English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Opening montage 0:00 Feminism is a historically relatively recent movement, even though it's much older than fools believe, who think everything starts with them today.
0:30 Many feminists will tell you that femininity is an invention of man, an invention of patriarchal evil, that it's a fantasy. I distance myself from that stupid side of feminism, which is not the feminism of the millions of women fighting to emancipate themselves from the slavery in which they are held—economic, social, patriarchal, all three at once.
1:00 There are males and females in nature, but there are men and women in culture, in history. That's where those who think it's in the genes are wrong—that yes, a man is a man, a woman is a woman, it will always be like that. No, no, no, it hasn't always been like that.
1:41 Men and women are roles and not substantial entities. Roles... which we cannot, since that could be embarrassing in privileged circles... Then that's very true, the true feminine, the one that must bring me, as well as the whole world, liberation.
2:15 Once masculine egoism, even in its noblest form, had broken before him. Elsa, the woman I had not understood until then, this purest and most necessary expression of the involuntary, made me a fully accomplished revolutionary. She was the spirit of the people from whom I, as an artist, also expected my liberation. That has quite a different scope, doesn't it, than someone who says she was raped because she was told 'you have a lovely blouse tonight, miss.' He must strip away the name of love.
The logic of the question: compatible or different 2:50 He must renounce his powerful delirium. And only then can he unleash the power of the involuntary. Question from Bertrand Saint-Songe, whom I greet in passing. Are femininity and feminism compatible or different? I repeat: are femininity and feminism compatible or different?
3:25 What comes to my mind first before answering, almost as a preliminary to the answer, is a small remark—I hope Bertrand won't take it badly because there's nothing disobliging about it—but it's that the way the question is framed is strange, because we say compatible or incompatible, compatible or contradictory, you see, for example. Are the two in conjunction, or should they be thought in disjunction? You see, we could refine this and play 36 variations on the same theme, that is: do femininity and feminism imply each other, or on the contrary, are there many things that separate one from the other?
4:11 Sorry, I no longer know how to say it, with inclusivity, because he said femininity and feminism—understand it however you like. But no, what interests me is that he said, is it compatible or different? Normally, before 'or different,' one should hear: is it the same or different? Is it the same thing or is it different? So I start with this preliminary remark, because you always have to see the logical requisites in a question if you want to answer it seriously, without making assumptions about intent.
4:46 But anyway, I'll answer now—I can allow myself to start giving a positive answer, meaning I'm no longer dealing with the implications of the answer—sorry, of the question—but with the questioning itself, namely: is it compatible or different? Well, I say feminism is different. Very quickly, I'll start with things on which we'll almost all agree. Feminism is a historically relatively recent movement, relatively recent, even though it's much older than fools believe, who think everything starts with them today.
Molière, the précieuses, and the learned women 5:33 You know, it's like Hegel's Philosophy of Right, when he says: everything happens as if it were precisely now that the world had waited to be thought, at its root, at its foundation, and this 'now' keeps renewing itself indefinitely. And since he wrote that more than 150 years ago, it's funny to think that some people really believe... It's not that the world discovers questions when it formulates them. No, feminism is an old story, an old story within contemporary and modern history. We don't talk much about feminist movements in the Roman Empire, though scratching a bit we might find things reminiscent of it from afar, isolated cases.
6:09 But I mean that, on the other hand, if we go back a bit further, let's still think of that event that was Molière's play, The Learned Ladies. Right? Because Molière, the corrosive one, the one who was troubled by the party of the devout when he dared to stage Tartuffe, even being forced into many cuts that the king regretted, telling him: come on, don't give them weapons to have you whipped, try to remove this, remove that, the inquisitors will feel too targeted, etc.
6:46 You know that the king had affection for Molière—Louis XIV. So Molière, who attacks so many prejudices, right? But often, among his most famous plays, it's the world of women that seems to concentrate prejudices, which he ridicules, starting with a famous title, The Précieuses ridicules. But it's not women he's attacking. It's a milieu, a rather confined one, where you didn't say 'an armchair,' because calling things by their name was so vulgar—you had to say it in a periphrasis: 'bring us forth the conveniences of conversation.'
7:27 That's what an armchair is—the conveniences of conversation. You'd have to have a rather twisted mind to say he holds a grudge against women. It's true that women were assigned to worldly roles, to receiving guests, to running a salon. One must never underestimate the importance—purely geographical it seems—of periphery and center in culture: either centralized at court, at Versailles—though we'll have to wait until 1814—no wait, with performances at court in which the king himself sometimes took part, as a character in a ballet or a play.
8:07 or decentralized culture—no longer Versailles but Paris, a bit freer in speech—and those famous salons and cafés that were so abuzz: in the 17th century, rather the salons of the précieuses, where they mapped out the Carte du Tendre, as they said at Mademoiselle de Scudéry's; but in the following century, the 18th, it's the salons where the fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment developed and which would lead to the Revolution, to put it quickly.
8:41 So, I close that parenthesis. There's something more serious than the Précieuses ridicules: The Learned Ladies, in which he seems to demolish women's claim to being full-fledged intellectuals, like men. So it seems that here Molière, on the contrary, joins the conservative, patriarchal reaction that says women should just stick to the kitchen or their role of being charming and beautiful, that's all you want, their worldly role, or practical role in kitchens and bathrooms, but not concern themselves with Mars, the Moon, shooting stars.
9:25 That's a quote from The Learned Ladies. When the husband, Chrysale, furious at his wife and her friends' follies, says: 'In this house, we know how Mars, the Moon, shooting stars move, and no one knows how my pot is doing, which I need.' Come on, let's be serious. And right away I clear Molière of the reproach one might seem to make against him. I'm dwelling on this a bit because it is, after all, the anniversary of his birth. So, in tribute to Molière, as always, Molière as a great classic sits in the just measure, in the metron, as the Greeks would have said, who remain the reference point for classicism.
10:13 I mean by that there are two extremes. There are the outrageous learned ladies—not today's #MeToo, mind you, but those who say it's scandalous that a white woman could translate a text written by a Black woman. And then, at the opposite end, there's the husband Chrysale, whom I just quoted, who says women should be preparing his chamber pot rather than doing astronomy. And between the two, there's the character who represents Molière, Clitandre.
10:48 'I agree that a woman may have clarity about everything'—when he speaks of the learned ladies whom he detests and who oppose him. 'I agree that a woman may have clarity about everything, but I don't want her to have the shocking passion of becoming learned in order to be learned. And the incense she throws at her hero of wit, her Mr. Trissotin'—a fop of the time—'her Mr. Trissotin grieves me and appalls me, and I'm enraged to see her esteem such a man, a fool whose writings are hissed everywhere, a pedant whose liberal pen'—he must have written by the mile—'a pedant whose liberal pen supplies officious papers to the whole marketplace.'
From nineteenth-century struggles to women warriors 11:31 'But I agree that a woman may have clarity about everything.' There you go. So, to say feminism is recent—feminism, these are the embryos, and you saw in what ambiguities sometimes. Then there's the struggle for women's emancipation which takes on great importance from the 19th century, from Romanticism, where women would play a pivotal role, and I'm not just talking about Madame de Staël or George Sand, who exercised influence in important roles.
12:04 Baudelaire, who is fairly reactionary on societal matters, used to say 'the woman Sand.' And then there are much more serious struggles afterward—there's the Paris Commune, there are the extraordinary figures like Louise Michel, there are the 'pétroleuses,' as they'll be called elsewhere, there are those who fought, if only for women's right to vote. Femininity, on the other hand, I would say, is lost in the mists of time.
12:34 I'm not sure, right? Femininity, that's as old as life itself—there are even female mosquitoes, or male ones, that's not the question. That is, a female mosquito that inoculates malaria—the female of the mosquito called the 'anopheles,' which is the leading cause of death worldwide, we didn't know that. Inoculated by a guaranteed organic mosquito. No, femininity is much older than feminism.
13:09 So you see, these suffixes aren't innocent. That said, does femininity exist? I said it's older. Yes, belonging to the female gender is as old as the human species. Right? And if I even go back further, from woman to female, right? It goes back well before the appearance of man, right?
13:40 That lets me lay out the concepts clearly—this question that seems so simple. Now, is it compatible or different? What's certain is that many feminists, especially those who claim to speak in the name of all women—which the women of the world never asked them to do, by the way, since they were elected by no one—will tell you that femininity is an invention of man, an invention of the patriarchal male, that it's a fantasy.
14:15 You can really see that they know nothing—neither of the history of painting, nor of literature, nor of women writers, nor, for that matter, of women warriors. I say this, another small parenthesis, because well, everyone knows Joan of Arc, but there's also Jeanne Hachette, whom the general public knows a bit less, but who is very important. I'll note in passing that she was as Lorrainaise as the Maid of Orléans. It's interesting to see that it's in those border regions of the Germanic world, where, as in Northern Europe today, there's an advance over the Mediterranean world—an advance compared to today's ideas—a more manifest equality of the sexes than in the Oriental-Mediterranean world, to put it quickly.
15:09 I close the parenthesis. And in fact, I attended a lecture at l'Officine, a venue I recommend, where there are very interesting debates. I mention this venue—actually it's a meeting place, for small lectures, on a small scale, but very pleasant, very nicely decorated. On rue des Maronites, near Ménilmontant metro, admirably run by our faithful friend Claire Tchekini—it's not because she's a compatriot that she can't also be a friend.
15:47 I attended one of the lectures, which had greatly interested me, on the theme—I'll get to it—we were on women warriors, right? On women pirates. Even more unexpected, more incongruous. And yes, there were women pirates. Most of the time, they were women who inherited, upon the death of their pirate lovers, husbands, companions, who inherited power over a ship. Now, they were almost all Scandinavian. There, I close my parenthesis. There's a tradition like that, of greater sexual equality, more pronounced in the countries of Northern Europe than in our machismo, sexist, more puritanical Mittelmeer, as the Germans would say, our Mare Nostrum, the Mediterranean, and the Orient, where it has its source.
16:37 That's a metaphor. But there's no actual source. But historically, we understand each other well, right? The history of the Mediterranean begins more on the shores at the mouth of the Nile, or in the gulfs of Ionia, that is, the western part of Turkey, than in Portugal, chronologically speaking. So, I wanted to make these little reminders, laid out on the table. It's been a good while since we returned to the properly philosophical content of our debates.
The sexes as roles, not substances 17:10 We need to move forward on that level. And here we are, right? There are males and females in nature. Even among insects, even below the animal world, among plants. When I say 'below,' there's nothing pejorative about it. It's a kind of grand chronology, even if it's a bit more complicated than that, not as linear as we might think. There are males and females in nature. There, man has nothing to do with it.
17:43 But there are men and women in culture, in history. It took the female of the human species to have a behavior that could be called feminine. Whether she was forced into it, assigned to it, or made full and abusive use of it, depending on the social rank in which one finds oneself—whether one is Queen Semiramis, or Nefertiti, or the Pharaoh's sister, or the wife of the poor Egyptian fellah who, for 5000 years up to today, continues trying to benefit from the fertility of the Nile's silt, while benefiting rather little from his exhausting labor.
18:35 In any case, what I'm saying is that, unlike male and female, which are above all physiological, biological determinations, men and women are roles and not substantial entities. Roles that one isn't obligated to play, by the way. But if, in a certain era—now it would rather be—I'll talk about the toys given to children, to boys and girls, which already have a constitutive value in the distribution of roles, right?
19:11 As for me, I'm a boy, so, well, I have a brother who's also a boy—we were given, especially in the generation of the 1950s, we were given pistols, gadgets, Zorro or pirate or cowboy costumes, whatever you like, and cars and things that men use. Nothing wrong with that. And to girls, they gave dolls or a tea set, right? I never saw girls protesting about the tea set, even though they had every right to come play cops and robbers with us—that's not the point.
19:48 So we are already less bound and determined by the roles of men and women than we are by—which is a heritage, I should add, and this is very important—than we are in the world of heredity, where one is a boy or a girl, male or female. Because even 'boy' or 'girl' is already marked by culture and by history.
20:20 'She's a tomboy,' people say of a girl. You see? She's a female on the biological level. They say she's a tomboy. That means she doesn't fulfill the role expected of a girl. There you go. Rightly or wrongly—that's another problem. Let's leave that for the sidewalk pundits or the TV talk shows to debate, it's the same thing. Urine, adrenaline, milk—those are substances, tangible things; they're not clans, they're roles. That means they're the consequences of a discourse, a prescription.
The feminism of the privileged against femininity 20:54 Right? A little girl must not—well, it starts like that. Isn't that so? Show this, etc. Or on the contrary, she must be coquettish and show off her pretty dress—I'm making things up, but it often revolves around things like that, put in extremely simplified terms. So I come back to the fact that boys were given pistols and girls were given dolls. Which, over thousands of years, ended up creating men and women.
21:26 And here, I distance myself from the stupid side of that feminism, which is not the feminism of the millions of women fighting to emancipate themselves from the slavery in which they're held—economic, social, patriarchal, all three at once. That's different. I'm talking about the one we're constantly bombarded with, the one that holds the upper hand in the media. That's no coincidence. You know that the media is in the hands of two or three magnates.
21:58 The opposite would be surprising for what is supposedly an objective, scientific, appropriate field of study. Where I distance myself is that, since it's been thousands of years that this role has been assigned to little girls first, then to girls, to young women and so on, it ends up creating different sexes—but sexes in the moral sense this time. Moral in the sense of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, that is, there is of course a different psyche.
22:28 But this is not a condemnation. That's where those who think it's in the genes are wrong—that yes, a man is a man, a woman is a woman, it will always be like that. No, no, no. It hasn't always been like that. But it's been like that for such a great number of years that it has shaped billions of women who embody what we call femininity, and which feminism would like to erase with a stroke of the pen. Because it can be embarrassing in privileged circles, right, to hold certain roles?
23:00 Well, yes. And yet, very often, those who claim to emancipate themselves from that trap of femininity in which patriarchal man supposedly wants to confine real women—I'll note that it's precisely among those, those who fight against this assignment to femininity, that we find the most hyper-feminine behavior when they need it. And that, well, I don't reproach them for it. That's fair game, because given what men have left them throughout history, they have to compensate somewhere.
Reading Wagner on Elsa of Lohengrin 23:35 So there you have it, that's Bertrand Saint-Songe's question—as you see, I'm not closing the question. It would take sessions like today's to cover such a fascinating subject. Wagner, yes, Wagner—I don't need to search far, since he speaks of his character Elsa in Lohengrin. You may not know the story, it doesn't matter, it would take 5 hours to summarize. But look, look, it's incredible, incredible, especially how damning this will be for those who believe that the most emancipatory feminism dates only from today.
24:08 'I remember that it is this same effort of clarity in execution that made me grasp with increasing precision the nature of the feminine heart, such as I had to represent it in Elsa's love. The artist proves convincing in his representation only if he is capable of entering, through a movement of total sympathy, into the being of the object he must represent. Elsa is the unconscious, the involuntary, into which the conscious, voluntary being of Lohengrin desires to resolve itself.' I remind you that Elsa is accused of having killed her little brother—she was accused by the villains of the story, to put it quickly—when in fact she had nothing to do with it, since he disappeared during a walk on which she was with him.
24:49 And there is a judgment of God that is pronounced at the moment when she is about to be condemned by this judgment, Lohengrin appears, a knight on a boat shaped like a swan, or rather on a swan, sorry, which serves him as a boat, and who comes to defend her like a white knight, quite literally, because he has a real silver armor on his shoulders, doesn't he? So there's a somewhat miraculous side to his appearance, and he is ready to defend her, against all odds, on one condition only: that she never ask him his name or where he comes from.
25:24 There you have it, that's all you need to know. It reminds you of the story of Eros and Psyche, if you look closely at Greek mythology. Well, this power of a consciousness so unconscious that I felt, I'll go rather quickly because it's not on—I don't want to dwell on the extraordinary hymn to woman that follows—that I myself felt through Lohengrin, gave me an ever more inward understanding of feminine nature, joined to the desire to represent it as faithfully as possible. Thanks to this power, I managed to enter so completely into this feminine nature that I felt entirely in agreement with the expression I gave it in my Elsa in love.
26:02 I had to approve of her so strongly in the final outburst of her jealousy that I suddenly understood the truly human content of love. And I suffered a real, deep pain that often made me weep hot tears, feeling the inevitable, tragic necessity of the separation, of the annihilation of the two lovers. Because of course, she won't be able to stop herself from asking him, in the end, his name and where he comes from. It's not exactly like poor Psyche in Greek mythology, whose sisters tell her: 'Wait, if he doesn't want you to see him, maybe it's because he has a nose like this.'
26:35 She introduces doubt, and so, tormented by doubt, she asks him, and of course, the dream collapses. And I'm going to slow down because the strong moment is coming. 'I had to approve of her so strongly in the final outburst of her jealousy that I suddenly understood the truly human content of love, and I suffered a truly deep pain that often made me weep hot tears'—sorry for laughing, look how he identifies with his characters—'feeling the inevitable, tragic necessity of the separation, of the annihilation of the two lovers.'
27:06 And here it begins. Listen closely to this extraordinary sentence that keeps developing the subordinate clause while waiting for the main one. 'This woman who, with clear knowledge of what she is doing because she insists on knowing where he comes from, throws herself to her ruin through the necessity of love, who even as she is caught up in the rapture of adoration, prefers to annihilate herself rather than fail to fully grasp the one she loves. This woman who, from the day she meets a Lohengrin, has condemned herself to perish by causing the other to perish.'
27:41 'This woman who can love only in this way and no other. Who, through the very outburst of her jealousy, manages—and only in this way—to pass from the rapture of adoration to the fullness of love. Manifesting through her own downfall this fullness to the one who still does not understand her.' You see the man doesn't have the good role in all this. Even the hero Lohengrin, who comes from the domain of the Grail itself. 'Before whom Lohengrin'—this magnificent woman before whom Lohengrin—'could only withdraw.'
28:18 You can take that with whatever connotation you like. Withdraw. 'His particular nature forbidding him to understand her. This woman, I had now discovered. There is the possibility.' And Lohengrin, his hero, the hero who gives his work its title. 'And Lohengrin was the lost arrow shot in the direction of that treasure which I had only sensed. But I traded its loss for the certainty of having now discovered true femininity.'
28:50 'The one who must bring, to me as to the whole world, liberation. Once masculine egoism, in its noblest guise, had broken itself against him. Elsa, the woman I had not understood until then, this purest and most necessary expression of the involuntary, made me a complete revolutionary. She was the spirit of the people from whom I, as an artist too, awaited my liberation.'
Femininity and feminism are different but compatible 29:20 We are contemporaries of 1848, and Wagner is going to be condemned to exile for nearly 20 years because he was found with his hands black with gunpowder on the barricades. He came close to execution, if it hadn't been for his future father-in-law Liszt, who with his usual generosity found him, at the very last second, a fake passport. 'She was the spirit of the people from whom I, as an artist too, awaited my liberation. But this knowledge, felt as a kind of happiness, still lived in silence in my solitary heart. It had to mature before becoming a profession of faith.' That's what was being written in the 1840s-1850s.
29:55 You see, that's a different scale altogether, isn't it, compared to someone who says she was raped because someone told her 'you have a lovely blouse tonight, miss.' Especially since you're not supposed to say 'miss' anymore. I've noticed, actually, that most of the young saleswomen in shops say 'oh sir, you can say it to me, I miss it when nobody says it to me,' because now everything has to be flagged. So you see, Bertrand Saint-Songe's question has taken us quite far, and quite close to what we are currently experiencing, but at the same time quite far.
30:32 No, femininity, feminism—yes, it's compatible. That's actually a very good question. Now, you see, I'm no longer criticizing its formulation, it's quite fitting, even if it's not the dichotomy we expected. It's less prosaic than saying: is it the same or different? That's a bit flat. Whereas here, 'is it compatible' means: it's different, and yet it's compatible. Yes, that's the least one can say. Right. That means a woman has the right to be feminine.
31:04 I will always remember—I salute her in passing, I haven't seen her in a long time—that Marie-Antoine Rieux, to whom we owe one of Clouscard's last works, Refondation progressiste—Marie-Antoine Rieux was teaching philosophy at the time in Toulouse, and I believe she still does, in Toulouse, quite close to Gaillac—she came across Michel's books and wrote to him, and she came to see him in Gaillac, she supported him, she pushed him to write—we know, given the first symptoms of his illness—she pushed him to write Refondation progressiste, and she told us that her students of North African background—she said, 'I owe it to Clouscard that my students of North African background, thanks to Mr. Clouscard's text that you had us read'—it was magnificent, her phrase—'we discovered that we have the right to be sentimental.' We are quite far from Philippe Sollers—that famous 'you have to fuck,' you know, that's Philippe Sollers—yes, that takes us
32:15 quite far, this story. So women, the current representatives of femininity, have the right to be feminine, but they are not obliged to be—that's precisely what distinguishes, in Hegelian terms, spirit from nature, in more recent anthropological terms, culture from nature, history, in Marxist terms, from nature alone—because all this, without nature, wouldn't exist anyway. There you go. Ah yes, a table doesn't exist in nature—a table with its four legs and its drawer, doesn't it—but you need wood, or gold, or ivory, you need something like matter which is given by nature, and a form which is brought by man. There you go—by man or by woman. Thank you for that lovely question.
