Papers by Fanny Soderback
Page 1. feminist readings of antigone edited by fanny söderbäck Page 2. This page intentionally l... more Page 1. feminist readings of antigone edited by fanny söderbäck Page 2. This page intentionally left blank. Page 3. Feminist Readings of Antigone Page 4. SUNY Series in Gender Theory Tina Chanter, editor Page 5. ...
Studies in the Maternal, 2010
The state of the maternal has been disputed among feminists for quite some time. Julia Kristeva-w... more The state of the maternal has been disputed among feminists for quite some time. Julia Kristeva-whose work will be my focus of attention here-has been criticised for her emphasis on the maternal, particularly with regards to her alleged equation of maternity with femininity. Critics have suggested that such equation risks reducing woman to the biological function of motherhood. Judith Butler, to give an example to which I will return at length, speaks of a 'compulsory obligation on women's bodies to reproduce'. 2 Kristeva herself has noted that 'it seems […] difficult to speak today of maternity without being accused of normativism, read: of regression'. 3 Kristeva's earliest thematisation of the maternal appears in her doctoral dissertation, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974). It is here that she first articulates her notion of the semiotic chora, associating it with the maternal body and early heterogeneous drives. She borrows the Greek term chora from Plato's Timaeus (2001)-a dialogue that more than anything deals with the question of beginnings, as it narrates the story of how the cosmos and its living creatures were created. In much of her early work, Kristeva distinguishes between semiotic drives and the symbolic order (although as we shall see this distinction is by no means an oppositional one). 4 Put most simply, chora, for Kristeva, is the articulation of primary processes and drives. We may say that it is the material from which language emerges, and yet, as I hope to show, to characterise it merely as 'material' is both problematic and inaccurate. Kristeva explains that all discourse 'moves with and against the chora in the sense that it simultaneously depends upon and refuses it'. 5 It is a 'preverbal functional state that governs the connections between the body (in the process of constituting itself as a body proper), objects, and the protagonists of family structure' (RPL, p. 27). Kristeva underlines that the subject involved in such a process is no mere subject of understanding, but one inhabited by pre-symbolic drives and, importantly, one connected to and oriented towards the mother (not yet differentiated from her). Both Kristeva and Plato characterise chora in Fanny Söderbäck, Motherhood: A Site of Repression or Liberation? Kristeva and Butler on the Maternal Body Studies in the Maternal, 2 (1) 2010, www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk 2 maternal terms: Timaeus, in Plato's dialogue, famously likens it with a 'mother' [meter] and a 'wet-nurse', drawing on female connotations distinct from the paternal demiurge and creator present from the outset of his story. 6 For Kristeva, the maternal body is 'the ordering principle of the semiotic chora' (RPL, p. 27). One could object that such an account problematically seems to divide a pre-symbolic, drive-ridden, natural, passive, maternal mold or receptacle from a symbolic-logic, cultural, active, paternal force of creation, with the consequence that we, again, essentialise such categories along gendered lines. This is precisely what many feminist thinkers have done.
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2019
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, Aug 17, 2022
At age six or seven, Julia Kristeva marched through the streets of Sofia with her schoolmates, ce... more At age six or seven, Julia Kristeva marched through the streets of Sofia with her schoolmates, celebrating her first Alphabet Day, honoring Cyril and Methodius, the brothers who created the Slavic alphabet. Her father accompanied her to the procession, explaining the etymology of the Bulgarian term for alphabet: Azbouka. Its meaning is derived from the very words making up its letters: "I / letters / understand / the word / the good / is"-a refrain that young Kristeva read forward and backward and otherward until she arrived at the magic formula of an infinite present: "I is a letter, I is the letters" (5), and "I am the letter that knows the joy of the written word" (9). Citing Colette, who "cultivated her alphabet in the flesh of the world," Kristeva reflects on her own experience on that day: "Imprinted in me, the alphabet overtakes me" (3). FLESH and WORD-the two terms that are capitalized in her seminal essay "Stabat Mater" (1977/1985)-merge here as they so often do in her work. Their merging implies a series of mergings and tensions and ambiguities, between unconscious and conscious, semiotic and symbolic, soma and psyche, biology and thought, private and public, affect and reason, sense and language, literature and philosophy, the need to believe and the desire to know. The essay in which the young Kristeva became a letter, "My Alphabet: Or, How I Am a Letter," opens Passions of Our Time, a collection of articles, essays, interviews, and speeches, first edited in French (Pulsions du temps) by David Uhrig and Christina Kkona in 2013, and then in English by Lawrence D. Kritzman in 2019. The volume, divided into six thematic sections, covers a wide range of topics, such as language and love, motherhood and monotheism, disability and the death penalty, digitalization, and globalization. It spans several time periods and genres, from Greek tragedy and medieval mysticism to modern humanism and psychoanalysis. As always, Kristeva exhibits an impressive and expansive grasp of bodies of literature and thought. She crisscrosses from Saint Teresa and Saint Bernard to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan; from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Simone de Beauvoir to Roland Barthes and Emile Benveniste. In each instance, she offers in-depth readings, spanning entire oeuvres, engaging biographical journeys and the trajectory of each of their thinking, always generously, rigorously, and creatively. In addition to WORD and FLESH, a third word is capitalized in "Stabat Mater"-FLASH-and it appears in the second essay of this volume, now as then in the context of a discussion of motherhood. If Freud scandalized the world by introducing infantile
Hypatia
At age six or seven, Julia Kristeva marched through the streets of Sofia with her schoolmates, ce... more At age six or seven, Julia Kristeva marched through the streets of Sofia with her schoolmates, celebrating her first Alphabet Day, honoring Cyril and Methodius, the brothers who created the Slavic alphabet. Her father accompanied her to the procession, explaining the etymology of the Bulgarian term for alphabet: Azbouka. Its meaning is derived from the very words making up its letters: "I / letters / understand / the word / the good / is"-a refrain that young Kristeva read forward and backward and otherward until she arrived at the magic formula of an infinite present: "I is a letter, I is the letters" (5), and "I am the letter that knows the joy of the written word" (9). Citing Colette, who "cultivated her alphabet in the flesh of the world," Kristeva reflects on her own experience on that day: "Imprinted in me, the alphabet overtakes me" (3). FLESH and WORD-the two terms that are capitalized in her seminal essay "Stabat Mater" (1977/1985)-merge here as they so often do in her work. Their merging implies a series of mergings and tensions and ambiguities, between unconscious and conscious, semiotic and symbolic, soma and psyche, biology and thought, private and public, affect and reason, sense and language, literature and philosophy, the need to believe and the desire to know. The essay in which the young Kristeva became a letter, "My Alphabet: Or, How I Am a Letter," opens Passions of Our Time, a collection of articles, essays, interviews, and speeches, first edited in French (Pulsions du temps) by David Uhrig and Christina Kkona in 2013, and then in English by Lawrence D. Kritzman in 2019. The volume, divided into six thematic sections, covers a wide range of topics, such as language and love, motherhood and monotheism, disability and the death penalty, digitalization, and globalization. It spans several time periods and genres, from Greek tragedy and medieval mysticism to modern humanism and psychoanalysis. As always, Kristeva exhibits an impressive and expansive grasp of bodies of literature and thought. She crisscrosses from Saint Teresa and Saint Bernard to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan; from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Simone de Beauvoir to Roland Barthes and Emile Benveniste. In each instance, she offers in-depth readings, spanning entire oeuvres, engaging biographical journeys and the trajectory of each of their thinking, always generously, rigorously, and creatively. In addition to WORD and FLESH, a third word is capitalized in "Stabat Mater"-FLASH-and it appears in the second essay of this volume, now as then in the context of a discussion of motherhood. If Freud scandalized the world by introducing infantile
SUNY Press eBooks, Mar 1, 2024
This essay examines sexual violence as a form of ontological violence, which is to say, a form of... more This essay examines sexual violence as a form of ontological violence, which is to say, a form of violence that aims to destroy the embodied uniqueness of its victim. Drawing from Adriana Cavarero's work on singularity, violence, and narration, I trace the destruction on the scene of sexual violence, as well as the healing that can take place in its aftermath, through narrative attempts to reconstruct a self in the wake of ontological violence. I offer a reading of Susan Brison's autobiographical Aftermath, alongside engagements with Cavarero's Horrorism, Relating Narratives, and "Narrative Against Destruction."
Feminist Philosophy: Time, history and the transformation of thought, 2023
This essay offers an analysis of several resurrected Antigones in contemporary queer and colonial... more This essay offers an analysis of several resurrected Antigones in contemporary queer and colonial contexts. I examine Sebastián Lelio’s film A Fantastic Woman, in which Marina, a Chilean trans woman, grapples with double loss: that of her lover and that of her right to grieve. Marina’s and Antigone’s stories intersect in myriad ways, the most obvious of which is their shared experience of being refused to publicly mourn and partake in the burial of their loved ones. Except Marina is no Theban- European princess but a working-class trans woman in contemporary Chile. And if Antigone was refused her right to mourn because of her being a woman, Marina’s grief is mocked precisely because those around her fail to recognize her as a ‘real’ woman. An Antigone-figure of sorts, Marina is thus also much more than that, and her being trans as well as concretely situated within a Latin American context renders her irreducible to the legacy of Antigone. The latter, after all, offers only a limited political imaginary, one that can take us only so far as we travel beyond Europe and beyond cis-feminist assumptions about what it means to be a ‘woman’.
Political Bodies: Writings on Adriana Cavarero's Political Thought, 2024
This essay examines sexual violence as a form of ontological violence, which is to say, a form of... more This essay examines sexual violence as a form of ontological violence, which is to say, a form of violence that aims to destroy the embodied uniqueness of its victim. Drawing from Adriana Cavarero's work on singularity, violence, and narration, I trace the destruction on the scene of sexual violence, as well as the healing that can take place in its aftermath, through narrative attempts to reconstruct a self in the wake of ontological violence. I offer a reading of Susan Brison's autobiographical Aftermath, alongside engagements with Cavarero's Horrorism, Relating Narratives, and "Narrative Against Destruction."
Journal of Italian Philosophy, 2024
In this essay, I engage Adriana Cavarero's narrative theory and put it into conversation with the... more In this essay, I engage Adriana Cavarero's narrative theory and put it into conversation with the work of Black feminist scholars who engage in practices of narrative rewriting of the archives of Black life in the wake of slavery. First, I elucidate the importance of Cavarero's narrative theory for developing a framework for understanding selfhood in relational terms. Next, I turn to Saidiya Hartman's concept of critical fabulation, reading it as an example of the kind of relational narrative that Cavarero seeks to promote in her work. I suggest that Hartman, like Cavarero, ventures to trace the contours of the extraordinary singularity of the women and girls whose lives she narrates in her work-lives that would have been rendered invisible and silent had it not been for her insistence on putting them into what she calls a counternarrative. I also engage Christina Sharpe and M. NourbeSe Philip, among others, to expand my analysis of how it is that narration, and especially counternarratives, can serve as practices of care in the wake of violence and destruction. My hope is to open avenues for relating the narratives of these distant traditions to one another, through their shared commitment to relational uniqueness and their mutual desire to narrate history – and histories – otherwise.
This exciting collection offers a range of perspectives from some of the most prominent feminist ... more This exciting collection offers a range of perspectives from some of the most prominent feminist voices of our time, including Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, and Jack Halberstam. Employing experimental modes of thinking and writing, the contributors remain faithful to the feminist tradition of subversion and resistance, while refusing to submit to its political tradition of a loving sisterhood or dutiful daughterhood. Through productive disagreement and cognitive dissonance, the essays presented here reflect the specific circumstances of our present, and attempt to dream and envision possible alternatives for the future. The volume thus invites us to think of the becoming of feminism itself, and the possibilities of future feminisms-to-come.
Philosophy Compass, 2020
This essay examines Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero's ontology of uniqueness through a readi... more This essay examines Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero's ontology of uniqueness through a reading of Alex Haley's novel Roots, and the recent television adaptation of that book. If Cavarero has insisted throughout her work that we need to challenge the philosophical privileging of abstract universality and focus instead on the irreducibility of embodied singularity, and if such a move in her work has always relied on a feminist analysis of the role women play in such a drama, I argue that attention to issues of race and the institution of slavery both supports and complicates her analysis in meaningful ways.
Architecture and Culture, 2017
Abstract In a political present increasingly marked by bigotry and violence, the need to establis... more 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 Plato's Symposium and Luce Irigaray's 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?
Hypatia, 2018
This essay offers a critical analysis of Hannah Arendt's notion of natality through the lens ... more This essay offers a critical analysis of Hannah Arendt's notion of natality through the lens of Adriana Cavarero's feminist philosophy of birth. First, I argue that the strength of Arendtian natality is its rootedness in an ontology of uniqueness, and a commitment to human plurality and relationality. Next, I trace with Cavarero three critical concerns regarding Arendtian natality, namely that it is curiously abstract; problematically disembodied and sexually neutral; and dependent on a model of vulnerability that assumes equality rather than asymmetry. This last issue is further developed in the final section of the essay, where I examine the idea that birth, for Cavarero, becomes the very concept by which we can distinguish and normatively differentiate acts of care and love from acts of wounding and violence. Upholding the normative distinction here depends on a conceptual distinction between vulnerability and helplessness. To maintain the ethical potential of the scene o...
Diacritics, 2018
Abstract:In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler calls for practices of ... more Abstract:In Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Judith Butler calls for practices of long-distance solidarity where ethical bonds can emerge globally, across space and time. Such practices depend on what she calls a reversibility of proximity and distance, such that those suffering at a distance ("there and then") can be felt to be acutely close ("here and now"), thus demanding an ethical response. Put differently, we might say that what is at stake, for Butler, is our capacity to be present with those who are not de facto present to us in any immediate sense. Global assembly demands that we are co-present across geographical distance and cultural difference. But is this, we might ask, possible? What would it mean to be present together across spatiotemporal differences? This essay offers a critical examination of the very concept of presence implicitly operative in Butler's analysis, and reflects more broadly on the temporality of global assembly with reference to decolonial work on the concept of time. What would it mean for those of us who are socio-economically and geographically located at the "center" of time—in the present of colonial presence—to attempt to "reach out of" that present, to be co-present with those who are not? How is this not always already a gesture that reinforces colonial structures? How do the material conditions of "here" and "there" come to matter as we envision, with Butler, a global politics of embodied assembly?
Interviews: Beate Grimsrud (Swedish author), Bob Hansson (Swedish poet), Maya Lin (American artis... more Interviews: Beate Grimsrud (Swedish author), Bob Hansson (Swedish poet), Maya Lin (American artist and architect), Hannah Lindroth (Swedish musician), Susan Sontag (American intellectual).
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Papers by Fanny Soderback
“This provocative, unique examination of these two philosophers’ understandings of time provides a thought-provoking look at how time continues to be used in sexual differencing. Revolutionary Time will be an excellent resource for those interested in the philosophy of time, feminism, race studies, and the politics of power … Highly recommended.”
— CHOICE
“Revolutionary Time makes a distinctive contribution to contemporary feminist and continental philosophical thought. By engaging Kristeva and Irigaray in depth alongside one another, and making time the guiding thread for reading their work, the author generates insights that are not to be found elsewhere in the existing literature. Through its development of the concept of revolutionary time, the book offers rich resources for thinking about temporalization in its existential, ontological, and political dimensions, in ways that are particularly valuable for feminist projects of change and political transformation.”
— Rachel Jones, author of Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy