PASSAGES: What gave you the idea of setting up the research group known as Psychanalyse et Politique as soon as the Women’s Liberation Movement was born?
ANTOINETTE FOUQUE: You probably don’t know this, because it has been forgotten, but when the Women’s Movement first began, most of the women involved, and especially those who called themselves feminists, would have nothing to do with psychoanalysis. In their view Freud was just a horrible male chauvinist.
As I have often said, the ideology of masculinity that was holding back the psychoanalytic revolution was not enough to make me reject such an instrument of knowledge, still less to use a feminist counterideology to fight it. Psychanalyse et Politique was my attempt to understand the unconscious element in political commitment and the political element in psychoanalysis, in institutions, but also in theory.
1I asserted, right from the beginning of our Movement, that there is not only the phallus, that this “only” (ne …
quelnoeud … queue) was imperialistic and dangerous for women,
2 that this fixation on the phallic phase, this feminism, kept them in a state of pregenital immaturity, deprived them of their genitality. Feminism was (is) clinging to ante-oedipal positions, often with a lot of hatred for the father on the pretext of the struggle against patriarchy; it clings to the father as an authority who has to be challenged and not as a symbolic function that has to be introjected. It is a regressive, anti-establishment, illusory, and infantile position; as I used to say at the time, feminism is, to parody the famous slogan, the infantile disorder of the MLF.
3 Rejecting the illusion that we will one day have the phallus is not a loss but a differentiation. The phallic stage is not the final stage for women. It is possible to surpass it, and its surpassing really is inscribed in the body of every woman: this is what I call the
uterine stage. Lacan derives this symbol—the phallus—from Freud’s theory, but he fetishizes it: he turns the One into the Only One and he puts Freud’s proposition “there is only one libido, and it is phallic” in an absolutist position.
PASSAGES: How did your work with Psychanalyse et Politique begin?
AF: In the 1970s we set off to find a libido 2, the “2” being simply a plural, the first figure that comes after “I.” I now tend to refer to this libido as the female libido or uterine libido . There is the one, a phallic function, a “Name of the Father.” There is also the two, a postphallic genital stage for women. I later spoke, in this connection, of a revolution of the symbolic.
Why has this phallic function found itself in an imperialist position, an absolutist position? For a little boy, it is the penis, or even the phallus, that allows him to distance himself, to differentiate himself, from the body in which he was a parasite, from the body that fed him and to which he remains in a state of extreme subjugation and dependency. The boy’s first relationship, with his mother, is heterosexual, and his homosexual relationship with his father is already caught up in a secondary process that represses the body. In contrast, a girl’s first relationship is homosexual; her first love-body is that of a woman; her homosexuality is native, primary.
Given that we women are “natively” homosexed, a failure to take into account this first relationship, which is the land of our birth, condemns us to an oral conflict, with all the hysterical or even schizophrenic sequences that implies. This native land is usually simply foreclosed as a space for withdrawal, a dark room, a shadowy room that makes women frightened of themselves, frightened of the other who is their likeness, and frightened at the same time of difference.
Bringing to light the girl’s relationship with the other woman, that is, the daughter’s relationship with her mother, with the woman part of her mother, with the part of her that is not subservient to the patriarchal system, that is not assigned to the mother-function, means abolishing the
foreclosure of the body of the mother (equivalent to Lacan’s formula the “foreclosure of the Name of the Father”). “Body of the mother” is a symbolic function: we are not talking about the real body or about the uterus as biological organ; we are talking about a relationship with a body, a land, a place of birth, an inscribed trace, the relationship between a daughter, or even a son, and the mother’s body.
In order to make himself independent of the phantasm of maternal omnipotence, which has caused him to suffer, the boy uses the phallus to bar it. The girl does not have that bar to cling to so as to assert a difference; caught in her mother’s grip, she is, or so they say, sucked into psychosis, or into what they call a defective or inadequate relationship with the mother. I don’t want to describe this relationship either as inadequate (Grunberger) or as devastating (Lacan).
4 But it is a fact that oral conflict is devastating, that it is itself already a result of the primacy of the phallus and of the refusal to articulate the same-sex relationship of a woman who gives birth to a daughter.
The rediscovery of a prehistory of women’s bodies should result in the elaboration of a history and a society that has at last been genitalized in a postphallic history and society. What was once a prehistory will become a posthistory with respect to the phallic stranglehold that restricts women’s psychosexual maturation in both the “beneath” and the “beyond.”
Women’s
native homosexuality is the first “room of our own,” a place where we can develop a language, a thought, a body, and a life of our own; yes, it is narcissistic, but it is also topographic, dynamic, a- and postphallic; it is a structuring homosexuality that is vital to any becoming-woman; it is a homosexuality that has nothing, or very little, to do with lesbianism, which refers to a secondary homosexuality constructed on the basis of an identification with the father. On the contrary, I am talking about a
primary homosexuality that takes priority in the elaboration of self-knowledge. It has priority and it is permanent; it is the only place from which we can assume the surpassing of the relationship between thefilse, the girl-son (a daughter legitimized by the father) and the Father.
5 This is Antigone’s only way out of the oedipal stage, the only escape from being no more than a stick for her father’s blind old age, the last pillar of the patriarchy that is established more than anything else by the Father/Girl-Son couple under the double headings of hysteria and feminism.
PASSAGES: So how can we take the psychoanalytic statement “there is only one libido and it is phallic” and think it differently?
AF: There are two sexes. There are men and there are women. There is a phallic libido and there is also, necessarily, a libido specific to women. You have only to listen to women talking to feel the way they suffer because they have not been listened to by theory and therefore cannot be received into the symbolic order as women. What women say is regarded as inarticulate, inarticulable, null and void; they are condemned to silence or mutism.
I have been working on what, for want of a better term, I am provisionally calling
uterine libido for twenty-five years.
6 I think the uterus is a space that is not at all outside the psyche. Women are speaking, thinking beings; gestation is a cultural and human act that is related to the unconscious, to speech, and to thought.
Perhaps the reason analytic theory cannot advance is that it is, like all institutions, in the hands of men who are shut up inside the monarchic, narcissistic bastion. The limits of this oedipal and all-phallic hell are a double foreclosure; “before,” at the stage at which we ourselves are created or, in other words, intrauterine life, the fetuses we once were, and “beyond,” in the procreative capacity to generate and to have descendents; a double foreclosure, of the uterine within the procreated beings that we are, and of the uterine beyond the oedipal and the phallic as the capacity to procreate. I think that we have not advanced very far in this direction, probably because men do not have, in their bodies, this capacity for procreation, the capacity to relive the experience of bringing into the world in the active mode. That creates a frustration for them, a uterus envy that cannot, it seems to me, be overcome; they do not want to, they cannot regard gestation as a psychic moment because they have no experience of it. If they could recognize their uterus envy, it could be sublimated into gratitude. The vital link with the matricial, with the maternal, could be restored, and the anamnesis of what has been foreclosed could be abolished. We could then begin to think about genealogy.
The main envy that haunts psychoanalysis is not penis envy (where women are concerned), which I do contest, but uterus envy, an underlying and more powerful force. There really is a universal obsession with controlling motherhood, procreation, and lineage, and it is tied up with an inability, on men’s part, to come to terms with that production and the idea that it escapes their control.
PASSAGES: How do you see psychoanalysis evolving today?
AF: I still wonder how women psychoanalysts in particular can function with the idea that there is only one libido and that it is phallic. And I regret the fact that the Lacanians (or Lacanists) are fixated on this dogma in a fetishistic way, because the work I did with Lacan did give rise to something to do with women, with certain formulations such as “Woman is not all,” she is not caught up entirely in the phallic, and “supplementary jouissance,” which introduces something like a “beyond the phallus.” Lacan himself was always on the lookout for anything that could help him advance. As for women psychoanalysts, I think that, in both their practice and their clinical work, they know much more than they say in their theoretical texts; much more about women’s native homosexuality and the uterine libido. But we are just beginning to come across a few articles here and there that are based on these concepts. We are slowly making progress.
Psychoanalysis must be democratized and must move from the one and the mono to the two. Democracy means acceptance of the other. It must elaborate a theory of genitality for each of the sexes, and that theory must take into account the constitution of “female” genitality—and of male genitality.
There are two sexes, but when the modality of the two is dual, dualist, and warlike, it is regressive, sending us back toward the anal and the pregenital; if we turn to genitality, the modality of the two is coupling, which provides the paradigm of procreation and ethics.
Serge Leclaire and I worked together on what I now call the
democratic personality, which recognizes and welcomes the existence of the other. The seminar that we planned to hold at the École Freudienne in 1977, and which we were barred from holding there, was to have dealt with the two; the outcome was an ironic response in the form of a little text entitled “Pas de deux”!
7 In 1979, in “Un soulèvement de questions” (A raising of questions), a report from Tbilisi, Serge Leclaire explained clearly how the dogma of the phallic-whole could be subverted.
8 He showed what the driving force behind the psychoanalytic movement might be and, commenting on our work with Psychanalyse et Politique, declared that “[these women] have at last given the other a place that escapes all reductionism:
women and, by the same token, men.”
9Unfortunately, all monisms bear within them the seeds of their fundamentalisms, and phallic monism is no different from any other monism. Perhaps Freud only analyzed religion in order to reinstate male monism all the more firmly. That is the only real danger with psychoanalysis. The pope can now cite Malraux: “The twenty-first century will be religious, or it will not be.” I prefer to think that the twenty-first century will be democratic.