[kristeva: the woman question]

As I begin to write (or at least think about writing!) my thesis introduction I'm reflecting on the double-bind I find apparent in certain web fictions: a desire to multi-mimetically represent combined with a simultaneous recognition of its inadequacy. In her text on Colette, Kristeva sees representation (or creation) as incommensurable with any singular identity. For any identity must constantly be questioned, reworked, and repositioned:

"Is there a feminine genius, then? The genius of women from the last century has invited us not to elude the question and to consider this: concerns about the feminine have been the communitarian path that has allowed our civilization to reveal, in a new way, the incommensurability of the singular. Although it took root in sexual experience, that incommensurability of genius is realized in the risks that each person is capable of taking, by calling into question thought, language, one's time, and any identity that finds shelter in them." (Kristeva, Colette 426-427).

An interview with Kristeva (which I found thanks to the Continental Philosophy Blog)



She explains that the epistemological tradition underpinning modern linguistics presuppose a split between subject and object. This "soliditiy of consciousness" (Descartes anyone?) becomes contentious during periods of social flux which Kristeva suggests are times of creation and innovation. And this is her theory, that the subject is dynamic and its constitution (signifiance) is dynamic. An example of this dynamism in language is found in Joyce (for Kristeva) as he wants readers to "hear the rhythm of his sentences." I wonder how this might transform in the online environment. How might the rhythm of image come to bear on the signifiance of Red in Donna Leishman's fiction or on the autodiegetic narrator of Dene Grigar's Fallow Field?