24. Gestation for Another, Paradigm of the Gift
2009
LE DÉBAT: A lot of ink has been spilled already on the subject of gestation for another person. You see it as a further stage in the Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF).1 In what respect?
ANTOINETTE FOUQUE: To me it actually represents a third stage, just as important as the first two: the fight for abortion and the fight for parity.
In this very space, when we first met,2 I said that during my own pregnancy, in 1964, the process of gestation had set me thinking about the difference between the sexes. Procreation struck me as the key issue to be addressed, politically, in an action that would be not only ideological but above all symbolic. This is what May ’68 made possible and particularly effective: engagement in political action in order to transform mentalities, to carry out a “silk” revolution of the self,3 to conquer rights and combat the discriminatory practices that arose, as I saw it, from that kernel of difference. An unprecedented way of articulating between the private stage and political engagement, each questioning the other so that the woman subject could emerge. The possibility of a place where women could be born, politically and historically.
This was the starting point for the MLF as Monique Wittig and I launched it in the wake of May ’68 in October. Somewhat idealistically, perhaps, I wanted to see a woman arise, free herself, in every mother, whereas Monique wanted the term “woman” to disappear behind the term “lesbian”.
The question of sexual difference, as she posed it from her perspective, has led to today’s theorization of the “queer,” to sexual indeterminacy. For me the question of the difference between the sexes (and not of sexual difference) finds its defining moment with gestation for another: this act definitively establishes the rock of procreation as the unassailable fact of the reality that there are two sexes.
One of the first aims of this revolution was to counter the socialist and feminist tradition of the period between the two world wars, a tradition according to which a woman’s emancipation consisted in being integrated into the secular republic, devoting herself to professional life, to teaching or writing, and also to sexuality. This integration to a homosexed model from the angle of an interned difference looked to me like an amputation.
From the outset, I set aside that notion of liberty via sterility in order to connect procreation with liberation. I wagered on liberation via a process of gestation that would be a bearer of identity, thus of liberation from the symbolic alienation inherent in the phallocentric structure. Everything pregnant women say today tends in the same direction, affirming their maternal, procreative, and creative desires, which do not exclude their drives of ambition.
The indexes of fertility and of professional activity on the part of women in France are among the highest in Europe: French women have had the wisdom to try not to sacrifice any aspect of their desire to exist.
And, as I hoped in founding the Women’s Liberation Movement, with gestation for another we are seeing that the word femme, “woman” has been disengaged from the word mère, “mother,” for the term gestatrice (gestatrix, “gestating woman”) has emerged. What were first called mères porteuses, “childbearing mothers,” then mères de substitution, “surrogate mothers,” had become femmes porteuses, “childbearing women,” so designated, appropriately, by Nadine Morano.4 This seems to me to be the culminating point, the last known stage, of the movement that began with the liberation of women in 1968, a movement that transformed the technical advance of contraception into a political act and linked this advance with abortion.
LD: How are these various causes linked, as you see it?
AF: The first major struggle was undertaken to free women from unwanted pregnancies, and I interpreted it not as a right to abort but as a right to procreate, which women do not have as long as they are not free to say “A child if I want one, when I want one.” In any case, our slogan was never “No child if I don’t want one!” For me abortion was the negative facet of a positive right to procreate, a first step: a seemingly negative right that came by way of the right not to procreate, allowing women to free themselves from thwarted fertility, from enslaved maternity.
We had to go through all the social stages, with Giscard and then the Socialists, to reach the point of a terrible fight over parity, the second struggle, beyond equality. Parity was an opportunity for the revolution of the symbolic, an alternative to discontent in a civilization entrenched in war against women.
But, with the arithmetic arrangements that have been adopted, parity seems to me to remain solely quantitative. Certain feminists think that parity is nothing but a tool for achieving equality: with this numerical, anal conception, we shall never proceed to register heterogeneity, difference between the sexes, and the fertility that this difference reflects—we shall not advance toward what I have called qualitative parity. There can be no fertility without difference between the sexes. There are sexual differences, yes, but that is not the same thing.
When Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Zapatero draws up a framework law, he applies it: there are equal numbers of men and women ministers in the administration, there is even a woman vice prime minister, which means that she will either deal with different problems or deal with problems differently. When Zapatero selects a woman to head the Defense Ministry, and when that woman is eight months pregnant, this is significant, since pregnancy marks the irreducible difference between one sex and the other. Qualitative parity—established on a quantitative basis, with the 30 percent necessary in an assembly for a different discourse to be heard, or, even better, with 50 percent—is a way to advance propositions that take the real of gestation into account and reflect the ethics or the philosophy of the living (philosophie du vivant).
Gestation for another is an element that comes with parity. Pregnancy has become political: among all the questions involving women, I draw special attention to that of procreation among women politicians. As the object of a law, gestation is the definitive legitimization of the difference between the sexes, not as inequality but as a supplement to quantitative parity.
Just as parity built on the right to vote—which was granted by de Gaulle but for which women had fought—and gave it a sort of corrective, as a right to be elected, in the same way passive gestation, or negative gestation in abortion, prefigured the affirmative form of the question.
Voluntary interruption of pregnancy liberated the right to procreation,5 the desire for a child. Parity invented heterosociality and political heterogeneity. With gestation for another, the foreclosure of women’s bodies as productive of living beings has been lifted.
It is a matter of looking very closely at how to think gestation or how to view gestation as a form of thought that may be carried beyond the metaphysical being, beyond the Oedipus complex, beyond the Wailing Wall that seals off the uterus—which remains humanity’s organ of culture even as it continues to produce for the structure that keeps it enslaved.
For forty years now, I’ve been focusing on what the uterine economy might look like. I couldn’t follow Lacan, who, in his seminar on psychoses, posits that “there is nevertheless one thing that evades the symbolic tapestry, it’s procreation in its essential root—that one being is born from another”;6 and who, wondering “What is a woman?” responds, essentially, “a deranged person,” since she is outside the field of the symbolic. The MLF wanted to liberate a woman in every mother, daughter, or sister, in all patriarchal functions.
LD: Where we rediscover the difficulty psychoanalysis has with the woman question …
AF: Even before 1968 I questioned the claim, in Lacan or in Freud, that “woman does not exist” and I questioned equality, that is, I raised the question of the difference between the sexes in politics. In psychoanalysis there was only a difference between genders, divided, moreover, into masculine/feminine, active/passive: what active citizen could be a woman? The activity of the feminine became feminism right away, but it did not include the universal particularity that is the ability to be pregnant.
Gestation remains either unnamed or unnamable, as we see in Freud in the process that leads up to The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis. The 1895 “Project for a Scientific Psychology” is basically a gestation of psychoanalysis in which Freud creates his own uterus even while entrusting it to his alter ego, Fliess, through transference. Now, the very term transference belongs to the order of exchange between an embryo or fetus and a woman. All the words of psychoanalysis speak of gestation without naming it.
Every woman deprived of control over her gestation (at once forbidden and forced, guilty like Eve and subjected to the diktat “in pain you shall bring forth children”) is from that point on gripped by anxiety, which through transference she transmits in utero to the child to be born. Gestation, for millennia, has been a process of hystericization, of the transference of anguish and the anguish of transference. There is a paradox here in the creation of a living being: a repression of the uterus and its closing-off within an economy of law. A male law above the laws, managing gestation as a set of laws vital for the renewal of the species. Whence the transference of anguish from masculine domination to all women.
In the odd text A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses, Freud posits that anxiety is the consequence of the climatic environment during the ice age,7 which supports my position: the world at that point constituted a uterus, an anxiogenic vessel.
We ought to calculate the consequences of the repression of female genitality: the sex organs were obscured, science concerning them was prohibited, and origins were foreclosed, all at the same time. The Enlightenment “shed light” on these simultaneously shameful and sacred parts subject to a taboo—hence the birth of obstetrics. We are familiar with the harmful effects, for both sexes, of the foreclosure of women’s genitality; we have seen the ravages of monotheisms and of the male element (vir) left alone to represent and affirm humanity.
We ought to see how the foreclosure and the cleavage, the male regression to a homosexed, unisex world, are finally a regression to an autoerotic self that, encountering the hostility of the external world, pulls back and withdraws its investment in the object, implementing sameness or a unisex model. This self needs the object only to appease its own drives toward self-preservation.
From that ice age decision ensues the hysteria of women, who are condemned to remain passive or else to become men if they want to exist on the social level.
In a strictly Freudian lineage, and following up on Freud’s work on the side of women and thus of genitality, it is indeed a question of lifting the foreclosure. That work still lies ahead of us.
LD: Where can it begin?
AF: The revolution begun by the MLF in October 1968, the longest of revolutions, is twofold: it is science based, with the pill allowing control of fertility; it is humanist, with women’s liberation, a development that has permeated all areas of civilization over the last forty years.
In the struggle over abortion, in the early years of the MLF, it was a matter of recognizing what the opponents of gestation for another still do not recognize: the reality of the body, that is, the desire for a child, which, in certain woman, cannot be appeased, even if it can be limited or obstructed. Look at those mothers with large families who keep on wanting one more child.
In his conversations with François Poirié, Emmanuel Levinas cites Jacques Derrida: “The movement of desire can be what it is only paradoxically as the renunciation of desire.”8 This desire is in effect unappeasable, linked to the infinite. “The Infinite,” Levinas says, “is produced as Desire—not a Desire that the possession of the Desirable slakes, but the Desire for that Infinite which the desirable arouses rather than satisfies. A desire perfectly disinterested—Goodness.”9 I think it’s this charge of desire that women invest in gestation for another, a perfect example of a perfectly disinterested desire, for goodness, which is forgotten in the philosophical gesture that has excluded hospitality of the flesh from its reflection. The desire for a child is desire itself, desire for desire.
It is at the heart of this desire that the question of difficulties with pregnancy arises, the most apparent difficulty today being denial. The denial of pregnancy results directly from the foreclosure of the symbolic, of a singular and universal experience that for the moment lacks words and speech; it is interned exclusion, a refusal of full interiority, a continued insistence that “that does not exist.”
The fact that pregnancy is a determining element in a woman’s life is verified, even in denial: one can only negate an event that cannot be denied. One cannot deny, then, that pregnancy is a very particular situation entailing disruptions of all sorts. It is pregnancy that makes the difference.
The denial of pregnancy is a psychic refusal of pregnancy, a psychic sterility that contravenes physical fertility. When a child is born and then killed in infancy, this infanticide can be read as a refusal to rear the child: here we see the function of the nurturing, child-cultivating, anthropocultivating mother, with all the diversified—and today often professionalized—functions that the term brings together. This brings to light the enormous work involved in procreation—especially the enormous responsibility.
Today many contemporary women assert that their family lives do not take second place to their career. This is a metamorphosis of the matricial, an affirmation. Here we have the only alternative to the war between the state-centered West, from totalitarianism to democracy, and the market-centered East, the only alternative to the phallocentric system: the genital system that is being announced as an innocent unsurpassable reality. These contemporary women with children illustrate the progressive and efficient articulation between procreation and creation, between the erotic drive and the drive of ambition in geni(t)ality.10
LD: The desire for a child also leads to gestation without a woman, to the artificial uterus.
AF: I see this rather as the end point of the long repression of women in an extreme technophilic delusion. The threat implicit in the artificial uterus is the creation of a child without a body, without flesh, whereas the promise of gestation for another is that two bodies are better than no body.
Just as philosophers and poets draw on that genitality, so technicians and obstetricians, by intervening in procreation, mean to appropriate for themselves, on the symbolic, economic, and ideological levels, what emerges from procreation without naming the principal actress, the creator of wealth, of living beings. Moreover, through a castrating, feminist body of thought based on various philosophies (queer, anti-Oedipus), they forbid her to bring to light the term woman or the woman subject.
In this context of repression by the sciences, by licensed experts, all the phobias are mobilized to prevent woman from existing. This effacement of women, fantasized as all-powerful mothers, is at the origin of misogyny, which has been exacerbated by the advent of the MLF, for every proclamation of, or desire for, independence makes it apparent that there is a war going on—a war of colonization, a war for control of fertility.
Not only has gestation been challenged, mythically, as a competence of women but even thus denied it has served paternal power, the dominating force. The absolute transcendence of the gestatrix is the object of all envy. The curse on procreation comes from the principle according to which “what I can’t have I destroy”: the male destroys gestation by putting it under a curse and perverting it, denaturing the work of civilization. Uterus envy guides the androcentrism and the monotheisms that have appropriated the female virtues of childbearing and made them theological virtues. Giving life is the paradigm of the gift, but Marcel Mauss, anthropologist of the gift, does not invoke gestation even once!
When I started the MLF, I used to say that, after the three symbolic blows articulated by Freud (Galileo’s discovery that the earth was not the center of the universe, Darwin’s discovery that humans are animals like the others, Freud’s discovery that we have an unconscious and that consciousness is not the queen of the ego), the fourth narcissistic blow is the recognition that one is born from a woman’s body, from thinking flesh. I have called this the genesic blow. It is Adam who is born of Eve’s body: here is a reversal of Genesis that could not fail to engender terrible resistance. All late-twentieth-century philosophy hinges on this obsession. Texts on hospitality speak—without speaking of it—about what I have called hospitality of the flesh, the capacity to welcome the other , the capacity to receive an absolutely foreign body: the ovum and the spermatozoon make an egg that is foreign to a woman and that asks this gestatrix to inhibit her biological capacities of rejection and to accept it as a guest.
Pregnancy is the model for every organ transplant that involves inhibiting the capacity to reject. This is why I posit that gestation is the paradigm of ethics .
LD: Let’s go back to gestation for another person. You didn’t have any doubts, as many others did, before you spoke out in favor of this?
AF: My position results from the path my thinking has taken over many years. My mother was in a state of denial during the first five months of her pregnancy until the day her sister said to her: “I’m fourteen years younger than you; I’ll bring up your child, let me have it.” So, from the fifth month after my conception, I had two mothers, one of flesh, heart, and uterus and another, adoptive. I have always known and accepted this; I offered two bouquets every Mother’s Day. If my godmother spoke that way, it was to end the denial of pregnancy, to get my mother to accept it. It was the support of a body and a listening ear: a compassionate body that made a gift of its person, and a backup body for her entire life. If the denial of pregnancy is one side of the coin, gestation for another is precisely its obverse.
When I encountered this question in the early 1980s, gestation was already at the heart of my intellectual commitment and of what I call the revolution of the symbolic, so I was favorably disposed to it. I see and understand all the possible missteps and exploitations: but if it is from the starting point of neurosis and lack that one can establish the normal workings of the psyche, one can in the same way envisage all the dangers attached to gestation for another and at the same time the unveiling that this practice constitutes.
The question of surrogate mothers arose around that time, while I was in the United States. We were beginning to see news reports on the practice, which has in fact always existed among humans: a wife adopts a child at its birth, most often pretending to be its mother. I indicated my favorable position right away: a woman must be able to say “yes” or “no,” “I want/ don’t want to be a mother,” and to specify the conditions. I have stressed for a long time that artificial procreation brings to light the sumptuousness of natural procreation, that to recognize the latter is to decolonize the uterus, and that in France the will to prohibit inflicted on women a new dispossession of their bodies.
My reflections have thus quite logically led me to sign the petition for the legalization of gestation for another—the lawyer who originated the petition, Nathalie Boudjerada,11 is someone I’ve known for many years. Five years ago I myself had sent Laure Camborieux, the president of the MAIA association for aid to infertile couples, to see Michèle André, then vice president of the Senate.
LD: Gestation for another nevertheless raises the question of service rendered for money, with all the drift toward merchandising to which that can lead.
AF: In reality I view gestation for another as a struggle against prostitution of the uterus. The two are often merged, because many feminists favoring gestation for another are in favor of regulating prostitution.
The uterus, as we have known since Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, is the terrain colonized, exploited, looted by androcentrism, the monotheisms, and every androcentric institution. With the free market economy putting profit above all else, we pass to a new status of the enslaved uterus or the purchased, prostituted uterus. We shift from artisanal efforts to an overt industry in the particular form of sexual or procreative tourism, that is, the exploitation of third-world flesh. The production of women’s bodies can be purchased for a very low price in the third world or for a very high price in California.
We have to talk about the empire of the dominant group whose members exploit the earth and all its species and the first of the earth’s environments, the uterus, a productive environment like all the others. If this environment is under the control of the rich in the richest countries (or of the rich in the poorest countries), we not only experience the commodification of the speaking-thinking living, but also the commodification of gestation, and then the establishment of an ethics committee to control the perverting of ethics itself, to control the transgression of human laws through profit.
There will always be the world of prostitution of the uterus and the world of the gift, of gestation for another. In the capitalist economy it is a matter of liberalization; in the economy of the gift it is a matter of liberation. There will always be a race between women’s enslavement and women’s liberation. Let me remind you that the MLF, with its slogan “The factory belongs to the workers, the uterus belongs to women, the production of living beings belongs to us,” has posited that the uterus belongs to women.
It would seem that gestation for another has always existed, that it has always been practiced in an unofficial or at least unlegislated way. Certain philosophers suggest that we could remain at the artisanal stage. But, in a period of worldwide industrialization, the question turns out to have been already caught up in a speculative economic system that makes human flesh one of its principal resources—gray gold, red gold, sperm banks, organ trafficking, umbilical cord cells …
Why say that the donation of an organ has nothing to do with the donation of a child? Why do we find organ donation appropriate? Because it is free. And because it goes from a dead person to a living one. In France, then, we tolerate only gifts from the dead to the living or gifts from one living person to another that do not cause death and do not require work but rather sacrifice. Still, something of a debt is involved—a costly one. In the gift of a child the question of compensation arises: indebtedness or gratitude may remain, but something is different in the cut-up body that led Jean-Luc Nancy say that he had been able to view the organ that saved his life as an intruder.12
It will not be a matter of remuneration. We may wonder about the price of this priceless work. How can such work be rewarded? By something beyond money? Compensation brings to the surface the wretchedness of women’s true enslavement, even more than slavery itself: it reveals that their production is irreplaceable, that they have a distinctive competence that necessarily partakes of the gift, being free, freely given, a matter of pure gratitude toward the species. They receive nothing in return. Compensation would only be alms.
We are a capitalist country, but one that does not want to give in to the dogma of doctrinaire free market liberalism as the Anglo-Saxon countries have done by and large: even as we posit limits, we press forward with truly alternative thinking, a conception of the gift that goes beyond earlier conceptions. In gestation for another, one woman comes to the aid of another woman. The children thus produced may be the last ones before the artificial uterus comes into play, children of flesh and blood rather than children of a machine, children rooted in a body rather than tomatoes grown without soil.
Up to now, before commercialization, there were altruistic elements, but human genius is in the process of industrializing and dematerializing itself; it is losing not only flesh and origins but the unconscious, prehistory. With gestation for another, there will always be this double economy, but for the first time the economy of the gift that gestation by one woman for another embodies will also be brought to light. It is not an economic question first and foremost; it is a real question that crosses all the layers of human organization, but that has to reach the symbolic function. Recognition of the genesic function of women is required if we are to struggle effectively against sexual prostitution and against uterine prostitution, against holding the third world and women’s bodies hostage by commodification and free market liberalism.
Today the question is presented to us polemically: one must be for or against without thinking anything through. Thinking solely in legal terms, as libertarians do, will not suffice. Trying to make a judgment in terms of economic factors will not do either. The law proposed in France seeks to give a framework to an underground, extraterritorialized practice and above all to trade in human beings. France is a country of laws, opposed to the commodification of humans. A law on the production of living beings will name, limit, and give its full meaning to the gesture of gestation. This recognition would not only lift the denial but would affirm the competence of the gestatrix. And, far from the ethics of restriction and prohibition that prevails at present, there would be an affirmative, materialist, liberatory ethics.
LD: Gestation for another also brings up hesitations of a much deeper order having to do with sex roles, the psychic identity of the actors …
AF: Yes, precisely what interests me in gestation for another is that there is more than one woman to make gestation circulate. This strikes me as an excellent way to desacralize the patriarchal maternal function and to bring out the difference in competences: the ovum is not a spermatozoon; even if there is some talk of parthenogenesis, the heterogeneity that the spermatozoon brings must be taken into account. Among many women who are opposed to gestation for another, there is the specter of homoparentality—it is not a question of justifying homoparentality “morally” by being “better” parents but of getting this manifest reality recognized—and there is also this disturbing question: does a woman have the right to give a child to another woman?
One of the first laws that followed on the heels of the MLF, in 1970, contemporary with the struggle for abortion rights, was the abolition of the notion of “paternal power.” Once parental power is dissociated, we are headed toward fragmentation. The fragmented body: these are the organs from a living body that are being given. An embryo is not a fragment, it is a future! It is, on the contrary, gestation recomposed: everything converges to create a living child.
In gestation for another, the infertility at issue arises indeed from the absence of a uterus in a couple: no uterus is available to proceed with gestation and create the child. Gestation for another then makes it possible for several people to contribute to fertility. Whether the couple in question consists of a man and a woman, two men, or two women is of no importance, since genitality is always at least tripartite: it is plural.
One can imagine an ovum, a spermatozoon, a genitrix, a gestatrix , an adoptive mother—or one can say that the genitrix is the mother who will receive a child born to another woman. Matricial filiation is introduced horizontally. It does not simply involve mitochondrial DNA but also the transmission of an embodied unconscious. My body is an inscribed body that remembers and thinks—and gives. It seems to me that what is involved here is not fragmentation but a will to reassemble; rather than a body in pieces, a body plurally conceived and enriched. Rather than one child for two women, two women for one child.
In gestation for another there is a fine idea that topples the matriarch, the positive or negative phantasm of maternal omnipotence; it is an idea of sharing more than of tearing into pieces—a sharing of responsibility and of life. This diversification of functions of the finest occupation in the world is what permits a radical critique of male or female metaphysics. The Diana of the Ephesians is no more fitting than the belief in an omnipotent God, creator of heaven and earth, and of Adam. It is not uterocentrism that is going to cure us of phallocentrism.
Procreation must not be chained to maternity, for placing everything on the mother makes the mother everything. This leads us astray and brings us into a new phallocentrism or into a conservative morality, for, instead of liberating “woman” through procreation, we tie her down with the notion of “mother.” Aren’t the opponents of gestation for another, in their belief that they are protecting the “mother,” ultimately reinforcing patriarchy? The benefits of procreation are alienated when there is naturalization of the maternal function rather than symbolization of matricial activity where flesh would become word, where speech would not be logocentric, and writing would not be semblance. Instead of “woman” bringing about change in the structure of androcentered philosophy or in the Lacanian structure, it would be the unchanged structure that would integrate the woman-as-mother, which has always been the conservative position. The “silk” revolution of the self entails liberating a woman from all the roles that have been prescribed heretofore in an effort to thwart women’s competence.13
Gestation for another leads in this direction. The name of the father is multiplied and exchanged ad infinitum, between the adopter, the genitor, and others. And the body of the mother, nonphallic, is multiplied among several women’s bodies. The foreclosure of the body of the mother sent women into psychosis; but if we start to think that “mother” is diversified, then there are several women who are liberated. This is where an “I,” a woman subject, comes in fully. It is her singularity and her share in universality. It is the adventure common to the greatest number of women, and its extension to gestation for another can only increase the knowledge of all.
I support gestation for another because I am beyond feminism and because I am a psychoanalyst. My thinking about gestation is not totalitarian, that is, not maternalist; it is materialist.
The simple fact of referring to gestation reintroduces nonmaternalist materialism in fact. I dream of a woman who is free and whole, with all her competences: brain, uterus, and heart.
If Freud’s masterstroke was lifting the repression of the unconscious, that of the women’s movement is lifting the foreclosure of the procreating body: not only is it the case that “our bodies belong to us,” but “our bodies are here, we exist.” Starting from a negative situation, the debate has made it possible to think the historical condition of women. Today, as was true yesterday and will be true tomorrow, we must not remain where we are: we must have the courage to go further. We must work on the function of a woman’s body, the uterine function, and the metaphysiological unveiling of that function. For the first time, we do not see the uterus in counter-relief, in absentia, as in hysteria, or amputated as in hysterectomy; we see it rather in its necessity, in its vital function.
This is culture; this is civilization: to try to order without repressing, without destroying the burgeoning of culture. There are problems to solve, problems that cannot be solved by a denial of the questions that they raise, a denial that could be the negative response to all the questions.
LD: So for you, then, the essential issues are going to be decided among women?
AF: The childbearing woman comes in where there is no uterus. And she comes in, as it were, through the creation of solidarity, an alliance among women from which both sexes benefit. At this point I see her as an ally, a “comother” (commère) who fulfills the role of fairy godmother, who rights the wrongs from which her goddaughter suffers.14 During this episode a prolonged dialogue between women will be launched.
The coresponsibility is not simply maternal, but matricial, uterine. A different sharing and different compassion come about according to the laws of the living body rather than according to the laws of the mind or of a legal system. It is thus logical that this responsibility should enter into law. One must neither foreclose the childbearing woman in anonymity nor trivialize her gift. There is one more parent, not one less gestation. We need to envisage childbearing in the philosophical sense of the term bearing: the sculpturing of a living entity. Between two women homosexuation allows not only the sharing of fertility but a cocreation of a living, speaking being. It is impossible for a woman without a uterus to make a child, and yet it is possible if a gestatrix carries the child alongside her, if she does ethical, poethical work.
The alliance between women assumes competence and responsibility for the act that has long been viewed as the original sin. Gestation for another is one of the first liberating acts of this gestation without guilt. If the women involved have the possibility of speaking about their pregnancy, they will express their inexpressible jouissance, all anguish surmounted, all hope fulfilled. And this will be the end of the three monotheisms, those murderers of human matter.
LD: You have alluded more than once to the secular stakes that would be attached to gestation for another. What do you mean by that?
AF: Through the pending legislation it is also a question, as I see it, of secularizing maternity, which is still overly sacralized, and of proposing an ethics on the side of “for others”—literally a secular ethics.
Women, artists, and workers—the revolutionary trilogy proposed by Auguste Comte for the transformation of the world—have to be renewed (not abandoned) so as to become women, ecologists, and secular thinkers. By “secularism” I mean women and the secularization of mythologies through metapsychology, depth psychology, a mission that Freud assigns to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has to focus on women, and anthropology on ecology.
Speculation has to give way to the rematerialization of the world, which goes along with secularization, at once a passage from the religious to the scientific (but not necessarily to the technological) and from fantasy to reality (to clinical experience).
Whence the royal road of the psychoanalysis to come, which is gestation, for the analytic scene and creative processes, as well as for the work of the unconscious and the treatment of transference neuroses, early neuroses related to recent experiences (for example, early maturation and pregenital repression in girls).
LD: Do you see women as the actors par excellence in secularization?
AF: The alternative to any discourse, to any metaphysical science, to any master discourse, is an exploration of “Planet Woman”—which is part of Planet Earth. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, Planet Woman—Planeta Femea—was the title for the meeting of worldwide women’s associations that later organized the UN World Conference on Women in Beijing. There were women from all over the world. It was a matter of saying that, vis-à-vis God, there are women and that women are the locus of secularization. Women are confronting clerics and doctors of Law—doctors of all laws, religious and scientific. The voice of secularism is the collective voice of women.
I said as much at Rio: the uterus is the human being’s first environment. Today we see the relation that gestation may have with ecology: How, after the Grenelle de l’environnement,15 can we fail to see that this environment exists? Contrary to ecology, it is not a matter of man and nature, it is a matter of an intermediary environment that is not nature, that is strictly human, where something is played out involving an environment and a psychic future for the species, of which women, anthropocultivators, are the guardians. I do not believe that the earth is a uterus, but I believe, in contrast, that the uterus is both an earth and a world, the soil of civilization, of culture. All phylogenesis relived at the level of ontogenesis: this is genesics. Here the process of humanization of the species is endlessly replayed.
The earlier human sciences do not suffice to account for this. We need a new epistemological space; we need to bring a dark continent to light through a discourse that this decentered, ethical, hospitable subject will posit. This is the object of the feminology that I have been advocating for years. This science of women, or rather these sciences of women, speak of gestation, from genitality to genius. Feminology secularizes; it brings people the knowledge of masters, doctors, clerics, philosophers, authors, all capitalists of meaning, as it liberates what their domination kept enslaved. A politics of civilization has to proceed, today, through women and their humanizing contribution. For our civilization, by putting procreation under a curse, has perverted the human story.
LD: How do you envisage this higher state of civilization?
AF: For me it is summed up in access to the stage of genitality. Envy, which Melanie Klein deemed primordial, has to be transformed into gratitude for women’s gift to humanity or into admiration for such an unbelievable thing. Why did Descartes write that admiration is the first of the passions to be formed in utero? For my part, I see admiration as opposed, term for term, to envy.
One can also establish an equivalence between faith, hope, and charity with the three keys to thinking offered by Heidegger: “remember, think, and thank.” Or one can say that God’s primary virtue is mercy and recall that the Hebrew root of this word is the same as that of the word for uterus.
This genitality, which psychoanalysis has been unwilling to theorize, is known. Everywhere in the books of philosophy I read there are traces of the fact that gestation is the event. For example, in the Jewish religion it is said that an angel comes to lay a finger on the lips of a newborn child, so that the child will forget everything he or she has already learned, knowledge that the Torah will reimpart. Diderot, in his Elements of Physiology, asserts that the child in utero already has all the knowledge in the world—Élisabeth de Fontenay calls Diderot a gynéconome.16
All humanity knows that the newborn is a perfectly equipped male or female human being, created to create, that is, to be a poet, a businessperson, an artist, a doctor, a laborer, an artisan, an engineer—everything that human minds have created and can continue to create—and that women, through gestation and procreation, are going to cultivate still more. We must reach the point of saying that there is a properly human—thus speaking and thinking—structure of the real, for what would be concern for the other, but not in a mothering manner. Women make children, and, ever since Homo erectus, have been in culture, have been participating in the creation of human gestures, speech, language.
Our history precedes each of us, comes well ahead of the self. Gestation is the living movement, the permanent invention, of the world and of oneself. The engram, that trace in the brain engraved before birth, in which I see an archiwriting, is a programming: there is no past that is not a future. According to Freud, “the individual’s mental development repeats the course of human development in an abbreviated form.”17 And humanity circulates with desire. Just as ecology does not respect borders, mitochondrial DNA, also transmitted by women, does not stay confined within them. This means that humanity moves through gestations. It is a generalized diaspora, and women are the traceability of that universal, transhistoric, transcontinental diaspora.
But foreclosure is being reactivated everywhere, endlessly. Every effort is being made to win back the field of gestation—discovered some forty years ago—by enclosing women within a psychotic and schizophrenic programming. This entire field remains unheard.
What would this gyneconomy be? It belongs to the order of the absolutely human; it certainly does not belong to the natural order: a woman is a female human, but she is human much more than she is female. What does she weave when she makes a child? What happens during pregnancy, during which intrauterine exchanges occur? We couldn’t have surrogate mothers because the whole intrauterine life would be lost? Quite the contrary! Beyond the cultural, symbolic, genetic, genealogical inheritance there is a gift tied to a singular person that will leave traces, at the level of temperament, drives, the creation of a personality. If the bond is maintained (and French law will surely provide for this), one can say that it will enrich the personality of the child to come all the more—and more clues will be available than in the case of an adopted child. This child will benefit from multiple origins, from a sort of interleaving of affects, emotions, resonances. The contribution of the gestatrix will be considerable.
Something is happening here that is very important to me, something in which lies, foreclosed, the truth, not just of women but of their procreatures, that is, all human beings, something Freud claims to have found in The Interpretation of Dreams: in dreams one sleeps and rediscovers intrauterine life.
Where are we to look for the term woman as an absolutely vital element for the humanity of the species in the humanism to come? Woman, for me, would be found in the act of gestation: pregnancy is not merely a state; it even surmounts the opposition between state and act; it is a place of absolute reciprocity, of alterity without alteration. Here is the full performativity of pregnancy: rather than “I write or I die,” it is “I give birth; I create.” All creators of genius, all poets, say the same thing. Freud writes that, while Martha approaches the end of her pregnancy, he is giving birth to The Interpretation of Dreams. Our culture is familiar with this geni(t)ality, but marginalizes it, even among men, for it is unacceptable to phallic reason.
Rather than in the forces of the spirit, the homosexed Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I believe in the forces of the flesh. Primordial transcendence is a bisexed trinity because it involves mother, child, and flesh. Flesh is the sixth sense, sexed, linked to jouissance rather than to anguish or its spiritualization, hope. It is the primary fleshly transcendence, which is not at all immanence; it is the transformation of a state into an act.
These three words, Gestation, For, Another, are magnificent, for they raise ethics to the nth power—or to the power of g (gestation, genesics, generosity)—as an absolute value, the human possibility of giving priority to the other over oneself. For the first time what could be called primary ethics and primary philosophy come together, through the mediation of law, to affirm a symbolic order achieved beyond a mercantile and dematerialized civilization. This shift beyond the frivolous represents an opportunity, at last, to think genesics , to think differently. All procreation for another is marked with this sign: the gift as interpretation of the world, knowledge, and acknowledgment of others. At the heart of ethics there is ethics itself: giving life.
But one must have the generosity to think such a gift. To love women would be to trust them, to count on their wisdom. The future of the human species lies here, in women as bearers of ethics and in ethics favoring the raising of consciousness on the part of women and of men.
It seems to me that what we have begun in history is this revolution: access to what is always still foreclosed, to geni(t)ality, to human genius.