Kristeva's focus on representation, including her writings on art, constitutes an important component in the feminist Kristeva reception that I alluded to previously. One would expect her works on ethics to have a similar impact, but it is somewhat puzzling to compare the prominence of her ethical thought in the Kristeva scholarship with the relative neglect in the wider field of feminist ethics. For example, two of her best-known and highly influential essays, ‘Stabat Mater’ (1977a) and ‘Women's Time’ (1979), both of which articulate distinctive conceptions of the feminine and of the maternal, do not feature extensively in the field of feminist ethics. Her association with post-structuralism, and its perceived ethical deficit, may account for such a gap in the literature, yet even some of the prominent texts in post-structuralist feminist ethics pay scant attention to Kristeva's ethical thought.

This relative neglect within the wider area of feminist ethics is out of tune with the importance accorded to her ethics in the Kristeva scholarship. For example, some commentators have identified elements of her writings as specifi cally ethical, such as her Strangers to Ourselves (see Beardsworth 2004a: 130), while others take an even broader view, suggesting that an ethics is implicit in all of Kristeva’s work (Lechte and Margaroni 2004); one commentator goes as far as describing her as an ‘ethical thinker par excellence’ (Graybeal 1993: 32).