To experience the Other in its radical separation from herself . . . as an object of love.
I am quite dedicated to the feminist movement but I think feminism, or any other movement, need not expect unconditional backing on the part of an intellectual woman. I think the time has come to emerge out of the ‘for-women-only’ practice, out of a kind of mythicizing of femininity. […] I have the impression [some feminists] are relying too much on an existentialist concept of woman, a concept that attaches a guilt complex to the maternal function. Either one has children, but that means one is not good for anything else, or one does not, and then it becomes possibly to devote oneself to serious undertakings.
As far as I am concerned, childbearing as such never seemed inconsistent with cultural activity […] Mallarme asked, ‘What is there to say concerning childbirth?” I find that question more pungent than Freud’s well-known, ‘What does a woman want?” Indeed, what does it mean to give birth to a child? Psychoanalysts do not much talk about it. […] The arrival of a child is, I believe, the first and often the only opportunity a woman has to experience the Other in its radical separation from herself, that is, as an object of love.
—Julia Kristeva
