LE DÉBAT: Unlike many post-’68 political actors and some of your sisters in the Women’s Movement, you have kept quiet. We know little about you. You are a legendary figure—a vivid reminder of the most outspoken wing of the MLF, the Psychanalyse et Politique group,
1 and yet a mystery…
A
NTOINETTE F
OUQUE: I wonder whether, even today, anything having to do with origins, which are always mythical, anything that remains of some primordial orality, of the mute word, isn’t seen as mysterious. Lacan used to say that to speak is to play the fool
(parler, c’est déconner).2 As for writing … !
As you know, what came to be called the Women’s Liberation Movement, the MLF, was created in the wake of May ’68. One could even say on that very ground. May ’68 was first and foremost an effervescence, an oral explosion, a cry; for me—and not only for me—it was a birth; perhaps that’s why it’s still burdened with so many mysteries. The Women’s Movement may have been started by intellectuals—Monique Wittig, Josiane Chanel, and myself—but the cry came first, and the body along with it; a body so harshly put down by the society of the 1960s, so violently repressed by the moderns of the era, the masters of contemporary thought.
Monique was already a recognized writer. For my part, I was working with literary journals:
Les Cahiers du Sud, Le Mercure de France, La Quinzaine littéraire. I was reading manuscripts for a publisher. But our movement did not begin with the written word; it began with what was called at the time
la prise de parole : taking the floor and speaking out, issuing protests and slogans of revolt, words from the body. I used to say that the revolution that the MLF was going to bring about would consist in lifting censorship on the body, just as in psychoanalytic practice and theory Freud had lifted censorship on the unconscious, and, of course, as a result, it would enrich the text, just as Freud had wanted to enrich the conscious mind.
But when you talk about a mysterious, legendary figure, you are going beyond me, I think, and raising the question of origins. This is a huge question that we could talk about for hours; it would touch not only on our contemporaries’ relations to that question but also on the relation that I myself, having been at the origin of the MLF (a moment that certain women historians today call its prehistory), have with my own origins, on several levels: real, fantastic, and symbolic. I used to say, in fact, that women’s civilizing development would take us from prehistory to posthistory.
The relations that our contemporaries still maintain with the question of origin is one of fear or rejection that is conflated with the fear of women or of a woman: some analysts have used the term
fantasmère, “phantas-mother,” to speak of that archaic figure, which was then in its heyday—for the early Women’s Movement excluded men, so as to re-mark our exclusion from most institutions and achieve status through opposition. It was virtually impossible to do otherwise. Reaching further back in history, some erudite readers might have remembered more or less vaguely, in this particular context, another A. Fouque—Adelaïde and not Antoinette, but nonetheless an Aixoise, a new Eve, bearer of sin and hated by her creator—who is at the origin of Zola’s monumental work
Les Rougon-Macquart.3I have to say that I was ill served by the way in which the Movement tended to close itself up, or off, as I have explained, and also by my own shut-in nature, which had to do, starting in adolescence, with my mobility problems and the pain and effort it cost me to get around, to get where I sometimes ought to have been: demonstrations, dinners, social gatherings. I was cut off from all that because I had to save my strength for my work.
And then what can only be called the unconscious root of misogyny—the foreclosure of the origin or, rather, as I have always insisted on putting it,
the foreclosure of the body of the mother as the site of the origin of living beings—was redoubled by my own relation to my origins: my psychic relation to my sexual origins, homosexed vis-à-vis the woman who was my mother and heterosexed vis-à-vis the man who was my father and my political relation to my historical, social, and cultural origins. Complex, even composite, relations to a heterogeneous origin—I have on occasion written
une(s) origine(s), “an origin(s),” just as I have written
une(s) femme(s), “(a) women.” The relation of rupture or alliance with an origin, including one’s own, seems to me to orient each individual’s destiny. This, for me, is the crux of it all; it is the very goal of the work of the body and the thought of the flesh. And it seems to me that as long as the investigation of this necessarily ambiguous relation does not take place, we are stuck in a monosexed and therefore lobotomized humanism.
As for me, I am trying to set origins in motion through a continual labor of “regression-reintegration” instead of repression or even foreclosure. It is like labor in pregnancy, a kind of intimate dynamic, an elementary movement.
As for what is “mysterious,” from the Eleusinian mysteries to Freud and his “black continent,” mysterious is the term that man comes up with wherever there is woman; mutatis mutandi , it could even be the certificate of authenticity that attests to the insistence or even the existence of woman. One day, the sciences of women, gyneconomy in particular, may well take up this mystery, think it through, reduce it, explain it, bring it to conscious awareness as much as possible, understand it and interpret it. What does the Romantic dream have in common with the dream in Freud’s interpretation? More or less what the Eleusinian mysteries have in common with the sciences of women.
LD: What were you doing on the eve of ’68?
AF: On the surface, I was an ordinary French teacher on long-term disability leave; in fact, I was a rebel. I was beginning my third year of doctoral studies, working with Roland Barthes on my thesis, which I never finished, on the notion of a literary avant-garde. I had come to Paris from Aix-en-Provence in 1960, was married to an intellectual my age. My daughter was four years old. My husband and I were working for François Wahl at
Le Seuil.4 My work, preparing reader’s reports, was an education for me in difficult disciplines—linguistics, psychoanalysis, antipsychiatry—and I kept abreast of the most recent contemporary texts: Sanguinetti, Balestrini, Porta; I even translated these authors. My future seemed clear; everything seemed to point me toward publishing, criticism, writing.
But in fact I was very rebellious. A woman’s economic independence, professional equality, and intellectual competence were not really valued. The milieu in which I found myself was very conservative in the way it operated, very repressive and intimidating in its modernist theorizings, and so it was extremely misogynist. I was constantly made aware of the false promise of equality, symmetry, and reciprocity that a university education had held out for so long. To have had a baby was almost shameful. Beyond that spurious equality, I felt other needs arising. I wanted to affirm in a positive way that I was a woman, since society—I might even say civilization—was penalizing me for being one.
LD: And it was in that context that you met Lacan?
AF: Yes. Through François Wahl I participated in the publication of Lacan’s Écrits: it was an interminable labor, taking more than two years. I was also attending Lacan’s seminar, along with Roland Barthes’s.
LD: And the analysis?
AF: I contacted Lacan in October 1968, at the time of our earliest meetings. I began my analysis in January 1969 and continued until 1974.
LD: Did you feel that you were a feminist before ’68?
AF: It never occurred to me to use that word. I felt like a woman who badly needed to be free, who was suffering, but every ism seemed like a trap to me.
Ever since I was a small child, I have questioned the lot of women. I was born of the desire of a working-class father, in 1936, which began as a year of many victories for him and ended with bitter defeats. I was conceived on January 1 and born on October 1, on the day Franco came to power in Spain. I come from an extended family, part Corsican and part Calabrian. We were something of a tribe, living close together. There was my father and my mother, my father’s brother and my mother’s sister—my godfather and godmother—and four children. My mother was one of a kind, but I grew up surrounded by the strength of maternal women. From very early on I was aware of their stamina, their courage, and their determination to integrate themselves—and their children at the same time—without disowning themselves.
My mother didn’t know how to read or write, and that was her constant complaint—she spoke of this as though it were her greatest misfortune. My father could read a newspaper. They were very civilized people, of the old school; I could almost call them “cultivated” because of their Mediterranean roots. That is one of the most paradoxical aspects of my highly problematic relationship with writing. (One of the reasons I went to see Lacan was that he was the author of
Écrits, as Montaigne was the author of
Essais, but he had never sought to write a book.)
My mother became French through marriage and was very proud of the fact. She considered it a sign of progress to have traded her father’s Italian name for her husband’s Corsican name. Yet she never forgot her matrilineal genealogy. Neither have I. Just as my mother named me after her mother, I named my daughter after mine. Over four generations, we seem to have been careful to establish a transmission, to inscribe another lineage. This was well before the MLF, and I used to say that I was a woman who was trying to find herself between mother and daughter, between woman and woman.
My mother was the most intelligent woman I have ever known, as well as the most independent. She had a kind of genius for freedom, for freedom without violence. Her mind was always at work. From a very young age, I could see, in spite of a total absence of the trappings of femininity in her—she didn’t wear makeup, she wasn’t flirtatious, and she had no interest in being elegant or stylish—that my mother was a woman. My father adored her silently. He would whistle the tunes of love songs to her; she knew the words. They met when she was sixteen, and he eighteen, and right until the end they retained a sort of youthful passion, even though my father had the temperament of a virile patriarch. During the war my father had been banned from the region because, while he was on strike, Pétain’s police had found him with his Communist Party card in his possession. Just as, during the First World War, my mother as the eldest child had stood fast with her brothers and sisters, now, under the Occupation, she took the whole tribe under her wing. In the most serious, the most dramatic situations she managed to find escape routes and safe havens. She steered us away from death. She was never inert, always active. She could sense danger ahead, and assess it. When there was a decision to be made, she was decisive: she would make her move, with us in tow. She was in charge twenty-four hours a day, always alert but not authoritarian in the least—sometimes angry, most often serious, yet cheerful. For example, when we were bombed out or had been evacuated because Marseille’s Vieux-Port district had been destroyed, she proved to be a real strategist, as subtle and crafty as Ulysses.
LD: When May ’68 happened, were you aware of what was going on in American feminism?
AF: Not at all. I had opened The Second Sex in the sixties only to read: “Women’s struggles are behind us.” I had never been politically active. I knew that I was born on the left and would die on the left, that I hated war and colonialism. Until I reached adulthood, I was part of what was still called the working class, but I never felt drawn to Sartrean engagement, to the “guilty conscience” of the intellectual.
I was concerned about social and political struggles, but from a distance. I observed them as though through a pane of glass. I could never manage to feel implicated and I felt a kind of disgust for the young women of my generation who got involved in the struggles of their lovers, their brother
normaliens;5 I felt the same way about my sister who, when she got engaged, tried to convince herself that she was a soccer fan.
I didn’t know what feminism was and I could say, now, that I regret that. It was a sign of my ignorance of the struggles of women in history. But I should emphasize that my distrust of ideologies—which I considered to be illusions as dangerous as religions, at the time—was such that I never defined myself as a feminist. Later, I fought against the Women’s Movement becoming the “Feminist Movement.” It seemed to me, perhaps wrongly, that with the word woman we might be able to reach perhaps not all women but at least the greatest possible number.
LD: But wasn’t the name Psychanalyse et Politique rather elitist?
AF: I didn’t choose that name; one usually doesn’t get to choose the name one is given at birth. In fact, Psychanalyse et Politique was what used to be called a consciousness-raising group, but one that did not ignore the dimension of the unconscious, at the level of what Freud called the psychopathology of everyday life, wit, or parapraxis. And at that time, you’ll recall, everyone was talking about desire, antipsychiatry, anti-Oedipus, and at Vincennes psychoanalysis was taught outdoors.
6 Our claim that we were articulating psychoanalysis and politics felt more like a luxury than elitism.
One of the things I wanted, at the time, was to bring to as many people as possible what was then the cutting edge of contemporary thought—in other words, to transcend the stereotypes of petit bourgeois culture. I wanted to share with any woman who came to the Movement, just as I had done with the women in my family, with my mother in particular. I wanted to find a common language without bowing to class stereotypes or academic ideals. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and just the opposite often happened: I was accused of being a theorizing terrorist; only my accusers weren’t workers, they were sociologists, academics who were very hostile to psychoanalysis.
LD: What were you doing during the events of May ’68?
AF: Monique Wittig and I were at the Sorbonne. We formed a cultural action committee that drew filmmakers, actors, writers, intellectuals: Bulle Ogier, Michèle Moretti, André Téchiné, Danièle Delorme, Marguerite Duras—these are just a few of the names that come to mind.
LD: You were thirty-two years old then. You found yourselves in the position of elder sister to the generation of ’68 properly speaking, with the influence that naturally comes from seniority …
AF: You mean in the MLF? Age distinctions were even less important there than at the Sorbonne in May. We were all young and beautiful. For most of us it was our first involvement in politics. We felt as though we had grown fifteen years younger. We all felt, in ’68, as though we had come down with a healthy case of adolescence. Later we fought systematically against age distinctions. At our meetings high school girls rubbed shoulders exuberantly with Christiane Rochefort,
7 as women workers did with women engineers, and daughters with mothers.
LD : Did you feel at ease right away in the political environment?
AF: The truth is that if Monique hadn’t dragged me by the scruff of the neck I would never have gone to the Sorbonne. I was very intimidated. I had never spoken in public except in class. That probably explains, in my own case, but not only mine, a tone and manner that was simultaneously vibrant and excessive—it was a clumsy revolt; it had been held in check too long.
LD: And from there to the Women’s Movement as such?
AF: Monique and I quickly learned from our experience at the Sorbonne that if we did not ask our own questions, on our own terms, we would be overpowered or excluded. For the first time in my life it was necessary and urgent for me to anchor myself in a decisive historical moment in which my personal history began to come into play. It was a need to intervene, to give something to others and also to give something to myself, to act out of gratitude as well as out of egotism. That’s what made it different from a commitment of the leftist sort. During the summer of ’68, over the holidays, we decided to begin holding meetings in October. We then set about to read and critique the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, with whatever means we had at our disposal, but we found nothing that suited us in their doctrines. We were bent on freeing ourselves from the constraints of our domestic, professional, and emotional lives. We wanted to expand the field of our subjectivity. We wanted to embark on the discovery of women through the discovery of each woman, beginning with ourselves. We had thrown ourselves into Maoist-Leninist-Marxist causes, but we were rowing against the tide.
LD: When did you make the further leap and choose the Psychanalyse et Politique orientation?
AF: Almost immediately, since we were reading Freud, too, but I must admit that, though not uncritical, I let myself be dazzled by Freud’s undertaking. The masculine ideology that weighed on the psychoanalytic revolution wasn’t enough to make me reject such a tool of knowledge, especially if that meant erecting a feminist counterideology. I couldn’t see myself, in this high seas adventure, trading Freud’s submarine for the scooter of some feminist, even a famous one. Especially since both vehicles seemed to me to be headed in the same direction, straight for the Phallus—but with the feminists you weren’t allowed to be aware of it or to point out the shoals. It seemed to me that if we didn’t take the unconscious into account, we would soon be drifting straight into delirium. Psych et Po reflected my desire to understand the unconscious aspects of the political engagements of the time, as well as to bring the power of psychoanalysis out into the open not only in institutions and schools but also in the discovery and theorization of the unconscious. I thought it vital that politics should know and question the unconscious, and vice versa. Simply put, there was politics in the unconscious and there was the unconscious in politics. Since then I have often thought of it as a sort of parental couple that brought me into the world of time and space: psychoanalysis is my mother, with her inquisitive intimacy and watchful anguish, and politics is my father, with his proletarian revolt, his commitment to resistance. A couple continually coupling and uncoupling so that both might affirm the uniqueness of their individual fields and the identity of their separate bodies, so that he might give to her, the woman, a political existence, so that she might make him, the man, conscious of his dreams.
LD: There was a period of gestation before the movement went public …
AF: Yes. For two years, we worked intensively among ourselves: we met, wrote leaflets, put out information … Our first public appearance—there were thirty of us—took place in the spring of 1970, at Vincennes. For me, that was the public debut. Because there were two launchings: one at Vincennes, in the university context, and another at the Arc de Triomphe, staged to commemorate “the unknown soldier’s unknown wife.” I wasn’t there, and that was no accident. This was a media event with three celebrities and almost no one else. Those two events, at Vincennes and at the Arc de Triomphe, pointed up the divergent paths that lay before the Movement.
After we went public, I was offered a lectureship at Vincennes, which I accepted on a collective basis. With the start of the school year in 1970 we began meeting in this broader setting. The Movement started to snowball. Other small groups joined ours.
LD: You met with Simone de Beauvoir?
AF: For a long time she was suspicious of the Movement, even hostile. The impetus for our meeting came from the feminists, but it was she who convened those who were, in her words, its “leaders.” I really had to be coaxed, because I couldn’t understand this way of going about things. She asked us to explain to her our conception of a women’s movement.
Sartre, at the time, was taking up leftist causes. Perhaps there was a desire for symmetry. Perhaps he had explained to her the stakes and the importance of an uprising like this, just as he had incited her to write
The Second Sex after his
Anti-Semite and Jew. Ingenuously, we presented our hopes and our dreams. I spoke of my daughter, I spoke of Lacan, of Barthes, and especially of Derrida. I admired his ideas, and most of the time I admired the texts of those about whom he wrote, from Leroi-Gourhan to Blanchot. I did not go over very well, to say the least. Even though I felt a kind of deference toward de Beauvoir’s intellectual persona, for her stubborn desire to be at Sartre’s side, the couple’s life that she was living struck me as hardly exemplary and enviable. I had admired
The Mandarins; I found it painful to see her turned systematically into the laughing stock of a clan of misogynist intellectuals. But I couldn’t understand, then, why this intransigent moralist, this lofty conscience, hadn’t joined the Resistance during the war; why, during the Occupation, between her bicycle trips and her climbing excursions around Marseilles, she spent her time getting her manuscripts published at Gallimard, which was controlled by the Nazis at the time. Ultimately, nothing was said, but my plea that our Movement take psychoanalysis into account as the only rigorous discourse on sexuality clearly placed me in the wrong camp. Not long afterward, at our general meeting, the feminists were shouting for heads—mine on the end of a pike and Simone de Beauvoir’s to grace their journal Les
femmes s’entêtent.
8Many of us experienced it as a hostile takeover bid, as an occupation or, if you prefer, a colonization, but we managed to resist the label “Revolutionary Feminist Movement” by insisting on “women” and “liberation.”
9 Actually, I don’t like talking about Simone de Beauvoir. Just as it is often said that the greatness of an enemy in a fair fight does us honor, I have often said to myself that the unfairness of her attacks made me feel ashamed.
LD : What exactly lay behind the rift over the word feminist?
AF: It has been said in recent years that the Movement had two orientations, one toward equality, the other toward identity. I want to make it clear, right from the start, that identity in this context must be understood as the uniqueness of the other and not as sameness.
For many, the best way of fighting oppression and the discrimination that comes from the difference and the dissymmetry between the sexes was to abolish difference, to deny dissymmetry. To my mind, that was like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The rallying cry “One of every two men is a woman” then became “A woman is a man like any other.” It seemed that the only alternative to exclusion was assimilation. This return to an absolute universalism, this militancy in favor of indifference, seemed to me preanalytic and archaic, given how far contemporary thinking had come.
The notion of equality is still quite sketchy. It has to be put to work, set in motion. Those who favored integration exclusively now know its limits. I could say, for example, that equality is the basis for difference or, rather, its impetus: it is the motor of future differences. Difference keeps it in check. It’s something like the relation between consciousness and the unconscious. Consciousness is the tip of the iceberg, the part we can see, just as equality is the visible part of differences. Consciousness without the unconscious is only an illusion of intelligence, and equality without difference is only an intellectual construct, a ruinous theoretical delusion.
But I avoided the word “identity”, which lent itself to misinterpretation at a time when the human subject was on trial; the word might have been confused with the identical, with sameness, whereas what we had to do was get away from identity and find a decentered position, each one of us, woman and man, according to her or his own uniqueness. Individualist feminism seemed to me to be saying: “The same model for everyone, and everyone for herself.” As for us, ours were the desire and the utopia of “each according to her own uniqueness, together.”
LD : How do you remember those divisive and controversial years?
AF: As truly frightful. And quite cruel … Most of the time, my adversaries wouldn’t engage in discussion with me, on the pretext that I would always end up being right. I never went outside the MLF to respond to those attacks except when we were accused later on—our publishing house was the pretext—of being a sect of thieves and criminals. And even then I refused to make a personal issue out of it and left it up to the courts, with Georges Kiejman as intermediary. It was very destructive, but no more so than any political confrontation can be. I suffered as much as I would have had bombs been falling, I lost the last of my motor capabilities, but I learned a lot.
My psychoanalytic work helped me to keep from drowning in hate or in terror; it helped me to symbolize, to swim, to live. The name feminist, some women have said, gave them a sense of unity, a dynamic feeling of belonging, a strong ego, and our approach to the issues was like a wet blanket on all that. Our questions were destabilizing, and that’s why the disputes were so bitter. But why should women do away with aggressivity, violence, and hatred, and settle a priori into the most disturbing kind of monochromatic Stalinist pacifism?
LD : All of this became intertwined with your analysis with Lacan.
AF: As I have said, my analysis helped me to “roam” instead of foundering in leftist-feminist impasses. It freed me from my adherence to all kinds of illusions that were as perverse for me as they were innocent for others. My analysis kept me decentered, unquestionably a painful state; it kept me withdrawn and silent for the most part, moored in a dissymmetry that was fruitful for me but disturbing for everyone who felt that it didn’t fit, that it somehow clashed with Psych et Po. Weren’t they dealing with a new sect? Well, that’s because they represented the reigning dogma …
LD: And yet the École Freudienne
10 itself began to function like a sect of particularly blind followers …
AF: In my analysis with Lacan I was always very free with my criticism. I believe he appreciated it, that it helped advance his work, and that, without the MLF, he wouldn’t have written
Encore . I used to go to all his seminars. I also attended his closed clinical seminars at Sainte-Anne,
11 where he presented his patients and for which he himself had offered to register me. But just as I had never wanted to belong to a political party, I never wanted to join the École Freudienne. I had enough to do coping with my inhibitions, my symptoms, my anxieties, without having to deal with institutional constraints, without casting my lot with a group of major intimidators.
We had so much to do to establish our own laws within the law, to get away from the outlaw status to which women are confined, to escape our foreclosure, even more than our exclusion, and we felt so small, so inexperienced, so clumsy … It seemed too easy to drive us to the point where we would start to kill each other. We would have preferred to keep up the fight, if debate over ideas was impossible. But many different clans were invested in seeing the fight turn into a death struggle for pure prestige, a fight over power that we lacked and are not about to acquire any time soon. The exception was Simone de Beauvoir: after being a figure of ridicule in the 1960s, she became in her turn an unsurpassable intellectual master, as some of her journalist groupies have written … At the same time, it was like riding a great Ferris wheel, experiencing a moment of destabilizing but also joyous giddiness, a chaotic and productive education, an exhausting and exalting apprenticeship to life and history.
LD : Let’s not dwell on the most familiar aspects of the Movement: the series of publications beginning with
Le torchon brûle in 1970,
12 and especially, of course, the struggle for abortion rights. But just a word or two on that subject. Didn’t a media strategy, the kind that you don’t like, ultimately pay off in the famous “Manifesto of the 343” in April 1971?
13
AF: I recognize that, and I acknowledged it immediately. I wouldn’t have approached things that way at the time. It was the feminists who had the idea of including celebrities in the manifesto, following the leftist model. That was very positive, but it hasn’t made me any less distrustful of the media; they’ve made me pay dearly. My approach was a bit idealistic. It wasn’t a desire to hide, but rather a need not to go on display. My dream was that thought and action could go forward hand in hand, at a slow and confident pace, that we were going to narrow the gap between those who slaved away in obscurity and the stars who stole the spotlight and put on the show. I’m always delighted when a famous personality joins in a struggle, provided that she brings to it more than she takes away; what worries me is the way famous names can capitalize on a cause to which they are not committed. It was that kind of narcissistic speculation that we were confronting; first we had bank credit cards and now we have media credit cards, via various associations and groupings. Watch out for inflation, rollovers, and the market crash of narcissism! It’s not that I refused to acknowledge the importance and the validity of the media, but that was the time when they were starting to want to dictate to us, to foist new stereotypes on us, and I saw no shame in not rushing to accept their terms. I not only signed the manifesto but I also actively led the fight for legal and free abortion.
LD: And was it after such a victory, the passage of the law legalizing abortion, that you wanted to further the Movement by creating the publishing house Des femmes?
AF: It was a dream I had had since the Movement began. The negative battles that had to be fought, the struggles to resist and defeat oppression, gave me only very limited and ambivalent satisfaction. I signed the abortion manifesto out of solidarity and conviction; the Veil law was vital for us all,
14 but I could never have had an abortion. From the beginning I wanted to build, to bring into being, to lay out positive paths. I wanted to emphasize women’s creative power, to show that women enrich civilization and that they are not merely the keepers of hearth and home, shut up in a community of the oppressed. I wanted to open the Movement up to the public: to publish. My dream was not only a publishing house but also a bookstore, a public place open to men as well as women. I knew that even the most scrupulous publishers chose manuscripts according to criteria that penalized women. The first text we published had been rejected by other publishers. As you know, the experience brought us more envy than either thanks from women or admiration from men. I believe that during those dark years only François Maspero suffered as much as we did.
15 But to be circumspect about it, I think that things could not have gone otherwise.
LD: How would you assess this enterprise? At the time there was much talk about promoting a feminine writing, écriture féminine. What are your thoughts on the project and its outcome today?
AF: To put the best face on things, I suppose that the smart thing to do with the business would be to fold … The last ten years have been hard on publishers. As for “écriture féminine,” once again, we weren’t the ones to come up with the expression. I think it’s a French translation of the English expression “female writing.” But in French,
la femelle hasn’t been a human category for several centuries now; in other words, the woman, in French, has lost the integrity of her sex. After having been completely sequestered in her uterus for thousands of years, it now turns out that she doesn’t have one, that she is merely gender, the other metaphor for phallic monism. The human female is foreclosed from our language, a phallic language if ever there was one. Thus the feminine is a gender that many men—from the transvestite to the poet, that imaginary transsexual—feel they can assume. We can read femininity in Rilke’s writing, or in Rimbaud’s. It’s not simple … A human being is born with a sex, as a girl or a boy, but also as a speaking being. Our experiences, our actions are constantly informed by this physiological determinism. For the man as well as for the woman, physiology is destiny. But at every moment also, what we say or what we write either accepts or rejects the constraint that the body imposes on language and on the fantasies that language produces in its speakers.
One is born a girl or a boy and then becomes a woman or a man, masculine or feminine; writing will therefore never be a neutral act. Anatomical destiny is always being marked or re-marked. The differences between genders come along and validate or invalidate the differences between the sexes. How can writing, as the experience of a sexually differentiated subject, be neutral? We did not want to put the cart before the horse. We accepted the challenge, took the risk of proposing that texts written by women might put language to work in ways that perhaps could bring out—why not?—a difference between the sexes. We never set out to declare as a foregone conclusion that there was such a thing as female writing. When Milan Kundera, in The Art of the Novel, speculates on how he might use the word contraband to smuggle into Czech the French word for having an erection, bander , what is he talking about, what is he doing? Lacan, too, said that language has only that on its mind. What is “that”? Having a hard-on? And in the meantime, how do women find their pleasure? For millennia, men have worked at symbolizing and inscribing their phallic libidos. I remember a wonderful text by Pierre Guyotat, “L’autre main branle” (The other hand jerks off). They could certainly wait a few decades, give us a few centuries, before they decide whether equivalent work by women is possible …
Moreover, “l’écriture féminine” has been used as an ultimate weapon, a cream pie to be thrown in the face of first-rate writers who didn’t wait either for the MLF or Des femmes to come into being before setting forth their poetics. I’m thinking specifically of Hélène Cixous: her
Dedans, which won her the Prix Médicis in 1969, carried within it the seeds of everything she would write later.
16LD : What about the Women’s Movement today? It seems to have been caught up in the general ebbing of the spirit of May ’68.
AF: The Movement was a creature of May ’68. It made its stand against the tide of extreme leftism and now is going to go far beyond it, just as it is now moving beyond the symbolic restoration that has come with the eighties. You don’t need me to tell you that upheavals of such scope don’t play themselves out in ten or twenty years. It is not about change, in the sense of a changeover; it is about the species’ growing pains. We are at the heart of civilization’s famous discontent, the passage from one stage to another, in which women find themselves involved against their will, taken hostage and made to serve as symptoms of the Other’s madness. This is what is happening to Salman Rushdie as well. You go as far as you can at any given moment, given the array of forces and what history can handle. It may later seem like an ebbing, but this is deceptive. New paths are opening up, there is groundwater yet from which new inspiration can be drawn. There will be new ways of transcribing what seems illegible to us today. Through progressive regressions, sometimes, perhaps, women are still advancing. After ten or fifteen years of state feminism (Françoise Giroud was named secretary of state for the condition of women in 1974), the founding militants could very well demobilize; it was even vital for them not to repeat themselves and to head in new directions. Most of them have indeed done so.
The many levels of resistance—subjective and objective, psychic, emotional, political and narcissistic—to this movement of civilization are now obvious. Resistance, in politics as in analysis, functions in complex and polyvalent ways and is part of a healthy maturation process.
Clearing pathways to symbolization—a term I prefer to “sublimation”—is a complex undertaking. Creation and invention are necessarily paradoxical. Freud, who for half a century theorized the talking cure, spent the last several years of his life with a cancer of the jaw that prevented him from speaking. His daughter Anna, his Antigone, delivered his lectures for him.
You asked me for a personal example. I could say that my movement, which I have never confused with my mobility, is certainly not unrelated to my paralysis. I am afflicted with one of those forgotten illnesses for which there is still no cure. I’ve probably had it, latently, since birth or before, and it manifested itself after a vaccination that I had after I finished school. The neurologists warned me that one day very soon I’d be confined to a wheelchair. I’ve managed to put off that day for more than thirty years, with a lot of effort to adapt to a “normal” life. Analysis has, of course, helped me in this. But perhaps at times it has over-immobilized me. And the Movement that has taken so much of my strength has also given me a great deal. And, finally, perhaps I can say that, just as thirst teaches us what water is, immobility has taught me movement.
The destructive forces came from without. Dialogue among ourselves may have been difficult, but it was made destructive by outsiders in whose self-interest it was to publicize the conflict. Everyone knows that fraternity can breed fratricide. But no one—except the right wing—thinks of using the internal struggles among the various tendencies of the Socialist Party to destroy one member or another. That wasn’t the case where we were concerned. Our differences, which after all were quite normal, were used to discredit us. It seemed that everything we did or said had to be held against us. The misogynists were right to defend themselves; the stakes were very real. We simply didn’t think that there would be so many misogynists or that they would find so many women to be their accomplices. Every little group, every party, every clique, tried to manipulate and control us, tried to take advantage of us. Each organization yielded up its own version of feminism. Perhaps it was a sign that that ideology was politically and symbolically dependent on the phallic structure. On the horizon was the mirage of equality that, since 1789, has offered the illusion of a Promised Land attainable through a class struggle that no one believed in any longer.
LD : According to a certain logic, one might in good faith consider universality to be more liberating than an identity that imprisons women in their biological determinacy.
AF: Why should biological determinacies continue to be a prison for women? Shouldn’t it be just the opposite, from the moment that one has control over one’s own fertility? After all, if anatomy is destiny, this also holds true for men. The reality principle cannot ignore these determinacies, and a just society would not exploit them. Equality and difference must go hand in hand; one cannot be sacrificed for the other. Sacrificing equality for difference takes us back to the reactionary positions of traditional societies, and sacrificing the difference between the sexes—and along with it the richness of life that this difference brings—in favor of equality sterilizes women and impoverishes humanity as a whole. It makes it impossible to reach the stage of symbolic genitality. This should be understood as a metaphor and not as some kind of organic reductionism. Genius and
geni(t)ality: it’s the same thing, isn’t it? When we recognize the genius of scientists or artists, we admire their ability to produce some living signifier, to bring into the world a form, an element, a unique flesh that didn’t exist before they created it. These “geniuses” have always used procreative metaphors in talking about their work. It seems to me that to this day the notion of equality has never been adequately articulated. Once I would have called it an idealistic concept. We never found the model to be of much relevance when we fought alongside women in Latin America or in the Maghreb except on the level of labor issues; even so, women who enjoy the benefits of equal rights in their professional lives are penalized de facto because of the dissymmetry inherent in procreation, a dissymmetry that at first no one wanted to take into account. One day procreation will be seen as
creation of the living-speaking (
création du vivant-parlant); it will be recognized as a major contribution of riches brought by women to the human community, and, for themselves, not only as physiological-psychosexual maturity but as a possibility of free fulfillment of desire. That is reality for the majority of women, and if some of us, without having to give anything up, also write books or become prime minister, so much the better.
LD: Couldn’t it simply have been the considerable success of the Women’s Movement in society at large that led to the demobilization of its activists?
AF: You may well be right. Even if it has, today, lost some of its momentum, it’s a movement that history will say was a success. And yet the official documents (the UNESCO report), surveys, media analyses,
17 everything indicates setbacks, exclusion, threats, and the repression of women. More than acts of resistance, what we see just about everywhere are countermovements. Basic misogynistic oppression has been succeeded by an anti-emancipatory repression. The normative prohibitions on which our societies are founded are turning perversely against women’s new freedoms. I’m thinking not only of what is a totally political alliance of the three monotheisms, but also of the return of Oedipus, the demanding, abusive parricide son, served up to us by the media in some new guise every day: so-and-so, thirty-eight years old, rapes his sixty-eight-year-old mother; someone else, thirty-six years old, brings a suit against his mother for having abandoned him; another man, younger, kills his girlfriend because she was more successful than he; and so on and so forth. Criminality has a sex. Men who want to remain in their protracted state of infantile omnipotence are afraid of women. Women are afraid because they are in mortal danger. From Louis Althusser
18 to Thierry Paulin, who killed old women, to Karlin’s hero
19 crimes are constantly being justified or excused through powerful identification fantasies. Whether they’re delusional or passionate, criminals or artists, sons “identify” sons with utter brutality and complete impunity.
It will no doubt be more difficult for women to free themselves from the Son than from the Father, who, to my mind, does not exist as such; it’s hard to cast off the role of Jocasta, to escape the passion according to St. Oedipus. The temptation to redeem the murderer will be great—that’s a very feminine way of escaping castration. Have a child and keep him for herself, raving mad or autistic, as a phallus with whom to shut herself up outside herself and in an exile of the self, rather than producing a child and letting him set off toward his own destiny as a man.
LD : Let’s return to May ’68. In retrospect, how do you understand that movement, and where do you situate the Women’s Movement within it?
AF: I experienced May ’68 as a real revolution and, as time goes by, I’m more and more convinced of this: it was the great leap out of the capitalist era, which has little left to do today but come to fruition or, better yet, come to an end worldwide. May ’68 was the end of the era of economics as the ultimate determinant, both for free market liberalism and for Marxism. And along with that end we saw the end of de Gaulle, the father and founder-president of the most monarchical of republics; almost two hundred years after the regicide, it suddenly became clear that de Gaulle was only a Son. There is no Father. May ’68 was the first time the Sons came together as such; after liberty and equality, we entered the era of fraternity. The demands of phallo-narcissism were written everywhere, on all the walls. Remember those two posters—“Power comes from the barrel of a gun,” one of them went; the other said “Power comes from the barrel of the phallus”—and those graffiti of erect penises that joyously covered the walls of the Sorbonne, the Latin Quarter, and then Vincennes? All of them self-portraits of the extreme leftist as young Narcissus or old Priapus. I firmly believe that the priapism of the extreme left is something that’s been overlooked.
Linked to the narcissistic valorization of the penis, the so-called phallic phase establishes a logic according to which, for the boy, only those like himself, possessing the same prestigious organ, are worthy of respect: the double, the reflection, the twin, the brother, or, these days, the buddy. A chain of identifications among all those that glitter: the golden boys have the gold and the phallus. The former doesn’t come without the latter, but it’s the latter that manufactures and attracts the former. The phallus presides over the gold. That’s what is new.
What is at stake in what Freud called the “primacy of the phallus,” for both sexes, is essentially narcissistic in nature. This logic can thus be termed phallo-narcissistic. The omnipotence and omnipresence of the phallus can also be represented by the fetish, which, as Freud says, is erected as a “memorial” before the horror of the supposedly female or maternal castration; it is a pure denial, upheld today by universal commodification, the generalized exhibition of “nomadic objects,” the ownership of gadgets, of prostheses—pure denial because how can this mother-woman have lost a penis that she never had except in his, the son-man’s, perverse imagination?
The phallus is the emblem, the image, the master signifier, the general equivalent of narcissistic wholeness. A woman, when she finds herself deprived of a “libido of one’s own,” is subjected to its imperialism, to its mode of economic development. If she is not satisfied with acting as Echo, then she has no choice for self-expression other than to take the phallic path, but at the expense of her psychic and physiological integrity; she commits her body to it or, rather, she is given notice that she must surrender her body as a hostage and succumb to a pathology in which she will be seen by herself and by others as the phallus—body and soul, the erect obelisk body that one still sees today in many movie actresses and models, the Father-God souls that many women writers and government ministers seem to have. And that’s how women, with or without the chador, get caught in the trap of a phallic narcissism that has little to do with them and become its most perfect symptom.
Christianity is a
filiarchy, a religion of the son, a filial monotheism, one might say. Socialism is perhaps its secular version. As you can imagine, in such a climate women have not had an easily defined place, given that nothing excludes girls more than brotherhoods do. By identifying with the sons, girls can always dress themselves up as
filses, “girl-sons,”
20 but, here again, symmetry is an illusion and a trap. If you’ve ever experienced the atmosphere of condescension towards women in extreme left-wing groups, you understand this. Their women militants came to the MLF to complain about this, seeking to escape dangerous identifications. Women in France who have sided with violent groups or supported terrorism are rare indeed. The feminists from Action Directe
21 came by once or twice to wreck the Des femmes Bookstore, but the analysis of ambient violence, an analysis to which the Movement as a whole and not only Psych et Po was committed, served as a powerful brake on the all-too-human death drive—though without repressing or denying it.
I never thought the principal enemy was patriarchy, but I have thought and still do think that the main adversary is filiarchy. The coming together of sons and brothers after the parricide to establish democracy excludes women radically and a priori. Society is doubly
hommosexed if,
22 moreover, its emblem of power is no longer mere gold. The phallus may turn out to be an even more destructive standard. That was the challenge our movement wanted to take up.
LD: Have subsequent events confirmed this diagnosis?
AF: Absolutely. And beyond my worst fears. The fraternal project has been strengthened. Though forestalled for a time by the Women’s Movement, thanks to socialist unity that played a pivotal role, the brothers were quick to take their revenge, and the reprisals are far from over. With May ’68 we entered into the pregenital stage. This narcissistic era is very important because it holds the promise of progress, of a civilization that privileges the image—it is part and parcel of the media age, but it represents a mortal danger if it is abused through isolation or massive identification. The image reigns supreme. “The Mirror Stage,” an essay Lacan wrote in 1936, foresaw this.
23 In 1968 we shifted into a new libidinal structure that Freud had introduced as narcissism fifty years earlier. After the age of passions and interests that Hirschman has written about,
24 we have the age of powers, identities, sovereignties, the age of the narcissistic democratization of absolute monarchy: first the Sun King and then star wars, which Roberto Rossellini’s
The Rise to Power of Louis XIV heralded in such a subtle way. This is the age of “self-”: beings who self-produce, self-exhibit, and self-promote like so many self-made goods. We are going to be living through years of pomp and ceremony, the staging of the ego, a period of generalized false selves rather than self-building. Activities that up until now have been undertaken most discreetly, from mountain climbing to writing, now have to be exhibited and shown on television. For the last fifteen years any writer short on fame has had to pivot around a heliocentric master word and get up on a stage where the ideal substitute for any standard whatsoever sucks in those with the ambition of shining when their turn comes. There is no hint of hegemonic ambition in Bernard Pivot’s personality, the accusations of this or that wounded Narcissus notwithstanding; nonetheless, an important part of Pivot’s fame is unquestionably a pure signifying effect.
25LD: You have a somber, not to say pessimistic, view of what the future holds for us.
AF: In fact, I think that the twenty-first century world of images and sons that lies ahead of us will be one that excludes women and all differences, even as integration will be the only thing anyone will talk about. After all, for all its promotion of equality, wasn’t the nineteenth century nevertheless the century of the bitterest struggles?
LD: Didn’t Freud translate a common prejudice into the language of psychoanalysis and make women the locus of narcissism?
AF: Yes, but wrongly, in my opinion … Freud simply didn’t know that a woman could be anything other than either the son’s mother, phallicized by her offspring, or else the father’s daughter, “the girl as phallus.”
26 The French ethnopsychiatrist Georges Devereux goes even further: speaking of Baubo, he claims that by showing her sex, she immediately situates it on the side of the Phallus.
27 Thus, with women, whatever is not kept hidden is to be considered as something exhibited, as belonging to phallic territory in a narcissistic naturalization. The only way women can avoid phallic exhibition is to put on the chador, the ritual foreskin of this “phallic age” from which it is clearly impossible to escape. So we go from Scylla to Charybdis. But this is a question about which much more needs to be said than I can say here.
LD: In concrete terms, today’s proliferation of images is associated with a transformation of the image of men, a transformation that is generally interpreted as a feminization.
AF: Masculine and feminine are twins in a way, monozygotic twins who admire each other, trade places with each other in a perverse mode and play on genders, without real sexual intercourse. Femininity is a disguise. Homosexual men—fashion designers, for example—dream of an ideal femininity and project themselves onto it. Along with the feminization you mention, this is the very heart of a false difference between the sexes that is so constricting for so many women: one has to look like a man dressing up as a woman. We have not gotten out of the category of the double: A and A’ rather than A and B.
LD: Could you expand more specifically on the connection you make between “phallic” and “narcissistic”?
AF: At this stage of an erotics that is very remote from its phallic economy, the nature of display, exhibition, the subject’s complacency before the mirror, the body’s syncope, it’s hard to distinguish between a phallus—a symbolic object standing in for every visual object of desire—and a representation of an erect penis. As with capitalism, what we’re dealing with is a primitive phallicism, a kind of obscene priapism, an apt figure for extremism. Poles apart, on the
Bébête Show we have Marchy for Marchais and Pencassine for Le Pen.
28 Still no women there, just their defigurations. Women are exhibited in places where they are not present, and where they are present they are prevented from speaking. It’s the historical scene of the oldest kind of theater. Women—symptoms of a castration that has nothing to do with them, but which sons resist with all their might because they are its prey—are made invisible. There are practically no more women to fill the superstar anchor position on the evening news.
The rallying cry of American therapists and academics is be visible. Lacan had already advised his disciples: “Make yourself known.” And so we are witnessing the emergence of a new type of persons who take on the task of manufacturing themselves through the practice, along with body building, of what might be called “self-building.” This could well be an obligation that will, as time goes by, become difficult to shirk without succumbing to more and more drastic episodes of manic-depressive delirium.
LD: So what is to be done, given this new world? It’s hard to imagine you settling for simply observing the phenomenon …
AF: We must be able, through speculation as well as through analytic regression, to get out in front of what’s happening, to fly ahead when we can no longer hobble along, because, as usual, history will not speak in a single voice. Besides, this narcissistic trend wasn’t born yesterday. It corresponds to an enduring tendency, but there comes a time when a latent and diffuse phenomenon manifests itself, takes its place in history, and takes over. That, in particular, I think, is what May ’68 revealed straightforwardly, and it is in this respect that May ’68 was a revolution. The historicization of the narcissistic trend we are facing might not be a bad thing. We could also be seeing the advent of a higher humanism, a civilization in which it might be possible to begin to think. And while we are at it, perhaps we can develop a theory of genitality and think about how to get beyond self-creationism. The
production of living beings is tripartite: one (male) multiplied by one (female) makes one (male or female). That tripartition is denatured by the Trinity: One alone in Three, Three that make only One. If we succeed in dismantling such devices, if one day we learn what makes them exclude all heterogeneity, we will then be able to think through genitality, to have done with the fantasy of the dark continent. A well-tempered narcissism must be invented. It’s possible to contain the star-cancer of phallic erotics (by star-cancer I mean the flip side of disaster), the narcissistic inflation as well as the ossified phallic disposition that overcompensates for it, by putting the libidinal economy of the phallus to work and by creating the epistemological field of a libidinal economy specific to women. This way we shall begin to conceive of a heterosexed civilization.
There are two sexes. This is a reality that history, if it wants to remain worthy of its ideals, should make its fourth principle, after liberty, equality, and fraternity. The Women’s Movement has carried with it, from the beginning, this fourth revolution that I used to call the “revolution of the symbolic.”
It’s possible to imagine the creation of an epistemological field that will take its place alongside the social sciences, the sciences of men: it would be the sciences of women, which would proceed from gyneconomy and feminology to the articulation of a body of specific rights. The women’s movement has been and remains one of the most powerfully federative movements of civilization. It is that federative aspect that makes me prefer the expression “movement of civilization” to “social movement.” This movement is continuing to unfold throughout the world. It’s a transnational rather than international movement—it raises specific issues in each country, but the principles are universal and general. Women’s political choices are thus registered at the planetary level. It is within such a framework that we must come to terms with a modern conception of women’s rights, the status of women and their demands for identity. With this should come solutions to some of the major problems that currently threaten democracy.
First of all, there are the great problems of the East, the South, and the Maghreb—nationalisms and fundamentalisms but also religious archaisms and traditionalist stereotypes. I could speak once again of the return of the sons: Isaac, Ishmael, Oedipus, Jesus, all of them figures of a “narcissistic fundamentalism,” of a symbolic stereotype. In the rise of Fraternity, in the fratricidal duels, partition or rupture still too often takes place via the bodies of women, which become the symptoms through which the madness and depressive megalomania of the Sons is expressed. In India Moslem women are taking a stand against the enactment of laws regulating personal behavior, against Sharia law, and they are allying themselves with women in the secular and democratic Indian state. In Algeria women are mobilizing around the same principles and against the same oppression. Sometimes even risking their lives in the process, they are going to advance not just their own demands but also the cause of Algerian democracy in general.
And then there are the problems of inequality in the work force, of so-called unemployment, of a two-or-three-speed European society, all problems that concern women directly. Unequal employment is compounded by unequal visibility. In this society the dominant males appropriate for their exclusive enjoyment not only creative work but wealth, power, and the media. There is not a single woman among those “at the helm,” not a single woman among the thinkers who claim to be leading the century. Narcissism at the end of the twentieth century no longer has anything to do with wildflowers or poetry. We have not only to share the labor but also to grant recognition and value to new kinds of production. By taking into account the kinds of production that belong specifically to women, the value of new tasks will be recognized, and a better balance of power will be achieved. Naturally, I have in mind women’s creation of children. Today knowledge of the fertility process is bringing to light the dissymmetry between the sexes in the matter of procreation, a dissymmetry in women’s favor. This gap, this inequality with respect to biological roles, this procreative power henceforth can overturn the order of inequalities and transform itself into demographic power. Between 1975 and 1988 the number of single mothers doubled.
In the end only permanent democratization can guarantee the expansion of democracy. Along with the social contract, today we can speak of a contract with nature and of a “contract with life.” It’s not simply a question of protecting what is human, but of choosing one’s identity, one’s life. This is the question of any integration that is harmonized with the power to decide. Along with rights, we have desires and duties. Women will have to overcome their repugnance and their inhibitions with respect to power. They will have to agree to assume responsibility, to consider that they have a right to be present and a duty to democratize the polity. The Alliance des Femmes pour la Démocratisation seeks to encourage and promote further thought and new commitments in these directions.
29