Antoinette Fouque’s work should have been introduced to English-language readers much earlier. It is highly regrettable that the vigorous American debate over French feminism, or, more broadly, over the question of gender, has not benefited from Fouque’s original, coherent, and persistent thinking. For several decades now, American feminists, or, to take a wider view, women’s studies programs, have analyzed, debated, supported, or contested, after Simone de Beauvoir’s contributions, those of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Monique Wittig. Although it is fair to say that Fouque, through her actions, speeches, and writings, has been the chief inspirational force behind the most original and most combative dimensions of the French women’s liberation movement, her name appears very rarely in the Anglophone context. There is an anomaly here that the publication of this book by Columbia University Press will, happily, begin to rectify.
From 1968 on, with the creation of the group known as Psychanalyse et Politique (Psychoanalysis and Politics) and the beginning of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (Women’s Liberation Movement, or MLF), Antoinette Fouque’s actions and theoretical positions have given a decisive impetus to French “feminism.” Her orientations have had a determining influence, in various forms, on all women whose thought has been burgeoning since the earliest manifestations of this group and this movement.
In this connection several points stand out as marking the originality of Fouque’s theoretical and practical positions—positions that were to have widespread repercussions on what later came to be called French feminism.
Fouque’s specific ideas about women’s liberation can also be read as a critique of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminism. With that form of feminism, in Fouque’s view, what was won in terms of emancipation was accompanied by an onerous renunciation. The woman who had to ignore or abandon all ambitions in order to devote herself to procreation (the traditional situation under the patriarchal regime) was succeeded by a woman who had to sacrifice her desire to procreate in order to satisfy her ambitions. Thus women emerged from the age-old maternal slavery—and this was certainly a first major step toward their liberation—but at the price of repressing the desire for a child. In Fouque’s view, what was required was not to pretend to be unaware of the strength of that desire, but rather to make a place for it in women’s liberation. Beauvoirian feminism thus had to be surpassed by a new phase that would no longer be “feminism” in the limited sense, but a true liberation that would take into account the entire set of factors involved in women’s full development, countering any notion that the difference between the sexes should be neutralized. In this sense, for Fouque, the feminist challenge remains internal to the patriarchal enclosure, as a position that seeks to obtain powers, roles, and functions for women that had previously been the monopoly of men, but to the detriment of women’s own capacities, among which procreation is the most significant and the most inalienable. It is not true that “a woman is a man like any other,” as certain feminist slogans from the early days proclaimed. This is why Fouque can declare that she is not “merely a feminist”—a claim that may be surprising and subject to misunderstanding if it is not resituated in the context of the contemporary debates.
Antoinette Fouque’s work is aimed at a more complete liberation of women, beyond the limitations that the first feminism imposed. She locates herself within a postfeminism that requires not only political and institutional advances but also a theoretical and philosophical step forward. This step calls for a new understanding—without regressing to earlier positions—of the
female libido that is at work in the desire for a child, in gestation, in childbirth. The Freudian conception, accentuated by Lacan, of a single libido that is the same in men and in women and for which the phallus would be the master signifier ought to be succeeded by a conception that takes into account the libido proper to women. Alongside the phallic libido there is the other one, uterine and matricial: the
libido creandi. Fouque’s relation to Freud stems from this fundamental position: she critiques the ideology of masculinity that prevails in Freud and Lacan, but she does not repeat the gesture of a certain feminism that simply liquidates psychoanalysis, for psychoanalysis still offers the only discourse there is on female sexuality. For Fouque, it is more a matter of amending and expanding psychoanalytic theory by challenging it with what is specific in female desire: above all, the desire to procreate. It is in relation to this partial and critical acceptance of Freudian psychoanalysis within the MLF that the well-known collective Psychanalyse et Politique (often called Psych et Po) was established, with the goal of exploring the connections between the unconscious and the political: the unconscious in the political, and also the powers deployed, the hierarchies created, within the unconscious.
This work of elucidation is accompanied by a reinterpretation of genitality, a libidinal phase that was recognized by Freud but that tends to be conflated with the phallic stage, owing to the supremacy attributed to the latter; in Lacan’s case it tends to be forgotten or even contested. Not only is it essential not to ignore the desire for a child specific to the libido creandi or reduce it to the phallic, but it is essential that gestation, pregnancy, the obscure metamorphoses that take place within women’s bodies, all the organic work that has always seemed to go on at an infrasymbolic level, be brought into language and acknowledged at the symbolic level. Hence metaphoric fertility in cultural and artistic creation is also implied in men and women alike.
Before the “penis envy” so heavily stressed by Freud, there is
uterus envy, male jealousy of women’s creative genitality. Appropriating that genitality for themselves, by all sorts of strategies, has always been one of the major concerns of the male world. It is a wound for men, an infringement on their omnipotence. Antoinette Fouque thus identifies a fourth narcissistic wound to be added to the ones Freud enumerated. Not only does the planet Earth not lie at the center of the universe; not only is man not the ruler of creation but a natural being closely related to other mammals; not only is the ego not the master in its own house, since there is the dimension of the unconscious, which the ego does not control; but there is a fourth blow to add to Freud’s list of three: the
“genesic blow.” A very old, very primitive wound that myths and religions have worked hard to deny, a wound that did not need the scientific revolutions brought about by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud to appear, but that has haunted minds from time immemorial: every girl and boy is born of a woman’s body. This material, fleshly birth, so hard for men to accept, cannot be evaded, forgotten, denied, transposed, or sublimated. This truth, which is at once hidden and self-evident, difficult to see and impossible to ignore, is foregrounded by a movement that places female genitality at the center of its ethics. Giving life, welcoming in oneself someone other than oneself—what Fouque calls
hospitality of the flesh—is the basis for the principle of the gift and altruism. With gestation and the act of childbirth, procreation must be taken as the model of the ethics of the gift, the very
paradigm of ethics.In this work of critical elucidation, the forgotten, repressed importance of the mother-daughter genealogy has to emerge, or reemerge. This genealogy has long been hidden away in our societies by the burdensome, structuring tradition—at once legal, economic, symbolic, and religious—of filiation and transmission along the father-son axis.
The place Fouque attributes to the mother-daughter relation leads to an original conception of female homosexuality. Just like a man, a woman has a woman—her mother—as her first love object. Then, in the canonical case of her libidinal development, she has to shift to a male love object, has to deny and reject the first object of attachment after having loved it. There is a hindrance here that may keep the woman from achieving full development of her libido, may prevent her from constituting herself fully as a woman subject. A primary, native homosexuation, distinct from lesbianism, has to be experienced with another woman or with other women in order to make access to a female, genital libido possible.
There are two sexes. This central affirmation on which Antoinette Fouque insists might seem trivial. It is at stake today, however, in multiple debates. In the subtle but often unrealistic and sterile controversies that arise around the difference between the sexes and its negation, Fouque takes a clearly delineated position, which she draws from numerous anthropological, philosophical, and political sources and from her deepest personal experience as well. At the opposite pole from a way of thinking aimed at neutralizing—or even completely negating—the difference between the sexes, she proclaims the reality of a difference from which it would be fatal, for women, to seek to free themselves. If it is legitimate to denounce the often repressive stereotypes that confine the “genders” to outdated historical and cultural expressions, this does not imply that the difference between the sexes is nothing but a purely conventional and arbitrary construction, just a matter of playing with signifiers, without any relation to the real. Transposing structuralist formalism, which has proved fertile in linguistics, mythography, and narratology, into the domain of the difference between the sexes cannot be achieved without the risk of a sort of bankruptcy analogous, perhaps, to the ruptures between the virtual economy of finance and the real economy. We can enumerate four models that, for Fouque, stand out in the history of women (or in the history of the relations between women and men) and that now open onto an anthropological revolution. The oldest and most powerful is the historical regime of enslaved maternity. A second model has tried to go beyond the first: this model negates the difference between the sexes and proclaims a unisex or a neutral sex as the solution to the conflicts between men and women. This leads to a third model, the one that prevails today in the neoliberal economic universe: here neutralizing and unisex feminism is combined in an unstable and unsatisfactory way with the inadequately assumed desire for maternity. Ultimately, there will be a
fourth model, the necessity and horizons of which are beginning to appear: a
new human contract, in a democratic universe that incorporates, with full parity, the ethical structure that is borne by procreation and creation alike. To hasten the advent of this human contract, Antoinette Fouque calls for the creation of a new science, a science of women,
feminology, a mode of thought that is materialist and fleshly rather than idealist, political and action-oriented rather than metaphysical.
Through her writings and actions alike, through her theoretical stances as well as through the multiple courageous creations of which she has been the origin and the tireless driving force, Antoinette Fouque is a crucial figure in women’s struggle for access to authentic freedom. Not only was she one of the founders of the MLF in 1968, then the founder of the publishing house Des femmes and the editor of several militant journals that played a key role in raising public awareness, but she was also the first woman from the Movement to be elected to the European Parliament, where she did significant work on behalf of women. At the UN World Conference on Human Rights, held in Vienna in 1993, she played a decisive role in securing the adoption of an article stating that “the human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights.”
1In the unsettled situation that confronts us today, it is fortunate that Antoinette Fouque’s thought is becoming accessible to an English-speaking public.
Jean-Joseph Goux
December 2013