Explores how the concept of revolution permeates and unifies Kristeva’s body of work.

El presente texto se propone recoger el impacto que la postmoderna reivindicación de la diferencia ha tenido en el pensamiento feminista actual. Partiendo de algunos antecedentes de la teoría feminista norteamericana, el artículo entra a considerar los llamados feminismos europeos de la diferencia, en particular los de las pensadoras actuales Luce Irigaray y Luisa Muraro, para revisar cómo en sus elaboraciones han ido sustituyendo el concepto de igualdad –que el feminismo ha venido reclamando desde el discurso ilustrado – por el (...) de la diferencia de género, que viene así a erigirse en una suerte de identidad femenina esencial. Se trata, por tanto, de entrar aquí en un debate intra-feminista sobre el género, que se plantea a la luz de la reflexión filosófica o que, si se prefiere, compete al ámbito del feminismo filosófico. (shrink)

_Provides a critique of reason, demanding that we take greater responsibility for nature and other people._.

Julia Kristeva is known as rejecting feminism, nonetheless her work is useful for feminist theory. I reconsider Kristeva's rejection of feminism and her theories of difference, identity, and maternity, elaborating on Kristeva's contributions to debates over the necessity of identity politics, indicating how Kristeva's theory suggests the cause of and possible solutions to women's oppression in Western culture, and, using Kristeva's theory, setting up a framework for a feminist rethinking of politics and ethics.

Accounts of mothering have both contributed to feminist theory's development and depended on certain of its central concepts. Some of its critics, however, argue that feminist theory is undermined by the problems of exclusion and essentialism. Here I distinguish between these two problems and consider their implications for questions about mothering. I conclude that exclusion and essentialism do not present insurmountable obstacles to theorizing motherhood, but do suggest new directions for such theorizing.

"Before the Voice of Reason is a phenomenological critique of reason grounded in our experience of the voices that already address us and summon us prior to the ...

This dissertation addresses the question of marginalization in cross-cultural communication from the perspectives of hermeneutic philosophy and postcolonial theory. Specifically, it focuses on European colonialism‘s effect on language and communicative practices in Latin America. I argue colonialism creates a deeply sedimented but unacknowledged background of inherited cultural prejudices against which social and political problems of oppression, violence and marginalization, especially towards women, emerge—but whose roots in colonial and imperial frameworks have lost transparency. This makes it especially difficult for postcolonial subjects (...) to meaningfully express their own experiences of psychic dislocation and fragmentation because the discursive background used to communicate these experiences is made up of multiple, sometimes conflicting traditions. To address this problem, I turn to a strategic use of Nietzsche‘s conceptions of subjectivity and language as metaphor to engage the unique difficulties that arise in giving voice to the subaltern experience. Thus, I argue that while colonialism introduces an added layer of complexity to philosophical discussions of language, the concrete particularities and political emergencies of Latin American history necessitate an account of language that can speak to these concrete particularities. To this end, I develop a conception of, what I call, ―hydric life,‖ a postcolonial feminist hermeneutics that better accommodates these cultural specificities. (shrink)

A comprehensive examination of Kristeva's work from the seventies to the nineties.