Abstract

The question of time is a cornerstone in feminist theory because the specificity of our time is its illegitimate foreclosure of temporal possibilities. In this paper, I try to thematize the specificity of this illegitimacy by first developing an account of time as messianic, which takes into account the entanglement of the feminist salvatory work and its foreclosure. Such an account of time calls for the question of the modalities and the structures upon which this unfolding hinges; I am mostly interested in the structure of language. Two approaches to the linguistic retrieval of the lost time are addressed in my paper; the deconstructive approach in Derrida’s “Force of Law,” and the archaeological approach in Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language. Deconstruction claims that the unfolding of time may never be outstripped by the power of language because of the aporetic structure of representation of language. Although Kristeva agrees with this point, her archeological framework nonetheless acknowledges that the symbolic order of language must represent a horizon for the feminist revolutionary work. To a stronger extent, I will try to show through Kristeva that there is a partial repudiation of language’s timely power in Derrida’s understanding of the place of the symbolic and representation in deconstruction. The power of language may instead be accounted for through the mode of production of meaning in language for Kristeva, which must take into consideration the structures of subject formation through psychoanalysis.