Becoming-Woman A metamorphosis in the present relegating repetition of gendered time to the past Louise Burchill 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. KEY WORDS • linear time • cyclical time • the feminine • conceptual persona • becoming-woman • the girl • mimesis • repetition • deconstructive gender parody • temporal synthesis • de Beauvoir • Kristeva • Deleuze and Guattari That the asymmetrical power relations between the sexes can be traced back to an originary ‘asynchrony’ of gendered temporal economies is a key postulate of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1958) that has received surprisingly © The Author(s), 2010. Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav VOL. 19 No. 1 (2010), pp. 81–97 0961-463X DOI: 10.1177/0961463X09354442 www.sagepublications.com 82 time & society 19(1) little critical attention. Yet, the reference to men’s and women’s distinct temporal economies intervenes crucially in the chapter on history when de Beauvoir addresses the question of how women were originally constituted as the absolute, or inessential, Other in contradistinction to men’s ontological status as Subject. Having, from the outset of her analyses, demarcated two very different forms of alterity – the first defined in relation to a pole of sameness, which pertains to the male-other qua ‘the other who is also the same’, while the second refers to a consciousness that permits of no reciprocity in so far as it is irreducible to an alter-ego for the male subject – de Beauvoir now explicates this distinction in terms of ‘woman’s misfortune’ to be biologically destined for the ‘repetition of Life’ within a continuous and cyclical time while ‘man’s project’ consists in ‘not repeating himself in time but in reigning over the instant and forging the future’ (pp. 113–15). Prevented by this identification with the ‘endless repetitious cycle of life and death’ from entering into the struggle for recognition that, according to the Hegelian framework adopted by de Beauvoir, forms the reciprocity of subjects, women would thus have been rendered alien to any affirmation of transcendence that could potentially threaten men’s sovereignty by making of them an ‘object’ in turn. Their enclosure within the static, cyclical temporality of immanence depriving them, thereby, of any prospective opening, women find themselves relegated to the status of absolute Other over whom the male-subject reigns as ‘master’ in so far as his transcendence of Life by Existence denies any worth to pure repetition through the creation of values bearing exclusively upon the invention of the future (de Beauvoir, 1949). This being the case, de Beauvoir’s reference at the very beginning of her book to Levinas’s Time and the Other (1948/1983) as the most explicit expression of women’s status of the other is highly significant since Levinas precisely posits this ‘accomplishment of alterity in the feminine’ as opening the (male) subject up to authentic temporality, qua ‘the event of the future as such’ (pp. 77–84). That this crucial reference to Levinas would seem to have elicited as little critical attention as have de Beauvoir’s own analyses bearing directly on the transcendent-temporal economies of the sexes serves to underline that the importance of the dimension of time for de Beauvoir’s understanding of the woman as Other remains to be fully explored. Such an exploration is not the objective of this article but I would like to place the differential relation of the sexes to a ‘temporal economy’, viewed by de Beauvoir as the key to the constitution of woman as Other, in what might be termed a longitudinal perspective. For the attribution of a specific temporal modality to women is, I would argue, no less the key to the function assigned to the category of the feminine within some of the most important philosophical texts published in France from the late 1960s on by authors as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Sarah Kofman and Jean-François Lyotard. Indeed, if we regard attentively the ‘images’ of burchill: becoming-woman 83 ‘woman’ deployed by these authors – images influenced as much by the modern disciplines dealing with subjectivity (especially psychoanalytic theory), psycholinguistics, sociology, and so on, as by literature, the politico-historical advent of the women’s movement, or the history of philosophy itself – it becomes apparent that these are to be understood ultimately in terms of the (spatio)temporal determination they present. Such an ‘extraction’ of spatio-temporal coordinates from the socio-historical determinations of ‘woman’ is undoubtedly motivated by the fact that our tradition – be it or not for reasons originally tied to woman’s reproductive function, as de Beauvoir argues – has consistently associated women or ‘female subjectivity’ with a cyclical, non-linear temporality in marked contrast to the homogenous succession of present moments that forms not only our ‘common sense’ apprehension of time but also the notion of time that continental philosophy, from Heidegger on, has viewed as determining the entire history of metaphysics. Given that late 20-century French philosophy aims precisely at formulating a new conceptualization of ‘time’ or, more strictly speaking, a new ‘transcendental aesthetic’ (in which the Kantian elaboration of the a priori character of space and time as forms of human sensibility undergoes a radical reformulation as the pure and ‘a-egological’ spatialization-temporalization constitutive of the conditions of both meaning and, let us say, the real), the function performed by the feminine in these philosophical texts can, as a result, be seized as one of presenting, or rendering ‘intuitable’, the new conceptualization of a ‘proto-temporalizing process’ that is, in fact, what is equally to be understood by the concept of ‘difference’ emblematic of the French philosophical project. In other words, ‘the feminine’ functions in these texts as a schema, with this word being understood, in accordance with the meaning Kant gives to it in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1985), as the (pure) spatio-temporal transposition of a concept. Schema: a term that can, interestingly enough, also be defined as ‘an intermediary’ between the sensible and the intelligible – in a sense not all that foreign to de Beauvoir’s analysis of woman as operating as a ‘sensible figure of alterity’. Of all the French authors deploying ‘the feminine’ to schematize their conceptualization of a proto-temporalizing process, it is undoubtedly Julia Kristeva who most explicitly elaborates the incompatibility between ‘female subjectivity’ and ‘linear time’ that underlies this functioning of the feminine as schema. While her 1979 article ‘Women’s Time’ is most often cited because of the typology it offers of the different stages of the women’s movement – from the first wave’s focus on ontological equality with men, through the post-68 exploration of a ‘feminine specificity’ that would find expression in women’s sexuality and social practices no less than in symbolic creation, to the post-identity-politics’ push beyond gender – the interrogation that pre-eminently orients Kristeva’s text centres on the temporal modalities associated with female subjectivity, such that the distinct forms feminism has taken throughout the 20th century are them- 84 time & society 19(1) selves, as we shall see, structurally distinguished in terms of the temporality they evince or aspire to. Of the many conceptions of time that appear throughout the history of civilization, female subjectivity has – Kristeva notes – been persistently associated with the two modalities of cyclical repetition and eternity. On the one hand, there are the cycles, gestation and the eternal return of a biological rhythm similar to the rhythms of nature that, however ‘shockingly stereotypic’ they may appear – and which were certainly condemned by de Beauvoir for relegating women to a sphere of immanence ‘outside time and history’ – nonetheless also offer to women a source of rapture and ‘unnameable jouissance’ (Kristeva, 1979/1995: 205). On the other hand, there is the ‘monumental’ – allencompassing, indivisible and infinite – ‘extension’ of eternity, whose enveloping or transcendence of all forms of measured duration prompts Kristeva not simply to recall its mythic and religious avatars in stories of fusional regression, redemption and resurrection, but also to stipulate (along with much of the western onto-theological tradition) that it ‘has so little to do with linear time that the very term “temporality” seems inappropriate’ (Kristeva, 1979/1995: 205). Such a statement could, however, be made as much in respect of ‘cyclical time’ as of ‘monumental time’ in so far as both these modalities remain resolutely alien to the linear and prospective development our civilization has predominantly consecrated under the name of ‘time’. Such is the time of planning and teleology, comprising the succession of points of present/presence that permits the projection of a future and the retrojection of a past: the time of history, no less than – on de Beauvoir’s understanding at least – that of transcendence. Noting that the concordance between such a linear time and the logical and ontological values of our civilization1 has been amply demonstrated, Kristeva (1979/1995: 206) suggests in this respect that the ‘anxiety’ or ‘rupture’ which uniquely finds expression in this temporal modality not only signs its alliance with death – as that which linear progression both ‘comes up against’ and attempts to master – but, by the same token, makes of it a time a psychoanalyst would qualify as obsessional. That said, it is by characterizing linear time not only as ‘civilizational’ and ‘obsessional’ but equally, as ‘masculine’ (p. 207) that Kristeva reinstates the distinction of gendered temporal economies de Beauvoir had proffered some 30 years previously: to men, there falls the desire to master the instant and forge the future in accordance with the linear time of the project and prospective unfolding; to women, the time that cyclically returns to its source or infinitely distends and envelops, thwarting mastery in the same movement by which it ‘inexorably overwhelms its subject’ (p. 206). Not, of course, that Kristeva – any more than de Beauvoir herself – thereby deems such a differentiation of temporalities to be an immutable, or essential, ontological structuration of sexual difference. As encapsulated in the renowned premise overarching the analyses of The Second Sex (1958) – ‘one is not born a woman; one becomes one’ – de Beauvoir’s entire philosophical enterprise burchill: becoming-woman 85 aims at refuting any form of biological, psychological or economic destiny corrobative of a ‘female essence’. Yet, whereas de Beauvoir was to view genderdifferentiated temporalities as the key to woman’s relegation to the status of absolute Other and, as such, necessary to be overcome through women’s ‘equal access’ to the linear time of transcendence and history, Kristeva is far less inclined to advocate ‘sexual alignment’ on the terrain of temporality as a means of assuring women access to autonomy and liberty. Indeed, one of the principal interests of her typology of the different forms taken by the women’s movement throughout the 20th century lies in its opening up the question of the form of temporality women might be in the process of affirming today. In this perspective, the ‘struggle of the suffragettes and existential feminists’ to ‘stake out [women’s] place in the linear time of projects and history’ is placed alongside of second wave feminism’s return to the cyclical and monumental temporalities historically associated with women in its ‘quasi-universal rejection of linear temporality’ (p. 208): for whatever the radical difference in the temporal modality acclaimed by these two ‘generations’ of feminism – which Kristeva understands in the sense less of chronological succession than of contrasting ‘signifying spaces’ – both share the coordinates of a ‘moment of thought’ aspiring to capture the dimensions of a sexual identity common to women as a whole. That feminism, since the 1980s, has precisely been marked by a problematization of ‘women’ as a stable, homogeneous category, can, in the present context, be seen to concord with Kristeva’s hailing of a ‘third’ signifying space2 which would, in its push beyond the metaphysical opposition of the sexes, equally point to the necessity to rethink the modalities of time with which women as a group have been associated. Oriented by an emphasis on ‘singularity’ rather than categorical identity, such a ‘signifying space’, on Kristeva’s reading, calls for the constitution of an ‘untrammelled, fluid subjectivity’ that would, in effect, not only evince a new configuration of sexual difference – in so far as each subject would have to negotiate its given ‘sexed condition’ in order to invent a specific singular sex3 – but also accord with contemporary scientific explorations of multiple space-times, irreducible to Newtonian or Euclidean parameters (p. 206). Yet, if there be nothing essentially ‘gendered’ about either linear time, which, whatever its complicity with masculine subjectivity as it has been historically shaped, is no less claimed by de Beauvoir as fundamental to women’s posing themselves as transcendence and thereby attaining ontological equality with men, or, on the other hand, the cyclical and monumental temporality women have historically ‘shared’ with marginal mystic or spiritual groups – which of itself insinuates, as Kristeva (1979/1995: 205) notes, that such a temporality ‘is not intrinsically incompatible with “masculine” values’ – this in no way mitigates against deploying traditional associations of women or ‘female subjectivity’ with modalities of time other than linear temporality in the aim of fashioning new conceptualizations of the world. Indeed, following a suggestion by Sigrid 86 time & society 19(1) Weigal (1996), it may well be that one way out of the ‘aporias’ that beset any discourse dealing with subjects such as ‘women and time’ – whereby one is caught between ‘the iconoclastic work of enlightenment on the long tradition of images of women on the one hand and the perpetual reproduction of precisely these same images on the other’ (p. 63) – consists precisely in wresting the social imagery ‘from the continuum of time’ in order to extract therefrom ‘thought-images’, qua ‘instantaneous crystallizations of a movement’, which render visible a specific historical constellation in all its contradictoriness and open, as such, our ‘present’ to a different conceptual configuration.4 Such an extraction of ‘thought-images’ is, to my mind, not all that different from the operation underlying the deployment in French philosophical texts of the feminine as a schema of a ‘non-metaphysical’ temporalizing process. Seizing upon the attributes associated with women as a psychosocial type – their physical and mental movements, their pathological symptoms, relational attitudes, and existential modes – the French philosophers subject these to a ‘determination purely of thinking and of thought’ which wrests them from both the historical state of affairs of a society and the lived experience of individuals, in order to turn them into features of the ‘conceptual persona’ of ‘the feminine’ – that is to say, into thought-events on the ‘plane’ laid out by thought or under the concepts it creates.5 It is, moreover, important in this context to stress that, not only is ‘the feminine’ as a schema quite simply impossible to identify with ‘women’ as a socio-historical type, but the fact per se that an association of ‘a feminine principle’ and a temporal modality outside of linear time has existed throughout the western tradition in no way acts to secure any sort of ‘ontological’ or ‘a-historical’ relationship between two terms supposedly endowed with a stable signification. Indeed, the very fact that ‘the feminine’ is employed as a schema of a new configuration of ‘time’ militates against any ‘essentialist’ conception, such as would consist in establishing a fixed relation between ‘the feminine’ (understood in this instance as rigorously referring to ‘women’) and an originary ‘temporality’. Whence the importance of underlining that, while the French contemporary philosophers draw upon the association of ‘female subjectivity’ and non-linear time – as they do, no less, upon other ‘images’ of women given either by the tradition or contestations of the same (such as the women’s movement) – they never simply reproduce it. The feminine’s functioning as a schema or ‘thought-image’ calling into question the linear conception of time finds expression in such philosophemes as ‘becoming-woman’ or ‘the girl’ in Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘hymen’ in Derrida, the personages of ‘Penelope’ and ‘Ariadne’ in Serres, or again, the ‘figures’ of ‘woman’ in Kofman, Lyotard, or Irigaray, among others – in short, what has been referred to as a general ‘tropology of the feminine’ in French theory (Jardine, 1985: 39). While all these instances of the feminine serve as transpositions of ‘another space and another time than those the masculine logos has imposed burchill: becoming-woman 87 upon us for thousands of years’ (Lyotard, 1977: 226), it is the ‘conceptual persona’ of ‘the girl’ mobilized by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980/1987) that is particularly instructive. In effect, not only does it clearly present a spatio-temporal determination corresponding to the authors’ concept of a pure form of time, ‘Aeon’ or ‘the time of the event’, but it is itself explicitly positioned as depending upon the extraction of ‘blocks of space-time’ from the existential attributes of ‘women’ qua a socio-historical entity. As we shall see, the failure to grasp what Deleuze and Guattari themselves name ‘the determination purely of thinking and of thought’ that produces the feminine as a spatio-temporal transposition not only condemns one to radically misconstrue these authors’ concept of ‘becoming’ but also, curiously enough, assigns women to a time that, contrary to the spectrum of differential thresholds composing non-linear temporality, retraces a repetition of the past rather than opening up the future. By declaring ‘the girl’ to be inseparable from their notion of ‘becomingwoman’ – ‘it is not the girl who becomes a woman; it is becoming-woman that produces the universal girl’ – Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987: 277) immediately mark its relation to the ‘pure form of time’ they define, following Bergson, as a non-chronological ‘time-line’, composed of an unlimited and content-free past and future, infinitely subdividing each present into two dissymmetrical vectors: one launched towards the future which makes all the present pass and the other preserving all the past which thus co-exists ‘at the same time’ as the present. ‘Becoming’, state Deleuze and Guattari, is always an affair of the relations and determinations characterized or given by ‘the time of the event’, namely ‘the floating line that knows only speeds and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and too-early, a something that is both going to happen and has just happened’ (p. 262) As a configuration or composition of relations determined by the ‘time of the event’, becoming is a process that links together terms incapable of being reduced to the ‘molar’ entities – individuals, persons, and things – we habitually take ourselves and all that surrounds us to be, as situated within a linear time serving as the measure for the development of forms and the determination of subjects. Becoming, on the contrary, consists in extracting from such forms, subjects, functions and organs, specific groupings of the ‘molecular particles’, ‘pre-individual singularities’ and ‘non-subjectified affects’ that enter into the composition of molar entities but which, ‘outside of’ the sedimentation and homogenization such composition entails, are defined only by the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness, established between them. Existing as such ‘in themselves’ on an ‘intensive plane’, these molecular components are the ‘matter’ of becoming, with this process reconfiguring one’s molecular particles, singularities and affects such that the relations established between them are the closest possible to those of what one is in the process of becoming and by which one becomes. Accordingly, the girl is quali- 88 time & society 19(1) fied by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘pure relations of speeds and slownesses, and nothing else’ (p. 271). There is no psychology involved here, no ‘lived experience’; we are not in the order of attributes or forms (such as that of a ‘subject’) but of spatio-temporal features: ‘A girl is late on account of her speed: she has done too many things, crossed too many spaces in relation to the relative time of the person waiting for her’ (p. 271). Hence the distinction between the girl, or becoming-woman, and women as defined by their form, endowed with organs and functions, and assigned as molar subjects within a dichotomized economy of gender. On Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of becoming as a process of desire opening us to a creative exploration of modes of individuation, intensities and affects (relatively) untrammelled by the forms, functions and modes of subjectivity society imposes upon us, all becomings are necessarily ‘molecular’. As such, becoming-woman in no way consists in imitating women but in producing in ourselves the relations of speeds and slownesses – the spatio-temporal determinations – and correlative affective intensities that are proper to the girl in her identity of a ‘molecular woman’ or ‘microfemininity’ (pp. 275–6). That the process of becoming-woman has nothing to do with imitation does not mean that there is no relation whatsoever between its product, ‘the girl’, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) in terms of relations of movement and rest, or again, of speed and slowness, and the psychosocial category of women or, for that matter, girls. As indicated earlier, there is indeed a system of referrals between the conceptual persona of the girl and the psychosocial type ‘woman’ but such referrals pass through a conceptual determination that extracts from socio-historical or psychological attributes the spatio-temporal relations inherent to them. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari have recourse to what may be variously termed the sociological category, facticity, or sensible reality of young female persons in order to extract therefrom a ‘logical diagram’ of all the material elements that belong to the girl as expressed under the relations of movement and velocity, on the one hand, as well as of the entire range of intensive affects correlative to these relations, on the other. That said, it is important to add that such a ‘sensible reality’6 can take the form of an ‘image’ gleaned from literature no less that of an ‘empirical given’. Accordingly, the girls that populate A Thousand Plateaus come for the most part from the pages of authors such as Proust, Trost, Woolf, James, and Kleist, to whose names those of Lewis Carroll and Sören Kierkegaard should also be added even if they are not explicitly cited in relation to becoming-woman. Deleuze and Guattari’s description of the girl as a configuration of spatio-temporal relations – ‘a block of space-time’ – clearly rejoins the portrayal Deleuze (1969/1990) gives elsewhere of Carroll’s Alice as caught up in ‘the simultaneity of a becoming’ characterized by the evasion of the present and concomitant indistinction of before and after, of past and future: ‘the essence of becoming [is] to move and to pull in both directions: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa’ (p. 1). Charting the para- burchill: becoming-woman 89 doxical reversals that constitute Alice’s adventures – the reversal of becoming larger and becoming smaller, the reversal of the day before and the day after, of more or less, active and passive, cause and effect – Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense diagnoses Carroll’s fascination for the figure of the girl as a fascination exerted by a body whose differential velocities and ‘lines of flight’ radically contrast with the ‘heaviness’ or ‘depth’ of the maternal body or sexual duality (pp. 114, 142). Before society imposes a history and corporeal constraints, or gender norms, upon the girl’s becoming, the girl freely roams, as it were, on the intensive plane made up of unformed particles, pre-individual singularities and non-subjectified affects. Hence Deleuze and Guattari’s statement, in A Thousand Plateaus, that ‘girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes: they produce n molecular sexes on the line of flight in relation to the dualism machines they cross right through’ (1980/1987: 277). It’s equally clear – especially given Deleuze and Guattari’s reference to Kierkegaard as a thinker of movement and their use of Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of the faith’ as a model of ‘becoming-molecular’ or ‘becoming-imperceptible’7 – that the figure of the girl found in certain texts by Kierkegaard exerts an influence on Deleuze and Guattari’s acceptation. After all, the girl is defined by Kierkegaard as ‘immediacy’, ‘exteriority’ or, again, ‘indetermination’ – all of which, in virtue of the particular spatio-temporal modality these categories imply, allow us to see the girl as the ‘pure’ expression8 of the temporality of the ‘instant’, composed of variable speeds and slownesses, that Kierkegaard opposed to the temporality of history, interiority and reflexion, as well, consequently, as of the subject. In short, for Kierkegaard no less than for Carroll, the girl is the pure expression of becoming as distinguished from the linear time in which forms and subjects evolve. Of course, the authors explicitly called upon by Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) in their chapter dealing with becoming-woman equally extricate from the plane of forms, subjects, organs and functions, the ‘block of becoming’ expressed by the girl in so far as her mode of individuation (to which Deleuze and Guattari give the name ‘haecceity’) consists uniquely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and to be affected: What is a girl, what is a group of girls? Proust at least has shown us once and for all that their individuation, collective or singular, proceeds not by subjectivity but by haecceity, pure haecceity . . . Trost, a mysterious author, painted a portrait of the girl, to whom he linked the fate of the revolution: her speed, her freely machinic body, her intensities, her abstract line of flight, her molecular production, her indifference to memory, her nonfigurative character – ‘the nonfigurative of desire’. (pp. 271, 277) So too, Kleist, whom Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) praise for having made all of his life, no less than all of his work, a composition of speeds and slownesses on a plane of immanence, composes the block of becoming into which 90 time & society 19(1) Penthesilea and Achilles enter and which simultaneously produces the becoming-woman of Achilles and the becoming-animal of Penthesilea, while Virginia Woolf is equally stated to have ‘made all of her life and work a passage, a becoming, all kinds of becomings between ages, sexes, elements, and kingdoms’, to have ‘lived with all her energies, and in all her work’, a becoming-woman that passes between the ‘great dualism machines opposing masculine to feminine’ (pp. 252, 276–7). Clearly, everything that makes up the specificity of the mode of individuation of the girl is of the order, not of forms or attributes, but of spatio-temporal coordinates. For this reason, it is particularly odd that many commentators refer the notion of becoming-woman and the conceptual persona of the girl to ‘stereotypes’ of femininity, understanding the creation of a molecular or microfemininity to consist in ‘reproducing the characteristic features, movements or affects of what passes for “the feminine” in a given form of patriarchal society’ (Patton, 2000: 81). Whether it be a matter of a succinct reference by Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987: 289) to women’s ‘transparency’ or ‘innocence’, or a more sustained textual analysis – such as that situating Proust’s narrator on a plane where he interprets Albertine’s ‘lies’ no longer as concealing a subjective secret that needs to be discovered but, rather, as merging with particles whose molecular speed prevents the narrator from counteracting the distance they insinuate between himself and his beloved (p. 271) – such determinations of the girl are simply understood as so many ‘feminine clichés’ enveloped within the ‘feminine gender stereotype’. One of the first commentators of A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi (1992), writes, for example, Deleuze and Guattari hold that the feminine cliché offers a better departure point than masculinity for a becoming-supermolecular of the personified individual . . . Becoming-woman involves carrying the indeterminacy, movement and paradox of the feminine stereotype past the point at which it is recuperable by the socius as it presently functions, over the limit beyond which lack of definition becomes the positive power to select a trajectory . . . This necessarily involves a redefinition of the category by and for those it traditionally targets: ‘fickleness’ translated into a political refusal on the part of women to remain fixed within the confines of the home or other constrictive arenas of work . . . ‘flightiness’ made to soar to heights of versatility in artistic creation. (pp. 87–8) Making becoming-woman fundamentally a process of mimesis, or a form of ‘feminine masquerade’ to the second degree, that would ultimately effect a revaluation of the very category of the feminine, Massumi’s (1992) reading can, as a result, be compared to positions such as that of Judith Butler advocating deconstructive gender parody – or more strictly, gender performativity – as a means by which gender norms, or 'molar feminine traits', are revealed as socially constructed constraints circumscribing the possibilities of imaginable and realizable gender configurations within culture. Be that as it may, however, such a burchill: becoming-woman 91 reading has strictly no textual basis whatsoever within Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘treatise’ on becoming. On the contrary, the two authors stipulate, in conformity with the injunction not to confuse becoming with imitation, mimesis or reproduction they repeatedly stress throughout their broader elaboration of the concept,9 that becoming-woman in no way consists of imitating ‘woman as defined by her form, endowed with organs and functions and assigned as a subject’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/1987: 275). That commentators confound becoming with reproduction or imitation, thus committing the primary error that Deleuze and Guattari set out to combat in their determination of the concept, must be seen to follow from their persistently identifying the ‘singularities’ – ‘indeterminacy’, ‘secrecy’, ‘transparency’, ‘innocence’ and so on – ascribed to the girl or ‘molecular woman’ by Deleuze and Guattari as so many psycho-social features instead of recognizing them to be constellations on the intensive plane, or ‘plane of immanence’, where they are given consistency precisely through the operation of the pure form of time or the ‘time of becoming’. As such, let us try to be as clear as possible on this point: what we have to grasp is the difference between becoming as a process that may well entail taking hold of the traits, movement or affects of ‘what passes for ‘the feminine’ in a given form of patriarchal society’ if this be in order to extract therefrom their spatio-temporal coordinates, and a process variously described in terms of a subversive reiteration of feminine gender norms or a ‘reproduction’ of the latter in the aim of yielding a micro-femininity. The fact is that, even if one asserts that ‘reproducing the characteristic features of the feminine’ is not the same as ‘imitating or assuming the forms of femininity’ – as does, in fact, Paul Patton (2000), whose commentary on becoming-woman we are focusing on here along with that of Massumi10 – reproduction remains, no less than ‘imitating’, a mimetic function that not only misconstrues the very nature of becoming but, by the same token, fails to isolate the nature of the singularities or molecular elements taken up in the latter process. As such, becoming seems simply reduced, on the one hand, to a repetition of molar traits but in a different, non-naturalizing (and somehow ‘molecularizing’) form – be this characterized as exaggerated, parodic, subversive or deconstructive – while, on the other, its description as a reproduction of affects, movements and ‘characteristic features’ (here, seemingly, in the sense of ‘singularities’ on a molecular level) seems, nonetheless, to equally conceive of the latter in terms of ‘molecular ‘molar’ traits’, if one may put it this way, as seen when Patton refers to ‘an incorporeal body of woman’ defined in terms of ‘affects associated with dependent social status such as capacity for dissimulation or for cultivating the affection of others, delight in appearances and role-play’ (p. 81). Either way, then, singularities seem to assume a status of ‘micro-repetition’ of molar traits of femininity – whereby the same traits are reiterated on a molecular level – which is equally to say that, either way, becoming seems to assume a status of repetition. 92 time & society 19(1) Having sufficiently shown that Deleuze and Guattari understand becomingwoman or the girl as a ‘configuration of spatio-temporal relations and nothing else’ – thus rendering superfluous any further disqualification of the suggestion that it entails some form or other of repetition of molar traits – what remains to be demonstrated is the way in which this confusion of molecular coordinates and molar attributes is compounded by a conception of becoming as repetition which mobilizes a very different temporal modality than that Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) associate with becoming-woman. That said, this difference in temporal modality is not imputable to the sheer fact of attributing a status of repetition to becoming. Deleuze and Guattari themselves equally – if implicitly – correlate the pure form of time, or time of becoming, with a mode of repetition,11 while Deleuze explicitly elaborates this correlation in the books he was to write both before and after his collaboration with Guattari. As such, the correlation per se between becoming and repetition is not the determining factor, but the mode of repetition thereby mobilized. Let us, therefore, schematically set out three different modes of repetition, basing ourselves very loosely on Deleuze’s (1968/1994: 70–128) own analyses of repetition as a concept central to a theory of temporal synthesis, in order to, then, distinguish the mode associated with becoming from that characterizing commentators’ ‘micro-repetition of molar traits’. These three modes of repetition are as follows: first, a repetition of distinct, successive instants generative of a temporal synthesis constitutive of the present, such that the past and future are dimensions of the present itself; second, a repetition of all past instants as these co-exist with the passing of each new present, such that the past is the synthesis of all time, with the present and future therefore mere dimensions of this time of ‘the pure past’; and third, a repetition constitutive of the future in so far as it extracts from all of the past, in its virtual coexistence with the present, elements that are, then, synthesized within a new configuration or new ordering such that this ‘metamorphosis in the present’ gives rise to the production of something completely different. To this extremely schematic outline, we should immediately add that the first mode of repetition – constitutive of time as oriented by the present – must be equally distinguished from a bare succession of instants qua the simple iteration of an identical configuration. Historically identified within the western tradition with the cyclical reign of ‘mechanical repetition’ said to make up the permanence of physical nature (to which modern science has given mathematical form), such an ‘iteration of the same’ is, indeed, for Deleuze – no less than for Hegel and, in a certain sense, de Beauvoir – a repetition remaining solely of a spatialized order and, thus, unable to be strictly qualified as temporal at all. Whence the need for the intervention of a synthetic operation: only when the ‘successive’ independent instants are taken up within such an originary synthesis, placing one instant in relation to others, do these assume, in fact, the status of ‘succession’, with the contraction of instants into the present finding itself accordingly oriented by burchill: becoming-woman 93 the passing of the present from the past to the future. In other words, the time thereby generated is ‘apprehended’ as a sequence of homogeneous points of presence, thus yielding the linear time of consequential development. From this perspective, that women’s assimilation with the repetitious cycle of nature is, in de Beauvoir’s view, what explains their ontological status as Other not only clearly conforms to Hegel’s dismissal of nature as the pure reign of repetition par excellence, relegated as such outside of history and the movement of spirit/subjectivity as aligned with the element of time, but all the more clearly evinces the priority de Beauvoir attributes to the temporal modality of gender differences. Ultimately, de Beauvoir places women in correlation with a mode of repetition that proves to be, stricto sensu, a-temporal in so far as, through its character of brute, or spatial, repetition, it indicates at best what Deleuze (1968/1994: 70), for his part, refers to as ‘time’s constantly aborted moment of birth’ – a characterization that aptly accords with women’s original failure to attain self-consciousness on de Beauvoir’s account. What mode of repetition (and consequent temporal modality) would though, then, correspond to a ‘microrepetition of feminine molar traits’ as formulated in terms of, either, a subversive reiteration of feminine gender norms or a ‘reproduction’ of the latter seeking to produce a micro-femininity? Certainly, the linear repetition of distinct homogeneous points of presence must be ruled out in this respect. As Judith Butler remarks, when underlining the ‘priority’ of the temporal modality of gender construction in Bodies That Matter (1993), the reiteration of acts involved in gender performativity cannot be simply construed ‘as if “acts” remain intact and self-identical as they are repeated in time, and where “time” is understood as external to the “acts” themselves. On the contrary, an act is itself a repetition, a sedimentation, and congealment of the past which is precisely foreclosed in its act-like status’ (p. 244).12 Crucially, on Butler’s account, the very fact that gender construction is itself a temporal process operating through the reiteration of norms both causes it to take on a ‘naturalized’ aspect as the sedimented effect of such reiteration yet, equally, leaves it prey to destabilizing or subversive effects to the degree that, when not ‘repeated loyally’, such ‘repetitive labour of the norm’ is shown to be incapable of wholly defining the field of ‘possibles’ (p. 10, 124). As Butler puts it, such subversive repetition and resignification thus amounts to saying, ‘I will mime and repeat the gestures of your operation until [the] emergence of the outside within the system calls into question its systematic closure and its pretension to self-grounding’ (p. 45).13 That the ‘miming of miming’ – subversive repetition – aspires to the production of something new seems clear. Yet can it truly claim to be constitutive of the temporal modality of the future corresponding to the production of something radically different, or would it not rather be, as Butler’s (1993) own stress on the sedimentation and congealment of the past suggests, more akin to the time of the ‘pure past’ – be it in the guise of a past repeated ‘disloyally’ in order 94 time & society 19(1) to affirm that which exceeds the norm? Certainly, Massumi (1992) views the version of subversive repetition he proffers under the name of ‘becoming’ as producing ‘differences’ in excess of the ‘reiteration of the same’ when he argues it to involve ‘carrying . . . the feminine stereotype past the point at which it is recuperable by the socius. . . over the limit beyond which lack of definition becomes the positive power to select a trajectory’. Such a production, or extraction, of ‘differences’ from and within the reiteration of the sedimentation of the past coexisting with the present as this ‘passes’ would, however, seem not only to prove perfectly recuperable by ‘the socius as it presently functions’ – at least if the media’s and advertising’s ready appropriation of certain forms of gender trouble is any indication – but, all in all, to restrain itself to what might, following Deleuze’s (1968/1994: 94) typology of the modes of repetition, be described as ‘including difference as a variant within the same’. Even should the category of the ‘same’ be deprived of its pretension to self-grounding or to a status of ‘nature’ as a result, even were gender norms to be thereby ‘put into crisis’, a destabilizing proliferation of ‘disloyal repetitions of the sedimented past’ still falls far short of constituting reiteration as a category of the future – if only because, as such a category, reiteration no longer operates within or on the ‘element of the same’. Put as succinctly as possible, becoming-woman as a mode of repetition constitutive of the future is distinguished from the repetition or reproduction of feminine gender traits in that, instead of contenting itself with including difference as a variant within (an enlarged field of) the Same, it extracts from the sedimentation of the past, elements ‘pertaining to difference’, which it then enfolds – or reiterates – in new configurations that no longer take their bearing from the past as it is congealed, nor from the present as the deployment of variations informed by this past. To return to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) example, mentioned earlier, of Proust’s Albertine, the latter’s ‘lies’ can in no way be understood as a reiteration/resignification of women’s ‘traditional flightiness’ or their ‘capacity for dissimulation’, any more than they can as a subjective ruse or psychological pathology; rather they mark a mode of individuation composed by elements precisely released from a sedimentation in the forms or traits making up the feminine gender norm, as well, for that matter, as the forms or traits of sedimented subjectivity per se. Albertine is not caught up in the ‘history’ played out by the narrator according to categories of self and other or the distribution of time in terms of an unfolding of the present according to the dimensions of past and future: she is quite literally ‘elsewhere’ in the sense that her ‘world’ is made up of affects, traits and movements free from subjective over-coding just as it is regulated by a time equally unbound by any form of transcendental standpoint serving to link memories and hopes together in a single cohesive story. Time here is a constant fragmentation of all linearity, with each instant being a point at which time ‘forks’ into a new distribution of burchill: becoming-woman 95 before and after, such that the elements selected or repeated from the past, and those affirmed of the future, shift, kaleidoscope-like, into new configurations: metamorphosis in the present. On such a temporal understanding, becoming-woman might be said to consist above all in loosening oneself from the over-coding structure of subjective constraints, including the mode of repetition as accumulation associated with gender norms. What one takes hold of to do this cannot be molar traits of femininity but gestures or affects that dispose one to the plotting of new coordinates. In this way, women might well not only find themselves (as well as men) released from the linear time that governs the development of subjects in keeping with gender norms, but equally inflect their historical association with monumental and cyclical temporalities. Becoming-woman, in this sense, would be an affirmation of a future in which the asynchrony of gendered temporalities serving as a basis for asymmetrical power relations between the sexes would be a thing of the past. Notes 1. Strangely, the two major English translations of Kristeva’s text both render her ‘valeurs logiques et ontologiques d’une civilisation donnée’ as ‘logical and ontological values of any given civilization’ rather than as ‘. . . of a certain [or a specific] civilization’. Kristeva is unambiguously referring to our civilization here, not each and every civilization per se. See Kristeva (1979/1993: 304, 1979/1995). 2. We might note that the proclamation of post-identity politics Kristeva makes in her ‘Women’s Time’ is a constant of her work from its inception in the 1960s – and thus well predates the ‘post-gender’ turn in Anglo-American countries. 3. This aspect is examined more fully by Kristeva in the third volume of her trilogy Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words, when she deliberates upon the conclusions to be drawn from her examination of the works of Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein and Colette, qua three ‘female geniuses’. Declaring ‘genius’ to be ‘the most complex, the most seductive, the most fertile version of singularity at a given moment’, Kristeva interestingly then recapitulates the typology of the distinct phases of the women’s movement she had set out in ‘Women’s Time’ by way of situating ‘our age’ as uniquely enabling an attention to each subject’s singularity. Her entire discussion in this respect is framed, moreover, by a dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir – to whom she dedicates not only the final chapter dealing with ‘feminine singularity’ but, indeed, her entire trilogy – with Kristeva notably describing her enquiry as pursuing de Beauvoir’s investigation into how the female condition can be freed from biological, social or fateful constraints. Isolating, contrary to de Beauvoir, the solution to lie in ‘the conscious or unconscious initiative of the subject against the weightiness of its program’, Kristeva ends her chapter (and trilogy) with a statement that could no less serve as a résumé of the theses of her ‘Women’s Time‘: ‘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 . . . [that] is realized in the risks each person is capable of taking by calling into question thought, language, 96 time & society 19(1) one’s time, and any identity that finds shelter in them’ (cf Kristeva, 2002/2004). 4. Weigal here is drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image, in the context of an argument concerned to show the relevance of Benjamin’s ‘thinkingin-images’ to the discourse of gender difference. In this perspective, she devotes the fifth chapter of her book Body- and Image-Space (1996) to exploring the parallels between Benjamin’s and Kristeva’s theoretical reflections. 5. This characterization of the extraction of ‘thought-images’ from the attributes associated with women as a psychosocial type is a paraphrase of Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction of conceptual personae and psychosocial types found in What Is Philosophy? (1991/1994). 6. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987: 543) quote in their discussion of the girl the following passage taken from the work of Trost, ‘She was simultaneously, in her sensible reality and in the ideal prolongation of her lines, like the projection of a human group yet to come.’ 7. Although I‘ve stated that Deleuze and Guattari never directly cite Kierkegaard in relation to becoming-woman in the chapter of A Thousand Plateaus (1980/1987) devoted to ‘becoming’, they do seem to impute to him a description of the movement of the infinite as occurring in a ‘becoming that is the girl’ (p. 281). That said, it is not clear whether this description of the movement of the infinite is referred to Kierkegaard himself or is a gloss by the authors of A Thousand Plateaus who are, in this context, praising Kierkegaard as a thinker of movement. Be that as it may, we should also note that Deleuze repeatedly refers to Kierkegaard as a thinker of movement and difference in the books he wrote before co-authoring A Thousand Plateaus. 8. Were one to refer to Kierkegaard’s ‘Diary of a Seducer’, in Either/Or, one could, for example, contrast the girl as the pure expression of the aesthetic modality with the concrete expression given by ‘the seducer’. For this distinction of modes of expression, see Jean Nizet (1973). 9. See, for example, pp. 233–9, 258, 272, 274, 278, 304–5, as well as the note given at the end of the chapter on becoming (note 95, p. 546) in which Deleuze and Guattari state, without any concession whatsoever, that the concept of mimesis as applied to becoming ‘is not only inadequate, it is radically false’. 10. Admittedly, by distinguishing ‘the reproduction of characteristic features [in the sense of “singularities”] of the feminine’ from ‘the imitation of forms of femininity’, Patton is evidently seeking to capture the distinction of molecular and molar traits. In this respect, Patton’s (2000: 81–3) commentary seems to us to be much closer to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming than those explicitly advocating a parodic repetition or reproduction of molar traits or forms of femininity. Nevertheless, Patton still seems to confound the molar and the molecular, forms of femininity and ‘singularities of the feminine’, when he defines the affects to be reproduced as those associated with women’s dependent social status. 11. See especially the chapter in A Thousand Plateaus, immediately following that on Becoming, which deals with ‘the refrain’. 12. See Butler (1993: 244, emphasis added). The critical importance of the temporal modality of gender construction is elaborated by Butler in her Introduction, as well as in a couple of key footnotes to this section of her text. 13. The specific case of ‘disloyal reiteration’ Butler (1993: 45) is referring to here is the notion of mimesis both advocated by Luce Irigaray (1974/1985) and enacted by her in her reading of philosophy. burchill: becoming-woman 97 References Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge. de Beauvoir, S. (1949) Le deuxième sexe. Paris: Gallimard. de Beauvoir, S. (1958) The Second Sex. London: Jonathan Cape. Deleuze, G. (1968/1994) Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1969/1990) The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1980/1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1991/1994) What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press. Irigaray, L. (1974/1985) Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jardine, A. (1985) Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kant, I. (1781/1985) Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan. Kierkegaard, S. (1843/1973) Either/Or. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kristeva, J. (1979/1993) Les nouvelles maladies de l‘âme. Paris: Fayard. Kristeva, J. (1979/1995) New Maladies of the Soul. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (2002/2004) Colette. New York: Columbia University Press. Levinas, E. (1948/1983) Le temps et l’autre. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lyotard, J.F. (1977) Rudiments païens. Paris: Union Générale des Editions. Massumi, B. (1992) A User’s Guide to Captialism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Massachusetts: Swerve Editions. Nizet, J. (1973) ‘La temporalité chez Sören Kierkegaard’, La Revue Philosophique du Louvain 71: 225–46. Patton, P. (2000) Deleuze and the Political. New York: Routledge. Weigal, S. (1996) Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin. New York: Routledge. LOUISE BURCHILL’s main areas of research are contemporary French philosophy and feminist theory. Her publications in these fields explore subjects such as the ‘feminine’ in contemporary French philosophy (focusing on authors such as Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray, Kristeva and Lyotard), the notion of ‘space’ in the work of Derrida and Deleuze, and the intersection of Derrida and cinema. She has also written on Deleuze and translation for a dossier on this subject that she co-coordinated for the French review Multitudes (summer 2007), and is the translator of many essays written by Julia Kristeva as well as of Alain Badiou’s Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), for which she equally wrote the Preface. She is presently translating Badiou’s Second Manifesto for Philosophy and completing a book on the work of Jacques Derrida, concentrating on the notions of the (Platonic) chôra, space and ‘the feminine’. ADDRESS: The Centre for Ideas, Faculty of the VCA, The University of Melbourne, 234 St Kilda Rd, Southbank, VIC 3006, Australia. [email: louiseburchill@orange.fr]