There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

Almost seventy years ago, it occurred to Freud that religion is “like the obsessional neurosis of children” and that its roots lie in a nostalgic and powerful need for “the protection … provided by the father.” He contrasts religious fiction with a “sense of reality” and with trust in rationality and a science that is imperfect but in movement and making progress.¹

After fourteen years of Socialist government, which I have described elsewhere as the republic of sons, the reemergence—via the conservative candidate (Jacques Chirac) who seems best placed to win the presidential election—of “the revenge of God” and the image of the Father is indicative of a psychological regression and reactionary political turn on the part of our compatriots.² And this regression-reaction has a direct effect on the preconditions for the permanent democratization that is needed in our country and in any modern state in its national, European, and global identity.

Democracy is ailing, here and elsewhere, because it has become trapped in monocratic dogmas and oligarchic behaviors. Democracy is ailing because the republic of sons has been unable to evolve into an adult democracy of men and women; it has been trapped in a narcissistic posture where it can only be overtaken, as it slides into an essential depression, by the politics of the Father. Whoever fails to advance retreats. The characteristic feature of narcissistic logic is its self-contemplation, its indifference to anything other, its adolescent perversity, its sterility, and its exclusivity (socialism, like feminism, is one of democracy’s adolescent stages).

The left has not only forgotten the struggles and the movements of the living forces that brought it to power; in the name of an equality that is as abstract as it is hollow it has also forgotten to think through the differences between classes, races, and sexes; these did not figure in its self-speculative mirror for self-admiration. The left has been incapable of foreseeing that, before the three great forces that have been excluded from its reign return in the form of protest demonstrations, the old demon and its horror of the other will seize its turf. Socialism will have been no more than a second conservatism, in the same way that Christianity is no more than a second monotheism. And the protest movement, together with the reforms that have come in its wake over the last twenty-five years, will end in a Vatican-inspired counter-reformation that is in fact a truly conservative reformation. Does not the removal of the bishop of Evreux, which has been announced by the anti-abortion commandos,³ recall the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (just as the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Algeria was announced by the introduction of the Family Code in 1984)?⁴

When religion takes over politics, and when moral values take over religion, these moves encourage discrimination, exclusion, and the most scandalous of the old orders. The pronatalist nationalist’s fear of the other reproduces the identitarian obsessions that see beings who are different in terms of their class, culture, or sex, as dangerous forces that will undermine the virile, national, and aristocratic ego. Athenian democracy excluded women, metics (resident aliens), and slaves. Thanks to its reference to a universal man, modern democracy has brought about the repression of the workers and the colonized, and the introduction of apartheid for women.

A power that was already gynophobic and heterophobic (is it necessary to recall that fewer than 6 percent of the deputies in the National Assembly are women and that the political class is almost exclusively cast in the same mold?) has become so “demophobic” that it describes as “populists” those who are not afraid of the people and accuses them of putting our democracy at risk, only to adopt their proposals a few months later.⁵ Is it really populism that threatens our democracy, or is it this “demophobia” and its rejection of the other? Is it populism that poses the real threat, or is it a fundamentalism that used to crawl on its knees but is now riding high? De Villiers, Pasqua,⁶ and the Vatican are all fighting for the values of the day before yesterday, while the Socialist shepherd,⁷ Narcissus and Endymion, is in a state of self-hypnosis.

Democracy is ailing because it has not made sufficient progress, because it has not familiarized itself with analytic thought, because it has been unable to develop a “democratic personality,” that is, a personality capable of otherness. Like the proletariat, which is etymologically “that which procreates,” women can and must contribute the specificity of their talents and their own genius to politics. The process of democratization, which has to be modeled on coupling, insists that we cannot have the (male) one without the (female) one.

Before we administer murderous miracle cures, we have to make an etiological diagnosis of democracy’s discontents. To rid ourselves of the symbolic handicap of excluding young people, immigrants, and women, we require new, forceful analyses and propositions that will allow us to wage a real fight against unemployment and exclusion, that will enable us to establish real parity between men and women and between civil society and political parties.