There Are Two Sexes: Essays in Feminology

This collection of texts goes back almost ten years. The first article, from 1989, already bore witness to over twenty years of theoretical and practical work, widely disseminated through meetings, demonstrations, creations, and productions organized by the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes¹ and Psychanalyse et Politique.² The essay represents a kind of fugue pattern in which the thought—the geni(t)ality of women³—that inhabits me, and that may well have inhabited me before I was born, is repeated, differentiated, vaporized, polarized, dispersed, decentered, excentered, exceeded. This latent thought manifested itself consciously at least twice. First through a personal experience: the birth of my daughter in 1964 literally discovered and invented it. Then came a public experience that made the geni(t)ality of women both explicit and thinkable: the birth of the MLF in October 1968, when Monique Wittig and Josiane Chanel and I, close friends at the time, joined the crowd of May ’68 agitators while engaging with the thinkers of the 1960s—at times reacting against them, more often acting in spite of them, beyond them.⁴

This second edition calls for at least two observations. While only a limited number of copies of the first edition were published, they were all sold, which means that the book found an audience at the time. Yet far from proving out of date today, its contents—women’s sufferings and struggles—unfortunately turn out to be more topical than ever. Over the past thirty-five years, not a day has passed without my feeling a need to resist, to understand, and to move forward, along with millions of other women. Although these last three decades have probably seen more decisive progress than the preceding two thousand years of history, the four new texts added to this revised edition, written between 1997 and 2002, confirm that the overall picture remains dismal.⁵ All over the planet, and with increasing frequency, women continue to be victims of the unilateral violence of male domination in all its possible manifestations, whether private, public, economic, social, cultural, religious, political, symbolic, real, or imaginary. It is as though just as women are asserting their liberation a macho counterliberation is constraining them, deporting them, imprisoning them, crushing them. Every day the courage and strength of women defy a destiny that is not imposed on them by anatomy but is rather prescribed by tradition and constructed by civilizations and history.

This year, in 2004, in France and elsewhere, we shall be celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of state feminism, that is, institutional programs for the benefit of women.

In 1974, after six years of involvement by women of all backgrounds, six years of intense activism on the part of the MLF along with the older feminist currents it had reinvigorated, the first-ever secretary of state for the condition of women was created in France. The street demonstrations, the culture of revolt, the impassioned demands, the utopias, the “Silk” Revolution of the self that the MLF stood for,⁶ the omnipotence of ideals and dreams addicted to the pleasure principle were succeeded—rather too harshly at times—by submission to the reality principle. The time for democracy, for well-behaved organizations (NGOs, as they are now widely known) and democratic reforms, had come. And, indeed, over the past thirty years there has been no shortage of reforms: we have seen legislation providing for the abolition of paternal omnipotence, divorce by mutual consent, equality between men and women in the workplace, equality regarding the matrimonial property regime and parental authority, and new laws on rape and sexual assault. The primary function of laws may not be so much to punish as to raise consciousness. Laws set limits, specify prohibitions, define rights, and call for justice to be done, both legally and symbolically. An antislavery law is a precious tool for defending the freedom to live and to think; a law against a specific injustice is a precious tool for defending the freedom to act. Laws substitute nonviolent compromise and negotiation for bellicose confrontation. Endowed with political wisdom and psychological maturity, far from lapsing into terrorism, women in movements have appealed to the rule of law and set about democratizing democracy. Three major milestones may be distinguished in the transformation of hitherto illegitimate demands into rights: the adoption of laws concerning abortion, parity, and secularism.

Recognition of the right to choose abortion, along with contraception, made control over fertility possible for the first time in human history. In opposition to enslaved motherhood, abortion law acknowledges the right to procreate (or not), and therefore the freedom for each woman to think over and through the experience of gestation. What I have called women’s geni(t)ality thereby breaks free from obscurantism, from the “miracle” of procreation, from the “mystery” of the dark continent. Without ideology, but with no lack of imagination, a new epistemological field is being invented. A place for exploring the genius of women⁷ in which Enlightenment obstetrics, the Freudian unconscious, the genesic and psychic creation inherent in pregnancy all mesh together as feminology to shed light on feminism, just as sociology has shed light on socialism.

With very few exceptions, every woman in democratic countries may now decide, relying on law and technology, whether she wishes to give life or not; fully entitled to be child free, she asserts her independence. With the abortion law in France, a vital measure of public health, women could hope to have full control over their bodies, their sex organs, their flesh, on all of which, below and even beyond the Freudian unconscious, through an unprecedented power play we had just lifted the censorship for the first time in history.

To put an end to the outrageous underrepresentation of French women in a “uni(sex)versalist” republic, the struggle for parity—a trans-European idea sustained by newly founded, highly active ad hoc organizations, by nationwide debate in the media, and above all by the political will of then Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to end a specific form of discrimination and modernize a republic ossified in its abstract egalitarianism—led to a change in the Constitution passed by the French Parliament on June 28, 1999. Article 3 of the Constitution now includes the following statement: “Statutes shall promote equal access of men and women to electoral mandates and elective offices.” Yet the choice of “equality” maintains the old order, the abstract logic of One-Whole applied to both sexes: the female sex is blotted out in its irreducible dissymmetry and so is the generative, fertile sharing entailed in the conjugation of the two sexes. The equality trap hinders the shift from the age-old centered, closed, selfish, individualistic libidinal economy, and from the phallocapitalist political economy based on profit, to a generous, generative libidinal economy that is neither binary nor dual but twofold, manifold, and to a political economy based on sharing or even giving.

Just as the law on abortion came up against the ultra-right, the law on parity has come up against free market ultra-liberalism ⁸ and ultra-phallocentrism; sovereign androcentrism hinders the emergence of a parity culture. Reduced to its quantitative, anal dimension, compelled by a fainthearted differentialism to express itself in terms of equality, parity is clearly on the road to failure. Only a change in the very foundations of the Constitution—which has yet to recognize women’s rights as “inalienable and sacred”—would have opened the way to qualitative parity.⁹

The opposition to parity, like the opposition to its logical extension, the law on joint surnames,¹⁰ is violent. It is a reaction by those who idolize paternal omnipotence and who pretend to confuse primary difference—the inaugural, absolute, fertile, genital difference that engenders living-speaking beings—with secondary differences—the relative, cultural, ethnic, national, dual, anal, phallic differences that produce war and conflict.

To save secularism, a modest law is to be voted on this year. In the debate on this controversial issue, positions are divided. Taking an unequivocal stance, the magazine Elle has urged President Chirac to protect the endangered rights of women.¹¹

Some would like to persuade us that parity is responsible for introducing the communitarianism currently threatening the republic, as if women constituted a minority.¹² Yet those behind the veil are indeed minor, subjugated citizens being displayed, or displaying themselves, in a gesture of voluntary servitude, however warlike it may be. No one has mentioned the torture involved in wearing a veil in the sweltering summer heat, where women are prohibited from going for a swim to cool off. We are not dealing here with a mere epiphenomenon, as some contend, but with a major symptom of the sexual divide running through the republic and the citizenry. The French words voile (veil) and viol (rape) are so similar that they can be switched back and forth ad infinitum. Rape reappears in the veil, and the uninterrupted rape of women returns in veiled form. It is often claimed that everything there is to say for or against the veil has already been said, but here again the last word on the subject is a long way off, considering how rudimentary a reading has been offered of what a veiled woman symbolizes: captive femininity and enslaved fertility, erected womanhood on display. Yet “no-veil” advocates often uphold the image of a phallicized woman—transvestite femininity reduced to an artifact or masculinized and trapped in a sterilizing egalitarianism, she too the eroticized organ of her master. Raped or veiled, covered from head to toe or clad in G-strings, women are held hostage, caught between the rock of enslaving tradition and the hard place of porn-market modernity.

On mainland French territory, and not only on the island of Mayotte—where the Constitution allows for retaining “personal status” as opposed to the civil status defined by French common law¹³—but also in the suburbs of Paris, the veil reflects an alarming reality that includes polygamy, excision, in the future conceivably even stoning; it reflects private and public insecurity in a country that, in violation of its own commitments, has refused to arm women with an antisexism law modeled on the antiracism law strictly for defensive purposes.

The positive aspect of the bill on secularism lies in the fact that it strengthens and renders more explicit a form of secularism that previously paid little attention to women’s rights, to the mixing of the sexes in education and public life, or to the heterosexuality of basic rights.¹⁴

State feminism seems to function on an ad hoc basis, taking back with one hand what it has given with the other; it lacks any overarching project or political will with regard to women. Between reform and counter-reform, it pursues a deadly wait-and-see policy.

The current context is of one of mounting confusion. One woman may be in favor of the Civil Solidarity Pact (PACS),¹⁵ but opposed to the law on parity; another may be for parity, but against the law on secularism; a radical feminist who has violently fought against the idea that there is a difference between the sexes may suddenly espouse a cultural differentialism verging on communitarianism. Still, a clear pattern emerges. The law on abortion is contested by right-wing fundamentalists, the law on parity by “uni(sex)versalists,” the law on secularism by fundamentalists of every stripe, from the totalitarian, pseudo-democratic, alterglobalist radical left to part of the mainstream, “plural” left eager to win over additional voters. What do all these reactionaries who react so violently have in common? Under what kinds of unconscious confusion, neurosis, psychosis, or perversion are they laboring? The “Mono Gang,”¹⁶ the “Holy Alliance” of totalitarians or fundamentalists, extends much further than the one involving monotheistic religions; it unites all the fervent supporters of One-Whole, those who are hostile to the open At-Least-Two, to the democratic personality, to parity democracy, to partnership democracy. Over the past thirty years a major transformation has taken place. Exposure of the misogyny intrinsic to all civilizations has not only reinforced an endemic sexual misogyny that is universal, although it targets individuals; it has also added in a massive political misogyny, an antifeminism targeting an ongoing movement of the historical condition that cannot be sidestepped.

The fact is that for close to four decades now the women’s movement has been a continuum that cannot be stopped. At every moment, somewhere on the planet, there are women individually or collectively asserting their freedom to act and think, fighting to defend their progress and their newly won rights. Each reform brings forth counter-reforms. Women’s liberation, the most protracted of all revolutions, must brace itself for the longest and bloodiest of counter-revolutions. We must arm ourselves with watchful patience and muster all our courage to take lucid risks.

The first and second backlashes,¹⁷ which provided the motivation for writing the essays collected here, had little trouble staging reprisals, because the counteroffensive took place against the backdrop of worldwide economic, political, and symbolic breakdown, starting with the first gesture of reparations toward women (the 1975 United Nations Conference on Women in Mexico City). The resurgence of religion preceded the rise of fundamentalism. As early as the mid-1970s, masculine protest and monotheistic paranoia grounded antifeminism in misogyny; antifeminism served to update the most archaic form of racism, just as today’s “new (male) feminists” oversee and promote women’s emancipation and, driving a wedge between mothers and daughters in a divide-and-conquer strategy, seek to take over the legacy of the women’s movement.

Our bodies still do not belong to us, and we have yet to receive equal pay for equal work. This negative picture looks even grimmer when we consider the litany of murders by close relations, gang rapes (a phenomenon by no means limited to the poorest neighborhoods), teenage pregnancies, and cases of incest and pedophilia in which porn-market modernity merges with the traditions of slavery.

In 1998 Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work as a whole; much of his research has been devoted to the condition of women. Although his writings have been available in French for over fifteen years, he has not acquired a significant following here. It would appear that most of our learned sociologists pay him no attention whatsoever. None of his books has made the best-seller list, and the gynocide he exposes has yet to arouse the indignation of a single one of the leading intellectuals so often featured in the media.¹⁸ On several occasions, most notably in the European Parliament and in this collection of articles, I have referred to his shocking report without getting the slightest reaction.¹⁹ A woman is missing? No, one hundred million women are missing from the world population. That makes a human capital deficit of one hundred million. In 2002 Amartya Sen went back on the offensive, but with equally little impact, stating, “But in dealing with the new form of gender inequality, the injustice relating to natality, there is a need to go beyond the question of the agency of women and to look for a more critical assessment of received values. When anti-female bias in behavior (such as sex-selective abortion) reflects the hold of traditional masculinist values from which mothers themselves may not be immune, what is needed is not just freedom of action but also freedom of thought—the freedom to question and to scrutinize inherited beliefs and traditional priorities. Informed critical agency is important in combating inequality of every kind, and gender inequality is no exception.”²⁰

The new texts added to the present edition confirm this human disaster. From real violence to symbolic violence, from rape to veil, from marital homicide to Sharia law, the massacre goes on with growing intensity. Every day, “if this is a woman,”²¹ the media trivialize the danger of dying.

In the New World, in Ciudad Juarez, on the Mexico-Texas border, over five hundred women have been murdered since 1993—after being mutilated, tortured, and/or raped—with total impunity. The gravity of the situation has alarmed the UN and led it to protest against government inaction and indifference.²² Here in our old Europe, on October 4, 2002, Sohane, a young woman from a housing project in the Paris suburbs, was burned alive in a garbage storage room by a jilted suitor.²³ None of the politicians who protested that same day against a racist crime and a homophobic attack expressed any indignation over this sexist murder or any compassion for the young martyr.²⁴ A year later, almost to the day, a fifty-year-old woman teacher in Nice suffered the same fate; this crime was similarly trivialized and met with even greater silence.²⁵ Lethal torture of this sort has become increasingly widespread in Europe. On July 1, 2003, a young, highly popular actress was beaten to death by her lover, a “politically correct” musician with antiglobalist sympathies. In late December, after a flurry of media attention, a highbrow newspaper included this sober remark in its year-end review: “Marie Trintignant died following a violent dispute.”²⁶ A few squeamish feminists were outraged to see such a scene removed from the private sphere, while others, showing greater dignity and rigor, viewed the murder in the alarming context of marital insecurity. Although the number of road accident victims has recently gone down in France, unilateral violence still kills five women every month, with little media coverage apart from the “human interest” or “manbites-dog” sections of the daily paper. In Spain, domestic terrorism kills more people than the Basque separatist group ETA.

Women, the poorest of the poor, are getting poorer and poorer.²⁷ When I entered the European Parliament in 1994, I received a first report entitled “La pauvreté se féminise en Europe” (Poverty increasingly affects women in Europe). Others were to follow. The charitable organization Secours Catholique has recently voiced concern over the issue as well.²⁸ Yet, since the 1975 Conference in Mexico, NGOs and women’s rights activists have been constantly reiterating this distress call. Whereas women produce two-thirds of global wealth, they own only 1 percent of it, get a mere 10 percent of disposable income, and constitute 75 percent of the world’s poorest inhabitants. In opening the doors wide to market forces, our democracies force women, often the heads of single-parent families, into a life of informal work, temporary jobs, and unemployment. In the current desocialization process, France is threatening its gynecologists, closing down maternity wards, and cutting back on retirement facilities. Although women have “biological advantages … over men in resisting disease,”²⁹ and although many of them have contributed several children to society, they are the primary victims of the current health and social service deficit. Their pensions have been unjustly reduced. Women also made up the vast majority of the heat wave victims in the summer of 2003.³⁰

Job insecurity or motherhood, unemployment or prostitution—the current headlong slide into free market economic liberalism throws women back upon the two “natural” occupations inherent in their human and historical condition: the world’s most beautiful occupation, procreation, and its oldest, prostitution. In point of fact, from time immemorial, these have both been forms of slavery used to provide men with children and pleasure. Free market forces are turning the Earth and women’s bodies into commodities. Trafficking, pornography, prostitution. “The economic horror”³¹ has combined with libertine sadism and barbaric individualism to exploit the voluntary masochism of a few Harkis of the divine marquis.³² Yet, instead of demanding the abolition of sexual slavery, a certain branch of the left and a certain branch of feminism suggest that it should be institutionalized in the form of regulated prostitution. Fundamentalism, terrorism, imperialism, fanaticism, egotism of every kind: both rich and poor spend their budgets on their urge to kill rather than using it to meet the need for nurturing, caring and educating women and children alike.

West and East are busy setting fire to our planet and to women; the world is in flames. Inside, outside, in the family, in the streets, at school, on the highway, in neighborhoods, housing projects, and rural areas, in societies where the rule of law holds sway and elsewhere, whether rich or poor, traditional or modern, at all possible levels of analysis, women are confronted with a particular kind of war, as if their bodies—endowed with a vital function for our species, the genesic function—were the target of primordial hatred. Those who point out this grim reality are accused of “victimizing” women, whereas they are merely calling attention to the slaughter and its perpetrators. Serial killers, rapists, jilted suitors, abusive alcoholic spouses, pedophiles, sex tourists—almost without exception, these are all men. Although adequate statistics are lacking, all reports confirm that males dominate this misogynistic world. There is no war between the sexes, simply because women do not wage war; up to now, they have simply been subjected to it.

Such regressions in democracy after thirty years of state feminism confirm the analyses presented in the first edition of this book and the assumptions underlying them. What is at issue here is not so much women’s commitment to the cause as the irrelevance of the political and psychoanalytical analyses that have come to the fore. In the intervening years I have amply stressed the structural deficiencies found in the various models for solving the problem, deficiencies that perpetuate the catastrophic situation of women in history. I am referring in particular to the traditional model of tota mulier in utero and to the uni(sex)versalist republican model that arose in the wake of an indifferentialist feminism of the tota mulier sine utero variety. In one case exploitation is deliberate; in the other it is denied. As for the democratic model, a recycled, compromise version of the two preceding models, it purports to reconcile family life and work life. The fertility rate, dislodged from the female bodies on which it depends and transposed to “the family” or to the science of demography, denies and exploits what I have been calling for years now the production of living beings,³³ which in many cases combines with both domestic labor and salaried labor to form a triple production.³⁴

The combined drift into libertinage and free market liberalism has taken us far afield from the studious years of practical and theoretical struggle in which one could find leaflets arguing that lifting the censorship on the labor power of proletarians was one of Marx and Engel’s most telling moves.³⁵ In 1884 Engels wrote, “The determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of immediate life … the production of the means of subsistence … and the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species.”³⁶

In lifting the existing censorship on the unconscious, Freud came up against “a difficulty on the path of psycho-analysis.”³⁷ He identified three major “blows” to human narcissism in history, all of which met with “emotional” rather than intellectual resistance: the cosmological blow dealt by Copernicus, the biological blow dealt by Darwin, and the psychological blow represented by the discovery of the unconscious. In lifting the existing censorship on women’s bodies, women’s liberation movements everywhere called forth, most often unwittingly, even greater resistance to a fourth blow to narcissism, the genesic blow.³⁸ However strongly they may assert themselves, masculine protest and its magic trio—frustration, aggression, and regression—have great difficulty suppressing and foreclosing the liberated strengths of women who are demanding the right to exist.

My reading of Melanie Klein, whose work Envy and Gratitude had just been translated into French in 1968, confirmed my intuition that uterus envy plagues the male unconscious infinitely more than penis envy troubles the female unconscious.³⁹ Yet the word uterus is absent from Klein’s conceptual framework. Two hundred years after Diderot’s Éléments de Physiologie and the beautiful engraving in his Encyclopedia,⁴⁰ the uterus still has not found its way into any dictionary of psychoanalysis or of ethics. It is not enough to identify uterus envy; we must also think through its political effects, which in all areas take the form of real as well as symbolic violence inflicted on women.⁴¹

Genesic blow to narcissism, uterus envy, foreclosure of the production of living beings, misogyny.

Genesis, the mythology of the religions of the Book, the great Freudian narratives on the evolution of a human species in progress, from the Overview of the Transference Neuroses to Moses and Monotheism ,⁴² and the monolithic thinking of free market liberalism that currently holds sway in the field of political economics,⁴³ all represent variations on the theme of envy—a concept that is both psychoanalytical and political—that boil down to the sacrifice of the living (le vivant) and foreclosure of its production.⁴⁴ In the realm of political economics, the production of living beings is neither accounted for nor theorized.⁴⁵ In the field of psychoanalysis there is no fertile woman, no theory of genitality. Under phallocapitalist law and the postmodern rule of the politically correct, thinking is prohibited.

This is what the Passion of the One, the pseudosymbolic order, anal phallocentrism, and homogeneous indifferentialism have been striving to control, to dominate, to enslave. My hypothesis is that misogyny, or racism against women, the most radical form of racism in existence, is rooted in the very source of the singular power that arouses the envy of all those—children and adults, women and men—who believe, rightly or wrongly, that they are bereft of it and erect in its place an alternative omnipotence (Freud speaks of a “surrogate phallus”) that colonizes it, exploits it, and forecloses its economy in favor of various general equivalents. These include gold, father, phallus, and language,⁴⁶ all of which, in the history of homo sapiens sapiens, symbolize the omnipotent phallus. One of the two sexes must be assimilated or disappear, must be converted or perish. Thus Gilles Lipovetsky considers procreation “a fundamental obstacle to the homogenization of sex roles.”⁴⁷ Similarly, Lacan (for whom, it should be recalled, “woman does not exist”) declared that procreation “evades the symbolic tapestry”⁴⁸—in his seminar on psychoses, no less—and thus effectively outlawed it. There is only one libido, and it is phallic, as Françoise Dolto, more Lacanian than Lacan himself, stressed repeatedly in the mid-1970s. Far from being a privilege, procreation downgraded in this fashion severely penalizes women in any integration process, whereas, if it were to recover its rightful status, procreation should become the primary motive for subverting an order that is perverse in every respect.

The main enemy of women’s liberation has not been adequately designated: male monism, phallocentrism, egocentrism, the One as the sole representative of the entire human species. From monotheism to republican equality, there is only the One. Only one God—male; one libido—phallic; one economy—free market liberalism; one kind of citizenship—neuter; one subject—universal; one sex, one individual—monadic, unconnected. The trouble is that while God needs men, men need “the race of women” to provide them with offspring.⁴⁹ This explains the colonization of the “dark continent,” enslavement (woman as a living instrument),⁵⁰ appropriation of the uterus (the principal means of production), exploitation of uterine production. The libido dominandi, savandi, sciendi of philosophers or that of the discourse of masters, analysts, scholars, or academics (Lacan)⁵¹—that phallic libido knows only too well that although a woman may be converted into a hysterical slave (disciple or bitch), and although she may be dressed in feminist guise like a political Marrano, not only does heterogeneous procreation create disorder in the doxa, but even pinning it down in concrete does not suffice to overpower the libido that escapes the phallic libido’s grasp every time a woman expresses her desire, the desire to have a child or the desire for another woman that lies at the source of her most intimate drive.

The oldest and yet still contemporary symbolic order pits men against women, dividing them from each other and dividing each of them in two. Creation, culture, the conceptual realm, legitimacy, privilege, and human genius belong to them; procreation, animal-like conception, nature, guilty genitality, illegitimacy, and discrimination belong to us. All Law belongs to man, One-Whole for both. Freud believed he had succeeded where paranoids failed; he lacked the time, and perhaps the audacity, to develop a theory of genitality. And if, through a sudden eruption of woman,⁵² uterus envy haunts the philosopher, he assumes the insane right to kill her, to set fire to the world, to her home, and her body; or, if he is too close to her, because he is a poet, failing to kill her, he will commit suicide—altruistic suicide, paranoid murder.

Meanwhile, the libido creandi of women (in Latin creare means both create and procreate), which I have been referring to for a long time as libido 2,⁵³ rejects binary division and conjugates procreation with creation, as befits the mother tongue.

Controllable, thinkable procreation can no longer be a form of slavery. It would also be madness to consider it a privilege; this would once again single out women as omnipotent, castrating, threatening to men, who would consequently demand its abolition. Procreation is no longer something to be forgotten, repressed, foreclosed, cast in the role of an unconscious threat to the paranoid ego. On the contrary, it must be made the motif of work on difference.

Liberating women’s libido creandi at its very source means constantly challenging war and the death drive. In the twenty-first century this gives rise to a revolution for the human race and opens the way to the geni(t)ality of both sexes.

Survivors and much more, supersurvivors and superalive, far beyond their condition as victims, when carrying a triple burden, given the slightest encouragement, women find the energy to transform themselves into leading agents of change, propositional forces, the beating heart of the triple dynamics of demography, development, and democracy,⁵⁴ in order to carry out a triple revolution involving the symbolic, the economic, and the political. Our MLF has always upheld the creative commitment of women and expressed its admiration to “heroines” from around the world. On March 8, 1990, a forum at the Sorbonne celebrated women who have distinguished themselves by their strength and courage.⁵⁵ Books, periodicals, publishing houses, and films gave voice and exposure to the achievements of these revolutionaries, including one Nobel Prize winner, from Eva Forest to Aung San Suu Kyi and Taslima Nasrin. In Africa 95 percent of all NGOs are operated by women. In Niger women are working to push back the desert, struggling tirelessly to reclaim and irrigate barren land in order to feed the population and revive village markets.⁵⁶ And for once France stands out as a model in Europe, combining a high birthrate with a high level of female participation in the workforce—an extremely rare pattern in democratic countries.⁵⁷

Nowhere, however, is there a political will that guarantees women the slightest security. Nowhere, neither among the poor nor among the rich, can women, feminae sapientissimae, enjoy their libido creandi , express it, exploit it for the common good. Real political will is required to oppose reactionary and destructive forces so that women will no longer be subject to the emancipatory good will of a philosophical, juridical, and political body that is both fragmented and a source of fragmentation. The inalienable, sacred rights of women must be incorporated into the philosophical foundations of our Constitution. And after ratifying the convention on the elimination of discrimination against women,⁵⁸ France must act on its commitments by passing a law against sexism and misogyny like the one adopted in the aftermath of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.⁵⁹ Such a law would clearly identify the war criminals in the unilateral war waged against women. Obviously misogyny cannot be abolished any more than anti-Semitism can be; the point is to keep them both at bay.

When is the president of France going to make the struggle against the marital, familial, urban, job, and symbolic insecurity that massacres women a top priority for the republic, as he did successfully where hazardous conditions on the roads were concerned? When is the national education system going to raise the consciousness of our future citizens, in the republican manual that has been distributed in schools since January 2004, about sexism, i.e., misogyny and homophobia, alongside racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia? When will courses touching on religion show adequate awareness of the androcentric character of the monotheistic religions, as well as of all traditions and cultures, even including the modern republic? When will there be an Observatory for Misogyny to create mass awareness of the crimes committed against women? When will there be a budget for research and support to organizations that will allow a full-fledged Ministry of Parity—an additional Prime Ministry—to announce, as part of a comprehensive policy, the emergence of a parity culture and a parity democracy?

The maternal body, the matricial flesh, is still every human being’s first environment. Whether we are born male or female, a woman is still our first love object. Every woman is acquainted with this homosexed, primary love, this native homosexuality ,⁶⁰ this most intimate place from which her libido creandi is transmitted. It is urgent for us to express its beauty before a unitary line divides women from each other and condemns them to lesbianism and incest.

Far from all the isms, heterogeneous and heterodox in relation to all instituted knowledge, feminology represents a leap out of the doxa and a field for research. Let the economists who are concerned with moving away from free market liberalism and the philosophers of ethics who want to do away with selfish individualism expand their work to include gestation, hospitality of the psyche as well as of the flesh, as a paradigm of ethics; let them reflect upon how the imperative of responsibility, the decentering of the subject, and the paradigm of the gift combine in this case to give birth;⁶¹ let them promote an ethics of gratitude in place of envy and matricidal hatred.

In thanking “the women who have transmitted their mitochondria to us,”⁶² Luca and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza pay tribute to the female anthropocultivators ,⁶³ archaeologists, archives, and archivists of the human species, the female genitors, genealogists , artists, creators, educators, generation after generation, of the laughing, speaking species, constantly in the role of other, constantly seeking the other, seeking the men likewise liberated, by them, from their solitary All-Powerfulness. From genesic function to matricial genealogy, every woman bestows mitochondrial DNA on humanity—it was the genius Rosalind Franklin who discovered DNA with a kind of knowledge that has never abandoned the question of origins. What grounds do we have for doubting that feminae sapientissimae actively contributed to the birth of art, in Lascaux and elsewhere?

Neither subservient nor slaves, with neither god nor master, solidly secular, women are moving away from the genesis of the Book, from whose scriptures they have been foreclosed; they are learning to read by recalling, by thanking, by thinking the place they come from, without turning back but rather forging ahead; women have begun to experience their new historical condition,⁶⁴ to write the genesis of late modernity.⁶⁵ Upheavals. May the time come for cross-fertilities. Fleshly and spiritual. For a new human contract.⁶⁶ Together. Tempus est creandi. For both sexes, each enriched by the other, with no debt and no bargaining.

The old world and modern history are on their way out. In the beginning … Once again. Primary thought and propositional capability. The courage to conceive, to bear, to give birth to what is coming. Neither anchored nor adrift, neither sedentary nor nomadic. Gracious memory. Lasting promise. And finally the life drive, alliance, resistance, deliverance;⁶⁷ sex playing, body working, flesh thinking, women, free, in movements, as of right now.