ABSTRACT
Julia Kristeva's hollow universalism challenges the ideals of sovereignty, universality and equality as being the most important sites of political negotiations of the modern state, transposing the political to areas such as literature and psychoanalysis. The hollow universalism of constitutional weakness will help develop the notion of a body transgressing the boundaries not only of social practices but also more importantly of language and thought. Feminists such as Toril Moi, Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser have observed the progressive potential in Kristeva's theory of a destabilising and displacing element in subjectivity. Discourses on the body and discourses on the body politics share a vocabulary in such a way that it necessarily will have an effect on our understanding of political practices —terms from each other, she argues: ‘A philosophically common metaphor for the appropriate relation between the mind and the body is to posit a political relation, where one should dominate, subjugate or govern the other.
