Fanny Söderbäck

Revolutionary Time: Revolt as Temporal Return

The subjugation of women in patriarchal society depends on a sexual division of temporal labor. As upholders of reproduction, embodiment, and the survival of the species, women have been confined to the cyclical time of nature. As inventors of a world that, in contrast, transcends our natural conditions, men have been bearers of linear time. How might we provide a temporal model that avoids this rigid dualism? This essay seeks to articulate a model of time that overcomes the dichotomous distinction between cyclical time and linear time. I develop this model—revolutionary time—by drawing from the work of Julia Kristeva. Revolutionary time is a movement of return that is meant to retrieve the forgotten continent of the body. This, I argue, is necessary for the elaboration of a future not already defined by past and present ideological agendas. My elaboration of time as a movement of return into the past and to the body does not imply a nostalgic or backward-looking agenda but is, rather, the basis for a politics of transformation and change.

Liminal Spaces: Reflections on the In-Between

Abstract In a political present increasingly marked by bigotry and violence, the need to establish spaces where minority voices can be heard, and where alternatives can be articulated, has become ever more urgent. What kinds of places and spaces, this essay asks, make possible a true encounter and dialogue? What kinds of places and spaces allow us to challenge the binary structures and divisiveness that so fundamentally mark our current political discourse? In an attempt to offer some tentative reflections on this topic, I turn in this paper to Platos Symposium and Luce Irigarays critical reading of that text. Might Plato, I ask, offer useful tools for challenging and resisting a contemporary political discourse defined by simplistic binary thinking? And can he provide resources for thinking about space in terms that transcend simple dichotomies between here and there; inside and outside; us and them?