3. There Are Two Sexes

1990

For Antonia, my maternal grandmother

For Vincente, my mother

For Vincente, my daughter

 

If we could divest ourselves of our corporeal existence, and could view the things of this earth from a fresh eye as purely thinking beings, from another planet for instance, nothing perhaps would strike our attention more forcibly than the fact of the existence of two sexes among human beings.

—Sigmund Freud, “The Sexual Theories of Children,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1959), 9:211–12

GESTATION OF A THOUGHT, THOUGHT OF A GESTATION

One is born a girl or a boy. I was born a girl, on October 1, 1936, to a brilliant, illiterate mother and to an active militant in the Popular Front. The day of my birth the flames went out: Franco seized power in Spain.

My mother: I occupied her from the moment of conception, January 1, 1936 (for the Chinese, conception has the value of birth); hence I experienced the Popular Front in her, through her, and also through her anger over this third pregnancy, imposed on her as she neared her fortieth year. She had been a tomboy, and I was a drag on her freedom. Early on she told me her dreams, the nightmares she had had during her pregnancy: her child had no feet.

I was born a girl, into a culture with a great oral and written tradition, the great Mediterranean South, cradle of monotheisms and democracy, where only God and man had the right to reside. I have known this since my birth, my childhood, my adolescence: in the streets of Marseille there is the brutal presence of boys and the raping aggressiveness of men. Elementary school and later high school confirmed this, as well as the Catholic religion to which I “belong,” with its God-in-three-persons or three persons as a single man. The masculine precedes absolutely …

Below the surface my mother’s incredible strength existed only for me. My mother was French by marriage, not well naturalized; as for me, I was acknowledged as a high school graduate and then qualified as a professor by our democracy. In the legal code my identity was diverted far from my natural ground toward a cultural internment that had to be relentlessly reconstructed. I reached the stifling boredom of equality, taking care to intern myself less than halfway. No womanly becoming was possible through, with, in, or by means of the knowledge transmitted via these apprenticeships within the family, the schools, and the academy.

Nothing, it seemed, would allow me to escape from this accursed circle; neither my mother’s determined illiteracy nor a first passion for a young girl, vital and destructive, the naive homosexuality whose lesbian impasse I may have been anticipating too early, nor marriage for love. Everything always seems to come back to sameness, even the poets who would have me be a mother.

The law, whether I was its victim or its accomplice, was blind and deaf to my most elemental need: to exist. I had a choice between slavery and absolute mastery, hystero-feminine or homo-psychotic, hetero-feminist or homolesbian. I believed that I was midway through the journey of life. I felt lost.

Twenty-seven years ago (I was about to turn twenty-seven; today I am fifty-four), pregnancy struck. Necessity more than coincidence, chance more than bad luck, an ordeal, in any case, that obligated me.

Ten years earlier I had fallen ill. The etiologic diagnosis was vague: prenatal origins, some prehistoric illness that was to affect my motor skills definitively and increasingly, contracted at the time my mother dreamed I had no feet. At the time this illness (a form of multiple sclerosis) constituted both a medical contraindication against pregnancy and a legitimate therapeutic argument for abortion. Today one would call on a surrogate mother, a substitute childbearer. I tried my luck: since I’d taken the first step, I carried on regardless. I wanted to make a child. I was also afraid. Anxiety and hope always go hand in hand: this was the subject of my DES thesis.¹ In the face of both, jouissance is hard to identify, but I sensed it at this turning point.²

On March 3, 1964, I brought into the world a girl in perfect health (she will soon be twenty-seven); her father and I agreed to give her my mother’s first name, just as I had received from my father my maternal grandmother’s name. Antoinette, he said. Vincente, we responded. (A. V.: initials that mirror each other vertically and form the letter X, the central X of my father’s first name, or a lozenge shape, a female symbol.) The mute word flesh that haunted my entire pregnancy (fruit of thy womb, flesh of my flesh), accompanying the fear of transmitting my illness, inscribed in these initials, triggered reveries about latent thoughts of a female genealogy, a genealogy of thought.

I was to pay very dearly for the risk I took, even though at first, paradoxically and contrary to all medical forecasts, my health improved. The responsibility for giving birth to a child would make walking more difficult for me. But what I was to lose in walking, I gained in the approach to what has preoccupied me as far back as I can trace my own questioning.

The unconscious work of gestation was for me, in its dynamics, a regression that worked toward reintegration and narcissistic restoration, a factor in the awareness and transformation of my own identity: I was born a girl and reborn a woman after giving birth to a girl. Thus despite the oppression of all the symbolic institutions (reinforced by the diktat of a certain feminism), I assumed the psychophysiological destiny of my sex.

I am not providing these autobiographical elements here to talk about myself—who would that be, myself in 1964 or myself today?—but rather so that I can come as close as possible to what I would come to know intimately of the identifications and the disidentification of a being presumed to be a woman.

Pregnancy as an experience confirmed for me, in a more exalting way than I could ever have imagined, that there truly are two sexes. Though a man and I had conceived, really, phantasmatically, symbolically, and legitimately together, I had to create, alone, for nine months. In the wake of the sexual play and the “pleasure of love” came an intense and unceasing bodily work that my physical condition did not allow me to forget even for a second and an activity of thought that was flowing, elementary, flesh , in a word, most often unconscious, clairvoyant, blind, very often also preconscious, foresighted, too rarely conscious, clear, like the attention I am predisposed to, my first name being its anagram: an activity of thought that never let go of me, during the whole time of gestation, both expectancy (attente) and management (gestion), during which I promised the three of us that I would hold on until the birth.

Conscious that a first cycle had come to a close with that event, I set out, once again on man’s land, in search of instruments to forge that would allow me to approach what was thinking in me without me.

THE OBSTACLES

AT THE SYMBOLIC LEVEL

It was at a moment when I had every reason to be convinced that there are two sexes and that no measure of equality could absorb the differences—it was at this moment that I learned, very officially, that there is only one libido and that it is phallic.

That was what the only existing discourse on sexuality stated: Freud, reinforced by Lacan, reinforced by Françoise Dolto, who was more phallicist than the absolute Phallus.

An equivocal silence on the part of the others who from time to time, according to the movement, the place, or the opportunity, denounced but never really took up the task of elaborating. Elisabeth Roudinesco rightly pointed to a few initiatives, but these had never really won a following.

In other words, in psychoanalysis, you are not born a woman (as Simone de Beauvoir also said, from a different but nonetheless convergent viewpoint). You are born a little boy or, more precisely, a castrated little boy. From this perspective, the female identity can only be a derived and negative identity, since (according to Freud and Lacan) it is determined by the absence or the inadequacy of a penis equivalent.

Within the space of phallic monism, one is trapped in the alternative: phallic for the boy, castrated for the girl. The order (the law) of castration ordains the phallic economy to which all jouissance and consequently all desire is suspended (Lacan). From the moment women recognize themselves as castrated (in the real), or as castratable (symbolically), they are legitimized, albeit negatively, in the phallic order. Many women prefer to designate themselves in this place rather than to conceive of a symbolic order that would complement the phallic order.

The genital stage, the stage of psychophysiological maturation of sexuality, on the basis of which I am capable of engendering living beings, is assimilated with the phallic stage, that is to say, reduced to the infantile genital stage of the boy, characterized by his interest in his penis. As a result, it becomes impossible to symbolize and elaborate on the uterine dimension and the uterine activity without which access to the genital stage is properly unthinkable for a woman.

The uterus is considered not as an active/productive organ, symbolizable as such, but as a pure “space” (lieu ; we speak idiomatically of a uterine “milieu”)—moreover, as the etymology of the word tell us, as a space that is “behind” (husteros), prehistorical, prenatal, and that calls, and calls only, for regression. Female genitality is thus dismissed as pure biology, as belonging to the natural-material realm of the preverbal (even pre-preverbal) and prepsychic. This space, for the person who can imagine nothing beyond the phallus, is fantasized as the absolute beneath (en deçà), as the black hole of the black continent, and even worse, as a generator of psychosis, of “white noise.” Now this uterine space remains definitively “behind” only for the one who has come out of it without looking back and who has lived the contact with it in an essentially passive mode: the son. Nevertheless, in the space of phallic programming everything takes place as if man and woman could think the mother—the maternal flesh or body—only as a (mi)lieu, an environment or object for the child, the sole subject.

And yet the parturient is not an object, no more than the child is an object for her: the woman who procreates and gives birth does not remain “behind,” she labors, she accompanies, she stays alongside and goes ahead to meet the subject-to-be. In so doing she does not return to the maternal body, she integrates this first body inside herself, at the very moment that she projects herself forward and outside, by procreating.

If women see only the phallic milestone, if they do not understand the necessity (psychic, not biological) of undertaking a process of identitary regression-reintegration, the only one that enables an escape from the logic of phallic identity, they cannot really progress. Either they will become “girl-sons” (filses),³ not-quite-sons, or they will remain hysterics (literally, women who suffer in and owing to the uterus), suffering from both amnesia and reminiscence, as if by a badly executed amputation of the matricial, since it is from the cutting off of/from the uterus, from the foreclosure of the uterus, that every subject is supposed to organize itself, and not from the integration of the uterus within the whole maturation process that would be completed in a heteronomous adult genitality.

This process of regression-reintegration is in some ways mirrored recursively when a woman engenders a girl. But only a woman who engenders a son really has the right to the title of mother in the cultural imaginary. In other words, it is not procreation that makes a woman a mother, it is her designation and her place within the patriarchal structure and patronymic transmission. Similarly, one thinks of the young girl’s passage from girlhood to womanhood only in her relation to a man (who deflowers/marries/ legitimizes her) and not for her procreative capacity: this is decidedly the syncopated moment, the black hole of a thought that shirks thinking (itself).

We could almost say that “woman” (that is, not the concept but the reality of every woman, at once unique and shared) does not come about, has not yet taken place in history, for even what we call feminine is, most often, only a metaphor, man’s phantasmatic representation (re-creation or fabrication) of a woman or even a gender (genre) that man bestows on himself, that is to say, a kind of transvestism. A certain femininity—which displays and markets itself as such—is not the expression of a woman’s inner speech, of her body or her jouissance: it is the gender that a woman picks up in return, thus imitating, through a kind of reduplication, the one who conceals her by imitating her. Hence, here again, the psychopolitical logic of a certain lesbianism (as distinct from authentic female homosexuality) that I describe as a kind of countertransvestism (on the model of a counterinvestment), because it consists not in seeking the place(s) of a woman in oneself but simply in reduplicating the process of imaginary inversion, exchanging one fetish for another.

This is why I prefer the adjective femelle, “female” (as it has been retained and used in English in “female writing”), to the adjective féminine, “feminine”; for me the word femelle does not refer woman back to a prepsychic, antecultural, biological register;⁴ it enables me to convey, within the space of the thinkable and the cultural (a space that defines the human itself), the work of the body and of the flesh that belongs specifically to women.

It is not a question of embracing the antiphallic or the antioedipal, which would be tantamount to advocating the abolition of the phallus. The phallic stage of a girl child (even of a woman) that corresponds on the sexual level to clitoral activity is at least as structuring for girls as it is for boys. But unlike what happens with boys, in the case of girls this stage is not terminal. And even for men, is there any reason for their desire for infinite erection other than a fantasy of pure prestige and power over the so-called weaker sex and over nature? We can thus challenge the notion that the phallic stage is the end point of speculation, and even the idea that it would be the ultimate stage for man, by questioning the reduction, for him too, of the genital to the phallic.

The phallus, representation of the penis, detached from the body and in a perpetual, imaginary erection, is a narcissistic fantasy. It is erected and maintained as such to express resistance to castration and especially denial of the difference between the sexes and of the body at work—a denial that shores up this erection. It is a fiction that contradicts the reality of the penis and the procreative and cocreative capacity of female flesh and a simulacrum of a fourth stage that obscures the reality of this “fourth dimension,” which, for the woman, is the uterine dimension (the stage and the thing). It is the sign of a denial not only of the reality principle but of the real itself. In this sense one can say that phallic organization is in reality pregenital. The idea of the phallus is inherently metaphysical and signifies its primacy over thinking/procreative matter. This is an illusion of psychoanalysis.

The adult man can only acknowledge the posterective flaccidity of his real penis. The economy of the “genital penis” will integrate this reality in place of the barbaric fantasy of castration (as an anal-sadistic punishment for phallic priapism). The adult man will have to renounce, at one and the same time, his resistance to castration (the narcissistic defense of the little boy) and bodily and psychic mastery over gestation during the time it takes place.

But God, according to the fantasy of those who have imagined him, does not want to renounce his power over gestation. The Bible is filled with examples of his delusions of mastery: after pulling Eve from Adam’s rib (a reverse genesis that still doesn’t strike many people as astonishing), and after bestowing on woman only a “derived identity” and not one of her own, he opens and closes at will the uteruses of the matriarchs (Sarah is sterile for one hundred years; Abraham thus needs Hagar to engender his first son, Ishmael, who is illegitimate in God’s eyes; then Sarah becomes fertile and engenders Isaac—this is the root of the current conflict between Israel and Palestine, Judaism and Islam); then God condemns adulterous women (an adulteress might introduce into the family a child that does not come from the father); finally God concedes that his son-made-man may have a flesh-and-blood mother, provided that she remains a virgin, like Athena for the Ephesians’ Diana, but deprived of divinity. All that is too well known to warrant further emphasis here.

We know that the churches have never ceased claiming their mastery over the bodies of women, but we easily forget that states too share this obsession with mastering gestation: some outlaw abortion, others impose sterility. Is there a single state anywhere that does not legislate on and over the bodies of women?

So how can we think and put into practice the symbolic independence of women? By refusing egalitarian symmetrization, we posit ourselves as potential partners in a heterosexed symbolization rather than as castrated twins in an immovable order decreed immutable.

But to attempt to think the role specific to each sex in the production of living-speaking beings (that is, of the human), to demand both the acknowledgment of differences and the economic, cultural, political, and symbolic equality of women and men is to come up against—at every level, not just at the symbolic level—the theoretico-political machinery that neutralizes, that is, conceals, women’s sexed reality and experience in the name of the dogma of phallic monism.

AT THE LEVEL OF THE ARTISTIC AND SCIENTIFIC IMAGINARY

Genital production (that is, production of the living-speaking, or anthropoculture,⁵ a task and responsibility that today and throughout the world fall almost entirely to women) appears, oddly, to have been relegated to a secondary level, on the scale of symbolic and cultural values, where the pregenital organization of little boys—in which sadism and anal eroticism play the leading role—reigns in absolute sovereignty.

The imaginary of artistic creation (literary in particular), imitating the theological fable of Genesis, repeats the foreclosure of uterine production by fantasizing it as an idealization or at best as a sublimation/transposition of anal activity: earth, mud, shit, and gold are exchanged for pleasure, infinitely equivalent, substituting for each other to satisfy the fantasy of the all-powerful Narcissus, whether his face be that of God, a poet, a philosopher, a psychoanalyst, or any old despot-son.

“I kneaded mud and turned it into gold,” each says in his own way, both the poet (this is how Baudelaire sums up his poetic enterprise of capitalizing transmutation in The Flowers of Evil) and the theoretician of the capitalist economy. It is better to produce gold (verbal or sociomaterial) than thinking flesh, unless the production of living beings, fragmented, fetishized, merchandised, enslaved, denied in its female origin, is transformed into a flourishing industry through the magic of technology. We have lost count of sperm banks, blood banks, organ banks, and it is now quite common to speak of human capital, of red gold or gray gold.

It’s a question of screening off, of eclipsing the unquenchable uterus envy of the Creator,⁶ of creators, unless one makes oneself, as every true poet does, an “imaginary transsexual,” an inventor of a poetics of the real. This transsexual temptation is also, today, that of the physiologist, of the scientist—René Frydman, for example, from “test tube babies” to the title of his latest book, Ma grossesse, mon enfant (My pregnancy, my child);⁷ in the order of our metaphysical, pregenital, and prethinking civilization, all creation would tend to impose itself as expropriation, exploitation, and replacement of the procreation that haunts it.

AT THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL LEVEL

It thus seems quite natural that the same censorship should order the economic and social sphere, where our hyperproductivist organization penalizes women both professionally and symbolically. The only women considered active are those with a professional activity, even if it is raising children other than their own. Women who make children and do domestic work are counted among the inactive population! There is no country in which the production of living beings, the work of renewing the generations, of renewing human wealth—work accomplished by women—figures in the calculation of the gross national product. The production of women’s bodies, their labor power, is only valued or quantified in a technological or industrial context that forgets woman and origin, woman as the origin of living-thinking beings. And yet demography, a discipline within the social sciences and economics, is primarily based on the concept of “fertility rate per woman.” Such are the contradictions, the inconsistencies, the aberrations of the social sciences that continue to erect themselves on infantile fantasies.

Moreover, women are less than ever in control of the creative process that is the distinctive property of their own bodies. Even as they deny this form of creation, traditional societies continue to make it a production of slaves, while industrialized societies exploit it in a technocratic, industrialist, and capitalist manner.

It is obviously not a question of demanding salaries for mothers, but rather of refusing the distinction between women declared “active” or “inactive,” refusing the shameless exploitation of those who make children, and of establishing the concept of the triple production of women, the majority of women being workers three times over in our society; pregnancy must be considered not only in its economic and social aspects but also in its ethical and universalizing dimensions.

AT THE POLITICAL LEVEL

The functioning of our democracies is far less well-known than that of religions, and yet the founding myths of the Athenian democracy continue to evangelize or imperialize the world, through culture and theater in particular, by its fundamental principles, which are all the more powerful today to the extent that they are hidden to us, unconscious, repressed.

What do the Eumenides tell us in the last play of the Oresteia?

 

1.   Orestes, who killed his mother, Clytemnestra, who had killed her husband Agamemnon, in part because he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia, will be found innocent by the virgin goddess Athena. His case will ultimately be dismissed with a non-lieu ,⁸ and he will be allowed to regain his kingdom and become the privileged ally of Athens.

2.   The Erinyes, goddesses avenging matricide, in becoming Eumenides, will lose all power. Exit matricide as a crime.

3.   Following the example of Athena, born solely to her father, Zeus, who swallowed his spouse as she was about to give birth so as to give birth in her place, indigenous Athenians will be born to the mother-earth, without women. And Athenian democracy, as we know, will deny women, slaves, and half-castes the right of citizenship.

Nowhere but in The Eumenides do we find expressed with so much clarity, precision, rigor, and arrogance the mythical, historical, political defeat of women; the masculine dictatorship that founds the democratic model is haunted from the outset by the exclusion of the other, by uterus envy, by the hatred of the mother-woman and the expropriation and foreclosure of her body as the place of creation of the human being, of the living-thinking.

Women’s bodies are foreclosed to the advantage of the mother-earth and Gaia is excluded from symbolization. Freemasonry, which is one of the primary ideological agents of democratization and secularization, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, excludes women from its principal rites, asserts itself as resolutely monotheist and, in the initiation rites of mixed or women’s lodges, leaves earth outside the temple of light.

“Liberty, equality, fraternity”: two centuries ago, with the great revolution, we entered the era of simultaneous affirmation of the individual (“liberty”) and the universal (“equality”). Desire for identity and desire for sameness were displayed in a single movement. God and King were dead (or at least recognized as mortal) and the blow to theocratic and state monotheism favored the flowering of individualistic liberation movements and, simultaneously, of egalitarian surges of solidarity (or rather of mutual acknowledgment). A little later socialism and feminism made their entry onto the politicocultural scene and more recently the May ’68 movement put the finishing touches on this evolution by encouraging the formation of narcissistic brotherhoods, that is, by insisting both on fraternity (among men) and on the right to the unlimited expression—the power—of a sovereign ego marked and constituted on the side of the phallus: the 1968 graffiti slogan “power comes from the barrel of the phallus” is reiterated today by the rap-graffiti group NTM (Nique ta mère [Fuck your mother]), superstars at the zenith of Canal-Plus,⁹ subsidized by the French Ministry of Culture.

All this leads me to think that we, women and men, have gone at best from patriarchy to a filiarchal or fratriarchal regime. Feminism is the demand for undifferentiated, stereotypical equality, modeled on images lent by the power in charge, to satisfy that demand, sometimes with and sometimes without knowledge of the fratriarchal hegemony. Yet if the affirmation of difference without equality produces only reactionary hierarchy and archaism, it has always seemed to me that an equality incapable of acknowledging differences only creates hom(m)ogenization and assimilation,¹⁰ literally sterilizing for those who have simply chosen/yearned to act like their so-called fellow human beings, their brothers.

To produce life, actually and symbolically, is it not necessary that the One enter into relationship with the Other? The apostles of the great Neutral, who dominate the Western media at present, deliberately lump together the demand for recognition of the difference between the sexes and the demonstrations of separatist nationalisms and other fundamentalisms that proliferate all over the world. Yet ancient and contemporary history alike show that nationalism is not the opposite but rather the corollary, the specular inverse, of universalist individualism. The aspiration to undivided sovereignty, source of today’s conflicts and wars, proceeds from the same narcissistic logic, immune to all division, as the republican pretention to reduce every other to the one, in a community that is one and indivisible.

Finally, the affirmation, made in ignorance of reality and the unconscious, that the category of sex does not exist (or has ceased to exist) and that there are only individuals, all similar but each working for itself, throws every woman and man back to the narrowest and most selfish form of individualism and deprives women of the capacity to recognize misogyny and to struggle together, that is to say, politically, against it.

To complete this brief tableau of our politicocultural evolution, I shall add that, in the West, all this seems to be accompanied and reinforced, at the economic level, by the shifting of the industrial economy strictly speaking (which falls within the anal imaginary of production that I briefly described earlier) into a total market economy that implies absolute control of exchange value; in other words, an economy that is still on the order of representation, the fetish-effect or gold-effect—an economy that some have described as the emergence of a spectacular society or a society of the spectacle.¹¹

AT THE JURIDICAL LEVEL

If, in the phallic order, the identity of women is conceived as a derived identity, in the juridical order, which commands social organization and political discourse, this identity is not even mentioned. Women in France, not to speak of those in other countries, have not yet been recognized as such by the law: they still do not have full access to citizenship and, beyond that, to a symbolic existence, since our Constitution does not even mention the word sex among the distinctions between human beings that have the right to respect and to existence in the polity.

Here is the preamble, dated October 27, 1946:

In the morrow of the victory achieved by the free peoples over the regimes that had sought to enslave and degrade humanity, the people of France proclaim anew that each human being, without distinction of race, religion or creed, possesses sacred and inalienable rights. They solemnly reaffirm the rights and freedoms of man and the citizen enshrined in the Declaration of Rights of 1789 and the fundamental principles acknowledged in the laws of the Republic.

They further proclaim, as being especially necessary to our times, the political, economic and social principles enumerated below: The law guarantees women equal rights to those of men in all spheres.¹²

Yet there can be no real equality, as demonstrated a contrario by this preamble, unless a distinction is made first, at the outset, symbolically, by naming the very ones, men and women, who would be promised equality, juridical-political nondiscrimination: in other words, there can be no true, full, concrete equality, indeed no parity, unless differences are taken into account. Indifference goes on producing new forms of discrimination. The perverse effects of symmetrization and egalitarian neutralization are no longer even noticeable because institutional misogyny remains so steadily unthought.

Law continuously inhibits the political. We must therefore go back to the principles that founded it in order to analyze its contradictions, its inconsistencies, its denials and negations, and unveil its immaturity, so true is it that democratic principles founded on a neutral, abstract universalism in contradiction with its own ideals lead, where symbolic power is concerned, to a real sexual apartheid. Universality, on the contrary, would stem from the fact that subjects under law are biologically, therefore ontologically—since we are talking about human beings—sexed. Juridical monism recognizes on a social level that there are women, without recognizing this symbolically, just as Catholicism recognizes the Virgin Mary as a saint but not as a divine being.

By refusing to sexualize the status of citizenship in the Republic, law, in an unconscious reference to monotheistic dogma, neurotically denies reality, shrouding it under a veil of ignorance rather than facing it through analytic work on its philosophical presuppositions—in other words, through an effort to democratize. Law thus authorizes a denial that there have been any attacks on personal rights in the sphere of the difference between the sexes, since it has not inscribed that sphere on its own pediment.¹³ Like every object foreclosed from the symbolic, this difference has not ceased to haunt the reality of a psychotic political-symbolic power, incapable of responding fairly and with justice to the questions that the historical existence of women, henceforth indelible, raises for democracy.

And is it not owing to this “constitutional misogyny” that everyday misogyny, in contrast to racism, is still not recognized as a crime? Every day, all over the world, the misogynist plague rears its ugly head.¹⁴ Here and now, little girls, young girls, and women are being humiliated, degraded, sold, beaten, deported, tortured, raped, subjected to incest, and killed because they were born women—not because of who they are but because of what they have the capacity to make: children. And this is such a scandal that it seems scandalous to say it, to evoke the reality of the scandal. The mildness of penalties (often going so far as dismissal of the case, a verdict of non-lieu) sanctioning murders linked to matricide or sororicide reproduces every day, at the juridical level, the political and symbolic coup constituted by the passage from the Erinyes to the Eumenides.

In the general mutism and immobility pierced every once in a while by a television personality’s burst of laughter, it is difficult not to remember Robert Antelme, who writes in The Human Race: “You can burn children without that disturbing the night. The night is unmovable around us, who are enclosed in the church. Above us, the stars too are calm. But this calm, this immobility are neither the essence nor the symbol of a preferable truth; they are the scandal of nature’s ultimate indifference.”¹⁵

Faced with the increasing gravity of crimes committed against women, which will finally have to be considered as crimes against humanity, Amnesty International has introduced the category of sex, next to those of race, belief, and religion, in its international statutes.

It is urgent to modify the preamble of our Constitution so that women will truly conquer the right to law. For the meaning and the role of law are also to name, to designate, to recognize, to tear away from silence, oblivion, and denial. The right to a nonderived law would make women subjects of a specific legal regime that would recognize and legitimize (as has been done with regard to identity) their specific function as producers of living beings, guarantors (until further notice) not only of the survival but also of the life of the human species, a species that will advance or decline according to whether this law is respected or violated.

This full recognition of woman’s “supplementary” capability, of her integral personality, would be a basis for making procreation, symbolically founded in this way, a universal personal right, in turn, instead of a demographic duty, a right that would necessarily include the right to abortion.

On the frontispiece of all the constitutions of the world we should find the following inscription: “Each human being, without distinction of sex, race, religion, or creed, possesses sacred and inalienable rights.”

AT THE LINGUISTIC LEVEL

As we know, in language (at least in the Indo-European languages), it is the term man that expresses the human, while the word woman can never speak for the human. In French there are two genders, masculine and feminine, but these genders do not refer to the sexes (to sexed reality) even if they function, if they are made to function, in their stead. And in French grammar the masculine gender prevails over the feminine, even annuls it, as soon as the masculine—and there need only be one element—takes its place alongside the feminine.¹⁶

There is thus only one language, and two bodies, differently sexed, that are both prey to the same language. The syntax and lexicon of French demonstrate—as if a demonstration were needed—that not even language is neutral, or rather that its neutrality, here again, is marked in the masculine. If the neutrality of language is not neutral, the logic of discourse is even less so, as Jacques Derrida has shown; his term for its mechanism is phallogocentrism. And now, after leaving behind the adjective femelle, language tends increasingly to forget the mark of the feminine. This is a constant on television, but all too frequent elsewhere as well.

The question of the subject of writing—who speaks, who writes when “I” write?—is infinitely complex, and I do not pretend to do it justice here. It is certain that at every moment our writings, our representations, and, of course, our words, are in agreement or disagreement with the constraints the body imposes on language and on its phantasmatic effects. Born a girl or a boy, one becomes a woman or a man, but also masculine or feminine, son or daughter of the mother or of the father. This is the whole problem of the distance between gender and sex, of the complex identifications with which each subject structures and composes himself or herself: in sum, we must take into account here the dimension of psychic bisexuality. This said, and quite rightly, the act of writing will never be neutral.

I would like to formulate, here and now, a hypothesis that you may well find shocking, and yet … I wonder whether, as Jean-Jacques Annaud implied in La guerre du feu (Quest for Fire), women were not the ones who invented language. Many anthropologists have shown that women were the first to practice agriculture and fishing while men were off hunting and at war. I think that women are the anthropocultivators who, by talking to the fetus during pregnancy and then to the child, invented and transmitted articulated language. In fact, if we consider the philosophical question of address involved in “speaking to,” we are led to think about the patience involved in listening and speaking to another. For a pregnant woman necessarily both listens and speaks to the fetus. This is, for me, the inaugural scene of language.

TOWARD A NEW HUMAN CONTRACT

My thinking is organized around submission to a reality principle that could be formulated as follows: There are two sexes and they are irreducible to one another. This irreducibility arises from the dissymmetry between man and woman in the work of procreation, from the experience of gestation as the specific time and space for welcoming the other, for hospitality and responsibility toward the unfamiliar, as the common origin in which, for the human species, the genealogy of thought can be understood, the advent of ethics is announced and pronounced: gestation as the paradigm of “thinking of the other.”

This reality is denied at all levels by our civilization, which functions by means of a totalitarian assertion that there is only a (male) one, there is a (male) one without a (female) one, there is only a one without an other. Recognizing this reality—that there are two sexes—would enable us to move from a homosexed, repressive, inegalitarian, and exclusionary history to a heterosexed, fertile, just history; it would enable us to move from the old order erected by the sons, in the name of the father and then of the brother, to a new civilization. For this, we must work toward the formation of a new analytics and a new ethics of procreation.

THE ANALYTICS OF PROCREATION

This must come about, as I have already suggested, through the elaboration of a theory of genitality for each sex, one that accounts for the formation of “female” genitality—and even of male genitality—beyond the boundary of the phallic and that would consequently admit into its field of investigation and reflection what I call the uterine stage, corresponding to a uterine or female libido. For a long time I have called this libido 2; nevertheless, the woman precedes; she came first and she is moving ahead.

Imagine a tertiary process, a sort of principle of strangeness or of integration, which would displace the fixation on the two onto an oscillation between the two and the three: a new distribution that, by recalling the forgotten woman, would integrate her capacity to welcome instead of foreclosing it, would dissolve the drive to envy and to hate, would reduce the defensive splitting of the ego. We can predict the economic effects (on underdevelopment), the political effects (on xenophobia), and the symbolic effects (on gynophobia). From the vital knot untied to the vital link retied, that is, to the human contract; from a bodily constraint to a contract of free association.

Neither an everyday oral-anal transit nor procrastination, but progression (no doubt this is what leads the engendering woman to reintegrate drives), genital time is a historical and political time, in the strictest terms: nine months, no more; scansion, maturation, term, and decision. It is the historic time of conception, rather than a historic conception of time. It is women’s time, the time of a promise that can be kept. Time to understand, to free oneself in fertility’s openness, to take with oneself the woman, mother, sister, or daughter.

Such an epistemological turning point should logically lead to a reformulation of relations between sex, body, and psyche as they are articulated, separately and together, with the cultural order. On the one hand, because the uterus (the function and the organ), while it is genital, is no less sexual (it provides uterine jouissance); the matrix of living beings, it is at once the sex that plays and that experiences jouissance, the body at work and the thinking flesh. A fleshly materialism from which each monism is subverted one by one and from which what is called thinking can presumably be initiated. On the other hand, because such an analytics of the production of living beings/the living, which would separate the biological neither from the psychic (both as the unconscious and as language, because a woman in gestation, it must be recalled, is a speaking being) nor, at another level, from the symbolic, would give its full cultural dimension to an activity vital to the future of our species, its genealogy, its memory, its transmission, and its history. In other words, such an analytics would put an end to the reign of culture as a metaphysics that opposes creation to procreation, valorizes the former at the expense of the latter, and conceptualizes the existence and functions of the two sexes along that dividing line.

It is on the condition that creation and procreation, genius and genitality, conceptions of/about the flesh and flesh that conceives, cease to be antagonistic or divided, that men and women will together be able to elaborate an ethics of procreation and an aesthetics of creation without mistaking one for the other.

THE ETHICS OF PROCREATION

In order to arrive at the formulation of a new human contract that would take into account the physical, juridical-social, and symbolic dimensions of the existence of living-speaking beings, we must first think through, at the level of collective organization, what has remained unthought in our societies: the production of living beings the living. We must sketch out the economy of this production practically and theoretically—in short, we must invent a gyneconomy (or a feminology with a larger epistemological field) as a human science dealing with women’s share in production in all its forms.

The children of the earth, after a very inadequate social contract, are concerned today with forging a new alliance with nature: the ecology of the elements, plants, animals, and human beings is focused on a vital “natural contract.” In the beginning were the waters, and the waters are now polluted. In the beginning was the air, and the ozone layer is shrinking. In the beginning were the forests, and the forests are disappearing …

In the beginning, for each of us, there was a woman’s body. But in millions of pregnant women numerous pollutions (radiation, AIDS, and so on) are attacking the amniotic fluid and the placenta, the first protective and nutritive membrane of the human being. Alongside physiological pollution, mental and psychic pollution are transforming mothers’ “capacity to dream,” their function as sublimators, their activity as anthropocultivators, into sterile neuroses, into desertifying excitements.

The maternal body is the first environment, the first natural and cultural, physiological and mental, fleshly and verbal milieu. It is the first welcoming (or rejecting) world, where the human being is formed, is created, and grows. It is the first earth, the first house a human being lives in. The living, speaking, intelligent flesh of women is the first thinking matter; at the same time it is the first factory, the most formidable production machine of all. What a fantastic computer it is, with the uterus connected to the brain, to the hormonal system, to all the organs, but also to the psychic apparatus, to the soul, to love! Creative flesh is like a fifth element, the quintessence that contains the four natural elements—water, fire, air, and earth—and sublimates them. Gestation is the unique place and time of the common and universal origin of our species.

Like the body twenty years ago, flesh is still overlooked. Flesh wants the jouissance of sex, wants the caress of hands and body, wants the work of the flesh: the full presence in the hollow of the body, not incorporation but a double reciprocal incarnation, desire fulfilled, a project lived, sexuality beyond sex, the yes and the no. Flesh is both clairvoyant and invisible; it is a coupling and an uncoupling; it is memory, a thinking element, in unceasing maturation of self and nonself, premeditation and foresight, a sensitive element, an anticipated reminiscence, a lexicon of affects, pre- and reapprenticeship, source, organization, management of passions, regeneration of drives; the crucible of senses and sensations, transference-countertransference of moods, of affects and of intermingled, chiasmatic thoughts; it ties and unties, summons and sorts, retains and delivers; at once archive and prehistory, it wants the whole but shapes the singular; its unconscious is structured like thinking; the flesh is hospitable: not only does it welcome the guest but, being thrifty, tolerant, strategic, tactical, managerial, dreamy, and enthusiastic, it informs, forms, nourishes, equips, and arms it, withholds it inside only to better accompany it and render it up to the outside, to itself, as unique. For the genital, any contretemps would be harmful.

Thus, just as ecology attempts to establish a contract of rights and duties between human beings and nature, the human contract I have proposed should permit the establishment of new rights and new duties between men and women, and also between both men and women and the transitory subjects we know as children. For production of a living being is tripartite: the two must not exclude the third, and human adults are at once the fruit of their double heterosexed origins, of their double lineage, and of the child each once was. The new human contract would reestablish the vital link with the matricial space and time, would make men and women partners in a multiple alliance: between women, between men, between men and women, and with their own nature.

Ethics does not appear to be possible without working on (and I say working on, not returning to) origins.

Thus, at least a recasting of the symbolic, if not an exit from the symbolic (insofar as the symbolic implies the two, such an exit does not seem necessary), would be possible, opening and articulating itself around the semantic field of gestation, on and with reality: there are two sexes.

Gestation as generation, gesture, management, and inner experience, experience of the intimate, but also generosity , genius of the species, acceptance of a foreign body, hospitality, openness, desire for a regenerative graft; an integrating, aconflictual, postambivalent gestation of differences, an anthropo-cultural model, a matrix for the universality of humankind, the principle and origin of ethics; gestation, a fleshly and spiritual conception of the other, always already subject, rather than Genesis, that autistic fable that men and the religions of the Book have substituted for it; gestation, a transformation in the present toward a real, nonutopian future; gestation, living attention and heteronomous experience, which knows how to make a place within the self for the nonself; gestation, the promise of the being to be; gestation, finally, the paradigm of “thinking the near/future other,” a paradigm of ethics and democracy.

What can we women do in these times of despair and sterility? It is hardly possible for us to act, and we can’t do much to make our voices heard, but we can always practice thinking. Perhaps we should try to go through and past the place where hysteria has always put us in an impasse; perhaps we should try to succeed where the hysteric has always failed. By starting with the following proposition.

It is the symbolization of what the all-one excludes, the symbolization of our foreclosed knowledge concerning primordial thought, of our foreclosed knowledge concerning the experience of gestation as a trial, that can not only go beyond monistic totalitarianisms but can also promote a mode of ethical thought beyond animist, religious, or scientific ways of thinking.

Allow me, then, to express a few wishes: rather than the biblical and Greek mythologies, which falsify origins by substituting fabled, motherless geneses for female gestation, rather than unisex, matricidal democracies, we want a process of democratization that recognizes the irreducible difference between the sexes, the dissymmetry and privilege of women in procreation, a process that makes procreation a universal right, that reestablishes reality, the fleshly and sexual truth of human origins, that expresses its gratitude to women for their unique contribution to humanity in its genealogy, its memory, its ongoing transmission, its capacity to think.

We want a democratization that recognizes the genius of women as regards their genitality and their own identity, a process that considers gestation as the paradigm of an ethics of generosity where the foreign body, the other, is welcomed by means of a spiritual as well as a fleshly graft, the model of all grafts, where the other is loved and created as the near and future being.

We want a democratization that recognizes that reproduction is in fact production, production of the other through oneself and of oneself through the other, that considers that this gesture of gestation must take place apart from all technological and commercial speculation, away from all devastating pollution, that it must be protected by a new alliance of humans with women, through a human contract that guarantees the durability of our vital link to the uterus (in Arabic and in Hebrew the same word designates the uterus and mercy).

Gratitude, as a replacement for envy, is the atheological virtue I prefer. Gratitude is the very “poethical” sentiment, in other words, a re-co-naissance in its infinite polysemy: being born anew, coming to birth, the birth to come (the pro-birth of procreation) and also of birthing together, investigation, discovery, knowledge, etc.¹⁷

As I thank you for having listened to me, I would like to read you a letter from Martin Buber to Emmanuel Levinas, quoted by the latter in Proper Names, where he develops a line of thought already expressed by Paul Celan in 1958,¹⁸ in his “Discourse in Bremen”:

Once again the hour for uncommon gratitude has come for me. I have much to give thanks for. For me, this was a time to meditate once more upon the word thank [remercier]. Its ordinary meaning is generally understood, but it does not lend itself to a description that would define it unequivocally.

One sees immediately that it belongs to that category of words whose original meaning is multiple. Thus it awakens a variety of associations in various languages.

In German and English, the verb for “remercier ,” which is danken and thank, is related to denken and think, in the sense of having in one’s thoughts, remembering someone. The person who says “I thank you,” “Ich danke dir,” assures the other person that he or she will be kept in the memory, and more specifically in the good memory, that of friendship and joy. It is significant that the eventuality of a different sort of memory doesn’t arise.

It is otherwise in Hebrew. The verb for hodot means first to come in support of someone, and only later, to thank. He who thanks someone rallies in support of the one thanked. He will now—and from now on—be his ally. This includes, to be sure, the idea of memory, but implies more. The fact occurs not only within the soul: it proceeds from there toward the world, to become act and event. Now, to come in support of someone in this way is to confirm him in his existence.

I propose to vow a thankful memory and to come in support of all who have sent me their good wishes for my eighty-fifth birthday.

Jerusalem, February, 1963¹⁹

The twenty-first century will be geni(t)al or else it will remain narcissistic and murderous and it will not be.