Here in Quebec we rarely hear a critique of feminism as a simple ambition to share an unchanged power with men. Gravida seeks to undertake such a critical approach, among others. This appears indispensable now that feminism has become a major cultural phenomenon.
In the interview that follows, “feminism” must be read as a demand to share in masculine power, or even an ambition to dominate within sites of power, without any radical challenge to that power itself, to its origins or its political and libidinal economies.
Groups of women and some men in Quebec are now working with the ideas of the psychoanalyst Antoinette Fouque.
A women’s liberation movement that critiques feminism: does that not warrant a pause for reflection?
Jean Larose
GRAVIDA: Let’s begin with the beginnings of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes in France and of the Psychanalyse et Politique collective.
1
ANTOINETTE FOUQUE: They are absolutely contemporaneous. In the May ’68 movement, which gave rise to the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes, there were two central questions: the question of the authority of the Father and the question of sexuality. Two struggles were going on at the time: one was anti-authoritarian, the other was for sexual liberation. But prior to the women’s movement there had been ten years of active anti-imperialist struggles in France and in the world, with the war in Algeria, the independence movements in Sub-Saharan Africa, the war in Vietnam and the groups opposing it.
From the very earliest meetings of what was to be called the MLF (more by the media, as it happens, than by women themselves), in October 1968, and even during the preceding summer, we worked on the self-evident fact that reality is organized around inequality between the sexes, between races, between classes. The inequality between the sexes, which was and still is our principal issue, was either raised in a precritical feminist way that antedated the psychoanalytic revolution—“there is inequality, we want equality”—and in which the question whether equality between two different terms was possible did not even come up; or, if it did, it led to the judgment that psychoanalytic discourse—the only discourse to date that interrogated sexuality—had to be questioned through a critical or postcritical effort to develop it further. Starting with the very earliest meetings of our little group, in October ’68, some of us questioned the way the sexual contradiction was inscribed not only in social classes but in the analytic field. The “Psychanalyse et Politique” pairing was already at work. At that point we were trying to work out the dialectics of the economic and the symbolic (Marx and Freud), rather than the dialectics of the anti-imperialist movement and the women’s liberation movement; the second process came later.
From October ’68 on, we could see the impasses into which the May movement was going to get stuck owing to the unconsciousness that pervaded the political realm. One of my own earliest observations was that expressions of the unconscious were not limited to situations in which there were two interlocutors and did not necessarily require a couch. This may seem a little ridiculous twelve years later, but the Psychanalyse et Politique practice was developed prior to the whole “anti-Oedipus” movement,
2 and it inaugurated what could be characterized as work on the political when the unconscious is not left out of the picture. I was already positing that not only is there something of the unconscious in the political but that there are relations of power and force within the system of hierarchization of the libidinal stages and what constitutes the “reality principle” (a position that is still not accepted, I believe, within institutional psychoanalysis).
3GRAVIDA: What is striking for North Americans is the way you use psychoanalysis. Here, we’re used to feminists dismissing Freud altogether because of what he wrote about women, whereas you have a totally different relation to psychoanalysis.
AF: It’s impossible to posit the contradiction and antagonism between the sexes in a precritical way that doesn’t take Freud’s discourse into account. We would be condemning ourselves to go back a hundred years in our thinking. We have to recognize, however, that feminists were the ones who unmasked the ideology of masculinity in Freud: in
Sexual Politics Kate Millett offered one of the first critiques of the ideology of masculinity underlying Freud’s discourse.
4GRAVIDA: Yes, but things have played out as though the feminists couldn’t get beyond this denunciation.
AF: It’s surely more complicated than that. In any case, they haven’t used the psychoanalytic instrument to critique the ideology of masculinity and they have maintained a kind of face-off, as if to say “he is masculinist, we are feminists,” which is a simple inversion (in fact, the same process of inversion is often found elsewhere in the feminists’ positions). The paradox is that the women’s movement has not taken the Freudian revolution into account as a condition for the maturation, and perhaps even for the birth, of that movement; it has even envisaged Freud’s work in the mode of denegation. In the earliest American texts, even in Millett’s, the works of Freud and Marx are addressed negatively, even though they had helped the historical situation to evolve. And then there is the whole question of the hastily forged concept of “patriarchy” to which feminists refer without analyzing their unconscious relation to it.
GRAVIDA: Doesn’t the importance of Jung in the United States, as contrasted with Freud, shed some light on the feminists’ attitude toward Freud?
AF: About Jung I can only say what everyone knows about him, that he was pursuing a metaphysical deviation. But yes, American feminism is indeed constantly going down blind alleys in the direction of the occult sciences, hypnosis, and pre-Freudianism. Feminism is most often “anti”-or “ante-,” pre-Marxist and precritical in terms of the psychoanalytic revolution. And it represses the MLF and the epistemological break this movement has instituted, since feminism starts from and remains wedded to an outdated humanist philosophy. This attitude, reactionary in its unwillingness to acknowledge the discoveries of contemporary thought, often proceeds by substituting an ideal ego for the ideal of the ego, thus remaining at a level of aggressive and anal presymbolization. It’s the old story of the musician-assassin. Do you know Dostoevsky’s short story? One day a man who sees himself as the world’s greatest violinist, without ever having touched a violin, meets the real “greatest violinist in the world.” And kills him. Necessarily, since that man was stealing, in reality, his phantasm from him. Here you have the process of paranoia: one has to kill the ideal object with which one identifies oneself so as to take the place of that object phantasmatically. This is Lacan’s “Aimée case” or Valérie Solanas’s SCUM.
5The divergence between feminism and the MLF has been, from the beginning, the difference between regression purely and simply experienced and regression traversed analytically. Analysis is a way of verbalizing regressive processes, whereas feminism puts them into action. Where Jung is concerned, one can speak of the immaturity of his deviation, of its structure as a libidinal oedipal “immaturation,” which is also found in the regressive components of the women’s movement, via feminism. The anti-Oedipus, the regressive return, whether denied or acknowledge, to a maternal, preoedipal stage. In fact, this is not what the Women’s Movement posited. The anti-or anteoedipal, or the prephallic, position is a position advocated in an oppositional move by the proponents of schizoanalysis and a position held by feminists. Some feminists have understood the anti-Oedipus as an antipatriarchal struggle, even as they deny what belongs to the unanalyzed and continually repressed relation to the mother, that is, to prepatriarchal values. Not to think through, analytically, the move beyond the phallic stage seen as the primary genital stage is to find oneself lingering a hundred years behind the times, instead of continuing the Freudian work that stopped with the discovery of the oedipal processes. The process of displacement and maturation—in other words, the analytical process—is continuously replaced by a phantasmatic operation of identification, which is then enacted.
GRAVIDA: Is this related to your belief that feminism is historically the last metaphor of patriarchy?
AF: Yes. Just as one can say that “it’s the son who makes the mother,” one could say that “it’s the daughter who makes the father.” The maternal inscription is given to a woman by the son who bestows a function on her within patriarchy. There is no mother but the mother of a son. A woman has to have a son, has to bring into the world the being who bears and symbolizes the phallus, if she is to be worthy of figuring honorably in a patriarchal structure. It is much less certain, in contrast, that giving birth to a daughter allows a woman to achieve the prestige of the maternal and its majestic function. Yet it was perhaps Anna Freud, or Lou Salomé, who “made” Freud, who allowed him to attain a paternal function and exit from a certain position as a son dependent on the mother or on a woman taken for the mother. You know that there is a text by Lou Salomé called “Thanks to Freud.” In the same vein, the issue of
L’Arc devoted to Lacan was written exclusively by women from the Freudian school. I think the famous “Name of the Father” can only come historically from this relation of a man to a woman who is not in a position to be his mother and who is going to draw him out of his position as son.
6This is why I say that feminism lies within the patriarchal enclosure. The object of feminism is the struggle against the patriarchy, but that struggle “against,” at the point where it fails to interrogate its own unconscious motives, where it represses the ambivalence of the relation to the father (ambivalence in its positive aspect)—that struggle is polarized around being “against the father” and very close to the father, without bringing to conscious awareness the daughter’s fixation on the father. In fact, it seems to me that what is happening is an identification of the daughter with the father, that is, the daughter “makes” the father: she imitates him and makes him the father, exactly as the son makes the mother a mother, that is, imitates her (putting himself in the position of creation) and gives her her function. Paradoxically, the antipatriarchal struggle is thus also the advent of the symbolic position of the Father; it allows the shift from an unconscious or archaic patriarchy to an assumption of the Name of the Father through the fact that what is advocated at bottom in the counterpatriarchy is access to the paternal identity, to the Name of the Father, and to the phallic position.
GRAVIDA: You’re saying that feminism is a fixation of the woman at the phallic phase?
AF: While the chief enemy is presumably the patriarchy, there is a phallic demand, a demand for equality with men in the world as it is, a world in which the reality principle is confused with the principle of inequality between the sexes and still more so with the principle of the absolute primacy of one sex over the other—the other being practically nonexistent. Lacan established the analytic theory that has predominated over the past twenty years by positing that “the phallus is the signifier of desire.” Men and women alike are said to confront this reality principle—which a close look at Freudian theory shows to be a prepubertal reality principle. Historically, the world is stuck in this prepubertal position, for both sexes: jouissance can only come from the phallus, and there is only one sex that stands for both sexes—a position that is called phallocentrism or (in keeping with Derrida’s concept) phallogocentrism. The antipatriarchal struggle remains inside this enclosure; thus we witness the paradoxical situation in which the feminists, who think they are struggling against patriarchy, demand the phallus—that is, the Name, individualism (they designate themselves as [female] “individuals,” as undivided, nondivided subjects), the Ego, and a share in power on an equal basis with men—without asking to what libidinal phase the history of this struggle is attached. Thus, indeed, if one designates the principal enemy without understanding how that enemy can also be an object of desire or identity and how it can play a role in structuring desire or identity (something that analysis can contribute), one believes one is situating the enemy on the outside and thereby fails to recognize it not only as an internal enemy but as an articulatory component.
It is not a matter of declaring that feminism as a fixation on the father is good or bad, but rather that, from the moment when it fails to recognize the relation of the daughter to the father and the articulatory function of this relation, it represents a fixation, thus a regression. In other words, feminism is a dead end only to the extent that it is an unconscious fixation at the phallic stage, that is, on the aspect of the father-daughter relation that is in play in that phase.
The feminists get out of the self-destructive impasse constituted by the failure to recognize this positive relation to the father only by closing themselves off within political parties, within hyperpatriarchal institutions. In France, even as they denounce patriarchy, the feminists choose to publish with ultracapitalist and patriarchal presses. In other words, a feminist can maintain a conscious discourse against patriarchy and against phallic imperialism, but as long as she does not identify the site where the phallus can be, for her, the signifier of desire, she is in a state of denegation. This persistence in denying the positivity of the relation to the father is the impasse confronting the feminists. Because where there is denegation there is fixation and regression.
But feminism has a strongly positive aspect, as does hysteria. Feminism must not be written off as negative; it is an absolutely necessary phase. This century is feminist, and I believe there is not a single woman today who is not a feminist. But it is one thing to recognize oneself as a feminist, caught up in a process of elaboration, and quite another to stop there and choose feminism as the ultimate state of women’s liberation. For the phallic stage and feminism are not the ultimate stage, for women, either in historical or libidinal terms. There is a stage “beyond feminism,” because there is a stage “beyond the phallic.”
GRAVIDA: You say that there is a stage “beyond feminism and the phallic stage”; couldn’t this be rather a question of falling short?
AF: No, it can’t be a matter of falling short. And in fact, when there is denegation of that phallic articulation, an anal or oral regression often ensues, with phantasms of matriarchy; or else a fixation, though the latter has the advantage of belonging to its own time. I repeat: this century is feminist; and today, ultimately, to articulate a phallic phase well is to traverse the century on the side of the privileged few. Just as, in the class struggle, there are the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and then the immense majority belonging to the lower bourgeoisie, people who belong economically to the proletariat but ideologically or symbolically choose bourgeois power, one could say that the feminists are “lower [female] phallocrats.” When I said this, a dozen years ago, they went for the jugular, and yet … What’s more, I wonder if it isn’t the women’s struggle that is going to bring back to light the desire that the exploited may have for the exploiter. That would make it possible to do some real work on the master-slave dialectic; Lacan does this, but it could be done on a massive historical scale. In fact, in the struggle women are undertaking, we see the desire that women can have for the phallus, that is, for their principal enemy, whereas it is much more complex to speak of the masochism of the working class or of colonized peoples or of the desire that the colonized may have for the colonizer, that a black may have for the “Great White.” But it’s high time to talk about this; otherwise I don’t see how we can account for the mechanisms of colonization, especially the aftereffects of decolonization.
GRAVIDA: “Articulate a phallic phase well,” you say. But this isn’t easy for a woman.
AF: That’s right; if one doesn’t want to remain fixed in a regressive and anti-oedipal posture, it’s obvious that the structuring of the phallic phase is extremely important. In Freudian theory the phallic phase has to be traversed and surpassed, except for women, who have to regress and fall short. But Freud also said that one never gives up a desire. The situation of regression in which he places women is the very situation that produces hysteria, that is, a fixation at the phallic stage.
7 So you can say “hysteria” or “feminism” in 1980: it’s the same thing. It’s the insistent fixation on the phallic phase, through a threat of regression dictated by the primacy of the phallus. And to fixate on the phallus is to renounce being women. So one has to articulate both the phallic phase and its surpassing—and its surpassing for men too. For them, fixation at the phallic stage is priapism or Don Juanism; this is where capitalist society is stuck.
One could also speak of the priapism of the feminists who are in a permanent state of erection. Feminism is hysteria enacted in a phallic positivity. In feminism there is thus the danger of losing a difference. In hysteria, prior to feminism, this difference is maintained, in alternation, in the “I want”/“I don’t want.” At the beginning of the Movement, women were raising questions about the ontological value of negation: from what positive space is the refusal organized? On what positive foundation does the negation rest? For, in the case of the hysteric, one tends not to hear what she is saying yes to when she is saying no. Some claim that this positivity of hysteria, in its refusal of the phallic, which I stress, is a regression to the uterus and that by recognizing this I am reducing women to uteruses. Others say that, in any case, for the time being, women have to acquire rights without worrying about this difference. I believe that this way of thinking is absolutely antimaterialist because there is precisely this self-evident, paradoxical fact that, in the phallic phase, a woman is being developed and a woman is being lost. It is obvious that now, today, this difference must be put to work; we must not wait until tomorrow. This century is feminist, but we have to think critically about and beyond feminism, which, failing to think the difference, reinforces the patriarchal enclosure. The Women’s Movement is situated beyond feminism. Here, moreover, is the fundamental break.
The fixation at the phallic stage has effects on erotic practices as well as on clinical analyses; this is completely obvious in statements by feminists or hysterics, for example. This fixation induces a whole series of erotic practices that are manifestly related to frigidity: for example, the refusal of penetration. In the Movement’s early days, there was a call for an absolute refusal of penetration.
GRAVIDA: Isn’t there a connection, nevertheless, with the fight against rape?
AF: Yes, the fight against rape is one of the struggles the Movement has taken up, has been working on in fact since 1970: how does the structure of rape fit into the libidinal economy? We noticed very early on that its structure was similar to that of castration. Rape, for a daughter, would be the structural equivalent of castration, for a son. There would be no legitimization, no practically introjectable identity for the daughter, without rape, that is, without “paternal trauma,” as Michèle Montrelay would say; Françoise Dolto speaks of “gentle rape,” consensual rape, something like the father’s stamp on the daughter’s body. And, with regard to hysteria, Freud first believed that, when a hysteric said that she had been raped, there had been a rape. Later, he claimed that the report of rape was a fantasy, almost a “primal fantasy,” and this Freudian position has been maintained, whereas rape is still very often a reality in such cases. This is to say that, while castration does not exist in reality for sons, rape really does exist for daughters.
In Jewish culture the boy’s body is actually marked and the girl’s is not. Where is the marking for the girl? Michel de Certeau is almost the only one who has really worked on the marking of the body through the signifier, through the articulation between the real and the symbolic, thus on the relation of the law to the body.
8 And that law, for women, is most often imposed in a completely savage and barbarian manner.
And, confronting Freud, there are the feminists for whom rape exists only when it is real. They do not recognize its phantasmatic dimension, still less its symbolic dimension. In fact, they have taken up the question of rape again, several years after we did, but solely in the courtroom context, demanding that the law recognize the existence of rape so as to punish rapists.
GRAVIDA: In the face of an assertion such as Georges Bataille’s that “women basically want to be raped,” feminists say simply “no, that’s wrong, that’s unacceptable.” They respond with a kind of passion that denies the possibility there could be something to think about here.
AF: Freud “battled,” if I may put it that way, between “she wants” and “she doesn’t want.” But be careful: a woman does not want rape. Where a woman desires jouissance in relation to penetration, what she encounters in reality is rape. I believe that this is a structuring fantasy of the
female libido—I am deliberately not saying “feminine” to avoid a generic opposition between “femininity” and “masculinity” within a monologic Logos. But, where there is a certain type of desire in a woman, rape is imposed on her, that is, penetration by physical force—and, by the way, rape is not only practiced on women. This issue allows us to illustrate the feminist fixation at the phallic stage, in relation to the refusal of penetration of which I spoke earlier. But this refusal is accompanied by a denegation of the symbolic function and of questions about early seduction as a primal fantasy. Preserving the integrity of what is inside the body, denying the existence of the vagina, fixating on the clitoris … In the United States there have always been arguments about vaginal orgasms versus clitoral orgasms. This is important, because these are points of conflict that are in fact points of repression.
GRAVIDA: It’s very important, this relation between points of conflict and points of repression. And not only in feminism; in left-wing politics, as well.
AF: There is the indication of a point of conflict, but at the same time the impossibility of thinking it, owing to the repression of the unconscious. Each conflictual theme at the sexual level is immediately transformed into a fetish, through a process that derives from pervertization or psychotization. The refusal to allow penetration is the very definition of frigidity …
GRAVIDA: What’s more, women drag men all the way into it.
AF: Men, poor guys, they simply don’t get it. The point where frigidity becomes a major point of conflict may be an important moment. In Spain women have refused penetration by the penis, but not in homosexual practice, nor with an artificial penis. A sort of vaginal strike, in the perspective of the fight against rape. This is not uninteresting. For the time being, women are saying no, collectively, to the phallus. Instead of an isolated “no,” they have set up an organized, intentional frigidity; it cannot be said to be really conscious, even though it is conscious by virtue of the repression of the unconscious. But women feel that there’s a real question to be addressed here. In frigidity there is a defensive reaction toward the phallus that is positive, but there is also the deprivation of a whole anal cluster. This female clitoral, phallic level refers back to a sort of oral mastery, but it completely censors the relation with the anal and the vaginal. In refusing penetration, women are depriving themselves of the occasion to capture the penis, which is a moment in a heterosexual relation. In other words, the refusal of penetration is positive from the standpoint of phallic structuring, but the phallic structure in this case is immediately referred back regressively to a pre-anal stage, through its fixation on the oral, and it even rules out capturing the phallus of the other. There is something in penetration that is arrayed on the side of mastery for the woman (consider the male phantasms of the toothed vagina). Although the vagina is not a sphincter, there is nevertheless a certain element of mastery, of capture. Mastery is structured at the anal level. If one deprives oneself of vaginal penetration, one is also foregoing the capture of the penis, which is one of the fundamental moments in feminine genital maturation. The paradox is that the feminists are depriving themselves in this way of the relation to mastery that they need in their feminism. As a result, they have a mastery that is purely a truncated erection. They remain most often in a process of identifying with the father, rather than in a process of introjecting the anal penis.
GRAVIDA: It takes place completely in phantasms.
AF: It takes place phantasmatically through identification: women mimic the father instead of becoming the father. When women unleash a campaign in support of a law against rape, they are, as daughters, bringing the Father into existence. The extreme leftists have criticized the feminists who appealed to the judge, calling for repression. But in fact that repressive law is not unrelated to the symbolic law: it puts men in a position where they can become men and stop being little boys, stop avenging themselves with respect to their mother’s bodies on the bodies of other women. And this is where the daughter acts as the father. She lays down the law to the little brother who wanted to rape her, or to the big brother. She appeals to something that is experienced as the Father and that she wants to put in a symbolic position. At bottom, in acting as the father, she brings to maturity, pulls toward maturity a little boy fixated at the anal stage (assuming that the structure of rape is recognized as anal). She enables an exit from the mother-son problematic by placing herself, as mediator, between two men, the son and the father. And this is the feminist function: a certain advent of a “higher patriarchy,” one might say, in fact—what Lacan calls the Name of the Father. That is to say that she founds the symbolic law of the Father. As a matter of fact, this was Athena’s role, to found the new Law. Feminists are modernists, in a way.
GRAVIDA: How can one think beyond feminism? How can a woman get beyond the phallic stage without simply rejecting it?
AF: According to Freudian theory, the Oedipus complex that constitutes “reality” would be succeeded by a genital phase (which Freud does not develop very fully), and the Oedipus complex would be resolved, for males, by the recognition of castration. Thus the whole question is that a man gives up his phallic fixation, his erectile fixation; or, if he fails to give it up, he regresses toward an anal phallic stage. Ultimately, if, in the terminology of the phallic period, phallic is opposed to castrated, then castration applies to both men and women. We could say that the phallic stage is the stage of primal genitality. Obviously, if the phallus is deemed to be the ultimate phase, the only possibility that remains is to regress and devote oneself to the anal, or to the interior of the body experienced as anal; moreover, in the equivalence “penis-feces-child-gift” Freud indicates this anal regression starting from the phallic stage.
But thinking beyond the phallic stage … Perhaps this entails thinking in relation to what happens when the erection is over in a man’s body. Or what happens in a woman’s body. The clitoris is not, as Freud called it, an “atrophied penis.” For there to be atrophy, there has to have been existence, then muscular regression. Regarding the clitoris, I would be more inclined to speak of the advent of an “age of the cut penis.” We talk about cut stone; I don’t see why we shouldn’t talk about the cut penis.
The penis has several functions: urination, sexual pleasure, and reproduction. Whereas in a woman these functions are separated: she has a more elaborate, tripartite genital apparatus (clitoris-vagina-uterus), each part having a specific function; and if diversification is recognized as an evolutionary process, without venturing into biologism we can say that the female genital apparatus is more highly evolved than that of the male, and that this allows us to read the relativity of the phallic function at the genital stage. This is a hypothesis, of course. And here I should like to say that I still consider as hypotheses the principal points that I am setting forth in this interview, since hypotheses leave room for both prudence and boldness. But these intuitions, if they are to be thought and expressed, have to pass through the constraint of phallocentric language at the risk of getting lost or getting stuck there, immobilized. So I reserve the possibility of changing my mind. We are at the very beginning of a process of acquiring knowledge, with all the risks that that entails. And the assertive form is only the effect of the enormous difficulty Phallogocentrism has in thinking beyond the Phallus; Phallogocentrism and Culture, speculative and specular, organized around a mirror: what does not appear in a mirror is considered as nonexistent. In other words, a female sex organ does not exist: the girl child does not know the vagina and still less the uterus. Now, a woman’s sex begins beyond the mirror, by no means before. Nor does it begin behind—there is no behind except in a problematics of the mirror.
GRAVIDA: But isn’t this “age of the cut penis” beyond the phallic stage?
AF: Supposing that we remain at the strictly phallic stage: the phallic equivalent for men is the penis, and for women it is the clitoris. I don’t see why we would speak of atrophy for the clitoris. That is reductive. It’s humiliating. It’s like an illness. Whereas it is not the same organ. There is in fact a “beyond” of the phallic stage that does not belong to the order of castration, it has to do with elaborating something else. The reality of the drives—the physical aspect of psychic phenomena, the articulation between the somatic and the psychic—passes, for women, through this stage. It is not utopian; it is a physical and symbolic reality. Feminism is a historic moment of demanding equality (I am proceeding by analogy, but this is no worse an approach than any other), just as one could demand, at the phallic stage, the symbolic equality of the penis and the clitoris, because, after all, if it comes down to comparing one form of jouissance to another, no one can say whether that of the clitoris is inferior to that of the penis. Thus, in the phallic phase, equality is demanded and tolerated between one organ—the penis—and the other—the clitoris, since both are caught up in the phallic phase.
GRAVIDA: In fact, there are women more or less everywhere who have claimed the clitoris as the source of women’s jouissance.
AF: Yes, and who, in order to articulate that claim, have repressed, pushed ahead, what is beyond, that is, women’s multifaceted sex organ (which has at least three components). And some women—the ones we were talking about earlier—even absolutely refused vaginal penetration (they were said to tolerate anal penetration) in order to establish that claim. And this isn’t ridiculous. It’s ridiculous when it isn’t understood. But it has a basis. As long as the girl’s jouissance in clitoral masturbation is not symbolized as equivalent to the boy’s jouissance in penile masturbation, we won’t get there. But, by fixating on this equivalence, feminism adds grist to the mill of phallocentrism, if it does not question the phallic stage itself.
GRAVIDA: But can we go further?
AF: It isn’t that we can go further: we are further! One really has to call on all the forces of censorship, repression, denegation, ignorance not to observe that we have gone further, as soon as we are in the period of puberty; and even before, even in the phallic period. There is no reason why a girl child should not know that she has a genital apparatus that is very different from a boy’s, one that has effects with which she is familiar. And I think the boy child knows this too. And so, here, the question concerns the symbolic existence of the vagina and the uterus in the boy. Because in a woman there is no doubt about it whatsoever. Symbolization follows this route. It isn’t a question of reducing symbolization to anatomy, it is a question of thinking the symbolic reality of a woman’s sex organ, which is tripartite (clitoris-vagina-uterus). At that point, if this is a symbolic reality, why not in a man? After all, the recognition of an organ for creating and producing living beings exists among creative men, in a symbolic manner. A (male) poet is a uterine being, one might say, a man endowed with a symbolic uterus. He recognizes in himself the faculty of producing
the living (
le vivant).
9GRAVIDA: At this point we are much further along than the phallic stage, then?
AF: No. We are not much further along; we are in the process of elaborating the following phase of the phallic stage, that is, the genital phase.
GRAVIDA: It is as though you were saying that, for men, the problem is symbolizing the vagina and the uterus.
AF: It is a problem for both sexes to exit from hysteria, that is, from the refusal to symbolize the uterus. In hysteria the uterus is everywhere, except where it is, that is, in its symbolic function. We’ve known about the “displaced uterus,” the “wandering womb,” ever since the Middle Ages, and we’re familiar with all the effects of false pregnancy in men … Freud’s master stroke was to have detected hysteria in men as well as in women. It is obvious that, once symbolization is achieved, just as phallic symbolization occurs for both sexes, there is no reason why symbolization of the uterus, as the space for production of living beings, should not also occur for both sexes. We already have examples of that symbolization: male poets, creators of living productions. This would be the truly genital stage, beyond the phallic stage, a stage of sexual differentiation. For there to be difference, there must be at least two sexes.
The question, then, concerns the paths along which this symbolization is elaborated. The girl child, we were saying, knows about her vagina, but every effort is made to make her forget it—and this is even more the case for her knowledge of her uterus. It’s something that is constantly censored, forbidden, covered up. The vagina is accepted only as isomorphic with the anus. Since a man has an organ to be penetrated, he tolerates the vagina. But the uterus is another matter, because he doesn’t have one. In fact, this is the poetic martyrdom of the man who feels that he does have a uterus, who is aware of something like that faculty for creation in his body. This is Mallarmé, it’s Rilke …
GRAVIDA: If only poets are involved, that means almost nobody. Poets are exceptions. So how can the uterus win the right to exist politically?
AF: It would be better to say “the right to speak,” or “the right to be inscribed,” or “the right to be symbolized.” For example, one could point out that the phallic phase for a man is accomplished through identification with the father, through homosexuality and through love for the father as the ego ideal. So it is hardly extraordinary if, for a woman, symbolization, that is, the passage from identification to identity, a narcissistic assumption, the elaboration of a symbolizable uterus, can come about only between two women. Just as something of the phallic phase is elaborated for the boy in the choice of the father as ego ideal. Now, we notice that the incestuous oedipal structure (we learn this from reflecting on the structure of rape) is reserved for the mother-son couple, with variations on this couple: mother-son, father-daughter, infinite reversals and reduplications of roles. In the mother-daughter relation it is not a matter of incest, unless the daughter plays the son’s role. The mother-daughter relation cannot be pinned down by this determination, and it inscribes, as it were, something to do with being a woman. This is to say that the mother releases herself from the fact that she is in relation with the daughter. Freud has a lot to say about the mother-son relation, calling it “the most perfect, the most marvelous” relation, while the mother-daughter relation is “the most devastating.” Devastating, because its positivity is not revealed in its difference, in what it brings into play in addition: libidinal difference when a relation between two women is at stake, even if at the outset they are mother and daughter. It is from this relation, between two women, outside of the patriarchy, that “woman” comes about, real, imaginary, and symbolic.
As a matter of fact, “nonmixity” was the distinguishing feature of the Women’s Liberation Movement at its birth: a form of conditioning for the appearance of difference between the sexes, a “way out,” a way of taking on the process of exclusion of difference by phallogocentrism. We are excluded from a system of speech that asserts that “there is only one libido, it is phallic.” We are exiting from that enclosure where we are, as Derrida would say, “interned excluded.” A first gesture: externment, if one can call it that, of the internment, a taking into account and an interrogation of the exclusion. Nonmixity of the Women’s Liberation Movement, outside the enclosure. Madwomen at liberty, but mad outside, that is, mad because outside-the-law, since such is the law: “there is only one libido, and it is phallic.” And, starting from there, a questioning of that difference.
And so homosexuality, de facto, female; one could say symbolic homosexuality or ideological or political. And, from that starting point, a questioning of homosexuality at an analytic level. The feminists refuse to analyze homosexuality, but they nevertheless live it and affirm it as subversive from the outset. In fact, they have dismissed that question with “lesbianism,” which is in itself an ideologization. One might say that there is an equivalence between the way Freud brings the unconscious to light on the basis of hysteric neurosis and the way one can bring to light, today, the specificity of a libido other than the phallic, the maturation of the phallic process in genitality, on the basis of female homosexuality. Lou Salomé asked herself: “Woman, what is there between you and me?” Women today are asking themselves this question on a massive scale, and my way of answering is to say that between two women there emerges production of the living, sexual difference, the other—the other by asserting each other’s identity through the other.
The norm would have it that the boy’s assertion of his identity through the father as an ego ideal is desexualized and that the sexual object remains the mother. We may wonder what the situation is for women, whether that relation has to remain desexualized, that is, idealized, or whether, owing to the fact of what is to be symbolized—the uterus—, it is precisely the body that is in question and whether this assertion of identity passes through an erotic relation. In this choice by a woman of the other woman as an ego ideal, if the body is repressed at the outset, one risks finding oneself back in phallic symbolization, in a regression from the phallic to the anal, in a problematic of the partial object.
In practical terms something incredible happens: what is called female homosexuality is most often phallic, which will lead us to talk about the relation between feminism and lesbianism. But we must first posit that it is impossible to separate out what, in 1970 when we worked on the question of homosexuality, I called libido 2 , designating in this way a libido other than the phallic libido, without freeing ourselves from the Freudian and Lacanian assertion that “there is only one libido, and it is phallic.”
I don’t characterize this other libido as feminine. In fact, the terms masculine and feminine designate a gender difference within a mono- sexed, monologic, phallic language. The Derridean concept of phallogocentrism brings out the absolute complicity between the Phallus and the Logos in the Western conceptual system. Masculine and feminine are both phallic: masculine = phallus plus, and feminine = phallus minus. What is in question then is not a difference between the sexes but a difference in gender, a localization within the phallogocentric system of a position with respect to the phallus. Thus, in the same way, I very quickly determined that femininity is transvestism. We know, for example, that feminine fashion is the work of homosexuals who see themselves as women and project their visions on women. And, moreover, one can say of a man that he is feminine and of a woman that she is masculine. We find this difference in gender again in political language, with the couple macho-feminist. This other libido could be called a
uterine libido, to refer to another body, a body sexed differently, a woman’s body.
The libidinal difference, in my opinion, can only emerge through a questioning of female homosexuality, for both sexes. The symbolization of the uterus, of a space where the living is produced, can only be questioned from the starting point of female homosexuality, for men and women alike, in just the same way that the phallic phase applies to both sexes.
But what is a man poet? What is a man who works with his body? What is the production of a man’s body, that is, a body endowed with language? What we encounter with Rilke, with Lautréamont, with every (man) poet, is a theoretical postulate according to which every man is in relation with the uterine, with the production of the living, of course symbolizable, the model of which, in the real, is making a child.
As there is “foreclosure of the Name of the Father” in male paranoia, there is, in female paranoia,
foreclosure of the body of the mother (I created this formula with reference to Lacan’s, obviously, but in order to designate something about which Lacan precisely does not speak; this is the other slope of the Lacanian work.) Then the question of the relation of the son to the matricial arises, and the question of the specificity of the relation between the daughter and the matricial, the
mise en abyme of the uterus: a woman engenders a woman who engenders a woman who, and so on, and the question of what emerges from this, for both sexes, on the side of the production of the living. We would then go through a process of genital maturation, that is, to reach a poetic humanity that recognizes its capacity to separate the phallic from the anal and to give the phallic access, by setting it into relation with another genitality, access to production of the living. This production is always tripartite: a phallus, a uterus, and the product, the production. At the level of the real, it is a man and a woman who make a child. But elsewhere? It would be a creative, genitalized society. It’s utopian and it’s not utopian; it’s something like a project, a political project.
GRAVIDA: Isn’t there a need to pursue the question of why this appears owing to female homosexuality?
AF: I said that the Movement had positioned itself from the moment of its birth through externment, starting from an “interned exclusion,” to go back to the Derridean concept; the emergence of a difference is produced by extraction from the One in which the difference is interned. To separate out a difference between libidos is not exactly to separate out a difference between the sexes. The elaboration of a libido other than phallic puts into play the question of the repression of the body, its imperialization by the sex organ. Perhaps there is only one symbolizable sex and it is the phallus. But there is not just one libido. The uterus does not belong to the order of sex, it belongs to the order of the extension of sex to a system of production of the living in the body and through the body. This is a very different matter; it goes beyond the notion of sex in genital maturation. I think this is very important, because, when we speak of bisexuality, we do not exit from the empire of sex, we do not exit from the empire of the signifier or from the empire of the sign. The masculine-feminine opposition endlessly refers to the empire of the sign. In writing, I don’t believe anyone anywhere has yet achieved a system for producing texts that effectively challenges the empire of the sign over the body. I believe that the system of production of writing is marked by that system of exploitation of the body by the sign, by the signifier. I think there is a struggle to be undertaken here, not against writing but against the current system for producing writing, which is a narcissistic system, no matter what anyone says, a system that refers to something on the order of the phallus, the One, and the exploitation of the body by the One, the exploitation of difference by Sameness. Here again, Michel de Certeau’s work is interesting. In Lacan, in contrast, there is an imperialism of the signifier and an absolute unawareness of the importance of the political in the unconscious, that is, of the power relations between structures. The relation between the oral and the anal is not just any relation, nor is the relation between the oral and the phallic. History shows, for example, the repression of all oral cultures.
So what is the situation of the oral, in terms of the oral-written opposition, and then, in libidinal terms, the oral-phallic opposition? In hysteria, we witness a constant deployment of the oral, which keeps coming back, and of oral conflict. How is the oral dealt with, for example, in the Lacanian “real-imaginary-symbolic” structure? When Lacan arrives at the Borromean rings, he says clearly that there are relations among these three terms. Simple relations? No, political relations. It is obvious that the real is dealt with by the symbolic. A question of dealing/trafficking: in bodies, in (male and female) slaves. The body is dealt with by the signifier. Here is where the articulation between psychoanalysis and politics lies. There is power in the structuring of the unconscious. It is not linear, it is dialectical, and this dialectics of the libidinal stages does not come about without bringing into play the master-slave, dominant-dominated relation. Which is not necessarily the man-woman relation. The question is not whether one has a penis or not; the question is what the phallus imperializes. The feminist position says: “He has it, so we’re going to cut it off and take it away from him!”
Here is where we can come back to the relation between feminism and lesbianism. In lesbianism, there is an equivalent for everything I have said about feminism: a strictly phallic between-two-women and a fixation on the phallic stage, with regression to a very primary, very oral homosexuality. And then there is another homosexuality, beyond the phallic phase and its oedipal reality principle, a homosexuality that can be called tertiary, or genital, between two women. Many women in the MLF have had heterosexual experiences that can be characterized as “normal,” “satisfying,” that is, without frigidity in the phallic system, with orgasms and the capacity for pleasure shared with a man. These women often also have children; in other words, they have fully realized their heterosexuality, as sexuality is understood today in the phallic system. And when these women encounter another female body, they say that the encounter constitutes an extension, an amplification, a surpassing of the hetero type of jouissance, not a regression; this is what is absolutely extraordinary!
GRAVIDA: This constitutes a political situation in the broadest sense.
AF: Yes. That the MLF, homosexed, is not regressive, does not refer back to something about the mother, to something before or beneath patriarchy, but to a surpassing of history as it is being played out—this is what is not accepted by the phallic monopoly, by phallic imperialism. It is intolerable for a certain number of men who are not themselves “yearning for a uterus.”
GRAVIDA: Right now the repression of the phallic is generalized, in the feminist manner, both among women and among men who identify with the feminists or who are taking up their demands on their own behalf. “Phallic” and “imperialism of the phallus” are completely confused with one another. Can’t we imagine that no particular libidinal stage has primacy over the others?
AF: What must be challenged is the crushing of the pregenital stages by the primacy of the phallus, that is, an unsuccessful integration, a repression or a censoring of the oral and the anal and then the primacy of the phallic as the ultimate genital stage, whereas it is only the primary genital stage or even, for certain authors, a pregenital stage or a moment of articulation between the secondary structure and a tertiary structure. For example, it is obvious that right now the phallic stage, historically, is completely caught up in the anal stage. One only has to see, in New York, the skyscrapers literally standing in shit; the lower part of the city is absolutely anal. And this is not a metaphor, it is a reality. If the phallic cannot think its own surpassing, it regresses.
GRAVIDA: But how can one think the passage from the phallic to the genital, when the phallic, as soon as it is imperialist—and in our experience, it almost always is—forbids that passage? Do we have to go through a castration first?
AF: I think, first, that castration is an anal phantasm. The idea that the penis could be detached from the body is a reduction of the penile organ to the fecal “stick,” that is, to something that detaches and falls away from the body. Now, it is not true that the penis detaches from the body. It is either in an erect state or in a flaccid state, but it does not fall off. At the genital level things happen very differently. When, after an erection, the penis returns to its ordinary position, there is neither loss nor castration, there is a quite different reality that men have to envisage.
GRAVIDA: This is to say that the passage from the phallic to the genital is also a passage from a phantasmatic mode to something else?
AF: To a
materialist mode! In the pregenital stages we are dealing with the pleasure principle. We are perhaps also dealing with a reality principle that, for the time being, is entirely organized around the “Oedipus complex” for the man. However, as a reality principle it is incomplete, because there are several realities: an oedipal reality for the man and another, not strictly oedipal, for the woman; the two realities are organized around different genital equipment. And then there is surely a principle of revolution or of creation, of differentiated elaboration—I don’t know what to call it—beyond these realities … The primary stage is related to the pleasure principle and the secondary stage to the reality principle (which is incomplete, because as soon as there are two sexes there is more than one reality). And then, as I see it, there is a tertiary principle, related to genitality, and this one would be a principle of production of the living.
In the Freudian schema of the pleasure principle that is said to govern the primary, pregenital stages, we are dealing with what Freud calls free energy and what he calls an identity of perception; this principle is followed by the reality principle, an already secondary stage, with bound energy and an identity of thought. The finally tertiary stage that I am proposing would be a principle of genitality, transformation, production of the living: this is the stage of the one with the other, of “being with” and no longer the other reduced to the same. And here we would have an identity—it sounds paradoxical—“of differentiation,” or a differentiated identity, which is a contradiction in terms; it cannot be thought. A double possibility of symbolization, for the two sexes, differentiated. And here we would be dealing with a managed, or unbound, energy. We are no longer in the free energy of the primary stage (to which it is not a matter of returning in order to avoid the secondary stage), nor are we in the bound energy of the secondary, phallic stage, which bundles together all the pregenital drives. (Faisceau, the French word for “bundle,” is related to the Italian fascio [“bundle,” hence “group” or “association”] from which the word fascism is derived; this was the emblem of power for the Romans and also for the French Vichy government, with the sheaf of wheat.)
So can we get beyond this bundle to something that is unbound energy, that is, freed (not “free”), in other words an energy that recognizes gestation, time to understand, as in analysis, and time to create? And this would no longer belong to the order of ejaculation, orgasm, flashes, lightning bolts, or ecstasy. It would mean situating oneself outside, setting up another space, a three-dimensional space where there would be time for gestation. If we take a child as representative of the production of the living, we know that it takes a certain time for him or her to be made, to be “made with.” We would be at the stage of an unbound, managed energy that is redistributed. I once heard a biologist say that most miscarriages are abortions owing to a selection operated by the uterus, a powerful sifting out of everything that does not suit it. The uterus is in the end an extraordinary machine for organizing, sorting, setting up, managing life. I believe that there is actually a passage from a stage that could perhaps be called pederastic (in Villon and Verlaine we find phantasms of anal childbirth) to a genital stage, a time for the production of the living. Moreover, this demand for time also comes up in ecology, in the movements of these last few years, on the new left.
GRAVIDA: Isn’t this passage from the flash, the instantaneous, ecstasy, to time also the passage from phantasm (instantaneous realization) to thought?
AF: And the passage from the “auto-”—since phantasms govern all autoeroticism—to “being with the other” or “doing/making with the other” or “seeing with the other.” I think this is the dimension of the “with.”
GRAVIDA: This may be the point of greatest difficulty at the social level. Take America, for example: it’s really the land of the instantaneous, the thing that happens of its own accord, autoconception …
AF: And the land of orgasms as well. That phallic punctuality, which is the event, after which everything would dissolve … it isn’t real. After orgasm everything doesn’t dissolve. Moreover, it’s in a phallic economy that the man, and now the woman, after orgasm, will pick up a cigarette. There’s depression here of the paranoid type, it’s obvious …
GRAVIDA: If we want to think this through politically, we can also make a social projection. What would a society that is no longer phallic but genital look like—if we can put the question that way?
AF: It would be a society that has differentiated realities productive of the living rather than just objects and waste products. A society that could be called “communist,” but one we haven’t seen. Today we have societies that are mired in an absolutely passive anality, with a hyperphallicity. In Latin America, for example, we see skyscrapers and slums side by side. Chinese society, Maoist and post-Maoist, in contrast, has an economy that profits from the benefits of anality, from its positive sides, to the utmost. For example, they use waste products to the point of complete elimination. Which is a form of ecology. A genital society, on the side of the
production of the living, would be a society that would move beyond treating the other as an anal object, that is, as waste, with all that follows from such treatment: torture, degradation, fetishization, idealization. It would be a society of the dialectic of the one and the other, or the other and the other. The production of the living is tripartite: it includes the third party as a living product. The model of the third party is the child, a livingspeaking being.
In the story of castration complex and in Freud’s “penis-feces-child” equation, the child is reduced on the one hand to a penis, thus to an organ that remains attached to the body, and on the other hand to feces, thus to wastes that are detached from the body but that are lifeless. Whereas the child is, without question, detached from the body of the woman who has made it, but it is alive. In contrast, the penis is reduced to feces, to the fecal “stick”: but if the penis is cut off, it never gets hard. In the film by Marco Ferreri, La dernière femme (The last woman), a man castrates himself and the cut-off penis remains erect. A phantasm! This film presents a man who is involved with a feminist and who believes he has to cut off his penis in order to respond to her desire … In this struggle to have it, why wouldn’t women use the same weapons? And from the moment when men decreed that women were castrated, shouldn’t women castrate men too? All’s fair within the “phallic circus” … And yet when a woman says that beyond her heterosexual experience an experience with another woman completely enlarges her libidinal field, this can’t be thought of as regressive. It isn’t utopian; in fact, it’s something beyond.
GRAVIDA: In your practice the transformation of society first comes through transformation …
AF: Through transformation of the structures of production, above all. Through economic independence. We have a publishing house that is absolutely independent economically, where the money that comes in—which is always from capitalist sources (since in this world all money is capitalized in some sense)—is decapitalized, if I can put it this way: it is spent without making new capital; it doesn’t function in the system of added value and the accumulation of capital.
GRAVIDA: Do you think you’ll always be able to avoid the question of power?
AF: But we don’t have to avoid the question of power, or power itself; it’s the abuse of power that’s dangerous. From the political standpoint, we are in a position of absolute independence, and that’s why we have given the MLF an official status. In 1968 it was unthinkable to create a formal association. In 1979 it was indispensable to do so, in my opinion, because the process of repression was such that the movement risked being completely wiped out. But most women didn’t understand this. They thought something was being taken away from them, whereas we were giving them something. It may have looked like a provocation with respect to all the women involved in the struggle; but in 1979 the feminists had already long since abandoned the word
liberation. MLF was becoming a slanderous term. We had entered the period of major repression with the International Year of the Woman (1975) and then the creation of a Secretariat for the Condition of Women and the reinternment of our victories. Reforms are necessary, but they presuppose a paralysis of the movement. This paradox is difficult, but it has to be borne.
Thus, in October 1979, we who had never given up the acronym MLF—it is found in our texts, our newspapers, and especially in the books we published—thought that it was necessary, even urgent, to give the Movement a minimal anchoring. The legislation adopted in 1901 allowing the formation of associations governs political parties as well as fun-loving bowlers’ associations; this was the supplest form that could lend itself to our movement—neither an organization nor a party but a form that we invented. Yes, a movement is the specific form of revolutionary art that defeats the totalitarianism of omnipotent politics. In 1979 there was a risk that the MLF would be wiped out. We were in great danger. Prime Minister Michel Rocard was talking about “incorporating” women. Out of the question to let him do it. Out of the question, too, to delegate as our representatives some party leader, some woman creator of yet another political trend, some woman theorist who was an institution in and of herself. And then, under the impetus of contradictions that had become divisions, the Movement was at risk of splintering, self-destruction, sterility. It was time to reconnect. So we created this association to bring about a symbolic liaison and a historical inscription. It was not a publishing house that seized possession of an acronym; it was a movement that had created, one after another, a publishing house, a monthly magazine, a weekly newspaper, and this association. But a large number of women, in the phallic stage where they were, experienced these developments as an abuse of power. People fight over an object, there is only one, and everybody wants it. Except that the Movement is not an object, and it is not a phallus. And we have to prove this, that is, to make it. To make it other. It is not certain that women today can think beyond the problematics of having it or not having it.
GRAVIDA: Could you describe your practice? On the militant level. There are the books, the weekly publications …
AF: There is a great deal of agitation, mobilization, explanation, political consciousness-raising … No one has said that we’ll always refuse to stake out a position in the play of elections, but such positioning can’t be reduced to a reinternment of a women’s movement within a system that, in the short or the long run, has to stifle and diminish it. It isn’t a question of passing from the situation of internal exclusion to a position of externment—which we have done—only to reintern ourselves once again within unchanged structures. I think that the leap outside the system is something important; it raises the question of how to think about externment from a phallogocentric enclosure instituted by the patriarchy, and then how that externment could avoid being a ghetto. It is obvious that our externment is fertile, active. For example, it is out of the question today that a woman from the MLF could present herself as a candidate in the presidential election (May 1981). Women in the various parties are going to do this. But it is not out of the question that the Movement could constitute itself as a political force and need to stake out its position. Exactly as it was indispensable, as I said before, to create an association under the 1901 law.
10GRAVIDA: Everything you say can be translated for men. The feminists are the ones who are keeping you from being heard by men.
AF: They have done this deliberately. But I believe that it also comes from men’s immaturity. As support for their castration, they need erect feminists, priapism on the part of women. I have men in analysis who say to me: “I want to see her hard” or “to have her/it hard.” In other words, they’ll refer to a girl who is hysterical, hard, with a hard-on and erect, because she guarantees their castration. Men’s fixation at the phallic stage is what imposes that position on women. We might say, mutatis mutandis , that men are the ones who want women to be feminists. This is why I say that feminism is one of the last pillars of patriarchy. The feminists’ fixation on the father makes feminism the last historically known metaphor for patriarchy.
GRAVIDA: Still, there is a possibility for certain men …
AF: It would be among the men who are in relation with the body, male poets, men with a nonhyperphallocentric libidinal structure. But the Don Juan/feminist couple sends them back into psychosis. We recently held an open meeting, at the Maison de la Chimie (Chemistry house); the men present expressed a desire to have the meetings continue. They understand, there’s something that touches them, but it may still take years. They cannot yet articulate it, because these questions are powerfully repressed. Most of the time men are reduced to nonspeech, as are all those with a libidinal structure such that it cannot speak, because it is mortgaged by phallic abuse. They also have all the defense mechanisms on the order of obsessionality, paranoid contiguity … There are cases of impotence or pseudo-impotence, such as premature ejaculation, with the need to identify with a feminist or a hysteric, a woman who is hard. All Pavese’s writing has to do with this, Bataille’s too. With Pavese it remained absolutely at the zero degree of literary utterances, beneath perversion, at the level of psychosis: no perversion, blank writing, completely made of what is flagrant and naked, of nothing at the level of nothing, that is, the thing. And it ended in suicide. And the scansion indeed came from premature ejaculation, anal nonmastery and what lay “beneath” or “behind,” the delegation of the anal phallic to the woman, with the man remaining at the oral phallic stage, in a fluttering … It seems to me that only men who are highly developed in their thinking can envisage practical paths. But who might they be, given that this work constantly threatens the privilege of the hypernarcissistic intellectual? For intellectuals and writers, it is a question of detachment. Writing does not tolerate constant contamination or alteration, and this type of critical work leads to the loss of privilege for writing itself. Writing nonetheless has countless other privileges to gain if it allows itself to be altered and changes its system of production—but one cannot explain to an owner what he stands to gain from the revolution.
GRAVIDA: Still, one could explain to a man what he stands to gain from the women’s revolution.
AF: He would have to ask himself what his own interest is in this type of work. With feminism it would be the advent of the Father, that is, the completion of the patriarchy, men no longer being sons dependent on a Mother. You can see the damage done by that regressive position in a film such as Fellini’s
City of Women, which we might call the city without women, the polity of the son, the polity of the oral-anal phantasms of an elderly newborn stuck in a sort of sordid, putrefied placenta. What a man has to gain from feminism, in fact, is the advent of the father and the opportunity to situate himself somewhere as an adult in a patriarchal system; this is not nothing. And then, later on, in relation to the shift from feminism to a liberation movement, he can become a man, that is, he can encounter women, encounter the difference between the sexes and be in relation, himself, with his own difference. A world without women is a world without men. For the time being, we are in a world without women, in a mother-son world and, to a limited extent, a father-daughter world.
GRAVIDA: How do you imagine men relating to your movement in practical terms?
AF: It can only be a relation of analytic work, of elaborating genitality: that is, work on resistance or nonresistance to castration, on the notion of castration as an anal phantasm; work on the material reality of the body and on what passes for the body in the phallic system; analytic work, then, or simply hystericization of the subject.
GRAVIDA: Hystericization of the subject?
AF: Yes. The analytic work involves taking into consideration that there is an other, thus that there is an unconscious, that there is a pregenital stage, and then also another sex. Hysteria can be said to be the rejection of the uterus and, at the same time, its recognition. Unconscious recognition in denegation. In other words, the male hysteric knows something about the uterus. This knowledge is unaware of itself, but it is expressed in various ways … Beyond the phallic and its imperializing function of bundling, there is what is unbound. Liberation. The word liberation comes to designate not the free energy of the pleasure principle but acquisition of a freedom. An active freedom, not a state-of-freedom; freedom in action. So it is obvious that this necessarily privileges everything that is different and everything that is oppressed, not only in the structures of class and race but also in the libidinal structures.
The libidinal stages are highly hierarchized, and the primacy of the phallus is established by a crushing of the pregenital, thus of the oral structure or a certain anal structure. A man who lacks integration, or who has only a fragile phallic integration, and who confronts a massive surge of women into the phallic system, may find himself tipping into schizophrenia or paranoia, that is, into regressive psychotic stages. This is why feminism is a danger; if it does not think through its struggle in the right place, it will bring grist to the mill of capital, of imperialism and phallocracy—as can be seen everywhere in institutional structures. In the last analysis, Margaret Thatcher is the pinnacle of feminism … And who pays the price? The oppressed of all sorts.
GRAVIDA: You really think that there’s a possibility of moving ahead, of progress for humanity?
AF: I don’t think in terms of “progress.” I think in terms of revolution and of repeated, ongoing, achronological shifts, progress being only what allows revolution. For example, Freudian theory is progress, to the extent that it allows the conceptualization of regression. After all, bringing the Oedipus complex to light is what has allowed work on the pregenital, which in turn allows us to venture into something obscure. Here is where we have dialectics. Progress, for me, has meaning only as a cross-section of the revolutionary spiral. In this sense, we might say that the MLF is a seeming regression that is actually an advance.
GRAVIDA: A regression?
AF: Yes, you know, people tend to accuse us of reverting to matriarchy, to something prephallic: “women among themselves who haven’t found any men, who need a good fucking.” And even the legal challenges the feminists brought against us were trials to see whether we had successfully integrated our phallic phase, to see whether we weren’t operating underneath the law of society. They lost them all. What the Women’s Movement is bringing about is not a regression, nor is it a “leap forward”; it is a leap outside the nineteenth-century patriarchal enclosure in quest of a true heterosexuality.