The sacrificial economy's awesome capacity for multiple disguises is most rivetingly attested to in a painting by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) titled "Time Unveiling Truth." The representation of woman in this painting is a cautionary motif for all feminists who seek emancipation. Tiepolo's painting depicts Father Time--muscular, sunburned, gnarled with age--grasping the figure of Truth, who is a beautiful young woman. As this painting is described by Perry Townsend Rathbone (1969), Truth sits serenely on the lap of Time, yielding to a "ceremonious disrobing." Regally dominating the composition, Truth's foot rests on the globe below her; her symbol, the sun, flies high in the sky above. For his part, Time's giant wings spell "irresistible strength" and his lowered head "speaks of determination." At the feet of Time are his customary attributes: a chariot, a scythe representing death, an infant symbolizing birth, and a parrot attesting to the vanity of human life. Rathbone's appreciation for the painting is clear: applauding the "sumptuous color, mastery of drawing, and brilliant brush work," he indicates that Tiepolo "surpasses almost every eighteenth-century artist" (127).

In Tiepolo's fantasy, as Rathbone reports it, Truth conquers all: does she not have the world at her feet? And her elegance, which Rathbone classifies as "triumphant," makes Time a rough-hewn servant to Truth's sacred authority. Even so, Rathbone's gushing commentary is curious; for, to an observant eye, something is terribly amiss in the painting. Notwithstanding Tiepolo's mastery of the art of drawing, Truth's right leg is positioned in relation to her body where her left leg should be. What is the meaning of this apparent dismembering and re-membering of Truth? Does Time hold her in coitus or, to the contrary, has Truth been the victim of a brutal rape (Kristeva, 154)?

Kristeva submits that Tiepolo's painting attests to a scene of conflict which, but for the telling leg, would be unknown. Only Truth's misplaced limb confirms the work of sacrifice: Truth is not the solar priestess of the Symbolic order, for she is one whose violation has caused Time and the sign to be. For Kristeva, the dis-ease of Truth's body suggests that heterosexual coitus is not the subject of Tiepolo's portrait, as Rathbone claims. For a difference which the love-making of Time and Truth might celebrate has been supplanted in the wake of a violent erasure of that difference by Time. Thus, in the homologous logic of the painting, Truth is a phallus (155).

What is the lesson of Tiepolo's painting for feminism? According to Kristeva, if feminists applaud that moment when woman becomes the truth of the temporal order through surrogate valorization, they fall prey to a crude but enormously effective trap (155). This trap is all the more lethal to the degree that the seductive beauty of a phallic Truth appears to attest to a feminine difference--a salutary trope of woman--which promises to elevate women's position in the world. Kristeva asks that feminists not overlook the dismembering of Truth's body by Time: her awkwardly placed limb gives the lie to the phallic fantasy of Tiepolo and shows that emancipation does not follow a dream of a goddess. To the contrary, within the sacrificial economy which bonds Time's Truth, the difference she bears--an alterity paradigmatically represented by sexual difference--always already has been throttled. Its force--jouissance and rejection--always already has been subjected to a matricidal sign. Thus, for Kristeva, the emergence of a nonsacrificial Truth awaits a change in the signifying economy. Only then could sexual difference, now structured by sacrifice, be expressed on other terms. Only then could genuine alterity and difference among persons be affirmed.

Julia Kristeva, "About Chinese Women," trans. Sean Hand. In The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.