The Feminine and the Sacred (review)

Topically, this collection of letters, exchanged over a year between Clément and Kristeva, amounts to a meditation on the feminine, the sacred, and their relationship. They wonder aloud at the redemptive pressures that a feminine "style" of the sacred might exert against stultified, often terrifying and voracious, modern dogmas of nihilism. We have, after all, historically ignored this resource. These women search for it in Catholic ceremonies in Africa, in the philosophies of Europe and the intricacies of psychoanalysis, the architecture of Israeli synagogues and the strength of Mohammed's daughters, the funeral pyres and the lover-gods of Hindu India. And their book is a model of intellectual civility, where acrimony has no place, where the participants needn't share every assumption, needn't work on the same goals, needn't care about the same concerns to work together, to illuminate questions and ambiguities. The greater—the nontopical—lesson to be learned in reading this book is how to think well with others.