all,” he writes. This dialectic between suspicion and retrieval runs throughout Ricoeur’s work. It allows him to address not just what meaning hides but also how meaning is created, told, and lived.
Narrative, Time, and the Self
In his later works, such as Time and Narrative and The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur turns to language, not as a static system of signs but as a dynamic, creative process. The concept of the narrative function is central to this, which he describes as the capacity of storytelling to structure and clarify human experience in time.
All narratives, historical, fictional, poetic, share a temporal structure. What unfolds in time can be told in time. This reciprocity between temporality and narrativity enables us to make sense of our lives and actions.
At the heart of storytelling is the plot, a term Ricoeur borrows and expands from Aristotle. Plot, or muthos, is not just a sequence of events, it is the act of emplotment, the structuring process that organizes disparate happenings into a meaningful whole. A plot doesn’t just recount events; it makes them intelligible by weaving together actions, goals, consequences, and circumstances. “Nothing is an event unless it contributes to the progress of a story,” he claims.
This is the reason why history cannot sever itself from narrative. While historians refer to actual events and novelists invent them, both are narrating from the distance of retrospection. Both face the problem of time, and both rely on plot to create intelligibility. The difference lies in reference, not structure.
The Work of Interpretation
Ricoeur’s hermeneutics seeks to reconcile two often opposing tendencies: the romantic notion of empathy (understanding the author’s intention) and the structuralist concept of the autonomous text (analyzing signs and codes). He argues instead for a dialectic of understanding and explanation. To interpret a text is first to understand –to make sense of its internal logic, and its structuring principles. Then comes explanation, a second-order operation that uncovers the semantic, cultural, and historical codes that shape the text’s meaning. This movement ends with a return to understanding in an enriched way. For Ricoeur, the movement between understanding and explanation is necessary. Interpretation is never just feeling nor formula. It is a dynamic interaction between the reader, text, and world.
Metaphor and Narrative as Semantic Innovation
Ricoeur’s work on metaphor reveals another layer of his hermeneutics. Metaphor, like narrative, is a mode of semantic innovation—it creates new meaning by disrupting literal language and forcing us to reimagine what is being said. A metaphor is not just decorative; it is a way of seeing-as. It opens a new dimension of reference, one that challenges and transforms our conceptual frameworks.
This creative dimension is shared with narrative. Just as metaphor redescribes the world by bringing remote terms into contact, narrative fiction reshapes the structures of action and time, offering not just a mirror to life but a refiguration of it. Ricoeur calls this the transfiguration of reality—where fiction discloses new ways of inhabiting the world.
Mediations: From Symbols to Texts
Understanding, for Ricoeur, is always mediated—by signs, by symbols, and most of all by texts. He distinguishes three key stages:
Signs: All experience is articulated in language.
Symbols: Culturally embedded meanings, often with double or multiple interpretations.
Texts: Discourse that detaches from its origin and becomes an autonomous world.
Texts, especially written ones, are where hermeneutics reaches its most intense form. Unlike face-to-face speech, texts are distanced from their original contexts. Yet this distance is productive. It opens up the possibility of self-transformation through reading. We come to understand ourselves not through introspection but through engagement with texts that project worlds we might inhabit.
The Narrative Self
Ricoeur’s lifelong philosophical project culminates in his concept of narrative identity. The self is not a fixed essence but a story constantly being told, revised, and retold. We are what we make of our pasts, our choices, our futures—through the act of narrative. This identity is fragile, always mediated, and always open to reinterpretation.
Philosophy, for Ricoeur, is a long detour. It doesn’t promise clarity through direct access but instead offers a mediated path—through culture, symbol, and text—toward a deeper understanding of who we are. It is in this detour, and not despite it, that philosophy becomes most meaningful.
“Every creation is singular, and the concept as a specifically philosophical creation is always a singularity. The first principle of philosophy is that Universals explain nothing but must themselves be explained.”
According to Deleuze and Guattari, the question “What is philosophy?” is not one to ask meaningfully at the beginning of one’s intellectual journey. It is a question for old age. For a moment of clarity between life and death, when everything comes together, albeit briefly. When younger, one may dominate, analyze, and theorize the question. But it is only later that the question can finally grab hold of one.
For Deleuze and Guattari, now is that moment. And their answer remains constant: philosophy is the art of creating concepts. But this answer is not abstract or general. To say what philosophy is requires one to pose the question among friends, in the face of enemies, within particular historical and existential circumstances. It is not merely a definition but an act, an occasion, a creation.
An evocative idea of Deleuze and Guattari is that philosophy emerges with the figure of the friend. Where other cultures had sages, the Greeks invented the philosopher, not the wise man, but the lover of wisdom, the friend of wisdom. The friend here is not an empirical person but a conceptual persona, a condition of thought itself. This friendship is not passive affection. It is an active engagement –a challenge, rivalry, dialectical tension. The friend in philosophy becomes a “claimant,” even a “rival”, especially in the agonistic setting of the Greek polis. Here, the philosopher enters a political and intellectual contest, creating concepts as claims to truth that must withstand dispute.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the true work of philosophy is the creation of concepts. Not merely reflecting and/or conveying them but instead inventing them. Concepts do not present themselves readily as pre-formed kernels of truth. They are to be crafted, often with pain, often with strange or poetic language, and with a signature. Philosophy is not contemplation, which belongs to the objects themselves. It is not reflection, which is something anyone can do without philosophy. And it is not communication that trades in opinion, not creation. Philosophy creates the concepts of these actions, but is not reducible to them.
Concepts are not eternal essences. They are singular, contingent, and historical; yet, they are not arbitrary. They carry a kind of necessity –one that belongs to their creator. As such, philosophy is always personal: “You will know nothing through concepts unless you have first created them.” Philosophers leave a trail of conceptual singularities: Aristotle’s substance, Descartes’ cogito, Kant’s condition, Bergson’s durée. But these are not static monuments; they live, mutate, and demand new articulations across time and space.
Philosophy has always faced rivals: first the sophist, then the human sciences, and today, marketing, advertising, and tech design. These new “concepts” claim creativity without thought. Concepts are emptied of their philosophical rigor and repackaged as brands. In this context, philosophy must resist becoming promotional. It must hold onto its task, not to sell, reflect, or opine, but to create. Even if others borrow the term “concept”, only philosophy remains committed to its true labor, which is to think anew.
Deleuze and Guattari are critical of post-Kantian thought’s encyclopedic engagements and ambitions and the banal professionalization of philosophy today. Instead, they call for a pedagogy of the concept –a way of training the mind in the art of creating. This means confronting the conditions under which concepts are born: their historical and existential urgency, the conceptual personae (like the friend, the rival, the lover) that animate them, and the necessity of their form and style. The concept is not given; it is to be created. And the philosopher is not a teacher of truths, but a maker of meanings.
What Is Philosophy?, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, Columbia University Press, 1996
“A philosophical reading of Capital is quite the opposite of an innocent reading. It is a guilty reading, but not one that absolves its crime on confessing it. On the contrary, it takes the responsibility for its crime as a ‘justified crime’ and defends it by proving its necessity.”
Louis Althusser, Reading Capital
When Louis Althusser famously set out to read Capital, he didn’t do so as an economist, historian, or even as a committed Marxist hoping to decode the text’s revolutionary potential. He read it as a philosopher. And for him, that distinction made all the difference. His close, methodical re-reading of Marx’s Capital -line by line, in both French and German- was not a neutral scholarly exercise. He knew there was no such thing as an “innocent” reading. All reading is already an interpretation. His own, he freely admits, is a guilty one. Guilty, but necessary.
As a philosopher, Althusser brought a particular kind of questioning to Capital: What is its object? What is the nature of its relationship to that object? And perhaps most importantly, what kind of discourse makes this relationship possible? What distinguishes Capital (in both its object and its language) from classical political economy, or even from the early philosophical writings of the Young Marx?
These questions are not just academic nitpicking. They are, in Althusser’s view, epistemological. That is, they concern how Capital produces knowledge, and whether that knowledge represents a genuine rupture—a founding moment for a new science of history and society.
To ask these questions, Althusser argues, is to break with the illusion that a text transparently communicates its meaning. And here, his reading begins to echo the structuralist psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Like Lacan, Althusser is interested not in what a subject (or a text) says, but in what it cannot say: what it represses, omits, or fails to articulate, even as it inadvertently reveals those absences. In Lacanian terms, the unconscious is structured like a language. And for Althusser, so too are texts and ideologies. What matters, then, is not just what a text says, but how its silences structure what is said—and what those silences reveal about the limits of its conceptual apparatus.
Althusser takes seriously Lacan’s lesson that absence is not simply a void or lack outside a structure; it is a structural effect within it. In fact, Althusser’s “symptomatic reading” owes a clear debt to Lacan’s notion of the symptom. This formation marks a return of the repressed, a trace of what cannot be fully integrated into the symbolic order. In the same way, Althusser reads classical political economy for its symptoms: those places where the text stumbles, contradicts itself, or substitutes one term for another without realizing the shift.
For example, classical economists talked about the “value of labor.” On the surface, their answer made sense: the value of labor equals the value of the subsistence goods necessary to maintain the laborer. But something is off. “Labor” and “laborer” are not interchangeable. And it is not the laborer who is bought in the wage relation, but their labor. Marx notices this slippage—not by imposing something from the outside, but by reading the text against itself. He sees that what’s missing is not simply absent, but structured into the very answer that classical economists gave. The concept of labor power (crucial to Marx’s theory of exploitation) was already haunting the classical discourse, present in its absences.
This is what Althusser calls a symptomatic reading. It doesn’t just note what’s there and what’s not. It reads the relationship between the visible and the invisible, and how what is unseen actually structures what is seen. In Lacanian terms, this is the logic of the extimate –what is both external and intimate, both inside and outside the field of vision.
Althusser insists that Marx’s greatness lies not in “seeing what Smith could not see,” as if he were simply a more astute observer. That would be to fall back into the old myth of knowledge as “clear sight”—a mirror reflection of reality. Instead, Marx occupied a different terrain—he worked within a different problematic, a different structure of thought. That’s why he could read classical economics symptomatically—because he had already broken with its assumptions, even if they were still structuring the discourse he read.
This structural understanding of visibility and blindness is deeply Lacanian. For Lacan, what we do not see is not simply what lies outside our field of vision. It is what is foreclosed within it. The real is not what is merely outside the symbolic; it is what returns as a rupture, a symptom, a trauma. Althusser applies a similar logic to theoretical texts: the most significant truths lie not in what they state, but in what they cannot state. Their ideological blind spots are internal to their structure.
And this is why, for Althusser, reading Capital is not just an academic task; it is a philosophical and political one. It is about understanding how knowledge is produced, how ideology functions, and how science emerges not through continuity but through rupture. Capital is not merely the endpoint of a linear intellectual development from the Young Marx. It is a break, a dislocation, a theoretical revolution.
This revolution also requires a new practice of reading. Just as Freud made us suspicious of speech and dreams, and Lacan taught us to distrust the clarity of language, Marx makes us suspicious of reading itself. Althusser says we had to “track down the religious myth of reading to its lair.” That is, we had to abandon the comforting belief that the truth of history, society, or the economy lies on the surface, just waiting to be deciphered. The text of history is not one in which a divine Logos speaks. Rather, it is made up of silences, gaps, and illegibilities: “the effects of a structure of structures.”
To read Capital philosophically, then, is to break with the idea that language and meaning are transparent. It is to understand that knowledge is produced in specific historical and ideological conditions. It is to approach the visible always through the logic of the invisible. And it is to see that sometimes, the most meaningful thing a text can tell us is what it does not say, but what it cannot help but reveal.
Bibliography
Louis Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” Reading Capital, New Left Books, 1970.
In his exploration of Hegelian philosophy, Alexandre Kojève confronts the complex relationship between Time, Eternity, and the Concept. He begins with the fundamental definition of truth: it must be universally and necessarily valid, eternal, or non-temporal. Yet paradoxically, truth is encountered in time, within the world. This paradox forces Kojève to confront the essential philosophical problem of the relation between Time and Eternity.
For Kojève, truth is always conceptual—“a coherent whole of words having a meaning”—and the totality of such coherence is called the Begriff (Concept). Consequently, the critical question becomes: what is the relationship between the Concept and Time?
Drawing from Hegel, who states that “Time is the Concept itself, which exists empirically,” Kojève argues that any discussion of truth must engage with the temporality of the Concept.
He reviews historical alternatives to clarify the stakes.
The first possibility (that the Concept is Eternity, as Parmenides or Spinoza might claim) is dismissed as inaccessible to man. The fourth possibility, in which the Concept is purely temporal and truth is denied altogether, is dismissed as skepticism. The second possibility (where the Concept is eternal but related to something else) appears in two variants: the ancient (Plato and Aristotle) and the modern (Kant). These models offer partial insights, but only Hegel’s third possibility (that the Concept is Time) fully accounts for history and humanity’s role within it.
Kojève explains that for Hegel, reality (Dasein) is change, and change is Time itself. The Concept, while eternal, becomes empirically real when it takes the form of human speech and thought. This means that the Concept exists in Time and as Time; specifically, as historical Time. In contrast to Plato’s otherworldly eternity or Kant’s structuring of experience through the timeless categories of understanding, Hegel locates truth in the temporality of human existence.
This identification of Concept and Time makes the philosophical project of absolute knowledge possible. If the Concept is temporal, it can evolve, realize itself through history, and account for the historical becoming of truth. Kojève symbolizes this using the geometry of circles: the Concept can recur in time without changing, maintaining a constant relation to Eternity while appearing in the empirical world.
Kojève elaborates this double relation through the metaphor of the Word. The eternal Concept, manifested in human discourse, simultaneously rises toward Eternity and allows Eternity to descend into time. This dual movement is what creates truth. Without the Word, Eternity would be inaccessible to man; without Eternity, the Word would be meaningless. Truth, therefore, exists only through this dynamic relation. And although this relation happens in time, it is not of time—truth is eternal in its structure, yet expressed temporally.
Kojève further distinguishes Hegel’s position from mystical or skeptical systems. In mystical thought, the ineffable lies beyond language and discourse, implying a limit to what can be known or said. Skeptical systems, by contrast, reject the idea of stable truth, as they regard knowledge as endlessly open-ended and evolving. But Hegel’s system, Kojève insists, offers a dialectical path between these extremes. While human knowledge evolves through history and appears temporally, it can ultimately achieve an “absolute” form—a closure of the historical circle. Yet this closure does not eliminate temporality; it presupposes it.
Kojève arrives at one of his central claims: that truth exists only in relation to human time. And human time, he argues, is structured by desire. Desire, especially the desire for recognition, creates a temporal structure in which the future takes precedence over the present. This is the basis of historical movement. Desire negates the present in view of a projected future and transforms the world through labor. Labor (mainly as conceptualized in the Master-Slave dialectic) is thus central to the emergence of the Concept in history.
Kojève explains that conceptual understanding is possible only through human action in time. The detachment of meaning from the empirical reality it signifies is made possible by the temporal nature of being. Mortality allows the separation of word and thing; it is because the real perishes into the past that its meaning can survive as Concept. The word “dog,” for instance, exists only because the living dog is mortal and perishes, leaving behind a meaning.
This analysis culminates in Kojève’s famous formula: Man is Time. Time is not a background container in which events unfold, but the very structure of human existence. Time is the empirically existing Concept, because only through the temporal unfolding of desire, action, and speech does the Concept come into being. When Hegel says, “Spirit is Time,” Kojève interprets this to mean that the human spirit—humanity as a whole in its historical existence—is Time itself. Without man, Nature would be mere Space.
For Hegel (and Kojève), Time is historical time: the time of action, change, and becoming. It is the time shaped by desire and work. Work, born from the Slave’s response to the Master’s domination, mediates between desire and reality. Through work, man transforms the world and gives rise to knowledge. Without work, there is no Concept. Therefore, “the Concept is Work, and Work is the Concept.”
Finally, Kojève emphasizes the mortal nature of man. To attain absolute knowledge, man must accept death. Only a being that can die can experience the world temporally and generate conceptual understanding. Time is not just a measure of change; it is the very form of historical and human existence.
In conclusion, Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel centers on the radical idea that the Concept is not outside of time, but is time. Through this identification, he offers a powerful account of how truth, knowledge, and history are possible; not in spite of human temporality, but because of it. In doing so, Kojève affirms that philosophy, far from being a timeless exercise, is a deeply historical endeavor rooted in the mortal and transformative nature of man.
Notes on Kojève’s Five Possibilities and Their Figures
As stated above, in this chapter, Kojève outlines the metaphysical possibilities for the relationship between the Concept (Begriff), Time, and Eternity –using geometrical diagrams to express these relations, each symbolizing a different metaphysical or epistemological position.
Source: Alexandre Kojève, “A Note on Eternity, Time, and the Concept,” Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Lectures on thePbenomenology of Spirit, trans.James H . Nichols, Jr., Cornell University Press, 1980.
1. The Concept is Eternity, Related to Nothing (Parmenides, Spinoza)
This first position takes the Concept as self-contained Eternity, unrelated to Time or anything external. Kojève aligns this with Parmenides and Spinoza, who assert a closed, unchanging unity (Being or Substance) where conceptual understanding is no longer relational. Here, there is no radius –no movement or relation between the empirical and the eternal –as there is no distinction to bridge.
The Concept is a perfect circle with no points, no entry or exit: no discourse, no temporality.
Since this system does not allow for communication, change, or historical action, Kojève critiques it as inaccessible. It silences the possibility of truth in the world.
2. The Concept is Eternal, and Related to Something Else
This second possibility is divided into two historical variations:
A. Ancient Variant: The Eternal Concept Related to Eternity
a. Plato: Theology (Figure 7)
Plato’s metaphysics posits that the Concept is eternal and refers to an Eternity beyond time. This is represented by a circle with a central point and a radius reaching outward, symbolizing the relation of the temporal word (the point) to an eternal Form.
The radius: the relation between Concept (within Time) and the Eternal (outside Time).
The circle: circular Time (the World), in which the Concept can appear repeatedly.
But, since Eternity lies outside of Time, this system is transcendental and theological –marked by a separation between man and God, between finite existence and infinite truth.
Figure 7 – “Theology” (Plato): The small circle (Concept) relates via a radius to the large enclosing circle (Eternity), but Eternity lies beyond the temporal sphere.
b. Aristotle: Eternity Situated Within Time
In Aristotle’s system, the eternal Forms or concepts are immanent in Time, particularly in the cyclic eternity of Nature. Eternity is present in the cosmos. This is shown in Figure 4, where the radius touches multiple equidistant points on the circle’s edge, suggesting eternal recurrence. The circle of Time turns, and at each point, the Concept appears again in the same relation to a stable eternity within Time.
This biological/cosmological vision explains animals and stars, but not historical, free, mortal man. It collapses the freedom of the Concept into a closed, repetitive nature.
B. Modern Variant: The Eternal Concept Related to Time (Kant)
Figure 10 – “Optimistic Skepticism” or “Criticism” (Kant)
In Kant’s system, the eternal categories (Concepts) structure temporal experience, but never entirely grasp reality. There is a partial, directional relation (arrow), symbolizing that knowledge is always reaching toward completion but never arriving. Time is necessary for the application of concepts but their relation remains open-ended.
The arrow on the circle (Figure 10) shows continuous movement, but the circle is not fully closed: knowledge is an infinite task, not a completed truth.
The skeptical optimism of Kant is that while we cannot know things-in-themselves, we can structure experience intelligibly.
The circle never closes. The Concept relates to Time but never fully overcomes it.
3. The Concept is Time (Hegel)
Figure 11 – “Absolute Knowledge” (Hegel)
This is Kojève’s preferred and most radical option. Here, the Concept is no longer external to Time. It is Time itself. This means that truth is historical and emerges only through temporality, action, and negation.
The closed circle (Figure 11) now represents historical Time that has achieved closure through self-reflective Conceptuality.
The Concept exists empirically, as speech, work, and desire (Dasein), and through this existence, becomes absolute knowledge.
Figure 11 represents the full unity of Time and Concept: Time is no longer an obstacle to truth but its medium.
Kojève writes that this system can explain human freedom, mortality, and history. It is neither silent like mysticism nor endlessly open like Kantian skepticism –it is self-grounding and complete because the Concept has passed through Time and returned to itself.
4. The Concept is Temporal and Relative Only
Figure 8 – “Pessimistic Skepticism” or “Relativism”
This figure shows a broken or incomplete circle, illustrating a worldview in which truth is always deferred and never attained. Kojève links this to historicism or radical relativism.
There is no fixed point or radius, no Concept that can transcend change.
Knowledge becomes an endless flux: learning without knowing.
Kojève sees this as philosophy’s failure: an eternal “why” without ever reaching wisdom.
5. The Concept is Eternal, But the Eternal is Ineffable
Figure 9 – “Mysticism”
In mystical systems, Eternity exists, but cannot be represented or articulated. Truth is accessible only through silence. The Concept, in its attempt to speak of the ineffable, falls short.
The circle is intact, but marked by a silence—a gap in discourse.
There is a radius, but it does not reach the center.
This system postulates something beyond speech: truth exists, but not in language.
Additional Figures
Figure 6 represents the double movement of the Concept: from Word (discourse) to eternal meaning, and from meaning back into speech. This double arrow or radius crossing both ways symbolizes the relation that “cuts through the circle” of Time and allows the Concept to transcend temporality without leaving it.
Figure 5 shows the upward movement from the Word to Eternity: a unidirectional ascent toward truth. But Kojève critiques this as half of the process –without the return, Eternity remains unrepresented in Time.
Figures 1-3 may represent linear temporalities, divided points of access to discourse, or symbolic preliminaries to the circular representations of higher knowledge systems. For instance, Figure 3 might symbolize a fragmented or pluralistic access to the eternal (multiple points, no circle), unlike the holistic systems Kojève favors.
Conclusion: The Circle as Metaphysical Symbol
For Kojève, the circle becomes the central metaphor of philosophical systems:
A closed circle (Hegel) represents a self-reflexive Concept that encompasses Time and attains absolute knowledge.
A broken or silent circle represents skepticism or mysticism.
A radius marks the possibility of relation: either between Time and Eternity, or between the Word and Meaning.
Ultimately, Kojève’s Hegelian circle (Figure 11) achieves what all others attempt but fail to do: it unifies temporality and truth, discourse and being, man and Concept.
This is not a static truth outside of Time, but Eternity engendered by Time, revealed through the labor, desire, and mortality of man.
Bibliography
Alexandre Kojève, “A Note on Eternity, Time, and the Concept,” Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Lectures on thePbenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau, edited by Allan Bloom, trans.James H . Nichols, Jr., Cornell University Press, 1980.
“In order to dismantle the dominance of the human, I have sought to no longer argue like a human, with other humans.”1
Radical compassion, in Patricia MacCormack’s The Ahuman Manifesto is a practice for dismantling human dominance –it is grounded in the rejection of human exceptionalism and species hierarchy, and the recognition of humanity’s complicity in the destruction of life and ecosystems. MacCormack calls for a critical reexamination of the systemic and individual ways in which human agents prioritize their own interests over the wellbeing of nonhuman lives and ecosystems. Practicing radical compassion requires confronting the inhuman, and the unsettling narcissism of Anthropos.
MacCormack advocates for transformative actions grounded in the practice of radical compassion as active care. Central aspects of this practice are rejecting human exceptionalism, adopting abolitionist veganism, embracing antinatalism, and co-creating non-anthropocentric ways of relating to and understanding the world. An important focus of MacCormack’s text is the necessity of rethinking and redefining fundamental human categories and concepts such as life, death, birth, joy, and pain.
At the outset, MacCormack states that she has no interest in offering a rational, academic analysis of how the cultures and practices of anthropos fuels ecocidal tendencies, rather she desires to “make manifest an alternate way of writing, reading and ‘doing’ ahuman work.”2 Thus, the suggestions presented in this work are radical and provocative, as they aim to challenge cemented beliefs about human exceptionalism and species hierarchy, and inspire ethical, ecological, and existential shifts.
This manifesto may seem to hate humans. It does not. It simply seeks different trajectories to the more typical political, academic human versus human arguments. It is a manifesto of doing something right now, individually, collectively, artistically. It is a manifesto of joy. But the joy is for all life, not only ours. It is a manifesto that repudiates hierarchy, that refuses that some human rights should be privileged over others, and that human rights should be privileged over nonhuman.3
Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, ix. ↩︎
“Material vulnerability shares the character of the ‘face’ that calls, making an ethical demand. Material vulnerability becomes visible, for example, in animals left as road kill, mountains levelled for coal, forests razed for paper products and bodies subject to nuclear fallout. The mutuality of a material vulnerability is at the crux of understanding not only compassionate action as an ethical response but also the way actions of hospitality and service rely on more-than-human agencies.” (Anne Elvey, Reading With Earth, p. 141-2)
Anne Elvey’s Reading With Earth is defined by a gentle eco-feminist hermeneutics that places compassion at its core, deeply connected with an awareness of material vulnerability. Compassion is about interconnectedness, shared vulnerabilities, and the potential for collective care. Elvey, drawing on Levinasian philosophy, emphasizes the material vulnerability that “shares the character of the ‘face’ that calls.”[1] We witness the shared vulnerability of humans and more-than-human on the “animals left as roadkill, mountains leveled for coal, forests razed for paper products and bodies subject to nuclear fallout”[2], and this witnessing entails “compassionate action as an ethical response.”[3] An act of compassion involves “cross-species and material agencies at work … its fleshy solidarities and resistances.”[4] Formed by senses and the body, compassion implies the body as ground: Elvey refers to the etymological links (in Hebrew and koine Greek) between compassion, maternal, and the corporeal.
Compassion is about cross-species relatedness. It is an ethical response to shared vulnerabilities across species, one which prioritizes the interconnectedness of all life forms. Elvey refers to Luke 10.30–37, where the parable illustrates a “fleshy space of solidarity” where compassion emerges from recognizing and responding to the material and existential vulnerability of others. Compassion also extends to an ecological consciousness and accordingly urges humans to care for the Earth and its beings as part of a broader ethical practice.
According to Elvey, compassion is not just about a direct connection between two individuals, like “an injured animal and me in a moment”; instead, it arises from and reinforces the interconnectedness of all life, emphasizing our shared ethical responsibility as part of the larger fabric of the world.[5]
Compassion is about recognizing the material givenness of human and more-than-human: “the reality of a material givenness that encompasses not only bodies … but also the relatedness that is an ethical reality.”[6] Material givenness reveals the inherent vulnerability of bodies, habitats, and Earth itself; how and through which acts they are exposed to eco-political traumas, climate change, pollution, and systemic oppression.
According to Elvey, an ecological feminism shaped around the reality of material givenness provides the ground for practices of compassion –a shared vulnerability that allows us “to feel in our bodies the structures of oppression that rely on the dead bodies of animals, including humans, structures for which trauma is constitutive rather than accidental.”[7] Material vulnerability is the tissue that connects beings and environments, human and non-human entities alike. “Ethics of entanglement” values caregiving that sustains life and respects the material interdependencies of human and more-than-human.
[1] Anne Elvey, Reading With Earth, Contributions of the New Materialism to an Ecological Feminist Hermeneutics (Bloomsbury, 2022), 141.
The criticism directed at new materialism that revolves around its assumed tendency towards repetition or reduction to “sameness” within its frameworks: by prioritising the centrality of materiality over language and/or representation, NM risks becoming the very thing it seeks to challenge, reinforcing the binary it aims to disrupt. (Does feminist new materialism remain in the phallo-anthropocentric, classifixationist, representationalist, hierarchical paradigm?)
In fact, Barad, Kirby, Alaimo, and other FNM theorists, following Haraway, problematize a dichotomous understanding of nature and culture, engaging with the concept of the material-semiotic, and with the idea that material and social cannot be understood within the framework of negativity, as if they are separate and/or opposites –instead they are deeply intertwined, mutually shaping and informing one another.
“Material-semiotic is one word,” as Haraway writes, a continuum that does not accentuate or over-invest in “material” on one side and “semiotic” on the other.
Michel Serres: “An idea opposed to another idea is always the same idea, albeit affected by the negative sign. The more you oppose one another, the more you remain in the same framework of thought.”1
The idea is not to destroy but affirm, not to produce sameness but difference, and engage in boundary-making practices that allow differences to flourish and stand out in their uniqueness.
Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations On Science, Culture, and Time – Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 7. ↩︎
But fire, in fact, what is that? A simple body, an elementary substance, that can be predicated on the basis of certain qualities. And light? The actual transparence of certain bodies that are potentially transparent: water, and many solids. Whereas at the beginning of epistemology, the philosopher was still marveling at such things as fire, and water, now they must be submitted to a rigorous scientific analysis so that their excessive power can be checked. They must be put in their place, within a general theory of being so as to lessen our fascination with them.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum Of the Other Woman
In her “elemental works”, which she centers on the four elements (earth, air, fire, water) and also on nature, Irigaray aims to reinterpret, challenge, and form a dialogue with philosophers of Western tradition. In answer to Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics as a “forgetting of Being,” Irigaray in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, critiques Heidegger’s emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech, and his oblivion of air in his existential-ontological account. Air is invisible but crucial as it sustains life. This work has been interpreted as a critique of Heidegger whereas Irigaray seeks to expand Heidegger’s philosophy to introduce the feminine, saying that she would like to “celebrate the work of Martin Heidegger. To succeed in this gesture implied not appropriating his thought but respecting it in its difference. To pay homage to Martin Heidegger in his relationship to the earth, to the sky, to the divinities and to the mortals presupposed for me the unveiling and the affirmation of another possible relation to this fourfold.”[1] The forgetting of air in Heidegger’s work symbolizes the exclusion of women in traditional philosophical discourse. Irigaray explores how traditional philosophy has been built on a patriarchal worldview, which prioritizes certain elements and concepts while neglecting others that might be associated with femininity, ephemerality and fluidity.
In Marine Lover of Nietzsche, Irigaray focuses on the element of water and encounters Nietzsche by addressing him in the second person (she only mentions Nietzsche’s name towards the end of the book). She touches on certain Nietzschean concepts, like eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, self‐overcoming, etc., questioning Nietzsche’s relationship with women. Water is the central element here, as for Irigaray, water is the element Nietzsche fears the most. She forms her narrative upon the complex relationship between the feminine and the fluid, engaging in an amorous dialogue with Nietzsche, and utilizing a lyrical dialogic, intimate prose. With the metaphor of sea, Irigaray alludes to the fluid and dynamic aspects of the feminine. Water represents the flow of life, the unconscious, and the feminine. Marine Lover embraces fluidity, change, and the interconnectedness of life, challenging the rigid, hierarchical structures. Irigaray critiques Nietzsche’s conceptualization of nature and the body, suggesting that he fails to embrace the material, embodied experience of existence often obfuscated or repressed by philosophies that prioritize the mind.
In Speculum of the Other Woman, presents an analysis of Plato’s epistemological model of the cave. In the well-known allegory, prisoners are confined in a dark cave since birth, and can only see the wall in front of them, and shadowy images cast against the wall. The shadows on the cave wall represent the world of sensory experience and the realm of appearances. The prisoners are watch the shadows on the cave wall as reality; thus, they are deceived by the appearances. When a prisoner goes to the outside world, he is blinded by the sunlight, but then his eyes adjust, and he witnesses the true reality of the physical world around him. The allegory of the cave is about the journey from ignorance to enlightenment, and to the world of real knowledge. The free prisoner can attain knowledge via reason and understanding of the Forms. Thus, “Plato’s allegory underscores the fundamental difference between knowledge (episteme) and opinion (doxa). Knowledge, in Plato’s view, is not derived from sensory perceptions alone, but from rational insight and understanding of the unchanging and eternal realm of Forms. Forms are the perfect, eternal, and universal ideals that serve as the foundation of true knowledge. In contrast, opinions are based on the imperfect and changing world of sensory appearances.”[2] It can be claimed that Plato’s epistemological model reveals the necessity of it constraining sensory perception as well as the deceptive nature of opinions formed based on appearances.
Irigaray, in “Plato’s Hystera” (as apparent in the title) uses the word “hystera” (uterus) instead of “cave”, presenting an “allegory in an allegory”[3] –hystera is fundamental as it is the ground: “For if the cave is made in the image of the world, the world is equally made in the image of the cave. In cave or “world” all is but the image of an image. For this cave is always already an attempt to re-present another cave, the hystera, the mold which silently dictates all replicas, all possible forms, all possible relation of forms and between forms, of any replica.”[4]
For Plato, categories of Being, Forms, reality, truth as well as wisdom remain outside the cave which implicates the natural-maternal-feminine framework. This view belongs to the phallogocentric structure that views the masculine as law, order, logic, structure, truth, reason, etc. Irigaray via her “allegory in an allegory” points at the “absence of women, the exclusion of the feminine, from the philosophical tradition not as something immediately or intentional, but rather an always-already presupposed, and remaining unquestioned, element that exists prior to, and is simply carried over into philosophical discourse.”[5] Irigaray writes,
Infinite projection – (the) Idea (of) Being (of the) Father – of the mystery of conception and the hystery where it is (re)produced. Blindness with regard to the original one who must be banished by fixing the eyes on pure light, to the point of not seeing (nothing) anymore – the show, the hole of nothing is back again – to the point at which the power of a mere bodily membrane is exceeded, and the gaze of the soul is rediscovered. A-lētheia.[6]
The seeker of knowledge must emerge from the dark materiality of the cave/hystera and simultaneously reject, conceal, repress it in order to attain the light of wisdom.
He must free himself from the materiality of the womb.
In Irigaray’s analysis, the founding masculine-feminine hierarchical imagery is demonstrated and emphasized. As such, masculine images appear as awakening, knowledge, etc., whereas feminine images appear as darkness, obscurity, lack.[7] The cave essentially is about
the epistemology of sight, which as per the psychoanalytic contingencies of corporeality is a phallic program [scopic regime], is over-validated as the certainty of knowledge-acquisition [a story of distance between the knowing subject and the known object is built upon this scientism, while political programs like the panopticon in colonial/criminological surveillance and cultural propensities such as scopophilia in cinema have been nourished by its ideological dependability] but the disseminated, plural and intimate epistemology of touch which is a feminine sense is excluded from reliability and responsibility of knowledge-making.[8]
Thus, Irigaray focuses on how subject of knowledge in Plato’s allegory essentially attempts to transcend nature and material world to engage with solid and fixed truths (conveyed via masculine imagery) in order to attain true knowledge. The masculine subject must escape from the cave of ignorance and attain the sunlight of wisdom by repressing the feminine.
In Lacanian theory, the hysteric’s relation to truth and desire separates the hysteric from the feminine. As Daniel (2009, p. 49) explains, while the hysteric suffers from castration anxiety, the feminine accepts her castration within the Symbolic, and dwells in it in a mysterious way. The ‘obsession’ of the hysteric to be completely symbolised within the (masculine) Symbolic, makes her a masculine figure (as she does not speak feminine language) but at the same time, also rebellious and powerful. This is the paradox of the hysteric’s position.
The hysteric posits herself as a masculinized figure, a being who only desires to symbolize herself as phallic. She plays her part in the game, as a symbol of feminine jouissance and her only concern is to sustain the frustration. She conforms to and perpetuates the Other’s fantasy of the feminine. But she also problematizes the Other’s claim on truth and exposes his lack, and this makes her truth-demand productive. She retains perpetual dissatisfaction as an inexhaustible source. Her operation exposes the dominant discourse as oppressive and the Other’s language as inadequate and limiting. This language does not acknowledge her infinity. She posits herself as objet a and problematizes the masculine understanding of the feminine. What makes her powerless is her incapability of dealing with her own truth -which she cannot articulate- and expecting answers from the Other.
The feminine is castrated as she inhabits the Symbolic but at the same time, she evades being fully inscribed in it, and has a different ontic quality, which Daniel defines as “a relation to infinity” (2009, p. 50). The feminine subject “exposes the Other’s powerlessness and lack in subversive ways” (Daniel, p. 65). The hysteric resists articulating and symbolizing her being, whereas the feminine inhabits the phallic economy as a speaking subject and exposes its weak edifice: “the feminine actualises her own desiring cause, overcomes the automatic law-like symbolic functioning, and engenders something new in the social realm” (Daniel, p. 49). The feminine inhabits the Symbolic and evades it at the same time.
The hysteric is permanently alienated within the Symbolic and is unable to say her truth. She is caught in the trap of the game with the Other. She is stuck within the desire to be a phallic symbol for the Other. She cannot symbolize her trauma and attempts to hide her castration. She must posit herself as the Other’s object of desire. She also attempts to hide that she is inscribed within the Symbolic, that she is always-already castrated. For Žižek, the hysteric wounds herself to hide the wound of castration which is already there. To redeem herself, she must symbolize her loss/absence and convey her trauma into words, separate herself from the Other and accept the Other’s inability to explain her truth: “only then is she able to move from having a symptom in relation to the Other to becoming the symptom of the Other, the symptom of a man’s finite and dichotomous logic” (Daniel, 2009, p. 73). In Lacanian theory, woman is not wholly inscribed in the phallic function, she defies being limited to phallic representation, as her relation to language is not wholly phallic. Woman is not entirely castrated because she is not completely bound by the signifier and has a relation to what is beyond the phallic paradigm. There is an excess of woman that is not in the Symbolic. The hysteric is reliant on the other for her identity but the feminine both has a presence within the Symbolic and other jouissance. Lacanian theory tells that the feminine has a bond to what lies beyond the contingency of the Symbolic, that she “unveils something that is excessive, unlimited, and destabilising in language” (Daniel, p. 76-77).
Contrary to the hysteric, the feminine subject does not preserve the cycle of desire qua unsatisfied. She articulates her being with words and enjoys both within the Symbolic and at the same time supersedes it as a being who is not-wholly inscribed within the phallic law. The feminine subject articulates her truth through her own language, through the analytical process, and this way, she establishes her femininity as both representable and something more than the Other’s deficient or inadequate symbolizations and representations.
Bibliography
Daniel, K. C. (2009) Dialogues between Feminists and Jacques Lacan on Female Hysteria and Femininity, PhD Thesis, Duquesne University, https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/455
Frequently cited by feminist philosophers such as Rosi Braidotti, Kristeva’s ‘Women’s Time’ critically examines the relation between time and the problematic of women, while reminding the risk of being trapped by a dual-essentialism of a rigid theory of sexual difference. For Kristeva, the ‘maternal time’ of repetition and cycle is to be reconciled with the ‘linear time’ of history and politics. She adopts a dialectical position on the issue of identity formation, conceiving it as neither the ‘semiotic’ nor the ‘symbolic’ but being in transit between the two.
According to Kristeva, “we confront two temporal dimensions: the time of linear history, or cursive time (as Nietzsche called it), and the time of another history, thus another time, monumental time (again according to Nietzsche), which englobes these supra-national, socio-cultural ensembles within even larger entities.”
An inquiry on time, in Kristeva’s text, is means to situate the problematic of women in Europe. She distinguishes two phases or two generations of women. They are both universalist and cosmopolitan in their demands, but also different: the first generation is marked by the national problematic, whereas the second is more engaged with its place within the ‘symbolic denominator’ and is European and trans-European.
In regards to female subjectivity there are two types of temporalities marked by repetition and eternity: Cyclical (repetition) and monumental (eternity).
There are cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature and imposes a temporality whose stereotyping may shock, but whose regularity and unison with what is experienced as extra-subjective time, cosmic time, occasion vertiginous visions and unnameable jouissance” and there is a massive “monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time (which passes) that the very word ‘temporality’ hardly fits: all-encompassing and infinite like imaginary space.
Cyclical and monumental types of temporalities pertaining to female subjectivity problematize the view of time as lineer and teleological. The women’s movement (suffragists and existential feminists) aimed to gain a place in linear time — in history (their political demands being fight for equal pay, for equal work, for taking power in social institutions; alongside their rejection of the “feminine” or “maternal” attributes that are incompatible with entering into that history –these are for Kristeva the part of “the logic of identification” with certain values: of the rationality of the nation-state.
The second phase involve the younger feminists of the period after May ’68 and also women who had an aesthetic or psychoanalytic experience: these women rejected linear temporality and exhibit a distrust in the political dimension. This current, for Kristeva, sees itself as belonging to another generation different from the first one in terms of how it views its own identity and temporality. They are mostly writers and artists, are interested in female psychology and its symbolic realizations, and want to create novel language, exploring the dynamic of signs. With a new generation, more subtle problems were added to the demands for socio-political identification, and also, with the demand for the recognition of their irreducible identity, “exploded, plural, fluid, in a certain way non-identical,” this second feminism posited itself outside the linear/teleological time. This feminism joins the archaic (mythical) memory and also the cyclical or monumental temporality of marginal movements. Kristeva next speaks of the mixture of these two attitudes: “insertion into history and the radical refusal of the subjective limitations imposed by this history’s time on an experiment carried out in the name of the irreducible difference.”
The symbolic contract is based on a sacrificial relationship of separation and articulation of differences, and this is how it produces communicable meaning. Kristeva questions our place in this order of sacrifice and of language. We don’t want to be excluded or we are not content with our functions in it, or not content with what is being demanded of us (perpetuate this socio-symbolic contract as mothers, wives etc.). How can we reveal our place and then transform it?
Kristeva observes two types of counterinvestment of the socio-symbolic contract: “trying to take hold it, enjoy it, subvert it” or more self-analytically, without refusing or sidestepping the social order, to explore its formation and operation one a more personal level.” This leads to active research aiming to shatter language, to find embodied discourse, and to the unnameable repressed by the social contract.
Other more radical feminist currents refuse homologation to identification with existing powers and want a counter-society. Kristeva writes that thus a ‘female society’ is constituted as an alter ego of the official society, “in which all real or fantasized possibilities for jouissance take refuge. Against the socio-symbolic contract, both sacrificial and frustrating, this counter-society is imagined as harmonious, without prohibitions, free and fulfilling.” This counter-society is founded on the expulsion of an excluded element, “a scapegoat charged with the evil of which the community duly constituted can then purge itself; a purge which will finally exonerate that community of any future criticism.” Kristeva says that modern protest movements have often repeated this logic of locating the guilty one to fend off criticism (capital, religion, the other sex), and asks if feminism when it follows this logic to its conclusion becomes an inverted sexism.
Kristeva also touches on Lacan’s “scandalous sentence”: “There is no such thing as Woman.” And interprets it as meaning woman with a capital ‘W’, possessor of a mythical unity does not exist.
Another important theme Kristeva focuses on is ‘religion’ — as a phantasmic necessity of the speaking being to find a representation (animal, female, male, parental, etc.) in place of what constitutes him/her as a speaking being –to find a symbolization. The current practice of feminism demonstrates aspects that constitute such a representation that makes up for the frustrations imposed on women by the Symbolic order. Kristeva sees this ideology as part of the broader anti-sacrificial current. She questions if feminism in its present form, is not in the process of becoming a religion.
There is a third generation that is forming, not as a mass movement, but as an attitude. They don’t exclude the parallel existence of all three attitudes in the same historical time, or that they be interwoven one with the other. Kristeva strongly advocates for this third attitude, where the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics. She asks what becomes of identity when it is challenged in a new theoretical and scientific space, observing an attitude of retreat from sexism and from any kind of anthropomorphism. She defines this process as “an interiorization of the founding separation of the socio-symbolic contract.”
She emphasizes bringing out the singularity of each person and the multiplicity of each person’s possible identifications, the relativity of their symbolic and biological existence, according to the variation in their symbolic capacities. She believes that at this level of interiorization, ‘aesthetic practices’ are the modern reply to the eternal question of morality.
How can I speak to you? You remain in flux, never congealing or solidifying. What will make that current flow into words? It is multiple, devoid of causes, meanings, simple qualities. Yet it cannot be decomposed. These movements cannot be described as the passage from a beginning to an end. These rivers flow into no single, definitive sea. These streams are without fixed banks, this body without fixed boundaries. This unceasing mobility. This life-which will perhaps be called our restlessness, whims, pretenses, or lies. All this remains very strange to anyone claiming to stand on solid ground. Speak, all the same. Between us, “hardness” isn’t necessary.1
Feminine imaginary, the non-identical excess that permeates and escapes the frameworks and formulations of the Symbolic; formless and amorphous.
Margaret Whitford writes about how the Pythagoreans viewed the world as a mixture of principles that had determinate form (good) and were indeterminate (bad).2 Formlessness and indeterminacy were bad or inferior as they implied irregularity, disorder, and chaos. Whitford draws a correspondence between Irigarayian imaginary that threatens rationality and the ontological categories of the pre-Socratics, opposing to critiques of Irigarayian imaginary and arguing that Irigaray aims to demonstrate patriarchy’s view of women as ‘natural’ and outside history.3
The constitution of female subjectivity within and transforming the Symbolic order can be viewed as the forefronts of Irigaray’s project but the locus is the feminine imaginary that underlies the Symbolic as it is deeply connected to “the primitive materiality of experience, life and death, kin relationships, and the body.”4 It is also formative of Irigaray’s elemental works which she forms around natural elements -earth, air, fire, water- harnessing the feminine imaginary and embodied knowledge within the dominant structures of rationality.
Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Cornell University Press, 1985), 214-15. ↩︎
Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 59. ↩︎
“In me everything is already flowing, and you flow along too if you only stop minding such unaccustomed motion, and its song. Learn to swim, as once you danced on dry land, for the thaw is much nearer at hand than you think. And what ice could resist your sun? And, before it disappears, perhaps chance will have the ice enflame you, dissolving your hardness, melting your gold.
So remember the liquid ground. And taste the saliva in your mouth also—notice her familiar presence during your silence, how she is forgotten when you speak. Or again: how you stop speaking when you drink. And how necessary all of that is for you! These fluids softly mark the time. And there is no need to knock, just listen to hear the music. With very small ears.”
Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche
liquid ground 