Becoming-Woman

Abstract

The category of ‘the feminine’ deployed in some of the most important French philosophical texts of the last 50 years critically draws upon historical associations linking female subjectivity to temporal modalities other than the ‘linear’ time composed of a homogeneous succession of present moments. As such, ‘the feminine’ functions within French philosophy as a ‘schema’ of a non-linear temporality calling into question the conception of time that the continental tradition, from Heidegger on, has viewed as determining the entire history of metaphysics. After revisiting Julia Kristeva’s influential article ‘Women’s Time’, this article focuses on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming-woman which is inseparable from the authors’ conception of a pure, non-chronological ‘time of the event’. Commentators who persist in situating this notion as a form of deconstructive reiteration of gender stereotypes are shown not only to radically misunderstand the spatio-temporal determination of the ‘singularities’ proper to becoming-woman but, equally, the very notion of becoming as a mode of repetition constitutive, not of the past, but of the future.