12. Recognitions
March 9,1994
The cultural education I received in secondary school, and my early apprenticeships—which, to be more specific, echoed two texts I studied in ninth grade (classe de troisième)—inspired in me, as an aftereffect of a precocious childhood curiosity, a sort of vocation for research, for seeking to learn in order to know and seeking to understand in order to live. The first text was Il vecchio scolaro (“The Perpetual Student”), by a late-nineteenth-century author (was it Pascoli or Fogazzaro?), and the second was Montaigne’s Essays, and especially the text that I would retitle “On Fainting as Experience.”1
After completing my university education, I committed myself to two projects: first, research on the sociology of literature, on the French and Italian avant-gardes, and on the thought of the 1960s, with Roland Barthes at the École Pratique des Hautes Études; then, after some years of adult life, in the course of which I became “a puzzle to myself,”2 research on psychoanalysis, which, as everyone knows, is an experiment in knowing (connaissance) that requires a personal analysis and not just access to the established body of knowledge transmitted by theoretical seminars, clinical seminars, and study groups linked to particular schools. In my case this meant undertaking a personal analysis with Jacques Lacan, attending his theoretical seminars at the École Normale Supérieure and his clinical seminars at Sainte-Anne,3 and, finally, participating in study groups with the psychoanalysts of the École Freudienne, with Serge Leclaire in particular, but also with many others, including Michèle Montrelay.
My MLF,4 if I may be so bold as to call it that, was permeated with this same orientation toward research. Some years ago, I established the Institute for Teaching and Research on the Sciences of Women or Feminology; its work has recently been made more public. At a session held at the Institute on March 5 of this year, a paper on the movement’s infancy by Françoise Ducrocq (an English professor at Paris VII) reminded me that the MLF was initially, for the most part, at once activist—we acted, were involved in struggles—and, in ideological terms, rather dogmatic—we followed master thinkers such as Marx and Althusser, although not uncritically: this was our legacy from the revolutionary left. But the MLF very quickly made allowances for what we then called “lived experience,” and in the highly original “consciousness-raising groups,” which were almost unique among the many small groups formed at the time, women’s speech began to make itself heard in the margins of, or in opposition to, all forms of institutionalized knowledge. In the light of two major experiences—that of procreation, which I described at length in the body of my thesis, and that of psychoanalysis, as I have just noted—it seemed to me that it was essential to rework both what was being said and the way it was being listened to.
Action and revolution required established knowledge and master thinkers; women’s reason and madness required them to distance themselves from the system and to detect, beneath it, the masculinist ideology of Freud, Lacan, but also Althusser, Marx, and others; wisdom, finally, demanded that we not let ourselves be trapped in the impasses of acting out, through activist actions that were repetitive or even suicidal, or trapped in preanalytic motivations that claimed, whatever the cost, to know nothing of the existence of the unconscious.
The creation of the research group called Psychanalyse et Politique in late 1968 allowed us to explore a “dark continent,”5 to discover a new world; it was an effort to embark on the adventure of articulating the unconscious with history, and the subject with culture. Attempting to work with and against psychoanalysis and politics at the same time meant attacking what Michel Foucault described, in his fine inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, as the two major poles of power; it meant trying to deconstruct ideologies, to reinvent and even to reconstruct the political. It meant concluding that an experience specific to women, their universal contribution—what Engels, in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, describes as human production, as opposed to the production of commodities (although this description did not lead to any conceptual work or elaboration)—was still foreclosed, as such, from the theory of political economics and from psychoanalytic theory.
As far as methodology is concerned, I would like to insist here on the value and function of experience and of the foreclosure imposed on the production of living beings. On the concept of “experience” I refer you to Roger Munier:
First there is etymology. Experience comes from the Latin experiri, to test, try, prove. The radical is periri , which one also finds in periculum , peril, danger. The Indo-European root is per , to which are attached the ideas of crossing and, secondarily, of trial, test. In Greek, numerous derivations evoke a crossing or passage: peirô, to cross; pera, beyond; peraô, to pass through; perainô, to go to the end; peras, end, limit. For Germanic language, Old High German faran has given us fahren, to transport, and führen, to drive. Should we attribute Erfahrung to this origin as well, or should it be linked to the second meaning of per, trial, in Old High German fara, danger, which became Gefahr, danger, and gefährden, to endanger? The boundaries between one meaning and the other are imprecise. The same is true for the Latin periri , to try, and periculum , which originally means trial, test, then risk, danger. The idea of experience as a crossing is etymologically and semantically difficult to separate from that of risk. From the beginning and no doubt in a fundamental sense, experience means to endanger.6
Speaking of experience rather than of what we had “lived” was a way of freeing ourselves from ready-made doctrines and isms—in my case from feminism in particular—and a way of trying to make room for the subject, the unconscious, the body: I mean, of course, the sexed body. It was therefore a way of remodeling reason and modern consciousness as represented at the time by the humanities and the social sciences. Wanting to be both subject and object of research, seeking to make ordinary what had once seemed impossible to learned men, we found that many difficulties stood between us and our aims.
The first experience of every living being, incontrovertibly, is the prebirth and birth experience. We are familiar with the importance Hannah Arendt attaches to birth in The Human Condition ;7 she almost turns it into a concept. However, she does not develop the point that being born a girl or being born a boy makes a difference and that this difference between the sexes conditions different destinies in that it is not simply an anatomical difference, because it is welcomed into what we call the symbolic order. The birth of a human being is not a natural phenomenon but a cultural phenomenon.
Since the dawn of time, being born (merely) a girl (n’être fille, as I put it) has been experienced as a catastrophe; it still is, in many countries.8 Being born (merely) a girl means being subjected to the radical oppression of a sex that is dedicated to the reproduction of the species. But being born a woman (naître femme) conjugates the destiny of being born (naître) with that of giving birth (faire naître). The same is not true of being born a man. Being born a man means to a large extent feeling that one is excluded from giving birth. Hence a series of contradictory affects: wonder, curiosity, a feeling of mystery, of secrecy, but also rejection, phobia, envy, and then substitution, exploitation, and imitation of the phenomenon of gestation. The specific experience of giving birth seems to be the basis for the very condition of modern woman, given the present state of knowledge. That is at least a hypothesis. Following Hannah Arendt, I would say that the anastrophic9 nature of women’s being born and giving birth brings about a return of the foreclosed in the genital, creative mode rather than in the psychotic mode that entails being forever walled up in silence.
Gestation, which is the initial and ultimate experience of the narcissistic development and accomplishment of women, constitutes the original experience, the first thought, the very heart of knowledge, and the paradigm of ethics for thinking of the other as a subject. It is a capacity to welcome the other and a recognition of the other: love of one’s neighbor and democracy. For women it is the royal road to thought; for men, on the other hand, it is the impossible experience, the real that is forbidden and therefore foreclosed.
The concept of foreclosure is not easy to define. It is a concept that was forged by Lacan in psychoanalysis, but it is not alien to juridical discourse. Let me cite the historical dictionary of the French language:
Of all the verbal prefixes of “clore” [to close] only “foreclore” [to foreclose] was formed in French from the old preposition “fors,” “hors de,” “dehors” [outside] and “clore.” The word was replaced by “exclure” (from a similar Latin formation: “ex + claudere” [to exclude]) but survives as a specialized legal term: “to take away the ability to perform an act or to take legal action after the expiry of a time-limit.” The active noun “foreclusion,” formed from “exclusion ,” is a legal term reintroduced into psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan to translate the word Verwerfung, “rejection,” which is used by Freud with reference to psychosis; the word concerns the primordial rejection of a fundamental signifier from the symbolic world of the subject. This mechanism, as distinct from repression, is said to lie at the origin of psychosis.10
There are other, broadly similar definitions, for example in the Manuel de psychiatrie,11 and a new and specifically Lacanian definition in The Language of Psychoanalysis.12 The latter also alludes to the term’s linguistic meaning, which enriches it considerably.
This production, this giving birth that is impossible for men, will therefore, as a result of all the contradictory affects I have just mentioned, be the object of a radical, primal repression in Freud (the origin of repression and the repression of origins). I remind you that repression is one of the basic concepts of analytic theory. In Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood, we can see how Freud, the discoverer of the unconscious, the specialist in lifting censorship, the stubborn investigator of dream work, the eternally curious child who wants to know “where babies come from,” a scientist rather than an artist dedicated to understanding secrets—this Freud underestimates the artist da Vinci’s libido sciendi, or epistemophilic drive, in order to impose his own childhood theory of genitality and privilege the work of art over the work of psychoanalysis.
In his seminar on psychoses, Lacan concludes his remarks on matricial and paternal functions with this sentence, which really is cavalier: “There is nevertheless one thing that evades the symbolic tapestry; it’s procreation in its essential root—that one being is born from another.... There is, in effect, something radically unassimilable to the signifier. It’s quite simply the subject’s singular existence. Why is he here? What is he doing here? Why is he going to disappear? The signifier is incapable of providing him with the answer.”13
For his part, Claude Lévi-Strauss admits to André Green, in a discussion of the elementary system of kinship, that he took little interest in the maternal function when he elaborated his theory:
 
CL-S: The question of the nonqualification of relations between mother and child is much more interesting. And I hardly need say that it is a problem that has given me more than a little trouble. But the reason I did not introduce it is that I did not need that hypothesis; in most cases the societies we study normalize the relationship between husband and wife, normalize the relationship between brother and sister, and normalize the relationship between father and son, but do not normalize—or at least not to the same degree—the relationship between mother and children. For you psychoanalysts, on the other hand, this is an essential relationship. But I would say that the two things are related, that that relationship must, for us, precisely not be normalized, in order to allow you to intervene and find your place (laughter). For if the anthropologist made it his business to specify, for every society, the relationship between a mother and her children, he would tell the psychoanalysts: “We have explained everything; there is nothing more for you to say.” Now, there are things we cannot say. What do we do? We try to determine, for each society, a sort of collective paradigm of attitudes. And you start out from the observation that this paradigm is not respected in the same way by all the family configurations within the group, that there is some free play, that there is some variation; the gap we leave you with is the site of that free play and its variations, and your essential mission is to study it …
AG: The question that concerns me is that you say you can do without that (mother-child) relationship, that you do not need it because there is no social regulation involved.
CL-S: I do not need it in order to explain collective behaviors.
AG: For our part, we say that it is essential, for two reasons: the mother-child relationship is considered not only in its structuring or normative nature in relation to the social group; it is quite essential for the problem of identity, for seeing how this mother will “see” her child.14
There is no question of seeing how she will make the child, produce it with her body and her flesh over a period of nine months.
In a study of Proust and George Sand, André Green, for his part, speaking about the difficulty and creative genius of Proust, refers to a “reserve of the uncreatable” and thus avoids having to address the homosexual Proust’s genital problem with the “unprocreatable” rather than the uncreatable.15
The impossible experience has two repercussions. The major theoretical constructs and systems of thought overlook gestation, procreation, and even the mother; women, who live and think in accordance with the prefix pro- (projects, promises, programs, progress), are relegated to and marked by the un -. The experience that is impossible for men becomes the poetic experience, an ethical, unspeakable, unliveable, untransmissible experience, and women are condemned along with it.
The genitrix, defined as the producer of living-speaking beings, is foreclosed from the law of universal man and his monist orders. That is what I tried at length to demonstrate in the work collected in my thesis.
And the reality of gestation, which has been expelled from the symbolic field, naturally keeps on coming back in political, economic, social, and juridical reality and in certain mad sciences such as demography. Denied in its necessary values and in its indispensable function, human production returns as an alienating prescription, a sacrificial duty, and an enslaving obligation whenever, in the course of a history in crisis, a conservative state decrees that women must be locked away, adopting a program intended to strengthen the family or a policy designed to increase the birthrate.
Freud lifted the censorship on dreamwork, Marx lifted the censorship on the proletariat’s labor force, and they gave us the tools and the means to lift the censorship not only on women’s labor, work, and action—what Hannah Arendt calls the vita activa—but also on their specific form of thought, their original way of thinking, and the censorship on procreation, on flesh-thought—or on what Arendt calls the vita contemplativa; they even gave us the means to advance the hypothesis that gestation in itself conjugates vita activa with vita contemplativa, removes and transcends the opposition to which these two components of human activity have always been deliberately confined.16
This abolition of censorship should allow women to emerge from a psychogenic underground, from the excluded-interned status (to use a concept elaborated by Jacques Derrida), from the status of outlaws, radical foreigners, immigrants with regard to citizenship, a status to which they are condemned, paradoxically, by the prescription and foreclosure of the matricial.
Elsewhere in my work I have attempted to demonstrate how the access of foreclosed knowledge to a scientific mode of knowing could give birth to a materialist rather than an idealist mode of thought, to a political rather than a metaphysical mode, and how it could give rise to an anastrophic, ethical being-for-life and being born/giving birth rather than the being-for-death of the Apocalypse and a catastrophic demography.
In these times of serious crisis, especially for women, now that state power is trying to restrict their right to knowledge and right to work, the urgency and contemporary relevance of this research will not escape vigilant minds and specialists in philosophy, literary creation, and the law such as you. Ifwe are unable to think about women’s right to procreation, “freedom and equality” will remain principles that mislead and delude us, and “fraternity” will never give birth to solidarity between men and women in a heterosexed world. Only the translation into law of a rigorous theorization of this issue can result in political actions that can benefit women. When politicians do not think, the law bogs down in quibbles over technicalities and legal excesses while citizens regress into dependency and depression.
The doctorate, which represents a maturational stage, can thus be said to have born fruit. In 1992–93 Professor Francine Demichel suggested that we run a joint DEA seminar on “The Law, Economics, and Sociology of Medical Decision Making” directed by Professor André Demichel.17
Three DEAs were awarded under this joint supervision, and the work that was done made our methodology explicit: we wanted to establish links between experience, reflection, and action. We undertook a collective three-part study of the question: “Is rape a crime against humanity?”: a synthesis of knowledge (historical, social, juridical, and political) about rape, concrete actions in solidarity with women victims (and especially with women who had been raped and tortured in the war in the former Yugoslavia), and legal action (actions, for example, to have rape recognized as a crime against humanity by bringing pressure to bear on international agencies).18 It was, therefore, at once a set of situational actions, a summary of existing knowledge about the subject, and analyses that attempted to promote new theoretical, political, and legal thinking about rape.
The seminar continued in 1993–94, and it led to the creation of a research group that has taken up and expanded the body of knowledge by women and about women: their store of skills (savoir-faire) and of empirical and pragmatic knowledge (savoirs). The group has collected documents, elaborated concepts, and set up the Observatoire de la misogynie, an “observatory” to document misogyny. These efforts ought to energize the university, and the university should confer legitimacy upon this body of knowledge once it has met a certain number of requirements to become an academic corpus that can be transmitted.
The strategy of this research group is modeled on the strategy behind my thesis: the mutual subversion of academic knowledge and foreclosed knowledge and the transformation and integration of each by the other. The resulting knowledge is doubly chiasmatic, thanks to the doubling of research structures: the extra-institutional research carried out by the Institut d’enseignement et de recherches en sciences des femmes ou féminologie stands alongside the intra-institutional research undertaken in the academic context (Paris VIII, the DEA). The two structures, both inherited from the Psychanalyse et Politique experiment, make it possible to critique and correct the flaws in the MLF’s methodology and to expand upon some of its strengths.
From the methodological standpoint, being both the subject and object of our research created many more problems in the 1970s than it had done for Montaigne, all the more so in that, being largely inherited from psychoanalysis, for which saying is doing and doing is transforming, our method was based upon an oral practice and in that we ourselves, rather than books, were most often the raw material for what we were producing, for our work and for our actions.
As for the production of living beings , which has been forgotten and left behind (husteros), it is still difficult, even today, to represent it (even to ourselves) as something that lies beyond the phallic agency, as something that theorizes genitality and the cornerstone of the human contract into which (this is my hypothesis) a higher form of humanism will transform the social contract.
However, international events—the UN conferences I mentioned a moment ago—have intervened, and they impel us to refine our existing research practice with a view to taking broader political action. And I note that, in recent months, the right to procreation, which I have tried for years to bring to the attention of feminist or socialist thought, has appeared, and is identified as such, in the latest UN texts.
The men and women involved in our research group (some eighty of them) come from very different backgrounds. They have all been politically active in the past; they have specialized professional skills as lawyers, doctors, academics, mathematicians, literature professors, engineers, and so on; they have some experience with psychoanalysis and they share a “feminist consciousness.” All these men and women have come there to despecialize themselves, as it were, and to try to learn and develop “the sciences of women” together.
The authorization to supervise research that I am requesting here would come less as a way of recognizing twenty-five years of work or as an encouragement to persevere than as a tool, a passport for exploring the new pathways and difficulties that will punctuate the creation of an epistemological field whose complexity and richness it has not been possible to describe in detail here. It would facilitate progress at the psychoanalytic, political, and legal levels, or so I hope. And we have known from the start that this would be the longest march in women’s history.